Thanksgiving!

I can't believe it's already that time of year! 2014 has just flown by! This year for Thanksgiving was pretty traditional. Matt and I drove down to Salt Lake on Wednesday afternoon to meet my sisters, dad, and Laurie for dinner and a movie. Dinner this year was at Buffalo Wild Wings, and after we saw "Mockingjay- Part 1". This is a fun new tradition for us, and really nice that it's the night before Thanksgiving, because holidays are crazy!

On Thanksgiving we had scones for breakfast at my mom's house, and then went shooting. This used to be a Fischer Thanksgiving tradition and for the past few years, my mom, Jeff, and sisters have always been able to come, and less of Matt's family is able to come! My mom and Jeff look forward to it every year. This year, both my sisters were off work (which is amazing considering that they both work retail!) and were able to come! Alex has never been shooting before, so she had some fun trying out all of Matt's guns!

My mom hates the bigger guns, and so Alex was a little hesitant to try, but she ended up liking it! Shooting clays is my favorite type of shooting, so that's mostly what I did.

Matt threw tons of pigeons- we went through almost 150 pigeons.

Lance came out this year with Diet, and Alex brought her friend Colby. They both really liked shooting Matt's bigger guns.

Matt and his dad shooting shot guns.

Alex even tried out Matt's black powder rifle!

All the girls!

First Week of Snow

This week we experienced the first week of snow! It is so fun to be in our house now that winter is setting in. It has been a full year since we started building our house, and it is so great to be able to park the cars in a garage (no more ice scraping in the morning before work!), and kick the heat on whenever we want! Last week we had a BBQ for dinner while we watched the Aggie game, and we had some food leftover, so this week Matt had to shovel the back patio so he could get to the BBQ. I have to admit, the food was great!

On Saturday we went to the Aggie game after a couple days of snow, and everything was still completely covered in snow! They had to use a snowplow on the field, and were slowly shoveling the bleachers as we were getting there. It was 25 degrees and even started snowing during the game, but being the true fans that we are, we stayed the whole time! Good thing it was the afternoon and the sun was out for a little while!

At least our drinks stayed cold all game.

Luckily, we ended up winning, otherwise it would have felt much colder! Good thing I was wearing my coveralls, a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, coat, two pairs of socks and gloves, a headband, and we still brought two blankets. At halftime, Matt bought me a hot chocolate, which really helped keep me warm until the end of the game!

Pumpkin Carving 2014

Every year, pumpkin carving is a huge deal for the Fischers. I don't really know how it started, but one of Matt's favorite things about Halloween is carving pumpkins. This year, Jenny and Randy were a little partied out, so I offered to host pumpkin carving in our garage. We set up tables and pulled out some tarps and we were good to go.

Melissa was babysitting until Randy got off work, so she had Wyatt, Brad, Claire, and Harrison. Jenni brought over her kids until Nate got off work, so it was just the girls with all the kids for a while!

Harrison didn't want to pull the guts out of his pumpkin, so I had to do it for him. I actually did just about everything for him. He helped poke holes, until he got bored. While I was carving his pumpkin, he really wanted a nose for his jack-o-lantern, but as you can see, there isn't one on the pattern, so I had to freestyle the nose while he was shouting, "Make a nose Tori!"

Wyatt did awesome!

Brad did his pumpkin on his own this year! He picked a pretty hard pattern and only needed help with a couple parts!

By the time Randy came, Claire was ready for some help. She did all the poking, and Randy helped with the carving.

Lindsay and Harrison did the same pattern. I think hers turned out better than the one I did for Harrison!

Carter and Brad did the same pattern. Carter kept trying to do the flying duck pattern, but Jenni didn't want to do all the carving on that one, so she had him pick a different one.

After the kids were done, uncle Matt was just getting started. He spent another hour after everyone went home carving his two pumpkins. He got online and chose his patterns carefully. He printed off an Olaf pattern for me to do, which was great because it was super easy.

The "super turtle" and minion! Harrison wouldn't call it a ninja turtle! He kept calling it a super turtle!

On Halloween, Randy and Jenny had already left on their cruise, so again, I offered to host Halloween festivities at our house. Diet and Myrna brought the kids over, and so did Nate and Jenni. Kamie had to work, so Tim brought the girls over. We had chili and scones for dinner before sending the kids out for some trick-or-treating! I stayed home to pass out candy, and was shocked at how many kids we had stop at our house! I almost ran out of candy! Matt said it was way crazy walking around with so many people out. Looks like our street is the place for all the trick-or-treating! We took the kids back to their neighborhood for a few houses, and then watched Godzilla at Nate and Jenni's house after putting the kids to bed. It was a great Halloween!

Halloween Festivities

The week before Halloween, Kenzy and I had to go down to Salt Lake for an After-School Conference at Thanksgiving Point. We were put up in a hotel, so we decided to make a weekend out of it! Matt, Kenzy, and I drove down on Thursday after work. We dropped Matt off with his parents and then headed off to see Thriller! It was fun to go with Kenzy, who had never seen it before, but I did still miss our big group! The show was amazing as always!

We spent Friday at our conference, and Matt went fishing with his dad. After our conference, we got free admission to the Museum of Ancient History so Kenzy, Matt and I wandered around while we waited for Devin to meet us. Then we headed downtown for dinner at Training Table and our annual visit to the Haunted Village at This is the Place! Kenzy was pretty freaked out, and I definitely jumped a few times! That is one of my favorite Halloween traditions!

On Saturday, we went to half of the conference, and then had to leave so we could make it back to Logan for the Aggie game! We had such a great weekend with Kenzy and Devin, and definitely will try to make this a tradition!

Mass Updates

Okay, I can't even give an update on my computer because I am SO FURIOUS about everything, so I will just update everything else.

Right after our anniversary, Matt and I decided that we were going to buy a new car. We have barely been thinking about it, and Matt found a car on KSL that he thought was worth a look. We took it for a test drive and talked about price. After the weekend, we called and made an offer. We usually don't think too long about these type of decisions. It was exactly what we were looking for: low miles, newer, comfortable, more spacious, etc. And of course, the price was right. Not exactly a steal, but good enough we couldn't pass it up! Now we are so happy with our purchase. Our 2011 Toyota Camry fits perfectly in the new garage.

After we finished the house, we had no interest in doing any landscaping. Then as some time passed, I became envious of everyone else's nice grass. I wanted to be able to sit outside on the lawn! So we made some phone calls, and after a ridiculous amount of time, finally were able to get a company to come out and install the sprinkler system for a decent price. This is what it looked like before they got started:

One Saturday, the girls all decided to get together for a Girl's Day Out. Jenny and Kamie met up first at 7:00 (too early for me) to garage sale in the rain. I met up with them around 11:00 to head down to Brigham City to meet Kendra and Jenna for lunch at Old Grist Mill. After lunch, we went shopping. Everywhere. Downeast outlet in Brigham City, D.I. in Brigham, and a bunch of places in Logan. We shopped ourselves silly and had to get some dinner at Chilis after we were finished. Then we went to see "The Giver". Jenny and Kamie had to make sure we used up as much of their day out as possible! What a fun day with all the girls!

For Lance and Kendra's birthdays, we got them tickets to the BYU vs. Utah State football game in Provo. We fully expected to lose. After a five hour drive from Logan to Provo in the worst traffic I've ever faced, we finally got to the game. I have never been in such a huge stadium. As anyone who watched the game knows, WE WON! It was sooooo fun. We sat up in the student section with all the other Aggie fans who made the drive and we were cheering like crazy the whole time! We didn't get home until 3:30 AM, but it was totally worth it!

Halloween is coming! This is absolutely my most favorite holiday of the entire year, and Matt and I have been extra excited to get our house all decorated! The first thing I did was pick up my pumpkins! There is an awesome "Pick Your Own Pumpkin" patch just down the street from my house, so I stopped by to grab some huge pumpkins! I only had to pay $5 for the ones that were over 30 pounds and $3 if they were less than 30 pounds. Love it! I bought a bunch of baby pumpkins too. Such a fun tradition, and super fun to support some of our neighbors.

Then I got out all my other decorations. We have been trying to collect some creepier decorations. We are trying to copy the old witch's house on "Hocus Pocus." So we have been collecting candles, old candle holders, skulls, jars and bottles, and of course my big book. I searched everywhere for a big old book that I could pretend was a witch's spellbook. It is actually a 100-year-old dictionary, but it looks amazing! When we get a little closer to Halloween, we'll put everything out on the porch. Hopefully in the years to come, we can grow our collection of creepy stuff and eventually have a full on witch's graveyard with tons of gravestones and fog machines. We'll get there eventually, but I love what we have for now!

Back to the landscaping.... This is what the yard looks like now that the sprinklers are in. The hydroseed was sprayed a few days later and we are patiently waiting for it to sprout. Hopefully we'll see some growth before it gets too cold.

More pumpkins...

We love having a second bedroom with a spare bed in it because we get to have visitors! Last week, my grandma came up for the Aggie vs. Air Force game and stayed the night. It was so much fun to catch up and spend some time with my grandma, even if she was also cheering for Air Force.

This weekend, we were able to invite our friends Natalie and Zach up to spend the night. Nat and I went to Skyline and lived together at Utah State for two years and have become very close friends. She and Zach live in Draper now with their darling little boy, Noah. They came up and we gave them a tour of the house, went for a walk, had dinner, then went and played mini golf and had hot chocolate. The next morning we had breakfast before they headed home! It was so much fun to catch up and get to spend time with cute baby Noah!

Okay, last pictures, I promise. On Saturday night (after Nat and Zach headed home), Matt and I met up with the rest of the Fischer crew, including Lance and Kendra who drove up, for dinner at Pizza Factory. Table for 15 please! Reagan had to sit in between Matt and I. She kept snuggling up to us, and even tried to give Matt a hands-covered-with-ranch-dressing hug during dinner. After dinner, I got a birthday ice cream that I shared with Blakelee. She is definitely a little girl! She was moaning in ecstasy after each bite, and was even trying to grab ice cream out of my mouth when I gave myself a bite! We had yummy dinner and great service before we went over to American West Heritage Center for their fall festival Haunted Hollow. We went last year and had so much fun. This year, Tim and Lance came with us, and even Harrison was big enough to come! We had fun standing in line, with the uncles harassing Brad, Claire and Harrison. Harrison would not let me put him down! He was wearing his birthday batman sweatshirt and was telling everyone that he was Batman. When we finally went into the Haunted Hollow, he was definitely a little scared, but Jenny and I kept talking to him and laughing at the scary people and he started telling all of them that he was Batman! They were all pretty cute when they realized how little he was. After the Haunted Hollow, I carried Harrison back to the car and he talked my ear off the whole way. I love the age that he and Reagan are right now because they are both so talkative! What a fun night! Love spending time with the whole family! So glad that Lance and Kendra could come up!

Sad Day

This update is to tell everyone that I have not been slacking on my blog! I have been working on a project to scan all my mom's scrapbooks and print them for myself. This was harder than I planned for several reasons:
1. The pages were 12x12 scrapbook pages so I had to "convince" my dad to buy a commercial size scanner so I could scan them at home. That took about a week of nonstop scanning.
2. While scanning, I realized that the files were HUGE, almost 1G each, and I have over 300 pages. So I had to connect everything into my 1T external hard drive, and still my computer was way bogged down.
3. Once everything was scanned, I thought I could just upload them to blurb and voila! Done! NOT! Apparently blurb doesn't read tiff files, which is what they all scanned as! Ahhhh!
4. At this point, I had two options. Rescan everything, or convert the files individually. I opted for the second option. I tried to open them and convert them in several programs before I found one that worked. I had to open them all in Photoshop, which took forever because they were such huge files, then I had to resave them, which took even longer!
5. I've been working on converting for about two weeks, and had just finished the first half of the pages when my computer started to get really slow. My macbook is from 2006, when I graduated high school, and has been through a lot. I figured it was tired from the huge project so I finished up and unplugged and shut it down. It did not turn back on.
6. I took out over to expercom, who was impressed it has lasted that long. They called it "vintage". They thought the hard drive was dead, but said they'd look at it. I didn't think it would be a big deal, because I don't feel like I use my computer that much. I was so wrong! In the three days since it's been gone, I've needed it 3-4 different times, and then realized I didn't have it. Then they called me and told me that the hard drive was gone.

I am so sad. I don't know what to do without my computer, and I'm even more sad that I may not be able to recover everything. I backed up my pictures about a month ago so most of those are safe, but all my music and other documents are on that computer. Expercom said they would charge me $100 minimum to TRY to recover anything, and more if it was difficult. I don't know what to do. I can replace the hard drive, but it is an old computer and may not last too long anyway. I could pay to recover my documents and then just use my work computer, although it is a PC and I don't like it. Or we could buy a new computer (probably not feasible after buying a house and new car). So sad!

So I will probably not blog until we figure out what we are doing with the computer situation. I have a bunch of stuff to blog, so when I get back up and running there will be a lot! Until then...

Football Season!

I can't believe it is already fall and that football season has started! I know it seems crazy, but I actually do like watching college football with Matt on the weekend. But even better than watching them on TV is going to the games! We got our season tickets again and are always trying to convince people to come to games with us. I finally convinced my mom and Jeff to come up for a game and to stay the night at the house. It was really fun! The Aggies didn't play very well, but they did end up winning the game! Right before the game, I called my mom to see if she wanted me to buy them new game day shirts, and she asked if she was supposed to wear her Aggie shirt... haha! Of course you wear your Aggie shirt to an Aggie game! Matt was in Salt Lake helping replace his mom and dad's roof and barely made it on time to the game. He didn't have time to change his clothes before the game so excuse his green shirt.