Baby, It's cold outside!

It's my favorite kind of day... a SNOW DAY! Really, it's an Ice day so there's not snow to play in, but the important thing is there is no work! It's a balmy 21 degrees outside right now and ACU cancelled school because of the ice on the roads. You won't find any complaints here. I love cuddling up on a cold day with an excuse to stay inside in your pjs and not leave the house all
day! It's been great. The only thing that would make it better is if Chris had the day off too!

I took a picture of a picture from my favorite snow day

in college where we all played in the snow!

This is the only productive thing I've done all day, but you

can't have a Snow Day without a big pot of chili.

And this is where you'll find me the rest of the day!

Hope all my blog friends are having as great a day as I am!

Merry Christmas!

Wishing you a fabulous Christmas from our family to yours!

We hope you all have a wonderful time with family & friends

celebrating the birth of our Savior!

Are you there readers? It's Me, Mauri....

So, In case you haven't noticed, I've been on a bit of a blog hiatus. Well, maybe that's an understatement. I haven't been a good blog writer or even reader the past few months. So, I'm going to try and be better, if any of you still even read. So, what have we been up to since August? Here's a quick recap:

September:
One word: pledging. I don't think I took a single picture in September. Sorry. But life was much better this year because I have a new administrative coordinator to help me out! YAY!

October:




I helped organized Jam Fest for ACU's homecoming, and in the process got a lot of glow in the dark things.










We got to have some great friends come visit us for homecoming weekend, and no one got food poisoning this time!












Gatsby had a great Halloween!










November:






I got to celebrate with my sweet friend Jamie the upcoming arrival of her little boy with my precious college friends!







A couple of weekends later we celebrated our 6th anniversary (CRAZY) by spending a few days shopping in the Big D and going to the Coldplay concert, which was AMAZING. But the best part was spending time with my beloved. We had so much fun together we didn't even remember to take pictures!


We had a great Thanksgiving with my parents.... despite my 24 hour stomach bug that hit me on Thanksgiving day. Ick. But luckily by Friday I felt like going to the ICE exhibit at the Gaylord. Too cool. A must see for all you DFW folks!








































December:

• We got to have a great visit with my brother who finally came and spent a weekend with us!
  
• We've begun the holiday celebrations, kicking them off with our small group holiday party. We had a cookie exchange where every family got cookies from all of the other families. And yes, Chris and I have eaten dozens of cookies this week. Nothing like gearing up for holiday eating!
• And we are officially caught up.

In other news, I'd like to ask all of you to keep my sweet friend Jodi and her family in your prayers. I'm actually updating my blog at her request! Jodi gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on Tuesday, Brooklyn Hope. Brooklyn has spina bifida, and had surgery yesterday. We are so thankful Brooklyn had a safe arrival into this world and that her surgery went well, but I know there is a long road ahead for this precious family!

Love to all! Hope you are having a wonderful holiday season!

Welcome Week + A Decade

Well, Welcome Week is wrapping up on campus. It's hard to believe it's time for another school year. This year is especially weird, realizing it was exactly10 years ago that I moved into Nelson Hall. The fear and excitement of being out on my own, all wrapped up together. After my parents left, I was not quite sure what to do with myself. So in true college form, I went with my roommate Traci to Sonic where we got cheddar peppers. I don't think I've eaten them since.

I still remember waiting outside Moody on that fateful day that Welcome week started. We were all waiting to go inside, having no idea what awaited us! And here's why I remember it so clearly. Traci and I were hanging out with her Midland friends. We were wearing our welcome week t-shirts like we were supposed to. The style was a little different then (does anyone else think it's sad that college was long enough ago that the styles have changed???) and everyone wore things BIG. Being the whopping 88 pounds I was at the time, they gave me the smallest size shirt they had: an EXTRA LARGE. So, naturally I had cut it off at the bottom. Don't get me wrong, it was modest and still long enough, but I had cut it just a bit too short to tuck in . Long story short, one of the guys and I were goofing around and he picked me up and turned me upside down... you can see where this is going. As the shirt started to go up, the guy that picked me up freaked out and dropped me on my head. All this happened in front of my new class of 1000 students. But I guess it's better he dropped me on my head than me flash my entire class!


Welcome week was different back in our day. Who'll ever forget Mud Day? ...The cotton in the ears, the hoses outside the dorms to wash us down! There's a lake and a new building in that field now, and mud day is no more. But as much as things have changed, they've stayed the same. There's still twister, and candle light devo. There's still freshmen scared to death, and freshmen that couldn't have come to college soon enough. So here's a toast to the freshmen of 2008- I hope you have the same experiences I had a decade ago. I hope you have days where you go to the bean (which has been renovated and is awesome!) to eat after chapel and have so much fun talking with friends you don't leave until after dinner. I hope you bowl in the hallway of your residence hall after curfew. I hope you take weekend trips with your friends, but that you also make up ridiculous stuff to do in Abilene. I hope you are challenged to connect what you are learning in the classroom to what you will do when you graduate. I hope you make your faith your own. I hope you make some of the best friends of your life. And I hope that when you leave this place, you aren't the same as when you came.

For all of you Wildcats out there, what is your favorite welcome week memory? and what do you wish for this new class of freshmen?

Phelps Phan

We are lovin' the Olympics... although it's not all that great for my sleep schedule!

This guy is just insane.
What is with my blog and the shirtless guys lately?

Just like the sleep schedule, my own self-esteem is being hurt just a little!

Anybody else feel a little inferior?

This will be me when I get my toosh off the couch after the Olympics!

Then i'll look like this....

(When I'm 41)

WHATEVER!

Where the Light Is

We went to the John Mayer concert in Dallas with our friends Jaime and Eric, and for anyone that might have been there, I think you could say he "killed it". It was awesome, and it didn't hurt that he wasn't wearing his shirt. It was pretty hot...outside, I mean! :)

The boy can play some guitar.

Concerts can be disenchanting sometimes, but John Mayer certainly didn't disappoint. In fact, I walked away an even bigger fan (and not just because he was shirtless!). His new live album is awesome, and i'm in love with his rendition of tom petty's free fallin'... if you haven't heard it, you should download it today. It was certainly a great way to end the summer, as I will now be buckling down for a few months. Lots of good food, good shopping, good music, and most importanly, good friends!

Gopher wood, anyone?

We had a great long weekend in Ruidoso with my parents, trying to get away from this Texas heat! I don't think it topped 70 degrees the entire time we were there. We had quite a bit of rain, but that was great with us... Just don't pay attention to what the rain did to my hair! We had a quaint little cabin in the Upper canyon and it was so nice to just get away for a few days...

Chris and I in Cloud Croft

Gatsby loved all the smells and trees to "leave his mark!"

This was his first real vacation!

And now for the title of this post and my reference to Noah's Arc. Remember the rain I mentioned? Well, as it turns out we got about 7 inches of rain within 24 hours. We were in the car with my parents to go sight seeing on Sunday, but as soon as we pulled out of our cabin area, about 1 block down we ran into this:

These cops were taking pics with their cell phones, which I thought was kind of funny.
This is the cabin area right before ours.

You can see the one on the right has already flooded!
Oops! Not ours, thankfully!
It was so crazy seeing how fast and quickly the waters rose. In our family pic below, you can see a smaller river behind us. When we got there, you couldn't even find the little stream that was back there, but by the time we left it was a full blown river! We ended up cutting our trip a few hours short so that we could make sure we could get out the back way. And depsite the natural disaster, we had a great time.
It's now 103 degrees in Abilene. I think I'll take the flood.