Category Archives: Just Life

Posts about the good normal everyday life stuff: eating out, family outings, coloring, just living life and loving it.

The Silver Lining

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I believe the difference between a good day and a bad day, between an awesome experience and an awful one, can all be in the way you look at it. Take our kitchen cabinets, for example. The house we’re renting (as we’ve discussed) is old, less-than-perfect, and quirky. When we first moved in and saw the kitchen cabinets, I thought, “Wow, they’re all white and made of metal. Taa-cky.” But then, one happy day, I was looking at our refrigerator, which is crowded with magnets and wedding announcements and cards from family, and then I looked at our cabinets…back at the refrigerator…back at the cabinets… “Hey!” I thought. “Those have potential!” And now (after a Christmas present from my sister of lots and lots of new magnets), I’ve turned our kitchen cabinets into more displays of cards, photographs, letters, and family love. Awesome!

So it’s all in the way you look at it, really. About finding the silver lining. Joshua and I were talking tonight, and we want to try to do that more often. Even when our lives are in flux, and we don’t know what changes with internships and jobs and such the next few months will bring, and life is scary and uncertain, we’ve decided we want to be better about looking for the silver lining.

House Pictures

Just Life

So here’s some pictures I’ve taken recently of our house. The grass (aka weeds) in the front was really really long, but our landlords had someone come and cut it all, and I was so excited that it looked better I went and took some pictures of the front…and of the back, which still kind of looks like a jungle, but hey. It’s kind of fun. A cat lives and/or explores back there. Hopefully the cat catches mice (because we had one in our house, but Josh caught that one). So anyway, we still fell super blessed and lucky to have such a nice (albeit old and quirky) house to live in!

Macro and Motion

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So tonight was date night, and we decided we wanted to get out of the house, so we grabbed our cameras and walked around downtown Provo taking pictures. We gave ourselves an assignment in the beginning: macro shots and motion shots. We don’t know how well we stuck to our assignment, but here are our pics! We like them. And we like our oh-so-artistic-but-not-so-serious titles and descriptions, too. Enjoy!

Family Comes to Town

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Last week we had a real treat: the Lyman family came to visit! We had been planning on a weekend of fun after they visited family north of Salt Lake, but thanks to a snowstorm and a broken headlight on the Lyman family car, we got to see them a few days early! The whole family (Mom, Dad, Christian, Zach, and Luke) rolled in to our house around 12:00 p.m. on Thursday for an emergency sleepover, rather than keep on driving in the bad conditions. It was a blast! It was great to have everyone here and visit and talk. It felt fun to have a house full of family, too. And we felt lucky that we had enough space and just enough blankets to (hopefully) sleep everyone comfortably.

And the rest of the weekend was great, too! We had a great time eating pizza and playing games with the brothers, playing around in the park, going out to dinner and ice cream, and even heading to the Quarry for some rock-climbing! It was the first time Josh had climbed in a while, and he and the boys loved it. And Heather and Paige were daring and conquered a few walls, too (despite Paige’s fear of heights!) Oh, and we had another sleepover on Friday night with just the brothers—Sam joined us, too, and we watched movies and ate popcorn. Oh, yeah, good times.

So it was a great weekend! All the fun activities were a blast, but the best part was just getting to see our family and spend time with them. It feels like it’s been since the wedding/Christmas/reception time since we really got to spend time with the Lymans, and then things were so busy! It was great to have a nice, fun, relaxing weekend, and we’re looking forward to our upcoming visit to Colorado!