Gone to Texas :)

Enjoy the Utah summer with family and nice temperatures and green mountains. Check.

Pack up and leave our first apartment together. Check.

24 hour drive through red, brown, yellow, and greenish deserts. Check.

Move into our new apartment in Austin. Mostly checked.

Start law school (Stephen). Check

Melt into a puddle of mush due to heat. Mostly checked.

Actually, I think I’m getting used to the heat. I’m remembering now that mostly avoiding and sometimes enduring over 105 degree temperatures is just a part of life. It’s good to remember that instead of vaguely thinking that I must have wandered into somebody’s oven.

I’ll quit complaining about the heat though. We’re really quite enjoying Austin. Stephen’s busy with being a super thorough law student and I’m busy with…well, I’m not actually busy. I did unpack almost all of the boxes last week though. I still haven’t been able to figure out what to do with our 12 boxes of books though. I’m not quite sure where they all came from and I’m completely clueless as to where they all should go. We’ll figure out places for everything though. And I’ll start my job with National Instruments on September 12. Then I really will be busy. I’m pretty excited for that.

Our apartment complex is set on a huge hill with lots of trees and rocks instead of grass. Somehow this lends to kind of wild feel to the place. Stephen said that he feels like we’re staying in a cabin in a National Park when he looks out the window. There's even wildlife in the form of multitudes of squirrels. There’s always a couple squirrels running up and down the tree in front of our door. I think maybe they’re provided for free entertainment. Our apartment itself feels spacious to us after Wymount. We don’t have a ton of furniture so our apartment is still pretty ideal if you’re looking to hold a dance party.

We’re enjoying diversity of the area ( although I mean, really, anywhere is diverse after BYU). Our ward at church has a substantial African population (mostly refugees, I think). The sacrament prayer was in an accent I’ve never heard before. There’s a corner in Relief Society where the French speakers discuss the lesson. Also, I think there’s quite a large Jewish population in our neighborhood. There’s a Jewish school, a large kosher section at the local grocery store, and we saw some Jews on their way to the synagogue on Saturday. At the neighborhood library (a tiny one-room branch), there’s a whole little section completely in Korean. It’s all kind of fun. Stephen also sat on the bus by a pharmacology major who “loves drugs.” She was shocked that Stephen had never smoked marijuana before (and that he believed in any kind of organized religion). Definitely wouldn’t have run into her at BYU

Anyway, we’re excited about our lives and excited to get to know the people around us.