Post Wedding, Getting Back on Track

I know things have been a little dead around here (well, actually they've been completely and utterly dead), but they got a little busy before the wedding. A lot of things came together at once - my graduation, Janessa's business trip, final wedding preparations, etc. - that put blogging on the back-burner. Now that we're back and settled in Madison though, these should be coming a lot more frequently.

Anyways, what have we been up to this last little bit? Well, on December 21st we had the whole graduation thing. I finished up my career at UW-Madison by getting a B.A., with majors in History and Political Science. Not to sell myself short, I should also mention that I received a certificate (minor) in African Studies. I'm really not sure how that's going to help me out in life, but it only took four classes so I figured I might as well. The whole ceremony was your standard graduation (the school talking about how good it is, speakers telling the graduates how much a degree matters, etc, etc), but it was nice to finally walk across the stage. The coolest part for me, being the sports nut that I am, was seeing a few of the football players graduate. I guess they're not all idiots...

Following graduation, it was on to Utah for the wedding. The weather was pretty good going out, but that Monday night in Utah it got bad. We somehow made it from Provo to Vernal that night, even though the roads we covered in snow and we could hardly see anything the whole way there. Still, we made it to Vernal and everything went off without a hitch. There was some stress in getting everything done for the wedding, but it got finished and the sealing on the 27th was great. The weather prevented some of the people we thought would be there from coming, but overall we had a good crowd. Tons of people came to the reception later that night, so all in all it went as good as we could have hoped for.

Next up for Janessa and me was our honeymoon in Orlando, FL. My parents have a timeshare down there at the Marriot Grande Vista and they let us use a week, so that's where we went. The weather down there was a nice break from the Wisconsin/Utah reality we'd been used to (near or below freezing for WI/UT, and 75 and sunny in Orlando), so we took advantage of it by spending a lot of time at the pool. It was nice just to lay around outside and do nothing - it's just too bad it had to end.

Following the honeymoon we flew back to Chi-town for the open house at my parent's place in Algonquin. It was a bit more low key than the reception, but it was still really nice. There were a ton of people there - the stream was almost non-stop from 6-8 - and the food was really good. Overall, there really wasn't a whole lot that could have gone better.

Now it's back in Madison and back to the real world. We had our first week in our new ward today, and it is a bit different than what we're used to. Coming from the University Ward where there are no kids, where Sacrament Meeting is perfectly quiet, it is a bit of an adjustment going someplace where there are 3 (going on 4) nurseries, a couple of primaries, and where at least 1/3 of the ward is under the age of 10. Still, though, the rest of the ward was nice to us; I don't think we'll have a hard time adjusting.

So that's the cliff-notes version of Janessa and my wedding extravaganza. In other news, while Janessa mourns the loss of BYU's Austin Collie to the NFL Draft, I'm having a little party for PJ Hill's early departure. He was good while he was here, but his moving on will allow stud back John Clay to get more carries.

P.S. If you'd like to see pictures from the wedding/reception, feel free to look at our albums on Facebook. The links are here and here.