Christmas 2012

Jake and Heather 2012 Christmas Video Card

This December may have been the craziest yet! We had final projects, papers, concerts and exams for school during the first two weeks of the month, then left for 10 days to go on a cruise to Mexico with Heather’s family. Because of all of that, we just didn’t get our Christmas cards out as early as we had hoped. But we were definitely thinking of you and hoping that you had a wonderful holiday season! We wanted to keep it simple this year by sending out postcards and just directing you to this site for a news report on our year. Well, here it goes:

This year has been so busy!  Jake is working full-time with Delta Airlines here at the Salt Lake Airport.  The benefits from his job has allowed us to do some fun traveling this year.

Travels

We started off the year with a trip to Florida.  We stayed in Adam & Erica’s (Jake’s older brother) condo in Orlando and visited Disneyworld and Universal Studios. We loved Harry Potter world and highly recommend it.  If you go, get the butter beer, it’s totally worth it.  Heather went through 3 of them in the one day that we were there!

In February, Heather surprised Jake with a weekend getaway to the Oregon Coast.  Cannon Beach is special to us, because it is the spot where we first said, “I Love you”, three years ago.

A couple of weeks after that, we spend a weekend in Alaska.  Seeing the Auroras is on our bucket list, and we read news reports that the largest solar flare in 5 years would be producing some beautiful lights.  So we cleared our schedules and headed up there, staying with our good friend Natalie in Girdwood, AK.  Unfortunately, it was cloudy all weekend so we missed the lights.  We had a lot of fun though!  Alaska is so gorgeous, we love it there!

In January we took classes for open water scuba certification.  In March we took a trip to Belize to use our new skills!  We went diving, cave tubing, snorkeling, and even hiked some Mayan ruins in Guatemala.  It was a blast!

Summer came, the semester ended and we headed south to Texas for a family vacation with the Estradas.  (Jake’s second family)  We met them in San Antonio and drove south to Port Aransas.  We spent an awesome week hanging out in the beach house, swimming, skim boarding, eating, laughing, catching sand crabs, and making bonfires on the beach.  Thanks for including us guys!

In July, Heather spent a weekend with her friend Amy in New York City.  She’s developed a love affair with that city and keeps hinting that she wants to move there someday.  We’ll see about that!  Anyway,  the two girls had a fun weekend seeing The Newsies and Chicago on Broadway, perusing the Metropoliltan Museum of Art, and biking in Central Park.

In August Jake’s brother, David, visited from Texas and we took him out to swim in The Great Salt Lake.  Heather has lived in Utah all her life, and Jake’s been here for 6 years, but it was a first for both of us!  It was kind of gross, but we’re glad we checked it off the bucket list.

At the end of August, before the fall semester started, Heather took another grip with her girlfriends.  (Does this sound unfair to anyone else?!)  She was gone for two weeks on a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean.

She went with her friends Angela, Jane, Holly & Michele.  Because they did a cruise, they were able to cover a lot of ground.  They flew to Rome and boarded the cruise in Civitavecchia, Italy and stopped in: Dubrovnik, Croatia; Corfu, Greece; Katakolon, Greece; Athens, Greece; Santorini, Greece; Ephesus, Turkey; and Messina, Sicily.  During the spring semester, Heather took an Art History class and she had a lot of fun seeing the ancient art, architecture, and sculpture that she had just learned about in school.  The trip was wonderful, but she was definitely glad to get home after being gone for two weeks.

But between all of our travels, we do work pretty hard.  Heather is still working at Williams Sonoma, and picked up another part-time job working for a Marriott here in Salt Lake.  She’s driving a hotel shuttle to and from the airport - watch out drivers!  Heather is still going to school full-time and is beginning her last semester at LDS Business College.  This year she was awarded a half tuition academic scholarship for her good grades.  This summer she will be transferring to UofU to finish her bachelors degree.  Jake went back to school this fall, also at LDS Business College.  We enrolled in one class together and had a blast competing all semester for who would get a better grade.  Heather won. :)  Just a few months ago we moved from our tiny basement apartment on Capital Hill, to tiny above-ground apartment (a slight upgrade due to the less cavey atmosphere) in the Avenues.  We are loving our new neighborhood!  Jake’s little sister, Victoria, moved from Texas to attend school in Salt Lake at the beginning of the year.  We had a lot of fun with her in town, watching movies, making dinner, and just hanging out.  She’s back in Texas now, waiting to leave for her LDS mission to Canada and we miss her!

On a less-fun note:  After several months of testing, Jake was diagnosed in June with Ulcerative Colitis.  He has not had a very pleasant time with the symptoms.  He’s been on over a dozen different medications, seen several doctors, undergone multiple colonoscopies, and they are still trying to get it under control.   Definitely keep in your thoughts.  We hope that his year he can get out of the active flare-up stage and into remission, where he won’t be dealing with so many symptoms and medications.

Well, that’s all for now.  We hope that you had the merriest of Christmas’, and send you our very best wishes for the coming new year!  All our love!

-Jake & Heather