Bowl Game!

(The last post wouldn't let me add any more pictures...)

After locking up the Conference Title, the team accepted an invitation to play in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise for the second straight year.  We weren't able to go last year because we were working, but we weren't going to miss it this time around.  We were able to get some good seats and enjoyed a great game in which we beat Toledo.  The Bowl allowed the fans down on the field for the trophy presentation which was cool and allowed us to get a few more pictures with some of our good friends and favorite players for the last time this season!

View From our seats!!

Loving life despite the COLD

With the Logo after the game

One of Joni's good friends from high school, McKade Brady.  Played with a broken jaw during the Louisiana Tech game.  A true tough guy for sure!!

During the game, secret handshake with Will, with Will and Joni, with DJ, with Matt.  Great ending to a fun game!

Football Season!!!

This post will naturally be much more in depth considering the author than it would have been if my lovely spouse was still running the show.  Those of you who aren't sports fans...I'm sorry.  For the second year I am doing Marketing and Promotions for the USU Athletic Department.  It's a great internship and I've learned a lot.  This season I had quite a few friends on the football team and was really excited for the season to start!  Joni was a little bit less excited.  I think she's started enjoying sports and going to games than she used to, but naturally she would rather go with me, and since I worked at all the football home games, and most of the basketball ones, she tends to stay home which is a bummer.  She did make it to quite a few football games this year though and I got to run up and visit her at least once a game!

The stadium the day before the first game, my credentials, and the Beehive Boot (Best team in Utah!)

The big game to get the season going was The Battle of the Brothers; Utah State vs The University of Utah.  My dad went to Utah and raised us to be fans of the Utes, but I must say I have become Aggie Blue through and through.  I still cheer for Utah most of the time (really as long as they aren't playing us) but this game meant a lot for family bragging rights!  It came down to Overtime and my good friend Will Davis made the game winning play on 4th down preventing Utah from scoring a game tying TD and the party was on in Logan!  The game was on ESPN and a few highlights from the game were actually used for a commercial throughout the season everytime ESPN had a Friday Night game!  It was a great win for Utah State and really set the tone for the team to have a successful year!

Chuckie Keeton and Will Davis in their spots in the ESPN commerical

The Scoreboard before the game!

The Star of the Show after the game with fans who stormed the field

My friends DJ Tialevea and Kellen Bartlett after the game.  They, Will and a few other players played on my softball team this summer

Most importantly I was able to go up and talk to Joni in the stands before the game!

The Utah game was great and really set the tone for what would become the most successful season Utah State football ever had.  It was the teams first outright conference championship since 1936, they won a school record 11 games, won a bowl game for only the second time in school history, ended the season ranked in the top 20 in the country, and ended the season as the only team that didn't allow the opponent to score a touchdown in the first quarter of any game all year.  Through my internship I was able to meet and host two Aggie greats.  Kevin Curtis who had a good NFL career, and Bobby Wagner who should soon be announced as the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year!  They were both really nice guys and it was cool to be able to chat with each of them.

With Bobby at the New Mexico State game

 With Kevin at the UNLV game

Novembeard was in full effect for the last home game of the season.  We hosted Idaho and after having beaten Louisiana Tech the week before, just needed a win to secure that first Conference Championship since '36 and the team didn't disappoint!  Joni came to the game and was able to get a lot of good pictures.  It was another chance for fans to storm the field after the game and we were able to meet up down there to enjoy the celebration together and get a few pictures!  Another point that should be noted is that is was Will's 5th straight game with an interception and he actually took this interception this game all the way back for a touchdown.  It was the first defensive touchdown scored by Utah State in 5 years and was obviously the first of his career.  I had been telling him all season that WHEN he scored a touchdown, as I would already be on the field running promos, that we would have to celebrate together.  After he crossed the goal line I ran to find him on the sideline and we did our predetermined and choreographed handshake!  After the game he gave me the gloves he had worn for the game which is a cool piece of memorabilia that I will keep forever...and I will get signed of course!

I was doing my best to run the Promos that day!

If you look close on the right side, you can see me going after Will to make sure I get his gloves :)

Some of my friends celebrating as Champs! (From top left clockwise)  Will Davis, Tay Glover-Wright, Coach Andersen, Travis Reynolds, and Al Lapuaho

And of course we snagged a picture with our favorite player!!

How does one become...

...a housewifehusband you might ask?  Well, it generally happens when and educated and successful husband wife finishes school and goes on to the real world, big time jobs, salary rather than hourly pay, and possibly even benefits.  Well being the 25 year old college student that I am, and Joni being the 22 year old college graduate that she is, we threw the worldly norms aside, she became a sugar momma, and I became a house husband.  Embarrassing fact, I just mentioned my age.  Yes, I will turn 26 in less than two months, no I will not have a degree by then (but I will have one a few short months later) so if you're doing the math, I will graduate college in 2013, and I graduated high school in 2005.  It doesn't take a math major to realize that I took about the slowest track possible to get things finished.  But alas, we are banking on the fact that my buoyant personality with shine forth during the job interview process and I will have a future employer smitten with my eloquence and grace who will be willing to look past the fact that I will omit my college GPA from my resume and make myself look like some sort of genius with years of experience, which let's face it, will be true!  Well that was a tangent if I've ever written one.  If I keep control of this blog for a while you will learn to buckle up when you start reading because it might be a wild ride!  Anyway, where was I going with that?

Now I think I remember what was happening in June, Joni was stressing about trying to find a teaching job.  Cache Valley tends to be very competitive for teachers from what I understand.  Beautiful overachieving women tend to get teaching degrees while they wait for their lethargic, neanderthal husbands to just grab any degree for the sake of finishing school (hence the house husbands) and they all look for jobs.  With only two school districts and some dinosaurs who never want to retire, there are obviously limited positions to be filled by a surplus of applicants.  Well unfortunately, Joni was a member of that vast surplus and though she worked her little fingers to the bone building a resume, passing it around far and wide, networking like crazy, and ultimately breaking down and crying to her dashingly handsome and surprisingly sophisticated husband who assured her things would work out...things didn't seem to work out.  Even when it seemed like every other first year teacher was finding a job somewhere, it wasn't working out!

As we got toward the middle of August we were dreading the reality that maybe it just wasn't going to happen this year.  We were starting to look into what it would be like for her to sub for a year and just get some more experience, and possibly pick up a part time job doing something she would enjoy to numb the sting of not being a teacher.  But then, one last time she looked on the county job listings and less than two weeks before school started, there were still a few interviews open.  To our amazement Joni was invited to all the interviews, for a few part time and a few full time positions.  One of the full time positions was actually two part time jobs morphed into one.  This listing was the second interview she got.  When she got home she felt pretty good about it but was prepping for the next interview for a part time computer teacher.  But before she had to leave for that interview she got a call.  I tried not to stare at her while she was on the phone and tried my best to eavesdrop with hopeful anticipation.  She hung up the phone and was offered a full time job as the ESL (English as a Second Language) job at two schools!  We were elated and our many hours of prayer, talking out different possible worse-case scenarios, tears, and hollow, but positive assurance were all worth it!  Just like that we received a great blessing and Mrs. McDonald was finally official!!

Now I wish I could say that this plaque signified the end of a journey.  It didn't.  Joni is a planner, she likes to be 5 steps ahead of the game.  She is a decorator, she couldn't live with herself if something she felt represented her (our apartment, her classroom(s)) was bland or boring.  Now being hired less than two weeks before the start of school is a great blessing, but for a woman who likes to have all her ducks in a line before they even leave the pond (does that analogy make sense?  It's late) this was terrible, it would have been terrible if it was one classroom, but because it was essentially two part-time jobs, she had TWO classrooms to decorate which upgraded to catastrophe from terrible to unimaginably horrendous.  By some tender mercy, she was able to turn two empty classrooms, into little jungle villages by the first day of school!

I think she had a hashtag like #ThisTimeImTheTeacher ... what a cutie

Pretty solid effort given the time constraints.  The decorations have only grown from there...

And so you can see how a regular dead beat college student becomes a house husband!

Catch up -- This seems to be becoming a theme!!

Confessions of a Housewifehusband.  Well my wife graduated leaving me the lone college student in our marriage.  Luckily she was able to get a full time job this year (which I'll probably cover in a future post) and though I have two jobs, school, and a podcast I'm running, I am home more than her...a lot more.  And because I have a guilty pleasure of reading blogs (mostly run by my sister and friends wives) I figured maybe there are a few people out there who would read our blog if we actually updated it, so I've undertaken the project for now!

Since Joni graduated, needless to say a lot has happened, it will probably take me a few posts to catch everyone up with everything and since I hate blogs that don't have pictures and we don't take pictures with camera's but usually use our phones, most of the catching up will be brought to you visually via Instagram...sorry to those of you who already follow us there!

Post graduation...I couldn't really tell you what happened during June because, well neither of us used Instagram then, so let's forget that month ever happened and shoot forward to July!  Our highlights of the month started when Joni's dad (Lyle) entered his car in the Cache Valley Cruise In.  A little back story, Lyle has had this car since long before I met Joni.  My understanding is that when he first got it there wasn't much to it and his goal was to completely restore it, which he did wonderfully over a few years.  It's been his dream to have a car in the Cruise In for a long time and with a lot of encouragement from his kids, he decided it was finally time to do so this year, so the Nova made it's first appearance and it was a blast!

We had a great time riding in the car up and down Main Street and it was a lot of fun to be able to spend time with Joni's family for the event.  I think everyone got a chance to ride around and Lyle and Cortney loved driving it for the thousands of people lining the streets!

Then came the 4th of July and we were lucky enough to be able to go visit my sweet grandma in the thriving metropolis of Milford, Utah...a town where people are outnumbered by pigs and the railroad rules the economy!  Grandma moved there almost 10 years ago and it's where his sisters lives, she loves it and has a beautiful house with gorgeous views of the valley and mountain.  Unfortunately because of a drought there were no fireworks in Milford, but that didn't stop us from having and great time and Grandma made sure to get our shirt sizes ahead of time so that we would fit right in with the locals during the parade.

In August we were able to go back to Illinois to visit my parents.  The aforementioned drought wasn't limited to just Milford and the St Louis area was having one of its worst droughts in decades.  If my memory is correct, a record was set for most consecutive days in triple digit weather (HUMID triple digit weather no less) and I believe they went around 40-50 days without a single drop of rain.  Luckily my parents have a pool in the backyard which helps take the edge off, but not so much on days we choose to do other things.  Most of you know I've been a St Louis Cardinals fan my entire life.  My parents got great tickets to a game in the 7th row behind the Cardinals dugout for a game against the Milwaukee Brewers who the Cardinals beat in the 1982 World Series and it was the 30 year reunion of the team!  It was great to see some of my favorite childhood Cardinals including Ozzie Smith and the rest of the '82 crew but it was HOT. 

The game was a lot of fun and the Cardinals won which is always a plus.  Another out door activity we chose to undertake was a trip the the Zoo.  I love the St Louis Zoo, it's been rated the number 1 free zoo in the country and they do a really good job.  It's also a favorite destination for our nephew Colin.  We always have to make a trip there with my sisters kids when we're in town and this trip was no exception.  So we went.  Colin did a pretty good job dealing with this heat.  His mom and baby sister did not.  My sister is a notorious complainer (love you) and the baby didn't like walking around in the stroller so I volunteered to carry her around.  Not my best choice but it kept her happy, keep in mind she was only 11 months old but in the 95th percentile for her age in height and 99th percentile for weight so lugging her around for two and a half hours was quite the workout in 95 degree heat.  But I digress.  It was a fun zoo visit and the penguin house, even though it smells terrible, was a nice cool getaway from the heat from time to time.

Despite the heat it was a great trip home and we had a good time with my family!!  We will have more catching up to do but I think I'll spare you for now!!