Marriage

Stipulation: If you read the below, keep in mind that I am not judging or criticizing anyone's choices, I am simply stating my opinion and experiences. I love everyone, even if they completely disagree with me.

So during my days at work, I can sometimes (almost always) be found looking at stories on the internet. I usually start at CNN and work my way around the circuit of various headlines/blogs/twittering/flickr, etc.
Sometimes there are stories and things I send to Joe or my dad and say "This is interesting" and move on. But this one caught my eye as something I could blog about (I've been wanting to blog about something) http://tinyurl.com/653hfw mostly because I am irritated with it. From this article I get the feeling that marriage is a bad word. I don't think that divorce is or isn't the answer, but I do think a lot of people enter marriage for a lot of wrong reasons and don't realize what it means to be married. Marriage does indeed take work, it can be really hard some days and really easy other days, but I do think that if someone constantly has the "out" of divorce in the back of their mind, what would make them work hard at keeping their marriage together? Like in High School, knowing that I needed a C to pass, why would I put myself through the trouble of getting the A (or any other similar metaphor).
Marriage is a commitment, for the LDS peeps, for time AND all eternity. Shouldn't people want to marry someone that they could work hard with and love a lot?
So all those wrong reasons that people get married for? I'm not going to list all of those reasons, but I will say that marriage is important and that it's importance will never go away, even though the lady in the article thinks it will.....
I think the excuse of "I'd be happier if I were married to so-and-so instead of my current spouse" is a bad one. I was talking to Stacy about this, and I've thought about it before: There were other guys I could have married, and plenty of them I could have had a just fine marriage with, however, it would have been different and probably not as fun as it is being married to Joe. My point is, regardless of who you marry or divorce and then marry, you will always have problems and issues, and things that bug you; there's no "perfect" marriage, because as we all know, we can never be perfect while on this earth, but we can try to be perfect and we can try to have a perfect marriage. When we are trying to make our spouse happy vs. just making ourselves happy, perhaps then we will see that our marriage can survive and that we can continue to work things out. I know I need to work harder for Joe.
Marriage also involves a lot of sacrifice, and I know Joe and I have both sacrificed, in our different ways. And instead of dwelling on those sacrifices and wishing that maybe I hadn't given this or that up, I have to focus on why I chose to sacrifice those things, like my career for a family; sometimes it comes down to what is more important to me, and then also, what is more important to our marriage and our future.
So to those who are thinking about getting married or getting really close to being married (Ian & Tykena), just know what you are getting into. Marriage is awesome, but marriage also means hard work, sacrifice, struggle, hurt, pain, disappointment, broke($).....etc, etc; you can't have the ups without the downs, or the rainbows without the rain :)
Ultimately, I want everyone to have a happy marriage, I love my happy marriage, but I also want everyone to know that being married does not automatically equal happy marriage.
Soapbox over.....for now.

Veggie Pizza

Ever since attending Pampered Chef parties, I've always wanted to build my own veggie pizza. The thing that has always prevented me from trying it is the issue of rolling the dough, I'm horrible at rolling any form of dough. Then the other day I was clipping coupons and saw that Pillsbury has released a new line of dough called Recipe Creations. It's basically just their crescent roll dough but in one sheet. It's brilliant! I say it's brilliant because although you can just push together the edges of their crescent rolls, you still end up with holes all over the place.
The best part is that when I went to the store to buy it, they totally had the Veggie Pizza recipe on the package!! Like they were reading my mind. So I bought what I needed and finally made the pizza last night. It turned out pretty well. I didn't get any dill weed, and next time I'll definitely add that. But it tasted good last night, and even today for lunch. I put carrots, yellow peppers, and broccoli on it. There definitely can be many variations.
I highly recommend checking it out, I plan on making more stuff with these gimmicky Recipe Creations that they've come out with (Sharon's beef and cheese foldover would work great with these). Love it!

Edward vs. Jacob: Breaking Dawn Release party

So our friend Emily wanted really badly to go the Breaking Dawn release party. Joe and I agreed we would go with her, along with Julie Poole. We knew we didn't care much about the "party" we mostly just wanted to get the book. We showed up at 11:30 (after preordering the book) and hung out in our color assigned area of Barnes and Noble (the mystery/romance section) until 12:01 when they would finally sell the books. Apparently they had a costume contest, trivia questions throughout the store, and a guest book to sign, among other things, to keep you "busy" while waiting. We didn't do any of it, just stood around waiting. We took a few pictures to document the history, but it wasn't as wild and crazy as I wanted. There were a few interesting looking people there, but mostly it was a bunch of young teenage girls with a few moms. The moms would all walk by us and say "What am I doing here?" It was pretty funny, because we pretty much felt the same way. I did participate in the dressing up bit though. When we bought the third book, Eclipse, from Sam's club, it came with a sweet poster and two iron ons for T-shirts, one was "Team Edward" the other "Team Jacob". I totally made a shirt with them, I put Edward on front and Jacob on back, just to take advantage of using both of them. I think I was the only one with the iron ons, so I felt superior to the girls with the puffy paint shirts :)

The book went on sale and they sold it by group, so that there wouldn't just be a huge line. I think we were in the fourth group up and we had the book purchased by 12:30. So I'm down and hour and $7 from my life (B&N sold it for $17, Walmart sold it for $10), oh well.I told Joe we had to read at least one chapter before going to bed to make doing the release party worth it. Then the next day I read it while we drove to the Temple, and then home from the Temple, and then until we went to bed Saturday, and then all day Sunday. We finally finished it Monday night!
I will tell you, without giving anything away, I enjoyed it. I am satisfied and pleased. Stephenie even put a suprise in there that I wasn't expecting at all, which made for some fun. I ultimately got everything I wanted, even with a few things that were a huge bother. I will say, as she has said herself, she isn't a really good writer, just a good story teller. I am glad I read the series, mostly to know what all the hype was about, but also becuase it was a fun distraction.

At least now that the series is over Joe and I can stop staying up so late finishing these books.....

Six Flags

Joe and I skipped out on work on Friday (August 1st) and went to Six Flags. We had been wanting to go, and since they have been running a discount on tickets, we decided it was time. It was a hot, humid day, but that's not unusual for summer in Georgia. It was fun, but it wasn't quite as awesome as Magic Mountain in LA. Goliath, the newest ride for the park, was definitely the best, it was scary and actually felt like it was pretty long, we rode it twice.

There were plenty of awesome people to look at too. Lots of rednecks along with teenages that thought they were the best ever. There were also plenty of scantily clad girls who should not have been so scantily clad.

Parking was a ridiculous $15, but what can you do. We were lucky to get out of the park without buying any food and only drinking two 20 oz. cokes for the ridiculous price of $3.50 each. It probably wasn't a good idea to skimp on drinking though, especially on water, because I ended up getting what seemed to be like heat exhaustion. It was pretty bad for the ride home, I almost vomited when Joe asked me to get a sandwich out of the cooler....I survived after taking a long nap and drinking a bunch of water when we were home.

These handing pots are for mom, she might get jelous though.

We don't feel the need to go back to Six Flags for awhile, especially since we are going to awesome Disney World and Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure in October! Yes!