New Blog

We have a new blog!

 I have been meaning to switch us over for a while now and its finally up and running. 

Goodbye taliafinley.blogspot.com

Hello rileyandtalia.blogspot.com

Moab

We went camping with our new friend Pat and Emma Matheson last weekend in Moab. 

Such a good time! It was one of the best camping trips yet!

We have cute nephews

Yes, my sister is wiping his face with a pad...She didn't have anything else!

Washington DC

We've been busy lately.
Here are some pictures of our trip to Washington DC. It was so much fun to get to see Abby, Rich, Eileen and our good friend Devon. We spent a week there and we did absolutely everything. It was so much fun!

The DC Temple after we did sealings

George Washington ate here! Abs and Riley acting colonial.

No trip is complete without a baseball game. The Orioles Camden Yards.

Dev + Abs

Library of Congress

Small World! I literally ran into JBod on the mall. 

Lincoln Memorial

Seeing the Constitution was exciting/reminded us all of National Treasure

Overlooking Alexandria

Georgetown Cupcake. So good.

Ford's Theater (where Abraham Lincoln was shot). We saw the play 1776, and it was amazing!

Arlington. I loved watching the changing of the guards.

Mount Vernon. I loved this place

Lincoln is my favorite President

1776 in Ford's

Afterwards I met my mom and sister in Missouri for some Quilt Market

Early Birthday

Last night I was packing for our trip to Washington DC when Riley yelled from the other room, "Come in here, I want to take your picture!" He pulled this baby out and started taking pictures of me.

 I had no idea what was going on until he said, Happy Birthday and that the camera was mine! I've always wanted a nice camera and this one is perfect. I didn't need anything too fancy because I still don't know what I'm doing, but I'm so excited! I literally dreamed about my camera all night.

Riley is such a sweetheart. I know my birthday isn't for 3 weeks, but he wanted me to have it for DC. Last year he gave me my bike a week early too. I'm noticing a trend here....
Hopefully I'll figure out how to get this thing working so that I can post pictures of DC. See ya in 2 weeks!!

Jam

We just used up the last of our freezer jam from our wedding.

I guess we're not newly weds anymore. 

Like Crazy

Yesterday Riley HAD to study for his finals, so I decided that I would stay out of his hair and not distract him. It was so nice outside so I decided to ride my bike to the Creamery to get milk. We buy three gallons for five dollars at the Creamery and we go through them like crazy. Crazy! I think its because we eat so much cereal (cereal=cheap), or maybe its because my husband has a bottomless stomach.

When I was at the Creamery I saw a couple from our old ward buying HALF a gallon of milk. Okaaaay. I could barely hold the three gallons of milk while I was standing in line, plus I was buying five times as much as them. I looked like a fool.
Then...
I put two gallons of milk in my basket and one in a sack on my handlebars. I was looking good. The whole way home I was going super slow because the gallon weight on the right side of my handlebars was making me drift to that side and I couldn't control my bike very well with the weight.

The milks. And yes, I park my bike in our spare room. I don't like bike racks, okay?

I thought to myself, it would be the funniest sight to see this girl crash on her bike and see three gallons of milk go flying everywhere. And for a millisecond I hoped it would happen so that I could tell that story. (it would have been hilarious) And the next millisecond I thought, No. Not worth it. I'm glad my common sense came in during the second millisecond.

Sidenote: in order to make it so that Riley would not be distracted, I got myself a chick-flick from the Red Box. I told him I was doing him a favor because if I got some action movie like Ghost Protocol, he would have wanted to watch it with me, so I had to get the chick flick. But really I just wanted to watch Like Crazy. And I did. And I liked it.

The Lint Trap

Instead of cleaning out the lint trap like a normal person, Riley insists on vacuuming it out with the hose on our vacuum. I saw him do it three times last weekend and when I asked him why he was doing that he said, "I like it".
Ha.

Quilt Retreat...

...was great this year.

Sometimes I tell people about what me and my cousins and aunts do every April during General Conference weekend and I think they think I'm weird.
But I love it.

There were about twenty five of us this year and the project was just a chevron quilt. Nothing fancy--so it was basically a no-stress weekend. Some people might not realize how stressful quilt retreat can get, but when you haven't had any sleep and spend 15 hours sewing your little blocks and then realize you've sewed them all wrong and you have to unpick them and do them again, its enough you make you cry. So you do. (And PS everyone has done that; its not just me) But none of that this year. It was just fun and everyone was a little bit silly.

I love catching up with my relatives I haven't seen in a really long time and getting to know them better. Especially the ones who have married into my family. I'm sure my boy cousins know this, but they really picked some really great wives. And I wouldn't have known them this well if it wasn't for quilt retreat.

We have some inside jokes about the worst years of quilt retreat; the ones with the biggest breakdowns, the hardest projects, the stupidest mistakes. And everyone laughs about them now. I love having all of these women who are funny and cool and creative around me for a weekend and I hope all of their great traits rub off on me. Even if we don't have anything in common besides the fact that we're related, we have quilt retreat, and that's a pretty cool thing.

Hari Hari Krishna Krishna

This year was Riley's first ever Festival of Colors. It was such a nice spring day--so perfect for being outside throwing colors at strangers. The festival is a really weird craze that happens every year, but I think its fun.

I love that hot pink on his eye

They said last year there were 150,000 people at the Festival of Colors. I bet they had more this year

This was after Riley "got all the colors off". This side of his face had SO MANY different colors all caked on. And it made his mustache turn blue. Ew.

Garrett and Kellie had never been either. It was fun to be able to hang out with them because I feel like we never do.

Planet Earth

Last night in the middle of telling me about all of the things he needed to do this week Riley just blurted out:

"Killer whales! Oh my gosh did you see their tactics?! Their tactics are out of this world!"
And the was 100% serious.
Thank you Discovery Channel.

RC Willey & Caucus Meetings

Today Riley and I went to look for a new tv because ours is a TANK. It's one of the ghetto old big screens that sits on the floor. And it's sort of broken. So new tv for us!
We went to a couple of places and then to check out RC Willey. (For some reason I cannot find my way around that store. I have no idea where I am when I'm in there.) This girl at the front gave us this coupon book to look at (while we perused the store, I guess) and we saw that they were giving out free Creamies AND a free gift if you bought something. Luckily we needed headphones, so we took them up to the front and paid for them. We got our choice between like 5 Creamie flavors (I didn't even know they had that many) and then they gave us our free gift: A fine set of THREE, yes three, RC Willey brand kitchen knives. They look crappy, but they're probably a step up from our crappy Ikea knives. I mean, they are RC Willey brand after all.
I think our ten bucks spent was well worth it.

Oh, and then we went to our caucus meeting which was pretty cool. Thank you church, for canceling all of our meetings so that everyone in Provo could be at Wasatch Elementary and we could cram like sardines into the classrooms. It was seriously SO crammed. I overheard one girl say: "I guess this is what happens when President Monson tells everyone to go to their caucus meeting." I'm not that political, but I didn't feel like I was the only one there who wasn't. Lots of young people were just there to learn, which they probably wouldn't have done if the First Presidency didn't ask us to. I think that's neat.

Junk Mail

Riley pulled this from the junk mail pile because he knew I would want it.
That's a good husband.

Toupees and Husbands

This is Jason Alexander (aka George Kastanza from Seinfeld)

We went to watch him speak at UVU last week and it was pretty cool. I liked his real-life self. He told us about his career and taught us some acting lessons. I learned so much!

Some things I learned that night:
Seinfeld was basically a bust for the first few seasons. (Now look at it...ha)
He's met with and worked with a lot of really cool people.
He's really short.
He is nothing like his character, George (thank goodness)
He didn't pretend like he wasn't wearing a toupee (which he was...) And, he was perfectly fine talking about his "miraculous hair regrowth."
He does not have a New York accent (however, he does impersonate Woody Allen really well)
He's not religious, but he is spiritual.
He's been married to his wife for 32 years. Pretty cool, I'd say.
His greatest accomplishment are his two children.

It was really fun to hear from someone in show business who is so different than you'd imagined him. I'm glad we went to it.

On a sidenote....

Sometimes my husband does dangerous things that really scare his wife.
Case in point:

New Life

Even though I loved our old house, we've moved to a new apartment. It has so many great things that we've never had! AKA a dishwasher, a washer and dryer, another bedroom, and its WAY bigger. Plus we get free rent, so why wouldn't we love living here?
I never put up pictures of our old house, but it was just so cute-- I had to take a few before we left.

I'll put up pictures of our new house sometime.

Also, we bought a new car. And the heater works in it.
We're really moving up.

Valentines Day

Last year Riley took me to see Les Miserables on Valentines Day, so this year I wanted to plan it. I picked him up from school and we ate an early dinner at Zupas. We filled up our car at Smiths and got $.40 cents off! We were both super excited because it cost us less than $60 to fill up the truck (Known to Riley as "Susan"--which we're selling by the way. Sad for Riley, happy for our wallets).

This photo of Soldier Hollow is courtesy of TripAdvisor

I took him to the sledding hill at Soldier Hollow in Midway. I'd never been, but I'd heard it was really fun. Riley told me the tubes went pretty slow because they rake the snow so you don't fly off the mountain. The first run, they didn't tell us the rules AKA you have to brake with your feet once you get to the orange cones, so I went so much faster than Riley told me and I ran into the first two of the five fences they have at the end of the hill. It was crazy. Riley was excited because it was way faster than the last time he was there. We went up and down that hill so many times I couldn't count them all. It was so nice because there weren't very many people there and we did it at night. We had a blast!

I got Riley a book about his "financial IQ". It was a lame gift, I know, but that's what he wanted. He loves books like that. He got me paper lanterns like the kind on Tangled. He remembered me telling him a while ago that I wished we could have set them off at our wedding (Sundance wouldn't let us....something about setting Provo Canyon on fire or something) and we set them off behind our house. I really really loved it. And he got me chocolate covered strawberries. Best.

In other news, we're moving this weekend. It's been so fun to live in our little house, but we're so excited to move to a new, bigger apartment.

Brian Regan

In January, my good friend Katie Ann Perkes invited us to go to Brian Regan with her and her family at Abravanell Hall in Salt Lake (Thank again Natalie!). I was so excited because I love Brian Regan and Riley had seen his show before (he went with another girl when I was in Jerusalem...grrr) but no one else had. Everyone's cheeks were hurting afterwards from laughing. It was nice to spend time with Katie and Tyson and the Clydes. Riley was especially excited to talk to Wilford about construction. Ha.

We didn't get any pictures of the four of us together. Boo! We'll have to hang out again soon.

(Waiting for the show to start in the fancy-schmancy Abravanell Hall)

Sick Day

Being sick when you're married is SO much better than when you're single.

Your sweet husband comes home from school and skips his last two classes so he can take care of you.
He buys you gatorade, saltines, 7Up and Chicken Noodle Soup.
He holds your hair and rubs your back while you're throwing up.
Then he cleans the toilet and pretends its not the most disgusting thing ever.
He goes and gets the most chicky flick from the Red Box for you.
He brings you Chicken Noodle Soup in bed and gets you anything you need.
He watches an episode of the Bachelor with you until you fall asleep.

I never want to be sick like that again, but if Riley's there, it won't be so bad.

The Three Wheeler

I saw this three wheeled car driving around Provo of all places the other day.
When I told Riley he told me I must have dreamed it and it wasn't real. He really thought I was psycho.
But this is the proof that it exists.