Nichole's birthday

I know I have been terrible at blogging lately, but I have just been insanely busy! We just got back from 6 days in Idaho and Utah and I'll have pictures of that to post soon. We had a great time visiting with all my Utah friends, but the time went too quickly, and the drive was pretty long! I think the older I get, the harder that drive becomes. As soon as I took my 2nd job, my regular job got insanely busy. I have been working anywhere from 35-50 hours a week plus school. Its been a lot to say the least, but I am doing my best to make it work. Luckily there are only 2 weeks left of this term, I am really looking forward to a week and a half off school, and then starting my final semester, woohoo! In other really great news, Rick found out this week that he ranked in the top 8 managers for his region for 2009. He works so hard, I am so proud of him that he is finally getting some recognition. He was actually offered a different job recently, in Seattle. We thoughtfully considered the job for some time, and weighed all our options. After everything, we decided to stay here in Portland, and I think we both feel really good about the decision. Anyways, because Rick won this ranking, it means that we both get to go to Scottsdale, AZ on a trip for AT&T's Summit, to recognize all the top people in the company for last year. We are both so excited to take a trip to sunny AZ in April, and especially since it'll be free! Again, I'm so proud of all of Rick's hard work!
Well back at the beginning of February was our friend Nichole's birthday. I only have a few pictures, but I'll get them up here. It's a good excuse for a post :)
The birthday girl and I at The Loft (inside Grand Central Bowl)
Enochses

Heidi and I

And one last one of Jaime and I

Some of you may wonder how my New years' experiment is going for this month. The theme is love. Well, I sort of feel like I've failed miserably. I have tried to do some little things for Rick to show him how much I love him, but I honestly have had nearly zero time to do anything besides work and school. So I've just been trying to be kind and say "I love you" as much as I can to not only Rick, but everyone I love. The interesting thing, I think, is for a month that I am trying to focus on loving other people, I have instead been shown a lot of love. Its funny how sometimes when you try and do nice things, and maybe it doesn't work for whatever reason, you instead learn the lesson because someone is doing the same thing to you :) Rick has been wonderful in doing extra things around the house. He bought me a watch that I love this month, and has even been cleaning out the litter box for me! So, I hope all of you know how much I love each of you, but even more so, thank you for loving me back!
One last piece of good news: we got our taxes back and I paid my car off! I would have paid it off in July anyways, but it still feels great to have it paid off 5 months early, and no car payment is going to be sweet!
That's all for now. TTFN!

Weekend in Oceanside

The last weekend in January we spent in Oceanside, OR, a little beach town that I have always loved. My friend Stephine's co-worker owns a house so we were able to stay there for the weekend for nearly nothing. We had a great time, met a new couple, and had some great weather on Sunday to explore a bit. I won't give you too many captions. Enjoy!
Saturday night sunset in Oceanside...

Sunday we drove north to Cape Meares State Park

Oceanside from above

Crazy surfers in January

There is a cave that goes through the entire cliff to the beach on the other side. You can see it at the base of the cliff that everyone is walking to.

Porthole from the cave out

Hope you enjoyed, we really had a great weekend. I love the Oregon coast! Everything is great with us. I am extremely busy now with 2 jobs and school. We are leaving for Utah next Tuesday for 6 days so I am trying to work ahead to make my life a little easier while I'm gone. I'm really looking forward to seeing all my Utah friends, and we're stopping in Boise on the way there and the way back to see Becky too, so that is exciting!
Hope all is well!

July or February

This picture was definitely taken last July, right?

Nope. Try today. February 5th. It was 60 degrees out and I had the luck of shooting this cool condo building downtown, (that's Lincoln High School's field you see) with an awesome rooftop deck and pool. When it rains for the next 4 months I'll picture myself up there with a lemonade in hand, basking in the rays :)

New job!!

I am very excited to announce that as of today, I have an exciting 2nd job! I have always had amazing luck with finding work and this is no exception! There is a realtor that I work with (take pictures for), who I have always gotten along well with and enjoyed talking to. I hadn't seem him in awhile, so today when I saw him we caught up a little bit and he happened to mention he finally got his website launched, one he and I had discussed previously. He gave me the site and I said I'd check it out when I got home. Well, for some reason as we were parting ways I just said-hey, I'm graduating in June, so if you need people for whatever, just keep me in mind-totally thinking nothing would come about it. However, he got excited and told me he needs work done NOW-on a part time basis and asked me to come meet with him later this afternoon. So I went to his office this afternoon and we spent 3 hours talking about the website and what it does and what he's looking for. I'm pretty excited about all of it-the job itself and extra money every month is going to be so awesome.
The website is portlandoregon.com and it is a mesh of a social networking site and a site like yelp.com or citysearch.com, but I like how its set up better than either of those sites. Both of those sites are ran by people who don't live in Portland, and they just rely on people in town to keep the site up and running etc. Since Jim (my new boss) is from here, his website is really specialized down to neighborhoods here in Portland. You can basically enter in any kind of business you'd like, then people can leave reviews on the business and upload pictures etc. So my job will be to help upload all of these businesses to get them in the database. The hope is that as businesses start getting reviews etc, that they'll want to pay for advertising. I will also be spending a lot of time walking the streets taking pictures of businesses for the website. It is all right up my alley, so I'm very excited about it. I hope that you'll take some time (if you're in Portland), and sign up as a member and start using the site. You can add businesses you visit often and give them glowing reviews, or trash the businesses you had bad experiences with. There are already a lot of businesses already on the site, so you can start adding pictures and reviews now. So help support my new venture and a local business at the same time! I am very excited :)
xoxo!