Announcement!

You'll get one too once we find a place to buy envelopes.....but only if I have your address!

Wedding Bells

I'm Engaged!!!!

   Jamal and I are getting married in the Spokane temple on December 16th 2011!  I know it's fast, I know it's soon, but I also know that it's right.

    His proposal was so adorable.  I got off work at 7 on Saturday morning.  We always had this little joke that some day he'd be waiting at my house for me to come home from work so I could sleep in his arms, of course that never happened.  Who wakes up before 7 on a Saturday? But secretly I always hoped he would someday.  As I drove up to my house everything was normal, but then I saw his car in my driveway. It was pretty well hidden by my neighbor's bushes.  Then I looked up over our hedges at our front door and there he was sitting on the front step.  (he had been waiting out in the cold for over 20 minutes just in case I came home early!) As I approached him he told me to take off my gloves, got down on one knee, told me how much he loved me, and pulled out the box with the ring.  It was wonderful.  Then we went inside.....he had snuck into my house (both my roommates were out of town) and made us breakfast!  What a wonderful surprise on a most wonderful morning!  I can't wait for us to start our life together!

Oh Summer, Where Art Thou.

They gave us a month off for the summer.  It's very much bitter-sweet-bitter.  I realize that it's my last summer vacation ever and should be elated, except it's only a month long, and I am sooooo not ready to go back to school this week. At least I lived it up as much as I could this month

Dad let me borrow the jet ski, which really made the vacation.  It was so worth driving the mini-van around for a month!

I got to spend time with the little brothers. They're so grown up !

The RM is a pretty fun uncle...but not the coolest

Went to some sporting events.....really I only show this because we're so dang cute!

We pigged out....in the park.

Went and saw Les Mis with these girls and Ellen....technically I guess this was before summer break, but it was a vacation anyway. 

Rode the carousel for good measure.

Drove all the way to Utah just to eat here....

I mean to see this one get baptized...

Still fun, but still not the coolest....

Got to catch up with my mission mom. I love her!

And I went to the fair and the Rodeo. 

Obviously this is not a comprehensive list of everything I did.  I'm grateful the weather was nice enough to enjoy some camping and hiking and rock climbing and swimming and fun.  Here's to starting the last year of school of my life!!  (Hopefully)

Faith and Healing

Yup, I just noticed that I still haven't blogged about the Florida trip.  I will.  I swear. 

I actually wrote a blog post last weekend (not about Florida) and never posted it, I guess it's still too new and personal to share right now, but it's a good one. 

Things are crazy and busy, and crazy busy right now, and I'm definitely feeling overwhelmed.  Work is exhausting, school is kicking my butt, my year-end clearance is on Monday, I am not doing my best in fulfilling my calling, I started dating a new boy....

...guess I'll need to find a name for him....

and it's summer and all I wanna do is play!  I'm definitely hitting the bottom of my resources barrel right now, so I was looking for a pick me up tonight at work, especially because it hasn't been the most uplifting circumstances here at the Sacred Heart ER....I found these 2 talks that I loved loved loved when they were first given, so I'm going to share them. 

The first is called "Remember Lot's Wife"
       My favorite lines from this talk:
"She doubted the Lord's ability to give her something better than she had."
"Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ is the "high priest of good things to come."

I feel like it's all about perspective. It reminds me of the book "Believing Christ" by Stephen E. Robinson.  Sometimes we can believe in Christ, but do we really truly believe that he has the power to make things better, to heal us.  Which leads me to the next talk

"One Among the Crowd"
"Though buried among the thronging mass, she resolutely and quietly pressed forward with a single purpose in mind: to come to the Savior, having faith that He had the power to heal her, that He cared about her and would respond to her need. In this one thing she set herself apart from the crowd. The crowd came to see, but the woman came to be healed."

What I need is faith. And a blessing. And to re-evaluate my priorities.

Besides this....I am grateful.  Grateful for family (even though they're all together now in Wisconsin without me) Grateful for good trustworthy friends, Grateful for my job, Grateful for school, Grateful for my calling and my ward, Grateful that I am doing well.....regardless of how I feel about myself or my life, it's pretty dang great!

Networking

I've been very interested in networking this past year.  Ever since moving to Spokane it's become a lot more apparent to me how important networking is to being successful, and that's true not just for careers. 

Just this past week when we went down to Florida, we stayed with the most wonderful family, whom non of us had ever met.  The husband was Smiley's father's roommate in college, and they hadn't seen each other in over 26 years. However, their friendship and the networking ended up providing us with great support on our trip.

As far as careers go...I would probably never have gotten my job, or had such an easy time getting into the program here if it wasn't for Scooby and his network he had already created for me in Spokane.

I got an email from the BYU alumni today with an article on building relationships and creating influence.  It's not long, but it's got a great point.  This quote from Dale Carnegie really stuck out to me:

"You can gain more friends in two months by being interested than you can in two years by trying to get them interested in you.”

That really struck home to me, probably because I tend to do the latter more often than the former. And I've noticed that those girls in the ward that have no problem getting others to open up to them and create relationships of trust early on are the ones who do that, the ones who are sincerely interested in the other person.  This is something I need to work on for sure, especially if I want to be successful in my ventures next year starting a real career....

Trust

I will post about the trip soon.  Give me time, a lot happened. But right now, I want to just vent some frustration I'm feeling.

I just found out that a good friend of me lied... a pretty serious lie to me, that made me feel pretty horrible about myself. It's difficult to lose trust in someone that you have already entrusted sensitive
information to. I have not confronted this person about it.

Today's institute lesson was wonderful, and someone made a comment about how she felt that she was skeptical by nature.
It made me realize that I tend to be really trusting by nature. However, since I've been in my current calling, I feel like I have been blessed much more with the gift of discernment when it comes to church related stuff.....so why isn't this translating into my personal life? 
Why do I have a hard time reading people and understanding how they feel towards me?

I don't want to become an un-trusting person, but I really really hate being taken advantage of. Maybe it's better to be ignorant about what people truly think of me I guess.

FINALS

This is what I feel like every finals week...

I have no desire to study.  I am only posting this to procrastinate. I want to eat everything in sight. I'm angry at everyone except other people having to take tests.  I spent at least 5 hours today cooking and cleaning and working out, and....watching TV, and my next test is at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and it's the one I'm least prepared for.
Luckily, me and Balzy know where our priorities lie. As we were leaving the library we decided if we're going to have a final that early in the morning, the least we could do is plan for everyone to go out to breakfast afterwards....that seems much more important than preparing for the test. 
Thank goodness I have Florida to look forward to!  Oh yea, Costa Rica flight got canceled, so we made an impulsive decision to buy last minute tickets to Orlando for next week...... it's so nice to be young ;)

Small and Simple Things

Our ward had a fast for missionary work this last Sunday.  The missionaries in our ward have also been working on pushing a lot more on doing Less-Active work and it's been wonderful.  I appreciate the work they are putting in and the ward members who are on board with our new goals.  As I've been thinking about missionary work this video we used to show on my mission kept coming to my mind.  It's one of my favorites....and we could use it in Taiwan because it doesn't have any words!   Enjoy!

I'm Not Competitive, I'm Just Better Than You

Here's me feeling guilty again for not taking more pictures of our adventures last weekend.  Somehow, however, I did manage to document with my phone my amazing game playing skills.  Is it possible that the only reason Shawsh gets so upset during games is because she is just as competitive as me, but without the skills to back it up?  Let's just say that aside from Boggle, I won every game we played that night.  If you don't want your spirits and self-esteem crushed, don't play nerts with me.....or this game.

Because I was the yellow pawn! 

Real Friends Don't let Friends Open Bags of Almonds

So my BFF/fellow student/studying commiserator, Balzy and I sit next to each other in class every day.  And every day we sit in the back of the classroom and snack on food, look for cheap vacations online, complain about life and school, tell funny jokes/stories, and occasionally learn how to position skulls to put the petrous ridges in the lower 1/3 of the orbits for a parietoacanthial projection of the sinuses.....

I eat Balzy's food.  She always brings in the best snack foods, and plenty to share, and I'm selfish.  So one day she bought me my own entire bag of almonds.  She's a giver. Unfortunately, I never learned the life skill of how to correctly open a bag when you have no scissors available.  And this was the result...after I cleaned up a little.

Oh camera phone, why must you be so pixilated? 

(I still ate all those almonds)

Balzy, you're the best!  Thanks for being a great friend ;)

WICKED!

Bill-bo brought his family up this weekend to see Wicked!  It was wonderful!  Kit and Cami also came, and we left all the kids with LA....she was a trooper, but said she had a great time babysitting.  I wish I had gotten more pictures while they were here, the kids were soooooo cute.  But we at least got this one right before the show

Thoughts on Pride, Self-Esteem, Unselfishness, ETC

I'm just going to copy straight from my journal an excerpt from today. Another shout out to ldsjournal.com, I feel a lot more comfortable being honest in that avenue, and look now I can just share things here that I want, however, I am not editing for grammar, deal with it. Anyways, today has definitely been one of those epiphany moments: 

 I had some great insights throughout my day today though.  At clinicals this morning, one of the techs made a comment about babies.  She said "Babies are born selfish.  Unselfishness is something we learn through life." 

 I thought about that a lot.  Babies start to learn how to act unselfishly first I believe when they realize that doing things like crying affects the people around them, the people the love, in a negative way. So initially it's through love that we change.  I think later, that unselfishness is learned through service, another avenue that relies on love, or charity. 
    Then tonight at work I was chatting with the Elder's quorum president.  I told him about one of my friends who had posted pictures of her kids on facebook.  In each of the pictures throughout a period of time, you could see her husband in the background playing video games.  Obviously not giving attention to his children, obviously not sharing in the joy of their progression, while his wife is working her butt off in this x-ray program to support her dead-beat (stay-at-home) husband. He asked me frankly why women are so anxious to get married that they will go for MR. Right NOW instead of Mr. Right. I attributed it to low-self esteem and loneliness.  A woman like that will jump at anything that will give her attention, I've been there, sometimes I feel like I'm there right now. EQP said to me, "Don't ever settle Megan".  I said I never would, and that my pride and self-esteem were too high for that to ever happen, but that I'm worried about my pride...he agreed that he is also prideful and picky, and I commented on the irony of the two most prideful people in the ward being the presidents of our respective auxiliaries. ;)  He decided we're not prideful, we just have an abundance of self-esteem....which I'm sure we have learned through our knowledge of the gospel and what Heavenly Father wants us to feel.  To know of our potential, we should love ourselves!
    Then a little while later we did some x-rays on a 15 year old girl who had gotten beat up by some other girls at a party, apparently it was the ex-girlfriend of this girl's new boyfriend.  I overheard the police officers asking what happened and telling her they needed to go find her parents....I thought, man I don't ever want to get that knock on the door at 2 in the morning saying my daughter had just gotten her head smashed in.  We discussed it in the CT core while they exam was going on and I voiced my concern about how to not let your children fall into the trap of social pressures like that.  One of the other assistants said she feels like the most important thing she can do is just teach her children to be confident and feel loved, feel secure, and know what the standards of their family are.  I thought it was interesting that she talked about confidence and love, and how I had been thinking about that today in relation to becoming less-selfish.  I love how everything is so intertwined!

Oh Baby

Holy Wah it's been a long time since I've posted.  One of my friends introduced me to the LDS journal which is free and pretty spectacular and I highly recommend it.  It even reminds me when I haven't written in it for a while....which nothing else in this world ever does except for mothers.
  So this post is basically just going to be a picture series of events post.

The missionary came home!!  And came to see me!  And he can't have that facial hair anymore because he's at BYU-I  ;) haha.  It was so fantastic to see him, guess he's gonna need a new name...

 We did all the important Spokane things to do....Saw a weird castle, fed the ducks, rode the carousel, saw the temple, visited with his childhood friend Andrew, and went to Froyo.  Woot!

The Taurus rolled over 100,000 miles!!  Unbelievable.  I'm ready for it to die any day now.

Ellen had the baby!  Shawsh makes him cry, but of course he loves his Aunt Bacon...she's the coolest!

Sorry I really can't figure out why this picture won't flip over.  If you lay sideways then it looks right. 

Un-bearded RM and his new Frisbee.....this thing flies.

He's trying to take over my coolness status, but he'll never succeed.

Because I still rock

Grandma doesn't make the baby cry.

Shawsh didn't harm anyone in the playing of the train game....this time.

This is payback for whoever stole my camera

I love my mama!

Undocumented....My birthday.  Was great.  I had 2 tests that morning, but then Shawsh took me out for lunch and got me some piano music, then I went shopping and then FHE was a birthday party....uh.....for everyone...on my birthday ;) We played red rover, pin the tail on the donkey, had a pinata, a water gun fight, and a chocolate cake.  Then that weekend at Ellen's we had a joint birthday/mother's day/ baby blessing party with ice cream and Costco cake and family, and friends, and happiness.  Maybe someone will send me pictures of these wonderful events as well. I couldn't take many pictures there because I was busy trying to get rid of my baby fever.  He's sooooooo cute. I just couldn't help but hold him every chance I got!   Overall things have been great.  I'm halfway through this quarter, and can't wait to start my last year of school!    YAY!

Tender Mercies

I learned a perspective lesson last weekend. 
       All of the week before last was pretty miserable for me.  I had a cough that ended up turning into a sinus infection, I've been feeling really behind in my RS duties, and I am at Deaconess working evenings the entire month of April.  Boo April.  Basically it all added up to a horrible day. Wednesday, at clinicals, everything went wrong. I felt like a horrible person, and I was completely unprepared for the skull anatomy test the next day at 7:30am. Then I came home and there was a mini-party in my living room, that I not only couldn't participate in because I had to cram before the test, but I even with earplugs and a humidifier going I couldn't mask the noise and couldn't concentrate. 
       All in all, I was pretty proud of myself for the way I handled everything on the surface, my problems are my problems and I have thick skin, but deep down, I was frustrated and hurt. 
       I called in sick on Friday for clinical, which I consider a blessing since going back to Deaconess was not sounding fun, even if I was feeling well.  Work was pretty average, but I came home early every day.  Sunday morning I woke up for PEC and decided it wasn't going to happen for me.  I started to send a text to the Bishop to let him know, and to tell him what I would have reported on, but the list was too long, and I realized that I really needed to be there.  So I got up and went.  It was the hardest PEC I've ever sat through.  It wasn't even PEC I don't think.  And I once again, felt about 2-feet tall just like on Wednesday. I ended up just staying for the passing of the sacrament and then going home to rest.
      That's when everything changed.  I rested well, I took some more drugs and neti-potted ;), I ate food, and tidied up a little. By the end of the day, a handful of people had checked in on me to make sure I was doing OK, I got to talk to 3 of my 4 brothers, one of them offered to fly me to Hawaii this summer, a trip to Costa Rica got reinstated for June, and I studied some great church material.  Besides that, Jonny-bob was on his way up to visit me the next day!  I didn't feel much better physically that night, but my spirits were lifted tremendously. 
   Then this week, I got to see the little bro and hang out with him for a couple days (I didn't play hookie, I really was sick when I called in sick....who cares if I spend my sick day in bed or with family?) and then I went to Wenatchee for an x-ray conference, which wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it was one less week at Deaconess.....so it was wonderful ;)
     This experience It reminded me of this talk President Eyring gave a few years ago. The biggest lesson I got out of this talk is being grateful and expressing it.  You can bet I was on my knees that night in supreme gratitude to my Heavenly Father for knowing so intimately what I was going through, and knowing my needs.  My trials were not taken away, but I was reminded of the blessings I have and through His tender mercies I was given the strength to persevere.  I am not currently keeping a blessing journal, but I consider this my medium for that right now.  On the mission I made miracle walls with a couple of my companions, showcasing the miracles we saw every day for that transfer.  Taking that wall down each transfer was difficult, but inspiring.  And I testify that when I focused on the miracles and blessings I received during those times, I received the most blessings. 

HERE'S TO POSITIVE ATTITUDES!

New Favorites

Yesterday I went over to visit Shawsh for lunch to prove to her I love her and am not avoiding her.  Big surprise huh? She gets that feeling of being unloved from Mom..... I swear I'd make it there more if I had the kind of time I have during Spring Break! 

Well, I volunteered to watch the kids for a bit while she ran errands (I really just wanted to use her kitchen and stones to make some cookies) and while she was gone, P-Jo showed me these videos on YouTube.  Episode 3 and 4 are my favorites so far, but it looks like this may be an ongoing series.  Hooray for cute kids!

But!  If you buy 13 completos....It's only 13 dollars!

It Runs in the Family

You can pick your friends,

And you can pick your nose

But you can't pick the habits your kids pick up from you.

Spring is in the Air

Today I wore flip flops, ate frozen yogurt and hammered nails into a fence.

  

Thanks Mai Nails!!  

UGLI?

Ugli fruit can make you beautiful

 

Hello Seattle

So my friend Rachie is getting married.  I love her a lot.  So I went this last weekend to see her go through the temple for the first time with her fiance, who I like a lot too.  They make a super cute couple.  I don't have the pictures from the temple, hopefully I'll get those from her soon.  But I decided to go see Ellen and her fam since I'd be out that way, and since it was spring break, Smiley came with me. It was a quick road trip, but fun times.

We took the kids to OMSI and had VooDoo Doughnuts for the first time.  Not super kid friendly (my doughnut was the dirty bastard) But a fun Portland-y type thing to do.

Ellen's fetus really wanted a maple Bacon bar....
probably cuz he already
knows that aunt bacon is the coolest!

Good things come in Pink Boxes

Smiley is confused...

But the kids know what to do with Doughnuts!

Don't worry, I didn't leave Vancouver without doing the most important thing...Sheridan's Frozen Custard!!  The Closest thing we can get to a Culver's out here.  Oh bliss!

We went got up super early for the endowment session in Seattle, and then spent the rest of the day playing in the city. We explored Pike's Place:

Paying for parking first

So we can enjoy the water

Obligatory pike's place pig....

I was inspired by tangled

And so excited that LA called me to get a phone number while I was in the hat shop

Don't be jealous because you've never been to the SUPERMALL!!!

Then we met up with a Spokanite friend...And went to the cheapest entertainment we could find. Green River
Community College Presents:

And this was how excited we were about it!

Thanks Seattle for another great adventure.  Till next time....