2008 reasons I love my wife

I stole this idea from another blog I read, but I took it to a ridiculous extreme, as I usually do.

I love Caitlin because:

1-2-Her two beautiful eyes, that I can stare into all day while I hold...

3-8-The five fingers on her right hand as we walk, when she often says...

9-12-The three words "I love you that come from her...

13-14-Two beautiful lips that are quite, if I may, luscious that I've kissed every day of the...

15-119-Hundred days that we've been married and lived in the...

120-160-Forty square feet of apartment we live in, sleeping on the...

161- One mattres that we share under...

162-164-The three blankets we use to keep ourselves warm in this apartment. I especially love the one that says we got married in the year...

165-373-"208." I also love her...

374-383-Ten toes, it's a secret, but sometimes I kiss them, too. I also am quite fond of the...

384-392-Seven dinners a week we share together, especially the ones she cooks, they're delicious. I'm even more impressed by the...

393-421-Twenty eight words of spanish that she's learned and pronounces so well for the...

422-452-Thirty days we'll spend tramping around Argentina this summer, looking for undiscovered poets, possibly carrying around our...

453-456-Three (SECRET) children in her tummy. Who will be with us for the next...

457-537-Eighty years we'll spend together, loving each other...

538-562-Twenty four hours a day, every day...

563-570-Seven days a week...

571-936-Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. She's so smart she got a...

937-941-Four point oh for a GPA. We have sex...

942-951-Nine times a week, on average. That's also a secret. I love how passionate she is about things and the...

952-983-Thirty-one books on breastfeeding, women's rights and starving children in Africa she has on our bookshelves. I love the...

984-1084-Hundred different things she does a day to make me smile, like talk to me in her silly voice. I love reading the first...

1084-1102-Eighteen pages of the New York Times together at lunch and talking about the happenings in the world. Especially in the...

1103-1150-Forty-seven countries in Africa. We have fun playing games together. Last time we played scrabble she got, or made if you're from South Carolina...

1151-1271-One hundred and twenty points. I loved watching the...

1272-1276-Four episodes of The Office that we just watched together. It reminds me of the...

1277-1300-Twenty-three inside jokes we currently have between us that make me laugh every time. It's so great to see someone who loves to spend so much time with me, especially to go shopping and fill up our...

1301-1305-Four rather large pantry shelves with healthy foodstuffs (except for the cup of noodles that I hide in the back for comfort food). We love watching movies together. We even had Netflix for...

1306-1330-Fourteen days, until our free trial ran out. I love the...

1331-1348-Fifteen different names she has for me, none of which involve Tim, oddly enough. I love that she has...

1349-1361-Eleven pairs of jeans, some many years old, because she refuses to throw or do away with anything, because it would be a waste. I'm excited for our lives in the...

1362-1389-Twenty seven different countries we plan on living in. We have...

1390-1396-Six different cuddling positions that are our favorite. Whenever I see her my heart skips...

1397-1401-Four beats. I love her frugality. The most we've ever spent on a meal together outside of our wedding is...

1402-1420-Eighteen dollars. I also love her tea drinking abilities. She currently has...

1421-1429-Eight different types of tea. I love sending her...

1430-1445-Fifteen text messages a day. Every day she impresses me at least...

1446-1491-Forty five times a day with her intelligence...

1492-1525-Thirty three times a day by her grace...

1526-1573-Forty four times by her beauty...

1573-1652-Seventy-five times by her love for me. She shows this as she reminds me of that love by telling me so at least...

1653-1804-One hundred and fifty times a day. Often I get lost in her eyes for...

1805-1846-Forty-one minutes at a time. She helps me be better in...

1847-1899-Fifty-two different ways, including my posture. She is very concerned about helping others and works at a women's shelter...

1900-1920-Twenty hours a week.

1921-Women's sufferage. Yey!

1922-1934-Twelve times she's let me hold her as she cries. I love the...

1935-1958-Twenty-three years it took me to find her. Definitely worth the wait. We'll have fun spending the last...

1959-1962-Three hours of 2008 together. On our first date we played...

1963-1965-Three rounds of golf in my apartment. I love that she's used the same make-up for...

1966-1971-Five years sraight. It took me about

1972-1995-Twenty-three days to decide to marry her. She's definitely in the top...

1996-2006-Ten list of coolest people of all time. In fact she's number...

2007-One. And there are at least...

2008-One million more reasons why she means everything to me.

That's it.

P.S. I realize my math was off. But that's the way it goes. And that's another thing I love about her, she's a lot better at math. And Capitlization. Happy new year.

As the Christmas season winds down, I still grasp for stories of love, charity, and service. As individuals and families strive to emulate Christ and his ministry during this month, we see an outpouring of goodwill. On the other side of the world, in a tiny, poverty-stricken country, an airstrike by a century-old vehement political and ideological enemy ends the lives of over 300 and injures thousands more. I ask myself: Why so much hatred in the world? And where does it originate? How can one people have so much animosity towards the other? I cannot comprehend.

A randomly selected day celebrating the birth of our Best Friend

It's the day that the early Christian church decided would be designated to celebrate Christ's birth, most likely to correspond with Winter solstice to win over some pagans. But even though I realize that this probably isn't anywhere close to celebrating Christ's birth on the day He was born, I also realize that this is the best holiday ever. I never get tired of Christmas, of Christmas songs, of saying "Merry Christmas" or of eating Christmas themed candied items. Christmas themed episodes of TV shoes are always some of the most memorable, even when their political correctness makes them rather empty. The best Christmas movies can be watched every year and never get old. I still cry every time I watch Jimmy Stewart approach the manger in Mr. Kruegers Christmas. I love the season. I think if I had nothing else pulling me on to believe, the feeling I get at Christmas would be enough to get me to church every week. And what's great about the season is that the harder one works to make it special-especially in working to make it special for others-the better it is. This year I've striven to make Christ a bigger part of my Christmas celebration and I have not been disappointed in the least. Cait's been a big help in setting us up to donate to Sub4Santa and a progam to help refugee families in Salt Lake. We've also been working at the

Food and Care Coalition (Unsubtle Plug)

in Provo which is basically a classy food bank. Speaking of which, I'd like to throw in a plug for Sunflower Farmers Market

in Orem (just south of University Mall and in a bunch of places in the west) which donates a lot of the food used there. If you can't donate food or funds yourself, shopping at this eco- and local- friendly food store is a reasonably priced way of making a difference. And the products are just great anyway.

In diary news, we did end up making it to Morgan to visit my family last night, busing most of the way and stopping to see the light on temple square. We opened presents this morning and have just been enjoying a very peaceful holiday. We're excited to spend the rest of the break together and also are getting excited for school to start. We have some cool classes this semester.

That's us Christmas morning.

And here's our present to all our blog readers.

SLEEPY BABY 6

Merry Christmas Eve!!

We're heading up to Mountain Green to celebrate Christmas with Tim's family. I'm feeling very much in the spirit of Christmas. Although I kind of miss my family, it's nice to not have to worry about traveling and dealing with all that mess. Plus, Utah is nice at Christmastime with all of the snow. And I have really enjoyed working over break.

Nutcracker review

On Saturday night, we went to the Nutcracker put on by the Utah Regional Ballet company in Provo. We were in the balcony but the seats were decent. The company was... young. Very young. I never realized how incredible Carolina Ballet's production of the Nutcracker was until I went to others. This was only my second other, but neither matched Carolina Ballet's. The costumes were all pale pink. Clara had about 24 solos of just her dancing (boring!). The battle scene was disappointingly anti-climatic. The dancers were very talented. The snow scene was beautiful. But the choreography was lacking. Too much boureeing(I don't know how to spell that) and walking and standing and not enough real dancing. But I was there with Tim and I loved it because I love him and being with him and sitting next to him and holding his hand and knowing I would be going home with him. It's a lovely feeling.

A pictography of the night:

Break thusfar

The days and nights are going by way, way too fast. Even though we are doing pretty much nothing compared to non-breaks, I still just want this to last forever. It's our first Christmas as married people. It's our first Christmas knowing the other person existed.


Also, Tim thinks we need more pictures. We don't really take pictures though, but here are a few:


Sometimes... Tim cooks in our kitchlivinbedroom....


...we do this a lot (currently I'm working on Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's awesome. Highly recommended. Tim is working on Hillary Clinton's autobiography, Lord of the Things, Anna Karenina, a book about the apostles, some Orson Scott Card sci-fi, etc, etc. He likes to bounce around)...


...we go on dates sometimes to usually delicious yet sometimes disappointing ethnic restaurants...


our wall furnishing.


The end.

Argentina. Or bust.

We're going to Argentina with Gordon. Check out the plan. It will probably be in August, post Washington DC seminar. But HOW COOL IS HIS IDEA? I'm working on my Spanish. Stat.

Christmas-time. Finally here.

Finals ended today!! Hooray! Mine was early this morning, so I woke up and took the bus at 7 am. It was dumping buckets of snow, which I usually hate, but today it just felt perfect because I remembered the months of good weather we were allotted this year, so now I will embrace the snowy weather. Tim likes it, so I think I'll start liking it as well. I came home after my final and took a little nap and cleaned up the atrocious apartment (weeks of finals=no cleaning for us!) I walked to the Sunflower farmer's market around 4 and bought items for dinner (parsnips, carrots, swiss chard, red potatoes, lima beans, thyme, vegetable broth.... makes for a GREAT stew). It's all cooking up now and smells absolutely divine. We have a little conundrum in our household: I eat super healthy, pretty low-fat food because otherwise I would have skyrocket cholesterol and a pretty rounded belly, and besides I LOVE veggies and don't particularly care for many other foods. Husband, on the other hand, is ridiculously skinny and eats as many calories as he can hold to keep from wasting away. So, we're stuck in this limbo of how we cook/how we need to eat and have yet to find a delicate balance. Tim usually eats whatever I eat, then adds cheese/butter/cup of noodles for a little extra fat. One day, we'll find a perfect compromise. Maybe my metabolism will miraculously speed up after I have a baby. Yeah, right.

Now, I'm just sitting in bed, practicing my Spanish, and listening to the stew simmer. Waiting for my wonderful husband to finish his final already and come home to our little haven. Then we'll watch our Netflix movie (we have Once and Into the Wild). Both look profound. The snow continues to fall. Christmas is in a week. Life=blissful.

I love Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

From the same woman who proclaimed "Well-behaved women seldom make history", comes this quote:

"My Mormonism and my feminism intersect in a belief in the absolute equality of all of God’s children and in a belief that we have a responsibility to make the world better."

I found it while I was flipping through notes on Soc of Gender for my final tomorrow morning. I love it. That's exactly how I feel. Equality and parity and equal opportunity and improved standard of living for all of humanity and all of God's children.

On a lighter note, our housing situation is dire. Not dire actually, we just only have one more month in our apartment and nowhere to go after that until April. I think we should live as squatters in various locations on campus to make a statement that until everyone can have adequate shelter, we don't want it. And then if BYU gives us grief, we'll just claim to be anthropology students doing an ethnographic research project. Brilliant.

**In the early 1990s, BYU board of trustees "vetoed without comment" a proposal to have Laurel Thatcher Ulrich speak in a forum at BYU because she was "too controversial" (she's a Harvard history professor, Pulitzer Prize winner, married, LDS, mother of many children, and brilliant! Is that controversial?!). That same year, Justice Clarence Thomas (after his controversial sexual harassment case), was brought to BYU to speak. VOICE (Parity's ancestor) protested, and was suspended as a BYU club. CAN YOU IMAGINE? I wish I had been around during the heyday of feminist activism at BYU. We've made strides in the past few decades, but we're not nearly finished.

A relationship of trust

I've developed a relationship of trust with my phone, and I couldn't be happier. My phone is a flat phone, no flip, no twist, no nonsense (see the picture). But that means the keys are exposed. I thought, when I got the phone that meant that I would just have to put up with the keyguard that came up after 5 seconds making it frustrating to work on put protecting me from unnecessary calls. But last night I decided to show some trust in my phone. I gave it it's own pocket in my pants, the right front one if you were wondering. I don't carry many things in my pants as a matter of principle, so giving it its own pocket wasn't that big of a deal. And in response my phone has shown the highest sense of responsibility and cooperation, not dialing a single wrong number or even typing in one key that I didn't type in myself. I think there is a lesson to be learned here, but I'll let you figure it out for yourself. (That's my phone there in the picture, being stolen? or maybe snuck into a pocket? I'm not sure, but I think the story of it adds to the post)

Deseret News published my letter to the editor!

... my mom thinks I'm going to get excommunicated due to my outspoken opinions. I find that hilarious.

You've GOT to be kidding me....

Remember this one time?

Today, I have lost all faith in the BYU student body (at least that enjoy Randy Bott's mission prep class). Dr. Hudson sent me this article this morning. Highest-rated professor in the nation?? That is so unnerving.

Found it

http://nn.byu.edu/story.cfm/70533

Oh, and I was in the DU TWICE today!!

A reporter interviewed me as part of a Prop 8 article.

Tim says I sounded like I was scared to get beat up [which at some point, I think I was afraid of that]

I didn't mean for it to sound like I was going to be physically abused, just emotionally...

I can't find that one online yet, but she e-mailed it to me and this is what my section said:

"Senior Caitlin Carroll from South Carolina had a different experience. As someone who is against Proposition 8, Carroll began the interview for this article by saying, "I will not share with you all of the things that I am passionate about for fear of further attacks and threats against my personal being."

This fear, she said, was based on the response she received after publishing her opposing thoughts on the issue in a "Letter to the Editor" in The Daily Universe which included "threats and vicious e-mails from fellow students that I could not believe."

"I listen to my leaders, but I also pray and ask God for confirmation to know that what my leaders are saying is what I need to be doing," Carroll said. "On this issue, I received no divine answer but decided through my own experiences and research into the matter my position on it."

In the end, Carroll thought the way in which the campus dealt with the issue was harsh.

"I have so many friends here at BYU that are gay that mean so much to me, and I hated the way the students promoted Prop. 8 like it was a fun game with the plastering of posters and the telephone banks right in front of their faces," she said. "I don't think they realized the hurt they were inflicting upon the gay community both at BYU and throughout the Church.""


Haha... it does sound like I was scared.

We're a "top story"!!

Check it out here.

My Spanish phrase of the day

No me gusta ir a casa de mi suegra porque ella es muy antipática.

A cool little Christmas site

Here's a step back to the past, with a website that has gathered all of the decent videos that youtube has of Christmas movies, tv specials, christmas episodes of shows and commercials. It's a nice trip down memory lane. Personally I love this sort of stuff. Nothing is too cheesy in my book when it comes to Christmas. They have a TV guide in the corner that tells you when stuff is coming on, though it doesn't seem to be super accurate. It does play two or three things at once, so there's usually something good on. I've promised myself not to spend much time on here til after finals, but BYU's computers block it anyway because of the utube ban, so that wont be much problem. And you can even tune the antennas to remove fuzz. Just like the good old days.

hattip: http://www.boingboing.net/

Happy birthday to me.

Strep throat. No insurance. Hundreds of dollars. No place to live come January. Going to class on my deathbed. I think I may faint any minute.

BUT on the bright side:

Wonderful husband. Secondary education. Access to health care (even if it costs hundreds of dollars). Free lunch at the Pennyroyal courtesy of Cecilia. Wearing PJs all day long because I can. Plans tonight? Maybe.

My least favorite poet

I'm doing a project for my introduction to middle east studies class, and we're doing it on Saudi Arabian poetry. Under the topic of Saudi Arabian poetry on Wikipedia there are four names. The second name on the list is Osama bin Laden. That's right. According to Wikipedia one of the four most noteworthy poets from Saudi Arabia is Osama bin Laden. Here's a sampling of his poetry:

Tomorrow, William, you will discover which young man [will] confront your brethren, who have been deceived by [their own] leaders.

A youth, who plunges into the smoke of war, smiling
He hunches forth, staining the blades of lances red
May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent
Humans, should they fall, Djinn, should they ride
[And] lions of the jungle, whose only fangs
[Are their] lances and short Indian swords
As the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back
[My] stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame
On the day of the stallions’ expulsion, how the war-cries attest to me
As do stabbing, striking, pens, and books.

Corollary to last post

Please do not imply that I think being a suburban housewife is a negative thing. It is just not me. That is all.

Do you ever wake up in the morning and realize that your life has happened and you did not even realize what was going on at the time but then you look around and think and it all sinks in? That happens to me at least once a week. Sometimes, I wake up and look over and there is a boy in my bed and a little tiny part of me freaks out until I quizzically peer up at the wall and see our wedding picture and then I quickly recall that he isn't a boy he's my husband and it's totally appropriate that he is in my bed. I still find it hard to comprehend how much my life has been altered in six short months. That long ago, Tim was not even a figment of my imagination, let alone my husband who I will be with for eternity (and how freakishly long is that!?) My life happens to me like this though. I wake up one morning and it all hits me and sinks in. Nothing ever occurs to me while it is occurring--it always takes some time to become reality for me. I am so afraid that I will be one of those highly-motivated and intelligent college women who wakes up in 15 years and is a desperate, suburban housewife who is without an idea about why or how she ended up where she did but just knows she is not happy. I tell Tim on a regular basis to not let me end up somewhere in my life just because I am lazy or complacent or seeking an easy way. There are so many goals and aspirations and dreams wrapped up in this convoluted brain of mine that I want and NEED to accomplish. But I am certain of the need to take the time to counsel with my Heavenly Father and think things over thoroughly and live my life a little more deliberately.

Our adopted family

For Christmas this year, we decided to adopt a family from the International Rescue Committee to buy presents for them instead of each other and our families. I am so excited about the family they gave us-- they are Burmese refugees with a 3-month-old baby girl. I have an excuse to buy baby things! I am deliriously happy. And we get to help a family in desperate need who just arrived to the US four months ago. I hope that our little contribution will help.

We are also adopting a Utah County child as well, but have not been assigned yet. I have been needing to do something good in the community recently. There are so many people in need and I couldn't be happier to help.

"Lucy Stoners"

Since exercising my right to vote last month, I have been reflecting upon the work and sacrifices of the early suffragettes. The first wave of suffragists in the mid-19th century paved the way for the more radical movement in the 20th century that ultimately resulted in the 19th amendment.

I was reading today about Lucy Stone, a prominent suffragette who was present at the Seneca Falls Convention with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Lucy Stone was the first woman to graduate from college in Massachusetts, having been inspired to receive an education by Mary Lyon (the founder of Mount Holyoke) while sitting in a sewing circle of all places. After graduating, Lucy married Henry Brown Blackwell, a prominent abolitionist and brother to Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the US. Let's just talk about what a progressive feminist family: Another Blackwell brother married Antoinette Brown, the first female minister and another prominent feminist in the early women's rights movement. Those Blackwells must have had fantastic parents (father was a sugar refiner from England, mother bore 9 children, nothing too unique except that they were adamant about education for their daughters).

But what I learned today that I really wanted to share: Lucy Stone is the first known woman in the United States to have kept her last name after marriage-- "Women who continue to use their birth names after marriage are still occasionally known as "Lucy Stoners" in the U.S."

I'm a Lucy Stoner! That sounds so cool!

Good choice Barack