You never know when someone is paying attention...

Every day, the owner of the company I work for posts a blog, usually centered around personal leadership or something similar.  I pulled up his blog today and the beginning quote was, 

"So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence.  We are so easily offended.  Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way."

-Gordon B. Hinckley

In our company culture, we are encouraged to put a quote at the bottom of our signature on email.  I change mine about quarterly and this is the quote that I currently have on the bottom of my emails.  I usually have something subtly religious or a quote by one of the Church leaders.  Who knew that he would take the time to read my quote on my emails.... just goes to show you that you never know when someone might be paying attention to who you are/what you portray.  

 Being a seminary teacher, I just have to remind us all of Matt 5:14-16   Ye are the light of the world!

Here is his blog if you want to see it for yourself.

Florida Football & 16 Week Bump

It is that time of year again, when Football takes over life in Gainesville, FL.  I have never been in a town where college football is such a religion, a city where if you don't wear orange or blue on the day BEFORE the football game, you are deemed unworthy to live here.  A city where everyone starts tailgating at 8 am and the huge RVs come and park all around campus the night before and party all night (none of which are students).  A city where you have to get to the game at least 3 hours before to even find a remotely close parking spot.  A city where every main road is lined with tailgaters (and I come from a college town where there were not any tailgaters).  A City where 50,000 people come to the city for game-day weekends and the hotels require you to stay at least 3 nights and charge crazy rates.   All of this, and my Husband would not change any of it for the world..... until the last game against Miami.

We sit in the Pharmacy block for the games so we are surrounded by Mike's fellow students.  We got to the game quite early and were enjoying the whole scene.  Well, the game was at 8:oo so everyone had been tailgating and drinking since early that morning.  By the time all the students got to the game, most of them had had WAY too much to drink and were quite drunk and sweaty.  It was not the most delightful of surroundings, but it was the Miami game and Mike would never miss a game if he could.  

To make a long story short, there was about 5 min left in the 2nd quarter and the guy right behind me, who should not have been there, decided to throw up right behind me.  Luckily, I was able to jump out of the way but Mike got some on him.  The smell was horrible and I was quite proud of myself that I did not throw up back on him being pregnant and very queazy with smells.  Needless to say, we left early and missed the whole second half of the game.  The bummer part was that we could have easily sold our tickets for $150 a piece as regular tickets were going for $400 right before the game.  And yes, scalping tickets is legal here.  

So here is a picture of us watching the last of the second quarter under the stadium.  I have never been more grateful for the Word of Wisdom and how much wisdom there really is in it.  Seeing all these drunk students and how horrible they looked just emphasized our resolve to live by the words of modern prophets.  

Here is what it feels like to be in a stadium of 90,000 at the beginning of a game.  Just multiply the sound times 90!  (side note, if you pause on second 11, you can see Mike's happy face)

On a totally separate note, here is a picture that we took last week of my belly at 16 weeks.  The baby is healthy and happy as of our Dr. visit last week.  Our next apt. where we find out what we are having is on October 16th, so we are totally looking forward to that!  

We're Prego!!!!

After a year of trying, we're Pregnant!  We are so excited to be able to bring a little spirit into this world and cannot wait for the day s/he arrives!  I am just over 12 weeks and am due March 3rd.  The baby is super healthy and last week, when we had our second ultrasound, we saw s/he moving all around, doing somersaults and all the arms and legs.  It was quite amazing considering 4 weeks prior all we saw was a little bean.  

This picture is not the best but the baby's head is at the bottom left and one arm is sticking out by it's head, waiving hi to us.  We will be able to find out what we are having in just over a month so we will keep you updated.  We just could not be happier!  

A Very Late 4th Update & 3 Years o'Awesomeness together

Well, it has been a while but I will try and update our lives for the past month.  

First, we had the 4th of July!  We had a couple days o' fun including Fanfare & Fireworks on the 3rd with live Gainesville Band/Orchestra music while the fireworks were going off (think Sandlot) and on the morning of the 4th we had our ward breakfast & games and then had our own version of the Cul-de-sac of fire.

We borrowed a house just off a little lake that had a huge backyard and invited some friends from the ward to party with us.  After some good food & games, we went and did our own little fireworks show which was followed by the neighbors full on huge firework show (big fireworks are not illegal in Florida and they sell them year round).  It was a great 4th as usual.

Oh, and Mike was in charge of the camera so it was a bit sparse.

leisurely enjoying post-dinner activities in the huge backyard

Sitting on a great southern porch in rockers.

The little girls this year loved sparklers a used the bug-repellant candle to light them all night.

This picture is here because while we were watching the neighbors fireworks from the backyard by the lake, we heard some gator calls, but could not see any so we took a picture to make sure that they were not right next to us by looking for their eyes flashing. 

It was also our 3 year anniversary this week so last week we went down to Busch gardens and played there for the day and then went to the Tampa Bay Rays game against the Toronto Bluejays.  It was a good game but what was awesome was that it was 90's night and after the game, MC HAMMER did a concert.  By that time it was getting late so we only stayed for 3 songs to get home by 1am.  All of the songs he did at the beginning were his new stuff, (yes, he has new stuff) but our friends who stayed said that at the end he did some "Can't touch this" and other Hammer classics.  It was a fun and tiring day.  

I am so grateful for my hubby who is my best friend and who I could not picture my life without.  This has been an awesome 3 years and I am so excited to spend the rest of eternity with him. Thanks babe for all that you do and for supporting me at all times.  I love you!

Hello? Is anyone out there? I know that some people seem to peruse these posts with some regularity, so there must be an audience. Therefore, I have decided that it is about time that I made some sort of contribution to this collaborative effort. After all, I am the andmike part of rachandmike. So welcome to my very first blog post, depending on how it goes it might end up being my last one. (I could leave the blogging to the family expert, I love you Rach) So now that I have decided to try my hand at this whole bloggint thing I have to figure out what topic I feel so passionately about that I could write anything of any meaning. After pondering that for some time I realized that blogging isn't about things of deep meaning. (take a look at all the previous posts if you doubt me) In essence Rachel only seems to write about what we do in our boring everyday lives. So I decided to write about one of my new favorite things that I have discovered on the internet. (it is amazing how much there is to look through when you are at work but really have little to nothing to do) So my great discovery is the website http://www.pandora.com/ Now as everone is very aware, I am not the musical on in our house hold, but I think I have stumbled across something that all you music lovers will enjoy. (or maybe I am behind the times and everyone has already discovered this site before I did, in that case kuodos to you) You can enter a song or group that you like and the site will play other songs that have similar music qualities to the songs you like. It is pretty cool I think. Thanks for reading through my ramblings. I hope it brought you some form of enjoyment.