Somebody, somewhere

(Once again I failed to post on a given day!) This April seems busier than all previous collegiate Aprils. I'm spending more time doing schoolwork, more time with friends and more time preparing to leave for New York.

Sunday was basically like Saturday, though. Becca and I spent our day at the Lava Lounge again, complete with more head-to-shoulder leaning, though this time I took the initiative and stole Ben's shoulder before he could steal mine. Our break between sessions of General Conference was spent at Badger's. He held a nice little barbecue for friends in the neighborhood. It was delicious; he's kind of a master chef.

In the afternoon I caught up on some YouTube and other shows I watch on occasion while working on stuff for my InDesign class. When I got bored with my homework I switched over to designing something for fun. This is what I came up with.

 

I feel pretty proud of myself considering it's the first thing I've ever done just because I wanted to do it. My design class has easily become my favorite class of the semester. It turns out I actually have a really interesting sense of design, one that isn't bad in the slightest.

The rest of the night was spent relaxing watching Doctor Who at Lava Lounge and then Community at Peter's. It's awesome to have new episodes of "Who" to watch at Doctor Who night. There's a pretty big group of us who get together which makes it really fun. It's definitely a show that's more entertaining to watch in a group. And watching Community with Peter was great since we hadn't seen each other in almost 5 days which is a lot considering we live right across the street from each other and have all the same friends. But as always, a 20 minute episode of Community always turns into at least another two hours of talking. It seems quite impossible for us to spend less than two or three hours together whenever we see each other, which is going to make for an interesting couple of months while I'm in New York and he's still in Provo. I predict some long phone calls will be happening.

The BYU equivalent of spring break

Since we don't get spring break at BYU, I've decided that General Conference weekend is what we get instead. We get to sit on our couches for hours on Saturday and Sunday, spending time with friends and eating delicious snacks. That's as close to a break as we get here in Utah.

This morning Becca and I went to the Lava Lounge and got a free pancake breakfast! Our friends were nice enough to treat us to that while we watching the morning session of conference. It was great to be spread across all of the couches there with friends enjoying all the talks.

For lunch we all went to Chick-Fil-A and then to the park for a picnic! It was a bit windy so we didn't stay long but it was nice to be outside nonetheless. It's turned into a kind of tradition to have Chick-Fil-A picnics on the Saturday of conference. When we got back to the Lava Lounge after eating, Becca, Ryan, Ben and I ended up crowding around Becca's tablet watching N*SYNC music videos. I hardly know how that happened but it did. All four of us were crammed on, like, three couch cushions so that was fun.

Within minutes of the beginning of the afternoon session of talks, Ryan, who was to Becca's right, and Ben, who was to my left, had managed to get closer to us than they already had been and eventually put their heads on our shoulders. (Ben on mine and Ryan on Becca's.) Usually when you think of heads leaning on shoulders, it's the girls putting their heads onto guys' shoulders, right? Well, not at the Lava Lounge; at the Lava Lounge anything goes when it comes to shoulder leaning. At one point Becca and I made eye contact over both the boys' heads and smiled so big and laughed silently for a few minutes. It might sound strange to say but we both feel quite blessed to have these friends in our lives who are so comfortable with us and with each other that they'll drop their heads on our shoulders without a moment's notice or without even asking if it's all right to do: everyone just knows it is. They're our boys, through and through, the kind of friends that define my time at BYU.

After all that was said and done, Becca and I went grocery shopping (wearing our matching Keens) and made enchiladas for dinner! They were super delicious. We're basically unstoppable food-wise when we make something together.

Hellloooo BEDA

It's that time again! Time to blog every day in April. I very much so like this month for this reason.

Well, I'm going to start with a run down of the weekend.

This was General Conference weekend, for more on that you can visit this place or this one. Basically, it was time for some spiritual rejuvenation. I don't really like when people describe it in that way but it's probably easiest to explain it like that. It was quite lovely, though; I mean, it always is. I got to spend a lot of time w/ my friends/neighbors because of it. Since conference goes for two sessions a day on Saturday and Sunday, I was with them for pretty much all of yesterday.

Once the afternoon session was done yesterday, we went to Cafe Rio and got delicious salads and went on over to the park and had a lovely picnic and watched the sun set. Yesterday was in the high 70s so that was fabulous. We also got ice cream once the sun had gone down.

Then all I did that night was a little homework and I watched Doctor Who. I finally finished series 6. I watched all of them right after they came out up until The Girl Who Waited. After that one, I just kind of . . . didn't watch for whatever reason. Mostly I think it was because I a) got busy with school and stuff and b) the "and stuff" included a great friend who gave me lots of other things to do that were at least as fun, if not more so, than watching Doctor Who alone.

Today I watched conference alone, but that was quite lovely. All of my roommates were gone and it was a time for me to just be by myself. That doesn't happen too often at college.

Tonight was amazing though. A bunch of Wisconsin people got together for dinner at the house of a family who used to live there but now moved to Utah. When I say a bunch I mean at least 15 or 20. The family had so much food for all of us. There was: kabobs with chicken, shrimp, peppers, onions and pineapple; apples with caramel cream cheese dip stuff; carrots, salad and cucumbers; fresh guacamole and corn salsa and chips; oranges and strawberries and yogurt dip; two kinds of cheesecake and chocolate brownies. In short, IT WAS ALL DELICIOUS. Being with Wisconsin people was also fantastic. Pretty much everyone there I've known since I was, like, 12 or younger. It's crazy to think that we're all in college now.

And now I'm just back at my apartment watching YouTube videos and doing a bit more homework. Once the homework is done, I'll be devoting my time to watching Sherlock. These are all great life choices, I know.

As far as school is concerned, the semester is totally and completely over on April 19. That's the last day of exams. Classes end on April 11. I thought last semester went fast but this one went ridiculously quick. It's both exciting and kind of sad. It's exciting because so many more of my friends will be coming home from their missions starting in May. It's sad because yet another year of college has gone by. I'll be a senior in no time. The thing that got me through this semester was the thought of my freshman boys coming back, and now that it's really starting to happen is super weird in the best way.

Until tomorrow! And as you know, I'll be blogging every day this month so if you have any suggestions or things you'd like me to talk about, just let me know.

Last YouTube video I watched: Fun Science Randomness

General Conference

I feel like if you don't know it already we can't have been that good of friends in the first place but in case you didn't I'll tell you now: I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And if you have no idea what I just told you, let's try this on for size: I'm a Mormon. So now you're going, "Ahhh, yes. Oh those Mormons . . ."

Every April and October, the first Saturday and Sunday* of the month are dedicated to something known as General Conference. It's basically a time when the leaders of the LDS Church talk to all the members and anyone else that happens to be watching the right station on satellite/cable, or somehow stumbles upon the lds.org website. They go over stuff like how many members there are, how many missions and missionaries, the number of temples, the number of congregations, which in the LDS world are known as branches and wards. There are currently over 14 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so that's kind of a big number.

Besides a few statistics like that, the current president and prophet (Mmhmm, we definitely have a prophet which is awesome) of the Church, in this case Thomas S. Monson, and his counselors and the Twelve Apostles (Yeah, we totally have those too. Cool, eh?) and some other leaders give these talks, I suppose you could call them speeches. In layman's terms, they're pep talks and reminders and all-around inspirations of goodliness to help us become better people, all the while testifying of Jesus Christ.

The reason I'm saying all this is because General Conference was this past weekend; well, it still is the weekend so it literally just ended. (I mean literally since the last session was barely over two hours ago.) My brother came down from Idaho w/ his girlfriend and stayed the weekend at his best friend's place and we all went together on Saturday afternoon; I even had a date, so fancy that! (My date was actually the aforementioned boy from yesterday's post about basketball.) There's the sweet Conference Center in Salt Lake City where it's held every year; it holds something like 21,000 people. So yeah, you can watch it on TV or the Internet and that's cool but going there is even cooler. (After the session was over then we went and got Culver's, so that was pretty fantastic too.)

This morning, whilst we were watching the morning session, one of our neighbor's came over and she had two tickets she couldn't use so my roommate Mckenna and got dressed all fancy and went up to Salt Lake for the afternoon session. And it was awesome.

So that was my weekend! I don't know if any of that will really make sense to people who aren't LDS who read this but if you do have any questions let me know and I'll clarify to the best of my ability. I tried to make things pretty simple but my version of simple might still be complicated, you know? I don't talk about my religion much unless asked because usually people just don't want to hear it. Religion is cool, though, way interesting and it's the kind of thing that really helps us to understand each other; at least I think it does.

*There's two sessions each day, a morning and an afternoon. And on Saturday night there's one specifically for all the guys.