Holiday Greetings!

Merry Christmas a little late, and a happy New Year to everybody! It has been a wonderful holiday season this year, and I'm so glad to be back in Spokane to spend it with my family. It has been crazy around my house, but the holiday excitement has been a little fun. It has meant a few more headaches, but I can handle that. It has also meant way too much sugar. Oops! That tends to happen every year though.

One thing I am very grateful for this holiday season is the optometrist. Last Monday, I had an eye exam to figure out what has been going on with my eyes this past semester. I found out why my eyes have been getting to tired! Apparently, I am very very farsighted. My right eye is much much worse than my left eye though. My left eye has hardly any problem at all, while my right eye can't even handle the prescription that I need. The optometrist said that my eyes (well, my right eye) couldn't handle the full prescription, so I would have to work my way up to that full prescription over time. I had no idea that my eyes were that bad! He said that because my of the specific kind of farsightedness (I think that's how you would say it) that I have, the muscles in my eyes can compensate. I just have to put in a lot of effort to see things clearly. I was having to put in so much effort, that my eyes were noticeably tired. He was shocked that this was the first time in my life that I had complained about my eyes.

While at this appointment, I had my eyes dilated. It was weird because at the same time, as part of the dilation, my focusing lenses (in my eyes) were paralyzed. This meant that EVERYTHING around me was very blurry. While out and about after our eye exams, my dad and I went to get groceries while at Costco. One does not simply get their groceries when at Costco in the evening though. You practically have to try all the foods that they have out for customers to sample. Well, as you remember, I couldn't see anything. I had to ask my dad what everything was before I ate it. Things were going pretty well, I could see well enough to not run into everything, and the samples were good. Then we got to another sample. Just as I had been doing, I asked my dad what it was. He told me that they were little burritos. I thought, alright, then picked one up to try it. Turns out that it was not a burrito. It was some kind of puff pastry, and it had been frozen. I was not expecting that at all. We got a pretty good laugh out of it, and the lady doing that sample had fun too. She joking told me that I was not really in a Costco, but I was in a huge Walmart instead. That was a fun adventure for sure.

My glasses finally came in the day before I left back for Rexburg, and I love them. It's a weird change to be wearing them all the time, but it's kind of nice. It is hard though to retrain my eyes. For the longest time, they have worked super hard to focus. Now, I have to retrain them to unfocus and let the glasses do all the work.

Enough talking about my eyes. There is much more exciting news. I decided about a week ago that I am going to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this fall. I am thrilled to do this. For those of you who don't know a lot about this, I will explain it a little. Feel free to ask me any questions if you think of any. I would love to explain them to you the best I can. I am going on an 18 month mission. I am starting the paperwork process right now, and will hopefully be able to leave in late August or September. Once my paperwork is filled out, I will get a letter from the church headquarters in Salt Lake City that tells me where and when exactly I am going. At that point, I will start my final preparations, like making sure I have everything on the packing list for that specific area, and things like that. Once on my mission, I will have a very busy schedule teaching and serving others wherever I am sent. I will get up early each morning, study the holy scriptures with the other missionary that I am assigned to work with, and then we will go out and serve. We will knock on doors, go to our scheduled appointments, and look for ways that we can help others around us. That is just a very basic outline, but I am thrilled to be going! While on my mission, I will have one day a week that I have time to email and write my family and friends. I am planning on writing a mass email that I will send to my family for them to post on here for me. In other words, once I'm gone, this will be a missionary blog for those 18 months. It will have pictures of me on my mission that I will send back to my family, and letters that I send back. It will be a great way to stay caught up on what I'm up to. I could not be more excited for this opportunity. I am looking forward to it, and soon, I'll be counting down the days!

One Semester Down

This last month and a half has been crazy to say the least. A lot has happened. For one, I finished my first semester at BYU-Idaho. I love it there in Rexburg so much! It is a hidden gem, and going there has been one of the best decisions of my life. That doesn't mean that everything about it has been easy, but it sure has been worth it.

For one thing, Rexburg is cold. Being from Spokane, I am used to cold weather. I'm used to lots of snow in the winter, and below freezing temperatures. Rexburg is worse. On top of it being cold, there is almost constantly windy. There was one week that it was -22 or so at the coldest. That is without windchill. It was so cold one day that the power went out and classes didn't start until 11:30 if I remember correctly. It was freezing!

I also finished up my one and only semester as a music major. I made it out alive!!!!!! I was able to learn all of my pieces and still have my brain intact by the time I was done. I am grateful for the opportunity. I really did learn a lot about life through being a music major. I guess I learned a little about music, but not as much as I wanted to. I learned more about how to focus on one particular thing. I had to learn to be dedicated no matter how hard it got or how much I hated it.

And guess what? I met the craziest guy ever. He is the best. I don't even really know where to start. He has the voice of an angel. He will tell you that he doesn't, but don't listen to him when he tells you that. Just listen to him sing instead. You will understand. His name is Sam, and he is my favorite. And yes, we are dating. He makes me so happy.

I should probably say how I met this guy. We have this mutual friend. Eric. Sam knows him through men's choir, and I know Eric because he's from Spokane and we went to high school together. So, Eric had come over one day to my apartment to hang out, and that was great and everything. He told me that he could give me a ride back to Spokane for Thanksgiving, and I told him I would think about it. I sent him a text the next day telling him that I would love a ride. Then, he asked me if he could set me up on a blind date. I told him that he could. He planned on the date being the next Wednesday. We would go and see the play that was running on campus. Fast forward to the day before the date: Tuesday. Eric sent me a text asking if he could bring Sam over to meet me. He had originally told me that he didn't want us to meet before the date because he wanted it to be a blind date. I told him that they could come over, so they did. They stopped by to say hi on their way to a choir social. We talked for a little bit, then they left. About an hour later, Eric texted me saying that the social was dumb and that they were going to come back over. They came, and we all watched Les Miserables together. Sam and I totally hit it off, went on our not-so-blind date the next day, and as we have been saying, "the rest is history."

I feel so blessed to have someone as amazing as him in my life. I am going to miss him so much these next few months since he is off track. BYU-Idaho has a funny system where students go for two of the three semesters (Fall, Winter, and Spring). Both Sam and I are assigned to go during the Fall and Spring. I am staying this winter as well, and he is going back to Pennsylvania. I am just so grateful for skype. It is one of the greatest of all modern inventions! It is going to make these next three months a whole lot easier for me. I am going to miss him so much! He truly is the best, and I feel so blessed to have him in my life!

Busy Busy Busy

Life is so busy! That's just a fact. My bed is put back together though, and there is no more hole in the wall. It's pretty stinking exciting. My bed is back in place, and it's amazing. I'm not sleeping on the floor anymore.

I have been super-duper busy with crazy amounts of practicing and reading an article for English (I ranted about that in the "my dreams" tab). I still love my English class an awful lot, and all the people are AMAZING, but it has been a lot of work outside of class this week. They are the best. We hung out a couple of Fridays ago to play capture the flag, watch Tangled, and drink hot chocolate. Capture the Flag at Porter Park was lots of fun in the dark. One thing about me, I am usually the kind of person that just stands there in games like capture the flag. I just stand there and pretty much cheer on my teem mates while acting like in some other life I could maybe have the chance of intimidating the other team's members. That's me. I am one of those people that just stand there and say "good job". It's actually pretty pathetic. This time, it was remarkably different though. I somehow got over to the other team's side, and I found the flag. No one on my team had been able to find it yet. I was just glad that I found it. It gets better though. I was able to, through some miracle, bring it back to our side. Yeah, it was pretty intense. I have NEVER done that before! It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. Not really, but it was still awesome.

On a totally different note, I am closer to getting my major changed. It really can't come fast enough. Several hours a day in the practice room is taking a toll on me. It is making me hate the thing that I love the most: music. That's just a crime. Because of this, I am ready to take my life in another direction. Web design is calling my name, and I am ready to answer the call. I had an appointment last Friday to work on changing my major, and hopefully I will have it changed by the end of this week.

My wonderful roommate Emily has sadly been sick these past few days. She has had a nasty cold, and I feel so bad for her. Hopefully we can get her feeling better before her birthday this Saturday. It wouldn't be any fun to be sick on your birthday! Kami and I keep on teasing her by telling her that we have something up our sleeve for her birthday, which we do. She keeps on saying that she is so afraid of what we could have planned. It is going to be fun when she sees the surprise. I just hope she is feeling better by then.

One of the best parts about this week that I almost forgot about was what we did for our Family Home Evening thing recently. We played the game "Assassin" for a week, and it was amazing and intense. I was SO PARANOID!!!!! Every single one of my friends can testify of that. For those of you who don't know what this game is, it's a Roman Colosseum based game. Each person in the group is given the name of another person in the group that they have to track down and "kill" we pinned clothespins on each other to "kill" our targets. Once a person kills their target, they then begin to chase the target of the person that they just killed. This goes on until there are two people left, and they fight it out. Kami, my roommate, won the entire game. Another game with a much larger group of people should start here this week, and I am so excited to play that game!

Oh, and you can tell people are having fun at the store when you see this when grocery shopping:

Time Flys

It has been two weeks since I have last posted, and so much has happened! College is still pretty awesome for the most part. Life isn't worth it, and I still despise math, but I can get over that. Music hasn't gotten any easier either. It's not that music is hard. I get it theoretically, but learning it hasn't gotten any easier. I just have to push through this semester though. The reason why? I just changed my major. I am no longer an insane music major. I am going to be a web design/development major. I am so stinking excited! I feel like this is the right thing for me to be doing right now. I will probably also get a minor in photography. Because of this major change, there might be a lot of changes on how my blog looks here in these next few years. I am very excited to dive into this field. I am going to miss this beautiful walk to the Snow building (where all my music classes are). I guess My other buildings aren't too far away, and one of them I will probably walk this way to get to it.

Enough of that boring stuff. I promise I have been out doing exciting things too. My roommates and I went to  a church Halloween party Saturday night, and we were dressed pretty crazily. Emily was a minion from Despicable Me, Madeleine was a Redcoat from Pretty Little Liars, and I was a person from the capitol in the Hunger Games.

We only made it to the last few minutes of the party, but it was still fun. Getting ready was probably the best part, in my opinion at least.

I had another exciting adventure involving the lovely bathroom this week. Yup. The same one that I got locked in two weeks ago. This time, the problem is a little different. The shower has been leaking a steady stream of water, so we had the apartment maintenance come and take a look at it. It turned out that it was a miracle our shower had even been working! It was dripping because some piece had been stripped. Because of this, they had to cut a hole in the wall behind the shower to take out the parts and replace them. My bed happens to be right where they needed to cut a hole, so my bed is on the floor next to my roommates right now until the drywall gets put back on. It's no fun. Yeah. That's where my bed was, and hopefully will be back sooner rather than later.





Last Friday night, some awesome people from my English class got together to hang out. They rock. That's really the simplest way to say it. They are the best, and I don't know what I would do without them. We had an awesome night eating chocolate chip pancakes and hanging out doing dumb things. I'm just going to leave it at that. Okay, we watched football, talked, and might have pranked a person or two. Don't worry, it was nothing serious, but it was way too much fun.

You can read a little more about that night on the tab (up at the top of the page) that says "My Dreams" if you really want to. Just for your info, I updated all of the tabs, and the "My Dreams" tab is new. I am going to post about the awesome stuff that I am doing there. It's kind of a life-long bucket list of sorts. I am super excited to start working on that project, and hopefully there will be more to come on that page soon!

College life!

It has been way way way too long since I posted, and so much more has happened than I will even be able to remember. College is great, but it also comes with it's challenges. I would prefer to focus on the good rather than the miserable, but I will still touch on some of that to keep the picture of my college experience fairly accurate.

First off, There have been many fun times between my roommates and I. One time, it was pouring rain on the day that we had a campus wide devotional. We hurried home from the building so we wouldn't get soaking wet. My wonderful friend and awesome roommate Emily is an usher for the weekly devotional, so she had to stay after, and thus got stuck in the worst of the rainstorm. Because of this, she took cover in the apartment of some of her other friends that was closer. She waited there until the storm calmed down, then came back home. While she was gone, I had been telling another roommate of mine, Kami, about working for Tracy Jewelers. This led to us both looking at engagement rings. Emily came home and I said to her rather excitedly, "Emily, you missed it! We were just looking at engagement rings!" She just heard the "engagement" part of it, and automatically assumed that I was engaged. Needless to say, the whole apartment was in tears since we were laughing so hard! There have been several other experiences like that, but I think that one alone perfectly illustrates the mood of the apartment...for the most part that is. I would rather not go into the other side. Let's just leave it at that because that's a whole lot easier.

Schoolwork isn't necessarily harder, but there is a TON of work. I agree fully with this pic that I found online

It's seriously ridiculous. All of us just hope to "defy the laws of physics" although we feel that it is utterly impossible. I know that as I get minimal amounts of sleep, yet still do my very very best to maintain good grades and have a social life, I do end up like quite a bit of a zombie. With me though, this usually results in more giggling with my favorite roommates than anything, which tends to make us stay up even later since we can't stop laughing. There have been far too many funny instances of that to even start listing them off.

Yesterday was an interesting day as well. It started off with an experience that I will never forget. I woke up, and went into the bathroom. I went to unlock the door and open it, and then things got interesting. As I grabbed the doorknob to pull the door open, the knob came off the door. That's right, I was holding the doorknob in my hand, and it wasn't connected to the door. I was locked in the bathroom. I tried using pressure to put the knob back into place so I could forcibly unlock the door and pull it open by grabbing the bottom of the door and pulling it open. This proved to be futile, and I had to come up with another idea. Thankfully at that moment, Kami came by, so I knocked on the door. She had seen my hand at the bottom of the door and wondered what in the world was going on. We ended up getting a screwdriver sent under the door so I could completely remove the door handle and get out of the bathroom. We now have a doorknob sitting on our bathroom counter.  

Being a music major has been stressful as anything gets! I have just about had it! Music is great and everything, but it has been far too frustrating. I have been putting in the extra effort to learn the music correctly, but it has made it so much more difficult as of the past two weeks. My first week learning the song, I was able to learn the sections of the piece perfectly. Since then, I have practiced twice as hard and long as that week, but have accomplished way less. In the hour that I have practiced so far today, I have only been able to learn one more measure. For all you out there that don't know what that is, it's about 3 seconds worth of music when played. This is not fun to handle at all. I will figure something out though.

All in all, life has been super fun, but I'm not sure I will be involved in music on the academic level for much longer.