What We Are Up To

My favorite picture of Carter and his favorite picture of me. #hottiez

If you are wondering what we are up to...so am I (lame joke). There should be a college class called 'Making Life Decisions' where someone (not me) plans out your life decisions for you and then everything goes according to plan. That's the hard part really: having everything go according to plan. So far Carter and I are only slightly above putting all our life choices in a throwback MASH game and letting fate decide.

This post is probably only as relevant as November 24th 2013 because we change our minds literally everyday. Not an exaggeration.

Carter is both the smartest and the craziest person I know. He'll be graduating in April 2015 with a double major in Math and Economics AND a double minor in Computer Science and Statistics. After that he's leaving reality forever to get a PhD in Finance, preferably at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, or University of Chicago, in that order. I'm rooting for Stanford because CALIFORNIA. Carter's very lofty ambitions make me very happy but also a little sad because it means we'll probably be living in East Coast apartments forever (also not an exaggeration). When I told this to a lady in my ward, she told me that they lived at Wymount for 7 years and loved it!!!

I'm currently working as a Teaching Assistant for a boy's group home and I love it! Originally, I took this job even though it's only part time because I was planning to get a Secondary Science Teaching License in Utah but...well, see above. Between my graduation last April and now, my plans have oscillated like a yo-yo, though now I've settled on getting a second Bachelors degree from BYU-Idaho online in Web Design and Development! Not very many people I know think this is a great idea and even part of me thinks I should grow up and get a real job at a bank or insurance company. I'm set on it, though, mostly because it feels so right. And 'feeling right' has to count for something?

After almost 6 months of investigating different web design/web development programs, I thought it wasn't in the cards. "Oh well, maybe someday when Carter is a university professor," I thought. I even enrolled and paid tuition at Utah Valley University, but withdrew a month later because the whole situation felt all wrong. AND THEN at church I saw an ad for the BYU-I online program. It was inexpensive and timely and even BETTER than all the other expensive programs I had looked at. Unlike my short time as as student of UVU, everything came along smoothly and I'm starting Winter Semester 2014 and hopefully finishing Spring 2015!

The need for this degree mostly comes from a need for a marketable skill that I could support our 4 imaginary children with. Unfortunately, neuroscience is totally NOT useful unless you are going to medical/dental school and I am not. Carter and I attend a family ward where I visit teach 4 ladies with my two companions. GET THIS: All of the women I visit teach AND my companions have non-traditional family situations. One lady was in a car accident where her husband and son were killed, leaving her with 6 (or 5?) young children and disabled legs. She's now much older and lives with her best friend and daughter and grandchildren who both work to support them. Another lady is married to a man disabled by short term memory loss fifteen years ago. She works to support them, her son, her mother, and her brother. The third lady went through 2 divorces years ago leaving her to care for 2 year-old daughter alone. And that's JUST the ladies we visit teach! We don't even live in a low income area (fairly mid-range)! I mean, is this a sign from the universe?? Should I be concerned?!

Carter says:
I ate carots all day long. That's when my dog ate chicken nuggets and french fries and boom, the cheese balls came out of nowhere. Very fun and awesome. I love duckies too. plug the burger are nice and then the dragon ate my green apple, and i was like what, apples come in green? I love wood that smokes bacon. Salmon is weird stuff, sometimes they are fishies and sometimes salmon is a kind of food served in restaurants and I was like, what? crazy. Deep frying turkies is crazy. Notra Dame is crazy and I don't know what to do about it.

See what I mean? He's totally nuts.