In which my day starts (and ends) happy

I totally forgot to blog on Wednesday and it was only the third day of April! I'm still putting up the post from the 3rd, even though it is the 4th, because I can't just gloss over such a nice day.

I woke up feeling pretty, well, sad and did a great job moping on the way to work at 9. It was a beautiful morning, absolutely perfect really. It was hard to enjoy because all I could think about was how I wouldn't see my Lorraine for 18 months.

As I moped my way to the library, I ran into Peter, almost quite literally as he came up beside me and slightly shoved me. I'm not sure if my moping was just that obvious or if Peter just knows me that well but whatever the case he knew something was up. So I moped to him a little bit about being sad and he gave me some cheesy lines about smiling and being happy and hugged me a couple times before sending me on my way.

It was a small thing for him to stop me and really ask how I was doing. It made my day infinitely better. The rest of the day was spent in class or working on projects. Most days I have very little down time between classes and Wednesdays are no different. I got home from my Utah history class just after 6:30, made some dinner and then hunkered down in my room to get all my homework done. Thursdays are by far my busiest day and there much to get done.

But, of course, the Internet wasn't working! I needed it to finish an InDesign project so I went to the Lava Lounge for a couple hours to finish all my work. I left around 10:15 but I wasn't quite ready to go home yet because I knew I would just mope more if I went to my apartment. Instead I called Peter and spent time with him and his lovely roommates.

As we are prone to doing, Peter and I ended up talking for a long while and stayed up far too late. Kirk and Kyle were a party to this talking/not sleeping as well but they went to bed well before Peter and I. The four of us talked about dreams, their anatomy class, organ donation, medical school, happiness and our weekend plans. I even convinced Kyle to come with me to my friend Chelsea's senior piano recital on Friday night. Ever since freshman year I've been telling Chelsea I would bring a date to her senior recital and I'm actually going to follow through on it. It doesn't really count as a date since it's with Kyle and Peter and I had to do use some persuasion tactics to get him to agree but she'll think it's hilarious no matter what. And as much as I love talking with Kirk and Kyle, talking with Peter alone was even better.

It ended up being a really relaxing night, which is not something I expected. Spending a weeknight with some of my dearest friends was something I needed though I didn't quite realize it at the time. I slept great that night and even though I woke up pretty tired, it was worth it. There are some days when staying up late and talking with friends is worth the hassle the next morning.

Another month of madness done

As yesterday was the NCCA men's basketball championships game, March Madness is officially over. This year was really fun. At first I thought my brackets were going to be terrible but I ended up doing quite well in all of my groups.

For my history class, I ended in 8th place. For the competition done by a local restaurant, I won! This Italian place did a group and I was the winner so I get a free pizza party for me and, like, 10 people. How awesome is that?! And then for the sports desk, I also won. Not a bad year by any means.

Whenever I think of March Madness, I think of my freshman year of college when I completely dominated all the boys I was in a group with. Out of the whole first round, I think I got maybe two games wrong. It was spectacular. They all kind of hated me, or so I was told by a few of them. They literally did not want to see my face in their dorm.

I also think of the last two years and how thanks to my lovely friend Jeff, I've had a place to watch games at all. On any given day of March Madness, I spent around four to six hours in his basement apartment. Sometimes it would be just the two of us; other times his roommates and other friends would be around.

I called my dad right after the tournament started and kind of yelled at him for giving me bad advice on teams, but it turned out in the end. I'll call him tonight to let him know he's taught me well.

Tis kind of a short post today, though I doubt my few readers care much about that. I'm hoping to get a lot of work done tonight on final projects and things of that sort so my last week of classes goes smoothly. I only have two actual exams, and they're on Monday and Tuesday respectively. It should be a lovely exam week.

Last YouTube video I watched: Malachi Our Friend

Pottermore

It's a thing I registered for today. As in, EARLY registration. I will be experiencing it before October. That thought is just incredible.

I figure an explanation of Pottermore is in order. Actually, that might take too long. Just go here. I will tell you that the MORE stands for Massive Online Reading Experience. Awesome, eh?

Once I had registered, my thoughts began to wander towards how much time I will be spending on this site. And I venture it will be more than I spend on either YouTube, Twitter, tumblr, or ESPN. It's probably YouTube that takes up most of it. Pottermore will inevitably become the thing I use for breaks. If I'm on campus writing a big paper and I get tired of it, I'll be on Pottermore. If I'm feeling sad for whatever reason, I'll be on Pottermore. If I don't want to go out on a Friday or Saturday night because I'd rather sit at home alone, I'll be on Pottermore.

I have this thing where I like to look at obnoxious websites while in the library. Well, it's not about obnoxious sites so much as it is about watching MysteryGuitarMan videos on full screen in very public areas of the library. Obviously I have my headphones in but I like to think people get just a little distracted by what I'm watching while they walk past me. My new obnoxious thing? Pottermore.

I'm strangely excited about that fact. I know so many people will be signed up for Pottermore but I have yet to hear of a non-fandom friend who has it. Strike that. I know one, a girl from my journalism class this past year got it. But she's a hardcore tumblr-er so I basically consider her to be completely fandom friendly.

I suppose now is the time that I encourage you all to go sign up for Pottermore. If you still don't get it after looking around the site, I'll explain it to you all in the best way I possibly can.

Last YouTube video I watched: I Love My Brother

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.