Exciting but frustrating news...

So I meant to wait to tell everyone our exciting news. I meant to wait until everything is said and done before spilling the beans. HOWEVER, at this point I'm not sure everything will EVER be said and done, and somehow my exciting news post has turned into an extrememly frustrated post about waiting...

We're still extremely excited and giddy about the whole thing, it's just now our excitement is laced with undertones of anger, frustration, and loss of faith in the human race...that's all. No big deal.

I'll start with the exciting news, and then explain the whole harried situation.

So we bought a house!!!! we're in the process of buying a house!!!

Not just any house, but rather our very first home! It's nothing too fancy--just a little town home--but perfect for us for a few years and perfect for a new beginning. Not only is it our first house, but it's exactly where we've wanted to be for the past 2 years...Daybreak!

Now I realize Daybreak isn't built for everyone. I've always commented that living in Daybreak would be like living in Stepford. Ya know, like in the movie Stepford Wives--minus the robots. I see this as a positive and inviting attribute, but apparently it is a nightmare come true for some. In fact, a coworker of mine made the exact same comparison of Daybreak to Stepford during my first week of work, only she followed it up with a good shiver and shake of her head...Funny.

BUT for us, Daybreak is perfect. Huge LDS communitee and tons of young couples with young families. So long to our ward with the retirement home! Plus, it will be so fantastic to be within walking distance of the Oquirrh Mountain Temple! My very favorite part about the new house though--the brand new TRAX station that they opened up across the street from it in August. The brand new TRAX station that Andrew and I can walk to in the morning and ride from end to end to get to work at the hospital each day. For free. Together. :)

This whole house thing is not something we decided to do over the weekend. In fact, it's been a huge pain and frustration with a never ending deadline since the middle of August and counting. Because of the fact that Daybreak is such a new community--everything was built within the last 10 years I believe--a whole freakin lot of people bought houses during the housing bubble and ended up stuck in mortgages they couldn't afford when prices plummeted. This means that 100% about 95% of the homes currently sold in Daybreak are short sales and foreclosures. We knew we wanted to move to Daybreak, so we had to play the short sale game along with everyone else. So we put an offer in on our house in the 3rd week in August, just after we got back from Hawaii. Then we settled in to wait. and wait. and wait. It seemed like there was always some other paper that we needed from someone, and it always meant more waiting to get it. As someone who likes to take care of things the second something needs to be done...as someone who plans out EVERYTHING...this has been a painful learning experience in the art of patience. It's been a ridiculously hard thing to do to simply put it in the hands of our realtor and broker and then just wait for everything to finally come together.

Throw Andrew digging a hole into the middle of his forehead and a weekend spent in the ER in with all of the house stress, and you get one very long and frustrating Summer that turned to Fall that eventually turned into Winter with still no house.

We had an end of November deadline that was pretty important not to pass, but alas it came and went with no house and we survived and kept on patiently waiting. Our livingroom was filled with boxes, packed and ready to go for all of November--I had to do something to feel like I had control of the situation. Supposedly Thanksgiving was what threw a wrench into the situation, and so we were told that right after Thanksgiving everything should be set and ready to close. You see, we've been waiting on 1 single piece of paper from the seller's bank for the past month. As soon as someone simply decided to send it on over, we could close the next day and finally be homeowners.

Obviously this didn't happen after Thanksgiving because it's now the 8th, and we're headed into a 2nd December weekend with no paper and still. no. house.

Not only has it not happened, but apparently as of yesterday we are still 10-15 days away from receiving it. Why the sudden change in story??? Well, there's a reason short sales take so long, and a reason they are quite the nightmare. You see, we're only allowed to talk to our realtor, who is only allowed to talk to the seller's realtor, who is only allowed to talk to the bank negotiator (the bank the sellers owe all this money to), who is the only one allowed to talk to Fannie Mae--which is owned by the government and has to approve this whole shibang (they're the one's with our missing paper...).

Can you see where things could get lost in translation?!?!

Really the biggest problem is that the seller's realtor is a total dweeb. Not the smart kind, the weird kind. The kind that looks like he's 12 (I think he's truly only in his 20's) and weighs a buck twenty-five soaking wet. OH not to mention that his hair has highlights circa the year 2000. Perhaps we'd be able to look past all of that, except that the guy has a website. Probably the worst website in existence. The kind you visit and marvel over the fact that people think he is legitimate and are willing to put trust and money into his hands. The kind with YouTube videos showcasing his cue-card reading skills, which aren't good at all, and those gorgeous highlights, in a button up shirt that looks like he shopped in the men's section, when really he should be wearing a medium in the boys section. The kind where none of the links work and if you try to click on a house listing it makes you sign up for a free trial of some kind in order to get access. Seriously. And our future in our perfect house in Daybreak is in THIS GUY'S hands.

He's also the guy who gives our realtor bad information just to get her off of his back for a few days, and then avoids her calls and emails when things don't pan out the way he says they will (like getting our paper right after Thanksgiving). The guy who literally yelled and screamed at our realtor because he thought she was calling him for updates too often--ya that happened. Seriously, he's like a teenager. Totally professional.

Basically he's the guy not doing his job because he obviously doesn't know what the heck he's doing, and it's literally ruining our lives right now. Since we're not allowed to call him though, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it except to sit and wait to see what happens. While our realtor--who is awesome by the way--continues to call and email him like it's going out of style (she thinks he's an incompetent dweeb too) in hopes that eventually it'll get us somewhere.

Oh and we have to be out of our current place by the end of December and will be in Seattle from the 23-29th, but no big deal...

Enough of the complaining though. We LOVE this house! We're ridiculously excited to call it home, even if it requires being homeless for a short-time (I hope not longer!) in order to do it! I've been racking up ideas to make it our home since the middle of August. My Pinterest account is just bursting with awesome DIY projects and decor ideas. Oh, did I mention I'm getting tools for Christmas this year. TOOLS. Not like hammer and screwdriver tools (I already have those anyway) but like POWER TOOLS! I have so many plans and Andrew is completely  trying to be on board with the whole thing. --I have to have something to do while he's at grad school! Home alone using power tools, super good idea.

Sorry about the super long post, but I need to be able to look back at this whole horrible mess later in life and laugh about the whole thing. I feel like it will be an awful long time before that happens though.

And just for the sake of giving you something to look at...here's the awful listing picture of our cute little townhome...

Cake and other various activities...

I rescued the top of our wedding cake(it took some digging) from my mom's freezer right before we left for Hawaii. We were in Hawaii on our actual anniversary, so we planned to eat our cake when we got back. It ended up being another 2 weeks or so, but eventually we got it done! And let me just say...that year old cake was AWESOME! What was NOT so awesome was year old Jones soda.

I swear I have better pictures than these somewhere, so I'll try to dig them up. In the meantime, what is marriage if not making your spouse pose for ridiculous cheesy photos...

As for the rest of our Fall--post Hawaii, it consisted mainly of time spent at work. It also included a whole lot of time and frustration put into something pretty awesome and exciting, that I'll tell you about hopefully later this week--or atleast this month.

We did get to sneak away to Park City for an evening of ghost stories, which I seriously LOVED. Old scary history is always so much better than just straight up history. It was alot of walking around hearing scary stories about houses like the one below. I have more pictures but can't figure out how to get them to download correctly after I flip them. I'll work on it...

Aside from that, our Fall as been pretty uneventful. We did get to watch the Utes first game of the season against Montana. My first game ever outside of the MUSS section in Rice Eccles Stadium. Our seats sucked (it was employee appreciation night and they stuck us all in the corner), but we won the game. One of my favorite places to be.

That's all for now, but remember.....exciting news coming up soon!!!

Hawaii...

Well, I'm a liar and I'm sorry I never posted about Hawaii or our anniversary or other various events. I have the best of intentions, but obviously nothing came of them.

For the sake of getting back on track, I've decided to just post a jumble of pictures, and try to fill in some of the gaps of what we were up to this Fall. Hopefully this will be followed up by posts about Winter, before Winter is over already. I'll try. Again, best of intentions.

First up, Hawaii!

Andrew's parents have a time-share on Oahu that they inherited, and when we go that's where we stay. It's a little condo with bamboo furniture and a great view off a private beach, in one of the poorer quieter parts of the island. We love it! This year we were there in August, and last time we were there the end of March. Apparently I never learned enough in school to understand why tides work the way they do, but our awesome private sandy beach of March was a sheer rock cliff in August. It does it every year I guess.

This rocky beach was a long sandy beach last March.

Hawaii was all about relaxing this year, as we'd already done a lot of tourist stuff the year before. We spent out time snorkeling, hiking, laying on the beach, sleeping, and eating. It was nice to get up in the morning and just see where the day took us.

Andrew and I love to hike, and don't do it nearly enough. We also really love Lost....I know, embarassing but true. So we figured while we were in Oahu we would take the opportunity to get some hiking in and also see some amazing Lost areas.

Most of these pictures are from a hike we did up through an area where they filmed a lot. It was GORGEOUS. The ridiculously old and awesome buildings are part of the compound where the cages are in Lost.

This waterfall was at the top of the trail. What you CAN'T see is the ridiculous looking model and photgrapher taking pictures at the bottom of the falls. HILARIOUS. Can't believe I don't have any pictures of it!

Just down the road from our condo was this cave. There is a pretty creepy story associated with it about a shark god who drug people in to it and ate them...I didn't get to fully enjoy it, because I was too worried about the shady looking gang of locals hanging out by our rental car. In Hawaii they go out of their way to post signs that convince you everyone is out to steal your stuff. I have an irrational fear of getting my license/passport stolen and not being able to get back home....it's a problem that leads to me asking Andrew 70 thousand times a day if he still has his wallet (with my license in it because I make him carry it around), and then making him pull it out to show me that it's still there. Really, it's a problem.

The cave is right off the main road, and our cars were parked across the street

Inside...super scary, right? :)

This how I spent a whole lot of my time

Sunset off our lanai. We ate breakfast out here every morning. This is Andrew's favorite place to be.

One of my all time favorite days was spent at the temple. When we were here last it was closed for remodeling. It was rededicated a couple of months before we were there this time. It's completely gorgeous and was such a nice and peaceful day.

Don't mind the awful picture. Contrary to what it looks like, the wind was blowing like crazy, and I don't exactly go out of my way to spend a ridiculous amount of time getting ready in the morning while on vacation.

Last but not least....Food. My favorite part of vacation. We drove into Honolulu for some Bubba Gump's the night of our anniversary. I have a thing for Bubba Gump's. I think it's because we don't have one in Utah, so everytime we're in a city with one (Seattle or Honolulu) I always want to go. However, when we got there we couldn't find it and ended up giving up and heading home, stopping at McDonalds for cheeseburgers on the way home. :( Not the best way to spend your 1st anniversay. It turned out okay though, because we went for round 2 the following day with success. We also hit up Hank's Haute Dogs for some awesome gormet hot dogs as well. In fact, we stopped off at Hank's twice, because once just wasn't enough. It's pretty fantastic.

Worst. Picture. Ever.

I swear neither of us are as chubby as these pictures make us look.

A-MAZ-ING.

Well, that's about it for Hawaii. I wish I had pictures of other various events, such as the massive amount of snorkeling we did (and found out we LOVE), or the super ghetto Big Island Aiport in the middle of the night on our way home. I've been to some pretty shady airports in my life--mainly those in Mexico and Peru, but this one looked a whole lot more like a bus terminal than an airport. Probably because it was outside, nighttime, and there were some big honkin spiders runnin' around. Quite the adventure.

Next up....cake.

Andrew's Accident...

Warning: This post will be long and boring (for the purpose of preserving the whole awful story while it's a fresh memory), and will contain some gorey pictures. I appologize in advance, and promise to get back to neglecting our blog soon.

I started a post about a month ago explaining how everything was so boring around here and so there was nothing to blog about. I couple days after that all this drama began, so in a way I feel like I brought it on myself.
There's been a lot of drama in our lives lately, and it all seemed to hit at the very same moment. At the end of October we were up to our necks in drama relating to some pretty big news that I'll share really soon (no babies involved), when all this new weekend drama began.

On Saturday, October 29th, I woke up and headed out for a fun filled day with my sisters and mom and the kiddos. We went to lunch and then went to see The Wizard of Oz at the Grand Theatre. It was really cute, although about as lengthy as the movie. A few minutes after the end of intermission, I got a text from Andrew that read something along the lines of "I passed out at TRAX and I'm on my way to the ER with Cam to get my head stitched up. Stay with your family." WHAT?! Upon learning that the play STILL wasn't going to end for another half hour (which actually ended up being another hour), Elise drove me over to our house for my car, and off to the U of U ER I went.

When I got there, I was obviously a little anxious to see Andrew, but the front desk attendent couldn't have cared less. She wouldn't let me back because Camden and Erin, his girlfried, were with Andrew and only 2 guests were allowed. She then took her very sweet time going and asking them to send someone out, by which time I was near hysterics (just think what would have happened if I had thought it was worse than stitches). Erin came out, and I finally got to go in and see Andrew.

 In the ER waiting room

This is what he looked like when I got there....no big deal. The guy refused to take his shoes off. I think he was in denial that he was going to miss the football game.

He was sort of a mess. His forehead had gauze on it, and he had dried blood all up and down his face, interspersed with bruises and cuts all down his nose and right half of his face. He had a deep cut above his lip that I was sure was going to need stitches. He looked terrible, and I hadn't even seen what was underneath that bandage on his head.

He breifly reiderated to me what had happened, with some help from Camden, and by the time he had told his story for the 20th time to the 20th doctor, I had it down pretty well. --Andrew was on his way to the TRAX station from our house to go meet Camden so they could go up to the stadium for the U of U game. He biked the 4 flat blocks from our house to the TRAX station, got off of his bike and was standing on the platform waiting for the train. He felt a little dizzy and light headed, and the next thing he knew some random guy was rolling him over and shoving tissue to his severely bleeding nose. He realized he had passed out, and the guy helped him to a sitting position. From there is got a little out of hand. UTA staff happened to be there checking tickets of football goers, and called an ambulance and firetruck. They blocked off a whole lane of traffic for the firetruck, and repositioned where the train stopped on the platform to stay away from "the accident scene". Andrew tried to convince everyone that he could just take TRAX up to the hospital and get some stitches, but he wasn't allowed on the train, due to all the blood--He was considered a "bio-hazard". So he called Camden, he definitely didn't call me, who came and got him and took him to the hospital after Andrew refused to ride up in the ambulance. This is about the time my dear husband thought to text me, not wanting to interupt my afternoon with his petty problems. Andrew was positive that all he was going to need were a few quick stitches and then off to the football game he would go. He adamently disagreed when I told him this was not going to be the case.

Needless to say Andrew didn't make it to the football game, which ended up being the Utes first PAC-12 victory :( sad thing to miss. He spent what ended up being about 23 hours in the ER, hunkering down for the night in the ER observation unit--I slept on the floor.

They insisted on keeping him because apparently it isn't normal for a 26 year old guy to pass out at a TRAX station like that. Honestly, I was kind of shocked they were making such a big deal out of the whole thing, because I myself am highly accustomed to passing out in random places (usually work). However, I passout because I am completely incapable of remembering not to lock my knees for long periods of time. Apparently for normal people, passing out is kind of a big deal.

Andrew also has a known heart murmur, which to our knowledge was not a big deal. So the first thing they did was an EKG of his heart, which showed something abnormal and they decided he might be having a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot that travels into your lung--super dangerous). They did a chest x-ray, and a screening test for a PE that came back positive, which led them to do a chest ct as well to check for a PE. No PE thank heavens, so they decided to do an echo (an ultrasound of his heart) in the morning (it was about 10 PM by this time) and if that came back okay we could go home. This was about the time they finally decided to get around to letting a med student stitch up his head and lip.
--I should say that my first thoughts about the situation were that Andrew was probably just overreacting to the large amount of blood due to it being a headwound. I was sure it probably wasn't really that big of a deal and probably didn't even need stitches...I even weighed in my mind how much less difficult it would be to just get some superglue to close up his wound. Really I did, and I was really really wrong.
I think he ended up with about 14 stitches in all. Originally they thought it would take more like 20.

This was the worst of it. It took about an hour for the doctor to stitch it up. It went clear through all the layers of tissue.

They also ended up putting a couple stitches in his upper lip. His lips were ridiculously swollen for a few days

After he was stitched up, they moved us to the ER observation unit, where we would be spending the night, around 11. Andrew's nurse ended up being my old friend Charles, who I worked nights at Huntsman with a few years ago. That was a nice surprise, and made me feel better knowing that someone I trusted had our back. Aside from his heartrate dipping into the 40s during the night, nothing eventful happened during the night. The next morning, Sunday, we talked to round after round of doctors (med students, residents, fellows, and attendings) and Andrew had his echo done. Finally around 3 PM, 23 hours after the whole ordeal started, they decided that the murmur and electical block in his heart probably weren't the cause of the problem and sent us home to follow up with the Faint and Fall Clinic at the U.

Our tiny observation room where we spent the night. I slept on the floor, next to the air pump on Andrew's bed :(

Right after his stitches.

Waiting for someone to let us go home

The ECHO they did Sunday on Andrew's heart before giving him the all clear to go home and follow-up later in clinic

When we did follow up the following week, Andrew did a treadmill stress test and a heart MRI to rule out a rare fatal heart condition that affects young people (scary). Those tests finally came back well at the end of last week. So basically after all of those tests, we still have no idea what happened. However don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have no answers as opposed to Andrew having a rare fatal heart condition. He follows up with another cardiology specialist in December, but I think it's going to be a wait and see if it happens again kind of situation. For now, we will just be grateful that he seems to be in good health and take things as they come.

All of the events of that weekend sure made me happy to go back to our original drama and hopefully put all of this behind us for awhile. Andrew's stitches are all out by this point, and his scabs are even gone. He's got a pretty gnarly scar on his forehead, that will fade in the next few months/years. He looks a bit like Harry Potter, which is okay because I dig Harry Potter. There are worse things in life to say the least.

Awesome news to come sometime in the next couple of weeks!! Hopefully only a couple more days...