Christmas (plus New Years) in February!

Well... I figured it has been quite a while since I blogged last, and when looking at my last post I realized it was in November!
Ack!
Time does fly by rather fast I guess.

So, what have we been doing over the past two months?
Well, for Christmas we flew home to Colorado to spend it with both of our families.
Jay and I are lucky enough to have our parents live in the same neighborhood and attend the same family ward, so we don't have to argue over which side of the family to visit each year.
Christmas morning was spent with his parents where we slept the night before, but unfortunately I didn't snap any pictures while we were there (that was my dumb blond moment for the trip).
Christmas day was then spent at my sister Stephanie's house a little ways away. (There's just too many of us to all fit in my parent's house anymore)
Unfortunately I had another blond moment while at their house and my camera didn't capture any pictures there either.

We drew names in our family this year 'tween the kids' treating the married ones as one unit. Jay and I got Mariela and Diego. They were pretty easy to shop for considering they are the only two that have passports (and actually use them) in my family. With the help of Sam's Club we purchased a 5-day 4-night trip to Cancun, Mexico (excluding air fare of course). The reaction from the other adults in my family was basically all the same: "Can you guys draw my name next year?" It was pretty cool. I can't wait to see pictures from their trip this year.

Moving a long after Christmas...
My mom's gift to all of us this year was renting a cabin for the 3 days following Christmas. We all drove down to Colorado Springs, up through Divide, over the river and through the woods, to a little cabin up near Pikes Peak.
There were 4 bedrooms for all of us to share, a cozy fire place, a hot tub, a tire swing, and a few hills around (ok, really they were driveways because any "hill" up there was speckled with trees) for some good sledding!











We pre-planned a few fun family activities for up in the cabin so that we weren't all just bored up there and sitting around. One day we had a competition crossword puzzle to see who would do the dishes (my team of Jasen, Stephanie, & Jay won). That was pretty fun. I realized that almost everybody in my family is good at those.
That evening we started baking the gingerbread for our extravagant house we planned to build.
My brother Ben (aka Diego) bought a pattern online for a pretty sweet beach house. And although we had some problems assembling the darn thing in the beginning, the finished product was pretty sweet. Every single material used to build it is edible!
Take a look!











My added touches were the well and the trash can by the door, oh yeah, and the grass (died white rice). My brother can be credited with the bicycle, and the surf board. Melissa was the master behind our two sunbathers. After marveling at our accomplishment we decided to leave the house behind for the following tenants to enjoy!

Sunday morning Jay and I had to take off early from the cabin leaving everyone else behind for another night. I had to be back to work on Monday, and we had a 3pm flight out of DIA to book it to after dropping by my friend Jenn's wedding (which we didn't get to stay for, but at least we got to give our congratulations before jetting off - literally).
Before leaving the cabin we did our usual family photo, and I had all the girls put on their white hats that I knitted for us all just to show off my work. :)





All in all I had a blast at Christmas and can't wait to go home and visit again soon.

Moving on though... because we spend Thanksgiving with my Grandma April, and Christmas with our immediate families, we decided to go visit my Grandparents in Heyburn, ID (my dad's dad George and step Granny Charlotte) for the new year.
We drove up New Years Day and stayed through the weekend with them.
It was nice just hanging out with them and going to a temple session at the Twin Falls temple together.
We snapped a few quick shots before taking off on Sunday for the drive home, but I can't find my camera right now, so I'll have to upload those later.
Lucky for us the weather was bright and sunny both days we were driving, so we didn't have a single delay a long the way.

Ok, so that about covers it all. Just another couple months in the life of two married nerds!
Oh how I love being boring!

Houston, Texas - NASA

I've been meaning to post this blog for a long time now, but I just didn't get around to it 'till now.

The "2nd" part of our Houston trip (well... 4 hours of the last day spent there really) was a trip to the Johnson Space Center, aka NASA!!

Jay and I had a blast touring the whole museum as well as going on the tram tour to historic mission control and various training centers on the base.





The highlight for me was indeed mission control. We toured there merely and hour before docking proceedures were to commence for the space shuttle that flew up on Friday (2 days earlier) to swap out one person at the international space station.





Speaking of the international space station. They have a training layout in a building there of every single piece of equipment up there. Obviously it isn't laid out exactly how it would appear in space, because they have to lay it out flat on Earth. But they do this so that when they take up new equipment to the station itself they can practice beforehand (and make sure it fits right, etc.).
This is the training space station building (don't remember the real name) where that all happens.















This is the arm on the shuttle that the astronauts use to manuver large/heavy objects around outside the space station for building/maintenance procedures. On earth it can't lift anything heavier than a balloon filled with air, but in space it can manuver the entire station itself (one piece at a time).

Going into the building with the "Saturn 5" rocket (that they flew to the moon in the Apollo Missions) on loan to the Johnson Space Center from the Smithsonian.










My favorite mission story:

This was my birthday present to Jay (and half-birthday present to myself - considering our birthday's are each other's half-birdays).

We had a lot of fun browsing the gift shop afterward and I bought a really cute white sweat-shirt-ish kind of a thing with the NASA logo on it. I also bought a picture of us just before going on the tour (they are required to take photographs of every person who sets foot on the base for security reasons).