Old Man Music

Yesterday, someone came into my office and asked my what I was listening to. I replied "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel and he gave me a look and inquired, "Isn't that old man music?" I guess it is, but it's my favorite kind. So here's to all the old man music out there that's better than anything else I've ever heard. Good old Phil is one of my favorite old man artists and this is one of my favorite of his old man songs. Enjoy. :)

Bad Week

So I've had a rough last couple of hours feeling extremely sorry for myself, so naturally, I'm exhausted and I am having a hard time concentrating on my at home midterm that I need to take tonight. So I figured I'd blog it out and if it got too mushy or personal, I would just make it private or delete it.. so you might not even be reading this. Mind blown yet?

Anyway, so back to my complaining. This week, I had to break up with my boyfriend, Ragnar. I've been dating him since June and we've had our ups and downs, but I thought things were really working out for us and I was getting pretty excited about what our future held. Then everything starting crumbling in my fingertips and there was nothing I could do. All my hard work and dedication to the relationship led to a sudden end, and I fought it and I fought it because I wanted it to work so bad, but I knew it wasn't going to, just like every shameless woman does in a relationship. Finally, I had to call it quits. I threw in the towel (and the $90... and all the hours spent worrying, training, and working on planning it). Don't feel too bad for me though. I hesitated to put this on here at all because it's one of those huge disappointments that you feel awful about but if one more person tells you how sorry they are, you might scream. All in all, I gave it my best shot and it didn't work out. At least I can't say I didn't try. And there will be other races that I will hopefully be better prepared for and there will be other opportunities to shine. These things happen and that's all there is to it. 

Back to my pity party. I had massive amounts of homework to do this past week because it's midterm time and I've been pretty solidly stressed about it, with good moments and bad moments. But overall, it's been a worse week for school than most. Luckily, I've managed to get everything done so far, so despite my being busy busy busy, I didn't fail to deliver, which I'm grateful for.

Then today in class, a girl spilled my Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper all over me and my notebook. It was gross and left some pretty awesome stains on my pants and my wife beat and of course my papers, etc. This is no big deal, but I thought I would add it for dramatic effect. The more awful things that happened to me, the worse you'll feel for me right? Right.

Moving on, I got in a minor car accident today in the grocery store parking lot. Luckily, me and the owner of the other car were both indifferent about our cars' paint jobs and shook hands and were on our way. 

I knew I was right to blog it out. Now I can see that none of these situations were that bad at all. Alright... glass is half full time...

I have an amazing boyfriend. He listened to me complain all week, especially today, and he was so nice and patient and I just think he's the best thing that's ever happened to me. AND... he's coming down to see me tomorrow!! And I'm about to poop my pants in excitement!! (Not really. Not only is that gross, but it would totally kill the mood when he got here.) 

Also, I have a wonderful family and I love them and I miss them and I get to see them on Thanksgiving!!

AND I have the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my life. Nothing beats that.

AND I'm going to Vegas this weekend!!

AND I have a beautiful room to study in...

AND I go to BYU and I'm getting a fantastic education...

AND I have a piano that I got for FREE...

AND I have a wonderful job with a fantastic boss, great hours, and I just got a raise today!!

This blog could get ten times longer really fast. It's amazing how many more things I have to be thankful for than I have to complain about. Moral of the story: if you're having a bad week, blog it out. My blog could cure cancer, I swear.

Isn't this picture cool? Quinn took it. He's an artistic genius.

Winter

The wind was often this cold in the middle of February, but today it was bitter. It was bitter and he was bitter. She had left him “without even giving him a reason.” At least that is what he would tell people for years and years to come. A ring on her finger and the promise of forever fresh on her lips, she had had the nerve to tell him it was over. How would this leave him? Desperate? Alone? Angry? Now that the unthinkable had happened to him, he had the ever present, but much more apparent in this particular situation, decision to make of what his reactive emotion was going to be. What would he carry with him for the foreseeable future?

            March quickly approaching, Adam sat with his head in his hands, still searching for the words to describe how he felt. Maybe, he thought, if he could put it into words, it would hurt less. Maybe, if he could diagnose it, a cure would become apparent and he could pick it up at the local pharmacy. Or maybe it would just go on like this forever. They say that time heals all things, but then why do we hear stories about love that spans across lifetimes even after a lover is lost? Do we ever really heal? Or do we wear a piece of that person we lost on our skin forever, like the scar from a dagger stab: thin, yet deep, always there to remind us of the eyes of our enemy in the moment of their victory?

            As summer reared its sunny face, a mockery to Adam’s mourning, a decision had finally been made. He would keep that February morning with him in his heart forever. It would comfort him—a stony comfort for a broken man. The gods had smiled on him and then laughed in his face.  And time. Time had done nothing for him. He had been patient enough.

Ketchup

Here are some pictures that I have been meaning to post.. I'm doing some catch up... get it? It sounds like ketchup. Ok, anyway, I don't entirely recall a lot of the dates, so I'm just going to estimate. To start off the picture fun, we have a picture from about two weeks ago when I got a new calendar to put above my computer at work. Unexciting for you maybe, but I love calendars and things that spice up my work area so I love it!

sometime between september 20th and september 22nd

This next one is my personal favorite. Quinn is sporting the stash and we are getting so good at video chatting!

sometime between september 20th and 23rd

Next we have pictures from Lisa's golden birthday celebration in Vegas!!!

friday, september 24

Happy Birthday, Lisa!!

 On Friday night, we rode all the rides on the top of the Stratosphere. They were scary but awesome!! Totally worth it. Plus the guys ahead of us in line who were celebrating a bachelor party were hilarious--mostly because they were ridiculous. But one of them I'm pretty sure crapped his pants on the ride. He didn't look down once. Poor guy. 

These were just my favorite slot machines. A little Wizard of Oz and LOTR shout out.

 saturday, september 25

Day Two of Vegas

 We spent the day at the pool, shopping, and watching the free shows on the strip. It was SO fun but we were so tired when we finally left and went to Cedar City for the night.. where I tragically left my phone. 

Moving right along.. we have an entire week of me not taking pictures and then only two from last weekend. I'm really going to start trying harder. I'm the worst. So last weekend, Quinn and everyone else in Rexburg came down to Provo for General Conference. It was, of course, SO good to see Quinn and Vance and Melissa and Brett and I also got to hang out with Jillian, Kyle, and Becca, which is always a pleasure. Unfortunately, I only took two pictures... :( And I didn't even take them.. Quinn did. 

sunday, october 3

I look kinda weird in this next one, but I love Becca's fierceness.

So there's the update. :)

Gentle Fawn

So this blog post is extremely overdue, but I've also been extremely busy... so that's why. Anyway, I had quite the home improvement adventure back in September when I moved into the house I live in now with my lovely roommates. The place was pretty cute from the outside and the living room looks pretty good as well. However, upon venturing downstairs, me and Kate were shocked by how nasty the walls in our rooms were and how desperately the place needed a make over. Here are some before pictures, complete with a hole in the wall with a pipe sticking out and walls that look like death ran a marathon on them and then threw up after to add a little color:

Notice the yummy curtains on the left as well.

 Pretty delicious, eh?

So... there was only one thing to do. Me and Kate had a painting party... and Lisa had one another day... and we redid these bad boys. Kate painted her room a lovely cement grey and I chose a lovely shade of brown appropriately named Gentle Fawn. Here's some pre-painting tapage:

Half n half...

Here's what I made of that awful pipe:

 The new color, complete with some DP: 

So now that the walls were looking sexy, I had to move all my crap in. I swear I get ten tons of new crap every year...

 Moving is the worst.

But it felt so good to get everything in there finally. Then it was time to make some curtains for my windows so the whole world didn't have to watch me change every morning and night and at times throughout the day...

 So, here's the glamorous finished product:

Welcome to Gentle Fawn. :)

And, to top it all off, some wonderfully generous boys helped me move this bad boy in and I was officially all settled in my new place and I LOVE it!! :)

Nook Appreciation

During a writing exercise, me and some friends found a lovely nook under some trees on campus and did another freewrite. This is mine:


Let me tell you about all the nooks in my life and how much I love them. When I was growing up, my family would go on a vacation once a year. It was sometimes to a cabin in Silver City where boredom would often take over. So, me and my sister found a stream with a lovely place to sit right next to it and we would go there every day for hours and just read or talk. I will never forget that haven of a nook. It is the first nook I remember and so it will always have a special place in my heart, although I'm sure I enjoyed many nooks before that one. Later in life, I found a nook at the nearby arboretum where no one else went. That became my home away from home during high school where I could go to be alone and at least feel like there wasn't a crowded city surrounding me. That nook brought me a lot of peace during my troubled adolescent years. Now, I have a reading nook in my room. It is a place where I can go to read and be alone with my thoughts and it's very "me", with curtains that I made in the room that I painted, a picture of Italy, and my absolute favorite piece of furniture--a recliner. I can concentrate better in my nook than most places in the whole world. And here I sit now, in a new found nook under some trees on BYU campus. Sadly, there are not a lot of places on campus that I really want to be, but this nook is lovely. It's shady and private but I can still watch the passersby. Best of all, there's room for my friends in this nook. What a fantastic nook! I love nooks so much because they are places that you can make your own and places where you can escape from the world and be alone with your thoughts--or you can bring a friend or a lover and just enjoy some nature or some other type of pleasant atmosphere. If you thus far have had no nooks in your life, I strongly suggest you get one or two and enjoy your time spent there. Nooks are highly under rated.

The Tree of Life

For my writing class, we sat next to this sculpture, entitled "The Tree of Life":

We were supposed to write for ten minutes, and this is what ended up on my paper:

So here I sit, under the "Tree of Life." Interesting that this huge concrete thing goes by that name while there are dozens of real trees surrounding it. I have always loved trees. They really add something to the world. Imagine your world completely void of trees. What a tragic world that would be! What would you sit under on a warm summer day to read a book or talk with friends? What would you decorate at Christmas time and mourn after New Year's Day? There would be no log cabins or wooden swings. The world would be cold, hard, and concrete--like this so-called "Tree of Life" under which I sit. Beyond its obvious symbolic meaning, this sculpture also brings better into focus the beauty of the world that surrounds it. The man-made is far surpassed by the divinely created in every instance I can think of. No matter what we build or invent, there is still greater already in existence on the earth. A rotating sky scrapper, renting rooms at billions of dollars a year still holds no comparison to a trickling stream down a mountain side, let alone the magnificent and terrible ocean that surrounds us on all sides. So what then can man be proud of? What is his portion of divinity? I think the answer is the raising and nurturing of a family. What can we create that is better than this?

Kentucky

In Kentucky, it's illegal to go more than one year without a shower. (Yes, this is true.)

Here's my five minute explanation as to why:

This law was put in place because one day there was a man at the DMV waiting to get his driver's license renewed and he smelled worse than anything in the entire world. No one would stand near him and a certain faint-hearted DMV worker actually passed out from the gases and died later that day. This man was clearly a public menace as he contaminated any area that he occupied. Once he left the building that day, the stench remained for a calculated 137 hours, despite valiant cleaning and sanitation efforts. The man was spotted later that week at a 7-eleven and was arrested for disturbing the peace... ? Or maybe it was air pollution. They didn't have a specific claim, but this person definitely needed to be in custody, so the men did their duty. Upon questioning, the police found that the man had made it a point not to shower for the past twenty months on account of it "saving ridiculous amounts of time and water." His awful stench was still lingering three forced baths later, at which point experts rendered him incurable and decided that it was probably around fourteen months when he went beyond repair. And so a law was written and passed that stated a shower must be taken at least once a year by all Kentucky citizens, just in case.

Candy

I'm taking a class about teaching composition in secondary schools right now and there are things I like about it and things I don't, but what I like the most is the abundance of freewrites we've been able to do. It has been a while since I've just sat down and written something--besides on my blog and I'm not really sure that counts. But I thought I would share some of my freewrites because I like them and maybe you will too. And maybe, if you like to write, they will inspire you to take ten minutes out of your day and write about whatever you want. It can be quite therapeutic and it's amazing what people come up with.

For this freewrite, we were given the topic of candy and given about five minutes to write about it. This is what I came up with:

Candy

I see my taste in candy as a metaphor for my maturation thusfar in life. As a child, I would only eat Skittles. Like the fruity and delicious candy, I was happy and colorful, but I saw my world one way--the right way--and nobody could convince me that any other way (or candy) was worth exploring. Chocolate was the most hated substance in my world, worse even than broccoli and pea soup. As I grew up a little, I started enjoying all kinds of different candy--even chocolate, so long as it was milk and mixed with caramel or in a hard candy shell. This was a time for me to break out of my own shell a little bit and explore some new things. My reluctance to enjoy or even try some candies remained (like pure chocolate candy bars and dark chocolate) and my love of some candies (like Skittles and Bubble Tape) were unwaivering. Eventually, I grew to love only candy of a more sophisticated variety. Milk chocolate with hazelnut and cream--as expensive as I could find--was all I would put in my mouth. I was past that kiddy stage with the Skittles and Starbursts. Boy was that a mistake! I found later in life that Skittles are still delicious, dark chocolate is still nasty, and that everything in between should be tried and has the potential to be loved. I have discovered some of my likes and passions as I've explored this vast world of candy and can't wait to find out what the rest of them are.

I realize this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it was the best I could come up with in five minutes and no preparation so don't judge me.