October and cold are here...

After months of talking about doing a blog together, we are finally ready to kick it off! Since we already put together a weekly email for our families each Sunday, we figure this really won't be to hard to keep up. And stay tuned for pics and details from our past honeymoon, wedding and our new lives together (which are long overdue). Thanks for joining and for being a part of our lives!

This week has been a better week for KerMatt - Keri feels rested finally from her heart walks and Matt's throat is more fully improved and he has been able to speak again. After much coaxing from Keri to finally go to the health center - he discovered that the cause of his throat pain was a GIANT CANKER SORE on the back of his throat. Keri takes no credit for it - even though she had a canker sore on her tongue about 2 weeks ago. :) So the communication in our home is back on and the week of Charades is over.

We finally setup our family blog and will start including our weekly updates in there as well. You can find it at kermatt.blogspot.com We'd love for you to follow it and check out as we are hoping to get our honeymoon pics and other fun stuff on there this week.

And for our big news this week - Matt got 3 second interviews out of the 4 Big 5 accounting firms that he interviewed with last week. We are so happy for him and proud of his success thus far. He has an interview with the LA office of Deloitte, San Jose office of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and the Irvine office of Ernst & Young. We can't wait to see what happens now (although hopefully not ending up in LA). These next round of interviews will be in-house interviews, which means they will be flying him out to their offices to meet him and conduct the interviews.

We spent Tuesday night at a bowling and dinner social with a company located in Portland called Stockamp Huron. They are an ISYS consulting firm that works with hospitals nationwide. After learning about the company, we are actually very impressed with them - although probably not enough to live in Portland. If we are going to live in the NW, Keri would rather be in Spokane near our dear friends, Brad & Sharee. But Keri did win an awesome fleece hoodie for getting the lowest bowling score - a whopping 47!!! Matt won a T-shirt for getting the highest combined score from both games.

We enjoyed a wonderful weekend of Conference and spending time at home doing more projects. Our favorite talk was Elder Holland's very direct and honest testimony of the Book of Mormon. What a profound and passionate talk it was!

While Keri spent time in between sessions painting more walls (giving Matt much anxiety) and finally putting up her pictures on the walls, Matt put together his surround sound system. He even had a couple friends come over and help him yesterday - and they just couldn't stop laughing about him hooking up the system to our janky little 19" inch TV donated to us by Keri's Uncle Larry. We are in the market for a bigger and more modern TV in case anybody knows of any deals. Keri put together a cool wall art project she found on DIY.com and has been dying to do (see attached pic). It may be a little too funky for Matt but Keri loves it and feels it adds a little something to our home.

This week is looking to be a better week for football, with BYU winning and the Chargers almost making a huge comeback against the defending SuperBowl Champion Steelers. In Fantasy Football it's looking like Matt is going to get a big win over Ryan & Dylan's (and Paige's trash talking) undefeated team (who

currently hold the #1 spot) and Keri's going down to the wire tomorrow night against Skyler. She's down 11 points and it's her kicker against Skyler's kicker. That might be exciting!

We are looking forward to our big trip to Seattle this weekend for Matt's 10-Year High School Reunion. Keri is going to fly over and stay a few days with Brad & Sharee in Spokane.

We love you all and love hearing about your lives! Have a great week!

Honeymoon Part 2: Universal Island of Adventure

Honeymoon Matt

We already posted our honeymoon but what we didn't include were the photos from our time at Orlando's Universal Studios and Island of Adventure. Matt and I sat through a timeshare presentation to get 3-day passes to the theme parks and enjoyed a few days there. We chose Universal Studios over DisneyWorld because Matt had never been to any Universal Studios.

Universal Studios

Island of Adventure

Carrying the weight of the world on my back

I've got the whole world in my hands...

Playing in the gift store

Sponge Bob Square Matt 

Just chillin with Jaws

Photo bombed by the shark

Cuz I'm bad like that

Matt and his funny faces entertaining me while waiting in line

And then doing some info-gathering  

Posing at the Simpsons Ride

The Lego people

Matt and I loved walking around seeing all these people gnawing on big turkey legs in the Florida heat

The real Jaws not so scary

Trying to take my mind off the heat

Look Mom, no hands!

About to enter Jurassic Park...

Matt showing that he is not afraid of what lies ahead

Just fighting off dinosaurs

Somehow I became a dinosaur

Help me!

I've always wanted to be character in a Dr. Seuss book

We represent the lollipop kids

Thing 1 and Thing 2

Thing 3

One night we stopped in the Universal Studios Riverwalk and had dinner at Bubba Gumps

"I know what love is"

The paddle is how you let the server you need help. Look at how sweaty Matt was - good old Florida humidity.

We also stopped in at this place in the Riverwalk where you could do karaoke with a live band and backup singers, which would have been amazing but I think we were both too hot, tired, and grumpy to actually do it. So we left after about 15 minutes.

We also saw the movie "Up" in 3D

For a couple days, we left Orlanda and headed down to the Tampa Bay/Clearwater area. We stayed in some dirty motel that we hadn't booked until we got there. But we got to spend the day at Honeymoon Island Beach, which was voted one of the best beaches in the U.S. It did not disappoint, though Matt got fried from not putting on sunblock. 

Honeymoon Beach

Clearwater, Florida

While there, we also got to see a pretty amazing firework show at night. 

As I look back at these photos now, I'm amazed at how many photos we took. But I remember we bought a little video camera just for the trip which we were excited about at the time.

Honeymoon in Cancun... or Orlando

Our dream Cancun honeymoon was cancelled the day before our wedding thanks to the wonderful swine flu shutting Cancun down.

So instead Matt and I postponed our honeymoon a month and a half and ended up finding an opening for his parent's timeshare exchange in Orlando. We wanted beach and warm, sunny weather and it worked out. Though I'm still dying to get to Cancun.

We headed out at the end of June and spent a week in Orlando and then another weekend at Clearwater Beach (near Tampa Bay) to get our beach fix.

While in Orlando, we stayed in the Marriott Grande Vista timeshare, which was a HUGE resort. The room was nice for us and we loved having our own little kitchen. I think we made 2 or 3 trips to Walmart for groceries - loved our Oreo's, yogurt, and nutter butters.

We had a wonderful Honeymoon and enjoyed Florida, but don't know that Orlando is a fave of ours. It is definitely made for children and tourists who like to pay a lot of money. One of our first lessons as a married couple was learning the differences between our travel preferences. Matt was completely content with staying in our hotel ALL DAY - watching movies, playing games, TV, sleeping, and relaxing (emerging only for sun and food).

I get more antsy though. I put up with a lot of relaxing but I can only take so much and around 2 pm every day I would start getting anxious to go out and play. Overall I'd say we had a great mix of relaxation and adventure though.

Our resort with its many pools

And its many lakes

Highlights of Orlando:

• The warm weather - minus the random hurricane warnings and rain
• All the theme parks
• The funny names of Florida, including their millions of random lakes. Matt & I had a game of yelling out the names of the lakes that we passed including: BOO BOO LAKE & TURKEY LAKE
• The food mostly - such as Pina Coladas at Bahama Breeze, BJ's Pizza pizookies, the Waffle House, Bubba Gump
• Timeshare presentations - which we took full advantage of and ended up getting a huge discount on 3 day Universal passes and even $75 cash
• Watching movies and relaxing in our hotel
• Our cab driver, Tito, who drove us home in a sweet Chrysler 500 and talked all about his time in jail, his local Ruff Riders motorcycle club and couldn't understand why we weren't going out dancing

Quirks of our time in Orlando:

• Keri forgot all of her garments so we had to hit up the Orlando temple
• Flying in at midnight, not getting to our room until 2 am and starving! But our resort was all shut down and a good 2 miles from food. Luckily the front desk hooked us up with a local pizza joint who delivered pizza at 3:30 am - only to be the thickest pizza dough we have ever had
• THE HUMIDITY
• Our rental car - a red PT Cruiser. Matt felt like an old man!
• All the cheesy tourisms
• Almost getting talked into a timeshare program - yep suckers

BJ's Pizookie - manna from heaven

Tito's sweet ride

Matt trying to sleep

Me not letting him sleep :)

Our nightly entertainment at Bahama Breeze - we ate there or stopped in for a drink several times during our week

The beautiful Orlando temple