SDSU graduation.

 yep! i walked in the San Diego State commencement ceremony!

I am going to miss this campus a lot. the palm trees, the architecture, the green grass and the beautiful weather makes going to class a teeny bit better. especially since all the classroom doors opened right to the outdoors and the classrooms usually had the windows open. 

on the day of graduation, jon gave me this perfect little gift. two bangles with special engravings on the inside. i love him.

so proud!

it was such a fun day. i have a few classes to take in the fall, but i'm SO glad i made the choice to walk early. i got to graduate with my fellow art history major friends! that would not have happened if i waited until next may to fly back to CA to graduate.

it was such a fun three years at state...the early semesters sucked since they were core classes and my teachers were all too liberal. but once i got into the art and art history courses i was so happy! the teachers were all still liberal, but they weren't so open about their political opinions since we were mostly just talking about art. i loved my teachers and could tell that they enjoyed their jobs. they worked so hard to get what they deserved and what the students deserved amidst all the budget cut stuff going on. 

i'm also thankful for this guy who was so supportive through all of this. i would do homework for hours and hours and hours and he'd sit across from me at the table and use his computer just to keep me company. he would stay up late and read me my notes before my tests the next day and it always helped! he also spent hours reading me literature in my last semester from haughty philosophers like plato, derrida, vasari, panaofsky, foucault, and baudrillard...things that sounded like complete gibberish and didn't make a lick of sense. 

i am excited that the tables have turned and that it is my turn to sit on the sidelines and cheer him on! i guess i'll read to him about cash flows, FIFA, accounts payable/receivable, etc. all those things that i struggled with so badly and soon after changed my major from accounting to interior design. and later in the semester from interior design to art history. i am sure jon will do much better in a business degree that i would have!

and now on to the next chapter in our lives!

eek

we are finally and officially moving to texas on friday and i am openly frightened. 

we have been in utah for over two weeks and i'm so comfortable. i wish we would have gone from san diego straight to san antonio and came to visit utah a couple months down the road. it's made it hard to come here and feel really comfortable and have to pick up and move again.

i was talking to my cousin barb tonight (pictured above). i told her i was nervous about the move because we feel good in utah and i have a hard time making friends in new places. we've been in san diego on our own for three years (our entire marriage) but i'm still nervous about being alone in texas. isn't that odd? also we're moving in with jon's family so we will be by our parents for the first time ever so we won't actually be alone. i think it's mostly moving away from my family that makes me feel so sad/lonely.

my dad got open heart surgery a week ago. he had four bypasses done and he's been recovering so well. jon and i have both been able to spend a lot of time with him during the whole process and it's been awesome! i feel like i'm moving away from home for the first time all over again.

anyway, back to barb. she has been through a lot in her life, major ups and downs. she is the funniest, most stylish and feminine person i know. she is also a powerful business woman, which is the best part about her. she is also very charismatic. whenever i have a job interview, first day of school or am simply going to a church activity alone i have to channel my inner barb and plan to be nice and outgoing. she has a lot of great characteristics, i could go on and on. 

she told me that moving is one of the top five most stressful things you will do in life. she also said to just plan on it being hard. its going to be difficult and if you plan for it, you won't be caught off guard. she also talked about our femininity. it is a beautiful thing to be feminine and no one should be able to make you feel bad about it. it sounds like a silly thing, but the fact that she brought that up really made me think. i'm rambling but i didn't want to forget what she told me. its going to be a big and difficult change moving way from all of our friends in san diego, friends AND family in utah. it will be weird living in the same city for a long period of time with a set of parents, especially living in their house with them. it will be a bit claustrophobic not having our own home, but it won't be for forever and it'll be really nice to be able to spend so much time with john and kathy. i need to remember that while i'm there and remember that this is a special time for the four of us to be living together under one roof. knowing that it will be a big change for us should help us come to terms with it and help us move forward with our lives in regards to finding friends, jobs and hobbies in san antonio. also i refuse to lose any of my femininity although i will be sweating my butt off all summer and living on a farm (basically) with a horse, one cat, four dogs and 6 chickens. if you start seeing too many pictures of me wearing boy clothes and not doing my hair, please nicely remind me that sometimes wearing a bracelet or perfume can turn your whole day around. thank you in advance and although this post reveals that yes, maybe i do have some anxiety still lingering from my teens/early 20's, i am actually very excited for our next life adventure. my cute girlfriend kim commented on one of my posts a few months ago about our move. she and mike have moved 5 times all around utah and to washington dc. she confirmed that it can be difficult, but that it isn't so bad when you are moving with your spouse. she said "the happy thing is that home is wherever jon is. you will be surprised how easily you will settle somewhere new together." those are some really great words of comfort. i have some sweet friends, don't i?

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!

graduation, vacation, moving...officially, and my cat.

been we've slowly been pulling off a bandaid for some time now.

actually i'd say since march when we first started packing our house.

now more excitement is headed our way....

i'm graduating today!!!!

 i actually have three more classes to take in the fall....but they'll be taken in san antonio. this was my last semester at SDSU and they decided they'd let me walk early since I won't be living here next year when i should be walking. 

tomorrow we leave san diego and drive our cars to utah.

tomorrow night i'm catching a red eye to...new york city! 

my sister lives there and me and my other two sisters are going to stay with her for a sisters weekend! 

i am soo...SO excited! i'm sad to say goodbye to san diego, but i think it's time to just pull the bandaid right off.

see you in murray on wednesday, suckers! 

(also, we pick up this lazy butt tomorrow morning. haven't seen him since march 24th and that's two months too long)