Schools out for summer....

Well ladies and gentleman.....i am happy to announce that I am now officially on my last 9 months of dental hygiene school. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!!! Today was my last day of finals, which is a good thing because we had 6. I've never been so happy to have a semester over with in my entire life!!!! I now get an entire month off and don't have to return until September 2nd. Oh how it must feel to be carefree! So I'm planning on cleaning my place from head to toe (it does get really messy especially around midterms and finals), scrapbook (I'm like a year behind) and vegetate like I've never vegetated before! Chris and I will also be going up to Calgary, Alberta Canada for a week! I've never been there before so I'm really excited. I just hope that I don't end up in the hospital again for the third time.....I seem to have had really bad luck this year!!!
Here are some pictures of our Fiesta that we had today. Our school had us take a Spanish class for dental professional so we can speak to our many Hispanic patients. All I have to say is Ya Basta!!!

Poor peoples pinata! We used a kite string and someones sweatshirt as a blindfold

Mad dash for candy!!! (sugar free....I think not!)

Here comes the sun....do do do do

For mother's day this year I got us (Chris, me, my brother Justin, and my mom) tickets to go see Classical Mystery Tour at Deer Valley, put on by the Utah Symphony. This is an impersonation group of the Beatles. When I worked for the symphony I took my mom to it about two years ago when they were on our program for the year. She loves the Beatles and anything that has to do with them.....so I knew she would just love to experience it again. Now if you know my mother it would not surprise you that while growing up I was quizzed on such "important" events such as "Do you know who's birthday it is today?" and "What is the historical significance of today." All answers had SOMETHING to do with the Beatles. Because of dear old mom I am sadly thankful to know that February 25th is George Harrisons birthday and John Lennon was shot on December 8th outside of the Dakota. How many people go to New York and the highlight of their trip is to see the Imagine stone and stand where John Lennon died......Oh I know!!!! Who is Jeannie Poore? Correct!!!!
Well all making fun aside we had an enjoyable time sitting in the down pouring rain with no umbrellas, listening to "The Beatles" play their hit songs and watch drunk "flower" children dance like they've never danced before. I believe the highlight of the evening was when the drunk old man next to us decided to get up and dance, slip on the rainy slope and spill his wine over the people around him. Or it could have been the large women in front of us who decided to swing her @$$ in our faces. All in all we had a TON of laughs, got pneumonia, and saw drunk people make fools of themselves......What a great tribute to a legendary band.

Justin and my mom enjoying the torrential down pour

Chris and I not being able to feel our toes

Where did he go?

Chris has gotten into paint balling with some of our friends (Court Hardy and Brandon Parr). They usually go on Saturdays and are gone ALL day. I must admit, sometimes it's nice. He always comes home with huge welts all over the place and I luckily get to hear him complain about them for the rest of the week. Well today he went to a paint ball store because he wanted to get some camo. He was so excited about his new pants that he had to try them on the second we got to his parents house. The next thing I knew he was outside hiding behind trees, in trees and rolling around on the ground like he was Rambo. I seriously married a two year old. It was really funny though.

If you stare really hard you'll be able to find him

It's like "Where's Waldo" but a lot harder

Visitors from the north

My father-in-laws mission companion from Calgary, Alberta Canada is in town with his family. The Raiche's are really nice people and are a lot of fun. It's great to listen to them talk because they pronounce things so differently than we do and always stick an "aye" at the end of their sentences. Today we spent most of the day with them and at there request we went to Leatherby's tonight for some ice cream. I don't know if everyone has been to Leatherby's but it certainly is a Utah classic. There serving sizes are SO huge, it's a wonder that anyone can finish what they order.

Chris's black and white thing

Chris enjoying his treat


Everyone around the table

Dental materials fun...

Part of my Dental Materials class is that we have to make these cast models of one of the students teeth. This may seem like a pointless thing to do and I can happily assure you that you are right. This is just one of those pointless stupid things that they make you do in school. You first take an impression and fill it with stone. Let it sit, then make a big stone base and stick your impression in that. Then you have to sand it down until it's flat and smooth. Then you have to cut these angles at certain degrees, round the edges, fill in the holes with more stone, and then sand it down more. I know everyone is thinking....wow I wish I knew how to do this....Courtney please tell me more!!! Well I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise for you on how mind numbingly dull it is, so one day I hope that you will experience this treasured past time for yourselves.


Finished product!!! It only took like 6 hours to do....such a good use of time.

I accidentally chipped the front tooth on one of the grinding machines....oops!!! At least I wasn't the only one.

Missouri Trip

Im here in Missouri for work and I didnt quite realize I was so close to a few church historic sites. About 10 minutes from here is the independence temple lot. Pictured below is where the cornerstones are in the ground across from the now Community of Christ International Headquarters. Click any of these pictures for larger versions.


Here is a picture of the Community of Christ 'Temple'. They have a large community center not unlike the conference center in salt lake on the adjacent corner. We also have a visitors center directly across the street from this building. Its as if the two churches are fighting over control of this one intersection.


And if I have time I am going to try and stop by Liberty Jail which is about 20 minutes out from my airport. Im not sure if any of these sites do tours on sunday but as of this writing I have about 4 hours to kill and my hotel is making me checkout at 12. Ive not been to these sites since i was like 14 so I figure this ought to be a good refresher.


Also last night I ate at one of the best bbq places I have ever set foot in. Smokehouse BBQ, i just put BBQ in the GPS and basically just picked one that wasnt too far (they have one in independence, MO) It was so good. Eating alone, however, is pretty crappy.

People Are Stupid

So I've come to the conclusion that people are inherently stupid, and when you get a big group of inherently stupid people, bad things are bound to happen. I learned this first hand last night at my in-laws. A big group from their neighborhood got together to have a bbq and watch some fireworks as has been done every year. Every year they seem to push the envelope of stupidity to increase the odds of someone either blowing up or catching on fire. Last year and so luckily this year my father-in-law and brother-in-law (who shall remain nameless) have been making these bomb things. If you live in their neighborhood I'm sure that you've heard them and thought that world war III was inevitably starting. Last year they blew one up and it exploded sending pieces of plastic as well as the bomb thing up the driveway where people were watching. Luckily no one got hurt that time. Every time they decide to detonate one of these death bombs I duck for cover either behind the house or someone else because as we all know, history does repeat itself when people don't learn from their mistakes (luckily no one got hurt from those last night, but we are all looking forward to the 24th!). Then they were lighting these jumper things which were probably banned in the 1950's due to mass destruction. The jumper things are like flowers but take flight like a demon and shoot across the air at mock 100 until it hits something. Well one of the first times they lite them one came shooting up the driveway and barely missed my friend Lindsey, a friends mom Laura and me. At that point I said, "Wow maybe we shouldn't do those anymore!" But inherently stupid people don't listen. So they continued to light these death beams and I sat along with the inherently stupid people and watched them as they continued to fly out of control shooting across the street hitting a neighbors window and another one launching into their bush, which was luckily not dry enough to catch on fire. They started doing them in a bucket so they wouldn't fly around, but somehow the inherently stupid people all forgot that these things were death beams and they started doing them outside of the bucket again. So again we watched them fly around hitting cars and such, oh what great 4th of July fun!!! Finally I had had enough and once again opened my non inherently stupid mouth and said,"Hey don't do those anymore!" In return I got a look from the inherently stupid people in astonishment!!! Why shouldn't we stupid girl? Don't ruin our fun!! So they decided to light another one. This time it flew straight to where the children were laying.....who could have foreseen this?........and went right into one of the children's shirts and continued to burn while the poor defenseless child screamed and tried to get it out of his shirt with his hand. Luckily dad acted fast and got his shirt off to discover that his sons skin was falling off of his arm and his hand was burned from trying to get the flying demon out of his shirt. Wow, this event was NO ONE'S fault because how were we to know that this would have happened? We had NO idea that these things were going to zip around and almost hit people!!! Why didn't we listen to the girl with all the insight? I don't think we'll ever know....... The best thing is that they'll probably continue to light them on the 24th, because as we've learned inherently stupid people just don't learn from their mistakes.
Well during the night we did at least have some fun with our group of friends!

This is the girls just chillin!

The men

The gang. I realize that Chris and I ruined the uniformity of the picture....why did I have to be so tall?

Increase Your Blog Productivity

Following these instructions will let you quickly check any number of blogs without the hassle of actually going to the blog sites one by one. This tip requires you to be running Firefox version 2 or higher. The instructions below have screenshots of the 5 very easy steps to set this up. Click on any of the pictures to make them larger.I highly recommend you run Firefox over Internet Explorer due to security issues with IE. Dont bother reading on if you are intent on staying with Internet Explorer. (Internet Explorer 7 has similar features to the ones I describe below but I dont believe Internet Explorer handles these as well as Firefox)

If you want to switch to Firefox or are not running Firefox 3, click here to download it and install it.

After installing Firefox, open the program (you should have a new icon on your desktop)

1. Select View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar

2. Now go to your favorite blog.. (for example, http://featherstoneclan.blogspot.com)

Any decent blog will have a thing called an RSS feed, forget the fancy explanations but it allows you to quickly check if your favorite blog has any new posts without even going to blog at all

3. Click the Orange icon (The standard RSS icon) and then select "Subscribe to 'blog title' Atom..."

4. This will take you to a screen that looks like the blog but a little more plain. Near the top of this page select "Subscribe Now"

5. In the next screen that pops up, Select "Bookmarks Toolbar" and then hit "Add"

A New link will appear with the title of the blog.

Clicking on this will show you all the recent posts. Any you have not read will have a grey "RSS" icon. If you have already read the post, it will show the icon of the website.

Repeat steps 2-5 for any other blogs you want to add. You can have as many as you like. Now by simply clicking these links you are able to quickly check several blogs and waste very little of your time by typing and endlessly checking blogs.

Note (this tip can also be used for popular news sites, they will also have the orange RSS icon)