Easter Sunday

The first year of marriage is always cute as you get to do a lot of "firsts." Sunday was our first Easter together. Growing up, two of us would leave the room while someone else hid Cadbury eggs. The rest of us watched and giggled while others were finding their eggs. In keeping with this tradition, I hid a couple of eggs (not Cadbury, but still chocolate) for Ashton while he was in the other room. I made him listen to music so he wouldn't cheat. To make things worse for Ashton, I took pictures while he hunted. He got me back though, hiding eggs for me afterwards and took pictures of me looking for them. Here are some of my favorite ones:


Ashton looking in the lamp for eggs. As you can see, unlike Ashton, I couldn't see over the top.





I hid one of Ashton's eggs in the paper shredder bag. I thought that I had hid it on the top, but turns out it fell down and Ashton had to take out the bag to find it. Ashton, on the other hand, hid one of my eggs in my shoe.



Later that afternoon, we headed over to my father-in-law's house in Park City to eat dinner with the family. We had a lot of fun talking, having dinner, and hunting for Easter eggs. We also celebrated some birthdays that happened this month. Here are some pictures from the night.



Katelyn loves Curious George and wanted Ashton to read the book to her. I don't blame her. He has a great reading voice. Beside this picture is Katelyn with her Easter basket from Grandma and Grandpa.






Lance and Stacy on the couch, watching people open presents and cards. Lance was apparently yawning, but Stacy was acting...maybe excited/happy for the camera. (Sorry Stacy that it's not the first picture). It was Ashton's dad's birthday on the 16th. He got a pair of glasses as a present. He decided that he would look more stylish with the tag still on them.






Anjanette's birthday was on Sunday. Katelyn decided that she wanted to read the card for her. It was pretty entertaining to listen to her rambling away, saying words that weren't on the card. All of us got a CD from Lance and Stacy. Mandy decided that she would wear her CD on her nose.

Saving the World, a Day at a Time

It occurred to me that nobody really knows what I do all day. Perhaps an image can offer a bit more explanation than I can.

Every month, my employer hosts a contest. I work for a company called DAZ 3D, which specializes in three-dimensional computer models, and the software to bring those models to life. I work on the software side, lacking any real kind of artistic talent.

The theme for this month's contest is "Heros! Men to the Forefront!" Without explicit permission, here is one of my favorite entries so far (entered by DAZ 3D forum member Bad_Kittie):
Every couple of months, we release a new version of the program used to put that image together. So far, I've mainly worked on the user-interface for it (buttons, labels, and so forth). Eventually, I'd like to understand the math behind the actual rendering process (converting 3D coordinates to a two-dimensional view port, making light reflect correctly, etc.), but for now that's a bit over my head.

Crunch Time

With only 5 weeks of school left, it's crunch time. All of a sudden, I went from feeling like I hadn't done much this semester, to stressing out by all that I have to do. I have a matter of weeks to do 3 research papers, another paper that's not quite a research paper, finish two books in Spanish, write a paper on one of them, and continue to do other homework that teachers assign.

Why teachers find the need to continue to assign homework when you have a research paper that you're supposed to be working on as well is beyond me. They must realize that you have other classes that are probably requiring similar tasks. The only logical explanation is torture. They had to go through it and so do you. Some pretend to have pity, but I get the feeling that my teachers are laughing at me behind my back and some of them probably would have no problem laughing in my face.

I will not miss this when I graduate.

On a lighter note, we put in an application for an apartment, the one that I really like in Pleasant Grove. As long as our credit reports and criminal records come back clean, we should get the apartment. I thought of making some joke to the lady who we gave the forms to and filled out other ones for us about hoping our criminal records came back clean, but I wasn't sure how she'd take that. I figured that it was better to be safe than sorry. We can start moving in April 19th and we have to be officially moved out by the 28th. When we move I'll take some pictures so you can see what the new apartment looks like.

School

It's amazing how your life can feel so busy and at the same time so dull and uninteresting. I keep trying to come up with things to talk about, but they never seem interesting enough. In my Spanish linguistics class we were talking about the history of the Spanish language and some things came up that I thought were interesting. So, I thought I'd share.

The class started out with us working in small groups on some questions that the teacher gave us. We were to answer the questions in our groups and then we'd have a class discussion on these same questions. There was one question that particularly caught my eye and that in my group, we had a hard time answering. The question was, "What is a language?" Seems easy enough right? It is until you start trying to articulate a definition. It's one of those terms or concepts that everyone knows, but it's hard to come up with an actual working definition.

As a class we came up with a few ideas such as that language is a way of communicating to express ideas and that follows certain rules. That works pretty well until my teacher asked, "How is a language different than a dialect?" It becomes even trickier when you start thinking about what people consider to be a language and what they consider to be a dialect.

One example that I can think of that might make sense to everyone, not just those who speak Spanish and have been to Spain, is perhaps the difference between Britian English and U.S. English. Some people would consider them to be two separate languages while others would only consider them to be a dialect of each other.

As we considered this example and others in class, my teacher brought up the point that it's something political and economic that makes us consider something a language versus a dialect. When a country develops its own political and economic power, they want their language to be more unique and separate from the country that their language was associated with previously.

It's a definition that I hadn't even considered before this class. At first, it seemed like a ridiculous connection, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense, especially when we thought of other examples. We used the example of Argentina and how they speak Spanish, but to Argentines, they speak Castellano. We think of people in Brazil as speaking Portugese, but to them, they speak Brazileno. To them, they are they have their own separate country/identity with their own separate language.

It brings a whole new dimension to thinking about languages and life. I guess that's what going to school is all about.

Sundays

For starters, I just wanted to let everyone know that we're going to Maine! Sadly, it won't be until August, but we're planning on going then and I'm really excited about it! Anyways, that was just a heads up for those of you who live in Maine.

Since we have church at 8 AM (not so bad now that it starts getting light outside at that time), we have a good portion left of the day after church to do whatever. Today, we drove around.

We have to give the managers of the apartment complex 60 days notice before we move out. There's quite the demand for apartments and this helps them to know who's moving out when. It's a pain for those of us who are trying to figure out when to move out although kinda helpful as well as it forces us to plan ahead. I realized today that if we're going to try to move out between the end of this semester (which ends in April 23rd), and the beginning of spring term (which begins April 29th), we'd have to give notice really soon...like a few days ago.

So, we sat down to try to figure out what we needed to do. After planning out some essentials like calling different people who were renting out places, we looked online at the classifieds of a newspaper in a town we were interested in living. We looked some descriptions of some potential places that also had their addresses listed. Hmmm. Why not go look at them?

We hop in the car and take off. We probably looked creepy to anyone that was outside watching us drive around slowly around neighborhoods peering at different houses. I love looking at different houses. Gives me an idea of what I'd like eventually for a house. We saw some that looked like mini-mansions, ones on street names that the city planner must have watched too many Westerns, ones that I just had to ask, "What the...?" and "Why?", and other ones that were just nice looking houses. I didn't take any pictures of them more because I didn't want someone to think that we were being stalkers. I did take some pictures of the mountains because they looked cool with the clouds around them, which can be seen below.