Not Good Bloggers

More than a year has passed since the last blog post and so so so much has changed.  I finished school in May and after 5 semesters on the Dean's List graduated with a 4.0 overall GPA.  We were really hoping that I'd be able to find a job that would allow us to stay close to our families.  Unfortunately that is not what the Lord had in store for us.  So after applying for jobs from Alaska to Texas it came down to a job offer in Las Vegas.  We ended up moving in June.  If you ever move somewhere hot don't do it at the beginning of summer.  We spent the first three months wondering why in the world we moved to such a hot place.  Luckily summer is over and things are starting to cool down a bit.  Hopefully the nice winter will make us willing to endure another summer here.  The three months here have been a real roller-coaster.  After about 4 weeks Heidi left to go back to Utah/Idaho for a family reunion.  So I had the pleasure of spending all of July by myself in a city where I knew no one.  I flew up to Idaho at the end of July for my sister's wedding.  It was very nice to get out of Vegas and be with my wife again.  I hope we are never in a situation where we have to spend that much time apart again.  If she hadn't come back with me after the wedding I'm pretty sure I would have just abandon all our stuff and stayed up there with her.  I can honestly say if I would have known leaving my last job and going to Idaho State was going to eventually lead us to Las Vegas I probably would have stayed in Salt Lake and kept working.  Being in Las Vegas has been incredibly difficult, especially after two years of living so close to our families.  Of my family I am the only one who married someone not from the Blackfoot area.  I am also the only one who has lived outside Idaho (besides missions & military service).  So I guess I am meant to be the wanderer of the family.  We are starting to enjoy Vegas more but hopefully we'll be able to find a way to move closer to our families sometime in the not to distant future.

We'd been home from the wedding only a couple weeks when we got a very unexpected call.  My Grandma Gregersen who we'd seen just weeks before at the wedding and looked like her normal cheerful self was now in the hospital and not expected to last much longer.  She went into the hospital on Thursday and died the following Tuesday.  It was very difficult to be so far away at a time when so many of the family were sad and mourning.  At a time when we were really not happy to be in Vegas the passing of my Grandma seemed to be just one more thing that added to a miserable situation we didn't really want to be in.  I was really questioning why we had ended up in Las Vegas and what purpose the Lord had for us here.  We had been praying and fasting and going to the temple seeking comfort to help us feel better about being in Vegas and guidance as to what we where here for.  The night Grandma passed away I was about as low as I've ever been and I offered up one of the most sincere and heartfelt prayers I've ever said.  I still don't know why we are in Vegas but while the passing of Grandma was difficult and we will miss her I now look at it as a gift.  Her funeral was the weekend before Labor Day weekend.  We had thought about going to Idaho for Labor day because I was scheduled to have 5 days off for the holiday.  My work offers a week of funeral leave so with the timing of the funeral I was able to use one day of vacation and get 12 days off from work.  I don't know if it had anything to do with me but I've heard there are no coincidences but at a time when I felt the weakest my dear Grandmother made it possible for us to be in Idaho and Utah with our families for nearly two weeks.  It still wasn't easy to leave at the end of the two weeks but I've felt better about being here than I ever have.

The time we spent in Idaho and Utah was so great.  Oh how I miss nights that actually cool off and how I miss waking up in the morning and having it be so brisk. We spent the first weekend in Hyde Park so we could go back and forth to Preston for the viewing and funeral.  The funeral was so good.  I'll write about it in a separate post.  The first Sunday we were able to go to the farwell of Heidi's cousin and spend time with her family.  Monday we went and test drove cars and ended up getting a new to us 06 Nissan Altima.  After driving Old Pukey (my stratus) for the past 10 years the Altima feels like a real race car.  I inherited Heidi's old car and she gets the Altima.  The mailbu is a big step up from Old Pukey.  Hopefully these will be good cars and will last a long time.  We went up to Idaho on Tuesday and I spent the next couple days helping dad with grain harvest.  We were supposed to go camping but the weather wasn't great and there are tons of fires in Idaho and not everyone could go.  We ended up just hanging out with the family and going to the fair which was pretty fun.  We went back to Monday afternoon and the next day drove back to Vegas.  So now we are back and just trying to get into a routine.  Heidi started a new job today and I was supposed to officially start mine but we got rained out.  Hopefully it won't be a year until the next blog post.