Exploring part I

Hello! It's been so very long since I've posted anything. Usually in the past I've said this after not blogging for 2 weeks, but now it's been 2 days shy of 3 months since I've last written anything... oops. I guess life gets in the way a lot of the time. 

Well honestly nothing eventful has happened in our lives. I'm not pregnant, we haven't graduated and won't for a while, and my sister isn't home from her mission yet. Not having anything exciting to write about also contributes to me not blogging. But that all changed when Ky and I took a trip on Friday to... THE HOGLE ZOO!! This is Salt Lake's zoo and it was so much fun. I had been getting restless for a while because I only ever go to 5 places: 

1. School, on BYU campus.
2. Work, on BYU campus.
3. Home, 3 minutes away from BYU campus.
4. Church, at the foot of Wymount and only 2 minutes away from BYU campus.
5. Macey's grocery store, about five blocks west of BYU campus.

Pretty much we like to keep it simple and stay within a 1 mile radius from campus. It's our safe zone apparently. So on Friday we braced ourselves for an adventure into the great beyond. 

We began our day with breakfast at the Awful Waffle. Yeah, that's the actual name of the restaurant. Despite its name, the waffles were DELICIOUS. I regret to inform you that I did not take a picture of them. But we both got the same vanilla based waffle with nutella, strawberries, bananas, delicious sugary sweet syrup, and lots of whipped cream. 

Then we hit the road and made our way to the Hogle Zoo! They gave us a map of the zoo (which Ky used as a route so we could "get our money's worth and see every animal in the zoo") and we started with the primates. Enjoy the montage of animal pictures with an occasional caption: 

This is a Colobus monkey, not a skunk. Don't worry, it fooled me too. 

This is by far our favorite picture of the day. This is the adult male orangutan. He's a handsome fellow. 

If Ky eats all of his fruits and vegetables, he might grow up to be as big as the male orangutan. 

The elephants' watering hole. 

These two little kids were talking to the rhino and saying "hey there little guy!" in the same voice that I'm sure their mom uses to talk to them/their baby sibling. It was so adorable. Especially because this rhino is anything but "little". 

This is a Jedi lemur. Really though, I'm pretty sure that's his scientific name. 

Our presence is recognized. WAY TO BE OREGON. 

The seals and sea lions were near impossible to capture on camera. These two seals were "hugging" each other and fighting almost the entire time we were looking at them. The throngs of children made it difficult to get a good view so we quickly moved on. 

One bear resting on his sister or her brother. I can't really tell what gender they are soooo yeah. 

This is called a Palas cat, but I'm pretty sure this is the wild ancestor of grumpy cat. 

Sloth! I made sure to take lots of pictures for my friend Kristin - a fellow sloth fan. 

These are called Tamarin monkeys. What's interesting about them is that the male is the primary care giver. He only gives his young to his mate when they need to be fed, then he takes them back. 

This is called a Kinkajou, and he (or she) was by far the ugliest animal we saw all day. 

Apparently monkeys love Fisher Price toys as much as babies do. 

We found Timon, but no Pumbaa. 

This is called a Sand cat. I need one as a pet. 

This is the Chuckwalla lizard. In its description, it says "Males will do 'push-ups' to attract a prospective mate, or to assert dominance over an intruding male." Wow, who knew men and lizards had so much in common. 

Ok, so you know when you go to the zoo as a kid, and you press your face up against the glass at every new animal? Then you reason with yourself that as an adult you should probably step back and let the kids crowd the animals and you'll just take pictures from afar. Nope, not Ky. As you can clearly see from the picture, he wanted to be front and center, looking at all of the animals too. He's just a big kid at heart. 

This is the Black footed cat, and it is a very rare animal to find in zoos. Hogle Zoo is one of the only zoos to have them. 

We came back three times just to be able to see the Lynx. Ky was so excited when he (or she) finally came out of the cave. 

Read part 2 for our visit to "This is the Place" and dinner at Red Robin's. 

One Year

On today's date, just one year ago, I married the man of my dreams. It has been the most fun year of my life and I can't wait to see what the next chapter of our life holds for us. 

In the spirit of our anniversary, I thought I'd share some fun facts about Ky. 

Fun Ky Facts:

• He is one of the most intelligent people I know - and due to that fact, he always spouts "useless" facts. Now, in his defense no facts are actually useless, but if I had a dollar for every time he started a sentence with "did you know..." I'd buy us a new car. 
• He doesn't like wearing anything but jeans or nice shorts in public. I can't get him to even go grocery shopping in sweats. 
• He used to think it was weird that I liked to clean hard messes with paper towels (due to the nature of germs and such) but is now converted to the ways of the paper towel. 
• If one could overdose on pasta noodles, he'd be dead by now. 
• He always forgets to put the dryer sheets in the load of laundry, and then I coincidentally get shocked by the car every time I touch it. 
• He does the laundry every week (he is the only one strong enough to make it all the way down to the laundromat without taking 5 breaks en route). 
• He used to think loofahs were unnecessary, but once again, was converted to my ways. 
• He doesn't like it when I wear my hair up. He especially hates buns. 
• He has yet to understand that red and orange don't go together. 

Now that you know Ky on such a personal level, here are some pictures from our magnificent day together! 

I made a book for him titled "Things Mari Says That Makes Ky Laugh". It's full of little sayings that, over the year, have become jokes between the two of us. 

He has a bad habit of touching things after eating honey - without washing his hands first. 

What Ky finds amusing about this one is that I even ask. There are 2 of us living in this apartment, so if I didn't leave them open, who else did it? Obviously I know he did it, I just like him to confess his wrongdoings. 

I'm not sure why I have to ask a 23 yr. old man this question, but I do. 

He doesn't like it when I ask "do you want to..." because he's taken to answering "no I don't want to, but I will do it if you want me to". Well played sir. 

I usually answer "no!" emphatically when I'm being asked to do something I don't want to do. Like go to school every day. 

It's like pulling teeth to get him to cooperate. 

I've grown accustomed to waking up with him there, and I just don't like waking up (unexpectedly) by myself. 

This is a regular suggestion made by yours truly. 

This one will never be resolved. I really don't think you can teach an old dog new tricks. 

When I'm grumpy I usually want to stay grumpy, but Ky tries to cheer me up - like any good husband would do. So he tries to make chokes and I don't feel like pity laughing so this little conversation quickly follows suit. 

Pretty cool right? I was fairly impressed with myself for making this little book, mostly because I'm the least creative person on earth. But this was a success. 

The next 5 photos are our attempts to get a decent picture. Our apartment has TERRIBLE lighting so we moved around and eventually tried going outside. 

Photo bombed by our friend Clay. He tried hard to stay out of the shot, but to no avail. 

Last but not least, my flowers!! This is the first bouquet Ky has ever gotten me, in our 2 years together. It was a special moment. 

THE END. And we'll live happily ever after. 

Hobbies

So this blog post comes more as a "story time" than anything else. No, I won't post pictures or recount some fun thing Ky and I did recently. As you can clearly see from the fact that I haven't posted anything since October 27th, my life is pretty uneventful. 

I just wanted to talk about hobbies. Ky is the youngest of 4 siblings and his closest sibling is 4 years older than him; therefore, for all intents and purposes he might as well have grown up as an only child. Due to this fact, he LOVES his "Ky time". He is a solitary creature for sure. I, on the other hand, have 4 siblings and one of them is a twin sister... needless to say, none of my siblings or I enjoy alone time and we always had someone around to entertain us. As you can imagine it's been an adjustment for us to balance time together and time alone. 

I personally think alone time is a joke. I don't need it now and I don't foresee a time when I will want it. Mothers are probably scoffing and laughing right now and saying "oh you naive fool, you'll definitely want alone time when your kids won't even let you use the bathroom by yourself". This may be true, but for the time being I don't see it happening. So, the other day I was complaining to Ky that he never likes to do things with me and he said "why don't you pick up a hobby?" to which I sat and pondered a long time. 

What falls under the category of hobby? For example, I love to clean. When I'm excessively happy, I clean. When I'm angry, I clean. When I'm bored, I clean. If you follow the pattern you'll notice that I just love to clean. So I proposed this idea to Ky as a hobby of mine to prove to him that I did have a hobby. He claimed it doesn't constitute a hobby since I can't advance in it or improve upon it. 

So using Ky's very closed definition of a hobby, what should I do? I dislike crafting, knitting, sewing, crocheting, etc. so I have no idea what to do. Basically I just want hanging out with Ky to be my hobby because it's the only thing I ever want to do. Maybe I should have a baby, I bet the baby would want to hang out with me. It seems like a pretty valid solution to me. 

IN OTHER NEWS... a few weeks ago I was admitted into the ER for intense abdominal pain. After blood work, sticking an IV in me, and performing a CT scan (or is it CAT? I don't actually know since I don't know what the acronym stands for), 3 hours later we found out I had gastrointestinitis. That means that I contracted a virus and it caused the swelling of both of my intestines. Yes, it was extremely painful therefore I got pain medicine. I felt so great after the pain medicine, I almost literally felt like I was walking on a cloud. Fortunately this was a one week ordeal. Unfortunately it happened the week of Thanksgiving. I only missed one day of class though, which I am grateful for. 

There you go folks. I don't blog for almost 2 months and then I blog a random, scatter-brained post about things you most likely don't care about. But, Ky urged me to make my blog my hobby so I decided to try it out. Perhaps if I officially deem it my hobby I'll write more often. Here's to dreaming.  

October Festivites

October is my favorite month!!! Here are the reasons: 

1. Mom's birthday on the 9th 
2. Dad's birthday on the 22nd 
3. Mine and Alex's birthday TODAY!! (27th) 
4. Fall weather - falling leaves, beautiful colors, perfect temperature, pumpkin flavored things, boots, sweaters, scarves, etc. 
5. Halloween a.k.a lots and lots of candy

This month has been chalk full of midterms and papers, so it's been quite unfortunate that I haven't updated the blog in a bit. But here are a few fun pictures to display the fun we have had, despite school's greatest effort to ruin October for me. 

Last night our ward had a fun Halloween activity, and Ky and I decided to dress up as characters from our favorite show - "Parks and Rec". It's pretty much the greatest show created. Seasons 1-5 are on Netflix... just saying. 

Ky dressed up as his hero, Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman). Below is a picture of Ron, do you see the resemblance? 

(courtesy of www.aoltv.com) 

I was Ron's lovely dinner, steak and eggs. This costume was inspired by our favorite Ron quote: 

"Just give me all the bacon and eggs you have. Wait... wait. I worry what you just heard was: Give me a lot of bacon and eggs. What I said was: Give me all the bacon and eggs you have. Do you understand?" 

Oh Ron. 

Due to the copious amounts of hair spray we had to use to get Ky's hair to cooperate, he woke up with a perfect faux hawk. 

This was my birthday breakfast!! The only thing we were missing was bacon. Delicious, mouth-watering bacon. 

This is a what 21 year old Mariana looks like. Classy and sophisticated (I say this while I currently wear sweat pants on my couch, after eating 2 bowls of ice cream and cake. Some things never change). 

Then Ky got weird and said "photo shoot!!" and started taking lots of pictures. This, my friends, is why I always take pictures at family outings. 

My "quit taking random pictures and just take a normal picture" look. 

My bro-in-law Devin and my BFF Jon came for birthday dinner and cake!! 

He's so cute. I can't stand it. 

My birthday cake - baked in a bundt pan because I don't have a normal cake pan. It tasted really good. Not bragging, just saying. 

This next bit is by far my favorite thing of the night. Ky, Devin, and Jon sang me "las mañanitas" a.k.a the Mexican birthday song. I love these three guys, so much. 

Now, we part ways. Until next time my friends.