Tuesday, Jan 6, 2009

2008 Recap

When we got married, we wanted to be cool like everyone else and document our lives in a we're-a-cute-little-family blog. A year after the fact, we're finally getting our first post up. (If this starts to sound like Seriously So Blessed, please tell me.)

2008 was a great year. Some of the highlights:

We got married! What started off as a pipe dream became a reality with our low-key wedding in Hawaii in January 2008. (This morning, exactly one year since the big day, Elliott rolled over and groggily said, "Uuuhhh. I wish we were in Hawaii." Amen.)

After a couple weeks of adventures on the Big Island during our honeymoon, we returned to real life. After our long life in Provo, we moved up in the world...to Salt Lake, where we got to live with Elliott's grandpa for about six months. I worked at the Center for Change and finished up my last class at BYU while Elliott did programming and web design work while studying for the MCAT.

In April we donned our caps and gowns and, only 7 years after starting, graduated from BYU. I guess it pays to stick around that long and get to know the faculty, because Elliott was chosen to speak at his convocation. It was definitely a proud wife moment.

Elliott was offered a job as a research fellow with the National Institutes of Health, and we were both ready to get out of Utah and head to the east coast. In July I quit my job at the Center (and I won't say I didn't cry), we packed up our stuff into a metal 6'x7'x8' cube, and we moved across the country. Our drive from Salt Lake to Washington DC took ~5 days, broken up by stops to see family, an amusement park, a German colony, and an unbelievable thunderstorm that made us fear for our lives (Elliott said it even put Houston tropical storms to shame). We were kept company by books on CD by David Sedaris and Michael Pollan (as we ate a steady diet of roadtrip food).

When we finally arrived in Maryland, we had 2 days to find an apartment and move in before Elliott started his new job. After a whirlwind morning, we decided on a little one-bedroom apartment in the upstairs of a single-family home. It took a while, but we've fallen in love with our tiny little house--even the sloped ceilings and faux wood paneling (the inspiration for this site design).

After a few weeks of being in Maryland, I found a job in marketing with a trade association, where I sometimes write, sometimes research, and all the time try to figure out what to do in my job.

We moved into a great ward and we both have callings in the youth program. It's refreshing and exciting and sobering to be in a congregation as diverse as ours. We have countless doctors, one of the country's leading economists...and we also have war refugees and people without enough food or clothes.

In our almost six months in the DC area, we've come to like it a lot. We've played tourist downtown and tried out some interesting restaurants. We've also hiked in Shanendoah National Park and white-water rafted on the Gauley in West Virginia. Elliott presented a poster at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Philly and I met him there afterwards for sightseeing and cheesesteaks. We have intended to have even more adventures, but much of the fall and early winter have been dominated by...medical school interviews.

It looks like we're finally out of the woods there, and Elliott's lucky to have acceptances from some great schools. The next big sigh of relief will come when we have a final decision made about where we'll be spending the next four years.

Which reminds me of another recent adventure. Back in November Elliott was en route from Ohio (interview) to New York (interview). Coming around a dark bend in the freeway at 75mph, a deer suddenly materialized in his headlights.

I was in Boston for work when my phone rang and Elliott said, more or less, "The car is totaled. I'm okay. I just hit a deer. My phone's about to die, I've got to go." The second sentence helped, but that's still not a call you ever want to get.

As he claimed, Elliott was okay, the car was not. Elliott drove home in a rental but once we had to give that back, it was no-car-time for us. But both of us take the bus/metro to work every day, so we figured it wouldn't be that bad to hold off on buying a new car. Seeing that where we ended up going to med school (NYC vs. Ohio vs. Houston) would seriously influence our vehicle of choice, we signed up for a zipcar account and bought ourselves some time before we have to make that decision.

For Thanksgiving, Elliott's whole family (minus one sister and brother-in-law) converged on DC. For three days, there were 12 people in our one bedroom apartment. We have one bathroom. We have a microwave-size countertop oven. We have a two burner stove. It was cozy. And it was a lot of fun.

We live almost perfectly central to Elliott's family but couldn't be much less so to mine. Our Christmas trip to Alaska was scheduled to take 17 hours on the way there, 12 on the way back. The trip home was a pretty good estimate. The trip there was off by...almost 24 hours. Most of which was spent in Seattle, waiting for the storm to pass and de-icing fluid to arrive. Nothing says holiday cheer like SeaTac a la hurricane-shelter Superdome. We were among the very lucky ones and couldn't have been happier to get out when we did.

We had a good time in Alaska. Elliott got to meet my brother who's been gone on a mission (and Jeffrey concedes I chose well), I got to show off my cross-country skiing skills (Elliott was as good as me by the end of the morning), we went sledding, we got to help my parents celebrate their 30th anniversary, and we got to celebrate Christmas with my entire family. While our downhill skiing trip had to be canceled (nothing says "indoors" like -20^o), we got to experience that post-workout soreness that only comes from three days of the Wii.

We traveled home the day of the 31st and, because of a short flight delay, we weren't able to make it to downtown DC by midnight like we'd hoped. Instead we headed toward home and unlocked our door just as we heard the downstairs neighbors counting down. We dropped the suitcases with just enough time for a New Years' kiss.

And with that, we'll call it a year.