Another One Bites the Dust

Our beautiful Sara got married!!

She got married to a great guy (that's right, I approve).

Introducing, Zach and Sara Allen!

Obviously, we did not want to let her go.

(In my opinion, I don't think that Zach is trying very hard).

But lo and behold, we had to let go.

Sara and I have been through

trillions of dishes,

257 pictures

235 rolls of toilet paper,

182 adventures,

90-ish credits,

45-ish mac and cheese dinners,

11 months,

6 trips to Utah,

5 church callings,

4 birthdays,

4 music videos,

4 roomates,

3 semesters,

2 wards,

1 skinny dip,

1 AMAZING friendship,

and

0 arguments (wink, wink),

together.

Love you Sara!

We miss you!

Maybe Someday...

... I'll be more embarrassed by this kind of stuff and stop posting it ;)

For your viewing pleasure...

It's November!

Yes, yes, I'm a big slacker.

So, October was a good month. I am loving school. It easily and quickly felt like home again long ago.

Here's a small summary of what we have been up to.

We made our traditional bi-annual trek down to my Aunt Christine's for General Conference! It was a blast, as always. My Aunt Christine always treat us so much better than we deserve and she constantly reaffirms to me how wonderful a lady she is! The talks at Conference definitely prompted a lot of thought and gave me things to work on.

Here is Zach and Sara. Zach didn't think that Sara wanted to be seen with him... he had a pretty grody mustache at the time. (19 more days until they get hitched)!

My beautiful roomies.

L to R: Kaylie, Anny, Sara.

Our crew, right before going into the conference center for the Sunday afternoon session. Sidenote: that was the session where Elder Holland gave his going-down-in-history testimony and talk on the Book of Mormon. We were so lucky to be in that session and truly feel the strength of his feelings and knowledge.

The day after we got home from General Conference, we had the privilege to wake up to this. It melted by the afternoon and we have only had one additional snow-stick since then.

On October 13, Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave the devotional here at BYU-I! He spoke about religious freedom. It was pretty intense. It made the news all over the place. If you haven't read it, I would recommend it. Sara and I were able to get tickets to attend the devotional. We were able to sit in the same room with apostles of the Lord while they gave incredible testimonies. And they weren't just heartfelt and testimony-building talks (though they were these things, too), but they were powerful, truthful, and blunt talks.

Sara's cute Halloween cookies.

We participated in a huge stake service project. We pulled weeds and painted fences. We were rocking awesome weed-pickers.

The stake provided us with styrofoam cups to put our paint in. For brushes, we used the gloves they provided us with to pull weeds. It made for an interesting service project. The paint was eating through the cups so quickly. I ended up with 3 stacked cups, and it eventually ate through all of them.

P.S. The weeds were pokey.

Lalalala

Well, my internet does not happen to be the best in my apartment. It works really great most of the time, but random things don't work, three things actually: email, uploading pictures to blogger, and submitting my accounting homework. Hmm... lovely. So, maybe someday I will upload pictures. We'll see. I'm not a big fan of the "all words" posts, since I'm not as entertaining that way ;)

Cupcakes and Caves

Okay, I am going to go backwards in my stories :)

This is what happened monday night

6 cupcakes

4 roommates

You do the math ;)

I made this delish pizza last tuesday!

Garlic chicken something or other.

Now, for the good stuff...

(I don't have pictures for this one, but I have good reasons).

Saturday night, Anny's friend from back home, Corinne, invited us to go to the caves. We have never been, but have heard a lot about them. So, we were planning on meeting right after the Relief Society General Broadcast, around 8 at Corinne's apartment. Sara was driving our group in her Honda Civic. The group was: Sara, me, Anny, Zach, and Sara's cousin, Andrew. On our way, Corinne called and recommended that we bring a truck, because the last time someone drove their car, the underside got ruined. So, we got my truck and went to Corinne's apartment. Skip ahead: we were on the road on our way to the caves. We drove about thirty-five minutes on the main drag until we turned onto a dirt road. There were 2 other vehicles with our group: a BIG truck and a hefty suburban, so my truck looked like a midget, plus I was last in our little "follow the leader" crusade down the scary, windy, BUMPY, rocky, dusty, and LOOONNGGGG dirt road. All those words: understatements. It was terrible. I've never been off-roading whatsoever with my beautiful truck and it's only two-wheel drive, so I was scared for my poor Gumpy's life. At least twice, we heard very large rocks hit the underside of my baby. It was terrible. Sara says that she wishes she could have recorded all of the sound effects I was making in sorrow for my vehicle. Moving on, the other two vehicles got WAY ahead of us and after a while we couldn't see them at all. Terrible. Nonetheless, we kept on trudging. After about 45 minutes on this ridiculous dirt road that was slowly killing my truck, we came to a "T" in the road. We could go left or right, so we chose left, because it seemed the most sensible. This road was MUCH smoother. It was wonderful. After about ten minutes on this road, we see another car going the opposite direction, so we figure they are just leaving the caves and stopped them to ask how much further it was. They informed us that we were going the wrong way: they were heading to the caves, too. Me: "But where did you guys come from?" Them: "Oh, the main road is just like 2 minutes away." AHHHHHHHH!!! We couldn't believe it. We had taken the ridiculously long way!! Anywho, we followed them, and it took us about fifteen minutes to finally get to the caves.

That's way too long of a story, I'm sorry. But the caves were fun. It was already ten by the time we got there, so we only got to stay for a little longer than half an hour (curfew is midnight)! When we were leaving the caves, the rest of our group had just gotten there! It took us just around an hour to get home. Gist: we're never hanging out with those people ever again and I officially am IN LOVE with my car. I have a new found respect and love for him: he endured much!

The end.

Side note: About five minutes into our off-roading crusade, we came to a HUGE flock of sheep. It was hilarious. They were basically flanking the road, and a couple were even in the road, so we had to find our way around them. Just a funny incident.

Back to the Daily Grind

So, I decided that I am only going to post about the fun things. No schoolwork. We'll see how long that lasts. The roomies and I are trying to make this a very hard-working and diligent semester, but at the same time make sure that we have a teensy bit of fun and a little bit of social lives :)

The first Saturday we were here, we went to the sand dunes to hang out at a bon fire. It was GIGANTIC! So much fun.

This guy carved his and his fiancee's names into the sand with a heart, poured gasoline into them, then lit them on fire. It was really clever and looked pretty awesome.

You've met Zach before, Sara's fiancee'. He's very secure. I told him to "be sexy" in this picture.

Yesterday, we went bridge jumping. It was a blast!! Holy cow. It was just a pedestrian bridge and it was probably around 30 feet above the water... not too bad. The first jump was a teensy bit intimidating, but it was worth it. I have so much respect for professional divers now!

I kept on trying to take pictures with my phone, but every time I just ended up capturing their legs. Bummer. Anyhow, Sara was the bravest and jumped right in.

You are probably getting a messed up impression of Zach, but oh well. He's a goofball and Sara still loves him.

Zach actually took this picture... gotta love it.

Good & true story:

Sara decided that she wanted to hold hands and jump in. Well, this is what we think ended up happening.. she jumped farther out than I did and we ended up pulling each other. We ended up landing really weird in the water. She chipped a tooth (a really small part, she says the size of a grain of sand or so) and I bruised up my leg nicely.

Anny, Kaylie (NEW roommate, with same name as old roommate from Fall '08 semester and close to other old roommate, Kayla, from Winter '09 semester... crazy), and I decided to swim out to the rocks in the middle of the river. Sara and the boys hung back and made a pretty funny movie.

We were all pretty exhausted as the day went on... as you can tell.

Sara had made me a cake on Friday and we lit the candles today. I have such good roomies.

More to come later!

Blackberry Art!

The aunts are here.

That can only mean one thing.

BLACKBERRY JAM!

We worked hard.

8 batches

and

51 jars

later...

I decided to have some fun with the leftovers.

Old, torn up jeans...

... plus reject blackberry goop...

...plus a pair of these...

... equals art.

;)

Roadtrip!!

Anny and I left Monday morning, with Bitsy in tow, for San Francisco. We spent time with my mom until we headed to Utah, Wednesday morning. We spent time with another roommate, Sara, on Thursday. Friday was Kaylie's (another roomie's) wedding and reception. Anny and I headed home on Saturday morning. We actually made some pretty good time. Less than 14 hours from SLC to OH.

Anny sits about 2 inches away from the steering wheel.

The bed of the truck was pretty full. I had to take stuff to my mom in SF and my Aunt Christine in SLC, plus my mom filled it even more with a coffee table and boxes of food (for BYUI) until we dumped it at Christine's.

In-N-Out!

Anny "could have sworn" that they had chicken burgers... and "crinkly" fries.

My mom treated us to some legit Chinese food. Guess how many people were eating. Hint: less than 4, but more than 2. Kind of ridiculous.

Then, she took us to Ghiradelli for a rockin' sundae.

Anny and I were equipped with our sunglasses and Hanna Montana hand sanitizer.

Travel buddies!

Kaylie was gorgeous and they are a wonderful match. He is a good guy, through and through, and that's a lot coming from me.

Tribute to Old Bitser

Well, Anny and I headed off on a roadtrip (post to come) partly to take my dog, Bitsy, to my mom in San Francisco. She's going to keep Bitsy, since I'm heading off for school soon. We've had Bitsy since I was around 6 years old. The house is so quiet without her!

This was a couple of weeks ago. I took her for a walk and didn't feel like carrying her (empty) plastic, potty bag.

After a nice rain shower.

She did awesome on the 15-ish hour car ride. She sat behind the passenger seat in my truck in her little bed the whole way.

I gave her some of my In-N-Out burger, so of course she wanted more. I spoil my puppy.

She has made herself right at home, once we spent the night at my moms. She claimed Finnegan's (giant) bed as her own.

Life of a Single, Almost 20 Year Old

Here's a picture narrative of the wonderful single life!

The view of downtown Frisco and the Bay Bridge from my mom's neighborhood.

Try doing this with your fridge.

Lots of babysitting.. for some pretty awesome kids!

A few weddings, here and there.

Vandalism. Of course.

This is probably my favorite part:

Who doesn't love pizza?

The End.