June

Last week our future looked like this...

(a black hole)

And now it looks like this...!

Hello Charleston, South Carolina!

Jason accepted a job on Monday to work with Google on a two year fellowship near Charleston, South Carolina. It's really about 30 minutes outside Charleston but hey. We are so excited! They need him down there in a little over two weeks which means we are leaving Boston next week :( Then we get to jump in the madness of finding housing and flying to Utah to get our stuff that's still out there. Talk about going somewhere completely opposite from Cambridge, MA. First of all it's a confederate state and the first state that left the Union which is kind of the exact opposite of here. I'm a history nerd so I pay attention to that kind of stuff. We're excited though to experience the southern hospitality and southern plantations and beaches. Apparently it's easy driving there and a lot more small town but still quaint and historic. We sure will miss walking to work and all the quirks in Cambridge though. We are so excited for the adventure, South Carolina here we come!

Graduation!

Jason officially graduated Harvard! I'm so proud of him. It was much more exciting than my graduation. First we got to go to the mega graduation where they conferred the degrees for all the graduating students. I woke up at 5a to go to the Harvard yard where it was to be held and still got a seat In the back where I couldn't see anything and was in the hot sun. It till was totally worth it. When they presented his school of education for the masters degree I was so happy for him and us! Other graduation festivities included watching him walk and get his degree and hearing Oprah speak which was awesome. We then ordered pizza and had all family over to come celebrate, it was the perfect day.

Memorial Day

Graduation week is here! I can't believe it's already done, but more for that on a later post. With all of the finals and job searching Monday was our first day that we could actually enjoy the fact that he finished school. Jason was dead set on hiking the Birkshire's out in western Mass and so that's exactly what we did. It was very different than a Utah hike. We drove 2 1/2 hours to get to the "mountain" and then in a mile and a half we were at the top and could oversee the whole valley. The hike itself was categorized as strenuous and it definitely got your blood pumping and heart racing if you took the difficult trail but it was a somewhat baby hike for Utah. However it was perfect because we got to the top in little time and had a beautiful view, definitely my kind of hike. It was so wonderful to be out in nature again! I didn't even realize that I had missed it. To top it off when we were driving home we stopped at two of the most beautiful grocery stores I've seen in MA. The first had a whole aisle of gluten free foods right when you walked in, hello happiness! (I've gone gluten free for the past month or so. more on that later) And then Wegman's which is kind of like Harmon's. Too bad we might be moving soon so I didn't get too much.

Kennebunkport

This weekend some friends that we have invited us and a few other couples to go up to Kennebunkport, ME. We all felt like we finally had a weekend that actually felt like a weekend. This was absolutely wonderful for Jason because Jason just finished finals this week (yay!!!!!) and he got back from a trip on Thursday so we needed something to do to celebrate as well as prepare ourselves for life decisions we have to make coming up. Highlights of the trip were sleeping in, playing on the beach, taking a nap, reading in a hammock and excellent conversation. One conversation I was asked if I could transmit three thoughts to the general population what would it be? Well my thoughts are 1. Family is the most important thing we can have in this life; 2.Listen to the stories that we tell ourselves because they make up who we are today. That includes family history, personal history, national history, etc. and 3. Pick your battles. It made for most interesting conversation to hear what everyone would tell the world if they had the chance. What would your three things be?

Sebastion and Michelle. Our excellent gourmet cooks

Alexis and Shay

Tom and Jenny, the excellent couple who put it all together

Rainy day in New England

I absolutely love rainy days here. It's green and beautiful, it smells delicious, and sounds amazing. Also fits really well the theme in our life. When it rains it pours both in good and bad ways and we've had both this week. Exciting things are on the horizon though, at the very least graduation for Jason! And the hope of exciting things after that. Right now Jason is in the thick of finals so wish him luck! I had to help him with a peer today and man it was hard work, all this thinking stuff made me miss school/ I'm also very grateful I'm not in school, it's a love hate relationship. I got to come home and take a nap though Jason wasn't so lucky. He's such a hard worker. Anyway there are my random musings for the day.

Stranger than Fiction

What a week it's been! A couple moments this week I felt like we lived in a movie mostly because that is the only way I could process what was happening. With the bombings on Monday everyone here was a little unnerved. The news went nonstop coverage on the bombs and we all hoped for some answers. Then Friday morning I woke up to a voicemail from my boss with the news that we were under lock down and work and school was cancelled. As happy as I was to have a day off of work it was taxing mentally and I almost wished I had work to do to distract myself. I did rather well at the beginning of the day as nothing really felt real. Then as the day went on there were no answers and it was anybody's guess as to how long we would have to deal with a terrorist threat. On top of that after we fixed dinner I burnt a brownie in the microwave and smoke was everywhere in our kitchen. Luckily we are in an old house and not in a new apt with an over-sensative  smoke detector. I was so worried the alarm was going to go off and it would become a huge issue since we were under lock down. By the time they found the guy I had lost my nerves and felt that at any moment someone would come through the windows and attack us. That was our terrorist day. I'm realizing that there are multiple reasons to have a 72 hour kit-hurricanes, snow storms, loss of power, and terrorist threats.

By Saturday we were so ready for life to get back to normal, which it did, until today. We went to visit our friend Aaron who is in the naval base in Newport, RI. It was so good to see him and such a sunny and beautiful drive. We were driving home on the highway having a nice chat in our car when we go over a moderately sized bump (not unusual here) and then we hear a whoosh when I look in the side view mirror to see our back windshield window flying in the air twisting and Jason saw it crash into a thousand pieces when it hit the road. Stunned, we pulled over to the side of the road. Luckily no one was hurt and so we just drove home with our back window completely taken out. We have no idea what happened. In my inability to cope with things I had to hold back a laugh, I mean how does the back window just completely come off? Who knows but now we have to figure out how to fix it. Just the cherry on top to our terrorist threat, finals, job hunting, and life decisions. Isn't it great. I look back at this week flipping back and forth from tragedy to comedy. Mostly comedy when I think about the window. Oh what a memorable week! (I PROMISE my next post will be happy :) )

There's no place like home

Okay so apparently I'm really bad at updating this blog. Sometimes it just takes so much to write! Also I've been pretty philosophical lately so I apologize if it appears that way in the post. The philosophical me generally comes out when I'm about to fall asleep which frustrates Jason to no end so maybe I've just been really tired the last couple days...Anyway, this last week I went to Utah to visit my brother before he left on his mission and it was wonderful. First of all I'm so proud of my brother who will be serving in Hungary Budapest for the next two years! It was hard to say goodbye to him but ironically I think I will actually hear more from him now that he's gone. I already wrote him his first letter so who's the best sister ever?

As hard as it was to leave Stephen it was even harder to leave Utah. It was a good thing Jason had to stay in Boston for school because otherwise I might not have come back. With Jason being here in Boston it was so weird to fly into Utah. When I landed I felt like I was torn between two places but neither place really claimed me as home anymore. It's so strange to visit Utah instead of fly home to Utah. Before, my family and my home have always coincided and now they are separating and I kind of went to panic mode when I had to fly back to Boston. Utah represents everything comfortable and everything I've ever known. You people who live there have no idea how nice it is to be able to talk to someone while you're driving because driving is easy, or how nice it is to lay on the floor because there's carpet, or how lovely it is to grocery shop because you can park and there are no people. Then of course there's the perks of being close to mom which includes a full fridge of delicious food that I haven't had in forever, my hair dresser that I love, my beloved piano and a treadmill, a sister and mom to shop with, family and friends, basically everything that makes me happy, all in one place except for one. Jason was really close to being outnumbered. He still won though so no worries there. When I flew back to Boston I felt like I was sacrificing everything for what? Doing something hard so I can, oh I don't know, grow into a better person I guess. After being back for a few days I'm definitely climatizing again and things are getting less dramatic. I like it here, I really do. Boston definitely has it perks sometimes you just have to look harder. Like these spring flowers...