If only!!

So I'm hoping to go on a vacation towards the end of summer with one of my roommates. Currently we're looking for tickets back east. However when I got onto Delta I saw some very attractive deals that would take me to a much more exotic destination. - Well not exotic, but definately amazing destinations! If I were to purchase a ticket by Monday I could travel from SLC to Paris for $469 or $529 for a flight to Tokyo (cost each way mind you) but still for Paris, that would be less than $1000 before taxes, fees and all that additional jazz. I can see me now, standing on the top of the Eiffel tower,

or spending hours in the LOUVRE!or check out Notre Dame

Or just hanging out in the middle of a ton of high rise buildings in Toyko (perhaps with my own camera hanging around my neck like the Asian tourists in Yellowstone).

Well those are going to continue to be figments of my imagination. Here's where the bummer comes in that says no not a good idea. I have a very small window of time for when I can take my vacation. It has to fall between now and August 24. After August 24, Jen the other full time Developmental Specialist will most likely go out on materity leave. Well these tickets unfortunately are for flights after August 29. Probably not the best time to be leaving. Andrea is another D.S. in our building and comes in 2 days a week and Lonna Joy the head tech would still be there, but I know how busy our building gets and it's nice to have at least 2 supervisors there when at all possible. That way one person can be handling the chaos and one person can try to get some work done. (We have well over 60 kids and over 30 adults passing through our building on a typical day.) The days that it's just been me there supervising that many people I honestly feel busy all day, but I don't feel like I got any thing done that I could honestly list out as an accomplishment. So taking a random flight across the glistening oceans to a foreign country, at least at the end of August.. not that wise of an idea.

Not to mention there are a few other things that I am trying to save for, and I think that it would probably cost a lot more to spend a few days in Paris or Tokyo than it would be for us to split a room in a couple locations on the east coast.

So these are the dreams, I'll let you know where I actually end up.

I LOVE MONDAYS!!

Wow! That's a phrase I never thought I'd say! But I do. I love Mondays! especially now that I don't work on them. Tuesday is far from my favorite day of the week now, but someday has to take Monday's old rap, might as well be Tuesday. To everyone reading this blog, it'll probably seem like a pretty boring day, but considering the contrast that I typically have being at

work for 10 hrs and being indoors Monday was great.

Well I'm done with my class to offically become a Developmental Specialist and I've finished the obnoxious assignments that came with it. I have taken my state test and I'm offically certified. And I now sign my paperwork at work "Deanna J. Taylor, BS, DS"

And now that I'm done with that I'm actually able to enjoy my day off again! Without doing homework.

So I was fortunate enough to be able to sleep in until 9:30 on Monday and then I woke up and my roommate Maria and I did Pilates for an hour. I absolutely LOVE pilates!! Well I LOVE how I feel after I do them. (Even if sometimes I have a pain in my abs afterwards, because that means I'm flattening them.)

And then Maria and I decided to take a little walk for lunch. Well a 4-5ish mile walk to and from lunch. We walked from our townhouse on Woodruff just south of Kearney, to Taco Time (Crossing Hitt on foot- which FYI is being chipped and the traffic lights were disabled that day) where we enjoyed a yummy taco salad and a sample of Mexi- Ice- which is FABULOUS!! - I recommend it. So far we've tried the Berry flavor and the Peach flavor both of which are really good.

After our delicious lunch we walked back. Wandering up and down several of the streets between Hitt and Woodruff and looking at some of the fliers for houses for sale in our neighborhood. There are some really nice houses in our neighborhood, and they are really actually pretty affordable at $139,000 for a 4 bedroom 2 bath and remodeled. I've always loved looking at houses and it was a nice relaxing walk.

Afterwards Maria and I decided that we were finally going to get some plants for our outside our place so it's not so drab. Well we got the plants, but didn't realize how much dirt we were going to need. OR really how much we actually ended up with.

So we made a quick trip to Walmart, where we somehow came out with more plants... and we hurried home and dropped them off at our place and quickly drove to Tautphaus park for FHE.

FHE was a lot of fun. We played 500 which was enjoyable, more because of the company playing than out of my enjoyment of throwing a football. :D but it was fun and then we went and got a snowcones. Which provided some great refreshment as our small crowd stood around and chatted.

Then after the snowcones we went and watched part of a softball game at Tautphaus again with some people from our branch and then Maria and I came home and we dug right in and started planting our flowers.

Well around 11pm we ran out of pots for our flowers so we made a quick run to WINCO and invested in some more new flowerpots. And raced home to finish planting.

By 1am we finally finished planting and this is the finished result on our front porch-



We also have several by our back door but I haven't taken a photo of them yet. But we got a variety of herbs, peas, and flowers including Gazanias, Marigolds, Geraniums, Salvia, Coleus, and Vincos.
Our townhouse is really starting to look like home for the three of us. And it smells pretty good too!

Lions, and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!!!!

So my roommates and I have made a goal of having a life this summer... imagine that. Well our first adventure was to go to the circus. (About a week ago, I've had trouble getting onto my blog and uploading without losing internet signal). Anyways it was a ton of fun. The circus was held at the State Fair Grounds in the arena there.


My batteries died like less than halfway through so I don't have a whole lot of good pictures to post, but it was still fun and it had all of the classic attributes of a circus- lions, tigers, a bear, people in weird get ups (both as part of the act and the audience), except there were no clowns, kinda strange, but I guess kid friendly. According to my roommate clowns are scary.

But it was a fun night out with the girls. And considering we had buy one get one free tickets, we actually were all able to go for cheaper than what it would have cost to go to a movie at Edwards.

And it appears impossible for my internet connection to upload more than one picture at the moment so please feel free to imagine all of the incredible acts at the circus.

On to a better month- HOPEFULLY!!

So yeah I have some complaints about May.
-First off- have you tried moving while you work 40s+ a week? In addition to working 40 hrs also be doing incredibly stupid and mostly mindnumbing assignments to get another Credential from the state of Idaho that allows you 1st off to sign the paperwork that you complete at work rather than have someone else sign it that has completed this pointless class instigated by the state of Idaho to basically soak up tax dollars and reteach you everything that you learned in college. And to force you to take something that you normally do, but to reflect upon it and think about it and basically just B.S. about the purpose of why you write this document and what the document really means... which honestly I just want to say that I write these documents this way because in order to meet the pointless rules and laws that have been written by legislatures that really have no idea what happens in a DDA I have to include this information and this information. So summed up I write an IPP or a PIP or a Developmental Assessment based off of a SIB-R because basically those are the general hoops that Medicaid (sp? I don't care to find the correct spelling at the moment) and the state Legislator have decided all DDAs need to jump through. And as if that stuff is not annoying enough, every couple of years we'll come through and audit everything that you do and make sure that you've dotted this i and that you've killed about a million trees to get a copy of every single document that's been created in the last year with Client A's name on it. Documents including reports from outside services that will generally only be looked at once and that will be glanced at occasionally throughout the year just long enough to make sure that the date is still current and that you don't need to rerequest. But if you forget to sign this by this date, or you forget to request one of the items or have a current physical for one of your clients we might just will take back a lot of money that we've paid you.- Well there's more to it than that, but general idea....
Sorry back to why I don't miss May at all- so yeah working 40+s hours on salary so I get paid the same whether I work 40 hrs or 50hrs (thankfully it hasn't technically been that bad)
-I'm doing homework again, like 3 or more assignments a week that take a fair amount of time to day and completely blow my days off of work and that unfortunately have caused me to have to refuse a date because I have homework I have to do. How is it I made it through 5 yrs of college without having homework interfer with my dating and now when I should just be working then homework rears it's ugly head? And so you spend the night you could be on a date doing a crap load of homework and you think you have all of the assignments done and you go to submit them by email and your internet doesn't work. So you take your "trusty" jumpdrive to work to email them, and you find out that 2 out of the 3 assignments haven't saved so you spend the day redoing what you've already done!!!

And after the homework is done and I finish reading a lot of dry information on assessments, child development, behavior, data collection, etc, usually 30-60s a week, then I end up sitting through a couple hours of lecture once a week all so that I can take a test this month that will allow me to sign documents at work "Deanna Taylor, BS, DS." it will be worth it, but geeze, what a pain in the butt now!!!

-It's been raining and snowing like more than I care to think about lately. Which completely ruined most of my plans for moving on the days and times I wanted to. And instead I ended up doing random, it's not raining better move some crap, moving sessions.

-I had to finish moving/ cleaning out my old place this weekend and
-I got food poisoning the night before we had to be out. So I'm throwing up all through the night and then the next morning I'm expected to wake up and have a spotless apartment. Well I did it, but I DO NOT RECOMMEND it!!! This also ended up being when I ended up turning down a date to do homework and then having it not save!!

Sorry I've been blowing off a little bit of steam, the last couple of weeks have not been fun. And you add a little bite of relationship drama *see previous posts and you have a month that has been a complete pain in the butt.

JUNE BETTER BE FANTASTIC- the whole opposition in all things- you have to experience the crappy stuff to appreciate the excellent stuff. SO A WHOLE BUNCH OF GOODNESS better be coming my direction!

AHHH!!! Answers PLEASE!!!

So remember how I was debating about whether I wanted to date one of my friends or not. Well I've finally figured out my personal decision and honestly as of late the guy has become annoying. Like there has been an increase in text messages and facebook chatting, but seriously he seriously hasn't made any real effort to see me in person or talk to me verbally since he asked me if I wanted to be serious??? I told him let's go on another date and see where it goes .... you know the first few dates I thought were the hey, you wanna do this and since you happen to be my friend and a girl we'll call it a date, kinda dates, now I needed to kinda look at him from a different perspective ya know????
But my question is- he wants to become serious, and yet we've been within a couple of miles of each other and yet he's made no effort to see me face to face? How can you be serious with someone if you don't actually see each other for a few months? His interest is still there, and he still brings it up, but usually more in asking what I'd like to do and I told him to plan something, *be a man and actually plan the date- I didn't say this but I wanted to. But honestly now months later I'm just not feeling it.

I did actually see him this weekend. He actually helped me move some furniture from my old place to my new place. But there were 2 other guys over helping too, and really I wasn't to focused on any of them of them. And honestly, it kinda felt like a couple of them were both kinda doing the see how masculine and tough I can be. I'm trying to impress you thing. And then afterwards he texted me saying that he was would be there for ANYTHING and ANYTIME- Seriously those words were in caps in the text message.

So how do you break it off (when it's not even really on????) easily with someone you've been friends with forever, but that seems to have taken an intense interest in you of late and yet you still have only seen him in person like once since Thanksgiving? How is it possible for someone to be extremely interested in you, and yet, they still can't get around to planning a date? I honestly don't want to tell him by facebook or texting, because honestly, that would be a lot easier, but I think this guy needs to hear it to his face and I want to give him some pointers to save the next girl some trouble. Should I just basically plan a meeting/ DTR and just be honest with him or put up with the texting/ chatting until he finally gets a date together? And then after that just be honest with him? I'm leaning towards the later idea, but seriously he popped up on Sunday and asked me how church was and what our talks/ lessons were on. And I really didn't want to tell him- they were Repentence and ---- LOVE--- in Sacrament Meeting Class was on "Choose Ye this Day" and Joshua- and I've basically made the choice about him, and then the ultimate no topic with a guy you've decided your not interested in Pres. Uchtdorf's talk from Conference- "Happily Ever After". Those were not topics I wanted to chat about. So I just said Joshua and a talk given by Pres. Uchtdorf. It was the truth... sort of....

So yeah any advise would be helpful!

Small World

So yet again I'm discovering how small a world it is, especially in the church. So today I did a little bit of facebook stalking I guess you could say... I saw that a friend from my first ward up on campus was in a relationship. So I decided to go to the guy's profile to just see what kind of guy she was dating. On his profile I also found a link to his blog. . . Yes I wasn't kidding when I said I was a facebook stalker. I've got to say I am totally impressed by this guy's blog. It appears that he's a convert to the church and served his mission in Ogden, Utah.

He had a posting on there about the movie Blindside and then compared the difference that the family in that movie had made for Micheal Oher. Then he talked about a family that had done a similar thing for him, just by welcoming him into their home and treating him like another member of their family. He had gone to day one of a weekend debate tournament or something for school and had needed a ride home. So he had asked a guy for a ride home. Since they'd be going back to the same place the next day his friend just offered to have him stay overnight and they could ride back the next morning. This was how Jared had got invited into the home of the Hydes'. He got to know the family and then the next school year he ended up having several classes with one of the sons. And he just really got to know this family and he was welcomed like another son.

The funny thing is that Jared, grew up and was introduced to the Church in Memphis, Tennessee. And the family that he was talking about were the Hydes. Well as I read on he ended up talking about the different members of that family and the impact they'd each had on his life and one of the members of that family was Ben Hyde, who strangely enough was the 2nd year teacher who ended up being my cooperating teacher at Jefferson Elementary where I did my practicum.

I just find it really funny that with a guy that I'll probably never meet, that I've actually got at least 2 connections with him. - My friend who's dating him and Ben Hyde. But because I found this guys' blog I was also able to find a link to Ben's blog. Where I got to see pictures of his precious cute little girl! He wife was about 4ish months along when I was helping out in his classroom. And now his baby is like 3ish months?

Also while I was on this guy's blog there were several likes to his favorite youtube videos that had made a difference on his life. And I found this one that I'd seen a couple of times before as well, entitled Small and Simple things. One of my old roommates had shown us this clip for FHE one night and everytime I see it it just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

It just reminds me of what a difference each of us can make in the lives of those around, whether we serve a mission or not. The missionaries ultimately taught this guy the gospel, but they play a small part compared to what happened before or what should happen after the missionaries taught and baptized him.

I hope that I have the opportunity to share the Gospel as a missionary, but if not I know that there are a lot of opportunities to share the Gospel just by example and being a friend. So often I think the friendship aspect is missed and new members are brought into the church and they're name is added to the ward roster solely for the purpose of another tally mark to say look we had this many baptisms.

The Church should not be this way. People should be our friends and welcomed and invited out to things whether or not they are interested in the church. You never know what kind of influence you might have on someone, but you also shouldn't be interested in their friendship just because you want to get them baptized.
And this guy Jared, who's blog I had found, I know that the Hyde family had welcomed him into their home, not because they saw him as a potential convert, but because they truely loved and cared for him as a friend. It was their example I think that taught him more of the precepts of the gospel than any missionary could ever fit into a series of discussions.

I encourage each of us to teach and share the Gospel through friendship and example.

Daring to dream

Why is it so easy to dream when your little, but once you get older, it becomes so much harder, because now they're not wishes you're daring to dream, they're wishes your daring to LIVE!
I've got a good job. It's basically the same salary as a teacher, but when I leave for the day I'm basically done. I don't have to take a pile of assignments home nor do I have to prepare for the next day. In that aspect it's great. And I currently have a fabulous apartment, however I'm moving at the end of the month to a bigger 3 bedroom townhouse in the same "complex" and one of my old roommates is going to be moving in with Hada and I.

But currently I'm trying to figure out what the next step is going to be in my life.

Obviously I hope for marriage to be somewhere on that list, but right now I don't appear to be heading that way. Mr. Right has a lot of hoops to jump through and bars to meet.

Graduate school?? Maybe.... when I get over the last 20ish years of schooling! I need a break... and to figure out what I'd study? Occupational Therapy? Social Work?

Mission! --- This is high up on the list, but need $ and at the moment with my grandpa's health I don't really want to leave at the moment. Not to mention I've at least got to make it though the audit at work before I even consider skipping the state.

Vacation--- YES!!! Hopefully! I've got a couple in the works, but at the moment they seem months if not years away. So until that time I'm going to be going on short day trips like I did last weekend where we drove throughout Central Idaho- hopefully I'll get some pictures up on my next posting.

SO I'm still not sure what dreams I'm daring enough to live... I guess only time will tell. Hopefully all of the above.....