Pictures

Here's the pictures from this week!

These were taken at Mr. BYU. In the bottom picture, you can kind of see them dressed in their sportswear... the Harry Potter guy is the sixth from the right. One guy had a little basketball hoop taped to his head, and another dressed up as Hansel from Zoolander, and he had a little scooter. :]
This was outside the theater, waiting for them to let us in to see Twilight. Julie was doing her Calculus homework while we were waiting. :]
Krista wasn't too happy that it was so cold. :]
Somers practically froze to death, so we had to huddle together for warmth.
I had leftoever whipped cream when I was making the blueberry surprise, so Mallory made a little boat with sailors out of a frozen mango slice, frozen blueberries, and a frozen grape. :}
This is Dejango, Dustin's toy poodle. He's fully grown. :]
Oh, he's so cute!!!
Our Thanksgiving dinner table!
This was taken after Julie came back from a date with Alan... and he kissed her for the first time. She was so excited, she couldn't stop smiling.
She is just too cute! She kept laughing and jumping up and down, she was so excited.

That's all of the pictures I have from this weekend!

-Cate

Exciting Stuff

Hello!

So this week has been pretty fun. Other than the two tests I studied like crazy for and took (and passed with a fairly good grade, if I do say so myself :} ), we've been having a blast here. On Wednesday we had our Thanksgiving dinner which was delicious! I made the cranberry sauce, cheesy potatoes, and blueberry surprise, which was a huge hit. We didn't actually have a turkey, which we were planning on, because when Somers, Julie, and I went to Walmart to get it, we passed by the deli and saw the precooked and flavored turkey breast.... so we just bought some mesquite smoked turkey breast. :]

Thursday night we went to go see Twilight... which... I refuse to form an opinion on until I see it again. We stood outside in the freezing cold for a half hour before they let us in. We didn't know we'd be standing outside, nor did we think it would get that cold, because it's been pretty warm lately. So we didn't bundle up and it was about 25 degrees outside, and we were freezing to death. When they finally let us in, we found out that you had to redeem your online tickets at the concession stand, but they'd had the building LOCKED before, so we lost our place in line because we had to get out and redeem our tickets since they hadn't let us do it before, and we ended up having to sit in the second row. So we weren't too happy about that--I mean, we'd gotten there two and a half hours early to get a good spot, and then we'd had to get out of line to redeem our tickets. So we were really close, and we were all really tired, and there were some little junior high girls screaming their heads off like, an HOUR before the movie even started, which, you know... after hearing them scream for about two hours, it gets really, really old. So we weren't in the best of moods when the movie finally STARTED... so I'm refusing to form an opinion on the movie until I see it again when I'm not standing in the cold, I'm awake, and when there aren't a bunch of girls screaming and giving me a headache. :]

Anyways, then Friday was a lot of fun. I actually woke up EARLY... and was wide awake. It was... really weird, since I'd gone to bed at 3 because of the movie, and then I was awake ALL day. Really weird. I didn't even take my daily nap. :}

In the evening we walked off campus to Papa John's and got some pizza, since Julie owed us. We have a rule in our apartment that if a guy holds your hand, you owe everyone skittles or M&Ms. If you kiss, then you owe pizza or ice cream, and if you get engaged, you owe a steak dinner. So Julie owed us m&ms AND pizza in the same week... so we'd already gotten m&ms and we just had our pizza party yesterday. :] But we ate it really quickly while walking back to campus because last night was also Mr. BYU, and so we wanted to get there early and get good seats.

Mr. BYU was hilarious. It was a mock pageant, and there were 12 guys that had to perform a talent, pose in their sportswear, and then answer a question. It was HILARIOUS. There was one guy who, for his talent, did the dance that Napolean Dynamite does in the talent show, and then he sang a song. And for his sportswear, he dressed up as Harry Potter and had a snitch attached to his hand on a wire so it looked like he was reaching for it. He was the second runner up. The first place winner was this really dorky guy who was SOOO funny. For his talent, he pretty much did a stand up comedy act, and sang a song (but the song wasn't serious--he'd changed the words to another song and made it funny). And his sportswear was a cross between karate and tennis, because, as he explained, he needed both cardio and weight training... so the karate was for cardio and the tennis for weight training. :] He ended up winning $150 dollars, a $60 gift certificate to Outback Steakhouse, and two tickets to the big game today against U of U.

Afterwards we met up with Alan Miller (from our ward) and one of his roommates, Brendon, and we took a bunch of blankets out to the DT fields and watched Ferris Bueler's Day Off. It was REALLY cold... we were all bundled up in jackets and hats and gloves and blankets, but we were still freezing. Julie was out with Alan (Rosenhan), and so she didn't come with us, and Mallory has been in Salt Lake City since early Thursday, and we'll be meeting up with her tonight at the Coldplay concert in Salt Lake. So we had Somers, Krista, me, Alden, Jackson, Brendon, and Alan watching the movie. After the movie I made some hot chocolate and Jackson, Alan, and I sat outside my building just talking until about 3, at which time I decided that since I'd stayed up till 3 the previous morning, I should probably go to bed... yet strangely, I was STILL fully awake after only getting 5 hours of sleep and missing my nap... odd.

Of course, I made up for that by sleeping in till 11 today... :] It's been a pretty relaxing day so far... I dyed my hair, took my time getting ready, did some laundry... I need to start packing as soon as my laundry is done. I think this is the first time I'm excited for PACKING. :]

Dustin just dropped by to pick up McKenzie for the football game, and he brought his ADORABLE little toy poodle, Dejango, and we got to play with him. He's so CUTE!!!

I'll have to upload the pictures from this weekend later because they're loading REALLY slowly at the moment.

I can't wait to go home tomorrow!!!

-Cate

Oh How Pretty Are The Mountains!!!

Hello!!!

Well, I just uploaded photos from my phone yesterday and realized I had a bunch of really old ones... and some new. So here they are. :]This is what the mountains look like right now... They used to be completely covered, because it used to be in the mid-twenties, but it's gotten a LOT hotter these past two weeks, which I'm not liking so much. It averages about mid-forties now, but this week is supposed to get all the way up to 60! Blech! :]
This past fast Sunday, Scott invited us to his ward's break-the-fast, because they were having a chili cook off. His chili got first place, and it was definitely the best!
This is at Brother McQuarrie's house, the week of Halloween when we went over and watched When A Stranger Calls. This is just his entertainment room.
The other side of the entertainment room... Eric and Julie were having a lot of fun on the workout machines. :]
And this is the giant screen we got to use to watch the movie. It was amazing.
There was also a little bar, that Brother McQuarrie stocked up with ice cream, fudge, caramel, bananas, whipped cream, and soda. That's Alan and Mallory doing.... who knows what. :]
This was at our homecoming kickoff. Yay marching band!!!

Well, this past week/weekend has been... interesting. The whole week, I was pretty much in the library again... I think I managed to get about 8 hours of studying in the library this week, which is less than last week... When I wasn't in the library studying, I was in my room studying, or at the lab for my physics class, or at a review session, or something like that. I've pretty much been a recluse these past two weeks due to studying. :]

And this weekend, I was just so relieved that it was the weekend that I vegged. Friday I spent most of the day studying so I could take my physics test that night, but I wasn't ready to take the test by then, so I decided to put it off till today. Mallory and I stayed up Friday night watching movies, and then Saturday... was slightly disappointing. Krista's ballroom class was having a show, and so we all woke up early to go see it. However, Krista and Somers forgot to tell Mallory and I that it cost MONEY to see it, and so we went to go meet them (mind you, this is at 8:30 in the morning on a SATURDAY), and discovered we couldn't see the show because we didn't have money... so we went back to the apartment, dead tired, and pretty much... the rest of the day I just slept/watched movies. :] It was just one of those days that I needed to do absolutely nothing so I could relax....

After church on Sunday, I immediately went back to sleep and didn't wake up till 5:30, which was perfect because that's when I needed to get up to start making dinner, since I was making lasagna rolls for our Sunday dinner.

We also went over to our basement buddies' apartment and helped them crumple up newspaper for a prank. They're having a prank war with two of the boys' apartments in our ward, and they've been using us as spies since the guys don't know we're in on it and we can easily just walk around and listen in on them. So the girls, to get back at the guys for A. throwing anchovies in their apartment and B. pouring soup in basically everything and C. filling their stairwell with leaves so that they couldn't get inside, have been collecting newspapers for about two weeks now, and they are going to crumple them all up, and then fill their apartments with newspaper about waist high. Not only are they going to fill it up with newspaper, they're also going to put water balloons all over the ground in the apartment, and the guys won't be able to see them because its covered with newspaper, and so they'll step all over the water balloons, pop them, and then get the newspaper all soggy. I think they might also be planning to put raspberry jello in their shampoo so that it turns their hair red when they wash it... :]

Anyways, so we went over last night to help crumple up newspapers because they're doing it tonight. They have so much! Their entire kitchen is full, as well as one of the girl's rooms, and they've bagged a bunch of the newspaper up so that they can actually move around THEIR apartment. We're planning on helping them take everything over and dump it today, but we found out last night that for FHE, we're supposed to be going to Brother McQuarrie's house at 7... and the prank is at 7:30, which can't be changed because the guys will be going to the Bishop's storehouse at 7:20, so the apartment will be empty. So... we'll see what happens. :]

And now I have to get back to studying for my tests... blech!

Only six more days until I come home!!!

-Cate

Weekend Fun/FHE

Hello!

So I don't have any pictures from this weekend... sorry! It was a slower weekend, which was relaxing. Saturday we watched the football game, and then that night Somers, Mallory, and I joined Alan and Eric, and a bunch of other people from our ward to watch Superstar out in the Deseret Towers field. There was Eric, Alan, Eric Thayne, Megan (who is from Lodi, where we always have a band review each year :] ), Jesse Dean, Spencer, Nathan, and one other guy I don't know... I don't know if he's in our ward. Anyways, we all brought a bunch of blankets and pillows, and Spencer brought a big carpet that we laid out on the grass (which was REALLY wet after it snowed and rained this week!) and then we all just bundled up in our blankets and laid down on the grass and used a random wooden crate we found on the field as a table for the laptop. Krista and Callee decided to stay home and watch Intolerable Cruelty cause they were too tired to go out, even though all we were doing was laying down on the field. :]

Anyways, it got REALLY cold, so we all had to huddle together for warmth, and when the movie was over, we all just laid there for about two hours talking and goofing around. It was too cold to get up and leave the warmth of the group huddle, and we were too tired to get up. But once it hit 2 AM and we realized we had to get up for church in the morning, we all grudgingly got up and went back home. When we got back, Mallory and I made up some hot chocolate and watched some TV for a bit.

Sunday we had two of Julie's friends over for dinner. Joe and Patrick. Joe met Julie because he was in the same ROTC program here as her brother, Nathan, and then Joe went on his mission to Siberia, and then Nathan got called to the same mission and Joe was Nathan's district leader. Small world. :] And Patrick is Joe's roommate... Julie had never met him before, actually. Anyways, they were a lot of fun... total goofballs. We had twice baked potatoes that were HEAVENLY. They were SOOOO good!!! After they left I started working on my three papers for Book of Mormon that were due the next day... :] I am SUCH a procrastinator! But they were easy papers and didn't take that long to write. It was all based on your own experience, so it's not like I had to research anything.

And Sunday night/Monday morning I signed up for my classes for next semester! Yay! I think I like my schedule... I think. :] I'm not entirely sure because I have two night classes, and I'm not so sure how I'll like that, but I think my schedule will be nice. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I don't have class until 10, which will be nice, since I've discovered I absolutely LOATHE 8 AM classes. :] And I'll be starting those days with Social/Cultural Anthropology, which should be really interesting. After that class I have American Heritage at 11 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and then at 10 on Thursdays, and then Biology at 12 MWF. And then on Wednesdays I have one of my night classes, which is Book of Mormon at 5. By taking the night class, I only have it once a week. And even though its a two hour class, I'd rather have it once a week for two hours than twice a week for one hour. And I'm taking it with Mallory, so we'll have each other's company for those two hours :] Tuesdays and Thursdays are going to be hard for me, I think. My Empirical Methods in English Linguistics class is only offered at 8 AM TTH. Yuck... I got the second to last spot in the class, which was a huge relief! But I can come home after that class and go to sleep, cause I don't have any other classes besides my night class that day. Except Thursday, when I have American Heritage at 10. So I can take a half hour nap in the library :] And TTH at 4 I have my Basic Humanities Computing Skills class, which I'm really looking forward to. So it SHOULD be fun. The more I look at it, it doesn't look that bad. I mean, I was worried that it was 17 credits, but I only have one more class next semester than I do this one, and I've been told that my BofM professor is really easy, and so is Anthropology. We'll see. :]

Anyways, last night for FHE we went over to the boys' apartment and played games. Most people went to the lobby to play some game, but I was really tired and the game involved running around, so I just stayed in the living room with Mitch, Whitney, and Whitney's boyfriend and we played Super Smash Brothers Brawl, cause Mitch brought his Wii with him. :] And then we watched Heroes at 8, which was AMAZING!

I don't think I've ever explained about Mitch. Mitch just recently transferred into our ward. I'd actually met him randomly one weekend, and then about two weeks ago he switched rooms and moved in with Greg, our FHE dad. Apparently he and his roommate were having issues, so Mitch moved. Anyways, as a result of Mitch moving into their apartment, they now have another couch, a TV, a Wii, and surround sound. :] And now we have four boys in our FHE group again. We have the smallest FHE group in the ward. I have no idea why their apartment only has 4 people, because they're supposed to have 6. Whatever. It's a mystery. :]

-Cate

Glad THAT'S Over!!!

Hello!

Well, this week has been VERY stressful. I had three exams and a paper due in anthropology, plus two homework assignments for anthropology on the same day as the paper... yuck. It also didn't help that I had the attention span of a fly this week, and so studying and doing my work was definitely a struggle. I did get it done though! :]

I discovered the wonderful world of the library this week... yeah. I don't like libraries, since of course, I don't like to be quiet. :]

But I couldn't focus at home, and so I grudgingly packed up all my stuff and trudged through the cold to the library to study. Tuesday I spent about three hours there...Wednesday I spent four hours there... and Thursday I spent another four hours... and I am definitely not wanting to go back after spending 11 hours in the library. Just saying that makes me shudder :]

Of course, there IS the no silent zone, where I COULD talk... but I like to go to the periodicals section where they have comfy lounge chairs and just listen to my ipod while I work. I've also discovered how amusing the periodicals section can be... Alden introduced the amazing technology of the sliding bookcases to me, and so we all had a lot of fun trying to trick the system into believing no one was standing inbetween the bookcases, and see if they would start moving. We managed to get it to work once... but as soon as Alden moved to run down the aisle, it stopped. So... no Indiana Jones moments in the periodicals. :]

When it hit Friday, it didn't even feel like the weekend because I still had to take my ELANG test after classes, and I studied for a few hours beforehand... so my weekend didn't start until about 5... But as soon as I finished my exam, I was SO relieved that I finally had a break!

Of course, this break isn't going to last for very long, seeing as I have three papers due in ONE class on Monday, as well as a physics exam next week. Yuck..... I'll be spending more time in the library, that's for sure.

Oh, but it WAS amusing on Wednesday night in the library because Krista, Julie, and I stayed until the library closed at midnight, and at 11:45 this announcement came on telling us to leave or else if we tried to hide in the library, we'd be fined. And then they started playing this AWFUL music to make everyone leave. :]

Anyways, after my exam on Friday, Krista and Julie's friend, Callee, who is attending UofU came to visit, and she's staying with us this weekend. So Callee came and then a big group of us went to see Wall-E since they're playing it in the Varsity Theatre for a dollar :] Afterwards we all came back to our apartment and talked for a while, until some guys from UofU that Krista and Julie grew up with came over and took Krista, Callee, and Somers back to the Marriott hotel to go swimming. Mallory, Jackson, and I didn't feel like swimming, so we stayed behind, and Julie went out to dinner with Alan. So Jackson took Mallory and I to Taco Bell (gourmet dining, I know :] ), and then we went to his apartment and watched The Princess Bride cause he's never seen it. And... then we just came back to our apartment and sat outside talking for a few hours, since it was past curfew. After sufficiently freezing outside in the cold (we didn't bundle up as usual cause yesterday was pretty warm... and I'm being dead serious when I say that it was warm when it was 45 degrees outside... I've adjusted pretty quickly to the weather, surprisingly enough, and so it's a warm day when it's in the 40s. No need for a scarf or gloves, unless its really windy. :] )

Anyways, so Mallory and I hadn't bundled up cause it was warm earlier, but it got down to about 35 while we were standing out there, so we froze just a bit :] We made up a bunch of hot chocolate once we got inside and bundled up in blankets and watched a few episodes of Avatar... our guilty pleasure. I think we ended up going to bed at about 4:30... Didn't wake up till 11 today. :] And basically all that's happened today is I've gotten dressed and watched the football game. :] I'm sad I don't have tickets to the game because Cameron, Mallory's friend, said that the field show is supposed to be spectacular today (he plays french horn for marching band). And they don't show the halftime show on TV... boo.... oh well.

Oh, and I have also discovered the wonderful world of hot curlers this week. :] Julie brought hers back from Idaho when she went home, and I used them and they're AMAZING! :] I don't have to do my hair in the morning if I use them at night, which cuts out a whole ten minutes of my getting ready time before class. And they curl my hair so nicely, its just wonderful. :]

Anyways, so I have no idea what's in store for tonight... TOmorrow I know we're having some people over from dinner... I think Julie said that one of them was her brother's roommate when he was a freshman here... I don't think I ever mentioned it, but Julie's brother is on his mission in SIBERIA. Yeah. Currently he's in Russia, and he's sent her some pretty cool stuff from Russia. But anyways, so I DO believe that the guy coming over tomorrow is his roommate from before he left on his mission, and the guys current roommates. But I'm not entirely sure... All I know for sure is that they're Julie's friends, and they're coming over for dinner. :]

Well, I can't wait to come home!!! It's going to be so weird, hearing babies cry in church and being in a HOME again and seeing little kids... :] Only 14 more days!!!

-Cate

Halloween/Military Ball

Hello!

Well, this week has definitely been a blast. A scary movie per night and lots of Halloween fun! For Halloween we were planning on having little kids come trick-or-treat at our apartment, but we stayed out shopping (for our last minute costumes) too long and missed the time. So we hurried to get into costume and then went to the Halloween Hollywood party at the Heritage central building. Here's some pictures of our costumes...
Mr. Green with a wrench...Colonel Mustard with a HUGE neon colored revolver... :] You can see me in the back as Miss Scarlet... I don't have any pictures of just me, so I'll have to wait until I can get them from the others.And I just loved this close up of Mallory as Colonel Mustard... she is SO creative with her costumes. None of us could have pulled off Colonel Mustard like she did. Of course, none of us would have wanted to glue cotton balls to our face, either. Mallory didn't think about how painful it would be to take off the cotton balls glued to her eyebrows... :]
Mrs. White, cleaning the kitchen... her lead pipe is somewhere...
Mrs. Peacock with a rope...
Professor Plum with a candlestick.

I had the knife tied to my calf... but it kept falling off, even though we looped it through my fishnet stockings, so I ended up tying it to my wrist, which STILL didn't work that well.
And here is the whole Clue gang :]

Anyways, the party looked like fun, but a lot of people in our group were tired and didn't want to stay, so we ended up inviting over a bunch of people and recreated our movie/sleepover setup in the kitchen, complete with three mattresses and the couch on top of the table again. We watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and a little over half of Wallace and Grommit and the Curse of the Wererabbit. Here's some pictures of the people there...This is Alan (Julie's friend Alan, not the Alan who drove us to watch the movie).
This is Cameron, a guy from our ward, and one of Mallory's friends.
Here's most of the people who came over... There's Waldo (from Where's Waldo?), a baby, a fairy, a guy who didn't dress up (Matt), and Pepper Potts (from Iron Man).
Julie on top of the couch on top of the table... :]

Unfortunately, curfew rolled around before the Wallace and Grommit movie was over, and so we had to kick out the guys and some of the girls left with them... and then we just never started the movie again. But we had two other friends come over to visit, Eric and Alan, and we just sat in the doorway of our apartment to talk to them. After about an hour we decided we really wanted to watch a scary movie on Halloween of all nights--but it was past curfew, so they couldn't come inside, and we aren't allowed to watch movies in the lobby because there's legal issues involved. So we piled a bunch of us into Alan's tiny car and drove to the park just a little off campus where there is a picnic area with an overhang and a little stage. We made ourselves cozy with a bunch of blankets on the stage and watched Prom Night (which really wasn't scary at all--Somers, Mallory, and I have yet to see a scary movie since coming here that actually scares us).

We ended up coming home at about 3:30 in the morning, and then us girlies piled onto our mattresses in the kitchen for a sleepover. Of course we talked forever, and so we didn't get to bed till about 4/4:30. Julie woke us up at 11:40 yelling "Holy cow we slept in till almost noon! We have to get ready!" because Alan (Julie's friend, not the one who took us to see the movie) was going to take Julie and I to the mall to find her a black satin bolero to go with her GORGEOUS dress I helped her find for the Military Ball that Scott was taking her to that night. So we hurried to get ready and Alan picked us up. We found the PERFECT one--but it was only available in a size two sizes too big for her, and so we settled on another one that still looked good, just not as good as the other one. :]

As soon as we came back we were frantically hurrying to get her ready because we'd spent too much time at the mall. Scott came when I was still finishing her makeup, so we made Somers, Krista, and Mallory run out and distract him while I hurried to finish getting her all ready. And when she opened the door to go out, his jaw literally fell open and he gasped, and it was the cutest thing we'd seen! He couldn't stop smiling, which of course means that SHE couldn't stop smiling. She looked so pretty!!! Here's some pictures...

Once she left, Somers, Krista, and I went over to Eric and Alan's to watch the second half of the football game (which was MAJORLY frustrating). And later Somers and I went over to a party in A. Richards hall in one of the girl's rooms, where they'd taken out the lights and replaced them with blacklights, and they'd decorated the place up for Halloween and had a huge stereo system. So there was a big party going on in their kitchen from about 9 to midnight, and that was a LOT of fun--although cramming about fifty people into a tiny kitchen and then having them all DANCE equals a really really hot room. They cranked the AC way up to try to keep the room cooler, but all that happened from that was people would crowd around the little vents on the sides of the rooms in an attempt to get cooler. :]

Anyways, this weekend has been a LOT of fun. Today on our way back from church it started pouring, and we all got soaked to the bone, but it was fun. We're all glad that it rained, cause we just LOVE the rain and when the sky is all overcast. Of course, running over to Scott's ward's break-the-fast in the rain wasn't too fun since my shoes got soaked through and were uncomfortable, but whatever. His chili won in their chili contest, and there was a LOT of cornbread and yummy chili to eat. And later at our OWN break-the-fast (which was just dinner for us, since we'd already broken it) we had a lot of fun getting to know our new FHE brother, Mitchell a bit. We've actually met him before, randomly when we were sitting in our stairwell and he was coming down and introduced himself and we talked for a bit. But apparently he's switched rooms for some reason, and is now in our ward. Greg, our FHE dad, had a roommate, but he ended up dropping out for this semester and so Greg had no roommate... and we only had three FHE brothers. For some reason their apartment has less people than others... they only had 4, whereas most have 6. Anyways, so Mitchell has moved in with Greg, and is now in our ward and our FHE group. We had a yummy dinner over at their apartment and watched a couple episodes of The Office. :]

Anyways, so I've been having a blast. But I can't wait to go home, as well! Only 21 days left!!!

-Cate