happy valentine's day

i guess i've taken to only posting on holidays. jk.
braden got me the 2004 billboard top 40 book at 12:05am this morning, so then of course i stayed up later!! it's awesome!!! it goes through 2003, so it has a lot of new stuff. i'm excited to look through it more. man, if i could only work for joel whitburn (the author).
so i went to the dentist yesterday, and it turns out i have an inflamed jaw and some sinusitis, so he gave me some antibiotics and steroids. so now i'm buff. :) he said i should feel better in 4-5 days. he goes to my ward, and we know his wife (better than we know him), so his wife and he hooked me up with a free visit, which was extraordinary helpful and generous.
things are coming together for the move to WA in May. we put down a deposit with wehaulmoving. we load up the truck and they drive it.
i just got an email on saturday from Jenny Wang, an old friend from the home ward days. she's doing well in utah with her husband. i need to write her back still, but i will do that shortly.

braden and i went to the LOTR concert with Howard Shore (we didn't go with him; he was just there!) on Saturday night. it was fun. i snagged some extra programs for ry and kev, because i thought they might like them. afterwards, there was a q and a session with Howie, so we stayed. during intermission, you could write a question and drop it in a box, and then maybe howie would answer yours. so braden turned in one. i didn't, b/c i couldn't think of anything to ask that wouldn't have something to do with bathroom humor. :) classic me. anyway, so this guy from case western who teaches film studies was the interviewer, and he was totally lame!! almost all of the questions he asked were his own personal questions, and then he looked down twice and was like, oh yeah, i have this huge pile of actual CONCERTGOER questions. so at the end, he goes, "i feel i would be remiss if i didn't mention that there were a ton of questions about "the hobbit", ie is howie going to do the score for that, and howie totally copped out. his answer was pretty much something like, well, gee, that would be really great to do that, and i certainly hope it does happen, etc, etc, but nothing concrete. he could be a great politician! :) no, i'm joking, i don't really care that he didn't say; i just thought it was humorous how he talked for a couple of minutes on it and essentially said nothing.
i just finished a translation on embryonic stem cells and cloning. it was pretty cool. it was interesting, i understood it, and i learned a lot about the subject, so i'm pretty excited about that. it's good to know that i like medical translation, since i'm almost sure that's what i want one of my translation specializations to be.
i talked to one of the deans here about putting in a good word for me to another prof who apparently has foreign language research grants that come in. i'm hoping that she has some spanish ones that she can send my way.
braden and i have been trying to be more conscientious about cleaning up the apartment. it's amazing how fast things can pile up if you slack even a little, like dishes, clothes or just junk! so we've been trying to do a little every day, instead of having a huge mess and not wanting to start at all. it seems to be working so far. we also want to start exercising at least 20 min. a day, but we'll probably work up to that before we actually do it every day.
that's all for now!