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!