Crazy, Wonderful Life

So, most of you know I got married this summer. Yay! I've been meaning to write posts about the bridal showers, the dinner in Utah, the wedding and reception in Atlanta, and the honeymoon. Yeah, hasn't happened.
Mostly, I'm just crazy busy with work and work and married life and spending time with Chase's family (his brother just left on his mission - quality time was required before that sad day!) and making food and trying to get to bed at a decent time (Chase does not share my views on appropriate bedtimes). When I do get a few minutes to sit down and write, I usually figure Thank you notes are more important. But I don't want to work on them today, so here's a tidbit of a blog instead.

Aunt Kara hosted a bridal shower for me on May 11, 2013. Mindy even came down to celebrate!

Chase and I flew out to Utah on May 30. I went through the Logan temple to take out my endowments on June 1, and that was followed by a big family/friends dutch oven dinner. (For which the food was fabulous and the decorations just amazing).

All of my loving and supportive family and friends at the temple.

The wedding was on June 21, 2013 at the Atlanta, GA temple. We had a wonderful photographer, Holly Jones. I loved her work!

My wonderful bridesmaids: Kalie Larkin, Erilyn Heintz,
Alyna Briscoe (MoH), and Sarah Hafen

The reception that evening was at a historic park nearby, Heritage Sandy Springs. (Did we get pictures?)

We went on our honeymoon to a cabin belonging to a Smith family friend in the North Carolina mountains, near Cashiers. It was beautiful and cooler and had lots of waterfalls nearby!

Employed Once Again

It's nice to be an active member of the work force again, even if my body is quite accustomed to this whole going to be and waking up on time thing yet. I now work for Fockele Garden Company (pronounced  folk-lee). It's a high-end landscape company that does design-build-maintain for residential and commercial clients. I'll be working with their maintenance division out of Atlanta. We're working on building up the Atlanta division, and hopefully I'll soon be taking on a leadership role. It's all very exciting. I've been doing office training these last two weeks and I can't wait to go and work in the field this week. I'll definitely write more about the job soon, but I thought I'd just throw this out here so ya'll would know what's up in my life.
Click here for Fockele Garden website!

Wedding plans are getting on pretty well, too. It's great to finally be "officially" engaged!

Last Day at Bartlett

Today was my last day of work at Bartlett Tree Experts. It was a kind of difficult choice to make, but I'm confident it was the right thing to do.
In January, I told my boss that I was looking into other job options. He was really good about it and offered a contact or two into my field of interest (botanical gardens, namely). Then, around the middle/end of January, he came up to me and said, "We need to figure out when your last day of work is going to be."  I replied that the end of February would be a good ending time for me because I'm going to Utah for a week in the beginning of March. He didn't seem too keen on that because he pushed right ahead and said, "Well, I have a new guy and I want him to start on Feb 11, so let's have your last day be Feb 8. Is that alright? Great. Have a nice day!"  Great.
My (rather half-hearted) attempts at networking with the people I need to apply to didn't yield much feedback. It's been difficult to apply myself to the job search, because really, I have much more exciting things to plan for and research on the internet (although that, too, seems to be going really slowly right now). But I'm kicking it into high gear next week and hope to have something lined up for when I get back from Utah.

 So, last day. I worked with Nick and Jaime. Jaime has been my consistently favorite coworker, so it was nice to work with him on my last day instead of someone less likable. We worked at a little family cemetery in Lilburn. It was kind of cool, and I liked the symbolism - last day of work=cemetery, etc.

 The work was easy (raise up some red-tip photinia that were hanging all over the drive and remove a smallish pine tree and dead oak spur), and the next door neighbor provided our entertainment for the day:

      He came over demanding that we turn our machines off and tell him exactly what we were doing and nobody wanted to be able to see the cemetery and dead people don't care what it looks like and we don't need a bucket truck to do that removal and we'd already been over in his property cutting stuff down [false, btw] and WHY WERE WE STILL CUTTING STUBS?! 

We had to get the sales rep, Art, over to talk to him so we could just do our work and not incur any physical altercations. I was pretty amused. Not a bad last day of work, really. I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone, but other than that, really not bad.

I find cemeteries to be pretty peaceful and interesting places, overall. There were headstones there from 1980 back to 1863 or earlier. That's pretty cool. This was the coolest one I found:

A WWII soldier, died in Italy in 1943. 

As a side note, I really enjoy Atlanta this time of year, because we start getting spring flowers blooming. Here are a few pictures from recently.

Lots of daffodils are starting to blossom right about now. 

Cherry blossoms! Pretty common now days. 

Ok, so not a flower, but it was an incredible sunrise from Monday morning. Seriously, the sky was hot pink and this picture does it no justice at all. 

A Tropical Thanksgiving - Better Late Than Never

This year for Thanksgiving, Mindy, Jeran, and I planned a dive/snorkel trip down to south Florida.  For some reason we thought it would be more fun to surprise you all with pictures from our tropical vacation instead of telling you our awesome plans... I'm not even sure why we did it that way, and I think it was my idea.

Florida sunset over the ocean - I'll never get tired of them

Anyhoo, I ended up having to work on Wednesday, so I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale that evening where M&J picked me up, they having departed from North Carolina the day before. We made it down to Key Largo latish that night and went to bed.

Thursday - Jeran woke us up early, and we ate breakfast before going to the dive shop, Silent World. We signed waivers, etc, and went to meet their boat at the dock. We were in a group with four other divers as well.  The first dive was excellent for me, but not so much for M&J.  I was enthralled by the very close-up coral, cool fishes, the moon jellyfish, and the fact that I could snorkel without choking on "icky-bicky water" every two minutes (it was closer to every ten minutes). According to the divers, however, the coral and fishes were rather common and the water was very murky and cold.  We did see the famous "Christ of the Abyss" statue though, which is famous.

I snorkel! Also, breaking the air bubbles from divers is kinda fun.

 The next dive was better - much higher visibility and warmer water. The ocean floor wasn't quite so near to me, so I didn't get to examine the coral so closely, but the City of Washington wreckage and the schools of big barracuda fishes made up for it.

City of Washington wreckage

That afternoon we came back to the resort (a little place called Rock Reef Inn) and got ready for Thanksgiving dinner with the owners and all their guests. It was...interesting. The rule for dinner was that you couldn't sit by anyone you knew, especially not your spouse, so Mindy ended up sitting on the opposite side of the room from me and (sitting kitty-corner to me) Jeran. I especially liked the homemade key lime pie.

 Friday - Awesome snorkeling! It was just us three on the boat, so the captain took us back out to the elbow reef where the second dive had been. We did two dives right near the same area as the City of Washington. This was the highlight of the trip for me - we had seen some sea turtles from the boat, so we were hoping to see some once we got in the water. I ended up seeing six sea turtles that day! (Well, at least four different turtles on a total of six occasions). I even got to swim along side one for a good ways, ending when it chomped up a jellyfish then turned and looked at me. 

Face off with a turtle - I had to remember not to reach out and
\touch it  (push it away)  because it was so close to me!

This is when snorkeling was better than diving, because Mindy and Jeran saw only two sea turtles instead of the six I saw. And then there were my two sharks - a small reef shark and a nurse shark. It was surreal to see them swim along the ocean floor and think that I was so close to a shark! I didn't have a camera, but this is what they looked like:

It's really hard to describe the experience of snorkeling (and I would assume, scuba diving). You get to peek into a world that you've only ever seen in aquariums, but it's so much more vibrant and alive. The current of the ocean pushes and pulls you constantly, and the coral is constantly swaying back and forth in it. There's no such thing as a moment when nothing is moving.

Saturday - We had planned to drive north along the coast to Jupiter where Mindy and Jeran would do another dive and I would hang out at the beach or something. But the dive shop there called and cancelled because it was too windy. So we ended up going to the Miami zoo instead. It was really quite a large zoo. I finally saw a koala! It was sleeping, so it just looked like a gray ball of fur (not food!).

Then on Sunday we drove back to Atlanta, entertained by Jeran's new game of "create movie plots from this title and main actor/actress." We should probably quite our jobs and become movie writers. 

Tidbits

I haven't blogged in quite some time, not because my life is boring, but because there's too much going on and I don't feel like I have the time to share even the big, important events. So now I'll just share little tidbits about a smattering of topics (kind of inspired by Lisa and Lindsay's recent blogs).

Work has been difficult lately - lots of co-worker tension and even a reprimand/warning from my boss. I've been considering finding a different job, but don't really know what else I would like to do. Or how to go about getting one. Luckily, it's smoothed out a little lately. My goal is to make it past Jan 15, my one-year mark at Bartlett.

Sugar maple leaf

I love fall, fall in Georgia, and Georgia. I can and I have written long lists of things I love about the fall season (leaves change colors, cooler weather, soups, apples, pumpkin pie, sweaters, etc). I did get the opportunity to be in Utah for fall colors there, which was fantastic and beautiful. But I love fall in Georgia. It gets nice and cool at night and usually is warm and sunny during the day.  Working outside is downright pleasant! There are more species of trees to turn colors. I went to an apple festival with Kara and Christina.

Fall in Provo Canyon

I feel like I've really been in the South now - I've had a deep-fried oreo at a fair. It was incredibly delicious and so not good for me.

Kara and I love making dinner together. We're always looking for new interesting recipes to try out. We recently tried pumpkin corn chowder, sweet potato enchiladas, and quinoa-stuffed poblanos. It's the majority of the time we spend together in the last four months, and always very fun. I feel like I'm a pretty good cook now, except when it comes to meat because Kara's vegetarian so we never cook any. 

I now have a boyfriend - Chase Smith. We've been dating for almost two months now; that's an impressive feat for me. He's a mechanical engineering student, we met at the YSA ward, and Kara approves of him.

Me and Chase at Blaine and Christina's wedding

My good friends from the ward, Christina and Blaine, got married this past weekend. I was a bridesmaid, which was stressful. Blaine and Chase are brothers, which added a fun twist. I loved my bridesmaid dress, which was a first ever. I have two more friends who just got engaged last month - Diana and Omar. I'll also be a bridesmaid for them in January. I feel like the movie 27 Dresses.


 That pretty well describes the major points of my life lately.

Gibbs Gardens and Antiquing

I finally had a Saturday without work, so Kara and I went to Gibbs Gardens up in north Georgia. It was kind of drizzly, but it rather added to the charm of the gardens. And there wasn't as many people.

One of my favorite parts where all of the bridges. Lots and lots of bridges.

There weren't really many flowers in bloom. Apparently July-September aren't very good months for that. We'd like to go again in the spring. Apparently they have a stunning daffodil festival in March. There was, however, a really adorable kitten really wanted to be petted.

After mediocre lunch from the garden cafe, we went down to a couple of antique stores on Ponce de Leon Ave: Paris on Ponce and Kudzu Antiques. The two couldn't be more different. Paris was over-crowded with some really weird/creepy things.

 Exhibit A:

Woman chasing her head.

 Exhibit B:

Creepiest looking dog statue imaginable. 

Exhibit C:

Gopher goes mid-century bling.

Like I said, some weird stuff.

Kudzu, on the other hand, was large and had lots of things nicely displayed. There was an old, sterling silver necklace that I loved, but it was $110. Not really in my price range. But I did get a never-been-worn semi-formal dress for $15.

I want this table for my Japanese room. When I have a Japanese room.

So, it was a really fun day.

July

July has been a busy month for me, but not so much in the social/fun categories. I've been working 50+ hour weeks all month. Crazy, but the pay check makes it hurt less. :)
Some of the fun things that've happened this month:

• Peachtree Roadrace and 4th of July at John and Kirsten's (Kara's friends)
• Antique Market with Kara, Artie, and John. (I got some awesome table candelabras for $5!)
• Mindy and Jeran came to visit. We went to the aquarium, where they were able to say "Ooh we saw some of those!", and Stone Mtn to hike up and also watch the laser show. We got very wet, sitting on the grass. We also had some great meals, including grilled pizza and quiche. 

• Atlanta Botanical Garden - Kara and I finally made it to the garden. We've been meaning to go for several months now, and it just barely happened.

• Olympic Opening Ceremonies party at Diana's house. Literally the only thing I've done with my church friends all month. Besides church. I love olympics. 
• Last Call Blues dancing. I really love this monthly fix of blues dancing. 

 Other than those things, my life has pretty much only been work, come home to make and eat dinner, and go to bed. It's very straightforward, which is nice. I would like to have a social life again, though. It adds spice to life.

Here's some more pictures from the Botanical Garden: