Ice Bucket Challenge...and More

After being nominated by a few people within a few hours, I accepted (within the 24 hour time) and did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. My brother, Jed, had also just been nominated, so we decided to do it at the same time.

Sorry about the dumb looks on our faces in the video thumbnail. I know that some may not like my approach that I decided to take on our challenge, but I will stand behind it because I feel that it was the right thing to do. ALS is a terrible disease that no one should have to endure, but I also know that there are several other medical challenges that are just as bad in their own way and also need attention like this. I know that all the wonderful research that has been done for Breast Cancer has saved my mom's life, and continues to save the lives of many others. I am infinitely grateful for that, but as much progress as they have made for this needs to be made in many other fields.

Other than this, there were a few things that I forgot to put in my last post. Sorry, I know I already posted so much last time, but I just had to add these.

At the end of the Spring semester, several of my friends and I drove out to the Rigby Sand Dunes for a bonfire. My friends did many other things like that in the last week of the semester, but I was unable to go to most of them. Still, I love spending time with my friends, and I will miss them all as I leave for Brazil for the next 18 months.

Another cool thing that we did at the end of the semester was explode a  watermelon. Let me tell you, that is one crazy thing! I would recommend doing it outside. We didn't think of that until after the explosion. After putting many many rubber bands around a watermelon, it made a huge mess. If I had access to the video of it, I would have put it up, but I don't. Logan put it on Facebook, but not YouTube, so I can't put it up. It's pretty cool to watch, and I wish I could share it.

Anyway, that's all the super exciting things that I can think of to write about. Until next time I guess.

June and July 2014 I Guess

The last two months have been just crazy, and I don't know how on Earth I can cover it all in one post. I never let my blog go so long, but the last semester was just insane, and then as soon as I got home, we have been working hard each week getting our house ready to sell. Yes, my family is moving. We don't know where, but I will probably come back from Brazil to a new home. My family will stay in Spokane for a while, at least the next semester for my siblings in school. Anyway, now to tell about all of the exciting things that I did. Get ready for quite the post.

First off, I got all of my visa paperwork off to Salt Lake. All I have to do now is wait. Hopefully I will get my visa in time to go to Brazil. If I don't, I will go to the training center in Provo, and then to somewhere in the U.S. until I get my visa if I still don't have it yet. We will see. I will do whatever I have to.

Okay. Now for all the crazy events. First, my ward (the congregation I go to church with) had a big paint fight on Saturday, June 14th! We drove from Rexburg out to the Rigby Sand Dunes with tons of paint. We had taken trashcans (new and clean of course) and filled them about halfway with water, and then dumped a gallon of bright, neon paint into each one. We had five colors (I think) and everyone was just covered in paint by the end.

It was seriously so much fun, and I look forward to doing it again after I return from Brazil because apparently it is an annual thing. I am super stoked for that! Let my tell you though, cleaning off afterwards was quite a pain.

The week after (Saturday, June 21st), a group of my friends and I drove over to the Teton Mountains and hiked on a little offshoot up to the Darby Wind Caves. Because of the snow, someone had slipped and broken their leg the same day we went, so not all of us went up to the caves. I was with the part of the group that stayed just below the caves. Considering that some of our group members were stuck in that very cave for around 29 hours I believe just over a year before, I was not too keen on going and getting myself stuck in the cave. Reader's digest even just did an article about when they got stuck in the cave. It was interesting to hear the story from their perspective, go hiking there, and then read the article. I was very grateful for their safe return from the cave. They loved it though. They took pictures at all these different places, like where they ran to keep warm, or tried to dig themselves out.

Isn't it just gorgeous! It doesn't look super high from here, but it was really at the top of the Tetons. I'm not even sure how high it is elevation wise, but it was pretty high up.

My amazing friend Julianna and I became hiking buddies that day. She is the best, and I am so excited that she gets to go to China here soon, if she isn't gone yet, to teach English through the ILP program. She is the best, and I'm super glad that we got to be such good friends this last semester.

I had the best friends in the world to do the hike with. That is one of the things that I loved about going to school in Rexburg. Even though Rexburg is a tiny college town, we always find such fun things to do. That is the power of good friends. I feel so blessed that I know all these people (and many more friends that weren't on this hike). I kid you not though, Rexburg is the place to be!

So I feel like I did a whole lot of things after this that were super exciting, but I can't remember. Probably because I don't have pictures or Facebook posts about any of them. Because of this, I am just going to skip to the things that I do remember. Trust me, there is still plenty to talk about.

The next big thing that I can remember was the Fourth of July. My dad's family had a reunion up in Island Park (it's pretty close to Rexburg). It was fun to see family, and super nice to get a little break from school. For the Fourth, we went and saw an amazing firework show off the lake in Island Park. I wish I could post all the pictures I took of that! After going through them all, I still have over 300 good pictures of the fireworks!

Yes, we were really that close! It was a little frightening at times because we did have some small pieces come down on us, but the show was spectacular! It lasted for quite a while too (I think it was somewhere around 30-45 minutes long).

After that, of course I continued to watch the World Cup, and to my great dismay, Brazil lost to Germany in the semi-finals. That game was so ridiculous that I didn't even feel like I was watching soccer (or, fútbol if we are being technical). Germany's shots looked just like replays because they were so close together! It didn't help at all either that I have a few friends that served missions in Germany. They stopped by my apartment after the game just to rub it in. I am still proud of Brazil and am very excited to go there next month (hopefully!).

Following that, we had one of the biggest scares of our lives in my apartment. We were just sitting one fine Monday evening (July 14th to be exact) doing homework when I heard some sound coming from our coat closet every once and a while. It sounded like a cat puling it's claws out of furniture. Finally, I got up, opened the closet, looked a round a little, but I didn't see anything. When I had opened the closet however, it smelled awful. Like skunk, but not quite as much. I didn't want to do too much digging around, but when our friend Scott walked past, I asked him frantically to come in and help us. Gratefully, he did, and helped us fix our problem. According to my lovely roommate Christie, this is what happened (or at least what she posted on Facebook the morning after):

On behalf of Apt 103 I'd just like to apologize to all of Birch for all the screaming you may have heard last night. We discovered a large, jumping mouse/rat in our front closet and were kind of freaking out as Scott chased it down. No worries, he caught it (for which we are eternally grateful!!!) and it has run away into the wild in search of a new place to poop. We figure it got in through the front door at some point seeing as there aren't any holes in the walls or anything...  

Soooooo, other girls at Birch, don't leave your door open unless you put some sort of guard in front of it!! There is a hobo rat on the loose.

Yikes right! It was one of the nastiest things that I have ever seen, but what we didn't know was what was going to happen the very next day: The Rexburg Flash Flood. My apartment was super lucky. While I did live on the basement floor of the complex, we were incredibly blessed. Most complexes around us had waist-deep water on the basement levels. In ours, the water just got to mid-calf, and luckily, only our carpet got wet (in my apartment anyway).

This was taken right outside my apartment. My head is the one sticking out the top of the window. Isn't that just crazy? That's not even the worst of it at all either! This was taken pretty close to the beginning, so the water level still did go up a ton after this. By this point, we had to climb in and out of our windows and keep our doors locked up with towels on the other side. Luckily, all of our belongings were okay, but we had to move all of our things out the next day and move into another apartment complex down the street. That was the toughest part of it all. That was definitely not the way any of us had expected we would say goodbye to our apartment that semester. The apartment we moved into was brand new and super nice, but it was annoying to have to move during finals week. No one wants to do that. Everything ended up being okay, and we are all super grateful for the help of all the amazing guys we know that helped us move and the love and support that was felt through the whole Rexburg community.

One last thing. I promise. During the last few weeks of the semester, my roommates and I pranked some of our guy friends during the night. It started out with caution tape that we got from volunteering at a fun run on campus, and then evolved into:

1. Toilet paper all around the doorway and raisins peeled open and stuck on the door 
2. String woven in a web around the doorway and pictures with Nicholas Cage's face photoshopped onto them stuck all over the door
3. Toasted bread strung on floss and woven across the door, fried eggs and more toast hanging from the top of the door frame, more raisins on the door, thin banana slices on the door, a plate of muffins and cinnamon rolls for them to enjoy, and cups with juice packets in them.

We got more and more into it as the pranks went on. We even dressed in all black and wore masks sometimes as we went to prank each time.

Needless to say, we had a ton of fun, but no matter how hard we tried, one of the apartments could never figure out that it was us. We had to just tell them at the end of the semester because after all that work, who wouldn't want credit? 

Mission Call!

So I am super sorry that it has taken me so long to post this because I got my call a couple weeks ago, and I'm just now posting it. My visa paperwork has taken up so much of my time, so I haven't really had a chance to post yet. Ready? I am going to spend 18 months of my life in...the Brazil, Ribierão Preto Mission! I am going to leave on September 17th to go to the MTC (Missionary Training Center) in Brazil, that is if I get my Visa by then. If not, then I will go to the MTC in Provo, Utah and then stay in the states until I get my Visa.

So there is where my mission is located. Ribierão Preto is in the state of São Paulo in Brazil if that helps you visualize where it is. The weather is supposed to be just beautiful! 70-80 degree weather or so normally, or so I've been told, with warm rain in the Summer. I have also been told that this area is called the California of Brazil because of the type of weather. 

I am a little bit worried about doing Portuguese thought. I will be speaking Portuguese the entire time I am in Brazil. This only worries me because I have spent my entire life hearing Spanish, and I spend several years learning Spanish. I know that this will help for several reasons, including the similarities in the structure of the languages and the fact that I have already started training my brain to learn another language. I am just nervous about the different sounds that I'm not used to hearing. That is what freaks me out a little bit. I know I will be just fine, but it still seems daunting to me.

In other news, I had a wonderful weekend! Friday night was a blast, which was good because I had a hard last bit of the week, so I needed something fun to raise my spirits. I had some complications come in the paperwork for my Visa, and this left me super-duper stressed all of Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. I am so thankful though that things got so much better on Friday. Around 8 pm, Christie, Mikaela, and I went to the park and chilled in the beautiful sunshine. We passed a frisbee around for a while, then went over to a bonfire with several of our friends around 9. Once the bonfire was done, we carried a lovesac that belonged to our friend Juliana from Logan and Andy's apartment to hers. It wasn't that far of a walk, but all of us looked silly carrying that around Rexburg. Once this was back safely in Juliana's apartment, we went on yet another adventure. Brianne, Andy, Christie, Mikaela, and I found a parking garage in the new complex by our apartments and climbed up to the top. That was a pretty good view of Rexburg! From five stories up, you really could tell how stinking small our little college town is. After that, we went and got Froyo at Kiwi Loco, and then went home. We tried to watch a movie, but we all ended up going to bed after a little bit. Yeah. It was quite the evening. I hope you all had a great weekend too!

First Website

Not that any thing too important or exciting happened this week, but I do have a little bit of exciting news. In my programming class, I wrote up my first website! It doesn't have a URL, but it was very exciting to learn some simple code. That's how I wrote the website. I used a text editor and wrote out the HTML code. It was so cool, but kind of tedious and boring. The page was simple, with just had a basic heading, a short description, and a table of names. I am going to, however, make a more exciting web page for my web design class. That page will be done at the end of the semester, and I am excited to learn all of the cool stuff from that class.

Yesterday was fun. My roommates and I went on a picnic with Andy. It was so fun to just be with some great friends, and the sun felt wonderful! Having this sunshine is something of a luxury here, but hopefully we will be able to enjoy it more often since it is Spring, and the weather is getting better. On our little picnic, we all made sandwiches, and then sat at Porter Park in a little circle of grass eating them and talking. We stayed there for a couple of hours because it was just so beautiful! It was a little windy though, so my hair kept flying in my face almost every time I tried to take a bite.

I started my first typography project this week. It took me so many hours of sitting and drawing to get my thumbnails done, but it was worth it. I think it is going to be the best way for me to familiarize myself with all the different fonts that I have to learn.

Semester Three

I am so sorry that I have been a terrible person and a slacker and haven't posted in over a month. I do feel bad though. I have been meaning to write a new post for weeks, but finishing up last semester and starting this new one has been just a little time consuming. And let me tell you, a lot sure has happened since my last post!

About a month ago, for FHE we had a silly string fight. It was hilarious! We used 28 cans of silly string (I think) and we got a little crazy. It was a lot of silly string to clean up. It was a blast, and a good way to end the FHE for the semester.

Since I last wrote, it was April Fool's Day. My lovely roommates Christie and Mikaela love to go all out on pranks. They colored the milk in the fridge, and they did silly things like putting toast in the showers. The best one was a prank that Christie pulled on Mikaela. I found it the next night when I went to turn off their bedroom light when we left one night. Take a look.

So that same night that I found this wonderful poster, we had a closing social for my ward (the people I go to church with). We had dinner and a talent show. Man, it was hilarious! My FHE group decided to have a brownie eating contest. We changed it up a little bit though. You know those funny videos where two people are working together--where the second person is being the arms of the first person--like putting makeup on the other person or something? We did that with our brownie eating contest. It was great. I was shoving brownies in Emily's face, and it was just hilarious because I couldn't see what was going on, but I was acting as her hands. Yeah. That was quite the night.

A few weeks ago, the church held General Conference. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is where the leaders for the entire church hold a conference for all the members around the world. My wonderful roommates and I stayed at home and watched it in our living room on TV. It is so wonderful to be able to hear words from God's living prophets! I feel so blessed to have this opportunity twice a year to listen to this conference.

Most people in the church have fun traditions that they do with their families during Conference. We, as roommates, did a few of these that each of our families do, and we started a few on our own. We had subway for lunch in between sessions on Saturday, and then made cinnamon rolls for the morning session on Sunday. We also moved all our mattresses out to our living room all weekend, and so we had lots of fun spending the weekend together.

Now that semester is over, and I had loads of fun finishing my classes. They were a lot of work, but the best things requires work and effort. I learned so much, and I especially loved getting back in the swing of things within the graphic design world. Even though my graphic design class was a lot of work, it was my favorite and most rewarding class. I learned things about the software I will be using the rest of my career (Adobe Creative Suite) that I never knew, and I was able to brush up on my art knowledge. It was great to take that class because I just felt like I belonged.

Between semesters, I went home and spent that week with my family. It was nice to have the break, but I am so glad to be back in Rexburg. It has really begun to feel like home here. it is going to be hard to leave it for a couple years for my mission. Anyway, while I was home, I had a great time with my family and the friends that I got to see. There were some fun adventures like finding a Styrofoam head at Hobby Lobby with its nose broken off (it looked like that Egyptian sphinx that is missing its nose) and going to see the ever hilarious Mr. CVHS with MaKormick. Man, that was a fun night! I don't get to see him enough since I went to school. I'm super duper excited that he will get to have the BYU-Idaho experience when he comes here next year!

So it's a new semester now, and I am excited, but the workload is going to be crazy. I am taking some classes that I am not necessarily looking forward to. My english class is going to be a lot of work, but I am actually excited about that one. I am also super-duper excited for my culture class in which I will be learning about art, dance, theatre, and music history. It is right up my alley, and should be a blast. I am also taking a Book of Mormon class (we are required to take religion classes) and I love it so much! I am taking from one of my favorite religion teachers, and I'm sure I will have a wonderful experience in that class as I prepare for my mission. I am taking several classes that have to do with my major, and some of them are going to be less enjoyable than others. I am taking Web Design, Computer Programming, and Typography. Hopefully I can learn everything that I need to from these classes because they are pretty important to my career. And in other news about this new semester, we only have four girls in our apartment when there would normally be six! There are Sophia, Christie, Mikaela, and myself in this apartment. No one new, just the four of us that were already here last semester. It's kind of nice. There is tons of room in the bathrooms and kitchen now! I even get my own bedroom, which is weird, but having the space it nice.

Oh, and I have an exciting update on my mission papers. Over the past month, I have had my final three interviews, the last of which was this morning. After that last interview, my paperwork was sent to the Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City. They will be seen by the church leaders, and then they will determine where I am going to go. This means that I will have my call here in a few weeks. Man. That just feels crazy! I will post on here where I am going as soon as I find out. I am pretty anxious to find out though.