Oh the Weather....

has changed!

The warm weather lasted until the end of October for us this year, it wasn't until this last week that I started wearing warmer clothing. I love fall, and sadly enough it only lasted for a week until the snow came.

I was coming home from work last night (midnight) and had to brush two inches of snow from off my car. We woke up this morning to having to brush another two more inches from off of it. We got four inches of snow last night! Although I am sad that fall is now past, bring on the snow, the hot chocolate, blankets and Christmas lights!

Best Month of My Life!

Today being November 8 means that Jamison and I have been married for one month as of today! I cannot believe that we have been married for so long for what it seems to be such a short amount of time! Time sure flies by quickly when in love! Our wedding day was beautiful, {much wedding details and pictures to come when they get here!}and nothing could have made it better for us.

This was us exiting out of the Mount Timpanogos temple after we had been sealed for time and for all eternity. We were so happy and in love! 

It has amazed me how much my love for Jamison has grown every day. He is my best friend and is truly the only man that I have ever fallen in love with. We are perfect for each other. 

I love you Jamison!

Evidence Of a Weekend Well Used!

Since I am now working at Convergys, (I start my third week of work today), I am required to work Monday-Friday from 3:30-midnight. Since I cannot be with Jamison as much as I would like to, I am then to make sure that I make my weekends worth it! 

To start off our weekend, Jamison and I decided to do some organizing and get our life put together inside our house. It started off by us cleaning out our second bedroom, it was so cluttered that we could barely walk inside of the room. Now there are only 5 items on our floor, everything else we were able to organize in the closet! It was so nice to have that room now cleaned out!

After all of the cleaning, Jamison and I headed to the store to pick up ingredients for the salad for that evening's party we were going to, pick up some last minute articles of clothing for Jamison's costume, and to make a decision on night stands and table lamps! I have taken forever in deciding what I wanted, and I finally broke down and made my decision! {Jamison gave me permission to decorate the apartment how I want it!} Now if only buying curtains and wall art could be that easy! I have yet to find the curtains and wall art that I want!

After a couple hours of tools and random wood parts, Jamison and I built both of the night stands and put together our lamp set. I absolutely love what it did for our room!

Now for some curtains and some wall art! At the rate I am going, it could potentially take another month for that decision!

Then for the evening, Jamison and I were invited to a "How to Host a Murder" party by one of my work friends, Aimee. There were four couples in total, and one person from each couple was part of my training class that I am in at Convergys. The party was so much fun, and it required us to dress up as our character. The game is similar to the board game Clue, but that instead for this game, we act out as a character and try to solve the murder mystery while eating dinner. {No one ate my salad except Jamison and I, it was delicious! I tried to not be offended by it, oh well.} My character's name was Scoop, a journalist, and Jamison's character's name was Billy, a baseball player. The story was based off in the 1920's and the person murdered was Hal Cappone. We had to figure out which one of us had murdered him, it was so tricky! I thought I had for sure murdered Hal Cappone, but it turned out at the very end that I was in fact, not the killer. However, Billy (Jamison's character) did make an attempt to kill him by throwing a bomb in his car but Cappone had escaped. I had never played this before, so it was really neat to try something I had never done before and make new friends while I was at it!

This is Jamison and I in our costumes about to head over to our party! I think Jamison looks so good in hats, don't you think?! 

After such a great weekend, and the new time change, Jamison and I were exhausted! Now I have another week's worth of brainstorming for good ideas for us this next weekend!

Cookies!

My parents had given Jamison and I (really to me) a Kitchen Aid mixer for our wedding gift! I was so excited that I got one that I decided to try it out and make cookies in it for the first time!

This is my Kitchen Aid, I am not one of those weirdos who call their appliances real names such as 'Frank'. So...this is my Kitchen Aid mixer. It only looks dirty because I had finished mixing my yummy cookies that I was making!

I had decided to make my favorite homemade cookies, Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Pudding cookies! The cookie dough, to me, is the best part. By the time the warm cookies are out of the oven I have no interest in eating them because I had eaten already so much cookie dough! This cookie dough is the best!

And because I have an artistic husband who is in a photography class, I have the added pressure {inflicted by myself} of taking impressive pictures with different angles. Plus, Jamison’s camera is really fun to take pictures with because of all of the cool things you can do on it. So this is me with artistic pictures.

And this here is the final product! Perfectly baked cookies! I was so proud that I didn’t burn one batch of cookies and it made 4 dozen! My secret is to take out my cookies 1 minute earlier then what the recipe calls for, only because the cookies still cook on the pan after it is taken out of the oven. Because I had so many leftover cookies, I delivered some to Lindsay and Rob (my sibling in-laws) and my next door neighbors Kasey and Megan. Trust me, Jamison and I didn't need 4 dozen cookies! I would say that I gave some to Jamison, but he inhaled them so quickly that without these pictures that I had taken there would have been no evidence that I had made cookies at all!


My first experience with my Kitchen Aid? Success!

Pumpkin Carving Madness

Jamison gets a little carried away when it is time to carve pumpkins, he gets out his ceramic tools so he can start carving away at his pumpkin. It honestly makes me laugh, he has to get the perfect pumpkin (which ends up costing us the most, his pumpkin was $6!) and although his sculpting is amazing it takes him several hours to complete his 'vision'. 

Jamison had the opportunity to carve two pumpkins this year, one pumpkin was at our ward party {which Jamison had to go by himself because I had to work} and the other pumpkin was at our apartment that we started carving at midnight {that is when I get off work}. 

This is the pumpkin that he had carved from our ward party, it was so impressive that Jamison even won us an award! 

I like taking some credit for this pumpkin because it says, "The Garners", which totally means the both of us! I did go over during one of my breaks at work where I enjoyed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Jamison had made me for dinner, so I participated...just a little bit! It makes me laugh the award was originally for "A for effort" pumpkin....I thought it would be an appropriate award for what I had carved at midnight later on during the week! I didn't even bother taking a picture of it, it was that awful, definitely a "for effort" pumpkin!

And yes, this picture was taken at midnight! We were so tired! I had finished my pumpkin within an hour and fell asleep on the couch while waiting for Jamison to finish carving his pumpkin. He didn't finish his pumpkin until 2:30 in the morning! {We carved our pumpkins at night because our schedules conflict with each other, when he is at school I am at home, and when I go to work at 3:30 he then is able to come home.} If we wanted to carve pumpkins together it was going to have to be late at night! 

His pumpkin without being lit up....

What is so neat is that Jamison just starts hacking at it and designs what he is going to do while he is doing it. This is not based off of any pictures that he is looking at or a stencil. He crafted and created this as he went!

Jamison is so good at this, although it can tend be to time consuming and kind of costly... He makes it worth it!

Happy Halloween!

Halloween was on Sunday this year, so being Utah we celebrated Halloween on Saturday! Since I don't work on the weekends, Jamison and I went up north for three reasons.

1.  To visit Grandma Gunn in the hospital. Grandma had suffered from a stroke over a week ago and it has left her paralyzed on the left side of her body. She had had surgery to try and remove the clot from her neck, but it was so large that they have been unable to remove it. Because of the large clot in her neck, it made it so that she had two other clots in her brain so now she can't grasp on to things and she has lost her muscle memory. {She can barely move her head without it hurting her}.  I didn't want to regret not being able to see my Grandma during this time if for some reason she wasn't to recover. With a lot of prayers, priesthood blessings, and family support, we hope for a quick and healthy recovery soon!

2. To buy new winter clothing. Jamison, by accident, grabbed the wrong bag of winter clothing that we took to the DI a couple of weeks ago. I went to go put on one of my favorite sweaters on a cold day {I love sweaters!} and the bag that should have contained my favorite clothing contained all of the clothing that should have gone to D.I. meaning that the bag we left at D.I. a few weeks ago had all of my beautiful sweaters! Jamison feels really awful about it, and he doesn't want me to bring this up ever again, but this is my journal and I guess this will be one of those things where I look back on it and laugh...instead of crying! So with my winter clothing lacking, I told him that we needed to go up north so that I won't freeze this winter season! 

3. Lastly, to spend some time with my family on Halloween. This is the first Halloween that my family wasn't doing something crazy at our house, namely dancing to Thriller like we usually did. So instead, we decided to go up to Aaron and Nanna's house and watch Jade and Dahlie go trick or treating. We had all forgotten what it was like to go trick or treating and to pass out candy, it was foreign to us! But we had so much fun, Jade and Dahlie were adorable!  

Dahlie was a Ladybug! I was lucky to be able to carry her from house to house for quite some time! It was so much fun!

Jade was a tiger! This was the best picture we could get of her, she was playing diva and didn't want her picture taken. Jade was so funny to watch, she would say Rawwwr! at least a million times and then if she wanted to scare us she would go Boo! She was adorable!

And my hair is a mess only because it was so stinking windy outside! I promise, my hair always looks better than this!

 I added this picture only because Dahlie's smile is so adorable. She smiles with her entire body!

I hope you all had a wonderful Halloween, I know I did!

If I Could Go Back...

I was cleaning out my 'random' documents file and found an old journal entry that I had written before I left Maryland, so I thought I would post it! This is how I felt before I came back to Utah!

"Wow! I cannot believe that in three days I'll be making the drive back to Utah. Surprisingly enough the feelings of going home are very,very bittersweet.

Don't get me wrong, I am very excited to be back and to be with my family and get this wedding completely planned but there are a lot of things that I'm not excited about being back to, such as being back in the mixture of millions of members, construction, dealing with cut throat drivers, and everything being cookie cutter and nothing all to extraordinary. I will miss the diversity of living in Maryland, the humidity, the brick row homes, beautiful old stone churches on every corner, green trees, the diverse people, amazing thunderstorms, the fatty foods from Bubba's and Season's Pizza, and being in a centralized area to so many awesome places!

I feel like living out here that I have grown up a ton, I have been sheltered for so long in Utah that I didn't understand that such cultures as in Maryland could be so different from the one that I lived in Utah. In Utah, everyone seems to be a member of the church, out in Maryland you'd be lucky to find a member randomly in a store. In Maryland, I strived to be able to feel the spirit and was able to recognize what things brought the spirit into my life; where back at home it was hard to differentiate because the spirit was always felt. I am excited to go to church out here and to socialize with individuals who have the same beliefs as I do because every day of the week being able to do that is a rare treat.

I will miss Maryland!"

Looking back on my experiences and photos, Maryland really is a beautiful state. When there are no mountains and just miles of plains, they produce some of the most beautiful sunsets. 

This was on top of the parking garage of where we lived, {we lived in the building pictured}. I will definetely miss the spectacular sunsets!

This picture was just taken a few minutes prior to the first picture. Beautiful!

This is a video of the sunset, I included this here only because we took video of the area near where we lived. The Catholic church I saw every day, the cemetery, the Towson Mall and where I lived.{Disregard some of Jamison's comments on the video...please!}. This is a neat video to always have to remember where I have been and what I saw during this summer.

Blog Overload

I am very excited to report that I now have the free time to start blogging! Now that the wedding is over and that I am now nestled into my new home with my husband that I can now blog! With that being said, there will be a lot of photos, and old news that I would like to catch up on since this is my form of a journal.

Please enjoy while I fill you in on both my old and new adventures. {Don't worry, there will be wedding pictures coming soon!}

Hugs, Kisses, and a new name change,

                Auburn Garner

24?!

Yes! 24 is correct! Jamison, (my husband) just turned 24 yesterday! 

{I tease him that he is now a quarter of a century, it didn't make him feel better that I am only a fifth of a century!} 

Our parents would groan if they knew that we thought that we were old! 

Because it is our first birthday as a newlywed couple, I had a lot of pressure, mostly self inflicted pressure...only because I had to make it a good one without breaking our 'hardly there' budget. So...with a couple tricks up my sleeves I had to get crafty with the things I had. Starting with my birthday sign, made out of markers and index cards...{hey...I don't know where anything is at still....sue me!} And with presents of some of Jamison's favorite treats.....I did my best to make his birthday his best one yet!

His first present happened to be in the fridge, so Wednesday afternoon after I had gone shopping he was banned from the refrigerator. He was a good sport for the most part, I think I starved him just a little bit though since he didn't have access to the fridge though...oh well! The stuff you sacrifice when it's your birthday! I sound mean...but to him, the present outweighed the sacrifice by far!

I got Jamison a gallon of Whole Milk, his absolute favorite! I had told him that when we got married that we were going to have skim milk throughout our marriage because whole milk is disgusting....hence the milk carton to the right...but for his birthday I thought I would let this rule slide for the day. 

Before we went to lunch at Panda Express, his favorite place to go eat, I let him open up one of his gifts. Once again, it is another of one of his favorite treats!

After a great lunch, Jamison had to go to his Ceramics class for a couple hours....so while he went to class Cierra, Paige and I tackled a dessert recipe that I had randomly found online that had potential of being liked by him. Since Jamison loves peanut butter in about anything, there was a really good chance that he would ike it, and besides that...this recipe had enough peanut butter to make anyone happy...that or to go into cardiac arrest!

The original recipe called for it to be in a loaf pan, but since I didn't have the correct size of pans for about anything, I thought cupcake sized bites would be better. And it was better! The dessert is so rich that it would have been difficult to have eaten anything more than just a cupcake sized bite!

It turns out that the little cookie on top looks like a tombstone, to make Jamison feel better about himself I told him that it was in Halloween 'spirit', he didn't seem to believe me..but I don't think he cared either way!

Before dinner and the dessert party, I allowed Jamison to open up the last of his gifts. He once again loved all of his gifts! {I was so embarrassed by how cheap the gifts were, but thankfully he loved how simple they were!} Jamison is so great!

 I had invited his family and my sisters to come to dessert at 7 o'clock at our house so he could blow out candles etc. Since Mama Garner is an excellent chef/cook/baker I was really nervous that my recipe I was trying out was going to fail. I was so worried that no one was going to like it that Mama Garner brought ice cream just in case it really did suck! So although I had a back up dessert, I still was nervous! Bless their hearts, the Garner family are such nice people that even if they didn't like it they still would have been nice enough to say that they had liked it. Luckily, everyone loved the dessert, including Jamison, and it was a great success!

This is the birthday man with his yummy leftovers! Judging by his face, he loved it! Success!

After a couple of rousing games of Crooked Rook with his family we watched a couple of episodes of Psych and called it early for bed! It had been a busy and eventful day and we were both tired from the festivities. 

After reading scriptures for the night Jamison told me that he had had a wonderful birthday, and that he couldn't have been any happier! It makes me so happy that my husband enjoyed his day, Happy Birthday Jamison!  

4th of July!

Amazing things happened when Hudson, Jamison and I went to Washington DC for the 4th of July, one amazing thing being proposed to by my wonderful now fiancé! I just thought for this post that I would let all the pictures do the talking, and in some areas make my comments be known. Enjoy!

If wanting to go to DC on the 4th, forget about driving!! The best way to go is by the Metro, for $9 you get an all day pass on the Metro and can travel into DC without having to worry about taking a car and finding parking spots! The only problem? Millions of other people too are taking the Metro too, it literally is the only form of transportation out here for the 4th that can get everyone in and out of the city in the least amount of havoc possible! 

And riding on the Metro is actually a lot of fun, it moves pretty quickly and when times start to get boring the individuals riding on the Metro are quite entertaining to watch. The Rail Operator was hilarious to listen to as well, you could tell he was enjoying working on a holiday so that I could go out and have fun....

When we finally got off the Metro we headed toward the Washington Monument (hard to miss!) so Hudson could take a look around. Hudson didn't have any pictures of the area so we made sure to include him in a lot of photos during this trip. I personally love this picture, it seems to fit Hudson and I's relationship to the T. We aren't touching, the look of harassment clearly shown on our faces. Hudson is my favorite.

The Washington Monument is huge!!

This is Hudson trying his best to look bad "A" protecting America. Strangely I don't feel very safe...

This is at the World War II Memorial, it was so bloody hot and humid that we had no choice but to put our feet in the water like everyone else. 

It was a beautiful, extremely hot day, notice that my hair is no longer long but up in a pony tail?!

In front of the Lincoln Memorial, that paper I was holding was smashed into smithereens by the end of the day. It was the thing thing a street vendor could have given me, a homemade fan!

The Lincoln Memorial is very neat, and in a room that is quite suffocating with all of the tourists and humidity!

Fail....

Much more realistic!

Jamison took this picture from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it was so hot and only 3 PM that we decided to take a long rest on the stairs and to just hang out and snack on some food that I had brought. In the meantime we took pointless pictures that nonetheless were part of the experience!

After several hours on the stairs and a quick bite of food from a very expensive vendor...we headed back towards the monument to save us a spot for the fireworks later that evening. Who knew that it would take over an hour to walk to the other side, but it sure was worth it! 

These were our seats, right in front of the Washington Monument facing the Lincoln Memorial, with a couple of outstretched blankets and some friends from the office we all just hanged out and relaxed listening to the Navy Band perform!

I have this picture to show you the before and after stages of how many people filled into this field, so this is the picture earlier in the afternoon....

and this is right as the sun was setting (obviously!) It was crazy to see how many people could fit onto this field!

This shot was a glimpse to try and see how many people were on the stairs of the Lincoln, the lights happened to be turning on while we took this shot. The fireworks were getting closer!!

The fireworks were spectacular, and not too long into the show Jamison got on one knee and proposed! 

This was taken as we were racing back to the Metro station to beat the crowd of millions of people. We were lucky that only several thousand people beat us to the station and not the millions! There were so many squished into the square that it was crazy, and incredibly humid. It was so hot it was nearly suffocating, to be more disgusting I knew I was breathing at least several hundred people's sweat....even more gross I was covered in it! Yuck!

It was crazy, but definitely worth the experience. I would suggest everyone to come out to DC on the 4th of July. Nothing like spending the nation's birthday at the nation's capital!