What the...?

So tonight, what might be the strangest (and not a good strange) experience of my life happened.
It started out well enough. I told Kenny that because he got a scholarship, he could spend 800 bucks on a new speaker system for our entertainment center. Such things don't matter to me at all, but he's wanted one for a while. So he went and bought a nice one and was setting it up while I played guitar and sang (I may or may not have been in only my underwear, fresh out of the bathtub). Then we heard a knock on the door. I figured it was landlady Lori coming to ask about Ikea (she's buying us new counters for the kitchen, yay!). Anyways, I retreat to the back half of the house to get decent. When I come back to the front, Kenny is outside talking to someone with the door closed (and Lucy was whining like mad that her daddy had stepped out without her). So I poke my head out the door to say hi to landlady Lori. But it wasn't lori, it was two cops. Kenny tells me to go back inside. I do, and listen through the door.
Apparently, Kenny answered the door to meet one cop, asking for Kenneth Kunz. He said "that's me" and steps out to see another cop to the side of the door (as if to ambush him if he acted up). So there are two cops.
There are some nice people down the street who live in our ward. I've chatted with the mom on several occasions- they are remodeling their house to accommodate baby number 3 who is coming any day now. Her name is Jenna. I offered to babysit her kids. She later told landlady lori that she thinks we are a lovely couple. Kenny hasn't met them, though they've seen him in sacrament, I'm sure.
Well, they now say (through the cops) that they have security footage of Kenny coming and knocking on their door at all hours of the night on multiple occasions. If Kenny does it again, the cops will take criminal action against him. (!)
I have no words for the absurdity of this. Kenny has never knocked on their door. Hasn't even met them, or been on their property except for to pass by while walking Lucy. Lucy hasn't even pooped on their yard.
The cops haven't seen this footage, but it was hard to convince them that Kenny is innocent and bewildered, to say the least. They advised us to just never go on their property again ("we can't go on their property less than we have, because we never have").
Kenny jokes about how sometimes he sleepwalks and the cops tell him "that would never fly in court"(duh) to which Kenny stops laughing and says "um, no, of course not."
So the cops left with many warnings (including the command not to contact these neighbors in any way) and Kenny and I just stare at each other, dumbfounded. I can't help but laugh at the absurdity, while Kenny has trouble keeping his dinner down.
He calls his dad (who went to law school and is a wise fellow when it comes to such things) and I call my mom (the source of all wisdom) and they're both flabbergasted. Kenny calls the bishop while my dad tells me that unless they have darn convincing evidence, we can take them to court.
The bishop, who is great, by the way, says he'll try and get in touch with them so he can mediate this a bit. Kenny and I go over the fact that Kenny couldn't possibly be leaving at night (even sleepwalking)- he'd wake me up, he'd wake lucy up, not to mention the fact that the cops didn't mention that Kenny was caught walking around in his underwear (which is what he would be wearing in the middle of the night. Heck, we're newlyweds.)
So, Kenny is probably going to shave his beard to make him less mistakable for the mystery man. It's a shame, his beard had just gotten back to it's original fullness (after the mustache-shaving incident.) We have to wait til Sunday for bishop to set up the mediation. In the meantime, Kenny can be arrested if the Fluckigers (yes that's right, their name is "fluckiger") think they caught him again. In the meanwhile, we won't be able to sleep.
Honestly, their are no words to describe just how weird the whole thing is. Poor Kenny.

Birthday!

Today is my birthday! And it's been great. Yesterday we went tubing down the Provo river with 2 married couples. I found a cousin of the whomping willow, the whomping river shrub, and made good friends with it, leaving with it a chunk of my chin. That's ok, it added to the adventure. We had a great time.
For my birthday, I've gotten 4 new books (including Jane Eyre, and Wicked) and 5 new movies. We also got a new board game called "Ticket to Ride", which we played for the first time last week and loved. Kenny bought me roses yesterday morning and treated me like a princess all weekend (sunday birthdays make the whole weekend fun).
Friday we went to a ward swim party and had a good time. Tuesday was my friend Chelsy's bridal shower. Wednesday we went on a ward service project to an LDS handicapped center and pushed around wheelchairs for their "dance". All in all, a very fun week.
Other happy news: I think I may be getting new position at work. A Team Lead in another department has been jokingly offering me a job for a few months now (ever since I tested really well on the product his team supports) and I think I may actually take him up on it. I told him I'm planning on having a baby next summer and moving to Texas and he said "if they can get me just for 6 months, great, or he'd be happy to set me up to work remotely for however long I want. my pay would probably only go up a little, but I'm getting less and less happy with current boss, so it might be a good option.
Anyways, things are great. Gotta go eat my Birthday ham!

The news

The good news:

• We loved Texas, and are oh-so-excited to move down there in a little over a year
• We had a letter waiting for us after our trip: Kenny got a full-ride scholarship for his lasst two semesters at BYU! That's 4000 dollars we can save!
  
• We've seen (and enjoyed) Ratatouille, Surf's Up and Transformers. I'd recommend any of them.
• Kenny has been so sweet- he wants to take me to France (and other parts of Europe) for our 5th anniversary. Yeah, we're planning way in advance. He's even learning French! We bought a $17 French program he practices each evening and all day asks me French words and stuff. It's good for me, too- I'd hate to forget it all.
  
• My company stock is going up, up and away! I get to buy 2000 shares at 11 bucks a piece, and currently could turn around and sell them for 23! Woot!
  
• We went to a Trendwest condo timesharing presentation and nearly bought in- it sounded like a great deal, and we actually could afford it- for now. But in the end, Kenny thought to pray about it, so we did- on the balcony of a trendwest condo in Midvale. We both instantly felt it would be a very bad idea, and promptly left, feeling very glad we didn't do something stupid.
• We bought Stranger Than Fiction and The Prestige, our two favorites movies from the last year. They were both even better than we remembered.
  
• We found a natural water slide in a canyon near our house. We took Lucy so she could go swimming for the first time. The water slide is just a 20-foot chute carved by a stream out of rock- it looked painful but it wasn't. We had a good time.
• We've now been married almost 11 months! Next month is our anniversary!
• Next Sunday is my birthday! Kenny's planning some big surprise, and has already got a bunch of presents. I'm excited.
• Lucy is completely potty-trained and coming along on other training, too.
• The fourth of July was great- we didn't do anything too exciting, but had some friends over for some fireworks.
  

The bad news:

• I'm less and less happy at my job. My new boss has no idea what I've been doing for the last 8 months and uses me as his personal tech support. Oh well. Still infinitely better than Heritage.
• I got my haircut for the first time since last September- it ended up being a little more helmety/frumpy-mormon-mommyish that I would have liked, but it's ok. I've had worse.
• I had a minor flu this last week
• Kenny's superscope for his super Nintendo no longer works. That's the bad news he suggested for me to post on here:).
• We had to buy Lucy an anti-bark collar. She barks nonstop, but only when we're gone, because she missed us. Since we aren't there, we can't train her not to. I'm sick of feeling uneasy about her bothering the whole neighborhood each time we leave. Fortunately, she's only worn it once, with it on the lowest setting, and she seemed to get the idea so we won't need to use it again.

That's all I have for now.

The Texas Trip

I'm going to try blogging every Sunday so I don't go this long between posts in the future. To start with, the Texas trip was great. We got to see Kenny's sister Jeanette and visit her lovely home in Fort Worth. I got to meet her husband, Jeff, at last, too. We look forward to living closer to them in the future.
We also visited Lori, Kevin and my parents. It was great. Let's see... the run-down: first, we got to drive a dark red '07 Ford Mustang while we were there. We paid for renting a dodge neon, but when we got there, we had a very nice cashier who felt bad for us having to pay an extra 10 bucks a day for being under 25. So she gave us a free upgrade to a Ford Mustang. Kenny enjoyed driving it, and we sure felt cool, but I think we'd both be content without ever owning a sports car.
Wednesday night we got to see Kevin and my parents for dinner at their lovely home, then drove to Lori and Sam's, where we stayed. Thursday we took off early for Sea World. Lori gave us some CDs of Harry Potter (books 1-3), so we had something to entertain us while we drove about. Sea World was great fun. We saw a great shark exhibit (Kenny's favorite) and dolphins and penguins and a good dolphin/beluga whale/synchronized swimmer/acrobatics show. Actually,the first thing we did when we got there was hit the water park, since we figured the lines would be better in the morning. We were right- we had virtually no lines the whole time. And just as we hit the last water attraction (the lazy river), a storm broke. Mind you, everyone is in swimsuits, and the rain is hardly cold, but sure enough, every one ran for cover. Kenny and I enjoyed walking in the warm rain.
I stayed in my swimsuit the rest of the day (got to work up a tan/burn somehow) but Kenny got into his dry set of clothes, which backfired when it stormed again in the afternoon. We had actually waited in line for a roller coaster for a half hour or so, and when we were the next to get on the ride, it started pouring and they closed the thing down. Oh well. We caught it later in the day.
So yeah, Sea World was great. After that, we went down the street to Kenny's friends from his mission, the Dahle's. They had a nerdy/cool 6 year old boy (he walked around "force lightning"-ing everyone with his fingers) and an adorable little 4 year old. I had a great time talking to Heather, the mom. It was great.
The next day we drove back to Houston and chilled with Lori. She bought me some birthday clothes (yay) then we went to dinner with the whole Ball gang. Then we when back to Lori's and watched Pan's Labyrinthe.
That's a whole blog post unto itself. The movie came highly recommended from many sources, but we all fervently HATED it. We were expecting a fantasy film- perhaps weird fantasy (Tim Burton style, perhaps), and got a depressing, disturbing war story with some depressing, disturbing horror fantasy on the side. Bleh.
Let's see- Saturday we went to Galveston. The weather wasn't great (apparently we misseda tornado), but the water was warm and it wasn't too crowded. We saw a great school of fish do some acrobatics just a few feet from us in the water. And, of course, I love playing in sand. That evening we visited some of Kenny's high school friends, now engaged and living about a half hour away from my brother Kevin, in a BEAUTIFUL wooded area (appropriately named the Woodlands). We went to Chili's and enjoyed just chilling.
Sunday, we drove to Fort Worth/Dallas to see Kenny's sister. We chilled all of Sunday and got to relax and chat with them, who we hadn't seen since before the wedding. Monday we went to Six Flags. Jeanette has a season pass and managed to get us both in for 25 bucks, total! Of course, when we first entered the park everything was shut down because of a threatening storm, but in the end that was a good thing because there were fewer crowds all day. We had a good time.
Let's see. Tuesday, we went back to Houston. My brother Kevin set us up with one of his ward friends who teaches High School science so we could ask him about teaching in Texas. We got some great info. Then my sister-in-law, Candace, set us up with an appointment with a Realtor so we could check out some houses. He was very helpful and showed us two lovely homes, each fairly new, with 4 bedrooms, beautiful master bathrooms (I'm big on the master bathrooms) and amazing prices- 120,000! We could EASILY afford that. Yay!
Then we flew home. By the way, United airlines sucks. We nearly got to stay the night in Denver. But we did eventually get home and got to see our sweet puppy. It was a great trip!

The great sprinkler explosion of 07

First, let me apologize for the little javascript alert that's been popping up on my blog. I was running some tests for some script I wrote for a client. I didn't realize the code was affecting my blog- it was supposed to just be my own website that no one looks at anymore. Anyways, I got the code to work and can now market it to clients to save them a couple thousand bucks. I'm pretty excited about it.
So, all sorts of excitement around here. First, more new pictures here. Second, my parents sold their house, at long last (after 8 months on the market- apparently no one needs a six bedroom home anymore)! Yay! I'll miss that house, but I'm happy for my parents.
We had some yard fun this week. Kenny has been reshaping the dirt outside our door so we could make a proper lawn out of it.
He had noted the sprinkler system looked fragile so he was working very carefully around it. He needed to move some dirt so he gently dug it out under the sprinkler pipe, which was about half an inch beneath the surface.
I was being lazy, inside, watching TV. All the sudden, Kenny opens the door and screams, "Get me a flathead screwdriver!". Didn't seem like the type of thing to question,s o I start running in circles thinking, "if I were a flathead screwdriver, where would Kenny put me?" I finall find the righgt toolbox and grab 10 screwdrivers or so, hoping that the bunch included the one kenny needed. I open the dor and run out, only to find myself in six inches of water, rapidly heading for my poorly-sealed front door. When Kenny had lightly brushed the pipe to move some dirt, it just burst. Suddenly Kenny had the equivelant of a dirty firehose on his hands, so powerful the two ends of the pipe couldn't be brought together. Mind you, this is all happening at the top of a retaining wall to keep our dirt/house from falling onto our neighbor's lawn.
Fortunately, the oldest daughter was home upstairs and helped me get the water turned off while Kenny wrestled with the hose. The result:

So, we've got it all back under control and finally have a walkway and grass seed down out there. Kenny's also working on a dog house for Lucy. We take her to puppy school each monday night, where she embarrasses us by being the most playful, energetic, hard to control puppy there. She did, however, get "lay down" faster than anyone else. She's a good dog. Kenny has so much patience with her. Me, I just clean up the pee and poop without complaining. Training for motherhood, right?
Anyways, we're preparing for our trip to Houston next wednesday. I'm sure I'll have updates then.

For Shame

Alright, alright. Today I realized that it has been a month since my last blog post. I don't have a great excuse, other than I've been busier at work. In other words I can't justify spending company time blogging. Then I get home, and want to be anywhere but in front of a computer.
Anyways, news from may- this is the recap I sent my sister-in-law for the monthly family newsletter:
-We went to Hogle Zoo for the first time and really enjoyed it.
-Lucy hurt her paw really bad at Kenny's work and limped and cried for about a week. She's all better now.
-We discovered that Lucy loves to go down playground slides and have been exploring the parks around our new home looking for bigger slides for her.
-Kenny's birthday went great. We threw a big party- 18 or so people came, and at any moment we had probably 6 video games going on various TVs. It was a lot of fun.
-Kenny got a pair of prints from his favorite artist, Brom, for his birthday. They are currently getting custom frames and we have eagerly cleared space on our wall to display them proudly.
-Kenny sold his vespa! While it will be sorely missed, we just weren't using it anymore and Kenny got a great price for it. We were able to spend some of the extra money on some new games and clothes for both of us.
-We're enjoying teaching the 6 year-olds in primary- they love to see Kenny's drawings and sit on my lap.

I'll just leave it at that for now. I'll try to be better about mor blogging, but don't hold your breath:).

Be careful what you wish for

Last week we got a call that the Bishop wanted to meet with us- surprising, considering he had met with us last Sunday as a welcome-to-the-ward meeting. So we figured, yay! we get callings. We mused all week about what callings we might get. I asked Kenny "How would you feel about a primary calling?"
"Are you kidding?" he says, "That would rock!!!"
Yesterday morning we got set apart to be Primary Teachers for the Valiant 10 class. :). We're quite happy about it, and to be in a ward that's so on top of things.
Other happy news-
Kenny looks quite handsome with his beard. And his usually-upset neck skin is happy and relaxed, which he is quite excited about. I just have to get used to the pokey kisses.
We saw the opening showing of spiderman 3 on Thursday night (technically Friday morning). It was good- definitely on par with the other spiderman films.
Saturday, we started our new role-playing group. I get to be a superhero with mind tricks and invisibility and stuff. Kenny is the group healer. I've never done an RPG before, so this is a whole new level of nerdiness. We had a lot of fun, though. However, it was the longest that Lucy had ever been left home alone- 7 hours. The poor thing. She had made quite a horrifically stinky mess of the bathroom and then walked all over and tracked it over her whole portion of the house (bathroom, laundryroom and hallway, fortunately all tiled.) So I had Kenny keep the now very-excited-to-see-us puppy entertained while I cleaned up (gag) and mopped the whole back of the house. Kenny was sweet and mopped the front half later in the day in preparation for company.
Then, this week, Kenny's parents are coming to town. I'm really excited and yet pretty scared- I'm thrilled whenever I get the chance to be with Kenny's family, as I feel we haven't had much of a chance to connect yet. But at the same time, I'm scared because I know I haven't always met up to expectations. They mean a lot to Kenny and I and I just want them to break whatever barriers there are and be able to act like family. I think the plan is to go out to dinner with Kenny's mom and dad (and little brother) on thursday or friday, then on Sunday we'll go up to Logan to visit the rest of the family in the area- I'm pretty excited about that, because I've already spent time with Margie and Bryce and their families and feel comfortable with them and have always had a good time in the past. Kenny always loves the chance to talk to Bryce about video games, and now we can introduce our puppies- they are pet-cousins, after all.
All in all, lots going on right now, mostly all good things.