The best two years?

Chris has been out of town a lot the past few weeks for his residency interviews so I decided it was a perfect time to start scanning my dad's mission slides. Last Christmas he purchased himself a slide converter (because all of his mission pics are slides) where you can scan the slide onto your computer to convert it to a photo but never got around to actually doing it so I said I would do it. It has been really fun to see him in his glory days.
He went to Guatemala and was there during a huge earthquake. He lived in a tent for most of his mission and wore jeans a lot of the time. He learned Spanish in the LTM, but then had to learn a bunch of Indian dialects straight from the people without any previous exposure. Here are a few of my favorite pics so far:

I am pretty sure that this is where he gained his great love of the great outdoors and sleeping in tents and working hard....all things that even over 30 years later he still enjoys!

Happy Halloween!

So Linzi had to work this weekend, making for a less-exciting Halloween weekend than we both would have liked. Kind of lame cuz I finally had a free weekend, being done with my urology rotations, and having taken Step 2 CK on Friday (what a long day). So instead of just watching football all day, I decided to carve another pumpkin while watching football all day. Admittedly, it took a little bit longer than I had planned, but I think it turned out pretty well. I swear that it looks better in person. I guess that you could consider this our costume for this year...a jack-o-lantern. Happy Halloween Everyone!

What do you think...any resemblance?

The Votes are in

Time to announce the winner(s) of the Pumpkin Throwdown 2010. We had to disqualify one of the sets of votes due to conflict of interest (even with them you still wouldn't have won Kathryn), but we thank everyone who put in their two cents. By my tally on 10/30/10, the public has spoken in favor of the pirate and the spider, each receiving 5 votes to tie for the win!!

tie 3. Dave Dodds (creator of #3 and #5, 4 votes total)
tie 3. Kathryn Dodds (creator of #1 and #6, 4 votes total)
tie 1. Chris Brown (creatorrhhhrgghrhr of #2, 5 votes)
tie 1. Linzi Brown (creator of #4, 5 votes)

Thanks to everyone who voted...it's nice to see that the public agrees with what Linzi and I have seen all along....don't mess with us in a Pumpkin Throwdown! It's been a fun tradition during med school.

*Note: the voting was not influenced in any way by this blogger. Of note, even his own mother and father voted for the Dodds...ouch!

Pumpkin throw down........

It was our 4th annual Dodds vs Browns carving contest. Many different techniques were used this year, some cheated by using punch stencils while others free-handed their designs. There are also 6 pumpkins instead of 4 because a few of us got super excited and carved both sides!


This year we thought we would let you be the judge. Which pumpkin do you think deserves the title of coolest pumpkin 2010?

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Dinner for two...........

We enjoy eating at Ruby Tuesday. We went there last night and these are the two things we ordered.....

As you can see, one dish was a steak the other was salmon. Which one do you think they tried to give to me first? Which one do you think was really the one I ordered? This is not the first time our meals have been confused. Sometimes it makes me laugh being married to a man who orders things like cobb salad, fish, and chicken. Do you think the waiters are judging me after they realize the truth?

The life of a toddler.......

So today I watched an incredibly cute toddler and realized that she and I had many things in common.
#1. she likes to read books
#2. she trips in her crocs (a lot!)
#3. she enjoys crunching through leaves and watching them fall off the trees
#4. her lunch consists of things like easy mac, green beans, and mandarin oranges (of which she only ate the later two)
#5. she snacked on gold fish, fruit snacks, and pretzels throughout the day
#6. she needs a nap every day

After sharing a few of her gold fish and fruit snacks and eating most of her rejected mac and cheese I realized that I indeed enjoy the diet of a toddler and that whole nap thing isn't so bad either!

Irony at its best.....

So you might ask yourself, what is that large stack of papers? Well, it just so happens to be receipts from the past four years. Yes, I didn't know at the time, but I married a receipt hoarder. (I am talking he had receipts from pre-mission people!). It didn't matter the purchase, you save the receipt. I was fine with this because all it required of me was to keep the receipt and put it on the computer desk for Chris to deal with. Well, he finally came around and decided that this was a bit excessive and a few weeks ago he purged. He threw away all of them except for big purchases. It was a big day and I was proud of him.

Then I discovered this when I went to put this jacket on:

The picture doesn't really show it well, but that is a security ink tag still attached. No, I didn't steal it, but apparently I didn't realize that they had not removed it. I got it when we went to Brason months ago. When I started thinking about it, I remember setting off the store alarm, but I thought it was a fluke because they had removed the tags.

Now do you see the problem. I have a jacket with a security tag still in place and no proof of purchase because Chris decided it was time to clean house after so many years. I guess I will have to hope that the Nike store here will have pity on me and take it off.

My mom actually asked me on the phone, "Well, is it in a place where you can't see it? Maybe you can still wear it." Yeah, because that doesn't scream white trash now does it.