Hooray for Christmas!

Lots of fun things have happened this season to get me in the Christmas spirit! Of course, that doesn't take much. :)

Me and Melissa decorated our room:


We went to Riverwoods (gorgeous!):




And Bree and Carson helped decorate the tree while we watched the First Presidency's Christmas devotional:



I love this time of year!

One Thing I Like About Halloween

I know it's much closer to Christmas than Halloween, but the pumpkins me and Melissa carved this year were AWESOME, so I had to share.

My Beatles pumpkin!

Melissa's Hunger Games pumpkin!

The two of us being happy!

Melissa EATING raw pumpkin! Bleh.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

. . . or pictures. Here you go:

Dreams

Today in Statistics 121, the girl sitting next to me asked me if I was a writer. I was a bit startled by the question, until she gestured at my notebook where I had been writing snippets of a story instead of taking notes. I found myself nodding and smiling in answer to her question without hesitation. We both turned our attention back to the lecture (mostly), but I keep thinking about what would have happened if she'd asked the follow up question: "So, what have you written?"

Uh . . . Well, I have a blog. And the margins of most of my notebooks have random bits of potential stories. I have a few short stories floating around from my high school days, and once upon a time I started writing a young adult novel, but I'm only five pages into it after five years, so . . .

That's how I would have had to answer the girl in my stats class. So while I think of myself as a writer, I have to wonder if others would think the same if they knew that I haven't ever finished anything that could be considered worthy of publication.

When I got home from stats, I stumbled across this article which made me wonder if I've stopped reaching. In high school and even before, I wrote all the time, and I'm not even counting the stuff I wrote for school. We're just talking about fun stuff here! I made a dedicated effort to take writing classes and tried to improve. I wrote every day. Now, the only writing I get done is in the margins of my stats notes.

So, I guess the real question is, how do I maintain a concerted effort to be a real writer and still get everything else done that I need to? And don't suggest that I should drop out of school to become a writer, because I'll do it as soon as someone gives me permission. ;)

Arches

I just barely realized that I haven't blogged about one of my favorite vacations ever! In July, me and los parentos went down to check out Arches National Park, and it was incredible. I have a billion pictures, and none of them really do that place justice. I highly recommend going!

We dubbed this formation the Black Pearl because we thought it looked like a pirate ship.

Mom and Dad at Balanced Rock. It was definitely Dad's favorite; he couldn't stop talking about it!

This Indian guy insisted on taking our picture at Double Arch, and he was going all crazy and lying down on the ground to take our picture. I like the wacky angle of this one though, and it's one of the few pictures of all three of us together.

The famous one! Delicate Arch was my favorite, despite the long, 7 AM hike we took to get there. It was so worth it! It was seriously one of the COOLEST things I have ever seen. And a lot bigger than I imagined, too. If you look really close, you can see a couple of tiny people under it if you want to get a sense of scale.

Mom and Dad pretending to be ol' homesteaders at the cabin of one of the original settlers of the area. They're the best. :)

A spectacular view of the canyons created by the convergence of the Green and Colorado rivers. SO awesome! It was really almost as good as the Grand Canyon.

Anyone know what kind of flower this is? It was so pretty, and probably about eight feet tall! I was standing right under it when I took this.

My delicious gnocchi! We had dinner one night at a fantastic little Italian place in Moab, and I was so hungry after hiking around all day, that I ate this ENTIRE thing!

Mom insisted on ice cream or milkshakes every night, and this little tiny shack thing is apparently the place to go for milkshakes in Moab. They were quite delicious.

I was in love with all the funky trees in the area. They seriously grow in the weirdest places and into such unusual shapes. Mom and Dad kept laughing at me for taking pictures of trees instead of rock formations. :)

Dad being a Native American(?) at Delicate Arch. I really liked the hike to this one because it was easy and there was an abundance of really cool things to look at.

For the life of me, I can't remember what this formation is called. I think it's one of the Windows, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it was cool because it was one of the few that you can actually go right up under.

I believe this one is Turret Arch, but you can't really see the part that looks like a turret in this picture. This always reminds me of something funny. We were walking back from this one, and this guy behind us was like, "Look! Red sand!" and literally ran off the path (which is forbidden in that place), freaking out about the red sand. Now, you have to understand that ALL of Arches is red sand. Literally. That's all there is. You can understand why we didn't stop laughing at that guy for a couple days. :)

This trip was a little different because it was just me and the parents, and we kept saying how we need to bring Neil and the grandkids to see it, but it was really quite nice to have a chance to hang out with just my parents. We had a lot of fun!

Hobbit Day!

Okay, so hopefully everyone knows by now that I'm a nerd. In case you didn't, here's the story of what I did yesterday.

I discovered on Twitter that it was Hobbit Day yesterday, or the day traditionally celebrated as Bilbo and Frodo's birthdays. It's very legitimate; it even has a Wikipedia article, and we all know that Wikipedia is a reliable source of information. Ahem.

Anyway, Melissa and I decided to celebrate with what SOME people call lava cakes. They are, of course, actually hobbit cakes. Anyway, we lit honorary birthday candles (which turned out to be trick candles as you will see in a moment) and watched the party scene from Fellowship of the Ring. It was a good party. :)

The Cool Thing About College

People in college do really awesome things sometimes. Young adults are in a strange place because a great many of us haven't grown up at all yet, so we're really just kids pretending to be adults. Or maybe adults pretending to be kids. I believe the technical term is kidult. :) Not always good, I know, but sometimes very entertaining.

For instance, as I was walking across campus on Wednesday, it started to pour. A couple guys in front of me immediately started singing "Singing In the Rain" at the top of their lungs, complete with the entire dance.

A couple weeks ago, I was hanging out with my roommates in our apartment, when three guys wielding Nerf guns burst in and shot us. Then we all had brownies together.

And last night, my neighbors did this:








And that's what I like about college.

The Kids

Don't know if you know it or not, but I have the cutest nieces and nephews in the world. Hands down. I even have proof:






















There you have it.

Jackson Pollock Day

Okay, if you don't already know who Jackson Pollock is, check out this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

My friend Melissa learned about him this past semester in her Humanities class, and she got the genius idea to create a painting the same way Jackson Pollock did. Here's what we started with:

A large white sheet held down with bricks made a perfect canvass!

We found as many diverse things to splatter paint with as we could, including flowers, sticks, scrapers, and even paintbrushes. ;)

The work in progress . . .

We signed our names, but then painted mostly over them. You can still find them if you know where to look.

We had to scrounge for paint because, well, paint is expensive. Some of the old stuff we had in the garage wasn't exactly in working order . . .

Me, looking like a caveman.

My hand (left) and Melissa's after dipping them in the weird pink paint (above). It eventually became, in form and color, much like cottage cheese and Jello salad. Weird!

Our paint-splattered legs and feet.

The artists (don't look at me too long; it's not my favorite picture of myself) and the finished project! We decided we need to do some more. We thought one made entirely of warm colors or cool colors would be awesome, as well as white paint on a black sheet.

So, anyone have any paint we can have? ;)