Lauren's Birthday!

Yesterday was my roommate Lauren's birthday! It was way fun decorating the apartment and making cakes and cards for her. We love birthdays in this apartment, and we always try and decorate as awesomely as possible given our limited budget. Here's what the living room looked like:


And here are the cakes: Lauren's friend Chandler made the palm tree one (because Lauren is from California and she likes palm trees) and we made the beach ball one.

This is Courtney, Sarah, Lauren, Chandler and Richard, enjoying the party!




Also, randomly, we decided to see how many people we could jump over on the couch. Way more entertaining than it sounds . . . This is Courtney (pink shirt) landing on Lauren after trying to jump over me, the other Courtney, and Lauren. Richard almost broke our couch trying to do this . . .

Bodyworlds

Yesterday I had a very cool experience. I went to the Bodyworlds exhibit with my kung fu family! I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but basically, this guy decided it would be cool to take human bodies and "plastinize" them. So the exhibit is of real human bodies that have been turned into plastic! Sounds freaky but it's not as scary as it sounds. They pose the people doing different things, so you can kinda see what's going on with the muscles. There was a guy throwing a javelin, and this girl who was doing a bit of archery:

We thought this one was funny because it looks like she has her hair in a bun, but that's really her brain sitting on top of her skull! There were all kinds people displayed doing different things, and then individual joints and organs were also displayed. At the end we even got to touch a real liver that had been plastinized! Probably the coolest thing was that they were able to preserve individual veins and arteries, and even the tiny capillaries! Here's a picture of someone's skull that they stripped all the muscles from and just left the veins:

So amazing! You can see why face wounds bleed a lot. I asked Sifu why there had to be so much blood in our ears, and he said that blood has to reach every cell of living tissue, which I probably should have known . . . Sifu also pointed out to us different muscles and joints that someone had either hurt, or was likely to hurt during training, and showed us how fragile wrist bones and floating ribs were. He also showed us where to hit people to damage their liver, kidneys, etc. Very, very awesome! I would definitely recommend the exhibit, just don't go get steaks afterward. :)

Conference!

I just wanted to post a couple thoughts about the incredible General Conference we just had! I found it truly inspiring, comforting and just generally awesome. I feel so blessed to be led by such great men! I especially enjoyed Elder Perry's and Elder Wirthlin's talks on how to find peace and joy in this troubled world, and of course, I loved every word President Monson shared with us. I also got to share the experience with lots of different people, including my roommates (along with what seemed like half of my ward), my family, and my coworkers.

This is kind of a crappy picture, but this is during Saturday morning session. Emily's sister Ann is there in the front, and then Smalls, Courtney, Sarah, Richard, Amy, Eleisha, Emily, Sam, Janae and Ashley. We did a good job keeping each other awake!

Chalk it up to Friday night!

Ah, my crazy roommates! Somehow they got the idea to do chalk rubbings of each other's faces! We ended up doing elbows, knees, ribs and feet too. This is a picture of Amy and Janae doing a rubbing of our friend Richard's ribs. It was kind of difficult because it tickles and the rubbings don't work as well when you're laughing. :)



When we were done, we taped all the rubbing to our wall. It makes a really awesome decoration I think! What better way to cover up a boring old wall? You can see our shoes and hands pretty well but faces, ribs, etc. aren't as distinct.



Then the fun moved outside and we traced each other ALL over the complex - even on the stairs! You can't really see it in the picture but it says "this is what happens when you do your home-teaching late."




Did I mention I rarely get bored? Very rarely . . .