Two More Weeks!

There are only two more weeks of classes, finals, bowl game, and then I'm going home for Christmas! It's officially the Christmas season now that Thanksgiving is over and I'm definitely feeling it. I went to Don and Debra's place for Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving I help them decorate their house for Christmas. Now that I'm home, Ashley and I are playing Christmas music and slowly decorating the apartment. Ashley had some nice window Holiday stickers and she already put them up. Aww, I love Christmas so much. I'm so looking forward to going back home and being back with my family and seeing how much my nephews and neice have grown! Yay!

While I was at Don and Debra's house, I made some of Mom's delicious chocolate cream pie! Debra just asked what my favorite pie was, and I told her that chocolate cream pie was among my favorite. She immediately followed my answer with, "Do you want to make it?" Uhh, sure! Why not? So, I called my mom to get the exact recipe and ended up making it all from scratch Thanksgiving morning. Well, I didn't make the crust. Debra had some graham cracker crust she had bought and I just used that. I think it probably would've tasted much better with regular crust, but it was still delicious. I just ate the crust first and then would enjoy the wonderful taste of the chocolate cream. MMmm... so yummy. We had a total of 9 pies! It totally reminded me of home, and I even got to participate in the pie making! They had two pumpkin, two apple, two lemon meringue, my chocolate cream, and two pecan pies. Wow! It was great stuff. Thanksgiving is good times. :) It was even better that the food was free. :P

Right now it's just a survival game until the end of the semester. I had my 4th and hopefully final pace test for Sight Singing right before the break. Then there's one more dictation pace test (which I got an A- on the last one! Wow!) and then I have my Music Theory project/final to do. There's one more Calculus midterm and then the final, my jury, and then that's it! Well, I have a final project for my Music Education class, too, but I've basically finished that. I taught all of my lessons, and now it's just a matter of commenting on how I did and getting peer feedback. Which, I already gave my videos to two people to review. Speaking of which... I need to do that for someone else. Fun for me!

I gave a talk today in church. I got a call Friday evening from the Bishop while I was at Don and Debra's place asking if I could speak in church. Something about the Spirit... so I ended up speaking on "listening to the Spirit." There were four speakers, and the other three talked about being "led by the Spirit", "following the Spirit", and "living by the Spirit." I think he did tell us all the same thing, but we all ended up remembering it differently. He told me Friday and I didn't end up preparing it until Saturday night. Don't call me on procrastinating that... I usually end up writing talks the morning of. :P It turned out alright, though. I ended up telling about 3 or 4 stories to apply the topic I was trying to talk about. They always tell us in our Music Education class that there should be little information and a lot of application. You actually remember more and learn from the application more than lecture. And it's just more fun to listen to stories in Sacrement meeting than someone reading a General Conference talk to you again. I got compliments from people about it, so I guess it turned out alright. :) I was surprisingly not that nervous. I think all these performances they make me do as a music major are helping me not be nervous when I perform or whenever I speak. It's nice.

I should really try to finish some of my homework so I can try to get some sleep tonight! Yay for sleep! :)

I Fail

I was doing so well at updating this every Sunday, and then I missed last Sunday! Fail! Oh well, here I am updating on a Tuesday night. I'm now free for a week! No more classes until next Monday. Good times. Most of my classes today were cancelled. It's funny because I think they were cancelled more because the professors knew that hardly anyone was planning on coming to class anyway. I would've gone, but oh well. I'll take the free time. :) I ended up just programming a calculator in my free time... yeah, I'm that big of a nerd. I'm working on a calculator with lots of complex functions. So far I've got it getting any sort of root (square root, cube root, 4th root, etc), inverse, power, factorial, and now I'm working on getting the log to work. Ugh, it's so hard. I'll get it figured out eventually. It's just so much fun! :)

The plan for this week is to go to my Aunt and Uncle's place (Don and Debra) for Thanksgiving. It should be fun. Free food, fun, and just being with family. Even if it isn't my direct family... it's just under a month until I'll be back for Christmas and be able to see them again. :) My mom sent me pictures today from a family get together this past Saturday. Everyone in our family was able to come (all the kids, their spouses and their kids) except for me. That was kind of sad to think about, but the pictures were all freakin' adorable! How did I get the cutests nephews and niece in the world?? Man, it's awesome. I'm so looking forward to seeing them all again this Christmas. Good times!

My excuse for not updating on Sunday is that I was having dinner with some family! I met up with my Aunt Bonnie and some of her kids (Jonathan, Jared, and Alena) along with Jeff and Nicole and their kids, Grandpa B, and Kristie and her daughter! Shawn and Coby weren't able to come because Coby wasn't feeling very well. It was so much fun! We had this awesome dinner of potato cream soup with some topping stuff (bacon bits, cheese, and green onions) and this delicious salad and some jello salad. Then there was dessert: cheesecake and pumkin chocolate chip cookies. Mmm... it was fun to see everyone again. After a lot of people had left and Jared was waiting for his laundry to finish (LOL... couldn't pass up the opportunity to do laundry for free), we played Apples to Apples. Such good times. It's great having family up here. Jeff reminded me a lot of my dad and Bonnie reminded me a lot of my mom.

So this Saturday was the rival game between Utah and BYU... long story short, BYU lost 48-24. At the half we were only behind 24-27. Just a field goal! Then Max Hall, the BYU quarterback, fumbled it which led to a touchdown by Utah. That just seemed to get him down and he ended up throwing about 5 interceptions after that... almost all of them leading the Utah scoring somehow. I've got to say, many of the Utah fans are just not nice. I was honestly scared wearing a BYU marching band uniform while being in that stadium. One of their favorite things to do was to give us the finger. It seemed like when Utah would make a good play they would cheer at us to rub it in our face more than to cheer on their team. We had this combined show with the Utah band and they were all really nice. One of their Saxphone players started singing, "Why can't we be friends..." So true! Why not? Man, they were all great people. It was fun performing with them. I remember one person looking at me and saying, "I'm sorry... " Oh, is this person actually being nice!? "...I'm sorry that you go to BYU." Oh, just kidding. He couldn't have the class to just respect me as a person. Oh well... at least I can sleep at the night knowing that I'm not rude to the Utah people.

Okay, I should try to finish my Smallville Rambling for the most recent episode, Bride, before I leave to Debra's place. It's gonna be so freakin' long... so much to talk about!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!