Our first apartment!

I've been meaning to post about this for awhile... we moved into a new apartment and have been busy trying to put it together. I'll give you some before shots and shots of the place today.

The beginnings of our kitchen...



Our kitchen today...



The beginnings of our front room...



Our front room today...



The beginnings of our bedroom...



Our bedroom today...



The beginnings of our bathroom...


Our bathroom today...



And here's a few pictures of us during the moving in process...





Love you all and wish you could come visit us here at our house! We have a very comfy air mattress for any who would like to!!

My wedding ring is more sparkly in the temple

Mark and I had the opportunity to go to the Oakland Temple this last week. I always love the temple, but for some reason this trip was special. Maybe it was because we hadn't been for awhile... we go every month, but in June we went at the beginning of the month and we didn't return until the end of July. I felt like I'd been away too long. I had missed that peace and beauty that permeates my soul and makes me feel at home and loved. It's such a beautiful experience and one that was made better by having Mark there with me. Several times during our visit I couldn't help but notice how much shinier and more sparkly my wedding ring was than usual. I am so used to my ring that I don't often notice it anymore, but it was simply and utterly more beautiful within the temple. I felt an overwhelming gratitude for Mark and for our eternal marriage. I am grateful for the temple that seals families together and will allow me to be with Mark forever. Mark is my best friend and the kindest husband, and the temple sweetens and brightens our relationship. The temple is a place where we can go to be reminded of what's truly important in life and to be reminded of our own worth, as well as the worth of those we love. I love to see the temple!!

Funny side story: after leaving the temple, we decided to go walk around the temple grounds. You can walk up some stairs and actually walk on a second story ledge around the temple. They have beautiful trees and bushes on the ledge and a fabulous view, especially at night. We walked around and came back to the gate that lets us out into the parking lot only to find... the gate was shut and locked. With no way out. It was honestly quite a humorous moment, but we weren't sure what to do. Sleep on the temple grounds until morning? Climb over the tall fence in my skirt and high heels? All options seemed bleak (but really amusing), until a security guard came back after making a sweep of the place to let us out. In retrospect, of course they wouldn't accidentally lock people in. Although after all the Man vs Wild type shows that Mark's seen, I'm sure he'd be able to figure out a way to get us out eventually.

The craziest, most exciting weekend ever!!

I'm a little late in posting this, but here it is!!

Mark and I decided to get married the same weekend of his graduation from BYU. Needless to say, it was a crazy weekend! Here's my recap:

We flew into Utah Wednesday evening. It was a crazy mess. We were finalizing our packing and just getting ready to leave for the airport when I got an automated call from the airline company telling us that one of our two layover flights to Utah had been canceled. I immediately began to panic thinking, "but I'm getting married! I have to get to Utah!" After some negotiations with the airline, we were able to switch to another flight out of Oakland airport the same night, which was actually a direct flight and got us into Utah sooner than we would have originally. We booked the flights and frantically started calling anyone we could think of who could drive us last minute an hour away during traffic. We are soooo eternally grateful for our friends John and Eliza McKeon (just married this last weekend, congrats!) who quickly answered our pleas for help and even left work early to get us to our flight on time. One thing I've learned time and again during my life is that immense blessings come when life throws us something hard.

On Thursday, we had a whole list of errands we had to run, including getting our marriage license, picking up Mark's tux rental (which had to be fixed that day because the legs were too short... my stinkin' tall husband!), getting my nails done, and taking pre-wedding pictures.

I have two sisters who each got married within 8 months of me. My mom wanted to get pictures of all three of the girls in our wedding dresses and the boys in suits. So yes, Mark saw the wedding dress before the actual wedding day, but it was for a good cause! The pictures turned out absolutely darling! Here are a few...

My sisters and I:


From left to right: Seth and Heidi Larsen, Mark and Heather Abbott, Dave and Ashley Voelkel:


After the pictures we hung out for a bit with our Wadsworth family until Mark went to hang out with our Abbott family for the rest of the night (and he honestly had to watch the Lakers tournament game). I have such a crazy amazing husband! I completely accidentally plan our wedding for the middle of the NBA tournament... the Lakers played game 4 the day of our wedding during our reception with a record of 2-1! I know what a huge sacrifice this was for him to not be able to watch the games and I love him to pieces for not being annoyed or complaining about it (or at least not to me)!!

So Friday morning we woke up at the crack of dawn for Mark's 8:00 am graduation. Mark even had to be there an hour earlier... poor guy! Mark's parents, Kevin and Rachael, Uncle Clay and Aunt Marcia, and my mom were able to attend with me. To clarify a bit... Mark actually graduated from BYU in the English/Humanities department last December 2008. However, for whatever reason, BYU doesn't hold an actual graduation ceremony in December so Mark had to wait until April to have us cheer him on while he walked across the stage (wearing borrowed robes from Rachael Abbott - thanks again dear, we dropped the ball on ordering his robes!!!) and received his diploma cover (not to be confused with the actual diploma that we had received months earlier). Mark graduated cum laude, which is quite impressive!! I'm so proud of him for all the hard work that he continues to put into his education and into bettering himself. He's the best example to me of someone who knows what they want and works hard for it!

Mark right after getting his diploma:


One of the last pictures of the two of us pre-wedding:


The Abbotts (Kevin, Rachael, Abby/Mom, Mark, Heather, Papa) - Tyler was in Utah for the wedding but didn't join us until after the graduation... too early:


Mom and I had a lot of fun eating and laughing during the graduation:


The rest of Friday was full of celebratory eating out for breakfast and dinner with the Abbotts, picking up our Budget truck rental to drive back all our stuff to San Jose (crazy adventure in and of itself... those things are ginormous!), and wiffleball madness! We were able to play a rousing game of wiffleball with some of our dearest friends, Arie and Abi Dekker, Dave Theurer, Forrest and Lindsey Parker (and their cute Davis!), Mike Hansen, Kevin and Rachael Abbott, Tyler Abbott, and Jayne Bradshaw. Here's the whole wiffleball gang:


That night Mark hung out with his family and I got to have my "bachelorette" party hanging out with my bestest friends!! Amber, Jenn, Ryan, Todd, and Jessica made my night before the wedding so fun. We had yummy appetizers and drinks at Spark Restaurant Lounge and chatted. I love being with them because we always end up laughing so hard! I wish I had pictures of the evening, but I didn't get any. Love you guys!

And that is our crazy weekend right up to the wedding day... but that post will have until another day. :)

The best feeling in the world...

I love being married. When I sit and think about all that it encompasses, I just can't get over how wonderful life is and how lucky I am to be able to spend the rest of forever with Mark.

Sigh...

On to today's story. First off, you have to know that I have never really been a morning person. I love sleeping in. Always have. My family growing up would typically sleep in until 10 am or so on Saturdays. We loved to stay up late and sleep in like crazy. In fact, I have sisters who used to be able to sleep in until the afternoon if we didn't wake them up. A bit crazy, but that was our life. Mark on the other hand, is most definitely an early riser (at least compared to me). I remember him telling me once that he had slept in until 9 or 10 am and being so proud of him for how late that was for him. It's probably better for him in the long run to get up early and eventually I will have to become more of a morning person. I'm starting to get better. Usually I can't sleep past 9 am or so anymore. But getting up before that is always kind of a struggle, to be quite honest. Also, another fact you should know... our bedroom gets very light early in the morning. We have thin curtains and the sun shines right into our room. So in the morning's I usually put on a pair of my eye cover sleep masks. Yes, I know it may sound a bit weird, but I have seriously used them since I was in high school. I just need complete darkness to really sleep. I've gotten better at sleeping with some light, but it's still not optimal. So when the sun starts coming up in the morning, I'll slip on my sleep mask and go back to sleep until the alarm goes off or I finally wake up.

Anyways, now that you have the complete and utter back story... here we go.

This morning, being a Saturday, I was definitely looking forward to sleeping in. I had been quite tired this whole week and wanted to catch up on my sleep. As usual, the sun came up early this morning and I put my sleep mask on and went back to sleep. I then would occasionally wake up and toss and turn and go back to sleep. I completely lost track of time, partly due to the fact that I was completely unaware of how light it was in our room. At some point, I woke up and began wondering what time it was. I suddenly realized that it could be late enough that Mark may have already woken up and, being the great husband that he is, not wanting to wake me up, he may have gotten up already and gone into the front room. I immediately began to miss him and want him. I turned over and, completely blindly, stretched out my hand slowly to see if he was there. My fingers soon found Mark sleeping quietly next to me. I relaxed and felt such peace with the world. I happiily snuggled up closer and went back to sleep. Best feeling ever.

It's getting hot in here...

So turn on all your fans and prepare for a warm one!

Turns out it's summer now, apparently. We honestly didn't think too much about it before moving into our new apartment, but turns out we don't have A/C. Which really isn't so bad. Except when it's hot outside, like now. We have a few small fans though and we bought one big fan so far. During the evenings it's actually quite cool outside, so we just open our windows and we put the fan in our bedroom window to blow in the cool air. Our bedroom gets downright chilly at nights... or at least as close as we can get to chilly. So we hadn't really noticed how hot it was getting. I knew it was hot at times, but just hadn't thought about it. Until... the butter.

A bit of a backstory... I decided about 6 months ago that one thing I was looking forward to having in my married life is a butter dish. I decided I hated having to scrap open the butter packets, which get all gross looking (especially with roommates it seemed) and also I hate using hard butter on toast or bread. Thus I have been soooo excited for my new butter dish (thanks to Aunt Susan!) at our apartment. It's a white dish, so I can't see the grossness of the butter except when I want to take off the lid and use the room temperature softened butter. It was a dream come true, for a few days. Well, the other day we realized how hot it was getting in our kitchen when I went to open the butter dish and found melted butter all over the bottom of the dish. So sad. We now keep the butter on the dish, but in the fridge. Sigh, at least I can use the cute dish. Then to remind us again how warm it is getting... last night we pulled out my scriptures to read together before bed and we pulled out my marking crayon/pencils case that my mom had bought for me over a year ago and found that they had melted and resolidified into one giant crayon of six colors. Sigh. Pretty funny though. Not sure how I can mark my scriptures now, but I'll figure something out.

So we're going to be purchasing another big fan and using that in our front room to push the air out of our apartment. My dad recommended having the flow of air to make things feel even cooler. And we'll survive either way. It's been a learning experience for sure! The joys of young married life.

It's Go Time...

So this is Heather's husband Mark giving his shot at the blog. I prefer to think of it as a guest spot, you know, like someone that comes on every once in a while (months, years,...) and wows the crowd. So I'll keep it simple, to make sure that it won't be hard to out do myself next time. Let me just say that I have the bestest wife and I love her very much. Now, time for some predictions. The Lakers will beat the Rockets in Game 7, the Nuggets in six games, and the Cavs in an insane Game 7. Harry Potter will be the best movie of the summer, followed by Terminator...and Transformers will be way good as well. So long for now...

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.