Deep in the Heart of Texas

As many of you know Casey and I moved from Orem, Utah, down to Austin, Texas, on August 13. We have been settling in the past month and I figured it was time to give an update on the big move. I don't have pics of the apartment yet (we are still hanging up pictures on the walls and decorating) but I hope to finish all that this weekend. Here is a review of our first month in Texas.

The Move:
Casey and I totally lucked out as my amazing dad flew out to help us move. We also lucked out and my awesome boss Nikki let us put our stuff on the truck her new job was paying for, so we only had to pay the cost of gas for our two cars on the way down. We had two cars, a truck and five drivers so even though it was a 22-hour drive it wasn't too horrible. Neville was a real trooper and made it two solid days of driving. We stay the first night in Alberqure, N.M., and the second night in Dallas. Sunday morning we moved Nikki's stuff out of the truck (in Dallas) and then headed down to Austin. Johanna, John and their kids met us at our apartment with the apartment keys they had picked up for us on Saturday. A really nice neighbor saw us unloading and helped us. Which was extremely fortunate as Casey threw his back out while helping unload Nikki's stuff. He was hobbling around like an old man. We don't have a lot of stuff so luckily the unpacking went quickly.

School/Jobs:
Casey had his first day of orientation on Monday the 16th and then I had mine on Wednesday the 18th. I started work that Thursday and then we both started classes on Wednesday the 25th. So far our classes are interesting and keeping us busy. I work for the Texas Regional Collaborative on the STEM Project http://www.thetrc.org/trc/ and Casey got a job as a graphic design intern with http://www.utexas.edu/tsm/

Life in Austin:
We are really enjoying Austin despite the blazing heat and random tropical storms. Our apartment complex has a pool which we have visited a few times with Jo and her kids. Jo has some cute pics and if I remember to get them from her I will post some. We have also tried out a few restaurants with friends including my friend Natalie who I went to BYU-H with and her husband. We also had a visit from my high school friend, Katie, and her husband Rick who live in Louisiana. Rick got us some free tickets to the first UT home football game and we all bought burnt orange shirts so I really feel like a Longhorn now.

Pictures for your enjoyment:
This is what happens when it rains 9 inches in one day

Sporting our burnt orange at the first UT home game. We won by the way.
The UT fans do actually make the Hook 'em Horns sign a lot. Like the entire game. They also chant a lot, swear a lot and drink a lot. Seeing as my football experience thus far has been high school and BYU it was quite the experience.
This is to show the world how much I love Neville.
And this was just too cute to not share.

Catch up Time

My name is Sarah Rogers and I am a horrible blogger.

There I took the first step to recovery. As many of you have noticed, it has been almost a year since our last blog post. I am going to restart the blog and with the hope that now we are in Austin and are exploring a new city we will have more things to blog about. So here is an attempt to catch you all up on the last 10 months. I will take it one month at a time so I can provide more posts for your viewing pleasure.

November 2009
November means Thanksgiving. Which at this point is the only thing I can say for sure that we did last November. Lesson learned: don't wait 10 months to write a blog post. Thanksgiving was very exciting as we got to go to Arizona and see the entire Rogers family. This is the first time Casey and I have been with his entire family in close to 5 years. We all stayed in a big house with a swimming pool and hot tub and the house was really close to the outlet mall. Casey and I flew down which was sooo much better than driving like we did the year before.

On Thanksgiving morning Casey, Dustin, Jennifer, Darin, Shauna and I ran a 10K race. This was the first 10K Casey and I had ever done and we trained for about 6 weeks for it. We were pleasantly surprised with our times: Casey 51:16.0 just beating Sarah who ran 52:36.7. OK, so 1 min 20 secs is more than "just" beating but it makes me feel better to put it that way.

After the race we ate way too much food and then that night we went to the outlet malls when they opened which was around midnight. That was pretty fun but there were way too many people for my comfort. I hate being in large crowds.

During the rest of the vacation we had a cousin gift exchange, played lots of games, made gingerbread houses and ate way too much. Casey and I got to spend most of Sunday hanging out with Dustin and Maddy and their kids as everyone else had already left. It was a great trip and hopefully we will all get together again in the next year (I believe there is a plan in works as we speak for next summer)

Below are some pictures from Thanksgiving for your viewing pleasure.

Our worst Frightmare came true

Toward the end of September Casey won six free passes to Utah's illustrious amusement park Lagoon. During October the park puts on "Frightmares" where they have some haunted house type stuff, people walking around in costumes and general spookiness. During Frightmares Lagoon is only open on the weekends and we weren't able to make it up until yesterday. But first, let's run down what we did the rest of the month.

The first weekend in October was LDS General Conference, of course. We received free entries to a run with your dog 5k at the University on Oct. 3. We've never walked Neville much farther than 2 miles let alone run with him. But he handled it like a champ and had we had a really fun time. He sniffed a lot of dogs' butts and since Casey was registered with him we came in third place and Neville one a giant red food bowl.

Here's Casey and Neville before the race:


Neville checking out the snacks at the end of the race:


Neville eating out of his prize bowl:


And Sarah with a very tired and grumpy looking Neville, he'd had enough excitement by the end:


And here's a photo of the three of us running together near the end of the course:


On the second weekend we went to see the Odyssey Dance Theatre's annual Halloween production "Thriller." The dance troupe does a variety of spooktacular dances from mummies to vampires to teenagers and evil scarecrows to of course the dance from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Casey's favorite was a tap dance number with glow-in-the-dark skeletons with removable heads. Sarah enjoyed the number with Frankenstein's Monster and the Bride of Frankenstein the most. That one features some really impressive dancing by the Bride as she accidentally gets "killed" part way through the number.

On Oct. 17 we had planned to go to Lagoon but our friends Stevie and Jesse went on a camping trip from hell to Moab and Katie's husband Brad was on a hunting trip in Wyoming. So what did we go do? We went shopping of course!

The next week Sarah successfully defended her prospectus to write her thesis (she built a moat, a wall loaded with archers and boiling oil to keep it safe from her evil advisement committee) and then her parents came into town. On Saturday, Oct. 24, Sarah, her dad and her sister Meghan ran the BYU homecoming 5k while Casey rocked the GRE. That night we rode the Haunted Canyon event on the Heber Creeper. It was fun and slightly scary. But it was our first ride on a real train! We think our nephew Nate would have had the time of his life as he loves both trains and Halloween.

You can read below what we did this past Friday night, and finally we come to Lagoon. We agreed to pick up Stevie and Jesse in American Fork and stop in Salt Lake City on the way up to pick up an illustration that Jesse's work is going to auction at a fundraiser. As we all know, Google Maps is pretty much worthless when it comes to navigating university campuses (at University of Texas in Austin, for example) and while we could see the building we wanted to get to, we had no clue how to actually reach it. Stevie and Jesse figured they would have better luck hoping out of the car than risking Casey's crazy driving which involved driving the wrong way on one-way streets and "sweet bootlegger turns."

We made it to Lagoon despite I-15's mysterious closure (a Halloween prank?) and met up with Katie and Brad. The lines were short and we were able to hit most of all the major rides (at least the ones we brave enough to go on). Some worth mentioning where the Spider which has a car that seats four facing opposite directions. We sat in the back of one car while Katie and Brad faced the front. It was crazy riding backwards and got even crazier when the car started flipping around so we rode sideways, backwards and forwards. It was definitely a unique little coaster.

Another signature at Lagoon is Wicked. This wicked coaster launches you straight up (really, we're talking 90 degrees here) across a peak and then straight back down (again at 90 degrees people) and then around some corkscrew turns. Casey volunteered the men set in the front row of the eight-person car and the girls sit in back. And guess who sits next to Casey? A girl about 7- or 8-years-old. Casey definitely screamed louder and in a higher pitch than the little girl.

Other rides of note were Colossus the Fire Dragon sporting double loops, the Wild Mouse, the Roller Coaster (seriously, that's what it's called, but it's an old-time wooden coaster) and the Celestial Screamer which is like the Enterprise at Kennywood in Pitsburgh. The Enterprise is our favorite ride at Kennywood and it is totally mellow and relaxing. It looks scary because you're in a little cart with no lap bar or seat belt and it spins you round and round and then tilts up so it is spinning you upside down. But the centrifugal force just pushes you back in your seat and if you just relax and close your eyes it is bliss.

Eventually it got too cold to ride any more rides so we went through a haunted house that Casey nobly lead us through. Then we headed into SLC to stuff ourselves with the wonderful pizza at The Pie. Pizza just doesn't get any better. Or root beer. Or cheesy pull-a-parts which are the most delicious thing there. Somebody hand me a napkin because I'm drooling just remembering it.

When we got home we watched the 1968 version of "The Night of the Living Dead" which was a first for Sarah. Well, that is if you don't include Dan Krauss' version staring Chris and Shad Kunkle. We didn't find time to carve pumpkins this year, but overall it was a pretty terroriffic October.

How to hoist a moider

As an early birthday present to Maddy Casey and I are actually posting something on our blog. On Friday we went to an awesome Halloween/Murder Mystery party at our friends Tegwin and Alisa's house. I was in charge of making the "blood soup," spider dinner rolls and dessert, for which I made eyeballs.



I was pretty proud of how it turned out until we got there and Stevie and Jesse made appetizers that kicked my food's trash.


The ham flesh had BBQ sauce under it so it bled when you took some off. I was too disturbed to eat it. I have worked with cadavers before and that was too close to the real thing for my comfort.



The monster mouths were apples with almond slice teeth, and really yummy.


The goblin toes were pretty awesome.

The murder mystery we did was Chicago Caper and was set in the 1920s. It features lots of period lingo with a Chicago accent. The frequent pronunciation of "goils" made us assume they were talking about gargoyles. I was assigned the part of Scoop the investigative reporter and Casey was Sock's the rich gambling hall owner who spent all his time golfing.



Alisa was a "madame" which was pretty funny as she is 7 months pregenant. I think she did a great job of throwing together a "slinky" outfit as suggested and hiding her prego belly. Her husband Tegwin was Ernie the millionaire gambler. He spent all night betting people and throwing fake (aka Canadian) money around.


Katie and Brad were real troopers and filled in for a sick couple at the last min. Even with no notice they put together costumes for a lawyer and flapper.



Stevie and Jesse and already planned some sweet costumes before the party was announced so they wore them anyway. Jesse made a great hobbit and I think Stevie just wanted to wear some ridiculous jeans and jewelry and not have to shower :)

Is this a good idea?

So every year Casey and I end up spending way too much money on Christmas presents for other people. This is mainly my fault because I will buy something for someone then find something else they would like and add that in too. So my idea was to make a nice cookbook and get it printed and give each person/family a copy. Casey and I are working on losing weight and have done well since Christmas because we are counting all our calories (well I am, I don't know if Casey). So, I was thinking I could include important nutrition info for each recipe like the calorie count, since it is hard to count calories when you cook from scratch. If you think this is a good idea let me know and I will start working on it as we cook each day. Oh and if you think you have a good recipe to add feel free to send it my way.

Descent: Journeys in Love

Have a happy gaming Valentines!

The long awaited update

*Pictures to be added, but I thought I should get this posted before any more snide comments appeared on my facebook account :) *
Lately I have been receiving some nasty comments about my lack of blog posts and lack of having children. I am here to make good on the posting, but not the child bearing :) Here is a little update on what has been going on lately with us.

June: I was still working at Willow Creek School as a teacher. I almost quit when a student tired to hit me. However, he was kicked out of my class and I came back. It was kind of nerve wrecking for a while though. I also worked at BYU curating fish for the Bean Museum, it was totally mindless but I got to watch a lot of movies on the computer. I also started grading packets that students did while in wilderness (they go there at the beginning of their therapy) this was a nice addition to our income.

July: My sister and her 5 kids drove out to Utah from Ohio for the 4th of July. We had a really good time and did a lot of fun things like going to the water park and seeing Miley Cyrus at the stadium of fire. Casey's brother Dustin, his wife Maddy, and their 3 kids stopped by on their way to Idaho and we took Maddy and Ellie to see stadium of fire as well. At the end of the week we all got really sick and I spent about 3 days in bed, which was not so fun.

August: Still working as usual. We moved into a basement apartment in Provo from our place in Orem. The great thing about the new place is the landlords have two dogs and fenced in backyard. We are also 1 house away from a park and walking trail. Neville is in heaven. Johanna came to visit with EZ and her newish baby Netta. It was the first time we had seen Netta and she really is as big as Jo said. She is incredibly cute and looks remarkably like the marshmallow monster on ghost busters.

September: I started my first semester at BYU as a graduate student. Around September 15th I was told that the school I was working at had gone bankrupt and would be shut down on September 29th. That was a little surprising. Luckily I still get to grade the packets and I work for my professor at BYU so I did not have to find another job. I hate looking for jobs. We ran our first 5K in about a year. It was hard and I had some trouble with my asthmas but it was fun overall.

October: My parents came out to visit, which is always fun. We run a 5K and it was much better than the one the previous month. Not much else happened except we made some kick butt pumpkins and ran a Halloween 5K.

November: Thanksgiving in Arizona. We got to visit Casey's family (Jim, Cheryl, Doug's family, and Dustin's family) were all present. It was a lot of fun and I got to visit my friend Jason who lives in Phoenix now. At this point I begin to slowly go crazy as I realize I took too many credits this semester.

December: I almost have a complete nervous breakdown due to my over zealous first semester. I will be taking less credits next semester for sure. I did however finish with a 3.97 GPA, all As and one A-. At the beginning of the month we spent 8 days in Springville Utah babysitting for my friend. We were responsible for 5 kids, ages 5-13. It was a big change, but a lot of fun. The kids loved Neville, espesically one little girl Rainy. We were beat afterwards and took about another week to recover, but it was fun and well worth it. I will devote a separate post for Christmas.

Remember To Vote

Hey everyone, this is just a reminder to go out and vote!!! Casey and I did the early voting (can you believe we actually did something before the deadline?)