Happenin' Happenings

I can't believe I'm already half way through February! Yikes! Every semester passes faster than the last (side note: someday I will be done with school and won't measure time by semesters. weird thought). I just remembered that I have fast internet and I can actually upload pictures to my posts with ease. I'll start doing that. In Israel the bandwidth was too small and it was very difficult to download pictures, hence the links to my photo albums on Facebook.

My life has been more the same: reading, writing, and fun when I can fit it in. One exciting thing was my computer ceased to work. It just stopped working-- no blue screen of death, just blankness. Fortunately it was still under warranty. I had to send it to the company and get the hard drive replaced. I thankfully received an external hard drive for Christmas and had just finished backing up all my files onto it--over 30 gigs of stuff from Jerusalem alone!-- two weeks before the machine died. I was without a computer for about 3 weeks, so now I've been trying to get all my software back on it. It's annoying, but at least it works right and I didn't have to pay for it!

My old Nauvoo roommate Abbie stayed with me the night before she entered the Missionary Training Center here in Provo. She is headed to Cleveland, OH. I'm so excited for her! That mission includes Kirtland and a lot of historical Church sites that we toured during our semester in Nauvoo. We went bowling the evening she was here with several of friends from her home and Nauvoo, then had ice cream afterward at the Creamery. We met up with Diane, another Nauvoo roommate, at the Creamery and for the first time since we left Nauvoo over 3 years ago, our whole room was reunited!

Room 317 Reunited! (L-R: Abbie, Sadie, Janae, Diane)

I'm so happy for Abbie and I know that she will be a great missionary. And it wasn't that sad saying goodbye because we only see each other every year to two anyway!

Another exciting event was my birthday on February 11! I love birthdays. A lot. I'm not sure why; maybe because my family was good at making it a special day. This year it was on a Wednesday, and unfortunately Wednesday is my longest day in terms of classes. But I don't have to work on Wednesdays, so makes it more tolerable. I start at 8am and get out at 8pm, with two long breaks in the middle of the day. I wasn't sure if I'd get to do anything special because of that, and because this is the first year in Provo that I didn't have any family around to celebrate with me. (I didn't have family with me last year in Israel, obviously, but that was to be expected). Danny is spending the semester in Mexico. Luckily, I have amazing friends! My old Nauvoo roommate Diane called me around 6am to convince me to let her take me to breakfast before my class. My roommates made me a poster and stuck candy all over it and left it outside my door to find in the morning. Then that evening after my class I was supposed to go to dinner with Diane and the other old roommate Janae, and then have cake at my apartment afterward with a few friends. The girls made other plans for me though! They planned a surprise party for me at Janae's apartment with lots of my Nauvoo friends plus a few other people. My parents sent me flowers and most of my family and several friends called to wish me a happy day.

22 candles!

The birthday gang

The celebration continued on Thursday when my buddy Eric cooked me and my roommate breakfast. My family's tradition on birthdays is breakfast in bed, and he knew that's what I miss most on my birthday when I'm not home, so he did the next best thing: pancakes the next day in the kitchen. Did I mention I have the best friends ever?

The pancakes on the plate read "Happy Birthday"

The celebration continues more this week. My dad attends the Utah Dental Convention every year in February and this year Mom is coming with him. I'm going up to Salt Lake City on Friday to spend the evening and go out to dinner for my birthday (the other thing I miss most about birthdays at home).

The other exciting things in my life include being without gas in our apartment for two days (the temperature got down to 48 degrees--inside), making it to the quarter finals in the Paso Doble with my ballroom partner at the mock dance competition against the other dance classes, the last of my original roommates from this year moving out for a job in CA (a sad thing, not exciting), and spending part of President's Day weekend with friends at a cabin up Spanish Fork Canyon. All in all February has been a good month, per usual.

I'd better get back to work on my homework. I slacked off over the long weekend and now I have to do double duty. I'm getting a cold, have a couple of projects to get started and finished this week, and a mound of reading that I will probably finish only a meager portion of, with or without slacking. Wish me luck!

ps. I updated my photo album links