On a spiritual note...

Confession: I am being a not good employee today and have been looking at all of my wonderful friends (and their friends) blogs all morning.. my rationalization is that it's Friday and I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing.. phone is on.. checking in patients.. etc.  The point is.. I love blogs!  I love that they can become such a display of your personality and I love that you can write.  I love writing.  It has always been my outlet. 

Anyway...on a spiritual note.. something I think about on a daily basis since moving to California is how much it has strengthened my testimony.  I think for this time in my life it was about the best thing that ever happened to me. Every day, I am surrounded by people who live for a different purpose than I do; most of them don't know what that purpose is.  It has been so interesting to be a minority in every since of the word.  ( I am one of like three white people at work and there is only one other mormon out of like 50 employees)  On a daily basis, I get asked about my beliefs.  Where did you learn spanish (the mission talk) Why would you chose to go to Guatemala.. You got married soo young... wait, you didn't have sex til I got married?! You want HOW many kids? Who is that Joseph Smith guy?  Are Mormons Christian? What cofee do you want from Starbucks? Questions about Sunday, alcohol, the bible, church, and just basic life happiness.  All around me, I see people how are missing something in their lives.  It has been a priviledged to work here, I have been so welcomed and accepted. People have been friendly and extremely helpful.  I have talked to them and gotten to know them.. and that's when I see their unhappiness.  Family problems, relationship problems, depression, lost kids, deaths. So so many problems.. with nowhere to turn.  I admire them.  I don't think I could go on living the lives that some of them do without the knowledge of the gospel.  I think I am too weak.  I would want to give up or wonder what it was all for.  It is our knowledge that brings us happiness.  We know what the trials are for!  We know where they come from! We know who to turn to!  We know what marriage and families are about! 

        I have never loved being with "a gathering of Saints" more in my life. To walk into a packed chapel or endowement session and feel the strength of those members who are in the world and not of it is inspiring.  I have never wanted more to be a good example, so replace fear or being unaccepted with faith.  It is a scary thing being different.  At the same time, I am proud.  Proud and humbled simultaneously. Proud to be part of this marvelous work.  Humbled by the responsibility I have to be a "light on the hill."

TMPLO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YA YA YA YA YA YA YA YA YA!!!!!! THINGS MARIAH PURPOSELY LEFT OUT!!!!!!

 welcome back bloggers of the mountain standard time. This is your Captain Jered, everyone please be seated, relax and enjoy this weeks episode of TMPLO
So, during this paradise weekend mariah left out one thing.. When we were waiting for our appointment to go snorkeling.. we walked onto a private beach.. well the private beach had a ton of people and.. free beach chairs.. and... so we thought we could maybe sneak us a chair... due to the fact that we didn't even bring one beach towel with us.. ha.. so within about 5 mins of seating we noticed they were coming around taking some sort of attendance ... so we bailed.. we ended up walking all the way down the beach and laid out on just bare wet sand for the hour before our appointment, where mariah told me the whole story of beauty and the beast, after that we walked over and kayaked and swam for 3 hours... so if we do the math... thats 4 hours straight in the sun.. and if we didn't bring beach towels... than by golly we didn't bring any sun screen... so that means.... yes.. we are sunburned... bad.. dont believe me? well.. here is your proof..

now you may be thinking.. well thats not bad... well confession... i photo shopped this.. you may notice that all the color seems a bit dim.. well here's why

ya.... a little burnt.. we came home both with VERY red shoulders and spent the evening dabbing vinegar on our shoulders.. because again.. if we didn't have beach towels.. and didn't have sunscreen... then you know we didn't have aloe vera gel. 

LAST THOUGHT: Mariah is a great photographer.. we are both still learning and are getting a bit better by the trip. I love her pictures.. she is just hard on herself

Memorial Weekend

I'm gonna try to write like a blog a week just about what's going on in our lives here in California just to keep ya'll a little more updated...

About a month ago we really splurged and decided to spend a lot more than we were planning on on a camera.  It is a Nikon 1400 I think and we're still trying to figure it out..

It was has been so much fun going places with our new camera.. it gives us more of a reason to explore because we want to try and get some cool pics.  I'm so glad Jered has gotten so into it, he's way better than I am and has a real eye for light.  The majority of the cool pictures we have are ones he took.  We want to try and find a cheap or free photography class so we can actually know what we're doing instead of just moving around a bunch of knobs and hope things turn out alright.

San Diego was the perfect place to do just that.  We left early Saturday morning from Fullerton and headed straight to the Del Coronado Hotel on Coronado Island.  The hotel is like 120 years old and soo beautiful.  It's pretty swanky and so are the people that stay there.  We tried to see as much as we could of the place and even snuck in on part of a tour which got us into their main banquet hall.. totally worth it.

We spent most of the weekend just exploring different places like the Seaport Village with the Star of India...

It was interesting to see them at night.. it's a whole different experience.
Sunday we spent a lot of the day at Old Town after finding an elusive Meeting House and listening to some pretty interesting talks.  Highlights included watching a potter create some little sombreros and pots and listening to a wind pipe (i think they're called) band.

Monday was our favorite day by far.  We woke up bright and early and checked out of our ghetto little Days Inn Motel on E Street and headed up to La Jolla.  We walked on the beautiful shores of La Jolla and ate sandwiches in a little Cafe until it was time for our Kayak and Snorkel trip.  Our guide Julie took us out on bright orange kayaks complete with wetsuit, goggles, snorkel and flippers.  We kayaked out to caves on the cliffs of La Jolla right next to a huge group of sea lions and got our snorkels on, swimming right next to the sea lions.  We got to swim through the caves and even snorkel through a bed of Leopard Spotted sharks.  It was such a beautiful sunny day and it was so fun to be in the water and not freeze to death.  We finished up the day with some hole in the wall delicious sushi and some traffic-free driving all the way home.. what a perfect Memorial weekend!

My first ever post!!

I decided Friday afternoon as the phones died down and the last few patients meandered into the doctors office I work at that the time had come for me to create a blog.  It is something I have been thinking about for awhile now for a variety of reasons... First and foremost,  I am horrible at keeping a journal these days, and thought if I had somewhere to write that was like I was writing to an actual person, maybe I would be more likely to write more often.  I've never been one to write anything really personal on Facebook for the world to see, but I think if I know that only people who really know me are on here, I will feel more comfortable being a little more real.  Secondly, I thought it would be a good way of keeping in touch with all you people I never see anymore now that I'm in California.  Lastly, I needed just a little creative outlet, and figured this would be a good place for it, emphasis on little.  Choose a template, download some pictures and write some stuff and you've got yourself a blog...

Every Saturday, we plug a different destination into our GPS, generally with no specific plans in mind.  It is the time I look forward to most in the week, exploring Orange County with my favorite person.  

We've all had the experience of stumbling into something amazing and, rather than pausing to soak it all in ourselves, instead feel the gaping emptiness of a person we care about; we wish they were there to share some of the amazing with us.  

One of my favorite things about being married is always having that person I want most to share the amazing with at my side when I come across such a situation.  

Three Fridays ago during my lunch break I was looking up cheap things to do for the fast approaching weekend.  I came across some underground band that was coming to some underground bar I knew nothing about called Alex's in Long Beach.  I was a little hesitant, but noticed there was a $5 dollar "suggested donation"and thought perfect, a couple of bucks will buy us a night of music.  

Predictably so, the parking lot of the bar found us in an extremely sketchy part of down town Long Beach.  The bar's plain black iron door had stood undetectable among a row of black iron doors,  and when we finally did find the right one, we sat in our car a good 15 minutes trying to decide if it was safe to go in; we spent the majority of the time calculating the white to every-other-race ratio to see if we would be welcome or not.  When we finally got the guts to go in, a gigantic bouncer with no neck carded us and informed us it would 10 dollars for the two us to get in, so much for "suggested donation." We decided it wasn't worth the money and walked slowly back to our little grey corolla feeling slightly defeated.  

Being resigned not to call it a night, we started looking up different "Night Life" points of interest on our GPS.  All sounded steep, but we decided to drive to the bar anyway because we had learned from the recording it was "located in beautiful down town Long Beach."

We weren't expecting much, but to our surprise, it took us to a lot larger city center than we expected or knew existed.  As we got closer, we saw hundreds of people on the streets.  We coudn't figure out what was going on.. turns out it was the weekend of the Grand Prix and everyone was out to party!

It was so much fun just to be down there with everyone even if we didn't know the first thing about Nascar.

We ended up coming across this amazing part of Long Beach all built on the river with twinkling lights, water taxis and even a light house.  It was so romantic to sit on the dock and overlook a seen we hadn't even known existed thirty minutes earlier.  That's what's so wonderful about this place, you never know where you'll end up...