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!

Sunday

Ah. Those poor kids that camped. It rained almost the whole night. Now, before you start feeling too sorry for them, they knew that the weather forecast predicted rain, but you should pity them a lot because every single girl was against one of the walls and so they all got soaked.  We were nice and warm in our beds.

Sunday we went to a single’s ward in St. George.  It was kind of fun to pick what time we wanted to go, instead of basically any other principle.  We choose 11:00, the college student’s wildest dream time (except for 10:20, which I feel privileged to have experienced).  Our favorite part was when this girl came into Sunday School and made the following announcement. 

Course, like half the class was from our group, so it makes sense that she didn’t know everyone.  She was announcing a games night she was hosting at her house that night. She wrote the address down on the whiteboard, and I turned around and saw Josh D., Jeff, and Kaitlan all writing it down while Kate was signaling for someone to write it down.  Typical.  Of course we were going to go to a games night for a ward we weren’t in…

After church we went to the St. George temple.  I love this temple so much.  I just love everything to do with church history so I can’t help but love this temple.

We all did a really good job remembering our church clothes, except for Josh D. and Jeff forgetting their shoes.  Jeff was so embarrassed and he probably did look funnier than Josh, as Jeff was wearing an entire suit, complete with cuff links, while wearing tennis shoes.

   We spent some time at the St. George visitor’s center.  We were really lucky about the weather- it was great the whole day. Those poor people who camped…  I really recognized one of the sister missionaries who was there, and we couldn’t figure out how we knew each other.  She kept saying that it was probably that we were in the same ward but that she didn’t really remember any of the wards that she was in, but I wanted to tell her that I pretty much knew everyone who has ever been in my wards.
Turns out I was wrong though.  We finally figured it out- she was in my ward. Embarrassing. Fortunately she said that she went to the Pacific Islander ward most of the time, so I had some sort of an excuse.

We ate dinner with Kate and her extended family that night.  Kate and her brother pretty much made the whole meal while we played with their kids.  The dinner was delicious.  Kate is such a great cook.  Afterwards, us single peoples did dishes and put all the food away.  We sang some primary songs to entertain ourselves.  The picture below looks like we’re all talking but I think at this point we were singing the EFY medley or whatever that is called.

After dinner, we went over to the girl’s house for games.  I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but everyone who wrote down the address wrote it down differently.  Fortunately we remembered that it was a “pink house by the football field” so we found it eventually.  We played a few games, but of course we took over pretty quick because we all have humongous personalities to begin with and that ward was pretty passive.  We really truly tried not to take over though, I promise. 

One of the games was”In the Manner of the Adverb,” a game where one person tries to guess the chosen adverb by having people act out different scenarios “in the manner of the adverb.”  It was like pulling teeth.  This is how the choosing of adverbs went:

Josh D.: Ambidextrously!
Kaitlan: Sadistically!
Kate: Robotically!
Chrissy: Victoriously!

Everyone else: Alright, so… meanly?

Needless to say, every round was over super fast because the chosen adverbs were excruciatingly easy.  The acting was like pulling teeth too.  When Josh D. was up, the word was “sadly” and he asked one of the girls to ask some boy out in the manner of the adverb and she said she couldn’t do it.  Then he asked if she would play the guitar, and she said she couldn’t do that either. 

It was a long game.  And so was the next one, even though we tried to stay out of it and let them do their own thing.  Eventually we decided that we just didn’t have fun the same way as everyone else, so we decided it would be best for everyone if we just left.

We found this sign in the middle of the road on the way home.

Then we went to bed, still laughing at the adverb choices.  This is Kate, Kaitlan and I all sleeping in the same bed, which we did for three nights.  Good thing Kate doesn’t mind being in the middle!  The boys slept on the couches/ recliners.