only two people follow my blog.

so there it is... i'm admitting to the world that i only have two followers. that' s right. it's high school all over. two friends. at least now i don't have to make excuses for not going to dances {or at least i don't feel obligated to do so}. aaaaannnnyyyyywwwwwhhhhoooo. i feel like things are starting to pick up again. here are the highlights of the past six months:

• i got a promotion
• i made a pintrest account
• mike and i watched 5 seasons of 30rock
• mike graduated
• we went to europe
• ran ragnar
• mike applied for medical school

 there it is... some awesome things and some less awesome things.

so since this post is boring. here ya go

old man crushes

i don't know what it is. sure, i could blame it on the fact that the main father figure in my life was my grandpa or possibly that since my grandma and i are so close maybe we're developing the same taste in men. there are lots of possibilities, but one thing is for sure...

my name is
Jess Reynolds
and i have some serious old man crushes.

it's no secret to my husband that i am obsessed with liam neeson. in fact, i have convinced mike that when the time comes and we have children, we will be naming one of our sons {ins-alla} liam and raise him well aware of his namesake.

so here it is. a tribute to all of my old man crushes.

~liam neeson~

even as a jedi he is beautiful

and don't forget his "particular set of skills" in taken


and of course (not that anyone ever doubted he wouldn't) he's beautiful naked

~gary oldman~
(right there in the name. old-man.)

c'mon! he has been dracula AND sirius black!

and last but not least....

~alan rickman~

he's awesome!
he's been col. christopher brandon, that guy in die hard, the voice of God

snape

the boss in love/actually that made every girl in the world wish they were that skank that works for him...

you know....
this one?
{lucky skank}

anyway, to the old man loves of my life, just know that if you ever come to salt lake,
you'll always have somewhere to stay.

our first house

Mike and I both come from families that have had a lot of problems - they're better for the most part and very functional now but ya know, we both had it a little rough growing up. We decided before we got married that no matter what, our relationship would always come first. This has been one of the greatest blessings in my life. No marriage is perfect but our relationship is so strong and we really are the best of friends. We agreed that one sure way to maintain a strong and healthy relationship is to take time every week for
"date night" and I am happy to say that (in our whopping year and a half of marriage) we haven't missed a single week!

Below, you will find our very first Christmas date of the year!

yes, it was disgusting but don't let him fool you...

it didn't keep him from eating it.




That's right. this house was made in memory of the late great Michael Jackson... just kidding Mike and Jess FTW!

Mike and I both love Christmas. We love thinking of the perfect gifts for others and anticipate watching them being opened. In my teens I had a friend whose parent had this AMAZING idea that for Christmas (since they had a large family and kids tend to get jealous over presents and what not) they would buy a specific wrapping paper for each child and only the parents knew which paper (and present) belonged to which child. Now, Mike and I a ways away from having any children but we both love this idea and so we decided to start the tradition. We each picked out what wrapping paper we wanted (well... i let mike pick from a selected few. I refused to let sponge bob make his home under our Christmas tree this year). Mike chose gold and I chose this cute green damask print that sort of resembles our curtains. THANKFULLY not enough to be tacky.

This year (after getting this FABULOUS idea from a friend of mine Tigan Robinson) I decided that in my quest for perfection ( it'll be a LOOONNNGGG quest) I would make all of our Christmas bows. Below are pictures of a few of them and then you can see the cute sparkly bows i made for my presents (they are in the pictures with the tree)

*side note* i would quickly like to apologize for the poor picture quality. as you may remember reading about our mishap in Peru, my camera (and all of my other tech-y gadgets) were stolen. My wonderful uncle was nice enough to give me one of his old android phones; however, the camera on it doesn't have a flash so... a lot of my pictures are blurry for the time being.

good news to my husband and people who care about random junk like this EVERYWHERE!

i came across this article today during my lunch break. some of you may remember that a few months ago mike's poor little car was totaled. during the interim period between cars, the insurance of the guy who hit mike paid for him to have a rental car. it was an hhr. i think the picture speaks for itself and mike's feelings towards it.

i drove it a few times and i have to admit, not only is it hideous on the outside but it is a BEAST to drive...for so many reasons.

anyway, here's to you chevy hhr. you are an abomination.

don't come back.

Cars Being Retired in 2012

Once upon a time Chrysler took a boring small car (the Neon), grafted a body that recalled 1930s-era roadsters on top of it and created the PT Cruiser. Seeing Chrysler's initial success, GM copied Chrysler's play step by step — hiring the PT Cruiser's designer to draw a body meant to evoke the 1930s-era Suburbans and using the chassis of the compact Cobalt sedan. Imitation may be flattery at its most sincere, but GM didn't copy Chrysler's sales; the HHR was big and cheap but thirsty, and like the PT never received enough updates to stay current — although the supercharged SS version ranks as one of the best modern sleepers available.

what's better than an adorable pendguin or a nice sweater??? an adorable penguin IN a nice sweater!

for those of you who don't know, i happen to LOVE all things penguin. i just think that they are the most adorable things on the planet. just today i stumbled across this little story that i couldn't keep from blogging.

Knitters make sweaters for penguins after oil spill

It's a sad story with a happy twist. Blue penguins in New Zealand have been soaked with oil after a container ship ran aground near the east coast of the country's North Island earlier this month. New Zealand’s Environment Minister Nick Smith has described the oil spill as the nation’s "most significant maritime disaster."

In their oil-soaked state, the birds shouldn’t preen themselves because their feathers are contaminated. They also need help staying warm before and after rescue workers do what they can to clean them up.

So Skeinz, a knitting shop in Napier, New Zealand, put out a call for knitters to make little sweaters for penguins in need. And boy, have knitters around the world responded. One blog post from the folks at Skeinz.com ran under the headline “It’s raining jumpers.” Another ran with the headline “We have Critical Mass” — but Skeinz is still encouraging determined knitters to send their handiwork along to “keep stocks available for the Wildlife Rescue Team to draw from if required.”

leave it to sweater clad penguins to make an oil spill story ADORABLE!

our lives in one picture.

.whirl-wind summer.

i feel bad, mike and i have had a ridiculously eventful summer... and i didn't blog any of it. i suppose the only option i have, without writing a novel, is to just list the events chronologically and then promise to do better. Here we go:

May - Peru humanitarian trip.

• I was robbed 20 minutes after landing in lima. we were in a cab on the way to our hotel from the airport when someone punched through my window and stole my bag off of my lap. They got the following prizes: my passport, my wallet (containing $200 {the equivalent to 600 soles}, all of my debit and credit cards, cell phone, ipod, camera, a few pieces (valuable pieces) of make up and of course my bag. Jerks.
• I was surprised that Lima was as gross and dirty as it was but it's ok because how often do you get to go to Lima, right? In my opinion, the thing that was the most interesting to observe about Peru is how like 50% of the people want to progress and update with the rest of the world but the other half is content with the old world ways. This can be both really charming and really frustrating at times.
• Volunteering in Cuzco was great, I worked in a orphanage for handicapped children, here is one of my favorites, her name is Maricielo, she had sort of neurological disorder that caused seizures and autism. it's so heart breaking. the children at this orphanage deserve such better and it's just impossible because they (not just the orphanage but the Peru in general) just don't have the resources to provide the care and therapy for these children. i would have loved to bring her home, i miss her so much.
• We went to Machu Piccu as well...

it was AMAZING!

June -

• Mike and I celebrated our first full year of marriage on the twenty-fourth! I know that one year of marriage isn't a lot and i know that i'm about three months late writing this but i can say without any hesitation that the past year has been the best year of my life. I'm really not one to talk about my feelings in a public forum but i am so in love with my husband - words can't even begin to convey how much he means to me. I really don't know what i did to deserve having someone like him in my life. I can't wait for the years to come.
  
• our anniversary was AWESOME. I took the day off of work and mike surprised me by taking me to the "penguin encounter" at the aquarium. it probably sounds lame to a lot of people but i absolutely love penguins and the "encounter" is a small group of people that get to go into the little penguin habitat and watch the penguins play and waddle around it. it was ADORABLE! after the penguin encounter, we went to the bombay house for dinner in provo (i know, there's one on foothilll but we had some time to kill) , it was amazing, as always. and then on our way home from provo and on our way to get our monthly massage, we were rear ended on the free-way. the picture of my car doesn't really look that bad so i included a picture of the other car so you can see how hard he really hit us.

My car....

ok, so it doesn't look that bad - even though my car just crumpled right up so...

here's the other car.

July -

• we did the usual 4th of July stuff. fireworks. food. family. always fun. I also met my soon to be best friend in law - Dakota. I approve.
  
• instead of the yearly (dreaded. literally ghastly) trip to beaver, utah (the birth place of butch cassidy for all you history fans like me), our family sojourned into the wilderness of island park idaho. Yellow stone was beautiful and smelly (as always), i always really enjoy the huge lines of traffic in the park because some animal (in our case a buffalo) just decides to do whatever it wants. way to go buffalo, keep the animal kingdom wild. maybe next time you could just do it sometime not around dinner because we were starving!

....i was going to keep writing but i'm boring myself so i'll spare you and just post some pictures.

August -

• august was kind of a scary month, ok, not really scary but ...ya it was in a way. Mike took the MCAT August 12th. I have never seen someone devote so much time to studying in one summer. poor guy. but his hard work paid off and he got a 32! yay mike!

Mike walking in to take the MCAT!

• i have to mention that mike and i love park city, it is home to some of the best restaurants and concerts (deer valley especially), my office helped sponsor the park city arts festival and i got a few free passes. so we spent a nice sunday afternoon up at the festival where we saw beautiful works of art such as this

• last year, the weekend before school started mike and i stayed over night in park city, we had such a good time that we've decided (as long as we are going to school in utah) that we are going to do this every year - 1) it's one of our favorite places and 2) we can get some of his school shopping done. we stayed up at westgate at the canyons. it was AMAZING! the four star crap hole we stayed in, in lima had nothing on this. here are some pictures of our room...

the pictures really don't do it justice. there was a full kitchen, a steam shower, a two person tub, a washer and dryer (i was kind of sad, mike wouldn't let me bring our laundry.... FREE LAUNDRY), oh! and some mediocre quality bath robes that we made sure we wore THE ENTIRE TIME we were in the room.

September -

• due to the impact of our car accident (pictured above) i had to have knee surgery for the second time. in my first surgery i had over half of meniscus removed and this time i had half of what was left removed. congratulations me - i now have an 80 year knee.

here it is looking GROSS!

the day of surgery. my little franken-knee.