Dog Fights (not that kind) and Bears

For Christmas, Nate's sister gave us tickets to whichever New England Revolution Soccer game we wanted to go to. Since some of our friends are big fans of the team, we wanted to go with them, and a few weeks ago we did. We enjoyed watching our team play (and tie) the Portland Timbers, but especially loved the minutemen that shot muskets when we scored. It was really fun to enjoy the game and see it from so close, I'd gotten used to watching soccer on my laptop during the World Cup, and it was awesome to actually be there. We also enjoyed that it was a quick 2 hours start to finish, since the night before we'd been at a Red Sox game we'd gotten free tickets to that went into the 10th inning and lasted much longer (BTW, we lost in the 10th inning, which may be why I'm a little bitter we stayed the whole time).

During this same weekend we were housesitting/dogsitting for one of Nate's coworkers. It was really fun to have a dog for a weekend! He is a super cute and very friendly Wheaton terrier, Lucky. We realized that we're not quite ready for a dog when we argued over whether the dog could sleep in the master bedroom we were sleeping in or not. He usually sleeps on his bed located underneath the master bed. Obviously you can tell what side of that argument I was on. When we got home from church the next day, he had eaten an entire loaf of bread that we left out on the counter, and then thrown it up.  We also found balls of smushed bread in several locations throughout the house. I'm SURE that this behavior stems from him not being able to sleep because Nate won the argument from the night before and kicked him out of the bedroom. <Nathan Note: my co-worker said this behavior is par for the course. And besides, who wants a jingling ball of heavy breathing underneath you as you try to sleep?>

This is before Nate realized he was under our bed,
I was hoping he'd just fall asleep and never know :)

Me and Lucky

I finished up my internship at Pfizer and am now on a little break before school starts up again next week. I find that time off is usually really good before starting school because I get so bored that even a full class/lab load seems more appealing than not having anything to do. I also have the time to watch all the TV shows now that I won't have time to watch during the semester (mainly Prison Break, which we just started last week and are already in season 2). 

The extra time has also been spent planning our endeavor to introduce the best candy ever to Boston. Chocolate covered cinnamon bears are not hard to come by in Utah, especially at BYU, but not here. If you ask someone on the East coast what a cinnamon bear is, they usually ask if you mean the cinnamon flavored Teddy Grahams. We are going to try to make/sell them here mostly just to share the joy, but hopefully we make some sort of profit as well. We've now spent several hours learning the best brands of dipping chocolate, the difference between melting chocolate chips and feves (wafers), percentages of milk vs. dark chocolate, and what tempering chocolate is. We're trying to think of a good name for them other than "chocolate covered cinnamon bears"--any ideas?

Lastly, this past weekend was pretty sad for us because some of our good friends here are moving to NYC. I've known Emily since she was in my freshman dorm room hall at BYU, and she now has two adorable little boys that we've fallen in love with. The older one just recently started remembering my name and Nate is especially attached to the youngest boy (as in I hope some day he loves our own children more, but am not sure that is possible), so they'll all be sorely missed!  Luckily they let us babysit one last time before they left so we got an evening with them all to ourselves.

At the park at their going away party

With the truck all packed up