A day at the Zoo. . .

Here are just a few more pictures. The one at the table is of our first Sunday dinner - Yum! It was buy one get one free roast day at Albertsons. The other picture of the flowers are the roses from our backyard. We have beautiful rose bushes, and also the picture is my view when I do dishes - nice! The fish picture is special. We brought them all the way from Spokane! Yup, they traveled with us. I was sure they would die along the way, but Charles put them in our cooler and they made it! That is our Dorothy that the Hinckleys gave us when they moved, and her fish friends Sally and Patch. I love my fish. There is something nice about having them swimming next to me when I do the dishes. : ) Thanks Heather for Dorothy, she was our first of many fish to come in the future!

I am still unpacking. A few of our major items broke along the way. Our couch and some shelves. Charles is repairing them in our garage - how great is that!? He is Mr. Fix-it. He loves tools and working with his hands, and he is quite good at it. Now, we are on the look out for a washer and dryer and a lawn mower - things which have become necessities to us. Garage sales - here we come! That is our plan, to hit the garage sales on Saturday.

Charles has been studying this week. He has to prepare for yet another portion of the Bar which is this Friday, wish him luck on that! He took the bus today to figure out the system here. Apparently, you just walk to any corner that a bus will come around and flag the bus down! Weird! So he tried it this morning, we will see how it works!

That is all for now. . .

Lots of love!

Mari

Going Green. . .

So we are trying to save the planet - one light bulb at a time. We went through our house and changed out every light bulb to an energy efficient one, they last up to 9 years! WOW! Actually, we are doing it for our own savings but we are happy to help the Earth as well. I will also be walking Sammi to and from school each day and Charles is going to take the bus to work. We are also planning on selling Charles truck and going back to a one car family. We "needed" two cars in Spokane but we are set up here so that we don't need two cars. I think when people think of a lawyer they think of wealth and no money worries - not so! Lawyers along with Doctors usually have an enormously silly amount of Student Loan debt that keeps you humble for many, many, many years!! Yeah for humility! Oh well, we are used to the humble life - a life we plan to live even if life offers more. We are happy this way. There is something fun about trying to save a dollar and being frugal, it is a challenge - we love a challenge!

I am grateful it was so hot in Spokane before we left and that our apartment was so hot. It does not seem so bad here. We never turn on the AC even when it is 100. We just roast - AC is too expensive! We have made a deal though, if we get to 105 or more we can turn it on for that day. : ) Really, it is not too bad.

Also, church was interesting on Sunday. The ward was SO different from where we came from. In Spokane our ward was made up of mostly students, Law and Medical interns. It was a huge ward with tons of kids and primary was huge. Here, the ward seems so small. The people seem older with a larger youth program and a small primary. So small they combined Sammi's class so the ages are from 4-6. I think there were about 20 children in primary. Weird. Anyway, it is very different. We live in a modest area surrounded by huge homes so the the ward seems to be mostly well established folks who have or will be here for a long time. It should be interesting. There is a kind of not-quite-Utah thing that goes on here. They talk about living next to Zion and stuff like that. It always makes me grin. I am so glad we grew up in a place where the gospel was unique and you had to stand your ground. It was character building. However, here it does not seem like there is as much LDS influence as I thought there would be. It is fun to learn about this new place. : )

That is all for now. I am very slowly unpacking. It is actually taking much longer than I thought it would. We have lots of little weird stuff. One good thing I found was baby clothes. William is growing so fast and he is wearing 6 months clothes at 3 months! So I found a ton of clothes from when Daniel was a baby. William will be set for life since he is following Daniel. Dan does not seem to ruin his clothes as much as Sammi did for some reason. Anyhow, it is great!

Lots of love from me!

Mari

Hooray!!

Sam and Dan are enjoy the backyard. Sammi is fanning Daniel off with a Samoan fan from Grandma and Grandpa while relaxing in the hammock. The other pictures are of the house - I will post more later as we get the house put together!

We made it!

We made it to our new home! Hooray!

We packed up our Penske truck on Tuesday and headed out on Wednesday. We had so much stuff it was weird. We moved to Spokane from Alaska with only a few boxes and now we have a house full of stuff! Also, we never bought any of it - it was all given to us. I felt so grateful for the kindness of good people.

Anyhow, I was only a little nervous to make the drive since I have never driven for more than an hour at a time in my whole life. It took about 8 hours of driving to get here. It was so funny. Following the HUGE Penske truck with the attached trailer - what a blast! Charles did such a good job driving the big-rig. I could tell he loved it. The kids took turns riding with him since it was so fun. We had made tapes of the CARS movie soundtrack and we jammed out to it the whole way (over and over). I highly recommend the music - it was perfect for the drive!

We went through some really pretty country but it was very smoky from all the fires in the area. We went through some canyon driving and while Charles said he was worried about me, I was much more worried about him as I watched his every move, often the trailer would swing off towards the side of the cliff! Yikes! When we got into town I had to follow him to find our home. That was tricky. I ran a few red lights, cut off pedestrians, and tailgated Charles so I would not lose him! He was the one that new the way! I did not want to be lost in a new city. We made it here about 8pm since we had to stop a few times for William's food. : ) Charles and I made a good team of drivers. It was like a game really, we could only go 55mph so everyone had to pass us. We had our pulling over routine down to a science! It was quite the experience. It was only difficult when William would start crying and there was nothing I could do to help. If he got really loud I would flash my lights at Charles and we would pull over to take care of him. Fun stuff.

Our home here is really nice. We found it on-line and I am always scared of doing that - you never know what you are gonna get. But this time it worked! I love it here. The house feels HUGE compared to the apartment we were in. The kids LOVE having their own rooms. The best thing is 2 bathrooms! Oh how glorious!! : ) It became quite the trick in the apartment. It is just so nice to be in a home. I love it. The backyard is awesome. The kids have been spending half the day out there. They just love it! Especially Daniel.

Church is tomorrow it should be fun. It will be testimony meeting which is a perfect way to figure out the ward. : ) It is a cool building, right next to it is this huge house - I mean HUGE with an even more HUGE garage for an RV. It is so weird, the garage is the size of a mansion. Anyway, it is funny. I love new cities and figuring things out in a new place. One of the weirdest things is the grocery stores. We love Albertsons and it is a major store here. Everything is digital! The prices on the food are digital - I had never seen that before.

Well, I will write more later of course. We are still unpacking. We are about half done. Our house here is double the size of the apartment so it will be fun to decorate - my favorite!

Lots of love to everyone!

The best thing of all - we finally got wireless service! Hooray!

Love, Mari