some Very Happy News

2007:

2011 (also with the magical kev wendell nemelka):

these two are getting married, and i couldn't be more thrilled. sarah, my bff since we met our first day of freshman year, and alec, my cousin. in the years that i lived with sarah, we used to joke about how sarah would eventually marry alec and we would be sealed together. (not sarah and alec, sarah and me.) we just knew it was meant to be, somehow.

and finally, after five years (!) of dating and writing and missing each other, they are finally going to tie the knot and sarah will finally be my cousin. and we'll get to see each other forever now, because once you're a myres you don't escape. you'd better believe that i've got a huge smile on my face every time i think about it.

i just thought that the event deserved its own Very Special Blog Post, because it's not every day that you get to go to your best friends' wedding. but i will be doing that very thing on may 4th, 2012. i wouldn't miss it for the world!

christmas in hawaii

well, this was the last christmas all of the murphy clan is going to be together for a really long time. little brother austin is turning in his mission papers THIS WEEK (!!!) and little brother dallin will be trading places with him right when he gets back, and now that camille and i are both married we have in-laws to visit each christmas as well. so it will be AT LEAST four years until we have another christmas together, and, knowing that, my parents decided that we should go big or go home. so, we went to hawaii together.

let me tell you, i had NEVER expected our family to do a trip to hawaii. i distinctly remember begging my parents to take us to hawaii (when everyone else i knew got to go) and they said that they had to wait to go to hawaii until after they were 30, so we could wait that long too. (no worries mom, it totally makes sense that you said that.) so it was a big (and exciting) surprise when they posed the idea to us, and we immediately jumped on board. obviously.

exciting things of this week:

-president obama was staying just across the canal from our house. we spent a good amount of time watching his caravan of cars parade in and out of the neighborhood and spying on the gunboats patrolling the canal. we never got a good look at the president, but i bet he was really impressed with us as neighbors.

-we went to pearl harbor and saw the memorials there.

-we went shopping at the honolulu swap meet. look at mom with her two sons-in-law!

-we ate shrimp out of a truck, and it was amazing!

-we visited the north shore and didn't actually go into the water.


-we went to a session at the laie temple, and the kiddos did baptisms. (except for cole, who spent two hours in the temple visitor's center with the sister missionaries.)



-we ate lots of shaved ice! (and it was sooooo good.)

-of course, we went to the beach. a lot.

-we visited a buddhist temple.


-we visited the polynesian cultural center.




(and we didn't buy the photos they took of us because they were twenty dollars each!)

-we went snorkeling and swam with some tropical fish AND a sea turtle!

-we went to church on christmas sunday.

-we watched the sun rise on christmas morning (most of us).

-we got surfing lessons on waikiki and were surfing MASTERS! all of us got up, even cole on his first time.



-annnnddd, we bought muumuus and hawaiian clothes for photo ops.

it was an amazing week, because of all of these fun things but even more because we got to spend a lot of time with the family. these are some really fun people, even if we do all know how to push each others' buttons still. i think we should make this trip an annual tradition! (haha, just kidding dad.)

HARRY POTTER WORLD

don't be too jealous, but after we finished our finals we had six days without any active work to do. so we decided to take a little trip down to florida to visit the world's greatest theme park. no, not disney world. the new wizarding world of harry potter. i'll admit i was skeptical about harry potter world--but i thought that we absolutely needed to make it there while living in north carolina. and this weekend seemed like the one where we would have the most time for the foreseeable future . . . all in all, we went on a pretty last-minute drive down to orlando!

we drove down on wednesday, went to universal studios (a.k.a. HP world) on thursday and epcot on friday, and then drove back on saturday to take off to utah on monday. i'll just tell you--harry potter world was excellent. i felt like i was really in hogsmeade and hogwarts--drinking butterbeer, visiting the three broomsticks, buying stuff at zonkos and honeydukes and ollivanders, wandering through hogwarts castle (and going on the three HP roller coasters). for a harry potterophile like myself, it was pretty dang great.

oh yeah, and epcot was pretty good too.

wanna see some pictures?

tommy greeting hagrid's hut.


two proud (but cheap) gryffindors. we took pictures of the robes, but didn't buy them. (they were $100 each!)

voldemort's wand--look out!

we ate at the rainforest cafe that night as well.

andddd, EPCOT!

although we had to miss my dear cousins bennett and jazz's wedding (because of flights being purchased, etc.) and i would have rather been celebrating with family, this was a pretty good substitute.