Phew... What a week!

This is going to be a photolicious post, so be ready.

This past week was my week off between terms, and boy was it an eventful week.  It all started last Saturday when we made an excursion to Atlantic city.

First we played on the beach.

Then we explored the boardwalk and other such famous Atlantic City sights.  

One of our favorite spots was in the Tropicana Hotel and Casino.  The inside of the casino had an Old Havana theme-- Cuba.  So we happened upon these 2 restaurants side by side- P.F. Changs (where we decided to eat- yummy!)- China- and Red Square- Russia- which had a giant statue of Lenin outside.  We thought the whole Communist theme was hilarious.  Good times. 

 It was a fun day, but was exhausting after the train ride there, the day packed with fun and over 10 miles of walking, and the bus ride home.  I know I slept well that night.

On Monday, we, along with Zack's parents, embarked on the 4 or so hour drive to a little town in upstate New York called Auburn, where Zack's mom was working for the week.  On the way, we got to stop for lunch in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Yes, the very one.  And if you don't know what I am talking about, shame on your for choosing not to participate in an important aspect of today's cultural tradition. 

On Tuesday, we took the drive out the the church history sights in nearby Palmyra.  We saw the Hill Cumorah

the Erie canal (whoop dee doo), the sacred grove, the Smith farm and houses, and the Palmyra temple.  Although we didn't get the chance to do a session there, I learned that the Celestial Room in the temple has a window that looks to the outside.  You can look out and see the sacred grove.  Isn't that awesome?  Well I like it.  What a beautiful place Palmyra was, and it was so fun to get to see those sights.

Wednesday brought a trip to Cooperstown, NY and the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Zack has been longing to go, and I think he really enjoyed it.  There was a Philly Phanatic outfit there so you can get a look at it- coolest mascot ever.

Thursday we took it easy by staying in Auburn itself.  Sound boring?  Nope.  Willam Seward, secretary of state under President Lincoln, lived in Auburn.  He was an awesome guy.  So we went and saw his house. 

It was fabulous. His family and posterity recognized that he was an important figure in his time and in history, so they preserved his house and his things very well.  Most of the items in the house actually belonged to him or his posterity.  It wasn't filled with period pieces and recreations, as so many historical sights are.  Harriet Tubman also lived in Auburn, but we didn't go see her house.

Friday may have been the busiest of all.  We got up and started the long drive back to Philly. On the way home, we stopped to explore Valley Forge, just 20 or so miles north of Philadelphia.

Also awesome, but we didn't get too much time there as we had to hurry home to see a Phillies game. 

It actually wasn't a very good game.  The LA Angels of Aneheim (what a stupid name) won 7-1. On a happy note, I did get to see the incredibly good-looking Chase Utley. 

Unfortunately, he's been playing like crap.  In fact, he was benched for the game tonight.  But he played yesterday, and he is so cute.  He could use a haircut, but when his hat is on, boy oh boy.

Here I am at the end of my week off, longing for a vacation from my vacation.  It was so fun, but I am tired.

Thanks to Zack's parents for making our trip possible.  Sorry to those that I ignored this week, sometimes inadvertently, due to the cell phone confusion... which reminds me- my phone number is back to the usual one so go ahead and catch me there.

Toodles.

So phoney

It came, it came!  My adorable little pink phone came in the mail yesterday.  Unfortunately, after activating it, I had to wait 4 hours for some of the features to work.  That meant that I could not make any calls or access the internet.  And since 4 hours after activation was 2 AM this morning, I did not get the chance to play around with it much until today.  I have played with it tons today though, which gave me a glorious excuse to put off studying for my 2 finals tomorrow, one of which is actually horribly important.  Yeah, I know, dumb idea.  I will have 2 years to play around with this phone, but I only get one shot at these finals.  Oh well.  I've studied my guts out.  I can enjoy myself a little.

As mentioned in a previous post, this is my first smart phone.  Yes, I have that PDA that Drexel "provided" (aka they tacked $800-ish onto my "technology fee") but I am very excited about the prospect of an internet connection with no actual wireless signal.  It does the pretty regular stuff that phones do these days with a camera and camcorder, music, various organizational programs (calendar, task lists, voice memos, address lists, etc) and also includes streaming video.  It has the potential to play live TV too but there's no way I'm paying extra for that.  So far, my favorite is, of course, the whole internet thing, but I'm also pretty crazy about the touch screen.  Yeah, I'm sure many of you have had such gadgets for quite some time and don't really understand my enthusiasm, or at least think it a little behind the times, but I will enjoy my new little gadget anyway.

For those who are interested, I will be trying to port my old number to my new phone in a few days when we have decided for sure that we're going to stick with this new service provider and such.  It looks great so far.  We have a fabulous signal in our apartment, which is definitely a step up from before.  If you wanna catch me in the meantime, I will still have my old phone for a bit longer, so feel free to just use that number.  I don't wanna paste this temporary number all over the place when I am just going to switch back to the old one (hopefully).

And, in case you didn't get enough with the last picture...

pRoCrAsTiNaTiNg

I should be studying, so of course I am wasting time by writing on my blog instead.  I don't think I really even have anything interesting to say, but I am procrastinating hitting the books anyway.

I am so excited to be done with this term.  I am 1/4 of the way to becoming a nurse.  In the 1 week that I have off, we have lots of fun planned.

My plans include lunch with a cute friend from the ward, having the missionaries (one of which is Zack's cousin) for dinner, an excursion out to Atlantic City (free beaches!), a trip up to New York for some church history sites and the baseball hall of fame, maybe Valley Forge and/or Lancaster county, a Phillies game, and I am personally hoping to do a daytime trip to the Eastern State Penientiary (we already saw it at night when we went for the haunted house thing they do around Halloween).  Most of these activities will include my fabulous parents-in-law.  We are so excited that they can come to visit at just the right time to fit with my break from school.

I have to mention that I am not at all complaining about only having a 1 week break from school.  It really is much nicer to start this program in the spring in terms of breaks.  They get longer and longer- 1 week after the first term, 2 weeks after the second, and a nice Christmas break after the third.  If I started in the fall, it wouldn't have been quite so nice like that, so hooray for that.

Well, nothing exciting, as promised.

So I put some of the pictures of our ever-so-hot mini golf outing onto my computer so here they are.  It's this fabulous little course that highlights some of the fun places in Philly.

Here's me with the Love statue

Zack at the museum of art

Zack with the liberty bell

Me at Independence Hall

So hot.  So fun though.  

In other news, we have happened upon (which makes it sound like it was effortless, and it wasn't.  I acknowledge my husband's very hard work in this matter) a solution for our no cell phone reception in our apartment issue, and we will be switching to a new plan.  This may happen as soon as tomorrow.  We have decided to get smart phones this time around, and anyone who knows me will not be surprised to learn that I have settled on a pink phone- the Palm Centro to be exact.  Now if I could just figure out how to put my nursing books on my phone, I could never again look upon that stupid PDA that I paid way too much for by Drexel's smothering decree.  So when I said call me at the end of my last post, I meant to suggest that you may actually be able to get through now.  Yay!  For those who want to know exactly how we wiggled our way out of 2 cell phone contracts without paying any penalty fees, sorry.  We enjoy this shroud of mystery and triumph we have surrounding us at the moment.  Ok, ok, so we've told about a million people, and it really won't be too hard to milk extreme braggings out of me if you really want to (or frankly even if you don't want to).

Isn't this phone cute?

Let's talk about the weather

It was a hot one in Philly today.  We were (and still are as I write) a solid 30 degrees hotter than all you Salt Lake City (and suburbs) folks out there, and I am learning more every day than I am not horribly fond of this humidity that we have here.  When we first went outside this morning, we were in the mid-70's and it felt like I was standing in the same room as an indoor swimming  pool.  I was thinking that the mid-70's were plenty warm if I had to deal with the whole sauna feeling in addition to the temperature but the day had other plans for me.  Back in the dry desert that is Utah, I have enjoyed many 90 degree days, but that's a different kind of 90 degrees.  So we decided to go downtown to this absolutely adorable mini golf course that they have outside in a park.  It's only like 2 blocks from the subway but by the time we got to the park, we had to sit on a bench in the shade for a couple of minutes to cool off.  I was drenched in sweat by the time we'd finished our golf game.  It was still really fun and I kicked Zack's butt (it's ok, he whomped me last time we played that course), but next time, I think we'll skip going in the middle of the day when it's nasty outside like that.  It got to 96 today. It's still 90 now, and it's 9:00 PM.  Thankfully, after our little outing we were able to return to our air-conditioned apartment, and I really am grateful for that because I know that there are definitely a lot of people here with no AC. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a summer person.  It is the best season.  Hot weather and sunshine makes me happy.  But not this kind of summer.  I want my dry heat back.  We're supposed to stay in the 90s for 3 more days (hitting 98 on Monday!).  If anyone wants to come over and partake of my air conditioning, please feel free.  I will be home much of next week studying for finals.  Call me.  I should actually have cell phone reception by then.  But that's a story for another time.

A peek at our new apartment

This post is mostly for the sake of my mom, who wanted to see some pictures of our new apartment, but feel free to take a gander if you feel so inclined.

We're still working on finding places to put some last things but I think you could call us pretty settled now.  Forgive any stray messes that may be visible in the photos.

This is the bedroom, which is much more spacious than our last bedroom, and here is our first real bed (we had been sleeping on twin beds pushed together until we moved here).

Here's the bathroom.

 

And the living room.

And also the kitchen 

(not extremely adorable, I know but it has......)

THE DISHWASHER!

So far, we really like it a lot.  It can be a little noisy at times (a side effect of living in the midst of many a college student-- happened in our old apartment too but was somewhat dampened by our 4th floor location).  The trolleys also stop just outside our building (they come above ground here, so it's not the underground subway-like system anymore once you reach our place), which can get kind of noisy, but is so worth it to have that kind of access to transportation.  I think street noise is relatively easy to tune out, and that was actually one of the major reasons that we decided to move here.

Mom and dad will have a chance to see it when they come for my pinning ceremony in 10 months (if I make it through this), and hopefully we will have found a place for everything by then, just in time to move all our stuff again.  

Next time, enjoy the view from below

My dad and little sister (actually not so little- she's 20.  She's also taller than me) were hiking yesterday when they came to a beautiful waterfall.  My sister wanted a better view of the waterfall so decided to climb up to some rocks above the waterfall.  It must have been quite the view.  Then she wanted to come down, as anyone eventually would.  She tried, but was having some difficulty when she slipped and fell 35 feet (hopefully I'm close on the number... not really sure I remember exactly what mom told me) onto the rocks below. She doesn't remember falling.  She says that her life did not flash before her eyes. Nor does she remember hitting the ground.  She just remembers thinking that she was going to slip.

Anyway, she got life-flighted (is that a verb?) down the mountain in one of those red sling things and they transferred her into the helicopter once she was at the base of the mountain. It's hard to see her in this picture but it's a pretty good view of the waterfall and helicopter.

She really ended up being quite lucky with just a broken thumb and several sets of stitches. Her knee got banged up pretty bad from what I hear.  I am just so grateful that she is okay.  She is upset because she was wearing a new pair of jeans and they cut them off her in the hospital... I am happy that something like that is the real tragedy of this situation for her.

I think I was the last to find out that this had happened due to some awful cell phone reception in our new apartment.  Luckily, that meant that they already knew everything was going to be okay, and she was already home from the hospital by the time I was clued in.  I would've worried myself sick if I'd found out sooner.

So Michelle, just want to tell you that I love you and I am happy to have you as a sister, and I am so glad that I get to keep you around with just some possible scarring instead of brain damage or worse.  And since you're okay, yay for your little adventure.  It'll make a great story someday.  

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