Visitors

The last two weekends were especially fun for us because we had visitors at our apartment! First, Natalie, Kayla, and Kjirsten came from Provo to see us. They were my roommates last year and Rob and I call them "the cousins". . . because they are cousins with each other, not us. And they are some of our very favorite friends! Basically we just watched X-Files all weekend because they brought all the seasons and we love X-Files. Also, we went shopping at DI and blog stalked and made delicious caramel popcorn! We didn't take any pictures, but here is an old one of the 5 of us from last year. We were so happy that they came!!


Then, the next weekend, Lindsey, Kyle, and Kyson came to visit us from Canada, so my parents and Katie came up from Salt Lake as well! We had almost too many delicious meals to fit into one weekend. My mom prepared and brought ingredients for tons of food! She made lots of chicken cordon bleu before she came for Friday night, and brought ingredients for meatloaf and mashed potatoes for Saturday, which was Valentine's Day, and she made mini meatloaf hearts!
She also made lots of heart sugar cookies and brought frosting and candy for decorating! They left on Saturday evening and left us a kitchen full of food and leftovers! (Plus canned food they brought for us, a box of oranges, lots of salad makings and veggies, and almost an entire cheesecake).
We were really excited about the food, as you can imagine, but we were mostly happy to have family visiting. We spent a little time outside, watching Kyson sled with Kyle, and walking around campus while Lindsey and Kyle reminisced. Then, we went to our clubhouse and played pool and ping pong. Later that night, after my parents left, Lindsey and I went to the mall in Idaho Falls to shop. It was a fun weekend and Kyson warmed up to us.

Kyle and Kyson sledding in the parking lot

Anyway, since then things have been a little more boring and busy. I started work last week and have been working long hours. Rob has been busy with school and study groups and tests. Nothing too exciting. In conclusion, we like having people come visit us!

Our Super New Apartment!!

So! Here's the blog about our apartment! We're very excited about our very first home together. It's very cozy and roomy. We love it so very much. Here's a short tour given by Rob.

The Ultimate Grimmer Home Tour Five Hundred Thousand

Okay, the two first pictures are of our living room. See those pictures on the walls. I don't mean to boast, but they didn't have any hanging brackets on them... so I created some and hung them myself. Thank you. Aside from that, we got the majority of our stuff second hand, but it's nice looking and we like it a lot.

Onward!!

Alright! So this is our bedroom! Rachel has always had a dream of a big white fluffy bed with a plush white comforter, as she's mentioned before. Well, this is it. Then for the hangings above the bed. I hung those. Anyway, I'm just saying... it's good looking. We also have separate closets! Two doored closets with racks and stuff in them. Very nice.

Next!

This is obviously the bathroom. I'm not quite sure what else to say about that... We do keep our bathroom really clean though...

The Kitchen!

Our Kitchen and Dining room. Not much decoration besides the flowers and the two pictures. We've been making a lot of bread lately. We've got a Bosch mixer, which is pretty sweet.This is our guest room... it's a little junky right now. Alright, I don't want to make this long. That's our apartment!

Wedding Pictures

We got our pictures back and we love them! They were taken by my friend from High School, Amy, and her husband Tavis Guild. They were really fun and creative and we had such a good time taking pictures with them. Their photography/videography business is called Memory Montage Productions and the website is www.memorymp.com.

Here are just a few of our pictures... we have a ton of them! If you are facebook friends with us, you can see more there.

Welcome Home Hermana Clement!

I know this is my third post in 2 days... but today is a very exciting day! My best friend Lindsey is coming home from her mission! She spent the last 18 months sharing the gospel with Spanish speakers of Phoenix, Arizona.

Lindsey moved to Yakima when she was 13 and I was 12, and we've been the best of friends ever since. We've never had a single fight and we were together for every New Year until her mission . . . with lots of hilarious memories in between. She is one of the best people I know because of her sincere love for others and her cheerful, uplifting personality. She was a great missionary and I can't wait to be able to see her again! Unfortunately I can't be at the airport when she flies into Yakima this evening, but I hope we can see each other soon!

Rexburg and Salt Lake City

We left for Rexburg last Monday so we would make it by Rob's first day of school on Wednesday. We had another super early travel morning (4:30), which turned out to be in vain because the passes were closed all morning. We were stuck in Pendleton, OR for about 4 hours until the pass opened up around noon. During our wait, we took a nap in the truck then decided to go inside the gas station we were parked outside of. In there, we ran into our friend Justin, who was also trying to head to BYU-Idaho! He informed us of the other cars that were stuck, and there turned out to be like 10 other people we knew stuck at the gas station! It was funny, and it was fun to have people to chat with to pass the time.

We finally got back on the road, but it was slow. We were pulling a U-Haul trailer and it would occasionally weave, so we took it especially slow. We traveled all day, and decided to stop and spend the night in a (worthless) town called Glenns Ferry. Rob was getting tired and we had about 5 more hours of dark, snowy roads ahead of us. The motel owner was nice and didn't make us pay the taxes/fees because he knew we were students, so we got a good deal and it was worth it.

We made it to Rexburg the next day and moved into our new apartment. We love it! It is just perfect and it is spacious for the two of us. It's nice and it has everything we need- even covered parking (PLUS, we don't have to share it with 5 other roommates)! Maybe we will post pictures in a future blog once everything is settled in.

We went to Salt Lake for the weekend to trade cars (we had my dad's truck and both of our cars were there) and visit my family. It was fun and we spent most of the time shopping. We had gift cards from our wedding and our goal was to get everything we needed for a bed, since we didn't really have bedding yet. We got some great deals! And we brought back with us our bed frame (I got it half price from Ikea on Black Friday!) so we were finally ready to put together our bed! And we love it!!

Rob building our bed frame

The final product! (With wrinkly sheets right out of the box). We also got a big white comforter. I have always wanted an all-white, super-comfy bed, and now I have it!

As a side note, along with the bed frame came two more full carloads of stuff with us to Rexburg! We had been storing things in our cars and at my parents' condo. As soon as we had gotten our first load organized and clean-looking in the apartment, we stuffed it with tons more. So it will take a little while longer for everything to be in its place, but we should be ready for visitors very soon, if anyone is interested! :)

Fortunately, I have a little time off before my job starts on Feb. 16th, so I can work on my neverending list of things to do (organizing the apartment, changing my last name/ driver's license, figuring out insurance/financial aid/bank accounts... to name a few) Rob is busy with school and is being very studious. We are working on starting his applications for Chiropractic school-- they say you can start applying a year in advance.

Anyway, that's what we have been up to. We are happier than ever and love our new life in our new apartment!

We did it!

We're finally married! We haven't been faithful bloggers through it all, but I'll try to recap the main events of the last few weeks. (It might be boring, but it's also for my own documentation!) We are expecting to get the rest of our wedding photos back sometime soon, so I'll put those in a later post!

Dec. 18th- I took my last final ever at BYU! They don't have a graduation ceremony in December (I can attend one in April if I want), but I should be getting my diploma soon!

Dec. 20th- I received my endowments in the Salt Lake Temple. It was really cool that it was a live session!

Dec. 21st- We traveled to Sunnyside to Rob's parents' house. The roads were terrible and the drive took us 15.5 hours, but we made it in one day... mostly because we left at 4:30 in the morning!

Dec. 25th- Christmas! We spent the morning with Rob's family, then went to Yakima where my family was staying at the home of a family in their old ward who was out of town.

Rob's parents and siblings pitched in and got us a Bosch! For those who don't know, it is a very powerful stand mixer that is well-known for its ability to make bread easily. On Christmas, Rob's mom taught me how to use it to make bread/rolls!

Dec. 26th- We went to Tri-Cities to take wedding pictures with our photographers (my friend from high school, Amy, and her husband Tavis). We took mostly indoor photos, and some around the temple (as many as we could bear in the cold). We were so glad we did this because we were able to take TONS of pictures of just the two of us without having our whole families waiting for us in the freezing cold. Plus, on our actual wedding day, it was really busy... and really windy! **see my hair and veil in the picture below.


Dec. 27th- Marriage!! We were sealed for time and all eternity in the Columbia River Temple. It was perfect, and lots of our families and friends were able to be there. Our reception was that evening at the home of the Tree family. It was beautiful. Lots of people came and it was good to see them all. Rob's uncle Reggie took all our family photos there.

Outside the temple

With both sets of parents

Cupcakes! I wanted them to be fresh, so I insisted on decorating them during the time between the wedding and the reception. We were a little pressed for time, but with help, we did it.

Cutting the cake!

Rob and his nephews: Keanu, Kalani, and Eli

Me and two of my neices: Annika and Meagan

Dec. 28th- We had an open house at Rob's family's home. Rob and I were both sick! We had been having cold symptoms off and on all week. We both felt alright on our wedding day, but I had kind of a scratchy voice and after talking all night in the reception line, I had no voice the next day. But it still turned out well! Afterwards, we took off for our honeymoon!

We are planning to go on a delayed honeymoon during the summer, but for the week after our wedding, we were able to go to a "cabin" (out of habit, we refer to it as a cabin, but it's really a 6 bedroom house) owned by Rob's uncle Dennis on Palmer Lake in Northern Washington. I have been there with Rob's family before during the summer, but it was very different in the winter. It was perfect though! The house was warm and comfortable and it was so nice to sleep in, relax, and be with only each other after all the busy-ness of the previous weeks.

This is the view we had from the house. Under all that snow somewhere is a frozen lake.

We found some halibut in the freezer, and Rob made us beer-battered halibut while we were there! It was delicious!

We did have one adventure while we were there: First of all, even though there wasn't really anything to be afraid of, we knew it would be a little creepy to be there. The house had been kind of abandoned for a while, and it was in a woodsy area without any close neighbors. I had told Rob that we weren't allowed to watch any scary movies while we were there, and as soon as we got there, I made sure he checked every room, every closet, and under every bed. Well, everything looked fine and there was still some daylight left outside. So I decided that it would be okay to disregard my rule and watch the X-Files movie we had gotten ourselves for Christmas, and that I was dying to see. Well, by the time we got unpacked and got the movie started, it was dark outside, but we were feeling brave (and made sure to keep the lights on). About 10 minutes into the movie there was a scary part (just an alien attacking a cave man) and suddenly, the TV and all the lights went off. They came back on again, then a minute later went back off and stayed off. It was pitch black in the whole house and we didn't know what to do! We hardly knew where anything was in the house, and I just had images of a creepy lumberjack serial killer messing with the fuse box and getting ready to come out and grab me. Rob took me into the kitchen looking for a lighter, and then he somehow remembered that he had seen a flashlight in one of the bedrooms, so we got it. He also remembered that during power outages, landlines still work, so he called his Uncle Dennis on the land line phone. Dennis gave us the phone number of the closest neighbors, so Rob called them and they reassured us that power outages usually only last about an hour. The lights eventually came back on, but it was a frightening hour or so. We even built up the courage to watch the rest of the X-Files movie a few days later... in the broad daylight. Overall, our honeymoon week was great and we didn't want to leave!

Well, this blog is getting pretty long, so I'll try to put what's happened since then in a new one!