One Month

One month until I leave to serve in the Chile Antofagasta Mission!  I report November 14th and I am super incredibly excited. 

I wrote about my decision to go and when I received my call here!  The same webpage has information about Antofagasta and will eventually contain my letters too.  

Prepartation has been good.  And by good I mean that I've gotten to travel like crazy in the last two months. It has been really fun to go around and see different countries and different cultures (well, maybe different touristy cultures).  As usual, my mom's blog is loaded with pictures and details of those trips.  

Otherwise, my mission has pretty much consumed me.  It's pretty much all I think about and my family is getting annoyed of my constant babble about it.  But finally the time has shortened and I now have less than ONE MONTH!

The Scrappiest

Here’s a post a boy in my ward put on facebook recounting the events of last night.

I’ll give you one guess as to who was on the other side of the head-to-head collision.

A lot of people running full sprints at one spot is not a good idea everyone.  Haha.  I’m fine though.  My knee hurts pretty bad as does my face, but I definitely don’t need any surgery.  I got up pretty quick (at first my knee wouldn’t bend though) and hobbled home but apparently he was on the ground for about a half hour and the BYU police and ambulance even came. A bunch of people came over to check and see if I was okay and check me for concussions.

I broke someone’s face guys.

Conference

For some reason I thought I had blogged this like a month ago.  Whoops.  I’ve been moving etc. for the last little while so I blame the lack of recent posts on that.

Conference weekend was great.  We went to both the Saturday morning and afternoon sessions.  The trees were beautiful!   Poor Kate was super sick almost the entire conference due to Chuck-o-Rama the night before.  She’ll probably never go there again.  We met Matt and Jamie up there before the afternoon session.  They obviously take great pictures. Jamie was sad because Matt lost his arm.

Josh also met us up there.  We had lunch with he and his roommates before the second session but it was forever away so we were almost late to the afternoon session.  We first stopped at the gas station right by temple square and there were about 4392469403 people in line for some crappy donuts or whatever else was there so our hunger finally got the best of us and we drove to find food with them.

 

I love actually going to conference.  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is amazing, but most especially in person.  Another great part about it is that you get to see all of the apostles even when they aren’t being sustained or something.  In the intermediate hymn for example, Elders Perry and Nelson held onto President Packer so he could stand up.  It was so sweet and the spirit was so strong.  I loved conference!  My favorite quote of the entire conference was in Pres. Eyring’s talk: “it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I knew I had to do it, so I did.”  I feel like that is kind of my theme recently.  Thanks Grandma for letting us have tickets!  We were sorry to miss you!

Hunger Games

Oh the Hunger Games.  That seems so long ago!  All week was exciting.  Everyone was talking about it, changing their profile pictures to the movie poster, posting countdown, etc.  Or maybe that was just me.  :)

The day of, I made 1.5 more shirts but then ran out of gold paint.  My roommate Lindsey and I went to the distribution center and Joanne’s and I picked some more up.

At 7, Jeff and I headed over to the theater because we heard that people had been camping out.  I think that was a different theater, but it was probably good that we got there so early since we had such a huge group. The theater had 12 showings and so the lines were the 12 districts, which I thought was really clever. We were district 1, the luxury-making district.

Jeff helped me make the last shirt.  You can tell in the picture below which shirts I made by myself and which ones Jeff helped me with.  ;)

 

And then we waited there for a lot longer before anyone else showed up.  Some people showed up at 8:30 but most people showed up about 9:30 when we were let into the theater.

Going into the theater that early was nice because we could get our seats staked out right away, but they never really turned the lights all the way on so you couldn’t see well enough to play any games and it was too difficult to go outside and do things.  So it ended up being a pretty boring wait since all our plans were ruined.  The one good thing was that a couple girls from Jeff and Aaron’s ward brought some bows and arrows so we spent a fair amount of time playing shooting games.  I was surprised no one came in and stopped us.  I tried taking pictures but my flash was crazy bright and annoying everyone and then I realized that I had the camera on manual mode but I thought it was a different mode and so all the pictures are super blurry. Argh.  Still getting used to this thing.  So here are the crappy pictures of waiting.  We ended up having 26 people in our group!

  

I loved the movie.  I thought it was pretty much flawless, although other people didn’t think so.  I could understand people who were annoyed at the filming or whatever, but I couldn’t understand people who thought it was very different than the book.  They left almost nothing out and there just really isn’t a way to film Katniss’ inner thoughts!  I loved it though and had a great time!  Of course I was tired the next day, but I got over that quickly.  The worst part actually was having gold paint all over my hands for the next two days.

The Festival

I almost didn’t go this year.  I’ve been before, and when the day came around, I didn’t really care to go anywhere, much less when it was going to take hours and hours.

But go we did!  My friends were going and I didn’t want to miss out on anything, so Kate and I headed down there to meet up with some of our friends.  It didn’t even take hours!  The Benjamin exit is the key everyone!  We got great parking and there was no traffic. 

I didn’t take my camera into the event, and also decided that I had no desire to be caked this year, so I went up on the upper balconies in the temple and watched the throwing from above.  I’m glad I did.  It was really cool to watch.  We went to the 7pm showing, which we thought would be the least crowded one, but it ended up being the biggest one of the day!

So this was my view (image from internet).  I was standing on one of those terrace things (the one on the left).  It was pretty great AND I could breathe!

Here are some pictures right after.  Unfortunately I didn’t get pictures of the whole group. See how awesome I look since I wasn’t caked!  :)

There wasn’t any traffic on the way out either, although there was tons I guess going the other way.  And then we saw that there was a really pretty sunset so we decided to get out and take some pictures.  The road that we were parked on was semi busy though so when we were taking them by ourselves, we had to wait for a substantial gap between cars and then set our 10 second timer.  There were a lot of attempts, but the last picture here was our best jumping picture result.

Lastly, I finally remembered all that money I spent on an external flash and we took this picture.  Then we were almost run over and we decided it was probably time to leave, especially since the sunset was gone.

Washingtonian Party!

Kirsten from Maple Valley decided that it had been far too long since all us Washington people had gotten together and orchestrated a Washingtonian Party.  It was a big hit!  We all planned it like the couple days before it was supposed to happen although the day and time had been chosen for over a month.  I was in charge of choosing the park.  Jamie and Matt even showed up!  She was excited to see Kristina and Brayden.  Kirsten is leaving on her mission in a few months to Temple Square!

Most of the people were from Maple Valley or were Running Start students at Green River, so I wasn’t very close to most of them but it was really fun anyway.

There were probably about 30 people who came.  This is about half of the group.  We had huge Costco hot dogs that were delicious and played football, frisbee etc. and then went to Tyler’s apartment to play games.  It was a lot of fun to see people I haven’t seen in years, even though they all did running start to graduate early and I’m graduating earlier than them.  ;)

Foiled

Just got back from my last innertube water polo game.  We are finally out of the tournament, which means that I really need to step it up in Run for Your Life if I want an intramural t-shirt.  Bummer. 

It was a really good season.  Jeff and I started the team and wrote down "We were really good two years ago" as our team name.  They didn't like that, so we ended up being Team 95.  We kicked butt all season and then got placed in the highest division, ranked 8th out of about 60-80 teams.  It was quite flattering, but we were hoping we would be in a lower division so that we could have a chance. 

We won our first game of the tournament and then got ROCKED in our second game.  The girls were BYU volleyball players and the guys were even bigger than Jeff.  I think the final score was 80-26.  Very humbling. 

Fortunately, in the highest division, it's double elimination.  We won our next two games and then finally lost tonight.  It wasn't that disappointing though- we'll let another team get the opportunity to lose to the team we got slaughtered by...

It was a super fun season.  I got to play offense and I was a total ball hog though. 

Jamie, Matt, Kaitlan and Josh came to one of our games during the season, so I actually have a few pictures from it.  Thanks for taking them Jame!

 

We decided that we're going to say that we got lost in the semi-finals in the top division.  It was really the semi-finals of the losers bracket of the upper division. Does that count as a lie???  :)

Baby Beckam

My cousin Lindsay had a baby boy this month and they named him Beckam.  Jamie and I went over to visit them when he was just a couple days old, and he seemed about the size of a two week old.  Poor Lindsay… he was 9 lbs 9 oz.  He slept most of the time of course, but he was real sweet and funny when he was awake!

Isn’t he cute in this one?  :)

  Mom sent Lindsay and her husband this onesie.  I think there was an inside joke but I’m not totally sure…

It was fun to see Aunt Marcia!  She is always so fun to talk to.  :)

  And also she is crazy.

Putting more of Jamie’s Personal Life on my Blog

 

Jamie was nice enough to let me come to her ultrasound at 27 weeks.  Here’s Jamie with the goo.  The ultrasound guy was a male, which threw us all off for a couple of seconds, but he was nice and let us see whatever we wanted.

Unfortunately, baby girl wouldn’t let us see her face, but we did get to see her yawn once!  That was super cute.  The picture below is of the heartbeat.  It sounds a little bit more real than it did a couple weeks earlier, but that might just be my memory distortions.

 

Also, that night we went to the Caucus’ in Provo.  We went to a different precinct because one of our friends was running for chair or whatever it’s called, but I don’t even know why we did that because he is always posting anti-Grandpa stuff.  It was a really cool experience though!  And we totally could have voted if we had wanted because they just gave us slips of paper. 

Matt wore a Orrin Hatch shirt and practiced his “if I see [our friend] walk.”  Well, it was more of a strut.  He chickened out when we actually got there and since people were mostly for Dan Lil…, they probably just thought he was weird.  If I had known how the caucus actually worked, I think I would have gone to my own, because it was pretty neat!

Croquet

This face pretty much describes our croquet experience last week:

Our friend Eric was nice enough to invite us to play Croquet with us.  We all dressed like preps and then proceeded to  break practically everything in the set.  It was a cheap set, but between Kaitlan, Jeff, and I, three different pieces to the game.  They were accidents, but we definitely could have avoided all of them.  Poor Eric…  The guy lets us play with him and then we break everything.

Jeff won but I was a close second.  Josh D and Eric came in last while Kate and Kaitlan forfeited about halfway through to do handstands.  Still not really converted to croquet but it was a very interesting experience.

 

Exploit your wives on youtube week.

 

I love these videos. They are super funny, and I don’t think they’re mean at all.  The husbands are so cute about the silliness of their wives.  So if you want to laugh, here are some really funny videos, but try not to get offended. I’m going to give the husbands the benefit of the doubt and assume the wives were totally okay with putting these videos on youtube.

 

I’m a MORMON!

I finally did it everyone.  I got a mormon.org profile!  It was really fun.  :)http://mormon.org/me/51Z5/

The Day Has Come

I love hype.  Which is the reason that I’ve been talking up the Hunger Games midnight showing so much.  I can’t wait for it, not because I can’t go another second without seeing it, but because I love the hype of a bunch of people anticipating something with great excitement.

This may be the farthest I’ve gone though- making t-shirts.  Jeff helped me with mine yesterday, and it went… okay. It' took us a while, but keep in mind that we were just using spray paint and stencils.  We learned how to do it well after awhile so hopefully the ones we do tonight will be way better.

T-minus 14 hours!

BYU Baseball

A little while ago my friends and I decided that it would be fun to be BYU Baseball fans this year.  Baseball is just so fun when it’s really low key and sunny outside.  What we really got was:

Just kidding.  We got just about exactly what we expected.  A semi-warm day (very Seattle-like weather. warm enough but cloudy and chilly whenever there was wind.  we must have made the visiting Seattle University team feel very much at home).  Not much happens in baseball games, but at least you don’t have to watch every single second of it like basketball games so you don’t miss something.

We lost, not that anyone really cares about the actual results of the game.  :)  Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of us at the game except one blurry picture of Geoff and his friend whose husband was the shortstop.  So enjoy these few pictures that show that I actually do things occasionally.

We really liked this kid’s stance.  He was the closer and I think I was taller than him.

Hey! A blurry picture of people!

We can’t wait for the games to show movies after them.  Then we really will be true fans.

In other news, 3 days!

First Day of Teaching

Today was my first day of teaching seminary!  I taught the entire book of Psalms, and made a few rookie mistakes, but I absolutely loved it!  My class is awesome.  I’ve a few kids that don’t seem like they want to be there, but they are all good kids and most of them want to learn.  I have a week off and then I teach for two weeks (every other day).  The class is about 75 minutes long.  During my two weeks, I’ll teach Isaiah 23- Jeremiah 16.  Talk about choosing the wrong year!  I’ve never been more humbled than learning how to teach seminary this semester.  I cannot wait to teach those kids again!

Panaca, Nevada

I will try to finish this trip asap since it has been several weeks now.  Has my new obsession with lightroom effects and collages gotten annoying yet?  Natalie, we just all want to be like you!

Monday morning we played some Hand and Foot with Grandma and Grandpa Grisham and then headed to Panaca, Nevada to take Kate’s car to her uncle’s house to fix.  Panaca is about twice the size as Manila, but still teensy tiny.  We absolutely loved it there!  I think this was everyone’s favorite day of the trip.

When we first got there, I was quite distressed.  I don’t actually remember being distressed, but I must have been because look at my faces!

First, note the movement between these two pictures.  It is obvious that there must have been at least 3 seconds between the first and the second picture.

Yet, my face doesn’t really change.  Does my face look like that in my natural state!?!?!

Jeff was far less distressed and wooed their dog quite quickly.  

Kate’s uncle and aunt decided to give us the grand tour of Panaca.  I’m glad they were in charge because turns out, Panaca is really cool and filled with amazing things!

First, we went to the natural springs.  It was extremely warm, but not like a hot tub or anything, although apparently it’s that way in the summer.  There were like a million little fish in it and they would come up when you held your foot in there for awhile and eat off your toes.  It was super tickly.   I tried to catch one (see below) but gave up after about 5 minutes.  Fast little stinkers.

We were sitting on these stairs on one side of the spring and Bryndee and Josh were at the other end sitting on this sloped concrete wall.  It was extremely stable until it hit the water and then it was pure moss.  I went over to see how their side was and right as I got over there, Bryndee started to slide down the wall.  All the way into the spring!

Poor Bryndee.  She had her phone and camera on her and everything!  Good thing it was a warm spring instead of a freezing cold river.

She can pull off my shorts and Josh D.’s shirt though can’t she?

Meanwhile, I put on a show for Kate.    It had already been a super good day, but then they took us to what was my favorite part of the entire trip: Cathedral Gorge.

Cathedral Gorge is basically clay formations that were hard enough that you could climb on them.  They also had these pathways through them.  Apparently at one point there were Shakespeare plays performed with the formations in the background and the actors would change in the pathways.

You can see that the pathways were pretty skinny.  We went through some tunnels too and there was a wall we could “rock climb” up.  I liked going up it, but I was a total pansy on the way down.  I think I’m pretty afraid of heights.  Arg.

 

Aren't the sand formations amazing!?  Kaitlan said the background to the picture she’s in looks like Star Wars.  Course, she has never seen Star Wars…

We had a great time at this part, and spent well over an hour climbing all around the formations and taking pictures.  About the collage below- Jeff is also our friend, although he disappeared for awhile finding a more hardcore route down.

I love these two girls. They are the best friends that I could ask for and I can’t wait to live with them in the spring again!  Thanks goes to them for such an awesome weekend.  :)

   

On Friday, when we decided we needed more boys on the trip and so I called Jeff, probably the most convincing thing I had to get him to come was the fact that we were going to go 4-wheeling.  Unfortunately, when we got to Panaca, Kate’s uncle told us that he didn’t know if he could get them started up right away since they had sat all the winter without being used.

Jeff was devastated.

So much so that we ended up practically begging Kate’s uncle to get them started.  Luckily he is a saint, so he obliged and so we went 4-wheeling.  Fortunately for you, I’m pretty tired of blogging and so I'll only put a few pictures up.  Here’s one of Kate and Kaitlan at the sand dunes.

There was also this bush that people jump over.  Maybe I should explain that better.  THere’s a pretty significant drop at the end of the sand dune pit.  Here’s a picture of Jeff to show you what I mean:

Anyway so there’s a bush that you run and jump over and since there is that huge edge, when you jump over the bush, you feel like you are jumping off a huge cliff and then you fall a while and then fall into the sand.  It was pretty cool.  One of us wasn’t very good at it though.  Can you guess who?

Here’s everyone’s take-offs.  Don’t they look great!? 

Only one person landed like this:

 

I am so graceful.  I was practically sitting on the bush on the way down I jumped so low…

The last thing we did was go see some chalk caves.  These were really cool.  Apparently the kids have group dates in here after dances or whatever and bring a generator and a projector and watch movies on the walls, which we all thought was amazing.

Then we headed home. We got home at about 11pm, which made it a 3.5 day vacation!  It was nice to get away from homework and out of Provo and it was an awesome trip!