What I've Learned Lately

• People think I'm crazy when I tell them I'm from Utah. I can't say I blame them, it just would be nice to get a response other than a blank stare, raised eyebrows, and "wow....Utah....that's.....fun..." I went to a salon the other day and when the lady asked me where I was from, I told her Utah. She said "Oh cool, I moved to Utah for a while after I lived in Michigan, it's very different, did you have culture shock when you moved there?" I paused for a second before I said "no, I didn't move there, I'm from there, like born and raised." And she paused for several seconds before saying the inevitable "Oh....oh wow." After soaking all of the information in she then told me that she was very impressed with how the people there help each other out in times of need and how "everyone brings each other meals for no reason, its amazing."
• The Railroad sucks and is awesome at the same time. I'm making Rick write a blog about it because I don't even understand it all, but for now we are feeling very fortunate that he's back to work, and hopefully he won't get laid off anymore.
• Tucson is a big city, and we live right in the middle of it. It takes 20+ minutes to get to the freeway. It's like Utah in the sense that they use the grid system, which I would probably die without, so that has made things helpful. I know all of the main roads and I've figured out which way is North. I'm used to being able to travel from one side of Provo to the other in 10-15 minutes. If you did that here it would probably take an hour. I haven't used my GPS in 2 weeks, and I've never felt so accomplished.
• Big city comes with big city crime. Listening to the police scanner in Provo was entertaining, listening to it here is scary. As I'm typing this there is a police helicopter flying around above us circling around in a mile radius with the search light on looking for someone. I had only ever seen that on cop shows until I moved here.
• If all goes well with Rick's job, we will be buying a new car in 6 months, and we will be looking for a house in 2 years. We are growing up.
• I'm turning into Rick, and it's terrifying. When we were first married he had been working out and was like "my thighs are chafed from running" and I was like "I have never experienced anything of mine chafing in my life" and the next day I WOKE UP with chafed thighs. No joke. How does that happen in your sleep? He also will get these boil like sores on his back and I'll be like "I don't think I've ever had a boil in my life, it looks like it hurts" and the next day I will have one. And yes, they do hurt. Remember how I didn't know what sleep paralysis was? Guess who took a nap today and experienced it for the first time ever? This is getting ridiculous. The only way I will be okay with it is if my legs start to get darker, because as of right now I think I'm the whitest person in Arizona.
• Meeko loves me more than anything. If we are taking a nap together and I cough or roll over or move at all he will come over to me to make sure I'm okay. If someone knocks on the door or he can see someone outside he will bark and then run to wherever I am and stand with his back to me in a ready-to-attack stance. If we go on walks he will look back every 15 steps to make sure I am still there. He runs into everything because of this. He follows me everywhere I go. If I walk into the bedroom to fold laundry or to the kitchen to do dishes, he will follow me and sit at my feet and watch me. Usually it's cute, sometimes it's annoying. He doesn't do any of these things for Rick. Probably because Rick was the one that threw him into the lake.
• I like my ward and I like going to church. If you know me at all, this is kind of a big deal, especially since church starts at 9. The people in my ward are either old and kind of crazy or young and funny. It's like the perfect combination. Everyone is on a first name basis, nobody calls each other "Brother" or "Sister". On mothers day I was especially homesick and missed my mom and after Sunday school a lady said "stand up and let me give you a hug, I bet you miss your mom a lot today." I needed that.
• The weather here is normal, it's the weirdest thing. Everyone was like "it's supposed to get cold this week, so be prepared for that" so I wore jeans and a long sleeved shirt the next day and I was sweating profusely. I assumed that when they said it would be cold they meant the very next day, but here if it gets cold it goes down 5-10 degrees a day, and then when it gets warm again it goes up 5-10 degrees a day, instead of being freezing one day and then hot the next. Weird, right?
• I got a job, and lucky for me it's not far from us and I can get there in 5 minutes. I've already started training. I'm nervous because starting a new job is scary but I'm excited to finally have a life again, and to talk to people other than Rick and Meeko.