So it’s been a few months since we got home but as always I have been distracted from blogging by life. Europe was so fun. It so cool to be there in the winter with all the snow; I say all the snow but there was at max a few inches. And even though there wasn’t much snow it was still my first cold weather experience. I know that is hard for most of you to believe but that is the longest I have ever spent in a cold place. It was a great adventure to me even though Aaron constantly teased me about my excitement. I would exclaim silly things all the time, such as “It’s like the Chronicles of Narnia!” or “Aaron, it’s snowing!!!!” We got to see so many awesome sites. It’s fun to watch TV and say “We’ve been there” (followed by knuckles). I don’t have the space or attention span to upload all the pictures to the blog but you can go to picasaweb.com/boushley to check them out. The really pretty or artistic ones Aaron took … I’m almost jealous. Oh ok I am jealous but at least someone in our family is. Maybe another time I will write my favorite memories but now my mind is occupied by other,less happy remeberings.  I will try to explain those another time as well.

Ok there are so many reasons to be happy and excited, let me tell you a few. I am DONE with finals! Yay! Some of them were unexpectedly difficult so it’s nice to have them out of the way. Aaron also finished finals yesterday and played hookie from work and played with me all day! We went to the temple and Golden Spoon (My most favorite low sugar dessert) then borrowed a tree stand from my absent parents (thanks mom and dad, even though you didn’t know . I did my visiting teaching and came home and watched Alias all evening with my super fun hubby (I could probably do a whole post on this alone,  I love this show, thanks Sara Castillo for letting us borrow it). I had made enough lasagna on Sunday to feed a large family so we still had leftovers so I didn’t have to make dinner. It was a great day. Back to why I’m so excited. It’s almost CHRISTMAS!!!! I know what you’re thinking “Elena you are an adult Christmas isn’t really fun again until you have kids.” Well you’re wrong on two accounts: one, I am not an adult; I may be tall but don’t let that fool you. Two, Christmas is still fun as a grown up if you make it fun. I love to give presents, especially when I come up with a good one that I don’t think the person will guess. I am so excited to give Aaron his present it is going to rock! So if those two reasons are not enough to be excited about I have another. Are you ready? ……. I am going to EUROPE! In approximately 3 weeks from today. AHHHHH! Now that school is done I can give this trip the proper attention it deserves! Isn’t it so exciting?!?!? I know you’re jealous, it’s ok those are natural feelings. If you comment I’ll bring you back something, just to make you feel better. I will try my hardest to do a really really long post about our trip but I make no promises because school starts shortly after we get home.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

So Aaron has been sick for the past few days and recently complained (and rightly so) that he never got sick before we got married.  So I was thinking about it and I came up with a explanation: Swimkids.  What does that have to do with it you ask?  Well for the first year or so that I worked at Swimkids I was sick all the time. And I mean ALL the time. I’m kinda sickly to begin with so that meant about once a month I was down for the count with some illness or other.  Well now Aaron is being exposed to the germs that I am bringing home from Swimkids that oddly enough I’ve grown rather immune to (exciting for me bad for Aaron).  So now the sickly one is healthy and the healthy one is sick. My how the tables have turned.  This does exclude my built-in illnesses that I can never escape. So maybe the tables haven’t turned. So close!

So it’s been what … 4+ months since our last post?  That isn’t that bad right?  Oh ok it’s pretty bad.  Anyways, here is an update of our lives.

Aaron: He finished the semester with crazy awesome grades, even made dean’s list so YAY for him! He started working full time at Az Pixels or something with the word pixels.  He’s enjoying that for the most part (he got another raise which is fantastic) though gets kinda bored sometimes.   Biirdy development is continuing on to the design stage (if you don’t know what that is then ask him I don’t want to ruin any surprises). Ummm oh! He is also learning a new language called Flex …. and that is about all I can tell you about it.  He’s really excited about it though so I’m going to learn a lot more soon.  It’s amazing to me how much I have learned about programming. I mean really for a girl that can barely email properly I am gaining an astounding amount of information about computers. Which is great because I’m not nearly so frightened by them as I used to be, though I will admit that “The Command Center” still makes me nervous.  That is my name for Aaron’s computers. Something about those dual monitors and 5, I mean 3 (or is 4?), towers strikes fear into my soul. Ok moving on.

Elena: I finished the semester strong, made pretty good grades and scored another dean’s list. I still work part time at Swimkids USA but got the chance to do something a little different. This year we tried a Summer Swim Team. It was outside! I know what you’re thinking “You’re a swim teacher why is that a big deal?” Well I work year round so that means that I’m inside ALL the time even when it’s 110 degrees. And I got a nice tan from being outside all the time. Which maybe isn’t as cool as I think because now I have a white swimsuit on all the time. If you don’t get that wear a one piece outside for a while then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Ok enough about swimming. As most of you that read this know I am going to school to become a Speech Pathologist. If you didn’t then you have my permission to furrow your brow and nod your head appreciatively for my good choice in majors. Any of you that have an interesting major will know what I’m talking about. For some inexplicable reason people always do that when I tell them what I’m going into. And I mean ALWAYS. Weird huh? Anyways sorry about the rambling. Ok. So I decided that I would like to try and volunteer somewhere that I could get some experience in my field. Well my aunt Donni works at a hospital and hooked me up. So for the last few months I have been volunteering/observing with the pediatric rehab. It is so cool! It makes me want to finish school faster so I can get started! My job will be so fun.

We haven’t gone on any real vacations yet, besides a short trip to Utah for Jamie and Jesse’s wedding. But in 4 days we’ll be driving to LA to go on another cruise!  Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!  I’m so excited!  We’ll also be crashing the Boushely vacation at the end of our cruise so that will be a ton of fun too.  Aaron and I have also planned a Europe trip in January but I try not to think of it because I become useless for at least 20 min dreaming about it after it is mentioned by anyone.

Well that is about all.  I’ll try to be better about keeping everyone in the loop.

This week has been spring break for Aaron and I so we have been living it up. We sleep in, eat junk food (in moderation) and we also upgraded our netflix for the month so we’ve been watching a ton of movies. But this is not the end of our entertainment. We also borrowed for any foreseeable amount of time my brothers’ old gaming systems: the super nintendo and the nintendo 64. It has been a glorious few days. We stayed up till like 1:00am playing one of the best games ever “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.” I personally rrrrrrrrrreally love that game and I’ve now converted Aaron. But this is a mixed blessing. Aaron possess a skill I do not, no he’s not better than me at the game, he can play video games or watch TV or movies all day and all night without stopping. Literally. (Maybe it comes from all that programming). I, on the other hand, do not have the stamina it takes to do that. Here I thought I was really good at watching a lot of movies but Aaron’s abilities but me to shame. Abilities is his word by the way. I think I may have found his super-hero powers. Please don’t misunderstand that this was all Aaron’s idea, I love playing video games too just maybe not to the extent that he does. Also playing this system brings back some very good memories of my childhood so that is an added bonus. I’ll let you know when we beat the game, it shouldn’t be long

So I’ve been rock climbing sporadically at Phoenix Rock Gym for a few years now. I’ve always really enjoyed but it is an expensive hobby so I never seriously pursued it. But when I met Aaron he was really in to it so I started going more often. And I remembered how much I really liked it. It’s rather addicting if you ask me. Well we decided that since it’s something we both really like and it’s great exercise we should get a membership to the gym. But my brother Todd beat us to the punch and bought us passes for Christmas! It was a perfect present. So we went and loved it. Aaron has his own gear and I didn’t so we used the some of the money from our wedding to buy me my own gear! Isn’t it so pretty? I think so. I used them twice now and it’s fabulous. I feel all professional with my own gear. I’m almost as good as Aaron now. Which is a big deal if you’ve ever seen Aaron climb. Well you don’t get the pictures because I can’t get it off my camera and Aaron is at work so he can’t do his computer magic. It’s a shame because the last time we went with Geneva and John I scrapped my shin really good. I was going to post a picture of that too so maybe it’s a good thing I can’t get it to work. Climbing is wonderful and I encourage all of you to try it some time your life.

Guest author Aaron again… now frustrated with Blogger.com All I wanted to do was to put pictures next to each other… and in the preview it looked great but in the real thing it turns out the columns were too thin. So I thought hey… I’ll make the template wider! But then was foiled by the template creator using so many dang pictures!

I don’t know how you all live within these tight bounds… wow. But because of the ease of use for the rest of it… I guess I’ll just stack pictures on top of one another for now.

Aaron

Guest author here Aaron Boushley. We have had a request to do a post about our Magic Bullet. Some of our siblings have seen the infomercials and wanted to know if it really is as good as they say.

Just for a little background we should let everyone know that my wife saw the infomercial and was sold so Lena was given the bullet as a gift from her Sister in Law Marcie. Who like Lena loves infomercials.

I personally have gotten some great use out of the bullet to make my morning protein shake. (Its much better than simply stirring… the chunks from just stirring are terrible). However, when I use the bullet my drink comes out perfectly mixed and frothy! The magic bullet also comes with party mug mixing containers, so I don’t have to get the bullet and a cup dirty!

We’ve also gotten a little more adventurous with our Magic Bullet cooking fun, and we wanted to share some of that with you! So far we have had two big adventures with the bullet. First was the cheesecake, and second was the hummus.

The cheesecake was made by Elena, while I wasn’t home, so there are no pictures of its creation… actually the only picture we have is once its about 3/4 gone It was good. Even though the recipe was for a smaller pan than we had, so we ended up with thin cheesecake. (Lena actually likes this cake to crust ratio.)

The second adventure was creating hummus. Since I was around, we decided to document our adventure. It was pretty fun and very easy although the recipe called for a little more garlic than we would have liked.

So here are some pictures from the great hummus bullet adventure!

Aaron