It's Tess, not Tessa

For some reason people have a hard time with my name, which is baffling. Maybe it's because my name is so short that people have a hard time? It's not a very common name, but I'm also not the only person named Tess. One dilemma I've faced my whole life has been when people call me "Tessa." I really cringe when I hear it because I know people are addressing me, but that's not my name. But then it gets to the awkward stage to correct people if they've already called me Tessa a few times. One of my new coworkers thinks my name is Tessa. And she's so sweet and friendly, but it's been a month now and I can't bring myself to correct her. Advice? Other fun names people have called me when they're confused: Beth and Ted and Pat. Wow. I really have no explanation for those except to attribute it to the fact that people don't listen. Or they don't care.

In other unrelated quandries, is it acceptable to chomp on string cheese as opposed to peeling it?

And while I'm thinking of it, I sometimes question the etiquette of caller ID. If someone calls you and doesn't leave a message, why would you call them right back? All of our outbound calls show the office number, which is for about 25 people. If you call back when no one left a message, I have NO idea who called you. Sorry. They'll call you back if it was that important.

I think I'm in need of a 3-day weekend.

The Air Up There

the F-22

We drove up to Ogden one Saturday to enjoy the air show at the Hill Air Force Base. It was quite amazing to say the least! I felt very proud of the accomplishments of the Air Force. The technology we have now is truly spectacular. Kevin is particularly interested in aerospace, so he was like a kid at a candy store while we were there! We were on our feet all day, so it was a little tiring. But it was well worth it!

Watching The Thunderbirds perform was the best part! They flew so close together and did quite amazing tricks.

This video shows 2 planes flying next to each other with one flying upside down.

This video shows the moment when the two planes that were flying directly towards each other turned at the last second and were belly to belly.

Just in case you doubted my hair color...

Two stories for you:

Chunga's

I had heard good things about this Mexican restaurant in Provo and, keeping in mind that my husband loves Mexican food, decided that we should try it one day. I look up the address and it's on Freedom Boulevard, not too far from where we live. I didn't write the address down (mistake!). We drive up and down Freedom Boulevard for a good 10 minutes trying to find it. We decided to come home and get their phone number to make sure the address was right. Sure enough it was. We attempt again to find it and voila. It is TWO DOORS DOWN from the Spin Zone. Sound familiar? The Spin Zone is where I do the laundry every week.*



Where are my keys? In the locked car? Oops.

This has happened twice in the past year, the most recent occurrence on Friday during my lunch break. I was sneakily trying to get everything arranged for Kevin's birthday and had stopped to get gas. So, I filled up the tank just to turn around and realize that I didn't have the keys and the doors were locked! Kevin had to come and unlock the door for me in the middle of the day. And he did not seem upset in the slightest by coming to my rescue. (In my defense, both of the keys-getting-locked-in-the-car incidents happened while I was on the phone with Kevin.)


*Except for the last 2 weeks. Kevin has been the one at the Spin Zone. Crazy connection to my stories: he was at the Spin Zone when I needed him to come unlock the car for me.

An Answered Prayer

On Memorial Day, we went canoeing with Kevin's sister's family. Kevin and I were in a canoe with Anna and Taylor, and Rick and Amy took Ryan and Dallin. The ride downriver was leisurely and fun. The ride upriver was a bit more difficult. Our canoe wasn't very stable and it was very difficult to steer. We had a number of close calls where we nearly tipped over, but managed to be okay. Then we got a bit tangled in a tree and lost our balance and out we went into a very cold river. I lost my flip flops and ruined my phone. I was a bit frustrated at these girls that were running on the trail next to the river. When I got to the shore with Anna, I asked them if they had a cell phone and they just kept running and called back, "No! Sorry!" I was hidden behind some thick trees, so they couldn't see my disheveled appearance and missing shoes and little girl sobbing, but whatever.

Kevin was able to yank the canoe back to the bank, but I couldn't see him because the trees were so thick. Anna and I started walking down the trail, and we saw Taylor coming towards us. My feet were burning up on the hot pavement and the bugs were eating us alive. It was miserable! I wish I would've had a camera to capture the expressions on the kids' faces when we told them they had to get back in the canoe since it was the only way home. They did not want to get back in at all. We decided to say a prayer that we could make it back safely. The bugs still bit me, I was still cold, and my shoes didn't magically reappear, but we made it back to the dock safe and sound. I don't think I'll be canoeing again any time soon!

*Thanks to John for the picture. See the canoe of people all messed up in the trees way back there? That was us.

Just call me Monica Seles

After longingly passing the tennis courts many times, Kevin and I finally learned how to play tennis! Thanks to our country club* friends Aubrey and Bryce, we played on a drizzly Saturday morning. I really enjoyed it and look forward to playing again. Aubrey and Bryce were great coaches, and Aubrey even climbed a fence after I whacked the ball over it. We took a few pictures and after looking at them, do you even doubt that Aubrey and I are friends? It might've been better for us to have been in a picture together...

*We actually played for free at the high school. But we did learn important lingo like love and deuce. AND how to keep score, of course.

My house is out of control, but I don't care because...

I'm unabashedly showing you pictures of the state of my apartment this week:

I am a bit particular about our kitchen, so I have managed to keep it tidy and orderly. And the bed still gets made daily. But other than that, our fridge was practically empty, I had three or four pairs of shoes out in the front room, the box from our new charcoal grill, papers, computers, and on and on. Kevin made dinner once this week, went to the laundromat, and made the grocery list after looking at the ads! Where and what, you ask, have I been doing?

I am employed!!!

I am the receptionist at an insurance agency! It's a great company to work for. I can tell already because we have candy dishes of chocolate in our lobby. Oh, and my coworkers are really great: my old roommate Emily works there too! I had a great week and trust me when I say that this job is a night and day difference from my last job. For one, I can see out a window. Natural light is very important. Number two, I am busy all day and the time goes by fast. And I have lots of tasks to do, so I don't get bored doing just one thing.

I am really happy that I found employment. I know some people experience unemployment stints for much longer, and I feel for them. It's not a fun thing. And if I had known how it was to work out, I probably could've been more patient. But I know that Heavenly Father answers prayers in the way He knows will be best for us. I am finally coming out of a difficult last few months, and I know that it's a blessing from the Lord.

Bonnie and Clyde

Clyde is Kevin's plant that I gave him on June 21st, 2008.

I think Clyde was lonely, so Kevin gave me Bonnie on May 10, 2009.

Clyde, meet Bonnie.

June 4th, 1913

Ninety-six years ago today, Elsie Marie Galbraith was born in a log cabin in Idaho. She was a playful child, enjoying hopscotch and jumping rope. One day while with the neighbor girl Ruby, they decided to play in the car. The car started rolling backwards down a hill and Elsie's father came running out of the barn to catch the car and stop it just before it got to the edge of a steep cliff. Ruby and Elsie were hiding on the floor of the car. After they were safe, they both got a good spanking for their mischief.

Elsie truly did walk to school in the snow: she remembers the drifts being so deep that she would walk over telephone lines. She worked hard as a teenager, thinning sugar beets with a short-handled hoe, stacking hay, and doing housework, getting paid $3-$5 per week. Being an Idaho girl, she picked potatoes in the fall alongside her mother. They were paid one or one and a half cents per basket.

Elsie raised nine children. Her husband, George Hill, passed away on her youngest daughter's second birthday. That youngest daughter is my mother, Julia. One of my favorite stories my mom tells about her that highlights her sense of humor is when she was working in a potato warehouse and she sneezed so hard that her teeth shot out of her mouth and onto the conveyor belt. Luckily she grabbed them before anyone noticed. Another funny story that hits close to home (because I make mistakes like this all the time) is the following conversation my mom and grandma had on the phone:

Grandma: The flowers are looking so beautiful in my yard. We put some commoner on them and it's working well.

Mom: Some what?

Grandma: Commoner.

Mom: Commoner? I don't know what you're talking about.

Grandma: You know, COW MANURE!

I knew my red hair didn't come from my parents.

All of the blankets that I owned until I was 16 years old had her hand in it: she loved to quilt. For my eighth birthday she came to Colorado and helped my mom surprise me with a homemade jean quilt. We went to Royal Gorge, which is a beautiful area of Colorado. This was back when it cost $4 or $5 to see the world's highest suspension bridge. Now it's $26 per person. I'm glad we took pictures because we're not going back (although I don't have one with the bridge on this visit) . . .

Grandma would come and visit us when she could. Denver is a long way from Idaho, but she made the trip many times. This picture is when she came for Christmas in 2000. (Side note: Nathan is so tiny!)

And this was one of the last times I saw her. My mom and I went to visit her in the fall of 2002. My mom and I were starving and looking for a place to eat. When we asked her opinion of what she wanted to eat, her response was: "I want a strawberry shake." So that's what we got her.

Elsie Marie Hill passed away on September 4, 2003. We miss her but are happy to have had her for so long. I wish I had more pictures, especially of her with my mom.

Spring Time Fun

So school has been out for over a month now, and what do I have to show for it? Well, apart from several adventures that Tess has already chronicled for our faithful reader(s?), I have mostly been working on small overdue projects at work.* I have also becoming more and more invlolved in an engineering project here at BYU. We are building a solar airplane, and I am on the team that is designing the wings. I am sure that I will post more about this in the future.

One thing that I haven't talked about from school is that in order to participate in this project, I had to take a class in airplane fundamentals, where, as part of the coursework, a partner and I built a model plane from a kit. We used this model in several tests that we did to learn more about aerodynamics, structures, and propulsion. The final for the class was taking our plane out to point of the mountin and throwing it off: if it flew, we got an A, if not, well, we failed.

Here is a photo of the building process, it came with these paper plans and a stack of wood. This is our assembled wing and fusalage and tale sections before we covered them (the orange plasticy stuff in the bottom left).

my partner and I with the assembled plane

just minutes before launch, possibly the last time the plane is fully intact

This is a video of our first launch. That is our professor throwing it, with one of the TA's at the controls. It took a while to get used to flying it before I could fly it on my own. The TA would stand right next to me and grab the controls out from my hands before I wrecked it. The first time I only controlled it for a few seconds, but after a little while I could fly it for as long as I wanted with little help.

It is kind of intresting how it works, The plane has no engine at all; it relies on the winds to push it forward and keep it aloft. It has little electric motors on it that are hooked to a radio to control the elevator and rudder. We didn't even wreck it, though the two other teams that built planes did wreck theirs--one catastrophically, tearing apart his wing and damaging his fusalage, which is kinda sad since it took each team about 80 man hours to build and he only flew it for about 10 minutes.

From building it, I learned a lot about aircraft. Here is an interesting piece of information. Notice that the wings are not straight as one might expect, they curve up towards the ends. This is called dihedral (well "polyhedral" really, but it's the same idea). This gives the plane the ability to self correct if it rolls to the right or to the left much like a marble will have the tendency to roll to the bottom of a circular bowl when pushed up one of the sides. It is one of the things that makes the plane inherently stable and good for someone just learning how to fly (like me). At any time if you just let go of the controls, it will straighten and level out and just glide along. It is really interesting how it works (interesting if you like engineering, I guess) since no motors are used. It all works becouse of the shape of the wings and tail and position of the center of gravity.

Anyhow, you could stay up on top of that point all morning and fly for as long as you wanted, flying out over the valley, back into the updraft next to the point to regain altitude, and then back over the valley again. It was really fun.

Tess even flew for a while (this shot looks posed, but I promise it's not, she really was flying at the time) and clearly enjoyed it despite the wind.

In any event, it was really fun, stay tuned for more news.

*For those really intrested, fire up your iphone or other mobile browser and head on over to mimobile.byu.edu as an example of a small overdue project I have been working on.

no use crying over spilled milk

For the past seven months, I have been anticipating the birth of my friend Melissa's baby. We talk at least once a month about how she's doing, and I was excited for them when they found out they would have a little girl. Katelyn was born on May 10--what a beautiful Mother's Day gift.

We planned that I would bring her dinner on May 21st, just a few days after her mom went back home. I was SO excited about doing this for some reason. I planned ahead that I would be making them Hawaiian chicken and rice and rolls. I even made peanut butter cookies from scratch! I got everything all set to go . . . the food was hot and looked so good! Until I stepped out the door and this happened:

On any other day, this might've caused a tear or two, but for some reason I was ok. The first thing I did was to call Melissa and tell her what happened and that I'd be a bit delayed. There are two people in my phone with the name Melissa, however, and I called and left a message for my sister-in-law instead! Oops! She called me back and said, "I didn't know you were bringing me dinner tonight." That might be tricky since she lives in Colorado! So, once I talked to the correct Melissa, she was, of course, very understanding, and she ended up making the rice while I pulled a Hawaiian chicken together in supersonic speed. Wow, what a day!

Colorado Trip

To "celebrate" my unemployed status/to take advantage of not taking needing to take vacation time from work, Kevin and I drove to Colorado for a long weekend at the end of April. I'd like to also think of it as a celebration of finishing winter semester. Have I mentioned that Kevin's plan is to graduate in April 2012? Yeah, we'll be here for a while. We enjoyed time with the Lords Family, including a Rockies game. Usually Rockies' games signify summer for me, but this game was very cold and we even saw some snowflakes! We didn't even bring coats from Utah--luckily my parents had some extra for us to borrow.

Jesse was a bit intimidated by his "Rocky Dog"

Other events included:

building a paper airplane

visiting Alexa's Tinkerbell-themed room

and shopping with my mom.

Lessons in Pre-Motherhood

I have babysat a lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's all Kevin's parents think I did in Colorado since every other family that came through our reception line, when asked how they know me, their response was, "Babysitting."

Babysitting now is much different than when I was a teenager. The reality of me becoming a mother is always in the back of my mind as I care for others' children. And there have been moments when I really wonder if I'm cut out for the job.

image shamelessly stolen from his mother

I had the opportunity of watching this little guy twice a week. James Fackrell. He was born in December, so he is still very much a baby. Being with someone who only communicates by crying was a bit tricky. Overall, he was a very pleasant baby and a joy to care for. One day he had a blowout diaper right after I fed him. As I was changing him, he spit up everywhere. I was definitely grossed out and had the thought, "I don't think I'm cut out for this," because I realize that while this was an isolated event for me, motherhood would entail dealing with that all the time, and not always from the comfort of your own home where you (hopefully) have the supplies to do it properly. Also, did I mention that he wasn't fussy at all during the cleaning up process? I am convinced that is not always the case. I was envisioning Kevin's reaction to me telling him that I was rethinking this whole motherhood business when I finished cleaning James up and he started cooing at me and was so happy. I felt like a hero! I was able to do something so simple for this little guy that he couldn't do for himself, and he was so grateful! I decided that it was worth it and I would really do anything to make him happy.

The last two days, I got to play mom for my 5 nieces and nephews in Spanish Fork. The oldest is ten, the youngest is three. During the day, it was just me and the youngest two:

Taking care of them was a breeze. I brought over some laundry to do and washed some place mats with our sheets. The color from the place mats bled on to the sheets! I was so sad! And I felt dumb to have made such a silly mistake. Mistake number 2 of the day was that I rolled down the window in the family van only to discover that it wouldn't roll up. Mistake number three, I couldn't find the pink stroller for the three-year-old. Of course she didn't miss it until I asked her where it was and then she really wanted it. (It was later discovered in the backyard.) We rushed to eat lunch on Thursday to make it to the school just down the street to see Taylor (the oldest) in his class presentation where he was dressed up as Scott O'Grady. We get to the school and discover that we're an hour early. Sigh. At this point I'm wondering why in the world my sister-in-law thought I was competent enough to do this job while she was out of town. I began to question again whether or not I could really handle motherhood myself when not even 24 hours had passed and I had managed to ruin sheets and a car window and needlessly rush two children through their lunchtime. When we returned to the school and watched the presentations and the songs by the fourth-graders, I looked at all these other parents that do this every single day and was in awe. How do they do it? I was selfishly feeling sorry for myself when suddenly it was time for the fourth graders to pick someone out of the audience to do a square dance with them. The nice elderly couple that was sitting next to us volunteered to watch the youngest two children when Taylor came to me and wanted me to come up and square dance with him! What an honor! That seriously made my day and I felt like none of my other "failures" that day mattered: I got to dance with Taylor at his assembly!

Afternoon activites:

On Friday night we made pizza with the kids. They seemed to like it and had a lot of fun making it.

All in all it was a successful few days. And I consider it as much because I only got the stink eye a few times:

Bajio's

April 30, 2009

Hello,

I have been a fan of Bajio's for some time now--at least 2 years. My mom visits from Colorado and always requests that we go there because she loves the pork ensalada so much. I am sad to report that the quality of this salad is steadily decreasing. I went there last night with 3 other people and was disappointed in the dry pork, the aluminum taste of the corn, and the new upcharges for guacamole AND sour cream. These used to be included in the purchase of the salad, and was a determining factor in my picking your restaurant over Cafe Rio or Costa Vida. I don't plan on returning to your restaurant anytime soon and am sad to have lost confidence in what was once a great product.

Regards,

Tess


May 11, 2009

Tess, I just received your email and would like to apologize. Normally the restaurant that you visited does a great job. I am on my way down there now to look into this. You should not have been charged for the quac or sour cream either. Will you please send me your address so I can send you some free meal cards to help make up for your experience. Again I am sorry, Randy

Randy Egbert

Bajio Mexican Grill

Area Manager

how not to be a poor loser

I need advice. Kevin and I played Chess last night and I lost horribly. I was just mad the rest of the night. I know it's just a game, but dang my pride was hurt! The only way to get better at Chess is to play it. And I definitely want to get better. So, I'd appreciate any advice for how to just relax. And to not make my husband vow to never play with his wife again in fear of the ugly monster that emerges. It's odd, really, because while I want to win all the time, I am not nearly as upset if I lose at Rummikub or Scrabble or Settlers of Zarahemla.

In other news, we walked to Macy's last night for a soft-served cone. There is only one acceptable flavor for soft-serve ice cream and that is chocolate. Guess what they were out of? Chocolate soft-served ice cream. Luckily I was slightly consoled by peanut butter m&m's.

And in other other news, in case all of you employed people have forgotten how much fun it is to brag about yourself, take my word for it: I'm having lots of fun and I'd be an AMAZING employee.

The end.

Girl's Night!

For the Priesthood Session of General Conference, I got some girl time with my old roommates Carolyn, Emily, and Tawnya. It's amazing how time flies. We enjoyed catching up. Sadly both Carolyn and Tawnya are moving away from Provo soon, so we probably won't be together like that again! Pictured are Carolyn, Lainey, Baby Holderness #2, Emily and Taylor, yours truly, and Tawnya and James.

which one is not like the other?*

Just for fun, I dug up this picture of our get-together a year ago. Lainey was the only baby then! And I am sure I went on and on about Kevin to them . . . we weren't quite engaged yet!

Another exciting thing about Conference weekend was having my brother Scott come down for a night from Rexburg. He sang in the Priesthood Choir. He was so excited since singing in the conference center has been one of his dreams for a long time. It was great to be with him, even if it was so short!


*That's right, I'm the only blonde.