Lucky number 579718

Last night Jon had an opening social for ASM (Association for Systems Managemnt). It was held at BYU's Legend's Grill. It's a pretty new "hang out" on campus. There's a lot of famous photos of BYU athletes and not to mention- great food. They served dinner for us and they had some local comedians there as well. We sat with Jon's group members and we had a pretty good time. They also were having a raffle. There were over 200 people there- so it wasn't like we were expecting that we had any shot to win any of the 4 prizes they gave away.

The time came where they were raffling off the last item. We were holding onto our ticket and waiting for disappointment to settle in and to hear screams of excitement across the room. Before we knew it- we were the ones calling out, "WOO!!!!" or something like that :-) We ended up winning dinner for two at Red Robin and they also gave us 2 prepaid movie tickets to a real theater (not the dollar movies where we usually go)!!! Hurray!! here is a picture of our winnings and of course- the free shirt for Jon who's a member of ASM :-)

Summer lovin, have us a blast

After looking into different options and how each will affect what happens to our family this summer, we have decided to officially accept the Corporate Wal-Mart Summer Internship. It is not what I plan on doing or where I plan on working for the rest of my life, but it is a perfect opportunity to gain experience working for a globally successful corporation. That experience will be most beneficial as I apply to the big 4 accounting firms next summer in addition with other more prestigious companies.

Our current summer plans, then, are as follows:
Mid May - Move to Bentonville, Arkansas
May 19 - Begin internship
May 21 - Develop hick accent
May 23 - Celebrate C's birthday
August 8 - Finish internship
August 9ish - Drive to Houston, Texas
August 11 - Hopefully lose hick accent
August 12 - DisneyWorld with the Sansoucie bunch!
August 19 - Return to Houston, party with the Criddles
Late Augustish - Help Leanna drive to Provo to return to college

Sounds like fun! Hope to see y'all there somewhere along the ride!

My beast of a phone... at work that is....

Have you ever wondered what kind of equipment customer service reps use as their phone?? Here is my phone... Behold, THE BEAST! Okay, so Jeff's "beast" is a lot cooler... but you have to admit.. this is one phone you'll never wish to own.

sorry- the picture isn't centered- what do you expect with a cell phone?? Anyways.. don't mind the soda cap on the phone... my supervisor and floor support decided to tape these caps over a button called, "after-call". This button allows you to do work on an account once the call is over or if you need a minute to forget how mean the last person was before you take another call. These "after-call" seconds must be GOLD to the higher ups. They want us only to be in "after-call" for about 10 seconds after each call... or averaging less than 20 seconds for every call for a week (let's face it.. no one ever does less than 10 seconds after a call unless it's super dead). It makes them look better. I'm doing fine with mine- but they put these caps over all the phones on my team. Lucky for us, we share desks with the graveyard shifts and they ripped them off. I hear that my floor support is putting them back on tomorrow- that should be really exciting.

Rich Chocolate

We just wanted to let you all know that we live the high life. We went shopping and saw some chocolates that we greatly desired.


After we picked out 2- we went to the check out and they promptly rang up at $14/piece. Because we're just rolling in the dough we decided to let the cashier know that there may be something wrong with the register- because they obviously were worth more. Right... The chocolates only should have been 30¢ each!!!! They changed the price and we walked out of there feeling rich :-)



Good thing we pay attention as they ring up our groceries.

The tale of our bathroom....

For those of you who know- the light in our bathroom hasn't been working for a few months. Actually, we cannot remember the last time it worked. Our upstairs neighbors (who we love so much :-) ) had a flood a while back and the water from their apartment drained into our bathroom (conveniently over our tub). However, we started to have little trails of water that ran down the walls and then.. the light went out. We tried changing bulbs- and that didn't do us any good. Whenever we turned it on- it would flicker like in horror movie. After a while, the flickering stopped and we had to use the bathroom in the dark. Do you know how hard it is to shower in the dark!? Anyways...

So, we tried to run down our maintenance man for the apartment complex and we left about 3-4 requests to have him take a look at it- and we waited and waited. Then during Jon's INTEX project (I'm sure all you group members remember this) he ran the man down (Lyle) and Lyle came into the house and took a look at it and told us that he couldn't fix it and we'd have to wait until his back got better. So.. the wait continued.. until yesterday.

Jon ran after Lyle while I was at work and they were able to fix the light in the bathroom!!!! The wiring was corroded because of all the water damage. Gross. Then, we found a lovely note on our door later.... Enjoy!! So visitors- you don't have to worry about asking for a lamp when you use our bathroom!!! Hurray!!!


PS: I also wanted to post a picture of a meal we made not too long ago and I thought it was picture worthy... we made mini turkey burgers and sweet potato fries!!! They were soooo good!
If anyone actually wants the recipes I have them :-)

Thankgoodness for updates....

So... we're bad at keeping up with this sometimes- but things around here have just been really busy!!! To give a bit of an update....

-Right after Thanksgiving (I know that turkey looked funny... but it saved me time!) I had my company party. It was held at the Grand America hotel in Salt Lake. If you've never been there- even to just walk around... it was very fancy. Jon picked me up from work and we headed over for "social hour"... it would've been more of a social hour if the people that I usually work with weren't still working. It was fun though. We ran into a few people I knew when dinner was about to be served. We were pretty much stalked by some waitresses and they pulled our chairs out for us and put napkins on our laps... I just hope that we didn't have to tip ;-) The food was delicious and we sat with a lot of my friends from work. After the food they were giving out prizes. We didn't win anything.. but it was free! We left as the dancing started.. people were getting pretty drunk. That was our cue to go home.

-The week after the party Jon had INTEX for school. For those of you who don't know- it's a week long project that is given Monday morning and is due by Friday afternoon of that week and a big presentation is done on Saturday. Every day the group he works with got together and worked from about 8am-11pm or later. We would always get together for dinner- all the wives would come over and spend time together and cook and then we'd either stay or leave depending on the time. They got the job done and they did a very good job (considering they had no idea what they had to do until Monday morning). They ended up getting a 92 on it! Not to mention PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) reps were there to watch all the presentations. They gave a lot of good remarks about the group's presentation.

-This week was Jon's finals and he did really well :-) Hurray!

For me, work has been.. well.. work. Nothing too exciting. I did win $250 from selling Showtime (a premium movie channel). That was pretty exciting. I just help people understand their billing and help them fix their equipment over the phone and I sell as much as I can. I can't tell you how much weight I've gained from working there. My eating habits haven't changed and I don't eat a lot of junk- I just sit all day and when I come home I'm just so exhausted. I don't walk to school anymore or walk around campus all day.. and my running habits have well.. let's just say I don't have a running habit anymore. :-S

For this reason, my sister and I are working on both losing weight to stay healthy. Wish us luck! She started a little earlier than me and she has done a great job thus far. Congrats, Shannon! Jon has set up a plan where when I hit "milestones" we get to celebrate in some way. Like for example, one of them is that I get a cookbook called "Deceptively Delicious". Not sure if you've looked at it- but it gives you tips on how to cook healthier. I know it sounds lame, but I have wanted to get it for a while.

Anyways, we hope that your holidays are safe and that you enjoy it. We miss you all and wish we could be celebrating with our families.

Thanksgiving Happenins

Crystal's big break from work was given to her for Thanksgiving, not Christmas, so we decided to make to most of it that we could. We were unable to travel anywhere so we planned on enjoying our first thanksgiving as a family here (married family that is).

Before Thanksgiving itself a fellow family here in the ward took pity on our loneliness and invited us over to their house for thanksgiving dinner. One big thing we noticed is that it finally made it feel like the holiday when we went over there. They had 5 extended family over and 3 babies so it was quite the full house (they also live here in Villa Rose). Before we went over it was just Crystal and I. We slept in. We watched the parades. We lounged like on any holiday. Unfortunately it kinda felt like any old Saturday until suddenly we were at a full house of people, babies screaming, people going everywhere, and great smells abounding. We brought a pumpkin pie to add to the mix.

It was fantastic and helped make the holiday absolutely great. The one downside to the whole thing was that Crystal and I already bought all our foods to make our own little 2-person Thanksgiving before we were invited anywhere. We offered to bring any other foods to the dinner but they said to only bring a pie. That left a lot of food still at our house. So the day after Thanksgiving we decided to have our own Thanksgiving dinner on the 23rd. That's right, two Thanksgiving Dinners in two days...and then 2 weeks of turkey sandwitches for lunch. That's a lot of turkey.

The cool part about our turkey is that when we were shopping, we looked and each other and thought "Call it a hunch, but we don't need a 20 pound turkey for us". So we found these mini-sized turkeys where they remove some stuff and cut the turkey in half so that it's not as intense. Anywho, here it is in all it's glory:




And after Crystal gave it a good cookin'


Add some more fixins


And put it all together with eggnog - YUM!



After Thanksgiving we were then able to put up and decorate our Christmas tree. First we went and bought a few really cheap ornaments and here's Crystal bending paperclips for hooks



While she was working on that I was putting up lights

And here's the final product: Criddle Family Tree 2007


And last but not least, Merry Christmas from the Criddles!