Merry Christmas!

Alright, I know I've been terrible at posting since school is out. I've wanted to post pictures, but the only times I'm on the Internet during break is at work without my laptop. So the Christmas pics will be up soon - if I'm lucky it'll be before school starts again on the 5th. But in the meantime...
I want to wish all our family and friends a most wonderful Christmas season. We just don't have the time or means to send out Christmas cards this year. But we are thinking of our many loved ones and friends. And hopefully we will get out a few wedding thank-you cards over the break (but don't get your hopes up too high....).
We have been so blessed in this holiday season. Our Christmas really started on the 18th when Kayleen and I went to Body Worlds with my sister Rebekah in Salt Lake (the tickets were part of our Christmas present from Mom and Brad - thank you!). Kayleen was so very excited. It was very interesting and we learned a lot. For those who don't know, Body Worlds is basically a museum exhibit of real preserved cadavers and body parts, explaining the amazing miracle of the human body. It was incredible. Thanks Rebekah for taking us and for buying us dinner too! :)
We were able to go to Enterprise last weekend to have an early Christmas with my family. We got to see Heidi's new house and finally use the Bracken's gift card from our wedding. And of course we took a few minutes to play in the snow! It's been years since I've seen that much snow in Enterprise. We had a wonderful time. Thanks Mom and Bradley and Julie for the rides so we didn't have to pay gas! We appreciate that! We had fun opening all our gifts and spending time with family.
We spent our Christmas Eve with one of Kayleen's patients, a dear lady named Louise. She didn't have any family to spend Christmas with, so we headed on over to have dinner and pie and read the Christmas story with her. It was very fun, and especially rewarding to think about others and not only ourselves on Christmas Eve.
Christmas morning Kayleen and I spent in our apartment and open gifts. And then in the afternoon we headed out on our adventure to Salt Lake City to pick up Kayleen's mom from the airport. She is going to be staying with us until New Year's Eve. We're really excited to have her here since we don't get to see Kayleen's family much. It was a BLIZZARD in Salt Lake, but luckily we got a hotel room a couple miles from the airport. That made it nice when we had to drive in the blizzard when Mary got here 3 hours late (they closed the airport and the flight was diverted to Boise before they finally flew into Salt Lake). Now we're back in Provo to enjoy the rest of our break.
We love you all very much and hope you are having a wonderful holiday season with family and friends as we have been.

Christmas, Christmas time is here...

We are finally getting a little bit of Christmas stuff. On Sunday we are going to get a little fake tree from my sister (Yay for free stuff!). We also made this gingerbread house together. We got the kit from Bed Bath and Beyond with some leftover gift card funds from the wedding. :) Hopefully we'll keep collecting Christmas decorations so our house gets more festive! (p.s. please notice that I added pictures to the post about thanksgiving, below this one...)

It's the Holiday season...

Our Thanksgiving break has been quite too short, and we're ready for Christmas break to be here. We had a good Thanksgiving though. We went to bed extra early on Wednesday night and couldn't get ourselves to sleep any longer than 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning! But that's okay, because Kayleen had to work that morning anyway.
We went to West Jordan (Salt Lake valley) to spend Thanksgiving with the Camps (my mom's side of the family). It was good to see all the cousins that we used to see all the time and now only see a couple times a year! Of course, we all just ate and visited and played games. The in-laws probably find it quite boring (sorry Kayleen, Trevor, Julie, and Norine!), but we Camps/Barlows love to just sit around and visit the whole day. Here are some pictures of Thanksgiving Day:

Rebekah and Andrea (sistas)Heidi and Trevor (lil sis and bro-in-law)

Here we are on Thanksgiving, too. Happy and thankful to have each other.

Yesterday we got to see our friends Meg and Jason - they came down to Utah for Thanksgiving break. And of course spent a little time with Brian and Megan and Baby Eliana. I still haven't got any pictures of her, but hopefully soon! I forgot to get pictures of Baby Paisley at Thanksgiving too. Oh well.

Now it's Saturday and we're just doing homework and getting ready for some crazy school days ahead!
We love y'all and hope you have had a most wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

P.S. Norine, I tried to see if something was wrong with the comment settings, but I couldn't find anything. Hopefully everyone is able to comment now! :)

Just waiting

Well, we are just waiting in anticipation for Brian and Megan's babe to be born. And excited that they have joined the blog world. Once the baby is here I'm sure you'll see some new pictures here on the blog. Other than that we haven't taken many pictures lately, and I'm always hesitant to write a boring blog with no pictures. But I wanted to give an update since it's been a while.
In other news....
My mom is moving to Smithfield (near Logan). That was kinda surprising but we are happy for them that they'll have a nice new home.
And that's about all.
But there will be more new adventures soon.
Love y'all!

Halloween fun

Two midterms, group project, and major research milestone group work this week.....All I can say is I'm running on no sleep and my brain has stopped working. So that's all I want to type for now. But here are some pictures from the Halloween party we had at our house last week:
Yeah, those are three-legged pants we are sharing :)

Planning our next major adventure...PhD school

I've finally decided what I want to do with my life after graduate school: stay in school. Forever. I'm planning on getting a PhD and pursuing an academic career in research and teaching Information Systems at the university level.
Now, I still have a year and a half before I graduate with my masters, but I'm planning ahead on the next step. I'm taking a prep research course and getting advice from my professor about how to succeed in PhD school. He is sure that anyone who takes the prep research course can easily be accepted to any top program in our field.
I won't apply for schools until about a year from now, but just taking a preliminary look, I'd really like to go to the University of Minnesota. Not just because Kayleen really wants to go there to be close to her family, but really because they are one of the top 5 Information Systems programs in the nation, they emphasis topics that are especially interesting to me, and I have heard nothing but good from the professors here at BYU that graduated from there. Another top choice would be MIT. Other schools that look interesting to consider (all are ranked in the top ten nationally for ISys programs): Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, U of Pennsylvania, U of Maryland, New York U, U of Texas-Austin.

I've still got a lot of time to decide, but this is an idea of where our lives are headed: after a couple more years at BYU, we'll likely be headed out of Utah to one of these schools for the following 3-4 years, and then Dr. and Mrs. Barlow will finally settle down somewhere, but who knows where?!

P.S. Why do I want to get a PhD?

(1) I like learning new things and would be able to constantly read, research, and discover things that are interesting to me.

(2) I would love to work with students in a university setting.

(3) Flexible as far as hours and vacation - able to spend time with family.

(4) Starting salaries for professors in our field are very high, and in the meantime PhD school is relatively cheap - any of these top-tier programs will waive my tuition and pay me $20000-$30000 /yr to study at their school.

Not much new around here - just a blog tag

Not much exciting to read about with us lately. We've been busy with school and just finding time to spend together. We're enjoying the fall weather and the changing leaves, drives up the canyon, and spending time with friends.

In the meantime, Heidi tagged me so now I have to list my six quirks:
1. I get irked when people don't respond to emails at work. For example, two weeks ago I sent emails to forty people needing feedback about a critical project. 6 responded. GRRR!
2. I don't dislike oatmeal, but even when I really crave it I can never finish a bowl without getting tired of it.
3. I enjoy being in school - that's quirky, right?
4. I wake up at 5:30 or 6 everyday even though I don't have to be to school or work until 8.
5. I check my Yahoo! mail, Facebook, Gmail, and blogs in that order, several times every day (even when it's really quite probable there are no updates nor new messages)
6. I can never think of good ways to finish lists about myself. :)

Have a good day everyone!

Homecoming Weekend

We had a wonderful weekend, enjoying a lot of fun activities. On Friday night we went to an activity sponsored by BYU just for married couples. We had a really nice catered dinner and got to hear Mindy Gledhill sing and saw an act by ComedySportz. It was all so good and so fun. Brian and Megan were there with us to enjoy the evening.

Saturday we got up to go get free pancakes at the Homecoming parade. It was cold, but we had fun just enjoying pancakes and parade together.

We also went to a movie at the International Cinema on Saturday. We highly do NOT recommend the movie "Turtles Can Fly". Saturday night we went out to eat at Brick Oven with our friend Keith and Kayleen's patient Jamie. We all visited and enjoyed yummy pizza.
Sunday is always good. We finished the weekend by spending time together at home and also going to visit Shaun and Lanette at their place.
Thank heavens for the weekends!

A Tribute to Roberto Nuñez

I met Roberto Nuñez, a faithful Latter-Day Saint from East San Salvador, El Salvador, in December of 2004. We were both serving in the Guatemala City North Mission. I had been in Guatemala only 4 months and was in my second area, a small Pokomchi village in the northern mountainous region of the country. Just after Christmas, transfers were announced and I went to Coban to pick up my new senior companion from the bus station. Elder Nuñez had been in Guatemala for about 15 months, and my first impression of him was that of a fun-loving, caring, hard-working, experienced missionary. We served together for 3 months, enjoying the cold weather (no heaters!) of the mountain village and walking many miles together in the rain and in the sun. During the time I got to know Elder Nuñez, we worked hard and faced many trials, but we also had spiritual experiences and saw miracles. I will always remember Elder Nuñez as the companion who kept a good attitude at all times and made me laugh constantly. Elder Nuñez honorably completed his full-time mission in September 2005. He returned home to El Salvador and was soon married and started working as a policeman in San Salvador. I soon stopped keeping in contact with him as we both moved on with our lives, but I've always remembered him as one of my favorite companions.
Last Friday night, my mission president informed me that Roberto Nuñez, this faithful funny friend of mine, was recently killed while on the job. I was obviously shocked to hear this news. My heart goes out to his wife and his family - I wish I had a way to contact them. While his life was taken too soon, he lived his short life to the fullest. It was a reminder of the impact that one person can have, even in only a few short months or years. In the three months I really knew him well, I learned from his example of how to be a good missionary and how to keep a happy attitude. Elder Nuñez, thank you for your life and example, and for the good memories.

General Conference, Mission Reunion, etc etc

It was a good weekend. It started out by going to my mission reunion on Friday night. It was so good to see some old friends and especially my mission president. We had some spiritual messages and I was really touched and missing the mission when we all stood to sing "Called to Serve" in Spanish again. It was probably the most that I've missed the mission since I've been home. I rode up with Andy Smith and we listened to some of the football game on the way, so that was fun, too.
Saturday we had the Wells family over to our home to watch the morning session of General Conference. And then we went to Brian and Megan's to watch the afternoon session. For Priesthood, I went with Ron and Shaun to watch and it was good to catch up with them a little. Kayleen stayed with Megan and Megan and Sarah and the rest of the Wells girls to watch a movie while the guys were out. It was a good day full of fun and food and visiting with friends.
Then Sunday we got to see the whole Barlow family at Brandon and Norine's. And a good time was had by all.