Last week Alec and I went to a haunted corn maze. At the end there was a giant inflatable black apparatus with a slit in the middle of it. You’re supposed to push your way through that entrance to be engulfed in total darkness. It was a little freaky, even for someone who is not claustrophobic. It pushes in around you on all sides. And then Alec said, “It’s like being born.”

I have no words.

I’ve had an external hard drive as my backup for the past two years. Except life has been rather chaotic the last two years. I have moved 5 times, graduated from college, and got married. So instead of the backup I meant it to be, it became my main storage device because at least two of my computers have died. I guess it doesn’t help that I have bought extremely outdated computers due to a lack of money. But for the past six months I’ve had this feeling that I really need to get another hard drive or find some other solution to back up my information. You know, gigs of music, pictures, resumes, documents, etc. Basically, our electronic lives. Every time the thought came up I shoved it back down, telling myself that I will buy another drive when some money turns up. Then last Thursday I turned on the drive and it screamed. SCREAMED! It screamed at me and rebuked and made me feel guilty for not paying attention to it sooner. After a few minutes of screaming, it gave up the ghost. My brother came over and tried to get the drive to spin. I even had a technical fixer-upper-guy advertising his services on craigslist try to work his magic on the drive. But no luck. Absolutely none. Apparently a data recovery service will cost me an unknown amount somewhere between $600 and $1900!

Now a $100 hard drive or an online backup service doesn’t seem so expensive.

Take it from me, it’s worth backing up your data and listening to the voice in your head. I wish I had.

When I met Alec for the first time he was clean-shaven. The first time we did anything together he was scruffy. Throughout most of our time dating he had a full-fledged beard. Most of the men my friends date or marry are clean-shaven. I never really gave any of this much thought, except that I really thought a bit of scruff was sexy. As soon as we got serious every single person I know seemed to like Alec, but would eventually say, “But what about that beard?” After the first person asked I just figured they didn’t like beards and they assumed I didn’t either. But after a while I began to realize that every one of my girlfriends assumed that I was going to try to get him to shave his beard. WHY WOULD I DO THAT? Alec is the same to me shaved clean as a baby’s bottom or with a big scruffy beard. I honestly like it and have no desire to try to get him to shave. What is it about us girls that we insist on trying to change our men?

I’ve always liked cowboys and rockstars. This must be why I like Alec’s facial hair. As part of the dress code for both his school and job, he’s required to shave. I’m sure he’s planning to grow the biggest beard known to man when he moves on from the school and job he’s at. I’m just hoping he doesn’t get carried away and go all Brigham Young on me. I don’t want to find missing household items in his beard.

He is, however, allowed to have a mustache. I am one of the leaders in a youth group for young women at my church. Some of the young men don’t even know my name, but one tried to identify me as the wife of the guy with the mustache! One of the young women said Alec has the coolest mustache.

I’m beginning to wonder if I married the man or the mustache!

Over the past three five months I have developed the bad habit of stuffing every receipt I get into my purse. I usually go through it every once in a while and file them. I keep them for a year and only keep the important ones after that. After a while it got so bad that I just took them all out of my purse and put them in a plastic bag. Just in case I was ever so bored that nothing else was more appealing to do. But because sleeping or just about anything is always more appealing than a mundane chore like that, I never did it. Since I’m married to a wonderfully thoughtful stud of a man named Alec, he did it for me. Granted, he was probably sick of looking at the grocery sack of receipts and realized that the only way it was ever going to get done was if he did it. But, I’m still beaming about it three days later!

Maybe I’ll change the name of this blog to alecandcassiemcd?? Marital and family blog love for all!

I was reading through my friend Cam’s blog and realized that she has “tagged” me on a few different posts. Normally I think tagging is silly.  But then, that’s only if I don’t get tagged. It’s like high school. Everyone wants to be popular. But no one wants to ADMIT that they’d ever want to be a part of that  group of people! And so it goes with tagging. It’s a silly little practice that I want no part of. Unless you really want to tag me. Then I might enjoy following suit.  So here goes. “5″ is the name I have dubbed this little meme.

5 Things I was doing 5 years ago

1. Exactly 5 years ago I was moving to Provo to start school at BYU. Alec was in the MTC there and I jogged past every day. Little did I know…
2. Going to more concerts that I could afford and buying way too many tee shirts that I’d never wear.
3. Signing up for Facebook. But preferring Myspace.
4. Driving the ‘96 Honda my sister Taylor drives now.
5. Taking anatomy and really, really hating the gross smell of the lab.

5 Things on My To-Do-List

1. Move.
2. Finish P90X.
3. Sort through the bag of receipts that I just took out of my purse. There are only three month’s worth there…
4. Go to the farmer’s market for fresh tomatoes so Alec can make salsa.
5. Buy a book about investing in gold.

Places I’ve Lived

1. Layton, Utah
2. Monroe, Michigan.
3. Mentor, Ohio.
4. Morgan, Utah
5. Logan, Utah

5 Things I Want to Be Doing in 5 Years

1. Living in a house I own.
2. Cooking well.
3. Making money without doing a blasted thing.
4. Managing a successful blog. You know, one that I update. Frequently. And that people read.
5. Playing with my kids.

Last weekend we went with my family to a sushi restaurant in Salt Lake that has half-priced rolls after 11 pm to celebrate my sister’s 17th birthday. SEVENTEEN!!!???? I thought I was still seventeen. They make me feel so old. Anyway, we were sitting around waiting for our order to come when my mom proudly proclaimed that she now knew what the colon, dash, and parentheses meant in texts. It seems that she’s gone all this time (and by all this time I mean the whole 6 months that it’s been since she embraced texting) thinking that people just kept making the same typo over and over! Then we told her all about the other emoticons you could use. You can even wink in texts!

Now my mom is always smiling at me in texts.

Alec is a cook. I’d say he’s more of a chef. He is and will always be the main chef in our home. I’m sure our children will complain when I have to cook something. You know someone has the foodie gift when they can improvise. And boy can he improvise. Since we got married I’ve been trying to learn from him. It’s going slowly. Let’s just say that before we got married I barely knew how to hold knife and most of my dinners were some form of boxed pasta. And now I am in charge of the cilantro and onions. And the dishes. Sometimes I try to be the lead by planning and preparing the meal; mostly to give him a well-deserved break. Only a few of these attempts have been what you could call successful. Most of those times it was because I used a recipe from The Pioneer Woman. She recently launched the Tasty Kitchen. I can only describe it as a social network for anyone interested in cooking, whatever their skill level might be. I love it! I’m so excited to get into it and try other recipes.

I’m going to my grandma proud!

I wish I had a good excuse for not posting since April. APRIL!? How has time passed so quickly?

It’s not that I’ve forgotten about the Internet. It’s not that I’ve been incapacitated. It’s just that every time I go to update my lovely blog, something else demands my attention. I’m not going to lie, it’s usually work related. What’s more important? My blog or my work? I’m going to go with work on this one.

You know it’s getting bad when people start asking you why you quit blogging. But I’m going to redouble my efforts. Nay, vow to post on a regular basis. I don’t want to set the bar too high for the first little while. I vow to you, Internet, that I will post three times a week.

Way back in high school I used to cashier at this grocery store, see. Seven hours of standing on my feet and scanning bar coded boxes gets tiring. Ya, it first I was pretty psyched about receiving $80/week. In high school everyone had this opinion that I was incredibly ornery. Perhaps I was, it feels like a lifetime ago. But I’ve come to realize that I have always had two main default facial expressions: happy and and what appears to be mad but is really just bored. Or tired. Or some other boring emotion that doesn’t deserve its own facial expression. But what makes a tired cashier ornery? Well I’ll tell you. It’s people asking why you’re so gosh darn ornery. Now THAT makes me ornery.

But my favorite part of that job were the small town terms I started to hear. People would often tell me that my job was better than a poke in the eye. Or when I’d give them a penny back in change they’d proclaim that it was certainly better than a kick in the pants! The other night I told Alec that his job was better than a poke in the eye and I suddenly felt like a 17 year-old cashier at Jubilee being reprimanded for not appreciating her job enough.

What are some other versions of this saying? I know I heard at least five different twists on it when I was there.

Last week the LDS Church posted an Easter message on YouTube. I hadn’t watched it until now, but when I did this morning I cried. Everyone should watch this video. The message is from an apostle of the Lord, Jeffrey R. Holland.