Brad's Graduation and Baby Ivy!

And then it was April and Brad graduated!

This was after the huge ceremony with all the graduates in the Marriott Center.  So proud of this guy.

And then we took this one after his Marriott School ceremony where they actually said his name.  We sure love BYU!

And what made the week even better was meeting our new niece, Ivy!  Isn't she precious?!

Baby Bear and Kobe.

March 2016.  According to the pictures I have, it looks like the following were the highlights.

So...I got to hold a bear at work.  Who knew you could do that?  They were there promoting something that I can't remember. It was pretty cute, but not super happy probably considering it got held by a whole bunch of people before I got my turn.

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And then later that month we went to Kobe's last game in Salt Lake.  He played...but not much.  And the Lakers lost.  But...such is life.

After 2015 comes 2016.

So I managed to finish my review of 2015.  But of course it's already October of 2016 which means I'm not even close to being caught up.  So I'll continue blogging about what's happened this year mostly for my own benefit.  One of my worst fears is forgetting things.

So we'll start with the following events that occurred in February of this year.

Brad's brothers, Jeff and Michael, came in town for a sibling ski trip.  Brent, Brad's other brother, came down from Layton and we all went out to dinner at Tucanos and then hung out at our apartment.  This is Brent testing out our selfie stick. 

This is the whole gang (aka all Brad's siblings and me) before our day of skiing at Solitude. 

On the slopes.  It was kinda windy and got very foggy which makes for interesting skiing.  But we had fun anyway!  I've been skiing since I was 4, but that does not mean I'm good at it unfortunately.  I'm too chicken to challenge myself very often.  I'm all for the blue runs.  But these blue runs were pretty intense.  I never did fall though.  Probably because I went at a snail's pace on all the scary parts.

After a day of skiing, we met up with the rest of the Pickering side of Brad's family at Chuck-A-Rama.  I'd never been before and it exceeded my expectations.  However, my one complaint about all buffets is that you can't bring home leftovers.  Sure you can eat a ton while you're there, but being that stuffed is never very fun.  I prefer paying for a non-buffet meal and then bringing home what I can't finish so I can turn it into two meals.  Nevertheless, the rolls were delicious!

Later that month we went to the Provo City Center Temple open house!  Boy is that temple gorgeous!  It is located a few blocks away from where we were living.

Brent and Trisha came with us!  We love hanging out with them and are sad we live in different states now.

YIR: December 2015

What do you know...we made it through 2015 before 2016 ended.  Here's a look at last December because who doesn't love Christmas pictures posted in July.  Also, looks like the amount of pictures in this post will make up for the lack of pictures in the last post.

If you remember our October 2015 post you'll remember that it's a Chase family (meaning Brad and Bridget Chase family) tradition to carve small pumpkins.  So we decided why not continue the tradition with a small Christmas tree.  We didn't have all that much room in our apartment for a big tree either.  Plus big trees are expensive.  So we bought our first Christmas tree together at Home Depot.  We took it through self checkout which I thought was pretty entertaining.

Here is the undecorated tree in our apartment.  :)

This is a picture of my cousin's son Channing.  I didn't take it and wasn't even present when they took it (they live in Idaho).  But when I saw it, I fell in love.  Isn't he the most adorable shepherd you've ever seen.  I'm tempted to frame it and use it as a Christmas decoration every year.

The beginning of a very slow/snowy drive home from Salt Lake City after work one morning.

Another photo of the drive.  I was going awfully slow since Google directed me on side streets.  Being from California and never having a car in Utah until after I got married, I'm quite inexperienced with driving in snow.  You might think I was scared.  Not really.  Probably because I was too naive to realize how easy it is to get stuck or crash.  I actually thought it made the drive far more interesting than normal.  I'd probably have different feelings if I had crashed, but I managed to make it home in one piece.

Brad didn't like the idea of me driving in the snow especially since working nights I was driving in the late night and early morning which didn't give crews very much time to clear the roads.  So, I took the train the night after.  I normally love trains...meaning I find public transportation exciting when it's cheap and I don't have to be somewhere by a certain time.  But taking it to work was not my favorite for the following reasons: 1) I couldn't be late to catch the train on the way to work.  2) I had to leave for work earlier than if I was driving.  (And when I was working nights every second at home was precious.) 3) It wasn't all that cheap.  Definitely not cheaper than driving.  Anyway, this is a picture of the sidewalk in front of my building as I walked from the train to work.  Pretty sure I was wearing Keds or some traction-less footwear.  But I made it.

This was taken on the morning of December 23rd.  It was snowing relatively hard on my walk to the train.  That was the other downside of taking the train.  I actually had to face the elements walking from my work to the train stop.  Driving from parking garage at my apartment to the parking garage at work was much warmer.

This is proof that we did in fact decorate our Christmas tree.  We even bought precious blinking lights (that's why a video instead of a picture was necessary).  We bought each other far too many presents.  I thought I might receive a few things I had mentioned to Brad that I wanted.  But he kept track of what I mentioned and bought almost everything if not everything on the list.  What a guy.

This is precious Jim on Christmas Eve.  The fam came up to Utah for Christmas!  I probably told him to give me a kiss.  

This is us after a fun-filled Christmas Day.

We also went sledding with my family while they were in town.  I wore my fake Uggs which also have zero traction.  It was pretty difficult to make it up the hill even if I took the long way around up a less steep hill.  

We also went to a Clippers @ Jazz game with some of my family.  I definitely a not a Jazz fan and am not really a Clippers fan either.  (Go Lakers.)  But if I had to pick between the two, I'd pick the Clippers.  I believe the Clippers won.

There was a promotion at the Jazz game for a free Chickfila sandwich if a Clippers player missed two free throws in a row.  That happened.  So what's better than the Jazz losing?  The Jazz losing plus free Chickfila.  The game was on a Saturday.  Chickfila is closed on Sunday.  And I believe them you could only use them at a Utah location.  So with my family already back in California by Monday, Brad and I got their two tickets as well as our tickets to take advantage of the free food.  So we went on Monday night for dinner.

And then we went on Tuesday night as well.  Hurray for free food.

Another morning after work on my way to the train.

This was my last morning of working the overnight shift.  Since they knew I was leaving in April, they hired another person to produce the 4:30am show.  So I trained her which is kinda hilarious since I was not an expert by any means.  My superiors had mentioned that I would switch to dayside associate producing at the start of the new year.  But for whatever reason I didn't count on it actually happening.  So I was getting ready to leave after the morning shows on New Years Eve and was then told it was my last day working nightside.  Great news.  Although I'll admit I was sad to stop working with these girls.

YIR: November 2015

November was a month of few pictures apparently.  Enjoy.

Another picture to prove that Brad is the greatest ever.  As noted previously, he'd rather watch most BYU football games on TV than in the student section.  But because he loves me, he decided to brave the cold (luckily it was a day game) with me for the last home game of the season.  It was against Fresno State and we won 52-10.  That day was also our 3 month anniversary in case you were wondering.  :)

I was lucky enough to get Thanksgiving and the day after off of work which allowed us to go home to California for Thanksgiving.  We spent Thanksgiving day with Brad's family and then went to Knott's Berry Farm the next day with both families.  This is Jim and me awaiting the Snoopy on Ice Christmas show.  From what I can remember, I highly recommend it.

YIR: October 2015

We've made it to October 2015...there is light at the end of the tunnel...

Of course there was more BYU football in October including the homecoming game against East Carolina.  Everyone was supposed to wear royal...so we purchased some new t-shirts for the occasion.  (Guaranteed t-shirt sales is the principal reason they tell fans to wear certain colors to certain games.)  I love BYU sports.  Brad does too.  But I'm a little obsessive and feel the need to go to all the football games while I'm in Provo.  Brad enjoys football from the couch on TV.  But because he's an excellent husband, he suffered through all the games sitting on a hard stadium bench with me.  To make it a little more bearable, we would sit at the top of the stadium so we could have something to lean against.

This is proof that we actually were actually at the game.

Then my family came up for my cousin's wedding.  Of course we had to take the obligatory "sis pic" after hanging out on campus.

And then we took this one with all the kids (minus Nick).

The next weekend we went to another wedding!  This time it was that of our friends James and Amanda at the Salt Lake temple.  Brad was a groomsman.

I got a job in Utah as an associate producer for TV news.  I was technically on-call, but I ended up working full time for the first 3+ months on the overnight shift.  Of course I was behind the scenes helping to write the morning shows.  But this one time I actually made an on-air appearance.  Thanks to there not being many people working the shift, I was chosen to be a face paint model during a segment wear the anchors tested out different Halloween face paint kits.  They gave the anchor some short amount of time to paint our faces on live television.  If you couldn't tell, I was painted to look like Darth Maul.  At this point I had seen a total of 0 Star Wars movies so while I had hear the name, I couldn't tell you who he was.  Let me tell you, I was very disappointed to learn while watching the movies later on that Darth Maul is only in one Star Wars episode.  How lame.   Considering that I had heard of him beforehand, I figured he was some important recurring character.  Guess not.  In case you were wondering, I washed the face paint off before I left. 

In case you didn't already know...I'm not much of a Halloween person.  I probably get it from my mom.  I have nothing against the holiday...I'm just not very creative when it comes to choosing a costume.  And I'm not a big fan of scary things.  Remind me why people pay to go to a haunted house and get scared.  It makes zero sense to me.  Anyway, working the night shift probably left me with even less creativity than normal.  So Brad and I (mostly Brad) came up with these costumes.  If you're not from the computer generation CTRL+C is the keyboard shortcut for "copy" and CTRL+V is the shortcut for "paste".  And since you can't really tell in this picture...Brad and I were both wearing white shirts, jeans, and white shoes.  We put the costume together a few minutes before our ward party a few days before Halloween.  And we got to wear them again at a Halloween party on Halloween hosted by our friends Jake and Anna. 

And of course we had to carve pumpkins.  Brad and I started dating in October of 2014.  He took me on our first date on a Friday (October 10) and then the next night was his roommate Jake's birthday party.  Being fall...small pumpkins were used as decorations.  Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to carve them and so the next day Brad brought them two of them over and we did.  So fast-forward a year and we decided to carry on the tradition and carve small pumpkins again.  Not only are they cheaper...but they are definitely cuter.  Yes, we carved them late Halloween night due to the fact I was lacking motivation and energy due to abnormal sleep schedule.

YIR: September 2015

Howdy ya'll.  Sorry I haven't posted in awhile.  We are now in California relaxing until real life starts in July (aka when Brad's job starts).  And since I know you're all dying to know what I did last September, I won't keep you waiting any longer.  Enjoy.

This was Labor Day.  Brad was studying and I was being a distraction.  Also, I love the glasses that when he's being especially studious.  :)

And of course September means football season.  This was BYU's home opener against No. 20 Boise State.  We went into the fourth quarter down 24-14.  We scored a touchdown to put us within 3.  Under a minute left in the game, we score another touchdown on a 35-yard pass to put us up 28-24.  Of course there were still 45 seconds left which is plenty of time for BSU to score.  But we intercepted it and scored another touchdown of our own to seal the deal.  It was quite exciting to say the least.  And in case that description wasn't enough...please refer to the following highlights video.

The next weekend we headed home to celebrate Brad's grandpa's 90th birthday.  Of course we also stopped by my house to hang out with this little guy.

It was also quite convenient that BYU played UCLA at the Rose Bowl that weekend (as indicated by the end of the above highlights video).

We got there plenty early and took this picture.  Good thing we took one before...  While we went into the game not expecting to win, BYU played surprisingly well throughout the first half.  UCLA didn't score a touchdown until the second half.  Even then...we led the whole game until UCLA scored a touchdown with three minutes left to go in the game.  Such a bummer.  But if we have to lose...UCLA is my second favorite team.  In fact I might have been singing along to their fight song the whole game.