our third anniversary! and other things...

i wrote about our second anniversary that we celebrated last year here. i posted it last week, so it may have been confusing for you.

this year we celebrated our THIRD anniversary on may 11th!!! amazing, right? it was really fun.

jon reserved a room for us on the 10th since it was a friday. we stayed at Hotel Indigo in downtown san diego. the lobby was really nice and had this water fountain going from the ceiling to the floor. we found out later that it is one of the only san diego hotels that allows pets which is why the floors are all hardwood in the rooms. 

the room was really nice! it was so fun to be downtown and be able to walk everywhere. 

for dinner we went to the corner. it had a really fun atmosphere. it was a seat yourself bar type thing and had games and books you could look at. jon and i played pass the popcorn. i don't really like movies (unless its as funny as she's the man, as cute as the notebook and as colorful as pitch perfect) so i didn't do very good, but jon knew everything about every movie. the burgers were oookkkaayyyyy and the fried pickles weren't good. we'd know too, we are burger/fried pickled connoisseurs. 

the three year traditional anniversary gift is leather!!! a few months ago jon and i went to mary's tack store to look around and they were having a great sale on boots. jon got me my tall leather riding boots and told me it was our anniversary gift. i am so obsessed with them! i am glad he gave them to me early because i was able to break them in and wear them to my show and to my last lessons on gerry. i got him a new big-boy watch! it looks so good on him!

saturday night we went to dinner with these two who we love!!!

this is a terrible picture but it shows the restaurant. we ate at the pearl which is a mid-century style hotel/restaurant that has a pool, movie screens showing old movies, and great food. we love hanging out with lindsay and wes so much that we hung out with them on our anniversary! that's true love, haha. 

per tradition we lit off three chinese lanterns for each year we've been married! we had chris and sully (the kids we were living with) help us. it was fun to have them there with us and only stressed jon out for one whole night since we saw the lanterns slightly dim and then fall into a far off field. these lanterns obviously weren't as good as ones we've had previously (but they were heart shaped!!!!) and good news:: no forest fires were started by us that night!

seriously though, our favorite activity is finding fun new restaurants. this one (craft and commerce) was recommended to us because of their amazing burgers and fried pickles (i wasn't kidding about being connoisseurs) and it was really good. the ambiance was interesting too. (you can probably gather that from the website)

three years ago whitney recommended kono's to us. we finally went. and it was awesome. 

and finally. the night before graduation we had a big family dinner with the isaac's. we had their typical sunday dinner which consisted of steak, salad, garlic bread and pasta. we laughed the whole way through dinner reciting office quotes. chris sr (the father) was cracking everyone up, his laugh is infectious.
(for you office lovers, we were laughing the hardest about the episode that stanley has a heart attack and they are all learning CPR. michael starts singing the wrong song!!! so funny! also, creed.)
 that night we got frozen yogurt and watched the season finale of the office. it was so good and we loved watching it with true office junkies. we miss them so much!!!!

a lot.

we are in salt lake. but a lot happened in san diego before we left!

jon getting out of the military meant us getting cut off of free health care which led to me getting lots of shots i didn't want to get. i got the meningococcal (for meningitis) in one arm and the TDAP (tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis) in the other and it was the worst pain of my life. there were a lot of shots i should have gotten in junior high that i never did get. am i proud of that? yeah, a little. am i happy i didn't go through the pain back then with my friends? no, i'm not.

this painful bandaid rash lasted for a full week. seriously, the worst!

 how cute is this guy with his side swept bangs??

 jon had his last day in the marine corps on May 3rd. it was pretty sad. but also not. there were weird mixed emotions and i'm not sure when or if i'll be able to write a post about it. it feels like we are on leave right now and eventually we will make it back to san diego and life will continue like normal.

 jon with his gunny, XO, and CO. they all had some really nice things to say about him. it was touching.

 jon signed his separation papers at about 12:30pm. the most notable part of the whole process was this simple sentence in the papers that may as well have been in bold. "You may proceed to your home of record or any other place you may elect." for four years someone knew where jon was at all times and they were now giving him the opportunity to go anywhere he wished. it was surreal. soooo we immediately went to the spa to get some well deserved pampering! jon got an hour massage, and hour facial, and a half an hour foot massage. (he is not ashamed of this either. you'll hear how nice it was straight from the horses mouth) i got an hour and a half massage. we were in the couples room so when my massage ended, i took a nap on my massage table while his finished up. it wasn't weird at all when i started snoring. after that we ate at smash burger and got frozen yogurt and enjoyed the beautiful night. one of my favorite things about san diego was seeing all of the hot air balloons!

we went to a padre's game with our dear friends steve and judy. they are the padres biggest fans and although i don't like baseball, i did fully appreciate the awesome seats and the amazing view of downtown. petco park is absolutely beautiful. saying goodbye to steve and judy was not fun. they have been so good to us ever since jon joined the military! we love them and the light at the end of the tunnel is them coming to san antonio next year for a wedding in steve's family!

 we love love loved living with the isaac's, they are the best. sully was our best friend and would go on walks with us, laugh so hard on the trampoline, and share his secret hide outs in our new (old) church building. it doesn't hurt that during all of this he's bringing up all the best parts of the office and quoting lines we'd never remember on our own. 

 this girl deserves a shout out. she was such a good companion to me while jon was deployed. we had a falling out right before the boys came home but i blame it on weird emotions that had built up the entire seven months. we've since made up and i couldn't be happier. she is my most faithful reader and even cried when she read my post about my horse show because she knew how much it meant to me. that is a good friend! 

 the isaac's neighbors had baby chicks! i couldn't tell if i loved them or not. they were not chicks but not chickens either. the feathers weren't soft, but they weren't that hard.....weird. but jon loved them and the girls loved putting them all over him!

 the goodbyes continued with mendez and gherine. mendez and i worked together at panera bread and had a really fun relationship. he is from guatemala and i loved hearing stories about how he grew up and liked having him help me with spanish although sometimes he was too honest. (i.e. making fun of my improper spanish and even one time commenting on my recent weight gain.)

gherine is definitely one of my best friends in san diego. we didn't get to see each other as often as i would have liked, but i always loved it when we got together. we initially bonded over justin bieber (we are both too old for him) and our struggles with gardening (we're both doing better). she gave me cooking pointers and always always always noticed if we weren't at church. there was a rough patch when jon first got back from deployment where we started going to church really infrequently and gherine was the only one who ever made sure we knew we were missed. i'm really grateful for that and good news, we are back on track!

the barn i ride at moved up the street. it was a pretty stressful day, but the farmer at the new barn we moved to tried to lighten the mood by carrying corina and i in the tractor! pretty funny!

I'M 25.

we started the birthday celebrations by having brandon and hannah in town! the four of us went and stayed in a somewhat sketchy hotel near sea world. it wasn't so bad and it was fun reminiscing about the first time we met 3.5 years ago and stayed in a somewhat sketchy hotel on camp lejeune! 

we ate breakfast at the mission which is one of jon's favorites.

after breakfast we went to balboa park. we made the rash decision to rent one of these bicycles!!! it was the best decision ever!! we sped around balboa park for almost an hour laughing hysterically. jon was so unsure the first few minutes and we were all over the place. he quickly got comfortable and we saw all of balboa, even the restricted areas. our ride included:
going over a very narrow and pedestrian only bridge
swiping the side of the bike on a pole on a sidewalk (luckily brandon and i pulled our legs in so that we can laugh about the memory and not cry). jon was NOT slowing down. we were very clearly too large to fit in between the two poles, but he was stopping for nothing.
and barely making it up a steep hill. we actually pedaled ourselves halfway up the hill before we came to a dead stop in front of more than four onlookers. we had to back up and get a good head start and we did make it up all the way though we were going verrry slow toward the top of the hill.
it was so much fun and i'm really glad we did that! it was definitely the best part of the day. we visited a couple museums afterwards then headed back to the isaac's for some games.

we have been living with the isaac's who are a family from our ward. it is weird to refer to them as 'the family we are living with' because that makes it sound impersonal. we love living with them so much and they seem like family.
anyway, brandon and hannah came over and we played a good game of monopoly with bella and sully (the two youngest issac's). lucy and brandon enjoyed each others company. we also played settlers of catan nights and cities. it was my first time with that expansion and i really liked it!
brandon and hannah are our game friends. they know a ton of fun games and are always looking for new ones. they are good sports and we always get such a laugh hanging out with them. (kim and mike are our movie friends. lindsay and wes are our SNL friends:))

sunday was my birthday!! we woke up bright and early to attend church from 9-12. after church jon and the isaac's gave me presents and sang happy birthday to me. they were all so nice on my birthday and let me make every decision! we played settlers of catan, had a yummy steak dinner, went on a wilderness walk, watched pitch perfect, ate cake and played the great dalmuti until we were all too sleepy to play any more. seriously, i think they all wanted to finish pitch perfect, but when i mentioned that i wanted to play a game, they turned the movie off and we played a game. annie (the mom) kept saying "it's your birthday! its up to you!" this family is so awesome, they do everything together! we can't figure out if it is always like this or if they all want to hang out with us just because we will be here for a short time. their house is set up perfectly so that the private areas are small and the common areas are big. even if people are in two different rooms, the rooms are all connected so they can talk to each other. i can't explain it, it is just not how i grew up!

jon made me the most delicious cake!!!! chocolate cake with made from scratch chocolate frosting. i was amazed at how good it tasted on day one, but it's only gotten better since. 

it was a fun birthday and i'm so glad we were at the isaac's to celebrate. they did a good job making me feel special and they all kept telling me happy birthday throughout the day. jon was really cute about my birthday as well and got me a really nice card which was my favorite part (along with the cake). i got to talk to my sisters and my dad on my birthday too, technology is so awesome. lizzie, amanda and i chatted on google plus and got such a kick out of the sound affects. if someone said something funny the others would either applaud or put on crickets. it doesn't sound as funny as it was, so you've justttt got to trust me. 

25 is going to be a good year, i can feel it. annie says that every year just gets better and better (until you're 70 at which point everything hurts or at least something hurts at all times) and i think i believe her.