Our Christmas Prank and Summer news

So, as promised, I will now tell about our prank we played on all of the Madsens (Melissa's Grandparent's and descendants). Every year the Madsens have a Christmas party on the 23 of December. Every year each family gives a presentation. One of her cousins led us all in singing happy birthday to Jesus. It was quite memorable

Anyway, the prank. Before the Mikhail family started the presentation I made the following announcement (with Melissa's encouragement) "Before we get started I would like to announce that Melissa and I are expecting, in May, to live in Toronto!" We had a LOT of thems peoples convinced that Melissa was pregnant. Haha!

So that's the news. We will live in Toronto from late May to late August of 2010. Melissa is looking for work there, we will be living with her grandpa, Zarif Mikhail. Unfortunately, my end date is too close to the start of classes. Melissa will have to go back to Utah without me.

Anywho, I've included some pictures of Toronto to make this post more interesting:

(Sorry this one is small, it's the only way it would fit!)

The Clyde Building

Today has been an interesting day.  Not because the day itself was really all that interesting, but because there was an "accident" in the Clyde building leaving me without a lab, classes, my coat, and my backpack with everything inside it (homework, books, phone, keys, notes, cell phone, any identification I have, lunch, and saddest of all my TI-89  :(  Missing it.)  Anyhow, not having my calculator ends up not being that big of a problem because all my classes tomorrow are in the Clyde building and the Clyde building is closed until 5pm tomorrow.  Yay!

So, I heard lots of different stories (no stories from credible sources, but some info from credible sources).  This is what I currently think must have happened, or in other words, a story I made up from the things I heard.

They've been doing some sort of construction on the first floor (where all my stuff is) and they put a screw into the main electrical duct.  (If that's not something, sorry, I think that's what I heard.  I don't know what an electrical duct is, but the thing I'm actually talking about is the grouping of main wires controlling the electricity.)  So all the power went out.    So, that's my power outage story, I guess.  There must have been a fire involved because the fire alarm went off.  And for sure there was a carbon monoxide leak (the firemen told me that one).

This is how this involves me.  I was working in some labs on the first floor (a machine shop and a room of ovens).  My stuff was all in a room near the machine shop.  I was near the room of ovens.  The power went out.  The emergency lights came on.  I went to look for a flashlight because the oven was on and I thought we should turn it off before leaving.  Then the fire alarm went off.  I went through a quick debate about exiting the near exit or going back to the room to get my stuff.  I figured they would let us back in soon, so I left.

After standing outside for a short time, I went to write a paper.  Part way through writing it, I was gonna go try and grab my stuff.  I ran into a teammate who told me they wouldn't let me in.  So I finished my paper. I went to see how I could get into the Clyde building.  I talked to some firemen that told me about the CO leak and that once they get clearance they would take people into the building to get important items.  I decided to leave and come back later and instead tried to find a way to read my assignment for my class in one hour, but was unable to, so I just didn't (book in backpack deal).  It ended up being fine though.  I went to all my classes, then tried to return to the Clyde building.  It was all locked up so I tried to find someone to give me information.  The only information I could get is that they wouldn't let anyone in.

So I walked to Campus Plaza and hung out with some friends and made them listen to my saga, which I think was fine.  It's really quite humorous.  After a while, one of them received an email that said they would be escorting people from 3-5 to get important things from the Clyde building, and also that all classes in the Clyde building are cancelled tomorrow.  Yay!  No school!  :)  I was super excited and ran up to the Clyde building.  When I got there, I found out that they would take people anywhere except the first floor.  Boo.  They said they couldn't take people there because "that's where the accident happened".  (Which is why I decided the accident was on the first floor.)  They told me to come back in the morning and that I'd probably be able to get myself then, so that's the current plan.

That's my long story of how today was interesting and now, I won't do my homework or go to school tomorrow.  Lovely!  :)

Mooching off other people's news

Here are the upcoming events in chronological order:

Natalie Harker (Ryan Scott's googalie) will be marrying Calvin (insert last name here) in March.

Jamie (Melissa's cousin) will be marrying Sasha (insert last name here) in March.

Nathan Cerny (Ryan Scott's cousin) will be marrying Mackenzie (insert last name here) in April.

Nicole (Melissa's friend from Toronto) will be marrying Jake (insert last name here) in April.

Emma (Melissa's sister) will be marrying James Clark (not James Armstrong who's 4 years old) in May.

Kyoko Mikhail(Melissa's sister-in-law) will have her second baby some time this summer.

That's our other people's news!

p.s. The definition of googalie is this:

One's sibling's spouse's sibling.

So my brother's wife's sister (Natalie Harker) is my googalie.

My siblings and my wife's siblings are googalies to each other.

St. George Trip

Monday (December 28, 2009) Me and Me(lissa) headed to St. George to try and escape the snow and a little bit of the cold temperatures. We'd been planning on it and really thought it sounded like a good idea. So that's what we did.

Again no pictures. Sorry. Our hotel was in Hurricane (still not sure how to pronounce that). We saw a cool monument about how hurricane was founded and how the canal was built. The next day we went in to St. George. At the in-n-out we stopped for food. Coincidence of coincidences, we saw one of my googalie's (Matt Park's sister Robin)!

We visited the Tabernacle. We stood at the same pulpit that Lorenzo Snow (and many others) did. Awesome. We saw Brigham Young's winter home. We did a session in the temple.

The next day (December 30) we took a 4 hour nature walk. It was only supposed to last 1 hour but we didn't study the trail map to figure out that it DOESN'T loop around. We just assumed it did. After 2 hours I called the office of Red Cliffs Desert Reserve and asked them what to do. They said turn around! Ahh! And Melissa had to pee when we started! Wow, what a trooper.

The next day we visited the Parks (Bonnie, Matt/Mateo, Noel, and Amy). We stayed up and welcomed the new year with some pleasant conversation and fun games! Noel didn't want to miss out. I think she lasted almost as long as Me and Me(lissa).

It was great fun!

Love y'all!

Christmas

Hello whoever reads this!  So, we had an awesome Christmas break.  It started with fake Christmas with the Armstrongs.  Sadly, the parents and Salli's family couldn't make it.  It was awesome though.

On fake Christmas Eve we hung out...details are slipping my mind.  I remember that Sam has an awesome army crawl (it's super cute.)  There are lots of other things worth noting also, but I don't have any pictures, so I'm not going to note them because they need pictures.

On Christmas, we had a little gift exchange, played some games, and headed to the church to dance with the Cerny's and the Reeves'.  Fun!  After all the dancing, the children (and Ryan) dressed up for the nativity.  They gave Finn a black cape.  I think he was supposed to be a wise man, but he ran around and screamed, "I'm BATMAN!"  It was hilarious!  Then I made lemon cookies with Malia.  And we had dinner at the Cerny's.  After that we headed to Shelly's house, played a quick game of bang and went home.

The next morning our home teachers came.  Yay!  Our plan for that day was to visit the Salt Lake Temple and Temple Square and then in the early evening go to a reception.  After the reception, we were heading to the Mikhail's house.  Then, before we left, we found out there was supposed to be a long, sleety storm and decided to just go straight to my parent's house instead.

I don't remember what we did that first day there.  The next day was the Madsen Family Christmas Party and it followed it's regular pattern.  One thing that was really fun though is that my grandparents asked Ry and me to man the kids pinata.  They're the ones that like pinatas the most, so that was really fun.  Oh another funny thing we did during the program too to play a joke on my family.  It worked and it was funny.  I'll let Ry write about it though.  :)

Then on Christmas Eve, Matt and Kyoko joined us and they brought Kei!  He crawls and stands now.  He was being super cute and interactive.  He hasn't been that way before, so it was super fun.  We did typical Christmas Eve stuff.  Ate dinner, played games, opened some presents, sat around and talked, read Luke 2, at one point we decided to sing songs...so my dad started singing Edelweiss, then another non-Christmas song, then another.  So Ry started singing an Anti-Non-Christmas song...I don't remember which one.

On Christmas we (My sisters, Ry, and I) got up early and made breakfast, like we always do.  Then everyone got up and we ate and then opened presents.  After Kei's nap we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house.  We reminisced on how weird it is to not head to Great Grandma's afterward.  After that, we went back to the Mikhails and hung out.

We hung out until Sunday and then headed back to Provo.  And that was it for Christmas!  Fun!