Beginnings of life in Covington

After a not so bad 26 hour drive across the United States, we finally arrived in Covington, Louisiana. Our new home. We split up the drive between 3 days. The first day we made it to Amarillo, TX which was a 13 hour drive. Day 2 we drove to Shreveport, LA which took us 8 hours. And the last day was 5 hours to Covington. (It definitely helps when you make the first day as long as you can. The days after seem easy in comparison!)

I did pretty good on the drive as far as my emotions went. But the hour before we got to Covington, I started getting anxiety, which I mostly expressed in the form of being a "keep your eyes on the road!" sort of backseat driver to Nate. 

I really like Covington. I like the size of it. It's smaller, but still big enough to where you have all the major stores you want. The main thing we don't have is a Costco, but I found out today that there's one across Lake Pontchartrain in Metairie. But there's also a Sam's Club 15 minutes away as well. Our apartment is off of the main road that runs through town but it's tucked back in the trees away from the main road. 

The humidity hasn't been terrible. But when the sun is out on full blast... gahhhh it's bad. If it's overcast, I don't mind it as much. It feels good on my dry Utah skin right now. The lady showing us around a furniture store gave us some advice about the humidity. She told us to "get a drink. Get a few drinks and after that you won't even care." Obviously she didn't know that we don't drink and the only thing we'd be having is water, which I'm pretty sure I would still care about the humidity after drinking water, so.... wasted advice. 

I like our apartment right now as much as I can, seeing that we have a cheap air mattress as our only furniture. Yes, that baby serves as a bed, couch, and seat... stupid thing. We have what we brought in our car. Which was basically vacation essentials for 2 weeks, along with cleaning supplies that our movers wouldn't transport. Oh and my 2 little house plants. They survived the drive! We have no cooking ware. No pots, pans, silverware, baking dishes, cooking utensils... the works. We bought paper goods to use, cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and microwave dinners. It's a blast. 

We bought a hibiscus plant for our little patio and finally some chairs to go out there last night. (We finally have something to sit on other then the floor!) The hibiscus plant is doing pretty well and we already have a couple of blooms! 

This is the view from our apartment patio. I secretly love it. I love that there are no buildings behind us. I just stand out there at night and listen to all of the noises from whatever bugs/creatures/animals are out there. They really are quite loud. Also, no crocodile has been spotted yet. I'm on the lookout. 

Gateway Chalk Art Festival 2014

Chalk art festival number four happened for me this past weekend and I think it was my favorite image that I've done so far. It was also my last chalk art festival before Scott and I will be moving. 

 

There were three of us that worked on the image together as a team. Last year we did a Michael Jackson image but it rained and ruined our work, so we never fully finished it.
But we wanted to do something with a lot of color, something interesting that wouldn't be everywhere else. (Frozen movie characters were immediately thrown off the list of options. Way too popular.)
This was the oil painting I found that we decided to do. 

 Normally I like to prepare for the festivals by sketching out the image on paper using the grid and then when the time gets closer, rough sketching the full size we're going to do on sidewalk. But this was the first time that I never sketched out on paper, on sidewalk or anything before the festival. So I was not feeling great about it. Combine with the absurd amount of things going on in mine and Scott's life the past couple months... means I was at times regretting even signing up for the festival. I just didn't feel like I had enough time for everything and I was getting stressed out! 

 Starting the image was hard. It was hard to figure out how to make an oil painting work with chalk and a sidewalk. We were kicking ourselves in the pants for picking this image at first. But as the hours went by we finally figured out how to make it work.

Meet Amber. She is the messiest chalker I know. :)
 

Meet KaLee. She is a perfectionist and made our image perfect. Amber and I made her do that hard parts that we didn't want to even attempt. (Like the gondalas.... geesh hard.)

 We chalked for 7 hours Friday evening, ending at 9:00 pm. It started to get really windy so we taped a tarp down around our image and called it quits for the night. There is where we ended...

 It ended up only taking us 4 hours to finish the image the next morning. I thought for sure it would take longer but we got rolling along! 

 The image was 8ft tall and 6 ft wide. I have no idea if we won any of the contests. We didn't stay long enough to find out. But that's okay because I never do these for the contests. It's fun being in the environment of all these great chalkers around you, creating beautiful images. You get sucked into your own work and don't realize you've been on the ground as long as you have. I love chalking as a group. My first chalk art I did by myself and it was fun and rewarding, but I couldn't even attempt these larger scale, and more difficult images that we've done as a group. Plus it's just fun to spend so much time with your friends creating something.

Here are some of the other images that were done that I thought were picture worthy!

The End!

Thesis Defeated

Scott sent me this photo yesterday...

YAY!!! He has officially and successfully defended and conquered his thesis for his Masters in Geology! 

I'm a very proud and happy wife.

Yay for freedom and no more school stress!

Woot! Woot!

A Trip To See Our Future

Where: Covington, Louisiana 

Duration: Unknown, somewhere around 3-5 years

Reason: Scott has a job with Chevron!

When: July 22nd, the long drive begins!

 

The flight left Friday evening. We were finally going to see what our next few years of life would look like! By the time we were flying over New Orleans the sun had gone down and all you could see were patches of city lights grouped together. You could see a river running through the city, it's edges lined with lights. As we descended the windows started to get foggy and I knew we were in the right place... humidity.
 

The humidity slaps you across the face over there. It was 10:00 at night when we landed and it was still so hot and wet. I could feel my poor, dry, Utah skin just soaking up the moisture.

 

Our hotel was right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The view was insane looking out at this huge lake with a road going across looking like it leads to nowhere. It takes a half hour to drive across and all the while you feel like you're driving in the middle of the ocean, you can't see any land going towards Covington! It is also the longest continuous bridge over water.

 

I loved driving around Covington. It made me think of the time I visited my cousin in Georgia when I was young. There are so many trees, big trees. And they line the edges of the roads. I liked the feel of Covington. It's more just a small town, away from the tourists and questionable items that you come across in New Orleans.

We started off our morning looking at the two apartments that we had narrowed our search down to. It took less time then I thought and was an easy choice! You turn off the main road, and the street stops at the apartments where they are back and tucked away in the trees. Scott will have at most an eight minute commute to work and there's a sports medicine office two minutes up the street if I can get hired there!

 

After finding our apartment we wanted to go explore New Orleans a little more. We were told that there was some stuff to see and good places to eat in French Quarters so that's where we headed. We found Bourbon Street. (You can't miss it. The smell is a dead give away along with the never ending rows of bars and loud music.) It's a gross street. I'm okay to never walk down it again. 

There were other streets in the French Quarters that weren't as bad. They were even quaint. We found a jazzy band playing out on a bench in the sun, sweating like crazy as they played. There were voodoo shops and lots of artwork displayed around a park. Past the park you can walk up to the Mississippi River and most likely see some steam boats.

 We decided to head back over to Covington for dinner that night. (We had seen enough of New Orleans for the moment and we did not want to get stuck down at the French Quarters at night.) We ate at Morton's Seafood Restaurant. It sits on the edge of Tchefuncte River. (I have no idea how to actually say that...) 

The food was pretty good. We weren't expecting our seafood platter of soft shell crab, shrimp, oysters, and catfish to all be breaded and deep fried, so that was interesting!

 Our flight back home was early the next morning, so it was just a small little trip. But I'm so glad we were able to go out there and see the area and find a place to live. I'm excited to move and I'm glad we're on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. :)

Balance

I feel like this year is an off-blogging sort of year for me. I think I've done about max two posts per month if that. Maybe I feel like there's nothing quite blog worthy to post on here lately. I'm a grown up girl now working about full time. I'm dating someone. I'm taking voice lessons. I'm developing another random hobby of embroidery. (Okay I guess I should blog some pictures of that goodness because it is fantastic.)
But I feel like life has gotten into a rhythm. A rhythm where I am keeping afloat and just riding the wave. A quite rhythm, more to myself and who is around me day-to-day instead of something shouted online. Maybe it's because I want to really experience something, relish deep in it without having to be the person behind the camera making sure every one else can see what fun we're having.
A friend of mine recently returned from her mission and she had a companion that talked about not being able to take all of our photos with us after we die. So she just focused on enjoying the moment while she was there. I think that's a great thing a lot of us need to learn in this new technological world. Sometimes it's hard to be "there", in the moment, because we have something else calling our attention. A text message, email, facebook notification, instagram, snapchat... we get so caught up in everyone else's life. And then it's a war and challenge to make ourselves look so fun, perfect, outgoing and living life online that I sometimes wonder if that's really living. But then again, I love the connection to people. I love reading their blogs, hearing their thoughts, seeing their pictures.
It's the world we live in.
I guess balance is the real answer.

But isn't it to almost everything anyways?

Gateway's Chalk Art Festival

This year I tried out chalking with a team and can I tell you that it's so fun and nice! With all three of us working it still took us eight hours to finish our piece. We didn't finish until 10 pm that night. 

Sadie Dodsen and Amber Johnson were my lovely team members. Can you believe that they've never done chalk art before?! They're amazing and I loved doing this with them!

*Sadie*

*Amber*

Some Things

Beautiful summer is here. I love how late the sun sets and I love the warm weather. Work is always interesting considering the fact that I pick up shifts at five different locations. (AF Hospital, Riverwoods Urgent Care, Utah Valley Sports Medicine Clinic, Provo InstaCare, and American Fork Clinic) Really my schedule just keeps me on my toes.

I'm participating in another chalk art festival this next weekend. I've been stressing quite a bit but things are falling into place and I feel better. Two friends of mine are going to be working with me as well. Our team is called Queens of Chalk and this is the image we're doing...

Very fun yes? I love Alice in Wonderland. I'm stoked! 

I went to Texas for the first time last weekend. Houston, Texas it was, where the humidity is abundant and the traffic even more. But don't worry, I had a fantastic time!

Case in point.

*Galveston*

*Kemah Boardwalk*

Elation

Just wanted to share a song.

Catch Up

I almost completely ignored this poor blog my last semester. So much has happened since I don't even know if I should bring things up to speed. But I'll do a quick recap anyways.

-I got a new calling in my singles ward as the Relief Society President. (Seriously, this had to happen right with my last and most stressful semester?! Good one...)

-I turned 22 in February. 

-I bought a car! A Nissan Sentra 2005 whose name is Richard Parker. 

-I got two new jobs during the last month of my semester. (So stressful but hey, it was a good opportunity.) So I now work at American Fork Hospital, a Sports Medicine Clinic, and Riverwoods Urgent Care.

-I finished all 1500 clinical hours and passed my last bunch of classes. 

-I graduated with a second associates degree. (So lame. Why couldn't it have been a bachelors?)

-I passed my Radiology Technologist boards exam. Do you remember how stressed I was about taking my Limited Practical Tech exam? Well this was way worse. But all is well, I passed.

It's so strange now knowing that when I come home from work I don't have homework or something to study for. I don't have school or tests. My time outside of work is completely my own. I love it. Life is so good right now and I am constantly grateful for it. 

Monday's Music