So, turns out we're married!!

I know I have posted for awhile, so this may come as a surprise, but WE'RE MARRIED!!!!! Mark and I are just loving life! We have tons still to do, especially with putting together our house, but we're really enjoying it and things are really coming together. It's pretty small, but honestly just perfect for us. I will have to post some pictures sometime... or you should all just come visit us and check it out yourselves! We're going to get an air mattress for guests to sleep on so we can become the vacation capital of northern California.

Some updates:

The Lakers are still in the playoffs, but it's been a weird series with the Houston Rockets. They lost the fourth game by like 40 points in Houston, but then came back to LA and beat them by at least 40 points... and last night just got beat in Houston again. So lame. We're positive they'll win the 7th game on Sunday, which will be in LA and hoping that these hard games will serve as strengthening moments and push them through.

We had our first visitor of our married life and of our new apartment last night!! Mark's oldest brother, Mike, works in the northern California area every two weeks and will be staying one night a month with us. We are so excited to have him come visit on a regular basis! He was able to watch the game with us last night and chat. He and Mark had time to go see a movie this morning and we're all meeting up for some sushi lunch. What fun! Next time, we'll hopefully have purchased our air mattress so he doesn't have to be a trooper and sleep on a pile of blankets on our front room floor... such a nice brother though, he said he actually liked it!

We officially have cable and tivo! We are most definitely a tv-loving family and are excited for it. Mark looked into all these great deals and found us a Comcast special package for $30 a month and then they also had another special that gave us DVR for $5 a month. We had the cable guy come on Tuesday and I think we've taped at least 15-20 shows thus far. We also get all the HBO channels, so we've been taping movies as well. Oh, random... we switched tv's with Mom and Dad Abbott (who were so kind to let us take the better/bigger tv) and brought it back and found... it's just like one or two inches too big for the tv stand that sister and brother (Ashley and DaveVoelkel) gave us. Totally lame. So, we're probably going to move the tv stand into the kitchen area to give us a spot for our microwave (must conserve limited counter space) and have more storage. It looks a little weird, but it will help and I think it will end up looking good. Then we'll just get another tv stand. We're definitely not throwing away the tv stand we got because it weighs about 5 million pounds and Mark and I carried that thing by ourselves up our stairs. It was the most ridiculous thing in the world and I still can't believe we did it.

So, I think most people know this, but Mark is going to go back to school in the fall and get his MBA (masters in business). We think this will work out really well for us in the future. He can get more of his schooling done now before we have kids and the economy will be much better when he graduates. The big news is....

He has been accepted to three of his top choice schools in the area!!! He's been accepted to Santa Clara University, San Jose State, and San Francisco State. We're currently leaning towards Santa Clara University (and have to decide in the new little while). It is more expensive than the other schools, but seems to have a much better reputation. The school doesn't really offer a regular graduate program, but instead has an evening program (which could mean Mark could work while going to school) where he'll go to school from about 5-10 pm twice a week. That will take some getting used to, but it's not so bad. Santa Clara is currently ranked #10 in the nation for its evening program, along with other schools like USC, UCLA, etc. Because it doesn't have a regular day program, it's not ranked except within the evening programs, but still... that does sound pretty good. Also, Mark originally applied for a program Santa Clara has where they take people who don't have a lot of work experience yet and put them through a 6-month course before they start the evening program. When he went into an interview, the guy was quite impressed with Mark's mission experience. He told Mark that he was over qualified for the 6-month course and instead pushed him straight up into the regular evening program. I'm so impressed with Mark and with his capabilities and hard-work and perseverance. I know it hasn't been easy to go through the job hunting process and the application process, but he has continually had a good, hopeful attitude and kept working away. He's such an example to me of doing the best with what you got (one of his favorite sayings) and he sure does have so much to offer!! We're really excited about these new opportunities!

Okay, I can't think of any other updates for the moment... I'll try to be better about posting more often.