This week was back to the normalcy of craziness. If there ever was such a thing. Without work, a lot more free time than I thought is now available which means I don't have to study all night every night during the week so I can play on the weekend but I can manage to do homework in the afternoons so that I can have fun at night. Which I think is a very good thing. Monday this past week was a holiday which is truly an amazing thing. Having no school for a day really manages to get people relaxed and allows them to do stuff they would normally never take the time to do...in this case a full packed day of fun and energy blowing. I started out with waking up early and cleaning up the apartment and doing my wash. All very much needed things that had to get done and things I take pride and joy in doing. After that, my roommates and I headed over to Kelly Ann's place for a brunch of waffles and homemade syrup and strawberry whipped cream. It was delicious. That led up to an excursion to the thrift stores and to Walmart so that we could find sleds and things to slide down the hills on so that we could have a fun afternoon sledding. We ended up going to Rock Canyon Park which has a pretty sweet set up with some pretty decent hills to go down on. The sled I ended up using was an old gymnastic mat, and it was the best sled that any of us had gotten and worked perfectly. The snow was just icy enough to allow us to get going really fast and then safely coast to a finish at the bottum on the padded mat. Other sledding tools like the green saucer went so fast that almost everyone biffed it at the bottum and managed to injure themselves in one way or another. Mine was my back. I managed to tweak it all out of place or something again and had to deal with the pain I haven't felt for quite a while for the majority of the rest of the week. But I got over it eventually and after not sleeping for the first night started taking IB profen until the pain calmed down again and I could finally do all my normal activities. After sledding, we headed to the Creamery grill to enjoy some dinner and then came to the apartment and projected the new James Bond movie. It was a lot more violent than I remembered in theaters and I don't know if I really want to watch it again. Once that was done, it was time for the ward neon dance party which went from 9 -11 and was full of strobe lights and flashing lights of every color that can be imagined. The dance was interesting because half the songs that were played no one had a clue as to what they were and the other half were standard fare that are usually played at every dance setting up here at BYU. But it was still fun and everyone was dressed up in crazy neon colors. Tuesday and Wednesday were getting work done days but I still managed to hang out with and talk to friends and play games and goof off and all those good things but there was nothing really out of the norm at all. Thursday night we had a cleaning check and so I spent all day after class was done cleaning the apartment getting done all the jobs that I had to do and then some because I read the list wrong and so ended up doing about twice as much work as I had to, but oh well. I got it done and I got it done to the best of my ability. And we passed with flying colors because he didn't really check anything at all so it wasn't that hard. After the cleaning, I managed to squeeze in finishing writing a paper that I had been working on steadily all week for history. It was on Jared Diamons Guns, Germs, and Steel and it was an analysis essay over the theme of the book. It felt like I was back in high school because she gave us all the question she wanted answered in the essay and exactly what format to write them in and everything. I like writing, love it in fact, but I hate the fact that I have to write like I am back in 9th grade and everything has to be in five paragraphs and perfect grammar and almost no individual style. It takes all the fun out of it and makes it so that my usual good writing turns out rather mediocore at best which is very frustrating. Thursday night I also attended an 80's dance club with Kelsey, Greg, Ryan Chapman, Kelly Ann, and Whitney. It was quite an interesting experience. All the music was clean and there was no alcohol or anything because it was an 18 - 21 only club. But still the atmosphere just didn't feel right. It was a lot of fun, but I think Ill just stick with BYU dances from now on. The surprising thing was that I knew most of the music that was played, even though it was all 80's. I guess I have my parents and aunts and uncles to thank for that, they all made sure I was very exposed to the 80s culture and music and movies while growing up and I love them for it haha. After the dancing we headed to Walmart to get some ice cream and then I came home and immediately fell asleep and slept soundly for the first time in ages since coming back up to Utah. Friday I turned in my paper and fixed and polished it up enough that it should garner a good enough grade to make me happy. But still it lacked any of my attitude or usual sentence structure or anything of the matter. Then I went to work, which I find myself enjoying a lot. It escapes all the drama that seems to surround me in college life and just allows me to work with my hands and get stuff done. After work, I had my first smoothie/movie night so far of the semester. A tradition all my friends and I plan on continuing on for the rest of the semester. We start it off at 8 by making all sorts of smoothies form whatever juices, milk, ice cream, yougurt, and fruit we could find all week and then drink and them and chat around and then finish it all off by project some G or PG movie so that everyone can watch and so that it is clean. A lot of people up here insist on having everything that clean and I admire and applaud them for it. It just means I see a whole lot more of Disney than I think I have at any other time of my life. After that we played a lot of big group games where we shouted ourselves hoarse and all those fun things. Saturday I got up and headed over to the science center to do a geology lab that is due Monday and which I completed really quickly with the help of Courtney, Sherrie, and new kid named Lloyd. I think I am going to love geology a lot. The teacher is amazing, the labs are fun and engaging, the homework is not busy work and easy enough to complete in a timely manner, and it is just fascinating work, period. After that we went out to lunch at L&T and then came back to the apartment where I did all the dishes from the smoothie mess the night before and everyone else watch the third Mummy. Then because it was raining fairly heavily, we played all sorts of card games out in the lobby before heading over to Amanda's and Sherrie's to watch Step Up. After all the movie business was over I talked some with all my friends and then watched an episode of Psych and managed to get all my roommates and Will addicted to it with me. It has to be one of my favorite TV shows ever. Its a clean sitcom, which is rare enough. But its also a spoof of Law and Order and CSI and all those shows and that just makes it even funnier. The only problem is that the only way to watch the show is online because BYU cable does not carry the channel we need to watch it. So I pretty much have finished up all the episodes that are free online and now don't have anywhere to go to watch the rest of them and the whole new season that just started last week. But I will find a way, there has to be a way. Because now that I have a lot of people that are addicted it to it with me, someone will find a way to be able to watch more of it, or so I hope. This week is filled with all matter of insanity from more parties and dancing to two midterms (already!) to all the normal school and work hours to writing the first half of another paper. To setting up another smoothie/movie night and I could go on and on. But I am going to have fun and it really makes me happy to be always doing stuff, I hate the feeling of having nothing to do and being bored. So I will write more next week.

Thought of the week: "A hug is worth a thousand words. A friend is worth more." Jasmine Fitzwilliam. And I have discovered the truth of this statement over and over again both in Mesa and in Provo as I realize how truly blessed I am in the friends that I have and how they bring me up and inspire me to do good.

Song of the week: "Leaving" by Jesse McCartney. It is so hard to find clean R&B songs and this is one of the few that is 100% clean and still fun to dance to and sing along with. Amazing.

Picture of the week:This is Kelly Ann, Kelsey, and I getting ready to head out to go sledding on MLK Day. It was a blast!

I like life busy

Alright, I am back now. Sorry I kind of skipped a week there, but life has gotten really hectic already for only being the beginning of the semester. This semester is going to be a heck of a lot different from last semester, in almost every way imaginable. But it is still going to be awesome, at least as far as I can tell. The classes I have this time are are Biology 100, Geology 101, University Chorale, Symphony Orchestra, History 201 (World Civilizations through 1500), Book of Mormon 122 (the second half), and Social Recreational Leadership (which is a leadership class where we just learn how to lead large groups, lead games, and host fantastic parties - sounds like the perfect class, huh? and guess what it is!). My work schedule is now that I only work on Friday nights and every other Sunday, but for only doing that I still find myself crazy busy all the time. I guess I should give the laydown of how every night of the week goes. Monday night is FHE which so far I have been planning because our mother has been absent as of late. We never see her and she never tries to plan anything - so I made myself kind of substitue father because no one else was going to ever plan anything. Which makes life interesting. This week I planned a movie night for the sake of the fact that I was trying to plan an activity only a few hours in advance. It worked out great though and we watched the old Swiss Family Robinson and talked and got to get comfortable with each other again. Tuesday night is my rec class night and it goes from 4 - 6:30. From the moment we get there the class is go, go, go! We start out with some kind of preopener or ice breaker activity and then move onto playing group games and then watch a powerpoint about what activity we will learn next how to plan (the main point of each being keeping it fun and safe for everyone - which means we have discovered the evil of having elimination games). For homework all we have to do is write up the rules to our favorite game or write up the construction behind a a massive three part relay or some other such fun thing. The class itself is divided into four groups which means that each group for the semester is responsible for planning a preopener, the huge relay, two mega parties (with at least 20 other people in attendance), and for the final - lead a party for everyone in the class that can only last 30 minutes long. Individually we have to plan our favorite game, two individual parties (where I only am the host unlike the group parties), and all sorts of other things like some service here and there and just making sure we get enough leadership time in over the semester through various activities. Sherrie, Aaron, and Jared are all in the class with me which means that its pretty much a blast and everyone else there is there for the sole purpose of having fun. After class, the four of us usually hit up Legends Grille for dinner and then get back to life as regular around 8. Wednesday night is now officially temple night, and I go with Courtney around 5ish to do some baptisms. The fact that I now actually have time set aside to go visit the temple makes me really, really happy. I need to balance out school with a lot of more of the spiritual side of life this semester. Which means I also try to do 2 batches of indexing for my calling a week - which should hopefully work out. Thursday night is going to be the night still where I go visit my aunt and uncle. That is definitely needed to control my sanity levels as I rush from class to class and event to event throughout the week and that will be my one period of slowdown to sit back and get some studying in and eat somewhat healthily and see some family. Friday night I have work from 4:30 - 7:30 which is awesome again. I can't even begin to describe how much I enjoy having a job and working. For some reason, work just makes me happy. Its really intense and physically exhausting usually, but it makes me really happy to be doing it. Friday night we also hit up the planetarium this week where the presentation was on the creation stories of all the different people all over the world. I found it fascinating....but I was one of the select few who did. Not many others enjoyed it that much at all. I guess that just goes to show what a nerd I am by the fact that I love learning so much. Learning new things is one of the most exciting things about college for me and it happens for almsot every class and every hour of my college experience. Saturday should start being my one huge playday of the week starting this week - where I can plan big fun things for my group of friends to do and then we go out and do them - whatever that may be. However for the past two Saturdays I have been detained by my music classes. We had to play for a conductor's seminar last Saturday in orchestra and I was there all morning. Yesterday was a chorale retreat where we spent six hours working on singing skills and learning the correct posture, mouth position, and almost everything else that has to be done by your body to sing the best way possible. I finally figured out what head voice is and I will agree that it sounds much better than chest voice in singing. The surprising thing is that I have actually learned how to sing though. I can actually sing and sing fairly decently - not amazing mind you - but decent enough. And they are sticking it to us hard this semester to learn some pretty hard pieces from Aaron Copland and Eric Whitecare. Things I heard my amazing choir friends sing throughout high school and now that I just barely started singning I have to catch up on. And catch up fast. But choir is making me happy too. I have always wanted to do it and never had the time to take to learn. High school was always too busy doing orchestra, MUN, and all the APs. Last semester was intense working a lot, getting GEs done and out of the way, and figuring out how college actually works. I can finally squeeze it in now this semester and it is amazing. After the choir retreat, Kahi called and invited me over to play some Rockband and I agreed to it. The game is still my favorite video game I have every played and I am able to play at a least a medium level for each of the components and a hard or expert level for the bass or guitar. A lot of people ended up calling me or texting me and heading over there too - there was Aaron, Courtney, Rachelle, April, Whitney, Kelly Ann, Kelsey, Kahi, and me by the end of it. And we rocked hard. By the end of the night, my ankle hurt from trying to figure out how to use the foot pedal on the drum set and my voice was shot from singing all day for choir and then singing at night for Rockband. But I think everyone had a blast. Which is saying something because when we got back from break - the semester started out with so much ridiculous drama where people didn't like people anymore. It just showed me how much the group dynamics can change by the abscene of two people - namely Joe and Samuel. With Samuel gone, old tensions rose up and people started hating other people again and I think last night it finally resolved itself. People finally learned how to get along with each other again and I can tell you it is going to make life so much better this semester. The other thing about it is that the group keeps growing kind of exponentially - this semester so far Sir William, Regan, Stephen, Tayler, Kahi's new roommates, Brad, and few others have been added to the mix with the result being that usually our apartment has people in it. And it ranges from a few to being stuffed. Its great fun, but the problem is that study time is getting more and more compressed and I have to study in my room now, the kitchen is just too distracting. The other problem is that therer is no way I can keep up with the cleaning, Im just too busy to spend an hour or two every day doing the dishes, mopping and sweeping, vacuuming, and toilet scrubbing. I try to at least get the dished done, but no one else ever does anything. Ever. They just go about their lives and make the place look like a pigsty and it is really kind of starting to get on my nerves. I am only one person, and everyone else should be able to pick up the slack too. Greg has Fridays and Saturdays completely off but all he ever does in snowboard and sleep. Aaron will spend his time watching movies or playing video games. And Jared is always on the phone for work or sleeping. Brad is simply never home that much at all which means that he doesn't really contribute to the messy problem so you can't really expect him to clean it up. There has to be a way to get everyone else to work though. I just have no idea what that is yet. They could care less how dirty everything is and that really bothers me. A lot. Im also the only one that ever does any cooking and they devour it like ravenous wolves no matter if it is Neiman Marcus cookies or banana bread. But Ill figure it out somehow. There has to be a way to get it to work. Well, with all the stuff I have written down, hopefully you got the sense of how full my life is. And Im going to try to make it fuller by working out in the mornings with Courtney, Amanda, Sherrie, and Tayler with basketball, racquetball, and running. I also have gotten more sleep this semester than I think at any other point in my life. And I intend to keep it that way as long as I possibly can because I feel fantastic. There are no more headaches for one and that feeling is one of the greatest in the world for me, no joke. I think that pretty much covers what I wanted to get written down today, so Ill write again next week!

Thought of the week: "Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind" - Cicero. This quote goes well with what I have been feeling for the first two weeks of the semester thus far.

Song of the week: "Love Lockdown" - Kanye West. The song has a really great beat and the message is great for a premissionary at least by stating that we must keep our love locked down until we find the one who we are really meant for.

Picture of the week: So I have been a slacker and have as yet not really gotten out my camera at all this semester...but I am going to change that this week and I will be posting the picture of the week for sure next week.

New year, new semester, new roommates, new everything

So it has been quite awhile since I last wrote...which can be attributed to quite a lot of different factors. But surmise it to say, I survived finals...did better than survived too. I managed to cram and multiple guess my way to almost all A's with the exception of an A- in dance and a B+ in economics which kept my GPA at a solid 3.89 so that I don't have to worry about losing my scholarship or anything. At least not yet. Finals week was full of friends, study, moving Samuel out to get him to Jerusalem, messing around in the snow, cleaning, etc. I finished them all by Wednesday but was unable to finally head home until Friday. But I got home Saturday and was immediately swept away by my family and later my friends. Being home over break for a week was a blast and a half. My time was spent crammed with family, friends, wrapping presents, unwrapping presents, parties, sleeping, driving (amazing!), and shopping. I was just ridiculously busy the entire time, but loving it as well. Christmas was amazing - I got the eclectic collection of gifts anyone could ever have thought to ask for that range from a Lion King hat to a crockpot and a miniature scarecrow to a new cell phone. Oh, plus I got an M&M dispenser which I am looking forward to using all semester. There was also a party that I ended up throwing which was only supposed to be a "few friends" but ended up over 50 people according to my mom's count and 75 according to my brother's. Suffice it to say there were a lot of people at my house and my mom decided the theme was "missions". Everyone was talking about their call and when they were leaving and such and Jerem actually opened his call that night. It just reminded me that mine is still so far off and not seeming to approach any faster while I my friends are already leaving around me. My last night I was able to spend with friends was Saturday night and the amazing Leilani took me, Sarah, Aubrey, Rachel, and herself out to Cheesecake Factory for Christmas. It was astoundingly delicious. The food was amazing, the cheesecake was even better and just talking about anything and everything between us felt like home again. These are the people who know me far too well probably to their liking but they still love me and even hang out with me and I thank and appreciate them for that. They are all my best friends and people I can go to whenever I have trouble and I know they will do their best to help me find a solution to the problem. That to me is simply amazing. Well, after one week down in Mesa it was time to head back up to the frozen northland of Utah and crash there with all sorts of family just playing around for the entire week. And now I have to start getting ready for everything new. My new classes should be all set up already or so my hope is. Im excited for all of them, even though history looks like it is going to be a killer, a big killer. But I love history...so I hope to make it through. My new roommate Robert seems fairly cool as far as any of us can tell so far. He is a lifeguard anyway, so that automatically makes him awesome. I have a new work schedule and might have to get another new one if this one doesn't work out. Truth is, Im thinking about quitting but Im just not sure yet. Life is going to be extremely hectic this semester and work gives me a good break from studying or partying to just work with my hands and clear my head of everything. But with dance, orchestra, choir, geology, biology, world history, and social recreational leadership - my time is going to be fairly constricted as it is. Fun, but very busy and always on the go. Plus there is an ice skating class everyone wants me to add and that I would just audit. I think that would be an ultimate epic fail if I did go, but I would really like to learn how to at the same time. The good thing is that I have at least one friend in each of my classes and can always make new ones in every one. It makes the year a much more fun experience to get to know more people. So I think that covers everything for right now. Except that I am getting sick...but that is hardly new. It seems to happen to me everytime I come up here. Must be something different in the air or something that sets off my allergies because I clear up rapidly when I am at my Mesa home. Hopefully, my next post will be from my house next Sunday so that I got to hear Joe's and Samuel's farewell. But I will just have to see.

Thought of the week: "It didn't come wrapped up in packages, boxes, or bags...maybe Christmas perhaps was a little bit more" and the whole entrie rest of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas book by Dr. Seuss. One of the most amazing morals from the Christmas season to be cherished and examplified throughout the entire year.

Song of the week: "Let It Rock" by Kevin Rudolf has been stuck running through my head for the entire break. It has a good beat even if all the words really don't make sense.

Picture of the week: