Spring is in the air

Spring is trying her best to break through. Last week it got up to 70 degrees. This week it snowed. Hopefully the sun comes back soon!

Life is still crazy busy, but rather than detail the stresses of my life which will only make me feel worse, I will only tell about the good stuff that has happened recently because there has been lots of that too.

Every year on March 14 my friend Jared W hosts a Pi(e) Party (3/14=3.14=pi). People bring pies which are then judged and awarded for different categories. Now, I have participated in quite a few of these parties and I've consistently had a good showing, but I've never won. My strawberry pie took third a couple of times, and the time I added other berries to it got me a second place finish. This year I was in it to win it. I went with a new recipe: Carmel Apple Pie. I found the recipe online a long time ago and saved it. It did not fail me, and I won first place overall! I was so proud. I wish I had got a picture from it but I forgot. Just know that it looked and tasted phenomenal. I'll post the recipe at some point.

A couple of weeks ago some boys decided to get people on more dates, so they took ties from all the single guys from church and had all the single girls choose an anonymous tie from the pile. Whoever's tie she chose was committed to taking her out on a date before the end of the semester. Being single, I participated. Last weekend I went on my "tie date" with my date Jeremy and two other couples. It was so much fun! We all had a blast playing like little kids the whole evening at Jeremy's family's beautiful home in Sandy, UT. Our activities included:

Dinner at Pita Pit
Girl Scout cookies
CRUD (a game played with a pool table)
Ping-Pong
Foosball
Sardines
Boys vs Girls keep-away
Indiana Jones movie in the theater room
Jumping off furniture onto giant bean bags
Sliding down stairs
Talking with good friends
Sleeping (not done as a group activity, don't worry! It was too late to drive home safely so we stayed the night and us girls shared a king size bed!)
Pancake breakfast


(remember you can click on pictures to see them bigger)

I had a lot of fun hanging out with friends and getting to know them better outside of church activities. I am surrounded by great people here.

The fun continued that weekend on Saturday. The weather was great and warm and I went running for the first time since last summer probably! I didn't last too long but it felt good to get out there. Afterward I spread out a blanket at the park and did homework in the sunshine. I got a little sunburn on my face but it was worth it! That night I attended a volleyball game with some friends, then made my award-winning pie again and had a little dance party in my apartment. We have good times.

This weekend was pretty stellar too. Friday night I went to a indoor water park with my old roommate Janae, and last night I went to the Festival of Colors. It's a festival to welcome in spring that they observe every spring at the Hare Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, UT. It is celebrated through song, theatrical performance, the burning of a witch effigy, and rounded off with everyone throwning colored chalk dust at each other.


This was the first year I was able to attend and I was pretty excited. I rounded up a car-full of friends and headed up to it. We got well-covered in dust and I crowd-surfed for the first time! I lost my cell phone for a while in the process, but I eventually got it back when a nice person found it uncrushed and returned it when we called it. That's what I call good karma!





After the festival we went up to the house where my friend Missy is living and went swimming in the indoor pool (after showering, of course). It was a nice way to wind down the exciting evening.

More Birthday and a pARRRty!

I got up a little earlier than I had to today to finish some reading, but it's done and with the little bit of extra (and by extra, I mean I don't feel like doing anything else I should) time, I've decided to blog for Debbie. Debbie Copstead is probably my most faithful blog follower and I feel guilty when I don't keep it up for her!

I came down with a killer cold right about the time I posted last. It was a pretty miserable week. The medicine I had wasn't very effective most of the time. Then it disrupted my sleep. On top of being sick and tired I started and finished a project proposal one day because the people I was supposed to volunteer for the project never contacted me back so I had to come up with something else in a day. Good think I was sick and felt justified in missing my classes that day anyway. Oh, and on Thursday I realized a big paper I thought was due the next week was due the next day. Once again, maybe being sick was a mixed blessing! I didn't work Thursday and Friday because I started coughing and I couldn't breath well, so I stayed home and wrote the paper. It wasn't my best work, but it got done. And then I ended up with a good grade! Now I wonder about my teacher's judgment...

As harrowing as the week was, the weekend was great. My parents were in town for the Utah Dental Convention, so Friday evening I drove up to Salt Lake and we went out to Tucano's for my birthday dinner. Uncle Don and Aunt D'Ann were in SLC that night too, so they joined us.



I stayed overnight with Mom and Dad at the hotel. Yet again, I did not sleep, but I was starting to get used to insomnia. I got some homework done around 3am. The next day we took a walk to Temple Square and then I took them to the airport. I spent the rest of the day in Salt Lake visiting friends and walking in the sunshine of a beautiful day. My cold was beginning to subside, so everything was feeling beautiful :-).

The next week was fabulous. I had two projects due that I hadn't started because of the stuff from the previous week, but one project had the deadline moved to the next Monday, and I got an extension on the other. Then the weather warmed up and the sun was out all week. My ward had a Pirate Party that weekend complete with treasure hunt, costume contest, and pirate ship regatta. It was a lot of fun!

I named it "El Barco de Muerte"

Midterms are over (I have no midterm tests, but lots of papers) and things seem kind of calm right now. This weekend for church we have Stake Conference and Elder Ballard is coming from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Should be good. And spring is coming! I can feel it!

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