Freshman year has started to wind to a close....and I am not quite ready to consider saying goodbye to everyone...

So, it has been a long time since my last post. A very long time. But I suddenly let life get busy this month and then all of sudden you just run out of time to spend an hour or two writing up here and organizing all the pictures you took during the week and such. Anyway, I have been having way too much fun lately complete with studying crazy hard complete with trying to do my best in everything that I do. Which means sleep has been lagging behind a little bit lately and I probably haven't been eating as healthy as I should or really want to. This past week has held a lot in and of itself and I think I will start writing about that first. Last Sunday, the Draper temple dedication took place and they broadcasted it to the Marriot Center for all to see. It was an amazing spiritual occurrence and definitely worth the hype that the bishopbric has been putting into it all semester. I have been to temple dedications before, but I was too young to really concentrate and understand everything and get all I needed to out of it. This one I finally listened and got everything out of it that I should have which makes for a much better and more uplifting experience. After that we went over to Will's sister's house to play games and just enjoy some Sunday R and R. She and her husband were really nice and they have a two year old son named Max who is pretty much the bomb. We played Rage! (which is a card game kind of like Rook or Oh heck! or whatever else you want to call it) and some Catchphrase. It was a lot of fun and totally worth it, although we did miss ward prayer and tunnel singing and the like which was kind of depressing but sometimes it is just nice to get away for a while from the BYU campus and forget about the stress and hyperactivity of college for a while. I usually need a few hours of this at least once a week and since I had been unable to go to Uncle Karsten's and Aunt Julie's the week before, I was sorely needing a breather. And Will's family was gracious enought to provide one and make my day and my week that much better and easier for me. Monday was back to school as it always is after the weekend and I got through school all day and then ended up playing around with Sherrie and Regan for a few hours watching Youtube videos and getting some homework done. I saw by far the trippiest video on Youtube ever, it is the music video for "Lollipop" by Mika and only watch it if you either want an epileptic seizure to occur or you want to kill a few brain cells trying way too hard to understand anything they managed to stuff into that movie. I also managed to go run get a book approved for history during that time which is due in about a week and a half along with a 3 to 4 page paper about it. I picked a book entitled "The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind" which so far has turned out to be one of the most fascinating reads yet. I always knew Alexandria was an interesting city and far ahead of its time on philosphoy and invention and such but I had no clue how truly far ahead it was. It was like the ultimate gathering place for all the smarties during that time period and all they did was study every possible subject know to man at that time. How cool would that be? Your only job is to keep learning your whole life through as much as you possibly can by studying the world around you and reading what has already been written about it. There was no specializaiton, everyone studied some of everything and managed to get quite good at it. That would be like my dream come true if such a thing were possible today. To just keep learning new things all the time throughout your life and somehow make a living doing it and just enjoying the countless hours of time to read, write, and experiment. But the modern world is too fast paced to have such indulgences, way too fast. You need to pick a major, study it for four years, then decide if you need to study it even further in grad school and once you finally graduate with the degree you want, work in that field for forty or fifty years and then finally retire and travel the world or go on missions or whatever until you eventually end up dying and hitting the next life and doing whatever it is exactly we end up doing there. Its not a bad formula, but I just wish sometimes that we got to the opportunity to learn more while in this life. The opportunity to explore more of the realm of human thought and knowledge. But I guess that is what the eternities are for: getting to know everything we missed out on during this life and truly knowing everything. Be that as it may, I found a new subject that I absolutely find truly fascinating and that is geology. Just throwing it out there if no one reading this has really studied it at all yet, but the Lord truly created an amazing world for us to live in with much more complexities than we can really ever comprehend until the next life. Anyway, getting back to Monday. Sherrie, Will, Regan, and I ended up going to the Nickelcade to see what it is all about. It was awesome! There is a $2.25 entrance fee and then all the games cost anywhere between 5 cents to 25 cents, nothing over that. Cheapest arcade I have ever been too and one of the most fun. We played skeeball, DDR, Gauntlet, car racing, motorcycle racing, Bubble Bobble, air hockey, all the classic ticket earning games, some shooting games, an 18-wheeler racing game, an ATV game, and countless others for a few hours. The greatest find though was a new take on DDR that involves using your hands instead of your feet. You have an upper left, upper right, lower right, lower left sensor that you have to run your hand under when the game tells you to do so in a DDR style format. It takes a couple run throughs to get used to, but after that the game is pure fun and dancing mayhem. Pefect for a group of college freshman just wanting to have some fun. It was amazing. Tuesday was another great day after I managed to get all my homework and classes out of the way. I played some racquetball for the first time in ages and greatly enjoyed it. The only issue was that I got pegged hard in the eye during the beginning of the first game that I was playing against Will and let's just say it hurt really bad and managed to get my eye to swell up for the next couple days. Be that as it may, I still managed to have a blast and play really the best I could missing all my depth perception from not being able to see out of one eye. After the end of the game, some of us headed over to the movie theater to go see "Knowing" which starts Nicholas Cage. It was an end of the world flick about the destruction of the world and those who try their best to survive it. It was an awesome movie until about the last twenty minutes and then it quickly transformed into the most stupid movie ever made. So if you want to see it, go ahead. But ditch the last twenty minutes and just create your own end to the movie or you will hate yourself for spending the money to go see it. Wednesday was another good day with the excpetion that I somehow managed to lose my temple recommend and so could not keep up my weekly temple trips that I had becomse so accustomed to. It was kind of heart breaking. I had been looking forward to going all the week leading up to it, like always and then at the last second I managed to discover that I had no idea where my temple recommend was. And no idea where to start looking to find it. That provided a kind of depressing crusher for the day, a really big one. But I am planning on getting a new recommend today after ward prayer in order to attend the temple this week. Wednesday night I also managed to play some more racquetball and enjoyed it yet again. Except that Greg played this time, and he creams me completely. I really need to practice more and get better at it because Will and I lost to him, not terribly but bad enough. Wednesday was also Psych night which is always a welcome night during the week just in order to laugh my head off for an hour and a half. We managed to get the whole first season finished recently and now just need to have a marathon in order to watch the second before the end of the semester. Thursday was finally a chance to do laundry again day. And do laundry I did. At least 5 or so loads of it at Uncle Karsten's and Aunt Julie's. And it was nice to finally get another break and get some homework done and play with Bryn and Brooke. I taught Bryn how to play war and memory with her deck of Disney princess cards. Also, I watched some "Sleeping Beauty" with her and worked on some homework with her. I love playing with Bryn and Brooke. Brooke and I just played with the random assortment of toys they have over there and ended up getting into a tickling war which was sweet. Im going to miss seeing all of them every week when I go home soon. I am looking forward to seeing my immediate family a lot, but I am going to miss the family I got to finally get to know really well during my time up here at college. Just saying. That night I also managed to stay up way too late going to Walmart or Wendy's like seems to happen randomly now. The stuff that happens when you have a car and your friends and you want to have an adventure at midnight. Good thing I decided to not have 8:00 classes this semester, it really paid off considering the fact that I sleep till 8:30ish every morning. And even then I probably should sleep more, but I usually wake up then and start getting ready for the day to start, which happens at 10 each day with my first class. When I go back home, it will be hard to adjust back to going to bed much earlier and, the getting up I can do. Its the getting tired at a decent time that is so difficult. But if I work really hard everyday, I should be exhausted enough to get enough sleep to get through the summer. Friday was finally the weekend again, which is something always looked forward to and appreciated especially since this is going to be the last normal weekend of my entire freshman experience. Kind of sad to see it go to tell the truth. Friday night we finally managed to squeeze in some Quelf for the last time. We had quite a big group of people playing and an even larger group wathching. Funny how that works out that people enjoy watching others be humiliated so much, but I thinks it's all great fun. I met Will's younger brother Michael that night and he is a pretty cool kid (and he's 17). We also ended up hitting Walmart that night and then taking a mini tour of northern Provo to enjoy the view that if offered by the mountain roads. Saturday I spend doing homeowork all morning and early afternoon which was a needed push in order to get all the stuff read I needed to for history. I also managed to start liking a new TV show called House. But it's a lot more full of adult content then I really like so I might stop watching it. I just wish they would make TV shows clean these days, because they are founded on great ideas but then they throw in so much unneeded stuff that it ruins the entire thing. Saturday afternoon, we headed to Holi of the Festival of Colors in order to celebrate the arrival of Spring in the Indian tradition by throwing color chalk up into the air at everyone possible. We got there too late to actually by any colored chalk but still managed to get covered in it from the explosion of it from everyone else. It was sweet. There was about thirty seconds to a minute where it was almost impossible to breathe because of all the chalk that was in the air and when it was all said and done, I ended up covered in almost every color imaginable. After that, we headed to Iceberg to enjoy some dinner and food while still all colorful and see the kind of looks we would get from people. And we did get plenty of interesting looks. After that we ran home and showered to get all of the color off. I manged to cover the entire shower in purple from my hair and it took about 5 minutes of spraying water everywhere to get it all to go down the drain. We went to the hot springs later that night and I didn't find them that amazing, but oh well. We also watched an edited "Galdiator" which everyone kept telling me was one of the greatest movies ever made, but I didn't find it that great at all. It was a good movie with good ideas, but it would have been much more effective to read that story in a book than watch it on a screen. That brings us to today, Sunday where I have work soon so this is the end of this post.

Thought of the week: "I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things."
---Alan Coren

Song of the week: "Six Songs Collide" by Norwegian Recycling. The perfect mix of songs that I love to death - it has "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz, "Superman" by Five for Fighting, "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down, and three other amazing songs. I got it on a CD from Will, and he is letting me keep it because it is just that amazing :)

Pictures of the week: