outside

Sometimes when I feel like blogging but don't have anything to blog about, I like to go through my old pictures and find something that happened before I started the blog. When we first got married, we lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in Provo. It was a fairly old place, and we thought the apartment was pretty ghetto, but it turns out that we moved into an even worse apartment in Texas, so we missed it a little for awhile but not anymore. The nice thing about the place was that it was $550 a month, which may not seem like a great deal for Provo, but it included everything. We didn't pay for any utilities, so we could keep the lights on all day if we wanted to and run our AC nonstop (which we did pretty much all year). We had to pay for our own phone, cable, and internet, but for the first several months we magically found cable in our apartment so we enjoyed that free until they apparently realized it because it suddenly stopped one day. As an afterthought, they squeezed in a spot for a washing machine in the bathroom, but there was no space for a dryer there, so we hung our clothes on a wire that we strung back and forth three times across our spare bedroom. We lived right in the midst of BYU student housing (375 N 1020 E for those who are familiar with Provo), but for some reason, we were two of only a few students in our complex. Most of the people there were Hispanic families. Brock made a few friends with his Spanish skills. Toward the end of our stay there, before we moved to Texas, we felt like the environment was going downhill. Someone introduced cockroaches to the complex (it takes some really trashy people to have roaches in Utah where bugs don't live very easily due to extremely low humidity). The bugs never made it to our apartment thank goodness, but we were feeling like it was a good time to leave. One night for FHE before we moved, we went around taking pictures of our little area. So here are the pictures of the lovely place we lived from marriage, May 2004 (a little before that for me), until August 2006 when we moved to great state of Texas (I'm saying that in my Sarah Palin accent).

This was the view across the field by our apartment.

Here's our parking lot.


Our backdoor. We shared that porch with many different neighbors. Our favorite time was between neighbors when it was empty. We always wished we had that apartment on the right so we could keep our grill next to our door. You can see that it's the one on the left at the bottom of the stairs. We chained it there.

Our dumpster and the side of the building, the way out of the parking lot.

Okay, this is actually our bedroom window. Our apartment was miserably hot all year long, so we had no choice but to install another AC unit. Since the windows didn't open the right way, we had to use a little bit of plastic. I know it looked beautiful.

The nice swingset in front for the children.

This vehicle belonged to the bug people. He didn't have any teeth and he drove an electric wheelchair around the parking lot all day. When he wasn't in his wheelchair, he was sitting by the fence in his Utah Jazz fold out chair (which he permanantly kept there).

We have so many good memories of living there and of having such good friends there. We were in the best ward ever. I miss a lot of things about Provo and BYU (strangely, they're mostly food-related right now). We also loved living so close to Brock's family and getting to see them all the time. Anytime we got sick of our warm little apartment, we could go to their beautiful and comfortable home. I'm so glad we took all of these pictures to remember this apartment forever.