On the Road Again...

So we are leaving the "frozen" tundra of Idaho to come to the "cold" desert of Texas for Christmas. We leave here on December 17 and come back on January 3, 2009. It seems like we travel all the time! I think we have gone somewhere to someone's house every month since we got here. That is a whole freaking lot of gas. UGGHGHHH!!!! Sorry just a little frustrated there. But the good news is that we get to travel down to Texas with my brother, his lovely wife, and their darling son. Who will be about a month old by then. He is so adorable. They are so lucky and you can tell that this was THE right decision for them and their family. Its hard not to be jealous sometimes. They have their life all together and everything is going great for them. Oh well, life is hard and then we die.  Oh well. Well I am really looking forward to spending time with our different families. I am SOOOO looking forward to it. Maybe I can spend one on one time with my sisters. That would be way fun! I will see you guys soon!

I HAVE A JOB!!!!!

WHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! I am so happy! I finally have a job! I am a cashier/work the front at Arctic Circle. I have worked there for 3 weeks now and it is bringing money in. I make $6.55 an hour, which isn't much and isn't going to be enough for rent plus gas, electric, gas for the car, groceries, care credit payment, and more. But the fact that I finally have a job is ecstatic! It feels good to know that I am no longer failing my family because I couldn't provide for them. I just love the way that feels. It feels good to work again. To be able to do something during the day and feel useful that I am actually doing something! So nice. Well, school gets out soon for Steve and I graduate on the December 6th. Which is nice because then I can start working on and getting my externship completed. Steve is doing GREAT in school. He is making excellent grades. I am learning to love life. Life is what happens when you make plans and they go otherwise. I love my hubby and am so grateful for everything that he does for me. He is the best husband that I could ever ask for. Mu-wah! I love you honey!

Finally!!!!

Okay so via my last post, I finally got some interviews. I am interviewing  at UPS, Verizon Wireless, Key Bank, and Toys R Us. All in the next two days. I am so excited for these interviews. My hard work has definitely paid off. I have been working on finding a job for five hours a day. So finally I have interviews and am so excited for them. So THANK YOU to everyone out there who put in a good word for me. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!

The Never Ending Search

Okay so if you've ever been to Rexburg, you know that the city was not made for as many students as it has.  There just aren't enough jobs for everyone to have a job in Rexburg. So what are you to do when you find yourself in my situation and barely have enough money for rent and the bills for next month? You look harder. I have been looking for a job since we moved here to Rexburg in September. Ya, I know. Where does all the money go? It seemed like we were doing fine, but apparantly we're not. We don't have enough money for food next month. No one is hiring here and I have gotten really discouraged to the point where I feel like I have failed Steve because I haven't been able to provide the things that we need. If I don't find a job within the next two weeks, we will have to start selling stuff to get money for bills. Neither Steve or I can donate blood or plasma. Conditions vary between us so we can't bring money in that way. So if any of you out there know of somewhere that is hiring, please let me know. I'm just frustrated that I am either over qualified for a job or under qualified for a job. So I guess the moral is, JUST GIVE ME A FREAKING CHANCE!!!!!

Trip to Utah...

Steve and I bought 4th row floor seats to a Dashboard Confessional, Panic at the Disco, Plain White T's Concert. I know, freaking amazing. How we could afford this you may ask while we are but poor college students is that we bought them in the summer when we had money and we didn't have to pay rent. Well the concert was in West Valley, Utah so we of course had to drive all the way down there to go to the concert. We left at 1:10 p.m. We were almost to Centerville, Utah at about 5. Then our car broke down. It just stopped working. We pulled over to the side of the highway and thought maybe we just ran out of gas and the gas light wasn't working or the sensor wasn't working. So Steve was going to walk to the nearest gas station and get some gas to put in the car. But we happened to be right by a busy construction site and they just gave us 1/4 of a tank of gas for free! That doesn't happen often and they were so nice! But that didn't work. The car still wouldn't start. It would crank and turn over but not start. So we tried all kinds of things to try and get it to start, still nothing. Then we tried calling family that we had in Utah to see if they could come help us out. Steve's brother ended up coming to get us and tow us to a gas station until we could take it to a shop and find out what the heck was wrong with our car. He didn't show up for a couple of hours. So we sat on the side of the road for 4 hours almost. (When you go on a trip, bring food and water or something to drink. Trust me.) We went to dinner and then the next day took it to a shop only to find out there was a million things wrong with the car. Timing belt, injection springs, pulley, ball bearings, and something else I can't remember. Anyways, it ended up costing us $608!!!!!! That is a whole lot of money! Thankfully my parents are either helping us pay for it or paying for it because they felt bad for us. If they wouldn't have we would have almost no money. Thank heaven for parents and everything they teach you! Was it worth it? Quite possibly. We got to see family, had free food for a little bit, gas was paid for almost, and Kelcie got Steve a birthday present. So yes it was definitely worth it. Now, if WE had to pay for everything, that would be a different situation all together. Lesson learned: pay attention in class, you will learn something about cars that could save you and your spouse's life if you're stuck on the side of the road. THANK YOU EVERYONE THAT HELPED US OUT THIS PAST WEEKEND, WE LOVE YOU!!!!

Rexburg Opinion Center

Okay so I finally got a call back from the millions of places that I have applied. I swear I know my resume like I know my own hand. It is that familiar to me now. But anyways Rexburg Opinion Center called me back to come in for an interview on Thursday. Training begins next week... but the only downside is that I am going to be out of town on one of the days and you have to attend all 3 days at once. So I have to go for a different training time. Another one of the things that stinks is that you have to work one Saturday a month and I go to school on Saturdays so that isn't going to work. We will see how things play out right now. Hopefully I will have a job soon so that we can start bringing money into the home....

Awww... the Wii

Okay so a little while ago, we bought a Wii from Ebay. We got the Wii, Guitar Hero 3, like 5 other games for all like $335. Which isn't a bad price at all. But anyways, since it has been here, we have played it like non-stop. I used to complain about Steve playing too many video games and never spending time with me, but I guess it's different when you want to play those games too. Then you are playing those games together which makes it kinda cool to just hang out and be together. That used to not be enough for me. I wanted to just always be with him and near him and just I guess expect him to entertain me. But life isn't like that. Life isn't about making sure that you're taken care of, life is about taking care of other people. And doing that really does make you happy. Service is truly the best thing that you can do to help yourself and others in one fatal swoop. Okay back to the Wii, Steve has this game called Resident Evil 4 and it absolutely terrifies me. I can't watch him play at night. It has come to the point where he can only play during the day time because it scares me so bad. Why? Why does a video game scare me? Me, who loves to watch scary movies. I have no clue. It just does. Well, life is going okay right now. Still looking for jobs...

APX Party

We went to an APX party that they throw every year last friday. Turns out there were like 8,000 people there.  And they were giving out free prizes like 42 inch plasma tv's, mountain bikes, 4-wheelers, go carts, cash prizes, and they were throwing money out into the crowd. Of course they only threw out dollar bills. And when they picked people for the contests, they picked the cutest girls they saw or their friends. Which for us married girls who can't jump that high, and only want to dance with their husbands, well it leaves us out of the grab bag for anything that we wanted. The guy next to us won a t.v. because he ate 8 raw hot dogs the fastest. Come on, anyone can do that. Easy! Not that I'm jealous or anything. At the end of the party at like midnight, they were giving out 500 dollars, and everyone was pushing towards the front, which was where we were, and practically squishing me. Steve's husband instinct kicked in and he pushed like 10 people off of me and they all fell on the ground. They all looked at him like what the heck are you doing? Steve goes "She's my wife, you're hurting her!" And then we left. SO I guess this just goes to show that the pretty really do get everything in life. Plus husbands rule!

Shopping!

Today while Steve was at school, I decided to do a little shopping to pretty up our home and make it, well, more inviting.  So off I went to K-Mart and the Dollar Tree. I bought some smell good stuff that you can systematically place throughout your home to make it smell better. i.e. the bathroom, kids rooms, etc. Now our house smells like it just rained, you know that right before it rains and right after smell? Like everything is so clean? Yes, nice. At K-Mart, I bought curtains and a curtain rod to put up in our living room so that the sun doesn't come in and bake us alive during the awful hours from 5-7pm. Then I walked over to the LDS Bookstore here in town and bought some picture frames of the First Presidency and Christ and the Living Christ proclamation in Portuguese. Hung them up on the wall and now this part of the house sorta resembles a home. A couple of pictures, curtains and some smelly good stuff did the trick. I should try that in the other rooms... ya that's right, you heard me "Office" I'm comin' for ya...

All the Kofoeds

Steve and I in the Gardens in Rexburg, Idaho.

Dance, Dance, Dance!

We went to a dance on Saturday. The Welcome Back Dance, mostly for freshman, but we were bored and wanted something to do so we went. Let me tell you, not a lot of married people there. Awkward... anyways, we danced the night away! And of course they played the dumbest song on the universe, Hannah Montana The Best of Both Worlds. Sorry to all of you out there who like that kind of stuff, but I'm not a big Hannah Montana fan. They had tons of different songs out there and boy did I feel old when they did line dances and I was one of the few who knew how the line dance actually went. There came a point in the night when I wondered if my husband really knew who I was when he wrapped his arm around some other girl! What happened was we were dancing in a mosh pit trying not to fall down when the song ends and he turns back towards the stage, naturally and wraps his arm around the girl next to him, which was NOT me. He didn't even look at her, just wrapped his arm around her and started swaying to the music. In the meantime, she was looking at him like WHO THE HECK ARE YOU? Finally I started to pull on his arm to get it off her, but he wasn't paying attention to me. Then I pulled harder and yelled his name, he turns and sees me... the look on his face was priceless! He looked like he had been caught red handed with another woman. So funny. He turned to her and apologized and she said it was okay but disappeared into the crowd very quickly to get away from this freak who just wrapped his arm around her. I think it was worth it to see the look on both of their faces when it happened. So ladies, if you're ever in the mood for a laugh, try this one at home!

Couch...ew

Okay, so we got this old fashioned style couch from Deseret Industries (D.I.) that had a weird pattern of like cabins and like an old fashion water wheel and was orange and stuff, not that pretty but pretty comfortable for like $30. Looks don't matter when you don't have money. Its all about how comfortable it is to sit on, right? Right. Well we bring it home and after a little while, realize that it stinks. Like smells pretty bad. At first, I thought it was just me, like I had forgotten to put on deodorant that day or something. But it turns out, the previous owner had let their animal or child urinate on the couch. It had seeped through the cushion and was on the underneath part where the springs were too. So we had to get a completely new couch. And of course the D.I. doesn't take returns after 24 hours. So we disposed of the couch and then finally got a new couch that is comfortable to sleep on, as Steve can testify to, and is beautiful. So thank you to all you Garage Sales out there! You literally saved us from a stinky life! We Love You!

Camping....

Steve and I went camping this weekend. We live in Rexburg and didn't want to go far so we camped about 2 or 3 blocks from our house in a campground called Eagle Pass or something like that. We were right next to the airport, which for those of you who haven't had that wonderful experience of going away to camp, don't camp right next to an airport. My husband said that it's not a camping trip until you've forgotten something. Well, try five or six things. I drove back to the house several times to get things that we forgot. Our campground smelled like stagnant water or sewage. We couldn't decide. Around 7:00 or so we started to cook our dinner in the fire pit. We had what my family calls Pioneer Dinners or Foil Dinners. Where you have hamburger, potatoes, carrots, and whatever else you want in your dinner with mushroom soup and some spices. It was very good. Later we had the obvious smores, but we each only ate one. After we ate and set up our campsite, we watched the movie The Bucket List. For all of you who haven't seen it, go watch it. It is amazingly good. Well anyways, Rexburg gets very cold at night for those who haven't been here. I would dare to say that it is the coldest place in the United States. Having no heat, just sleeping bags is not fun at night. I woke up a couple times because i was so cold. About 3 in the morning, I woke up Steve and told him that I was cold so he couldn't sleep the rest of the night because he was worried about me and hoping that I was warm enough, which of course I wasn't, but it was nice of him to worry. I think the temperature that night got down into the 20s or 30s. And its not even winter! So we got up in the morning had breakfast, packed up, and left. We went camping a good 12 hours or so I think. My husband says it is nice to be able to get away from everything and not have to worry about homework, or chores, or anything. If 12 hours of camping can help us not to argue so much and cause less stress I say "LONG LIVE CAMPING!"