Murder Mystery Dinner

We hosted a murder mystery dinner party, called Roman Ruins. It was an absolute blast! I turned out to be the murder. Suzi was the town hussy. Briana was a thief. Aubrey and Brigham were involved in an affair. Everyone was plotting to kill the poet, that I eventually murdered. That is everyone but Suzi. It was fun that everyone was willing to dress up and play along. We had secrets to reveal and discussions and arguments on whom the murder was. For dinner we served coke ham. It was a delicious night and very fun! We will for sure be doing this again. Our next adventure is Lethal Luau.

I promised!! plus purple bathroom...

So I promised I would finish putting up pictures of my house. Here is the kitchen! And I believe that's about all folks! Enjoy and if you have suggestions I'd love it!

Dream House!

If I was to have a dream house, this is what it would look like. I spent hours making this house and little 2 year old Camarae helped me do it. My students have me the kit for a Christmas present, how fun!!



Camarae was eating the half dead gingerbread man. :)

Finishing it up!!

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Okay my latest and greatest pictures of the house. Still need to take some of the kitchen and 1/2 bath downstairs! :) here you are!

New House!

Alright, I know IT'S ABOUT TIME!! I publish my new townhouse on the blog. I'm super excited to share it with everyone but I want to break it up into two different post. See, the thing is, I'm not completely done painting.... haha never ending process. Also, I want to expound the effect of the 'nastiness' that my townhouse was in before I moved in and started making changes. It was quite the adventure finding a place that I wanted to buy and second, being convinced this was the smartest thing for me to do.

I have always been in love with these townhouses on Trejo Street in Rexburg. They are called Riverwood Town homes. My friend Megan (whom student taught at my school so she carpooled with me) owns one down the row that I live in for a summer to house sit for her while her and her husband were selling alarm systems. It was the cutest place and so roomy and comfy. Even though they left all their stuff, we still had room for our stuff! ( It was my friend Natalia and I living there.) Perfect for two and had a two-car carport in the bad. Although I would prefer a garage, my pocketbook prefers carports.

So the search started, I looked at a couple different places and none of them appealed to me like the Riverwoods did. So I finally found one there that I wasn't in love with but with some TLC I definitely could be! We called it the Boise State house. The bathroom was covered with Bronco’s memorabilia and the front door has little windows in the top, they were covered with Boise State colored papers and Boise State stickers. We thought it was pretty funny. The Boise State house had a rental family in there, man, wife, and two little boys. It smelt funny like diapers and was dirtier that you could imagine. The carpets were a nice cream color under the rugs, but around the rest of the house they were a black brown. My mom came up to help me look for a place, and I’m forever grateful!! J She said, we can fix this for sure! So we kept thinking about it, (there was another place so much nicer but also a pretty penny more!)

Finally, we decided to make an offer and after haggling way to much with the owners and almost walking away, we came out with a deal and signed papers! I took ownership and it’s been a journey since! First things first, we cleaned like crazy without any heat because the renters turned it completely off and we couldn’t get it turned back on for almost a week!! COLD!!

Then we moved a bunch of stuff into the kitchen, picked out new carpet, paint, and got to work! We moved in and painted almost every single wall we could, had Lowe’s install carpet, and now we are trying to get unpacked and set up. It’s great! (Oh, we means Suzi, my roommate, and I.) Okay time for the before pictures, by Friday I should be able to put up after pictures. We love not having to worry about anything because we have parking, and I own the place! It’s been the best thing ever and makes us both more relaxed and so happy because we are always having a party and people over. We have no landlord to say, be quiet! Haha. Also, watch for my next post about my car journey. I guess I decided to put as much money into the economy as I could in a three-month period!
Kitchen, dining room view.

Kitchen the day we got keys!

1/2 bath downstairs

Spare bedroom, it's Suzi's room.

Master bedroom, it's mine! :)

Nasty carpet and hallway between kitchen and living room, 1/2 bath is in this hall. Then below is the living room.

Megan's Summer Update

ALASKA!!! It was a great trip, if you've read Sabrina's blog she's already updated you, but as for me.... I'm slow. After vacationing around the state we played at Sabrina's house for a while. Some fun adventures followed, like painting the babies room with sponges, dumping a big jar of pickles after walking through the woods and across the road into a ditch and getting passed by a car right after we were trying to hid the evidence!, shopping in Fairbanks and playing in Delta Junction. We went on a long bike ride for mutual and Sabrina whipped me, she thought I was just a slow peddler until she tried riding the bike I rode the day after and realized how hard I had to work to keep up with her! We celebrated our 25th birthday over Root-beer floats and some presents. It was a great vacation and we both cried at the airport when we had to say goodbye. I cried the whole way back to SLC on my 3 red eye flights!



Getting back to Idaho was great, I was able to get my classroom put together, see some friends and someone special. Infact, I went to Bambino's one night to get some Bambino's (the restaurant the bf is General Manager of) to save in the freezer for when I need an emergency lunch... Greg rang me up and gave me a great deal. :) Then I got home and opened my box. All the Bambino's were in there, but my name was written on the top of the box, no clue why so I had to read and...



Greg left me a note inside the box! It says MEGAN IS PRETTY! Totally made my day!

School started and I wasn't nervous or excited that much but it has been a great year. Teralee came up to see me right before I had to go back and we had so much fun and stayed up too late for such an old lady, me. Volleyball has been so much fun, I was nervous about this team bc we seemed to clash last year. But this year we all got along and had a great time and worked hard. We played Districts on Saturday and for the first time in school history, 8th grade WON districts!! It was a great thing to be a part of and we all got medals. My team also bought me some flowers which was fun. I am excited about this school year and what else it might bring!!

Megan in Alaska

I thought that I had better split this post into two different notes. This one will be the Alaska adventures from camping, then my second when I get back to 'the lower 48' will be the rest of the trip! I started my journey by arriving at my mom's house in Sandy at 2:20am Thursday morning and waking up at 5:30 to get to the airport on time and catch my plane. Since Alaska is practically a different country, they don't fly here often. I had a 5-hour layover in Seattle, which I slept and played on my computer for the time. I arrived in Fairbanks at 4 local time. Robert picked me up from Fairbanks airport and took me to the hospital to get Sabrina bc she was having a baby check-up. We grabbed lunch at the local Subway and we were off to Denali National Park!!




We camped one night at Denali and saw a lynx, bunch of birds and squirrels that wanted to eat out of our tent, a rabbit that was trying to camp in our fire pit, and most of all, bear prints on the bathroom wall!! We didn’t see a bear but we went on a couple of fun hikes before we left town. We also got to see the big hotel that Desaray worked in for a summer! We took the time to stop for pictures and see every free tourist center we could! I had a hard time knowing when to sleep because the sun never went down. That is a new experience. The longer I'm here the more I'm learning, you just go to sleep. But the sun is starting to go down about midnight for a couple of hours so it's helping.


After Denali we went to Anchorage and stayed with Robert’s great-uncle Merlen. They were really nice and it was great to be able to take a shower and not use an outhouse! Which we realized there was real toilets right beside our campground right before we left. We had been walking up the road to outhouses! Ha-ha, that was bittersweet. Anchorage was great, we hiked tabletop the first night and it was sure cold and windy!! At the top of Tabletop you can see the whole valley and ocean. It was a neat sight.



Off to Seward! We stopped at every touristy picture stop we could while driving the Beast, big red truck. Some were really neat and others were cold… okay let’s face it; I’ve been cold pretty much the whole time I’ve been here. Blasted lower 48 ha-ha. We camped at the Seward Military Resort. It was quite the feat finding our assigned tent spot but we did and we loved camping there! It didn’t stop raining hardly at all but we had access keys to a really nice bathroom with showers and hot water!! We toured Seward and Robert and Sabrina went fishing for a while so I played on my phone. I’ve never been fishing at a license for 3 days is 35 dollars, so I watched. Robert caught a big dogfish! Sabrina has pictures on her site of that. Robert took us driving around just looking at scenery, which was great because we happened upon fjords National Park, which had a glacier, Exit glacier, that we hiked to and did some exploring. We got to get up close to a couple of glaciers on our trip, that was
really neat!! We also went on a boat tour of the Alaska Gulf. We saw a lot of birds, sea lions, some otters, but no whales or orkas. We were a little bummed about it but we had fun.



After a couple of days camping we decided to head home. Robert drove us straight through the night and made a deal that he would if, and only if, Sabrina and I stayed awake with him. I lost badly…. But he stayed awake and kept driving! We had so much fun playing and touring Alaska! Now it’s to experience what Sabrina’s life is like up here in the Last Frontier.

This last photo was the middle of the night, all of that sunlight!!