We celebrated Mirella's 25th birthday yesterday!  Fun Stuff!  TWO cakes (from the relief society and from our friends the Wilsons) flowers, pancakes, omelettes, a cool birthday card, Church, a surprise party, fajitas, planet earth, good times w/ good friends, a video conference w/ one set of parents and a phone call from other parents!

We have really good friends.  We have really good extended families.  We're very blessed and we love it.  Just thought I'd include that in our online memory bank.

So Mirella and I are approx.  18 days away from seeing each other again, and about 23 days from being sealed for time and all eternity.  That's a pretty good feeling.  We've only been waiting for 4 months (5 if you count the time since I told her I wanted to marry her)  Now we've just got these few weeks left.  I thought it was going to take forever, but now that our family is dealing with the fire and Mirella has to get ready to host her parents at her apartment, and be ready to finish the new semester and be ready to move into a new apartment in two weeks, things are really speeding by quickly.  The picture you see here is almost ok to be a representation to what happened to our back yard.  The only thing missing is a picture of the hill and canyon.  They were burnt to a crisp.  God is in his heaven, though, and preserved our home - which by almost all accounts simply does not make sense if you look at it from a perspective from which God is not considered.  

Well, I'm home from School, and the first order of buisness was, of course, Shaver Lake!! First off, it was flippin awesome because I was able to be with my whole family (excluding Marc) in one place at one time. We had such a good time together, just talking, wakeboarding, playing games at the cabin (we don't rough it anymore, now that we've discovered the awesomeness of cabins), having a Dedrick-style sacrament meeting (Prayers, songs, speakers, special musical numbers and everything), eating lunch above a waterfall, and just being with each other.
This is 5/6 of my incredible fam. We had just listened to the sunday talks, and were heading up the trail to eat a nice sunday lunch. The waterfalls we named "Mike Falls" a few years back because our neighbor Mike Simmons had fallen at the bottom of the falls, and its now named after him.The rest of the pictures are of my family and me in a cove we call eagles cove. It's so peaceful in the evening-time when everyone
Takes thier boats off the lake, because it starts to get a little chilly. The whole lake gets really quiet, and the water turns to glass. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this would be a great place to raise my kids. . . .Or at least have a nice summer home. (Someday)