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...