My first speeding ticket

Yes, I got a speeding ticket about 2 weeks ago.  And yes, it was the first one ever in my 10 years of driving.  It was my goal to never get a speeding ticket!  So I guess it should also have been a goal to not ever speed!  :D

I went to pay for the ticket yesterday, and (since I at least want my official record to be perfect) to pay for traffic school, which will erase my ticket from my record.  I HATE spending money on things that I won't use, or things that are a complete waste of money, and paying for this ticket felt just like that.  Of course, I've learned from this experience, and I've been extremely good the last 2 weeks at setting the cruise control and not giving in to the temptation to speed.  But I would much rather have learned this lesson without having to pay for it.

After paying for the ticket, I went to the counter to pay for traffic school.  It's going to be a 3 hour class in the evening.  I picked the day in September and waited for the dispatcher behind the counter to charge me and get me my receipt.  She had been working on it quietly for a minute or two when a man came up to the counter, also looking to pay for traffic school.  The other dispatcher talked with him about it, took his credit card, entered his information, and got his receipt for him, and all of that took about 2 minutes.  And I looked back at my dispatcher, and she was still entering information into the computer.

I was surprised to see this man walk away with everything complete, and then still have to wait for about 3 minutes for my dispatcher to finish the process.  Apparently, I should have chosen to approach the other one.  In other words, I chose...poorly.

However, there could be an explanation for the circumstances.  Maybe she was trying to get a little schooling in early, and was trying to teach me to not SPEED through the process of setting up traffic school.  :D

Budgeting

I recently started following a new blog called Frugal Wife = Wealthy Life. This blog is all about how a wife (or the financially responsible person in a marriage, whether it be husband, wife, or both) can really help a family by living and managing money frugally. Some of their tips deal with spending, some with saving, and some with budgeting.

The blog is written by two sisters and their mother, and they offer suggestions that they personally use to manage their families' finances. I think that it's a very useful blog, and if you're trying to get your finances in order I would recommend that you check it out.

Right now Dave and I are trying to start budgeting again. We started out last semester with a budget, and I would say that we've done a very good job spending money only on things that we can afford. But we've stopped looking at our budget regularly and consciously thinking about it. We've decided (at the recommendation of the Frugal Wife blog) to try out the budgeting tool mint.com. The website keeps track of the different categories that you spend in, and helps you know if you've overspent on your budget. I'll let you know how it goes!

Change

I have been teaching a community ESL class at BYU's English Language Center (ELC). The class is called TTTC. It started about 4 weeks ago, and I have about 1 week of instruction left. The students are adults who are seeking English skills to improve their daily life living in an English speaking country.

After my last week, I will move into teaching another class, which will be a regular class offered to ELC students. These students will be focusing on passing the TOEFL and entering an English speaking university.

There will be a lot of change. The setting will be different. The amount of time that I teach will be different. The teacher that I work with will be different. The students' ages, goals, and maturity will all be different. Some of these changes might be hard to get used to. However, I think that the change will be good for me.

It's Finally Happened!

Several of you have alluded to this post (or the lack of it) in your comments. I have been kind of slow to get to this, but I'm really busy right now. And I promised myself at the beginning of my blogging career that I would never feel guilty or apologize for not doing something (blogging) that I was only doing for fun in the first place.

That having been said, I'm REALLY excited for this post! I've been thinking about it for a long time. Let me tell you how long:

In January, I discovered a blog. December and January were big blogging months for me, because I had just graduated from BYU and I was single, and I had a ton of time to read. I read on the 100 Hour Board quite frequently, and I would explore links to other blogs from blogs I already subscribed to. It was a very carefree time.

As I was saying, in January I discovered a specific blog: The Single Mormon Girl's Guide to Life. I thought it was fun. There was commentary on being single, on dealing with relatives and friends who make awkward/tactless comments about you being single, etc. I don't have a problem with being 25 and single, but it was still fun to read. I went back and read all the archived posts. And I found one post that I could really identify with. The author talks about a candy drawer in her family's house, and how everyone would leave the same old things in it, eating them only when they were desperate for sugar. She compared this to dating:

"I want someone new to come into my candy drawer ecosystem, open the drawer and see that banana flavored Laffy Taffy and say to themselves… ‘WOW. These are my FAVORITE! How did this get left in here? What dummy would leave a banana Laffy Taffy in the candy drawer? I’m so glad my favorite candy is in this candy drawer…what a lucky guy I am!’"

It's true! I really wanted someone to truly appreciate me while I was truly appreciating them. I wanted to find a guy (a piece of candy) that was my favorite, and think that I was the luckiest person in the world to get him before he was snatched up by someone else. And I wanted him to feel the same about me.

And it's finally happened! It started out when Dave and I had been dating not very long. I had read the Candy Drawer post, and I was going to write about it on my blog and comment about it. But something funny happened. Dave said to me one time, "You're my favorite!" I was shocked. This was exactly what I wanted someone to say to me! And it continued. We still say that to each other. So I decided to wait to comment on this post until things had progressed more with me and Dave.



Dave and I got engaged on Saturday! We're going to be married on August 15th, 2009, in the Snowflake Arizona Temple! And I can say that we are indeed each other's favorites. I'm so happy!

Guest post from Dave anyone???

It's about time I post something on my blog about my car.

That's right, I have a car. I bought my grandma's white Olsmobile Cutlass back in mid-February, and it's been wonderful to have some transportation! Especially since Dave was always coming down to see me in Provo and I could never go up to Salt Lake to see him. So now I've been able to make a few trips up there, and get around Provo easier. And it's great!

Here are a few pictures.

I wanted to call her Phlegm because of her license plate, but it was changed when I registered it.



So now I call her Eunice.



There's a car named Eunice?



Yeah...



So, the other day I went to put some gas into Eunice, and when she was full she wouldn't start. After several jump starts, and an embarrassing situation with my car stalled in the middle of University Parkway, I found out that Eunice needed the alternator replaced. And the battery. Fortunately, the battery could be replaced for free because it was still under warranty.

I'd really like to start calling her Burnsy, but I'll have to wait to do that until she does something really cool, like demonstrate her superb evasion skills. Oh wait! She did that a few Saturdays ago! This is a fun story. I was driving home from Emily's house, and Dave was following me because we had driven down to pick up his car, which I had left at Emily's that morning. As I was driving, I noticed a car ahead of me that looked just like mine turn right onto a side street. It was also a white Oldsmobile Cutlass. And as soon as I saw it turn, I knew that Dave would think that I had turned. Dave followed the decoy and we went by undetected! Until I blew our cover by calling Dave, that is. But you see now why she is worthy of being called Burnsy?

I got accepted into my program at BYU!!

That's right! I am going to be attending BYU for my graduate certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)! I found out that I was accepted to the program Monday, March 9th.

And I am so excited to be a student again. I know what you're thinking...I'm crazy. But I really do miss being a student. And I enjoy my job teaching ESL writing way more than I enjoy anything else I'm doing, so I know that I'll enjoy the things I'll be doing as a graduate student. The certificate program takes about 1 year to complete, and then I'll apply to the master's degree program that will also take about a year to complete. Wahoo!

I have a family emergency and I'm out of town. I'm not sure I'll be posting anytime soon. If any of you are religiously inclined, please pray for me and my family.

How It All Came Crashing Down

An article about the current economic crisis, How It All Came Crashing Down, was recommended to me by a friend of mine via blog post. I decided to check it out, because I was basically uninformed about how this recession has come about. I was shocked. To be honest, all of the investment in housing, and selling houses for more than you bought them, just before the mortgage rate changes...it all sounds kind of like those pyramid schemes where, yeah, sure, the first few waves all end up just fine, but eventually there's going to be someone who won't join, or who won't buy this ridiculously expensive house from you, and you lose it all. And then I was also shocked about the people that could still afford to make their house payments who walked away from it anyway. It's definitely an interesting world. I hope things get better before I start making huge financial decisions, like buying a house.

I'm graduated!

I have officially turned in my last final for my undergraduate degree! Finals were a less stressful than the last week of class, and now I have nothing to do but pack my stuff (I'm moving back to my old apartment complex) and get ready to go home for Christmas! I'm leaving on Sunday, hoping that the snow storm we're getting right now will be blown out by then. And then I'll come back to UT next Saturday so that I can be here for my nephew's ordination to be a deacon. Yay! Things are looking great!

I'm also starting a "new" job. I'm still working at the NMELRC, and I'm still doing some secretaryish things. But I'm also getting a raise now that I'm no longer an undergraduate, and I'm going to start working on a project for my boss Kirk. I'll be helping develop material for the "Best Practices" resources that the NMELRC wants to develop for teachers who teach Middle Eastern languages. It's going to be pretty interesting, and I'm way excited about it!

My Job Hunt is Over

Well, it actually wasn't much of a hunt...

I have been a custodian for over a year. Last summer, for the first 4 months, I was a full-time custodian. That's right, 40 hours a week! Then I've been doing it part time while doing school since last September. Last summer I started work at 8, but since September I've been starting work at 6. And I've had enough!! In January I started working as a TA for an introductory linguistics class as well as being a custodian. This was nice because my major is linguistics, and I like the idea of using my brain for work. That was my first real taste of getting paid for my skills. And I liked it. A LOT! Then, when that job ended in April, I was offered a job as a research assistant at the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC) on campus. I am basically a secretary, but for a very language based office, so it still falls into an area I like to call "resume building." Unfortunately, the guy who worked there before I was hired is just in California on an internship, and I was under the impression that my job there would end when he came back. So I decided that I would just have to find another job to fill the part-time hours I need to pay for life.

In the meantime, besides all of these jobs, I have been filling my time by volunteering in several ESL classes and doing various tasks that give me experience in the ESL world. All of these hours are for my TESOL internship for my minor. One of the classes I intern in is ELang 105, the freshman writing class for international students. The teacher, Alison, is great! She invited me to intern with her after the second time I met her, when I wasn't even looking for an internship yet. I was visiting her class to ask her students to take a survey for a paper I was writing in my grammar class, and I'm so glad that I did. I've been interning with her for almost 4 months, and she just offered me a job as her TA in fall (a PAID position) after my internship hours are done. I get paid to do what I've been doing for free! And then yesterday my boss at the NMELRC asked me and my co-worker Michael if we were planning on staying on during the fall because Jacob will apparently only be working about 4 hours a week when he gets back. Life is really good right now!

My House Hunt is Over

I've lived in my currant apartment for more than a year. I've had one roommate that entire time, and some other roommates through various semesters, and all of them have been great. But all of my roommates (current ones and past ones that are still in the complex) are moving out this fall. One of them is going to India, one of them is going to Ghana, a couple of them are married, three of them are moving to other apartments, and one of them is getting married. That's Lorie. I was a little sad at first about the idea of being the only one left here and starting out with new roommates. I really like the place I live in, and the friends I have in my complex and ward. So I almost decided to stay. But there are lots of other people in the complex that are moving out for the fall too, and I knew it wouldn't be the same to stay here anyway. So I was thinking about finding a new place to live.

My roommate Lorie is not getting married until November 29th, and she told me that I could come live with her! She's going to live in the apartment she and Alec will share until they get married and he moves in, and she invited me to live with her until then. I'll get to pay cheaper rent and it will help Lorie not have to pay so much rent by herself. It seemed like the perfect deal for both of us. But the only problem was finding good housing.

Lorie looked at several places by herself, or at least she tried. There were several times that someone rented the place she really wanted right before she got a chance to see it or make an offer on it. So she was way frustrated about that. Plus, Alec is in New York right now, and I wasn't available to go with her, so she'd been doing it all on her own. Then she left town to go home to Colorado and then to San Diego with her mom to visit her grandma for several weeks. So the hunt fell to me.

I looked at a couple of places. It was hard because I either had to get a ride from someone or walk to whatever place I was looking at. My car doesn't have a working clutch, so I'm footin' it around Provo these days. So it was nice when I finally found THE PLACE WE'RE GOING TO LIVE!! Br Br-Br Brrrrrrrrr! Heritage Court is the place! We're going to live in a basement apartment, one bedroom, little kitchen, little living room, little bathroom. It's WAY far south of campus, so I'll probably do a lot more walking than I've been doing, or using Lorie's bike. Exciting!