Carving Pumpkins

This was the first Halloween since our marriage that we decided to be festive and actually carve pumpkins. We started last night at about 8:30pm and weren't finished until 12:30am! We were having a lot of fun being creative together.

Just getting started...

After we cleaned out the pumpkins, Spencer collected the seeds and made us a delicious treat!

We decided to scrape out our designs instead of completely cutting through the pumpkins. I remember doing that with my family when I was in high school, but I didn't remember it being so hard! We tried to scrounge up all of the good pumpkin scraping tools we could find, but all of our kitchen knives were too big. Then Spencer came up with a GENIUS idea:

We found his old dental tools from his undergrad years, and used them. They were perfect!

Getting closer... but still about 2 hours left!

This was the full array of tools we used. I highly recommend buying one of those little pumpkin carving kits- it was very easy to use.

The finished product! They really do have candles in them, and we turned off the lights so you could see them glow... but the flash on the camera kind of ruined it. Oops!

We will be taking them to the ward Halloween party on Friday night, and we're hoping they won't dry out before the 31st.

Patterson's Farm

After asking lots of 3rd and 4th year dental students about fun stuff to do in the area, we quickly learned that Patterson's Farm is a favorite for the locals.
In addition to selling incredibly overpriced pumpkins- the one Spencer is holding cost almost $17, the smaller ones around him were around $7- (so we'll be getting ours at Giant Eagle for $3.59)- they also had a store where you can buy apples and goodies. I was looking forward to picking some apples, but they rotate which orchards you can pick from, and the ones at the farm we went to were closed for the day. Blast.

But we did indulge in a few treats, like this delicious kettle corn (which I must say looks much more appetizing if you disregard the mass amounts of vegetable oil on the left):


And donuts. It was a healthy morning.

Our Night at the Disco

Last weekend we went to this really cool Disco Dance Club in downtown Cleveland. It was super fun- here's a video clip of our hot moves. Enjoy!

America's Roller Coast

On Saturday, we spent a very full day at Cedar Point, an amusement park on Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. I had never been in the fall before, but it was definitely better than going in the summer: shorter lines (although they were still pretty long for the good stuff), cooler temperatures, and fewer folks that were scantily clad.

Kind of hard to take a cute picture when you're looking directly into the sun.

Our favorites were:

• Millenium Force- 92 mph with a 312 ft hill that dropped at 80 degrees!
• Maverick- the newest roller coaster in the park. At only 57 mph it hardly sounded daunting, and it didn't have any ferociously tall hills that looked super fun- but it did have plenty of awesome twists and turns. At one point it stopped us in a tunnel and then shot us out at 70 mph. So cool.
• Top Thrill Dragster- the tallest ride in the park (it's the yellow one to the left of Spencer in the picture above). Accelerated us to 120 mph in only 4 seconds, then took us up and over a super tall hill. I'm pretty sure I was laughing the whole time, and Spencer said he pretty much couldn't breathe until it was over because we were going so fast.
  

We got home at about 1:30am and went straight to bed. Whenever I lay down after riding roller coasters, I feel like I'm still riding one. That's how it was when I fell asleep Saturday night. Thank goodness for 12:30pm church the next day, or it would've been a rough morning!

More Visitors!

Shelby and Johnny Hansen came to visit us last night. Shelby and I went to grad school together, especially bonding in the spring of 2006 when both of our husbands were gone for long periods of time (Spencer selling alarms in Southern California, and Johnny doing an Air Force training in Alabama). We both lived at Wymount during spring term, so I would sometimes go over to her place to hang out. We even had a few sleepovers with other students, one for fun and one to study for our final for Dr. Fujiki's class on multicultural issues in speech-language pathology. I think we all got about 2 hours of sleep that night.

They currently living in Dayton, OH where Johnny is stationed with the Air Force. They were up visiting church sites in Kirtland and decided to visit us for a bit before heading home.

I felt privileged to be the first fellow grad student to see and hold her 6-week-old baby, Sol. Doesn't look too happy in this picture, but boy was he cute! We loved that full head of hair.

Done Deal

This past summer, Spencer and I decided to apply for a Health Professions scholarship with the Navy to pay for dental school and to help with our living costs. It was a big (and scary) decision to make, but we felt that it was a good opportunity for our family. A few weeks ago, Spencer's Navy recruiter, Senior Chief Steinbrook, informed us that he was awarded the scholarship. I joined Spencer on campus today to meet with the Senior Chief and the lady below, who's name I can't remember. We read through and completed all of the necessary paperwork (I only got emotional once, but hid it well), after which Spencer was sworn in as an Ensign in the Navy (the most junior rank of a commissioned officer).

Taking his Oath of Office.

The only snag(s)? On his oath of office paper, the secretary typed in an F under "sex." They just crossed it out and wrote an M in pen for now, but he will have to re-sign another paper later. We thought that was the end of it, but then we read the first few lines of the certificate pictured above and noticed that it says: "Know that ye, reposing special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity and abilities of Spencer Weiss Bjarnason, I do appoint her an Ensign...." Don't really want to hang that on our wall, so he'll be getting a new one of those too.

Indians vs. Athletics

CADA, an association for dentists' wives, sponsored an Indians game on Saturday so tickets were only $5 each. Heather and Jason accompanied us, and our seats were back behind right field. It was a pretty good game, with back to back home runs by the Indians in 6th inning. We ended up winning 4-3.

We were pretty much surrounded by other dental students.

Celebrating their victory.

We were highly entertained by these little boys, who were so freaked out by the intermittent fireworks after home runs and such that one of them started crying. (Don't worry, his dad pacified him very quickly with some cotton candy.) We also had a good laugh when one boy told his dad that he wanted some apple juice. His dad, who's in our ward, looked up at us and mouthed "beer."

We enjoyed the fireworks after the game for "Fan Appreciation Night." And just like the 4th of July, the camera couldn't quite capture them. We actually thought this show was better than the fireworks we saw on the 4th in St. Paul. Always knew Ohio was better than Minnesota...