24th of July

I love the 24th of July! Its been a couple years since we have been in Utah for the summer so it was fun to celebrate it again. We went to a parade in the morning. This was the only real float and the only marching band. But we were in the shade and Hannah loved it so we didn't mind at all. (And of course the highlight was Matt and Miriam and their big red truck!!) After her nap we had a BBQ that was so good and then did some fireworks. These are the kids watching...you can tell it was quite the show!

Hmmm...

I looked at this website to see what they think Hannah should have looked like. I am so glad they were so wrong...she is so much cuter!

Learning to Use Flash

For my internship at the food bank in Provo, we signed up with KSL to get a commercial aired during the Olympics and a couple banner ads to go onto KSL.com. We hired a couple BYU film students to shoot the commercial and I was assigned the task to create the banner ads. Originally I thought we would just create a static ad that just had a link behind it to our website, but the KSL guys told us that it needed to be flash if we wanted to get our money's worth. Thanks to Platinum, I already had Flash on my computer and decided I had better figure out how to use it.

So after 2 weeks of video tutorials galore and a bunch of messing around, here are two drafts of the banner ads. The smaller one is about ready to go, while the bigger one still needs some work (I intend to change the timing and the orange text by the lady in the picture).

A mind of her own!

This isn't a political statement from us!

4th of July

I love the 4th of July! This was our first year in Utah for the holiday in years so we had a lot of people to see. We went with my parents to Layton to see Hannah's great-granny and had a really good lunch. After that we drove from there all the way to Lynndyl because Jake had a lot of family in town. It was fun to see so much of our family this year for the 4th!
Starting the day in front of our house. Notice the house number!!!









Eating breakfast at Ihop in Springville.







Swinging at Hannah's great-
Grannies house in Layton






We drove back to Lynndyl after Hannah had a decent nap. Hannah went crazy for this really yummy watermelon.
Hannah LOVED the fireworks (Jake loved lighting them).
I think she thought the sparkler was cool but we only have pictures with her eyes closed so maybe she didn't even see it.

Say Goodbye to Classes....For A Couple Years

Today we (my class group) gave our final presentation for the capstone class for PR majors. It went pretty well. We had to create a PR campaign for the BYU Department of Communications itself. The reason for this is because though BYU's communications program has received high rankings and has won several national and international competitions (one of which happened recently, BYU advertising majors swept the international L'Oreal Brandstorm competition), very few people know about BYU's communications program and its success. Our job was to design a campaign that markets the departments success to other colleges, department alumni and students.

Throughout the presentation, I kept thinking about the time my father-in-law invited me to a presentation iSupply (a marketing agency for high-tech products) gave on how to market a new laser projector built by the company he worked for, E&S engineering. That was a great experience, I learned a ton. Now I have been on the giving end of three similar presentations, both at school and at work.

At my internship this summer, I've been getting a lot of marketing experience which has been really nice because I've really enjoyed learning about both mass marketing and PR. And though the two are not completely the same, there are a lot of similarities and both complement each other extremely well.

I've liked doing marketing so much that I'm pretty certain that will be the emphasis I go into when I go into an MBA program. So I guess business school is the next step, but before I start that, I'm going to thoroughly enjoy not having to do homework every night for a couple years!

Is It June Already?

Our backyard is really tiny but I LOVE having a it! I got this patio set for an early birthday present and we found a cheap BBQ so now we just need some good weather so we can use them.

I have also been attempting to garden this year. We have two plots like this. I am really proud of my spinach, snap peas and lettuce. We are also growing tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans and carrots. I hope it goes better than last year! And try to ignore the grass...maybe that will be next years project.