Tons of Fun! And Only 18 More Days!

I get to go home in 18 more days! This makes me sooooooooooo happy because I have really missed my home and family a lot. I wish that I could have gone home for Thanksgiving, but unfortunately home is far away and plane tickets are expensive. I did have an awesome time in New Mexico though! I got to shoot tons of guns! This one was my favorite

I shot other guns that were more powerful than the shotgun, but I don't miss with the shotgun. I would miss with the other guns though. That's why the shotgun was my favorite.

I also went exploring around New Mexico and found some Native American petroglyphs. Here are a few of them, but they're kind of hard to see in the picture

New Mexico was a ton of fun! I had some great Navajo food, went shooting, explored the tiny mall there and made fun of its ridiculous mannequins, explored the WalMart which is bigger than the mall there, bought cow print footie pajamas, and had a great time!

Here's me and Kayla in our matching footie pajamas!

Thanksgiving was a ton of fun, but I really miss my family. My little sisters have been calling me a lot recently though. They're counting down the days until I get home too! They don't really have much to say, most of the time it's just them singing some song that they made up.

Even though there's only 18 more days until I go home, it's going to seem like longer than that because of all the work I have to do. I have finals coming up very quickly, and a lot of projects due before that. I also applied for a job at the Cannon Center because I think it's good to have money for stuff. Like textbooks for next semester....those are expensive! And it may also be good to have a little bit of money for fun stuff too.

Speaking of fun stuff, I'm trying to have as much fun as possible in my last few days of this semester at BYU as well as balancing out working on school work. Today I went to Emily's surprise party which was a lot of fun, even though there seemed to be an unnecessary amount of candy throwing happening. I don't understand why somebody would waste perfectly good candy by throwing it at people.

Tomorrow the world's biggest donut is being served in the Wilk, so I'm definitely going to eat a piece of that! Tomorrow is also the Helaman Halls Christmas party, and there will be all sorts of fun stuff like an ugly sweater competition, gingerbread house competition, and lots of hot chocolate!

On December 6th there is a Helaman Halls formal dance. I haven't decided if I'm going or not. If somebody asks me then I'll go, but if not then I probably won't. It seems like the type of thing that would be much more fun with a date. I know some girls are planning on going without a date, but I don't think I'd go without a date.

The Hobbit comes out on December 14th! I've never been to the midnight premiere of a movie before, so I decided to get tickets to the midnight premiere! I do have a final on the 14th, but I should be fine. I'll take a nap before going to the movie, so I should get enough sleep.

And I think that's all the fun stuff I have planned so far. Unfortunately I don't have much more time to fit in fun stuff because I still need to finish a 10-page paper for writing class, make sure to do all my math homework and make sure I understand it all, read the Book of Mormon for 30 minutes per day, study for finals, and do more studying for finals. I'm not used to studying. I never studied in high school, but I know I should probably study now, especially if I want to try to get good grades. I've tried writing up a schedule, but let's see how well I'll actually follow it. But I only have to survive for 18 more days! Then I get to go home for 3 weeks!!! So excited!

Stress+Late at Night+Laundry+Obnoxious People=A Very Grumpy Lauren

This past week has been rather stressful. Teachers are trying to cram things in before Thanksgiving break, projects are due, essays are due, there's just a lot of stuff to do. Also, it's getting cold. I do not like when it gets cold. I've stayed up pretty late every night this week working on projects and other school stuff. This is normal for what I had in high school every day, but for college, it's the most stressed that I've been so far. I get kind of grumpy when I'm super stressed. ...Okay, maybe really grumpy. And staying up late really doesn't help that at all.

Right now I'm up super late because I need to pack for Thanksgiving break, and in order to do that I need clean laundry. That has been more of an issue than it should be. I was planning on doing my laundry after FHE. We went ice skating, so it was later than normal and I figured that most people wouldn't be doing laundry at 11:00 on a monday night. Well, I guess I was wrong! It seems like everybody in the building wanted to do laundry now. There are only 5 washing machines and I needed 3 to do my laundry. Thankfully, when I went down there 2 had just opened up, and one only had 3 minutes left. So I managed to get all my laundry started in the washers. However, the dryers is a whole different story. There were 2 open when I went back down to the basement to switch my laundry. I had enough stuff that needed to air dry that 2 dryers would be just perfect for me. I opened up both of the dryers and was starting to load my stuff in, when this girl walks in the basement and sees that there is still one dryer that I have not yet put my stuff into, so she rushes over to her washing machine, grabs all of her clothes up in a bundle, runs over to the dryer I was going to load my whites into, shoves all her clothes in, slams the door shut and starts it. This made me very angry. It's now 12:45 a.m. and I am very tired and just want to sleep so I said "Excuse me, you saw that I was about to put my stuff in that dryer. That was really rude!" And she said "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you were using this one. You can use it when I'm done!" And she walks away. She definitely knew that I was going to use that other dryer though. I am thoroughly frustrated at this point. Now I'm left with the option of letting my laundry finish drying and then putting in my other load of laundry meaning I'll be up until nearly 4 a.m. when I still have class in the morning, or I could be somewhat rude and take the laundry out of the dryer that's done and go put it on the ironing board. I was done with being nice at this point because I'm tired, and I still feel the leftover effects of stress, so I just unloaded the other person's laundry that was finished and left it on the ironing board. Sorry, but I needed to get my laundry finished. Now it's 2 a.m. and my laundry is finally done! Yayyyy. I'm going to sleep and I'll pack in the morning. Hopefully I'll be less grumpy then because I'll have to go to class and then spend a few hours in a car with Kayla and her dad and brothers and I don't want them to think that I'm a super grumpy person.

What Happens in Mormonland When a Liberal President Wins

*Disclaimer: This is just me rambling at 1 in the morning about how fed up I am with politics and people complaining about the election, so it may be best if you just ignore it because it's probably really stupid.

I am so glad this election is over. Seriously. I hate all the contention and political arguments. However, being at BYU in Provo, Utah when Barack Obama was elected to a second term was not a fun experience. People here overreact so much! People were sitting around watching how the election was playing out, and the minute that it was announced that Obama had won people were shouting and saying that this country is headed to hell and that Satan is going to have hold of the people now......seriously??? We've had four years of Obama as president so far and it's not the end of the world that he was reelected. It was too crazy so I had to leave to go for a walk. I needed more steps anyways for the women's step study that I'm participating in, so hey, let's kill two birds with one stone. I can get away from everyone freaking out over politics and I can raise my step count for the day at the same time! Yay!

But anyways...sometimes I just go into my sassy mode and I get really mad and just want to sass people out. Seeing some of these statuses really made me want to go into my sassy mode, but I refrained...then I thought I should do something, so I made this status instead: 
"To all my fellow BYU students...and anyone else who is freaking out about the results of the election saying it's the end of the world and they want to leave the country: Just a few things for you. 
#1: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued a formal declaration of their support for the president: http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/statement-on-election-result If they can congratulate and support Obama in his win on the presidency then you can too.
#2: Article of Faith 12: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law." Obama is your president, so you can honor him and show him some respect, even if some of his ideas differ from yours.
There is no excuse for some of the very rude statuses that I have seen. Both candidates did a very good job with their campaign, and the election was very close, but Obama has won, so I think we should all just accept that and move on with our lives."
I'm pretty proud because I think I managed to say what I was trying to say without sounding too rude or sassy. 

I'm just so glad this election was over and I can't wait for everyone to go back to living their lives as they have been. Ughhh. Being in the middle of Mormonland during an election like this is not fun at all.

Halloween

I have to start this post off by saying I have never seen anywhere more excited about Halloween than Utah. It's crazy here! There are more Halloween decorations here than I've ever seen in my life. There are Halloween shops and costume stores all over the place, there are haunted houses around every corner, and everyone is super excited. I've never known that people took Halloween this seriously before coming out to BYU.

I felt that seeing as Halloween was such a popular holiday here, I needed to figure out a costume for the Halloween parties that I would be attending. I have a pair of pleather pants, so I figured I'd be catwoman. I found a cool tutorial on pinterest for how to make a masquerade mask, so I made one all black for catwoman.

This is a picture of the mask I made in the process of drying. I cut up a cheap shirt that I bought at DI and then used puffy paint to make cool designs. The results were pretty good!

Unfortunately, at the Halloween dance, masks were not allowed, so I had to paint one on instead. It looked okay, but not as good as the real mask. And, while I'm speaking about the dance, I just want to complain about how I got kicked out. They told me that my outfit was inappropriate, and I could understand if it was because my pants were too tight or something, but no, it wasn't because they were too tight, it's because they were pleather. I was told that I was not allowed to wear pleather pants because pleather has a bad connotation. Girls wearing just leggings were fine, but I had to go change because apparently wearing pleather makes you a harlot or something here at BYU. Also, another thing I saw at the dance was a lady trying to kick out a guy for wearing a kilt because she said he was cross-dressing. He managed to win his case by arguing that a kilt is technically a man's article of clothing, so he was doing no such thing. The lady seemed reluctant to let him go back to the dance floor, but then finally agreed that he was fine when other students started backing him up and saying that he should be allowed to wear a kilt without being told he was cross-dressing.

Now, for actual Halloween. I did not wear a costume around campus to classes, but many people did. I saw Frodo, quite a few Waldos, many Batmans, a lot of nerds, a weeping angel, the tenth doctor from Doctor Who, power rangers, teenage mutant ninja turtles, Santa, Buddy the Elf, Black Widow, Captain America, some golden sea creature fish thing, and a bunch of stuff that I wasn't sure what they were supposed to be, mostly it was girls with teased up hair and a lot of makeup and prom dresses....maybe some kind of zombie princess? I don't know, but there were a lot of them.

Then at the nighttime, I wore my costume; pleather pants and mask and all, because it looked too good to not wear. I just had to avoid any authoritative looking figures that might tell me that I needed to change because they have an issue with pleather. During visiting hours, Kayla and I went to Ryan's room with some other people and we had a classy Martinelli's party, drinking sparkling cider out of crystal wine glasses. We felt very fancy.

 Here are Kayla and I! I'm catwoman and she's a country cowgirl.

 Ryan was just himself for Halloween. He did enjoy acting fancy while drinking his sparkling cider though.

Adam was the Doppler Effect for Halloween.

After that, Ryan had a pumpkin that was half-frozen that he wanted to do something with, so we went pumpkin bowling out on the basketball court. Unfortunately, the pumpkin thawed rather quickly and didn't work as a bowling ball for long, so Ryan started seeing how high he could throw it in the air.

And the pumpkin kind of just mushed everywhere, but the good news is that all the splatters were only the ice melting, and the pumpkin stayed in mostly just large chunks which were then disposed of.

Later, we went over to the Cannon Center where they were holding a dance-off for all the RAs in the dorms. I'm proud to say that my RA was in the group that won! And guess what! This time nobody in the Cannon Center told me that I couldn't wear my mask or my pleather pants, so I feel very accomplished!

Another note about this week. Helaman Halls started a giant game of Humans vs Zombies. It is so much fun! We have 200 people playing, and on monday we started with 3 original zombies. They have to tag the humans to turn them into zombies. I made it for 42 hours as a human before I got ambushed by a group of zombies. I had no idea that zombies could run so fast! Now I need to tag a human before I die. Zombies have to tag a human every 48 hours or else they starve and die. Too many of the humans are cheating though. They just sit in their rooms all day! Or they go to a big Helaman Halls activity and take off their wristband so that nobody knows they're a human. Tonight the number of zombies passed the number of humans, so the zombies are beginning to win!

Well, that was my Halloween!