Deck the . . . Living Room?

Amy got our Christmas tree up today! He is a faithful little Christmas tree despite the fact that he's fake, which, I suppose, makes him more faithful as he won't die on us. :) Here is a little video that I uploaded mostly to see if it would work, and so you can hear the Christmas music in the background.

Those Are My Beaters!

Unfortunately, I didn't get very many Thanksgiving pictures. I was enjoying myself too much I guess! However, I did get several very adorable pictures of my hilarious two-year-old niece, Bree. Here's my favorite story from Thanksgiving:

Once upon a time, Bree was enjoying licking the beaters from the home-made whipped cream.


A little while later, we made home-made ranch dip and Bree wanted to lick them again.


It wasn't quite what she was expecting, but she still liked it. In fact, when Grandma tried to take the beaters to the sink, Bree cried, "Those are my beaters!" in a most hilarious fashion. We are still quoting her.

I'll never buy a mop again . . .

It was a dark and yucky night, and cleaning checks were looming just around the corner. Specifically, nine AM, and we did not have a mop. Well, technically, we did have a mop, but it was so gross and old that trying to mop with it just spread around the slime. After I complained a lot, Amy enlightened us with a solution from her childhood. Following her suggestion, we all donned socks, dumped hot water and soap on the floor, and went skating. It was genius! It was so much fun even though our little kitchen isn't really big enough for all of us to slide around a lot. :) And, our kitchen floor was the cleanest it's ever been! Who needs mops?

This is actually from a while ago, but I just barely got the picture from Lauren, so here it is. See the nastiness of our socks? We did this for a long time . . .

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Once upon a time, there was a man who tried to blow up the British parliament in the 1600's. His name was Guy Fawkes, and to this day, people in Great Britain light bonfires and burn effigies of Guy. We decided to follow this esteemed tradition . . .

The construction of our Guy . . .


The burning of our Guy . . .


The slow, painful death of our Guy . . .


The ashes . . .

It was one of the funnest things ever! We are totally making it a new tradition.

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 . . .

The Pie Adventure

On Friday I got home from work to find three of my roommates and our friend Jonathan trying to make a pie. A quite involved and complicated series of events led us to owe Jonathan a pie, but that's another story. Anyway, the pie crust was causing serious difficulties for the intrepid bakers and after trying to make two different batches, they gave up and went and bought pie crusts from Smith's. The goopy pie crusts they tried to concoct did make really good sculpting material and hand moisturizer though . . .

Home Sweet Apartment

Here's some pictures of my little apartment!

My roommates are awesome, and we have tons of fun. The apartment is great, except for a little incident in which the swamp cooler spewed black mud on our toothbrushes and towels. We seem to be cursed in the wet-stuff-falling-from-the-ceiling department. We had a leak in our apartment last year too!