Our House... is a very very very fine house!

So, since there have been many of you that have requested that we post some pictures of our house on here, we have decided that we will. (Probably because we cleaned it up a bit today and made it pretty for the blog.)

Now we'll give you the Grand tour:
(We'll start with the outside and move inside)


These are our Daffodils. They just started blooming outside our front door. They are the first thing you will notice when driving up the front walk.


This is our backyard. It goes all the way back to the fence where the trailers are in the background.


This is our little "tool room" located outside under the carport



This is what you see when you come inside the back door. It's our shoe rack.



Next, we'll take you downstairs. (straight in from the back door.)



This is the first thing you will come to when coming downstairs. It's our bathroom.



The toilet sits back in a little corner. It makes it a little hard to sit down.



Just outside the bathroom is the family room.



Another view of the family room.



Another view of the family room, and a little view of the storage/laundry room.



As you can see: the Storage room.



This is the other half of the storage room. It's very useful to have your own washer and dryer.



back up on the main floor now. Here is our fridge and range.



This is a pretty good picture of the rest of our kitchen. If you look closely, you can see one of our dishwashers (Christy).



Around the corner from the kitchen is another bathroom.



Here's another view of the bathroom. Christy, Her Mom, and I painted the brown part and put up the wallpaper strip. It looks pretty nice now.



This is what is commonly known as the "messy" (or guest) room.



This is another guest room.



Around the corner from the guest rooms and bathroom, connected to the kitchen, is the front room.



This is another view of the Front room.



Yet another view of the front room.


Now going up to the Attic/Master Bedroom.



At the top of the stairs you will find the amazing bookshelves. (All of these books are the Stringhams.)



Here's an okay view of the Attic. If you see the tan parts of the ceiling, that's what we painted. (And yes, that is definitely shag carpet.)



A little closer view of the Attic room.



This is the opposite side of the Attic. Whenever we have a baby, this is probably where we will put a crib. The bookshelf is right behind where I am taking this picture.



This is going to be our savior this summer when the attic starts to really heat up. It's our standup fan.

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So, There you go. You just got the official tour of our house. Talk to you all later!

One Month Anniversary

So, tomorrow will be Christy and I's One month anniversary and I have decided that it is time for us to update the blog. Again, I'm at work, so I will have to make this one a words only blog. (As many of you have requested, we will attempt this weekend to post pictures of our house as well as hopefully some of our basketball team.)

This month has been a pretty eventful one for Christy and I. We've painted two rooms in our house, coached a basketball team to a lower bracket Utah South Valley Championship win, given talks in Sacrament, gotten callings in church, and tried to keep up with school along with trying to pick up a share of involvement in politics at the same time. Today is Friday, and both of us are very happy about this fact.

When we moved into our house we simply thought that we were getting a pretty good deal for newly weds. Since that time we have come to realize that we are more blessed than any set of newly weds we know (except maybe our neighbors who are in almost our exact situation.) Not only do we have a great house that we are getting a great deal on, but the Stringhams (the couple that are renting it to us while they are on their mission) are letting us do whatever we need to it to make it our own while they are away. We've now cleaned it up, fixed up a few things that were unsafe or unsanitary, and our latest decision has been to paint two of the rooms. (My plan is that tomorrow I am going to take some pictures of the house and post them on here so that you all can see.) The rooms we painted were the bathroom and our upstairs bedroom (the bathroom was an ugly blue color and the upstairs was annoying yellow.)

The next fun experience of this month was watching the basketball team we coached go to tournament and win the lower bracket. We've been coaching them since Christmas, and we had no idea how much each of us (hopefully as well as the kids) would grow out of this experience. We entered the season with a group of kids that came from all different backgrounds and ability levels. Neither of us had ever coached before. At the end of the season, as we were driving home from beating our kids rivals and Christy and I couldn't stop talking about how great it was to be able to see each of them grow in some way. Seriously, every kid on that team was able to walk away being just a little bit better at something than they were at the beginning of the season as well as Christy and I doing the same. The final game was a great culmination of everything.

The Bishop didn't want basketball to be the only interesting thing that happened to us this month, so he decided to ask us to give talks in church. We were given the whole 50 minutes for just the two of us to talk and because of daylight savings time we almost missed the meeting completely. We had to talk about Temple Marriage and ended up going over by a couple minutes. Christy seemed a little nervous, but I think that her conviction on the topic moved everyone there to realize how important the subject was for her. I was really proud of her. (My talk was okay, but I probably could have prepared a little more so that it came across as something organized rather than causing people to ask, "what has temple marriage got to do with 'colorblindness'?" The majority of the comments we got from people afterwards were something along the lines of "that really made me think.")

After the meeting, the Bishop told us that we had been called as replacement primary teachers. We will be teaching CTR 5 until the regular teacher gets over having a baby.

The last thing that has caused excitement in our lives this last little while is my new hobby: lobbying for change of public policy. In relation to the stuff I've been studying in school I've recently become involved in the gathering of signatures for the petition that is currently being passed around Utah to have the "school vouchers bill" taken to the ballot for voters to decide. Originally I was very much for the bill realizing that it was causing the private schools to have some accountability taken in their educational practices while at the same time giving parents a choice in where to educate their children, but recently have changed my views in a big way. (Christy has been against the bill from the beginning.)

It troubled me that Christy and I disagreed on this issue, so I continued to follow it as it went through the Legislature and put to the Governor to be signed into law. At the same time that all this was happening, at school I had been studying some literature about 'critical race theory in education' and happened upon a great article written about inequality in school systems as a result of public policy.

In this article it was noted that although Brown vs. Education set the precedent of desegregation of schools, since this court ruling there have been different measures that have been made to continue inequality. One of the things that the article brought up was the idea of school vouchers. The writer of the article brought up the fact that school voucher programs are a newly concocted version of an old racial policy generally labeled "white flight." She argued that because the voucher program does not cover the cost of the entire education of the child being taken from the public school system, the only people who are affected by the bill are the ones who have the financial capital to cover the difference in cost, namely: the upper class (the ones who truly don't need the financial help). In essence, I realized that although the bill professed to promote choice and equality, it was a bill that truly only benefits the rich and privileged.

I was so moved by this realization that I recently volunteered to help gain signatures so that the bill will be taken to the public for a vote. Tomorrow I will be taking petition pamphlets around Spanish Fork to be distributed to Utah PTA presidents to be placed in schools to be signed during SEP conferences scheduled to be held this week. (Christy tells me I get a little to passionate when I come to realizations.)

Anyway, that's our lives in a nutshell. Watch for some posts this weekend. I hope that they don't disappoint.

Finally Married!

Well, we are sitting around the house today feeling pretty sick so we decided we should update the blog and put some pictures in for everyone to see. These are only the pictures that were taken by Johnathan with our digital camera. We haven't gotten the ones back that were taken by Anthony with the better cameras. We've also used Google's Picasa to enhance each of the pictures. Here goes:

This one we think we are going to put on our front room wall in a frame that has white matting and a black frame.

We liked this one with the Dads (we kinda cut everyone else out)

We wish Christy's Mom wouldn't have been left out of this one. It would have been a really great picture.

Some more good ones for the Frontroom wall.

Christy calls this one her "Shaft" husband picture.

I thought this one would be cool to leave the flower in color, but make everything else black and white.

Christy hates this picture.

The Whole Christensen Fam-Damnly.

Another really great one for the front room. I love this picture.

We can't help laughing at this one. What kind of a face am I making?

Another funny one. Christy says even though it is out of my character, she is glad Johnathan brought some sunglasses. It made it fun.

This is just a cute picture. Do you think we're in love?

"Taylor will you please smile?"

"I'm gonna kiss you if you don't smile!"

Finally a good smile!

"How yooou doin'"

nice kissing picture.

"you want us to do what?"

"Do we still have to hold the kissing pose?"

It was my idea to get a picture with the tree. I liked it, everyone else said it was too busy.

This is a really cute one. We don't seem to be squinting, Christy has a beautiful smile, and I don't have a funny look on my face.

Another really cute one.

This is a good one of the temple.

"Wait, let me get the hair out of my face... Oh... too late!"

I think we're in love. (Nice backpack eh...)

Once we cropped out the weird dude that kept talking to me this picture didn't turn out too bad.

Well... there you go.... That's all for now. We'll definitely be adding some more pictures on here. By the way, if any of you got some other good pictures, let us know or send them to us. We'd love to see them.

Thanks again for helping us make this the best day we've ever had. It turned out amazing!

Finally a break from homework

It's been a while since I wrote on here and I decided, since I needed a little bit of a break from school that I would go ahead and post. Between the wedding and school and everything else, life has been pretty crazy for us.

Christy is now pretty much settled into our new house in Spanish Fork and each night until we get married Nan and one of my other brothers or sisters is staying the night with her. (It'll be a good day when I get to be that sleepover buddy.)

The first night that she moved in there I scared her to death telling her how easy it would be to break into the house and she made it my responsibility to change that. We changed all the locks and she found out the next day how secure the house truly is. I got a call about an hour before getting off work from her telling me she got locked out while trying to feed the cat. (just a little side note. I am not very fond of this cat we inherited from the Stringhams... the thing has been way spoiled by it's previous owners) I got a bit of a kick out of my handy work in making the house secure.

Another cool thing we got worked out for our new house is a network setup for our computers. I talked to my supervisor at work who helped me to figure out how to make it so that our two laptops can be connected to the downstairs computer in a network. I was surprised how easy it was to set up (although Christy would disagree with this seeing as how it took me 2 hours). The cool thing is that now that this is set up, we have internet filters on all the computers, all the computers can print to the downstairs printer, we can save files to the downstairs computer and access them from any of our computers, and we have remote access so that if we see a problem with the downstairs computer while we're up in our room we can remote in and take care of it. (Oh yeah, this is all related to my wireless router.)


We also found a cool feature on both of our TV's where it will filter what can be watched according to it's rating (both TV and Movie Rating). It's really useful to keep junk out of our house. Pretty much, between the internet filters and TV filters we feel pretty good about how safe our house is from bad media influences. (Any of you that have new TV's since about 1998, you should check to see if they have the feature. It is really a good feature.) (and for internet filters, I highly recommend www.getk9.com. It is a great program that filters really well and won't take over your computer)

Christy and I have talked about this a lot lately, and we have decided that it is really a good idea for us to keep up on technology to make sure that we are always a step ahead of the game. We feel like we're doing pretty good.

It's funny, I guess as I'm writing this it seems like our talk about how vulnerable our house was really had a significant impact on us. I feel good that we decided to take the precautions to make sure bad stuff can't get in, both physically and spiritually.

We're getting Married ... Earlier than expected!

Okay, so it's time to update this thing again, and again I am at work with no pictures. Life is really good right now.

Last Saturday our course changed a little.

After going to our games in the morning, we made our way up to Salt Lake to sit through a Timeshare meeting so that we could get a free trip to San Diego. We knew that they were salespeople trying to hook us in a contract, but we figured, who knows, at least we'll get a free trip.

After signing our lives away for a contract after three and a half hours of talking with sales people, we left the place with our free trip and 10 years of debt. (To save some time in this story I'm gonna just say that we ended up sending in a buyers right to cancel form on the next Monday cause we decided that this was exactly what the prophet warned against going into debt for.) (I should also add that we may have put some of those of you that follow this blog's names down on their referral list because we thought you might appreciate a free trip, we're now sorry if this might offend you... you can say no without them giving you much of a hassle.)

Anyway, so after coming near making one of the biggest mistakes of our early not-quite-married life, we were on our way to Missie and Justin's to talk about flowers for the reception and we got a call from Mom(Kyle's). After saying that she thought we were crazy for thinking we could do something like that, she asked what Christy and I would think about moving the wedding date up. She said she had seriously been worrying about Christy living in the Stringhams house by herself for 3 months, and us having all that alone time, and being able to still go to the temple in April. She wondered what we would think if we moved the wedding date up.

Well, this wasn't the first time that Christy and I had thought of, and been approached about, moving the date up, so we decided to see what it would take to make it happen. Her parents were of the same opinion as Mine, the only drawback was that they would need for us to pay their airfare. We looked at things and decided that, due to being able to file joint taxes, we should be able to work out helping them get out here. (originally Mom and Dad Christensen had planned on paying for them to come out if it happened early, but because of scheduling and other things we decided we should be the ones picking up the tab.)

We now knew that her parents could come out, so the only approval we needed was that of our Bishop and Stake President. Without going into much detail, this was what we were most worried about. There were some things that I was working out and we weren't sure if the Stake President and Bishop were going to let us go ahead this early.

We were surprised the next day when we met with the Bishop who said he had spoken with the Stake President and they had both agreed that it was in the best interests of everyone involved that this wedding be moved up. We had all waited long enough and it was time we made it eternal.

So, that's our big week... it's been crazy since we made this decision, but our wedding will now be held on February 17th in the Mount Timpanogos Temple at 7:00 pm. Our reception will still be on April 26th and Christy's graduation will still be on the 27th of April.

We are so excited that our Temple Sealing will be so much more meaningful because it will be so simple. All of the Christensens will be together again for the first time since I came home from my mission.... And Christy's Mom, Dad, and younger Sister get to come too!

Update on us.

Okay, so this is a short one without many pictures, but to tell you the truth, we're going to have to update this thing more often without pictures or else we will not be updating it at all. The only time that I find to update it is at work and I never have the new pictures with me when I am here, and Christy can't access it except when she is at home either. By the time we both get home in the evenings we just don't have the energy to get on and update stuff.

Basically life is good. We went up to visit Matt and Meshelle (and have some good pictures from that that we'll try and post when we can) this weekend and that was a lot of fun. It was nice to have a three day weekend after both of us getting back into the swing of things with school.

Wedding preparations are pretty much underway and everything seems to be going pretty smoothly (other than that Christy's Mom pretty much lost her job and is out of work right now making it so that there is a slight chance that they might not make it out here in April). Christy will be moving into our house on the 29th of this month.

Our basketball teams are doing pretty well so far. Lydia had a pretty good last second shot last Saturday in Christy's game and Kyle's team has won both of their last games by a score of 15 or more points.

As for our latest gossip, we have developed a tradition of watching Beauty and the Geek each week on Wednesday nights (by the way, that comment was for Chelle, Mom, and Natalie as I know they will give me a hard time for liking a reality show.)