Happy Anniversary #7

So Larry and I just celebrated 7 years together! We're very excited about this, but please save your "you should be married already" comments, I've heard them all already ;)

I had this whole plan for the day, you see Larry had drill the whole anniversary weekend so we had to push our celebration plans till the next weekend, but I did want to do something a little special for him on the actual day. He's normally not super happy on drill weekends, so I wanted to do something that'd make him smile a little. So I made these little cards, 7 that had little reasons I loved him, and 7 that were little promises for him. I chose 7 of each because we were celebrating 7 years, I had wanted to hide them all over in places he might find them, seeing as how he had no idea what I was planning. My original plan was on the night before the big day (the 14th) I brought them home, planned on staying up later and putting them in his car and laptop and other placed he'd look as he went about his day. Unfortunately, you can't ever plan things around the military, we've learned that big time! That being the plan, I found out on Friday he wouldn't get off till 10 p.m. and since I got home around 6 I decided to go get some snacks and movies and veg out. However, I ended up making myself pretty sick that night and going to bed early, which didn't go great for my plans. The good news is I guess I happened to set an alarm on my phone to go off at midnight, so when it went off I was able to get up and sneak his keys out of his pocket and set up the little cards for him while he slept, it went off perfectly well. Except, the next day he ended up staying till 8 p.m. and since I got off at 5, he ended up doing this stupid Easter egg hunt like search for the cards, it was a little more pathetic than I had wanted, but he got them and they did put a smile on his face, so it worked well enough, he did say he liked that I did it too. It just was more unfortunate because that was the first weekend in a long time that he had to stay that late for drill.

For the actual celebration we went to Vegas this past weekend. It was pretty fun too! We stayed at The Excalibur and gambled and ate till we wanted to burst and we had a lot of fun! I learned to play Black Jack on the electronic game that has the dealer and a few people can play together, and right off the bat I ended up making over $100 by accidentally pushing random buttons, it was amazingly lucky. We also got a nice deal when we walked in, these guys pulled us aside and made a deal that we get a free 3 day, 2 night stay at the Luxor hotel as long as we do it within a year, which is easy enough for us since we go at least once a year. It's amazing how lucky we got right at the start of our trip. I had even gotten up $150, but that was so early in the trip that I kept playing and ended up only up $40 so it wasn't as great, but at least I didn't lose all my money. We even played in their arcade they had at the hotel, I played the "Deal or No Deal" game and won the big prize on the game and won 400 tickets, but the prizes were a little lame so we ended up giving the tickets to these kids that played the game before us. It made them so excited so we felt pretty good about that, what's better than seeing a kid light up because you made their day after all? ha ha

All in all it was a pretty great anniversary, but me being weird about odd numbers I'm REALLY looking forward to the next one :)

Some pictures from Vegas:

This was a mini casino in the airport in Vegas,
I had no idea they did this. Utah is so not cool

Our hotel (front)

Our hotel (back)

Where I spent about 80% of my time ;)

Larry playing because I had lost too much
And didn't feel like playing anymore.

Too bad it's tickets and not $$
But I was happy I won :)

A bit of a catch up

So, I know I've been a little M.I.A. lately, not sure I can explain even more how busy I get with school and work and by the time I do have some down time I just want to relax, or I end up cleaning and doing laundry since it gets a little crazy between weekends. So I figured I'd do a tiny catch up while I'm waiting to start laundry and clean...again.

• First thing, I'm thisclose to being done with my current schooling, I can almost taste it! I have passed off all but 2 classes, and one I can't start till November, so currently I am only enrolled in one class, which has been kind of nice, because it's my advance coding class and it is the only one I ever really get homework in and it's nice to be able to focus on one of the important classes. I found out after I am done with this class I'll take my big national test (I can either take an early one in November and, if I don't pass that time, take the one in December, or take the one in December and hope, hope, hope I pass it so I don't have to wait till February for the next one). Once I pass the national test I can start my externship and once I'm done with that I can, gulp, move onto my real life job, hopefully. It's scary, but I'm so very excited to get past this little part of life that I can hardly wait anymore.
• While I'm only in one class a day I've started, and I do mean just started, working out again, it's definitely been a challenge seeing as how I'm just SO out of shape. But I'll be happy when I can feel good about myself and be happy with my progress and when it won't be as big of a challenge to huff and puff ha ha.
• There's a big reason I would love to get into shape now...Larry won us a cruise! I'm SO excited, because we had talked about doing a cruise next year anyways, and he's won us one so we only have to pay for a passport and the flight. What's great is the cruise is to the exact place I wanted to go too...the Bahamas!!! It's only a 2 night cruise, but you can't complain when it's free. Depending on my testing, I'm thinking we'll go in February, maybe for V-Day :) not that I'm huge on celebrating that dreaded holiday, but we can't go for our anniversary and I read that winter is the best time to go there, and I'm SO up for going to a warm place when it's freezing back home.
• Last month we got to spend a few hours with Larry's and (kinda) my niece, Cailyn. She's SO adorable, I can never get enough of her! I've never seen Larry hold a baby before and he's such a natural, she just relaxes and falls asleep in his arms. He's got some magic extremities or something. I wish I had more time to play with the babies that have come into the world recently, but I try and squeeze in time whenever I can.
• We've had so much unfortunate luck with laundry lately, you wouldn't think there'd be so many problems with the stupid machines! The machine we were using was taken away (since we were just being loaned the machine and it wasn't really ours), then we hooked up the machines we had off to the side [after the genius Larry figured out how to fix them and put them together, gotta love having a handy man in the house ;)]. Then the dryer wasn't actually drying the clothes because it was blowing only cold air, so Larry spent $80 in new parts to fix that, just to find out it still was only blowing cold air. So then we spent $800 on a new dryer (only dryer) to find out it wasn't the dryer that was broken, it was the circuit breaker that was messed up. GREAT :/
• And now that it's really no big secret anymore, and I don't think Larry's dad reads this blog, the big reveal: We're looking at officially buying our own house! We've found an AMAZING house that we put an offer on back in August, but because it's a short sale house it's taking a long time to actually get accepted or not, we're still waiting to hear. But we're still looking around at other places in case we don't get accepted or to just put a backup offer on a place. But really I just want the house we found, it's perfect! I'll post pics if we ever find out about it.

So aside from a few mishaps this year is turning out exactly how I wanted it to, and you know what? I couldn't be more ecstatic. I knew how to make sure to put my life in my hands, I knew if I wanted something that much I'd need to work for it, and I did! There's a few things I'm still learning, but I'm beyond happy about what I have learned so far. Larry and I are putting down roots and planning our future together and I'm happy about that too. So I'll stop now and get back to my busy, hectic weekend, but at least at the end of this weekend I get to go see my pseudo nephew-Oliver :)