Graduation

Guys I finally graduated.  Only two years after the rest of my high school class.  2015-Doesn’t mean a thing.  Oh well.  The fact that I was graduating meant almost nothing to me until the week of finals.  I didn’t care because I’ll be going back to school pretty much exactly the same time as all the BYU students who aren’t graduating. 

But then during the stress of finals and graduation I had several moments of nostalgia just thinking about where I was as a person when I started college and where I’m at now. 

Here’s a picture of me my very first day at BYU.

Aww. 

Here is me on my graduation day.  This is the only picture I have in my possession where you can see my face. So you can notice the lack of side bangs.  Jk, you can’t see anything because of my sweet hat.

The same:
-I graduated in the major I declared when I arrived on campus.  Whoa.

Different:
-Side bangs
-Likes country music
-Wears skinny jeans (boy did that take a long time though)
-Eats onions
-Pearl earrings instead of Eiffel Tower earrings
-My name, or least what people call me.

On a short, more serious note, a lot of my reflection was based around how grateful I am that I had the chance to attend a University that was just as concerned with my character and my spirituality as my education.  I’d like to think that along with a lot of preferences changing, my character changed even more.  In those moments of reflection, I pondered how my view of the world and my understanding of so many secular knowledge had changed (I didn’t even know what an EEG was 6 years ago), but also how my testimony has grown and changed me as a person. 

So thank you, BYU, for my undergraduate (and soon to be graduate) education. 

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.  ;)