byu home opener: provo and memory lane

before i get to the seattle trip, i wanted to post a little slideshow of the boys with their grandma and aunt tami feeding some ducks. the feeding took place over the weekend of byu's homeowner against northern iowa. we were up in p-town for the game and stayed with kim and gaylin like we usually do. we had a lot of fun being with family and watching byu start the season. caleb came to the game with us and sat through the entire thing. it was hot, but he was fairly well behaved. we had great seats, compliments of my boss.

you'll notice the last photo in the group of the boys with their homemade capes (thanks to grandma hodges). they love their capes. caleb throws his on and thinks he is superman. it's kind of fun until he disappointingly says, "dad, when am i going to be able to fly?", and i worry that he is actually going to try and test the cape out someday.

we always enjoy spending time in provo since it is where aim is from and that is where we spent the first five years of our marriage. aim always runs into at least 4 or 5 people she knew from back in the day there two of which she usually went out on dates with and they sit around and reminisce about the good ol' days... for several hours sometimes.

happy valley brings back memories. some happy, and some not so happy. there's our first apartment which we affectionately refer to as the argentine house. why the argentine house? well, i served a mission in a very poor part of argentina and saw a lot of poverty while there... our first apartment, which was actually part of a house, reminded us of a house you'd see in argentina.

it was great. it had two red doors in the front, but we could only use one (although the one we could use didn't open all the way because the master bedroom was in the way). the master bedroom was a treat. the door to the master bedroom wouldn't open all the way either because the bed was in the way. correction: the mattress was in the way. yes, we didn't have a bed when we got married, nor did we have our own car or telephone service. we didn't have much money either.... but we had the stuff that really mattered, like a tv, a sandwich maker, a blender, an ice cream maker and a brick oven down the street with a pay phone.

yes, you heard me correctly, we did not have a bed when we got married and, now that i think about, we didn't even have a mattress - we had some foam pads that we fashioned together to use as a mattress for our first marital bed. very romantic. the master bathroom (which was the only bathroom) was also one of a kind since you couldn't shut that door either. you learn a lot about a newlywed spouse listening to her shower everyday. we loved that place. we loved it so much, we moved out after two months and moved in with the in-laws for the summer. i won't comment on living with the in-laws since they read the blog except to say that we may have had some grandkids for them a little sooner had we not been living with them that summer.

after the we left the hodges manor it was on to virginia and helen's 200 year old home. virginia and helen were two 80 year old sisters who kind of reminded me of a an ancient version of marge's sisters on the simpsons except they didn't have the raspy smoker voice. they were our landladies and were very nice people, but a little old and a little too content with the house in it's very old state (i said 200 years old). i offended one of them when we were doing a walk-through of the house and asked if some of the wallpaper was the original wallpaper.

that house was fun. for starters, it had no shower... only a bathtub. that didn't seem like such a bad thing at first, but a year and a half later, i was ready for a permanent shower (thank goodness we could go to the temple, do baptisms and then shower there). it was kind of funny watching a pregnant aimee in the tub with her belly sticking out of the water. this is also the house where we finally figured out why that patch of what we thought was immortal snow in the backyard would never melt... turns out it wasn't snow at all. silly us, we should have known that it was regurgitated sewage bubbling up from the sewer opening we had in the backyard. is that up to code? in the 1800s i guess it was.

ask aimee sometime about the dog we kept down in the cellar at that house. actually, ask tyler about it and if he doesn't start shaking and wet himself as an emotional reaction to what has to be a traumatic memory of the time aim told him we had a puppy down in our creepy cellar and urged him to go down and have a look. what she didn't tell him was that there actually was no dog down there at all and when he reached the bottom of the stairs, all by himself mind you, she was going to turn of the lights and shut the door. did you ever see that horror flick, "the ring"? yeah, it was like that... girl at the bottom of the well while her mom covered the well with a stone. tyler probably starts to twitch when he watches that show.

i think he was six years old at the time. he cried and hid under the table when he got back upstairs. didn't know aim had it in her. for the record, she now feels bad about doing this. luckily tyler survived the moment and will not haunt/terminate us as we watch a video someday. we don't have a vcr anymore, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

last note about the historical monument house: this is where we met our first married couple friends who occasionally jump on the blog and comment: sean and jasmine (actually, it's shawn, but if i remember correctly he prefers, sean). as i mentioned, this was a house which we shared. as such, we lived downstairs and they lived upstairs. shawn and jasmine were great friends. we had a lot of fun with them. our living spaces were separated by a door inside the house and sometimes it maybe seemed like we were actually sharing the entire house rather than living separately. in fact, we would sometimes come home from school hungry and looking forward to eating some of that leftover pasta roni or frozen pizza we'd had for dinner the night before only to find that shawn had helped himself to a little snack during the day while we were out. we missed them when they moved out, but they got this sweet deal on a mobile home that was bound to make them tons of money, so we understood.

alright, aim said this is too long, so i will stop. memory lane. the nostalgia. someday i'll pick with the next place we lived at after that: the projects. get excited.

is that long enough for you, callie?