Oh how life is interesting

Today was my second day of work at the Creamery on Ninth (known affectionately as the CONE). It went well, it is just such a different working experience from Papa Murphy’s. I work at the Creamery stocking shelves from 5-10 in the morning. Today was tiring because I didn’t get into Provo until after midnight last night. It has been somewhat strange traveling back and forth from Syracuse to Provo to go to work…it almost feels like I have a regular commute to get to work. Thankfully once school starts again that commute will be about 30 seconds instead of an hour.

As far as news goes, today has been a good day. A story that I submitted to MLIA was published, which made me pretty excited, and, even more exciting, I started my mission papers today!! Only roughly 5 months until I leave! It is so weird to think about already getting ready for my mission. It used to seem so far away and now it is so near.

Well, that’s about it for today. School starts up again Monday, but I still have plenty of time to party between now and then. Oh yeah, as an interesting and important note, Jimmer Fredette, BYU’s starting point guard, scored a school record 49 points in the basketball win over Arizona last night. I knew he was a special player, but man, 49 points is pretty amazing! Go Cougs.

Well, so much for that...perhaps a new years resolution is in order.

So, my resolve to blog more regularly pretty much went down in smoke and flames. However, now that the first semester is behind me, it seems now is the time for new year and second semester resolutions. So, I hope that in the coming semester, I can update my blog on a fairly regular basis, such as once every one or two days. Now, this seems rather ambitious, mostly because it is rather ambitious. I just hope I can keep up with this new goal.
Now, as a separate note, this Christmas was rather enjoyable. It seems strange to think of it as my last Christmas before my mission. Where has the time gone? 2010 used to seem so far away and now it is right around the corner. Although the future is always uncertain, I can be fairly certain that 2010 will be a year filled with many new and wonderful adventures. Well, until next time. Go Cougs.

Why does college have to be this way?

Oh College. It seems like every time I am finally on top of things, college turns around and smacks me in the face. Take today for example. Despite waking up late, I was feeling very productive. I got a lot of my homework done, had lunch with my Dad, and then I went to class and everything went downhill. When I got to class everyone was turning something in. I immediately began to panic because I had no idea that anything was due. I checked the syllabus and, sure enough, there was a major assignment due that I had not done any work on. I remembered being assigned this assignment, but for some reason I never made note of the due date. Needless to say, I spent class trying to figure out what to do about my predicament. After class I came back to the dorm and sent an e-mail to the TA explaining my poor planning and general freshman attitude that had resulted in me forgetting my assignment. Then, I just felt like....doing nothing. So that's what I did. I read some, but other than that, all feelings of productivity have left me for the day. It's funny how one single event like that can totally turn my day upside down. I have now started working on my forgotten assignment and I hope I can at least submit it for partial credit. Hopefully I have learned my lesson. On a happier note....well, at this point I don't really know if there is a happier note. I guess the fact that my room mate made dinner tonight helped a little.

On a different note, tomorrow is Wednesday, which means...class all day! Yes! I can't wait. Or maybe I can. Wednesdays are always interesting because I have class from 9-2 and then I have a 5-9 films class at night. My films class is definitely.....different. I feel like it has so much to teach me, but I am barely scratching the surface. I'm trying to apply everything I am learning in that class, and it just seems like too much work. I am trying though, and it really is making a difference in how I view film and the world in general for that matter. I guess I have the professor to thank for that. He is one of the smartest and most eclectic people I have ever met. To me he epitomizes my view of a typical college professor: casual, collected, and absolutely brilliant. Well, I've reached my ten minute post limit. Until next time...Go Cougs! 

A New Outlook

So I've decided to maybe make an attempt at this blog thing again. I've made some changes and I'm going to kind of use this to detail my life as a college student. I'm not sure if I'll have time for this, but I figure I might as well give it a try. My hope is that it will keep people interested informed about my life and it will also help me collect my thoughts about college and share them with other people. Who knows, maybe along the way we can even have some fun :)

Getting ready for college

I just got my new laptop for college today!! It is totally sweet! I'm one step closer to being ready for college...this is crazy. This week I have been cleaning my room of all the junk that I'm not going to need for college. It has amazed me how much stuff I have found that I kept for no real reason. I'm almost done and I've thrown out 6 garbage bags worth of stuff from my room. Crazy. Anyway, I am super excited to get down to college...It's going to be a party!

Spring Break

Southern Utah is, in short, amazing. Zions canyon was absolutely spectacular and today we get to hike in Bryce Canyon. It is amazing how much beauty can be created out of rock. It has been awesome to spend this vacation together as a family and everyone has seemed to enjoy it.


-- Post From My iPod

It's a wonderful thing

I finished my Eagle Project yesterday!!! Now I am totally done except for my board of review! As a gift, my grandparents gave me a car, which is absolutely amazing! It is such a relief to be done with my project. Finally, I can move on to other things.
-- Post From My iPod

On the Brink

I turned in my order today for the supplies I need to complete my Eagle Project. After all was said and done, I raised over $1000 which will purchase enough materials for about 170 kits. I will assemble the kits this Wednesday and I will donate them to the Humanitarian Center on Friday and then I will be done!!! I am so excited to be so close! After this week all I will have left is my Eagle Board of Review!


-- Post From My iPod

Making progress

I am so close!!!! I'm almost done gathering donations for my Eagle Project. I've gathered almost $900 so far and that is great news! My goal is $1000 and I'm almost there. It is so exciting to be this close. I can't wait until I'm done with all my Scout stuff. What a relief that will be.


-- Post From My iPod

Pooper scooper

So my parents received nearly 300 pounds of fermented horse manure from my grandpa last weekend. When they got home from their trip down south, they just left the poop in the car. Well...the other day I was driving the car when I got stopped by a crossing guard. The sudden stop caused the poop to tip. Needless to say, it was a mess! My dad and I spend over an hour cleaning poop out of the expedition. Boy, was that ever fun. Anyway, at least now the inside is well cleaned.

Getting Close

I am now less than a month away from my eighteenth birthday. Not only does that mean that I am less than a month from being an adult, but it also means that I'm less than a month away from the deadline of getting my Eagle Scout. I'm so close that I should be able to finish, I've just got to work hard at it. All I have left is my project and two merit badges. For my project I am going to gather donations and purchase materials for humanitarian education kits and then I'm going to assemble them and donate them to the humanitarian center in Salt Lake. My goal is to be all done with my Eagle by March 21. I hope I make it.

Brynna the Teen

Well, Brynna is an official teenager now! It's kind of scary thinking that we are all teenagers now. Kae Lee is learning how to drive now and Brynna will be there in just a few years. It's weird how fast we seem to grow up.
Brynna's birthday was a lot of fun and she said she really enjoyed it. It was fun to have our gradparents down to celebrate with us. My grandma keeps reminding me that she has a car waiting for me once I get my Eagle Scout. I'm really close, but I'm also really close to my birthday. Hopefully, I can get eveything done in time.

Sweet Success

Woo hoo!!! Our ProStart competition was today and it went amazingly well. Despite one of our team members being sick and not coming, our biggest setback was forgetting tongs. We were able to finish everything in tIme and the plates looked great...even though we only had three people. The critic chefs were very impressed with both our menu and our food...they seemed especially drawn towards the Miso Soup.
The competiion was way fun...but i'm glad it's over. Hopefully we placed but even if we didn't, it was still fun.

Snow and the winter blues

Today has been snow...and snow...and snow...and even some more snow. In fact, I don't think that it has stopped snowing since I woke up this morning. Granted, it hasn't all been HEAVY snow...just some of it has. Then, on top of all the snow, I seem to have caught some kind of icky cold...which just makes the cold and wet outside even more miserable. My head has felt like it's going to explode all day today.
To add to the misery, I had to pay $30 today to apply to weber state university8 so that I could register for my CE English 1010 class. Lame! I thought that I had already been admitted since I has received a letter of admittence. Apparently that doesn't mean I was admitted...for whatever reason. So there was 30 bucks out the window to be admitted to a college I was "already" admitted to. Oh well, what else can I do?
On the bright side, I was admitted to BYU the other day. I'm so excited! I hope to be there this fall entering the pre-animation program there. I'm way excited and hopefully everything works out so that I can be a true blue cougar later this year.

Come On!

Well, we lost our churchball game AGAIN today. Ugh! I don't see why we keep losing! Today we were so close, but we still couldn't pull it off. I don't understand why we can't seem to close out games. We have been drastically outscored in the second half of every game this season. I'm not quite sure why we need to do to change that. It's just frustrating when we dominate in the first half and then fall apart in the second half. Whatever, it's just a game, right?

Just absolutely nuts!!

So work tonight was INSANE!!! We sold like a bajillion pizzas. We have a heart shaped pepperoni pizza on sale for $6.99 and people were buying it like crazy. It was most definately the busiest night we've had in a long time. And tommorrow is supposed to be even worse :( oh well, that is the life of a pizza maker I suppose.

Closing in

So we're closing in on our ProStart competition. It's next Wednesday and so it's pretty much crunch time for us. Today in class we practiced in a mock competition with the other group that is going from our school. It went really well and I think it really helped us prepare for the competition because we had people staring at us and asking us questions the whole time. It was fairly intense.
Overall I think we are ready for the competition, but there is still a lot that we can improve on. Oh well, ready of not competition is headed our way.

Kae Lee is what?!

So I guess Kae Lee is driving now. It's rather frightening. I can't believe that she will be 16 in just a few months...that's crazy!!! All I know is that as soon as she gets her license, I'm going to avoid the roads at all costs. Actually, my parents claim that she is a good driver. I just haven't has the chance to see for myself yet. She hasn't run a stopsign yet, which is more than I could say at her age. Who knows, maybe she'll turn out to be a better driver than any of us think.

Sweet iPod

So I haven't written in a while and that's mostly because I've been distracted with my new iPod touch. It's awesome!!! In fact, i'm making this post from it right now! It's way sweet. We forfeited our basketball game on Saturday because I had to work so only 4 players showed up. It was a bummer but oh well...we'll get them next time. Oh ya, it's been snowing all day today which is kind of lame because all the snow was almost gone and I need the snow to me gone to do my Eagle Project. It also managed to turn the high school parking lot into a small lake. Which we then had to wade across to leave school. It was ridiculous. But, oh well.

Basketball

This week is sophomore appreciation week at school, which is pretty much amazing for the seniors and juniors. It basically means, the sophomores have to come to school at 7:30 and take the UBSCT tests while the seniors and juniors get late start and don't have to come until 9:30. Thanks sophomores.
This morning I made good use of my time and went to the community center and played basketball for and hour and a half. There wasn't anyone else there (well, except for an early morning Pilates class, and I wasn't about to invite them for a game of pickup basketball) so I just shot around by myself. It was good practice, and I feel a little more confident in my shot. Hopefully it will show in this Saturday's church ball game.

Bummer Man

Today we had our 3rd churchball game. We lost. I was pretty mad about it, but that's just how I am. We played a team that we definitely should have beat, we just couldn't make the plays down the stretch. Now we're at 1-2 and I am definitely not happy about it. Although I can't blame the loss on just one person, I can't help but realize that I didn't score at all in the second half. I need to work on that. We have been outscored in the second half of every game this season. Well, I guess I'll just have to work harder.
On another note, I have semi-accepted my seminary teacher, Brother John's, challenge. His challenge is this: 25,000 push ups by graduation in June...its about 250 push ups a day. Ya, that's quite a bit, but I'm up for it.

YUM!

Today in ProStart we decided to go through and do our entire competition menu which includes teriyaki salmon on a bed of sauted vegetables with yam frites on top and chive garnishes, a miso soup, and apple wantons for dessert. Everything turned out really well, except for...when Zach (the head banded one) was getting ready to deep fry the yams, I told him he had too much oil in the pot. So...he took a cup and removed some of the oil. I still thought he had too much, but I didn't say anything. When he put the yams in the oil, it boiled over the pot, onto the stove, and created a small lake...of 400 degree oil. Well, needless to say, since none of us got hurt, this episode was quite humorous.
But, besides that one setback, everything went really well. The competition is looming (sometime mid February) but I think we'll be ready for it.

You mean I HAVE to take this class?

So apparently here in Utah they have this weird rule that says you have to take a Fit For Life class to graduate. It's basically a very very basic PE class. I mean come on! I'm a senior here and I've had weight training...doesn't that count? Well, according to my councilor, no ninth grade weight training does not fulfill the Fit For Life requirement. Lame. So now I'm in this Fit For Life class that's all sophomores, a couple of juniors, and like 4 seniors.
Today we had our fitness test to see where we stand now and then we'll do it again at the end of the class to see how much we've improved. I managed to grind out 32 push ups in a minute and 50 sit ups in a minute. I was kinda bummed because I had worked out before going to school, so my arms were tired and I wasn't able to do as many push ups as I could have but whatever, it just leaves me room for improvement right?
Well, hopefully this class turns out to be better than it's looking like right now, but I'll just have to wait and see. Oh yea, and the worst part is, it's the first class of the day! Honestly, let me just get all that blood pumping at 7:30 in the morning. Jeeze.

Owie!

So I was thinking that my blog looked pretty empty, and I remembered something disastrous that happened today. So, I was in my ProStart class (It's a competitive cooking class) and I was sauteing some vegetables for our Teriyaki Salmon plate. Well, I was minding my own business when Keegan, one of my group members, came up and scraped some pepper seeds into the vegetables with a knife. As he was scraping the knife blade off on the pan's edge, he managed to slice my knuckle. OW! It hurt. I started gushing blood and screaming my head off. Well, not really. I didn't scream, but it was bleeding a little bit. I think I ruined one of the dish towels with my blood. Anyway, now I have this nice cut on my knuckle, and I'm sure it's going to hurt like a beast in a few days, but whatever.

Woot! I'm a blogger (whatever that means)

So my mom started a Blog, and I thought Hey, that's pretty nifty. Naturally, I couldn't let her get too far technologically ahead of me, so now I've started my own. Hopefully, this becomes something pretty cool, but who knows. Guess I'll just have to see what happens with it. Anyway, so far, it's pretty neat to be a Blogger.