The Funeral

Tim's funeral was the weekend before Thanksgiving and despite the circumstances that brought us all together, it was a very good weekend. Tim was the kind of guy who always wanted to make people laugh and enjoy themselves and his funeral was no different. I swear I have never laughed and cried so hard in one day before. That's just the way Tim was and that's how he wanted people to remember him.

Probably the best part of the weekend was getting to be with friends and family from California that I haven't seen in a while. It was great to get to be together again. We ran into my favorite Thorkelsons at the stake center...

After a very long service (3 hours... Tim was kind of a big deal), we headed over to the cemetery for the burial.

To finish up the day, it was back to the Cummings for some Cafe Rio and a party in Tim's honor. It was the perfect end for Tim's funeral. We will miss Tim and his positive, happy presence in our lives.

This is the Place?

Favorite Quote of the Week: (while walking to class on Monday morning while the temperature was in the low 20's, Chad remarked, "I know Utah is supposed to be beautiful and everything, but I think Brigham Young was wrong when he said, 'This is the Place'... he should have kept going in a south-western direction...."

I had no choice but to agree. When we woke up on Saturday morning, we were greeted by a little sprinkling of snow everywhere and I all I could say was, "It's freezing and I live in Utah. How did that happen?"

I guess we are just two kids from much milder climates....

Winterized.

It's that time of the year again. The winter cold has begun to set in and our house has turned into an igloo. Don't get me wrong, I love our house, it's perfect for us AND it's super close to campus. However, it's a fairly old house with poor insulation, old windows/doors, tile/wood floors... it can get pretty chilly inside. It doesn't help that even when we run the heat, the second we turn it off, it gets cold within a couple of minutes. Our house just doesn't retain heat very well. In order to be better prepared for the winter THIS year, we have made a few adjustments:

1. we now BOTH have good-quality slippers to wear in the house at all times.
2. Invested in a space heater at the end of the winter last year that is safe to use in the bathroom. It's quite nifty, it can be programmed to turn on 10 minutes before our alarms go off so the bathroom is nice and warm when showering.
3. Gotten out the coco-motion a couple of times and it is in good working order for the winter.
4. We now always put rolled-up towels under the front door and side door to reduce the amount of air drafting in.

A friend from our ward, Ben Hugo, reccommended that we try to winterize our ancient sliding door in our kitchen by this method:

So for date night last Saturday, Courtney and I sent Ben and Chad to Home Depot for the supplies, while we cooked up a delicious dinner. When they stepped through the door with a small box in hand, I wasn't too sure what they had found for our predicament. Essentially, its a large plastic sheet that is secured to the sides of the door frame and then vaccuum sealed on with a hair dryer. While they were putting it up, I was thinking that we were going to look like My Big Fat Greek Wedding with furniture & things covered in plastic, but now that it's up, you can't even tell! We're just hoping it does a better job at insulating the doorframe.

Eating some yummy dinner after the home-improvement project.
Homemade Caesar salad with barbeque pork mini-sandwhiches.
The rolls.
The delicious BBQ pork.
The Caesar Salad. Our favorite recipe...
And then oatmeal-chocolate brownies to finish it off. It was the right thing to do. It was a good date night.

BYU Basketball

After a crazy week of tests, studying, essays, projects, study groups, etc. it's kind of nice to take advantage of the fun side of being students. So on Friday night we went to the BYU basketball game with our favorite Saltzman family! Good news... BYU won!
Apparently the Saltzmans are very intense about the game... I just love spending time with my favorite ex-roomie.

Tim Cummings

After a long and courageous battle with cancer, Tim Cummings passed peacefully through the veil early this morning, moving forward on his eternal journey.

Growing up, we were close with a couple of families in our ward and stake. I grew up with these families, their kids, and they were a constant part of my life. These are the kind of friends that we always watched the Superbowl with, had Christmas traditions of caroling and eating cinnamon rolls during Christmastime, went on family vacations to Lake Mead, celebrated Halloween with... people who were like other sets of parents to me. I consider them to be family. One of those families is the Cummings family.

Over a year ago, Tim Cummings was diagnosed with cancer and the Cummings family was presented with this totally new challenge in their life. It's been a really tough year full of challenges and heartache. Chad and I had the opportunity to stop by St. George and see them a couple of times throughout the last year as we've been driving through on our way to/from Utah and they have always been optimistic and happy. Tim was a comedian, the kind of guy full of life who could always make you smile or laugh. Even while experiencing chemotherapy, when we saw him he had a smile and something nice to say.
In the last couple of weeks, Tim has been in incredible pain and earlier this week, they decided to stop all of his maintenance medications/IV's/treatments except for pain and anti-anxiety medications. It was time for him to return Home, and he passed away early this morning. We love the Cummings family and pray they will have comfort in their loss. This has been an interesting experience for me as I've heard of the various challenges and struggles that Tim and Liz have been through in the past year. I wasn't a direct participant like my parents in helping them, but they've constantly been in our prayers. I've also had the experience to take care of patients one-on-one on the oncology floor at the hospital where we do our clinical hours, and I know the tremendous pain and suffering that can come with cancer. People handle it so differently. I took care of one man (34 years old) who was given a year left to live when he was diagnosed a couple months prior to the day I took care of him who was depressed, withdrawn, and completely hopeless. Nothing I did or said made any difference in his mood, and I felt helpless. I tried to my best to be happy and help him when I could, but it didn't really make much different.

That same day, I also took care of another patient with terminal cancer (49 years old) who had approached cancer with a completely different frame of mind. She was pleasant, cooperative, and optimistic despite the circumstances. As I got to know her a little better and took care of her throughout the day, she told me stories about her life and her gratitude for everything that she'd been through. It was a spiritual experience to be able to serve someone who was so close to our Heavenly Father. She had things figured out, and she was content and happy to be able to return to our Heavenly Home. I hope if I ever experience that challenge in my life, I could have that attitude.

Tim had that attitude, as well as his family. They have the understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ in their lives and they know that they will be together again someday. That's really the most important thing. When things get hard, you just have to remember that it all pays off and someday we will all be reunited with our families again. We love you Tim.

Tim Cummings 11/14/2009

Vaccinated!

I am now officially vaccinated. It shouldn't be a big deal, but after all of the hoops I had to jump through to get the H1N1 vaccine, I'm pretty excited and I want everyone to know about it!

Nursing school requires the regular, seasonal flu shot every year, but this year they've also required that we get the H1N1 vaccine... by Thanksgiving! I tried one time to go to the County Health Department to get the shot, but when my friend and I arrived we were informed that the line would take approximately 3-5 hours. As we are students, and time is not something easy to come by, this was most definitely NOT an option. (Besides that, it would have meant waiting in line in a parking structure, while it was snowing, and with a thousand kids running around crazy for having to wait in line forever)

Since then, I've been trying to get an appointment for a shot at either the Utah Valley County Health Department or the Salt Lake County Health Department but there are never any available. Randomly last week, I ran into another nursing student who had a phone number for a Smith's pharmacy in Sandy that was offering appointments for the shot for $10. I jumped on the bandwagon and went to get the shot with some other nursing students. Thank you Smith's!
I'm now vaccinated (even though I'm pretty sure I had the swine flu a couple of weeks ago) and can officially not be kicked out of clinicals at nursing school. Happy day.

Couponing Returns

I've been taking a small break from the world of couponing due to a hectic/crazy school schedule. However, this weekend Smith's was having an awesome sale and I just couldn't sit idly by... especially with Christmas around the corner. I secretly want an awesome camera (sometime in the future), and I feel like saving money on groceries is a good way to save up.

This picture shows all of the items I bought... $85 worth of groceries. Guess how much I paid?

$31!
(and that's including other groceries I needed to buy but didn't have coupons for, not a bad deal)

Happy return to couponing!