What weighs 105 lbs & takes 12 man hours to count?

LAUNDRY QUARTERS!!! As you know, we manage a single girls apartment complex, and one of our responsibilities is to count the quarters from the two washers and dryers in our laundry room. It is not our favorite thing to do, so we tend to put it off until we get a pillowcase full enough of quarters that we can hardly lift it. Because we hate it so much, we recruited our friends, Dave & Hailey, to help us count them in exchange for free laundry use. This latest bunch that we counted this weekend was from only a couple of months...and it ended up being $2100, or 8400 quarters! Needless to say, it took us quite a while (6 episodes of "The Office"). Before we jumped in to counting, however, we had a little fun with the camera...

Here we are counting:

And here's the finished product:

It doesn't look like much, but there are 210 rolls of $10 dollars each (that's 40 quarters per roll!) If you're not impressed, we'll invite you over to help us next time...

What's been going on in the Smith world?

We've had a lot of fun blogs lately, but we haven't really given an update on what we've been doing the past few weeks. In a nutshell: work, school, church, and apartments. There you go--that's our life!

Work: My job is going well, and I am happy there. I don't know if I've ever posted it or not, but I am an executive assistant at Rocky Mountain Mortgage. I love the people I work with, and there are parts of my job that I really enjoy. I like my boss--he's a good guy--but I've been there long enough (a year-and-a-half) that I'm starting to get frustrated with some of the ways he does things. I've decided that attitude determines everything, and when I put it in my mind to have a good attitude, then that's when I love my job the most. I'm still contemplating leaving once I graduate, but I've decided that I will only leave if I can find my dream job in the medical field somewhere. (Preferably in a baby doctor's office!) I've applied to a few medical assistant positions, but I haven't heard back from any of them yet. I'm not holding my breath for any of them--I figure, if I'm supposed to get a new job, then it will happen. If not, then I'll be happy where I'm at. Curt's company is still going well, and he's keeping pretty busy. He keeps getting more jobs, which is a good sign! He has pretty much paid off all his debt from starting the company, so now we can start making a profit. Yea!

School: We are officially in the middle of our first round of midterms. Funny that they call them "midterms," because there are usually two or three of them in a given semester, so technically they should be called "quarter-terms" or something like that. It's amazing how fast the time flies when we're in school. I can't believe we're already into October! Only two more months of school for me! :)

Church: For those of you who don't know, I am our ward's Relief Society President, and Curt is the 1st Counselor in the Elder's Quorum. I don't tell you that to make us sound all high and mighty--but rather just to explain why we are both busy with church. Every weekend for the past month-and-a-half I have had something going on each Saturday--including new sister visits, a VT workshop, and a dinner at our apartment for the General RS Broadcast. (Not to mention the hoards of meetings I'm privileged to attend on Sundays!) Needless to say, it's been busy! It has been such a blessing, though, and I have really enjoyed getting to know the sisters in our ward. I've decided that every person has something amazing to offer, if you just take the time to get to know them. Though Curt hasn't had quite as many things going on (the boys are WAY more low key than the girls!), he has had his fair share of activities too--if you can call a steak barbecue an actual activity! (that's right "steak" as in the meat, not "stake" as in a collection of wards--these boys find any reason they can to get together and eat meat!) :) We both enjoy our callings, and we love our ward!

Apartments: This is our favorite time of the year being managers. We're in the middle of semesters, so we don't have people stopping by to see the apartments, and most of the major maintenance issues have been fixed, so we rarely hear from the tenants. Curt has been working on some outside projects, though, such as repainting the lines in our parking lot and rebuilding our planter box out front. Here are some pictures of Curt and Dave Kunz working on the planter box. It took them a full Saturday and then some, but it turned out great!

If you look close, you can see that Curt is wearing my old choir shirt from 7th grade--I think it's so funny that he wears it!

What a stud!


The finished product:

Well, that's about it for what's been going on. This past weekend was so nice as we were able to relax at home and watch General Conference in our pajamas. Conference was so good, and we had so much fun just spending time together. It was so sad to have to go back to work and school today! Unfortunately, life must go on...

Nothing Really Exciting

Nothing really exciting has been going on lately...unless you count apartment checkouts as exciting. For those of you who didn't already know, Curt & I manage a single girls apartment complex a few blocks away from BYU. It has both its good and bad to it (one of the good things being that we essentially get free rent), but sometimes it's really annoying. This time of the year is one of the annoying times because we have to do cleaning checks, checkouts, and lots of maintenance to get ready for the new tenants moving in for the fall/winter semesters. (We have to fit this in with our already-busy work schedules.) The only time worse than now is in April when we have finals on top of checkouts and work. All of the tenants will be gone by this Wednesday, and then the new tenants will start trickeling in after that until the end of next week. I'll be excited when everyone is in and settled!

I shouldn't complain--it's not as bad for us as it is for the girls leaving. At least we don't have to be the ones doing most of the moving out and cleaning; we just have to be the ones responsible to make sure it all gets done. (Which, if the cleaning doesn't get done...then yes, we have to clean.) It's all worth it in the end, and we have pretty good tenants, so it's not too bad. Plus, we are completely full for fall, so that's exciting! (We've never been completely full before now!)

Curt's company is up and running, and he just picked up a job installing countertops, tile, and a few other miscellaneous things in the cabin of some friends of ours. He has a few other jobs tentitively lined up, so hopefully he'll start rolling in the money! (I don't care if it's a lot of money...just SOME money would be great!) I'm proud of him for getting it all worked out, and I think he'll do great.