Flashback to bangs and glasses.

This week held nothing super new for me. Work, school, the usual. The highlight came in the form of a facebook group that I discovered- "Mr. Yonce's Class".

When I found this group that consisted of his students (clear back from the 6th grade class of 1972!!) reminiscing about the good ole' days, I almost wept with joy. It was only when I found a few minutes later that Mr Yonce himself had yes, created his own facebook, yes, added me as a friend, and yes, had scanned all of his classes' yearbook photos into a facebook photo album, that my week was made.

Back in sixth grade at Robinson Elementary, Mr Yonce was only the coolest thing since sliced bread. So many memories were created in those walls- the infamous "No-Shoulder Story", desk earthquakes, our class pets (Lenny the Stapler and Rumpelstiltzkin the Squeaky Dolphin), the constant quips about the USC Trojans, and the annual class musical- just to name a few. It is only these wonderful memories that now ease the pain of looking back at photos of my ugly stage...



Good times, good times.

The perks of being a computer lab assistant?

You can surf the web all day at work and look like you're on task...when in reality, you're laughing at stuff like this:

Soo...

yeah it's been a while. I've been pretty lax with my blog posts lately, mostly because it's the only area of my life I can afford to be lax in at the moment, haha. That's what 19 credit hours and 15 work hours a week'll do to you...

BUT. Without any further ado, let me recap my most wonderful Christmas break. I'm going to attempt to use as few words as possible, and let the pictures speak for themselves. Here goes!

In other news...school is wearing me out...and I've only been going now for what, three weeks? Pitiful. It's alright though, life goes on. Other than that...nothing super exciting has happened lately, unfortunately. Unless you count the new weird boy in my ward that tried to hold my hand this week. But unfortunately I'm used to weird boys trying to hold my hand here so I don't really count that as news anymore. Haha. Stay tuned...hopefully I'll have something a bit more entertaining happen to blog about next time :)

Action-packed week.

Funny how you can never find time to do the fun/crazy/unproductive stuff you want to during the semester, but then decide the week of finals that it's absolutely critical that you do it all then, when you have the least amount of time of all and the most to do. It only makes sense.

It all started on Friday the 12th, dubbed "reading day" by BYU in an effort to encourage us students to use our time wisely and study the weekend before finals. Studying...right.

Naturally, the first thing we do Friday morning is organize a birthday ambush for a friend. There may have been a few hitches in the plan, (the victim woke up before we could ambush him and he caught one of us hiding out in his living room that was waiting to jump him) but overall I'd say it went pretty well:

And then it all snowballed from there. Saturday my fish Pierre died :( and we took a joint apartment trip to temple square in Salt Lake:

Sunday we went to church, drove around and looked at ridiculous synchronized Christmas lights:

(click on the picture for more info about the annual display)

and the boys brought us a present/tribute to remind us of our late fish Pierre:

the resemblance is striking...

Monday was Family Home Evening- eating pizza and watching Home Alone, a Christmas must-see.

Tuesday was the first real snow of the year that stuck, so naturally, I was ambushed and bombarded with snowballs when apt 125 knocked on my door and I went to answer. I spent all day at work thinking of ways to get them back, and when I came home that night, we had an apt brainstorm.

If any of you have ever watched The Office, you may recall the episode in which Jim puts Dwight's stapler in jello and leaves it on his desk, and Dwight, being Dwight, freaks out. I have always thought this was hilarious, and I've always wanted an excuse to do something like that. Now I finally did.

That night, Loni and Kirra and I made up some excuse to go over to their apartment to hang out for a little bit. Loni came prepared with her humongous purse, and we proceded to stealthily swipe half of their stuff right out from under their noses. We made off with quite a stash, and lemme tell ya they were TICKED about the remotes and mail key...personally I felt most bad for the poor sap who didn't get to brush his teeth that night. Also for whoever had to fess up to owning the scalp cream...

(The pink razor is mine, hahaha...we thought it added a nice touch, and it would be pretty amusing to have them trying to figure out who's it was in their apartment...)

We figured we'd give them a full 24 hours to start missing all their stuff before we would return it to them bright and early Thursday morning...

in jello.

Yummy...

Revenge has never tasted so sweet...

no pun intended.

Santa Claus is coming...

...to the OACL Christmas party?!??

If I didn't know any better I'd swear he was my boss...Stanley...

Notice the floppy disk ornaments on the tree in the background.

Only at a computer lab party...

Girls Night. Plus Nolan.

Well it's that time of the day. The time of the day when I'm sitting here at work, thinking of all the things I could be studying, but instead find myself here, imagining all the things I want to blog about. So here goes.

This past weekend was amazing, to say the least. For one thing, we finally were able to tear Lanae away from her boyfriend to spend a girls' night with me, Loni, and Arielle. For another thing, we got pedicures (whoooo), ate chinese food (can you say Great Wall of Chocolate Cake at PF Chang's??), and built our very own, precariously-postioned-atop-a -lamp, ready-to-fall-over-at-any-second, watch-movies-under, have-sleepovers-in, what-every-kid-dreams-about, blanket tent!!! Yeah, that's right, you heard me.

We played Disney scene it, sang some kumbaya with Nolan, watched Elf, and eventually fell asleep under the tent. 10 am the next morning...and Loni and Lanae were still out cold...

Also (even though Arielle and I are not pictured here, since we had gotten up 30 minutes earlier) I would like you to notice how Loni and Lanae each got their own mattress, but Arielle and I somehow ended up sharing the pink one. That is roomie love for ya...

Noche de luz, Noche de paz

This Christmas, my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) really wanted to do some good service for some needy families in Provo. We had worked to raise some money over a period of a few weeks, by going around to various apartment complexes and asking for loose change. In just a few short weeks, our ward (church congregation) had raised $1300 in pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, with just my group of 15 raising $1000 of that. We had more than expected, and much more than we knew what to do with. Finally we decided to work through the Sub for Santa organization, where groups of us were assigned a local needy family to buy gifts for. On Saturday, my partner Devin and I (we were in charge of our group) went to the store to buy all kinds of toys, clothes, and books for this family with 4 children. Each family was allotted about $400, which is a lot of money, and Devin and I felt that we were more than generous in picking out gifts on Saturday. When we got to the checkout counter, however, we discovered that we still had $150 to spare! It had been suggested that we buy the family a Christmas tree as well, so we did, as well as decorations, wrapping paper to wrap the gifts in, and a visa gift card with all the leftover money on it.

Now, the point of this story was not to tell all about what we did for this family...the point of it was more to tell about what they did for me.

We showed up last night to deliver the gifts, a little apprehensive because even though they knew we were coming, we were not sure how they'd react to us. We approached the door, opening with a verse of Silent Night. They sat quietly and listened, and there was the special spirit as a few of us finished with a verse in Spanish. God bless the boy in our group who had the foresight to bring a couple of Spanish hymnbooks. You see, the family was Hispanic, and spoke no English. We went in, and while the boys set up the tree, a couple of us girls gathered around the mother and her two adorable little daughters to chat. She was touched by how many of us spoke Spanish and Portugese and were comfortable conversing with the family. I learned a lot of things about them, how they were newly baptized members, how they'd only lived in the area for a few months, but had no family close by, which is why they were so appreciative of the love that we showed them. It almost seemed that our willingness to just talk to her in her native language meant more to her than all the gifts we had brought them.

I came away so happy with not only the service that we had performed that night, but because I know now that there is a reason why I am studying Spanish. I've kind of always known it was the right direction to go with my education, but I'd never really had this gut feeling validated until last night. It was the first time I've ever really had to use my Spanish, but I know that it will not be the last time that I will use it to help others. And I'm grateful for this little family for giving me that opportunity last night to serve them and helping me learn a little more about myself :)