Top Ten List

Well, we made it through our first two weeks of school! Hooray! It has been really weird to be back, but we are both enjoying our classes and are....so far....doing really well.

There are a few things that I picked up on during my first two weeks back. So here they are!

Katie's List of Top 10 Things she learned in the first two weeks of school:

10. Get to class early enough to get a comfortable seat, other wise it will be 50 minutes of uncomfortable Hell. My first day of my Nutrition class I was just a little later than I wanted to be, and I always try to sit on the left end of the room because I am left handed and hate bumping elbows. I ended up sitting in a broken chair that was extremely uncomfortable. Needless to say, the next class time I was 10 minutes early.

9. Don't sit behind tall guys during art history. Your notes will be lacking if you can't see the board, and you may or may not spend the entire class trying to write down what your professor says verbatim with out any luck.

8. The T-Bird Grill is gross......'nough said.

7. Some times, trees can be photogenic. So when we first got back to Cedar, I went and talked to the University Journal to see if they needed photographers. It doesn't pay much, but it helps. Well last weekend, I was given two assignments, the SUU Volleyball Tournament, and a tree. That's right, a tree. The only instructions I was given was "It's a tree adjacent to the Randall Jones Theater." Of course I took pictures of the wrong tree, but the photos I did get were pretty cool.

6. It's harder to run the stairs on campus than it used to be. When I was a criminal justice major at SUU I had to make it from lower campus to the fourth floor of the GC building on the edge of upper campus in 10 minutes and got pretty quick at it. In fact I didn't even get winded or tired.

Well, that is not the case any more.......

5. If you choose to go back to school when you are almost 30, you will get asked ALL of the time "are you really a student here."

4. Enoch has the most beautiful sunsets ever! The other night we got home just as the sun was going down and I was able to get a couple of shots of the western and eastern sky. This is why I

was excited to move back to Southern Utah.

3. Water Polo is a scary sport! Cameron is playing water polo with the club on campus, last weekend he convinced me to come watch them play. Wow....that's all I'm going to say! At one point it looked like my big goofy husband was going to give one of the other guys a hug, the POOF, the guy was no where to be found. When I asked Cameron about it he just laughed and said, "that's Tanner, he's pretty cool." So see kids, it's cool to hug your friends and then drag them underwater with your feet.

2. I love water!! I can't get enough of it, in fact, I drink more water than coke or pepsi now. Huge accomplishment!!!!

and the number one thing I have learned in being back at SUU.....

10. I can make art with out my camera! I am taking 2D Design this semester, and lets be honest, I can't draw!! Not even sort of. So this class was making me nervous. Well we spent this whole week working on our first project, we were supposed to demonstrate line. I think mine looks pretty cool.

In other news, I was hired yesterday to be the office assistant for the science department, so that is good news!!! Yeah for being employed!!! It's good to be back!

Back to School!

So Cameron and I just recently moved back to Cedar City. We have been trying to get back to Southern Utah for about a year now, and I wish that I could say that we got an amazing job here and we are going to make buckets of money, but that just isn't the case. We are going back to school.

Now those of you who knew me during my first stab at college know that I was a less than enthusiastic student. I was really excited about the social aspect (roommates, singles ward, HOPE and of course my never ceasing search for my Mr. Right) but as far as academia goes, I mentally checked out. It isn't that I wasn't mentally capable of being a good student. I just didn't care and I didn't like it. My philosophy was "I just want to be a photographer anyway, so I don't need a degree for that." In someways I was right, in many other ways I was really wrong.

In the past three years Cameron and I have had challenge after challenge thrown at us. We have dealt with trips to the ER, surgeries, cancer, heart attacks, more cancer, broken hands and lost jobs.

We thought when the job at Photo Works came through that we were going to be ok. And then Cameron graduated from massage school, and we thought we were going to be great. Then Cameron broke his hand, you can't do massage with out both hands. Then after working 60 to 70 hour weeks during Christmas, my employers demoted me to a part time associate and I was making in a month what I had made in a pay check.

So in June, after getting paid so little to do so much at my job and Cameron not being able to find a massage job, we made a decision. We needed to further our educations. We moved six weeks later after being accepted to SUU.

I am majoring in Graphic Design, and of course I will take some photography classes in there as well. Also, all of those Criminal Justice classes that I took before were worth it, because I have enough credits for a minor! Cameron will be taking prerequisites at SUU for a year, then transferring to Dixie to to the Physical Therapy Assistant Program. He will apply for the program in March and my fingers are crossed that he gets in. This program is the perfect compliment to his massage.

Ok so I've sounded a little whiny, "poor Katie and Cameron, they just can't catch a break, boo hoo." But really that is not my mentality at all. I am so glad that we had to go through hell to get here. I am actually excited to be back in school. Scared to death and feeling REALLY old, but excited! If it were not for the hardships that we have had in the last three years, I don't think I would have made the decision to go back. I would have worked forever at Photo Works for less than I am worth and although I would have tried to be a better photographer everyday, I wouldn't have had the training that I needed to make me great!

As an outlet, I will be blogging about this new adventure in out life. I figure we are going to be so busy that that may be the only way that we can communicate with anyone other than Cam's parents (who we live with), Carly and Scott (Cam and Scott have a class together) or Hillary (just because Savannah will ask why we never come over, and I am a total sucker for Vannah). Hopefully with in the next year or so we will have adoption new to blog about as well.

Anyway, so that's just a little update on us.