What I am thankful for

With Thanksgiving coming up, I was thinking of some the things I am thankful for:

#1. I am thankful for BrianThis is Brian after eating a cream puff the size of his face

I am so blessed to be married to by best friend! He is everything to me! He makes me laugh and laughs with me. He plays the piano and violin with me. He explains the finer points of football to me. He listens to my endless stories of third grade. He plays frisbee with me. He is patient with me in every situation. He respects me and honors me. He tells me everyday that he loves me. He tells me that the macaroni and cheese tastes great even when the sauce comes out lumpy. He keeps me warm when I am cold, which is most of the time. He puts up with me talking (and singing) in my sleep. He tells me I'm beautiful when I don't feel like I am. He encourages me to be my best and inspires me to be even better. He is the best husband I could ask for. What would I do without him?!

#2. I am thankful for my family

I am so blessed to be part of such a wonderful group of people! The Wrights, the Evans, the Oldhams, and everyone in between! I am thankful to have so many people who love and support me and are such great examples to me.

#3. I am thankful for the temple

The temple is such a beautiful place where such beautiful ordinances are performed! I am so thankful that our Heavenly Father has provided such a great plan to help us to return to him. I am thankful for the eternal truths that I can learn when I go to the temple. I am thankful that I can serve my brothers and sisters by going to the temple and serving to unite families forever. I am thankful that I can be with those I love forever because I have been sealed to my parents, my brothers and sisters, and my sweet husband for time and all eternity.

#4. I am thankful for good friends

I can't put a picture for this one because inevitably I would leave someone out. I feel so blessed to be friends with such amazing people. I work with amazing people at school who are always there for me and love me even when I'm not perfect. They help me "lower my affective filter." :) I also have so many great friends in our complex and ward. Just this week while Brian has been gone, someone has invited me over every night to make sure I wasn't feeling lonely. They are such great examples to me of loving service. I am thankful for wonderful neighbors who are our great friends. I am thankful for those friends who, even though we don't see each other often, are always there-- all of those friends who can pick up our friendships right where we left off, no matter how much time has passed. I am so thankful for all of my friends-- they are all wonderful examples of strength, endurance, kindness, and service.

#5. I am thankful for my job

These are my students eating noodles with chopsticks. We were reading a story about a girl from China.

I have the best job in the world! Every day is different and exciting. I love my students to pieces (even when they drive me crazy!). I am so thankful to be a teacher and learn so much from these fun boys and girls. I love watching them learn. I love seeing their curiosity grow. I love it when they find that book that sparks a love of reading inside them. And I love reading Harry Potter to them on the rug.

Great Books

I just read a great series! I actually read the first one because I was going to have one of my higher-level guided reading groups read it at school (it is about a 4th grade level). After that I got hooked. I'm not going to lie, the cover initially turned me off:
but this particular book definitely proves the adage "don't judge a book by it's cover" true. It is about a group of people who live in a village beneath a forbidden mountain. Because their culture puts a lot of value on strength and courage, Rowan is looked down upon for his timidity and small, weak stature.

In the first book, "Rowan of Rin," the river running down from the mountain goes dry. The village wise woman, Sheba, gives them a prophesy/riddle to solve that will help a small group navigate their way up the mountain.

Seven hearts the journey make,

Seven ways the hearts will break.

Bravest heart will carry on,

When sleep is death, and hope is gone.

Look in the fiery jaws of fear

And see the answer white and clear,

Then throw away all thoughts of home

For only then your quest is done.

In each book there is an adventure, usually guided only by Sheba's seemingly confusing and helpless prophesies. Each one is a great read!

The series is in this order:

Rowan of Rin
Rowan and the Travellers
Rowan and the Keeper of the Crystal
Rowan and the Zebak
Rowan of the Bukshah (Alternate title: Rowan and the Ice Creepers)

I particularly enjoyed these books because they were quick reads (around 150-200 pages-- I read each one in 1-2 evenings), but they were still intricate and exciting. I think Emily Rodda does a fantastic job of developing her characters and setting, even in such short books. I highly reccomend these books to anyone who enjoys fantasy and adventure!

Halloween

We love Halloween!

Despite the fact that we both woke up feeling under-the-weather (which resulted in not being able to spend the evening with our good friends the Hamiltons... sad day!), we still were able to take part in a few Halloween Traditions:

Carving Pumpkins

Costumes!

And, of course, Garfield's Halloween

Ingenious Contraption

On Saturday, we figured out that we had probably put too much oil in our car... like 3 quarts too much oil... but we weren't quite sure. Our new Mazda's dipstick is absurdly hard to read. It's a long story with lots of details that no one really cares about, so we'll just say that we're pretty sure we thought it was empty so we added 3 quarts, and now we're thinking it was probably full to begin with.

So, being the self-reliant (not to mention "poor") students that we are, we had the great idea to rig up a homemade device to suck some of the oil out. The device would involve some rubber tubing from Lowe's and a baby nose-sucker from WalMart.

We drove all the way to Lowe's and were walking in when we realized that neither of us had our wallets (aka no $). We decided to check to see if they even had what we were looking for. They did. It cost 9 cents per foot. Dilemma: do we drive all the way home to get a quarter or do we search the floors of Lowe's until we've found all the loose change people have dropped? We searched the floors for about 5 minutes as we walked from the back of the store to the front doors, then drove home. We considered asking random people if they had any spare change. It's too bad we didn't have a spare Santa suit, a bell, and a Salvation Army bucket in our trunk.

We eventually did acquire the needed materials and produced the world's most inefficient oil-sucker. It took us about 45 minutes to suck out about a quarter of a quart.

We finally decided to take it to Jiffy Lube on Monday and have them drain all the oil and put in the right amount, just so we can be sure.

A New Member of the Family

We've been wanting one for a while.....

We haven't decided on a name yet.....



We finally got an amazing deal on the car of our dreams: a 2008 Mazda 3 Sport Hatchback. This car is just the color and has the features that we wanted. Our car broker got it at an auction last week and we were finally able to pick it up from his house on Wednesday night. So far, we have been enjoying the sunroof way too much and the nice sound system.

There was some early drama with the car, as it was leaking oil faster than Rocky was leaking blood during his fight with the Russian man of steel. We took it back to the shop and they had put the wrong oil filter in (which is what we thought happened). They fixed it in an hour. The whole time we were surrounded by Latino children running around, drawing pictures, and offering us candy that had fallen out of their mouth onto the floor.... At least we got the car fixed, even though we felt like minorities in our own country.



We're not used to driving a sporty-looking car yet, so we feel pretty nifty every time we climb into it. Fortunately, we do a pretty good job of sharing the joy of driving it, so we don't have to set out defined custody agreements and times.

Baylor College of Medicine

Editor's Note: This blog was written a couple of weeks ago but due to technical complications was not uploaded in a timely manner.

After waiting around the Columbus airport for forever (9/24), I finally boarded my plane for Houston. The plane made a brief stop at the Chicago-Midway airport, so naturally the seven of us continuing on to Houston made a mad scramble for the good seats (front windows) once we were done being counted. An old lady ended up sitting next to me on the plane, and we started talking during the flight because she kept spilling her food on me. She started telling me all about her granddaughter who was studying at some Texas university, minoring in Religion so she could go be a missionary somewhere. I told her that I was a missionary in Russia for two years without even having minored in Religion. She had all sorts of questions about that, but it seemed that when she found out that I went to school in Utah she stopped being so curious. Oh well.

I got a ride on SuperShuttle to get from Hobby airport to my host’s apartment. There were only two other people on the shuttle with me and, oddly enough, one of them was some lady from Orem going to some ultrasound conference (she worked in a hospital). So it really seems that I can’t escape from Utah Valley regardless of wherever I go. My host people were really nice (a married couple from BYU), and I just ended up watching “The Office” and “Jeopardy” with them the whole evening while I prepped for my interview.

I rode the light rail transit system into the Texas Medical Center (TMC) Friday morning and was completely amazed at how large the center was! It seemed that TMC should stand for Texas Medical City, because it was definitely larger than some cities that I had been in! If I felt like a little flea at Ohio State, I definitely felt like a tiny electron being bounced around in that big city. I walked around and took pictures of the area (something I actually got into trouble for later on by some of the police… they said I looked like a terrorist taking pictures and could get into trouble with homeland security…. Spending a night—or lifetime—in jail would be a great to impress Baylor!). My interview day didn’t start until noon (and I left at 7:45 when the host-husband-person left for his classes), so I sat around a lot. I saw a lot of applicants interviewing at the neighboring UT-Houston medical school. They got those cool backpacks with the drawstrings! And all I got was a name badge. Not fair, but in a just world they will end up paying for it through their tuition.

The monstrosity Texas Medical Center

More of the medical suburb inside Houston

There were about 50 applicants being interview at Baylor that day, so I was definitely in a big group. After stuffing us with pizza and tons of information about the school, we had a three-hour block where we had two 30-minute interviews. My first interview was with a faculty member who must have been from Nepal or India or something (I’m not an expert, unless he would have been Russian). He had lots of questions about my mission in Russia and wanted to know what a typical day was like. At the end I asked him how he balances his career as a physician with his family (and also how he did it in medical school). It seems that he wasn’t the most qualified person to answer that question, because he told me he sacrificed and left his family to go to medical school because he knew he wouldn’t be able to divide up his time properly (though he is married). Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! You can’t divide up your time properly so you just completely cut them off? He was happy with his choice, but I definitely won’t be following his example in that way. At the end of the interview, he said that he would be excited to have me at Baylor and his comments to the rest of the admissions committee would be towards that end. : )

My second interview was with a medical student on the admissions committee. Towards the end of the interview he asked if there was anything else that I wanted to tell him about myself that wasn’t on my application. I told the thrilling story of when I was biking in the Columbia River gorge and did not know that my brake was dragging on my front wheel for 29 out of the 30 miles that we rode (this is the cliff-notes version). After I finished he said, “Wow! Did you rehearse that? If that was off the cuff then that was pretty impressive. I can definitely tell you have some background with literature.” I thought that was kind of funny because it’s not like I sat down the night before and planned out that story. Yeah, I’ve told it before but it’s not something I always keep in my back pocket in case a dull moment comes my way. As we were walking out of the room he said how much he enjoyed my story (at least I know that it will stick in brain and give him something to remember me by when he reports to the rest of the committee) and would look forward to having me with a colleague. Hopefully both of these interviewers weren’t just saying that to everyone, because it definitely lets me gauge how well they thought the interview went.

We had several tours of the metropolis known as the Texas Medical Center afterwards and we were finally done with our day at around 7:15. I ran over to the McDonald’s on the main floor of the heart hospital (what a great location for a place that fills you with cholesterol the second you step through the door) for dinner before getting picked up by my student host. It was here that I realized that my name in Texas is not "Bri-an" but rather "Brahn." The cashier did not recognize my name when I said it. After I repeated it, he asked "Brahn?" "Uh... yeah."

Overall I think that the trip to Baylor went pretty well. I was pretty disappointed with it at first (when I first arrived at TMC) because it seemed pretty impersonal and immense, filled with great and spacious buildings everywhere. However, once I got to the medical college, met the students, and got to know more about Baylor I started to feel much more excited about it. Thus, this is a perfect example of why it is so important to interview at the school and keep your feelings open so you can get a feel if the school is right for you or not.

I woke up at 3:30am Saturday morning to catch my 4:00am shuttle to the airport (the driver asked if I was "Mr. Brahn"...). I had never flown on Frontier airlines before, and it was quite the adventure! Each airplane is painted with a different animal on it and so I felt like I was walking into a zoo onboard. Everything from the flaps to the landing gear was creaky, and so at first I worried that the monkeys had gotten loose and tinkered with everything, but we flew safely. At the end of the flight, our pilot let us know that “Sal the Cougar” (the mascot of our plane, apparently) was grateful that we flew with them that morning. I saw the other Frontier planes when we pulled into Denver to switch planes, and I was scouting out which animal I would want to ride on next. It turns out that I got stuck with Jack the Snowshoe hare. Not as cool as Sal the Cougar. I got into Provo at 9:30am, just in time to get picked up from the airport, beat traffic back home, and get ready for the BYU-CSU game! Thus ended my long road trip, finishing the second interview of my double-header. Baylor will start informing the applicants that they accept starting on 10/16, informing a few every week, working their way down their rankings list. So the sooner I hear back from them, the better!

My Hero

My little sister is one of the most amazing people! She is kind, selfless, caring, patient, and always willing to help. I feel bad because sometimes I get grumpy around her because she is so good at so many things that I am trying to work on myself. But she is always sweet and patient with me.

Sarah has been called to serve in the California, Fresno mission speaking Spanish (exotic, yet domestic)! She flew up to Provo on Friday with my parents. My parents left on Sunday and I got to be my sister's companion for 2 days until she reported to the Missionary Training Center. It was fun to have her tagging along to my class and the different errands I had to run. She took her scriptures with her everywhere and read, because she was determined to finish the Book of Mormon before she reported to the MTC.

I was pretty much in denial the whole time. I kept thinking "she is going to be living literally down the street from my house for 8 weeks while she learns how to teach in Spanish." I just ignored the little detail that I won't be able to see her or speak to her even though she is that close...

We dropped her off at 8am on Wednesday, so I could get to my school by 8:30. That was when it hit me. My baby sister is going on a mission! I can write her letters, but I won't be able to see her for A YEAR AND A HALF. I know it will go quickly, but so many things are going to happen in that year and a half. Moving, medical school.... and who knows what else.

I am so excited for Sarah, she is going to be a fantastic missionary.