The End of Another Semester

I finished! I am officially done with my freshman year of college. Today was the last day of finals, so I took my two remaining finals today. I took physics in the morning, and then I had my Honors Civilizations 201 final scheduled for 5:45 p.m. As I went to the Maeser Building at about 4:00 to study with a study group, I saw the line for the testing center. Those poor souls! It was the longest line I have ever seen! It stretched back to about where the science center is, and apparently when the line was at its longest it reached all the way to the library! That is insane. But anyways, I'm done! Yay! Now I just have to wait until monday to go home. I'll see how many adventures I can fit in during that time!

Geology!

This past weekend (the 12th-13th, when I started writing this post) my Geology 111 class went on a field trip. We traveled down to the Saint George area, and we made some stops along the way to look at different places of geological interest in Utah. Basically all of Utah is of geological interest, so we made stops about every 45 minutes on the way down to our campsite. The van ride was a lot of fun. The van that I was in named itself the Party Van. By the end of the trip, everyone in that van had a nickname. My nickname was Jenna. This came about because the boys in the van didn't know my name, so they shouted "Jenna!" to get my attention and ask what my name was. Even after they found out that my name was Lauren, and not Jenna, the name Jenna just stuck. We had a lot of fun in our van, getting to know the other people in our class. We shared stories, wrote a geology rap, had a period of time when we were all asleep (except for the driver!) for about 45 minutes...yeah, I can see why we were the party van...Haha. Another thing that surprised me about the van ride is what those 12 passenger vans can do! We were going about 95mph at one point, we did some serious offroading, drove pretty much straight up the side of a mountain, and other crazy stuff like that. I have a video of us going down the mountain. Going up was much scarier though. Although, watching this video, this does look pretty terrifying! Also, I have no idea if the video has sound or not.

Anyways, on the first day we:
touched a fault line,

 analyzed the age of a huge landslide,

stood on top of a rhyolite dome,

stood on a basalt flow,

walked through a lava tube,

swam in a hot spring, and went cliff diving on the first day. The cliff diving was at our campsite. The water in the Sand Hollow Reservoir was so cold! It was about 55 degrees, which may not sound too cold, but it is! After jumping in, I swam out to the island in the middle of the reservoir, and I feel like I was starting to get hypothermia. It was hard to breathe because the cold water was making my lungs contract, all my muscles were freezing up, I started getting a little dizzy, but thankfully by that time I had reached the island so I could get out of the water before anything really bad happened. After exploring the island with Chelsey, we swam back. As soon as we got back, other people from the class had gotten the raft out to go pick everyone else up from the island so that they wouldn't have to swim back in the cold water. Oh well.

On the second day some people from the class found a bigger cliff to jump off of.

They had a lot of fun with that.

Then we left our campsite and went to see more geology! We saw a river that was fed by hot springs, but later on there was no hot water because of the types of rock and what can filter through it, then we looked off of a scenic overlook and described the different geological events we saw,

then we saw some interesting rock deformations, and then we found dinosaur footprints! I wish that I had pictures, but I didn't have my camera with me :( After that we went back to BYU. On the way back our van shared awkward date stories, and it was very entertaining! It was a really fun weekend!

My First BYU Police Encounter

On Saturday I was cleaning up some stuff in my room, and I had s'mores materials leftover from my geology camping trip (which I still need to write a blog post about....) and I knew I wasn't going to eat a whole box of graham crackers before the end of the semester. I don't even like graham crackers. Well, I figured the ducks would like my leftover graham crackers, so at about 9 p.m. I knocked on Jess's door and asked her if she wanted to go to the duckpond with me to feed them graham crackers. She gave me a really weird look, like I was crazy, but she agreed to go. So we went and fed graham crackers to the ducks. Then on our way back from the duckpond, while walking down the hill to Helaman Halls we saw some people from our ward up on the top level of the parking garage, then Matt and Riley threw a water balloon at us! Well, this meant war. We had a bag of marshmallows in my s'mores supplies that had been opened, and had gone stale, so they were rock solid. We ran up to the top of the parking garage and found a game of real-life MarioKart going on. We started throwing our rock hard marshmallows at Riley and Matt because they were the main offenders. Then we found their stash of water balloons, so we got one and hid. When Riley came by pushing his shopping cart with some girl in it, we tried to throw it at them, but we missed. Then we decided to get another water balloon to try to hit the cart that Matt was pushing with Isaac in it. While we were hiding in the bushes a cop car pulled up and asked what was going on. It probably did look pretty ridiculous. There were 4 shopping carts with people in them rolling around a parking garage with balloons attached to them, throwing banana peels, mushrooms, and water balloons at the other carts. Isaac explained the game in full detail to the cop, and the cop said "Oh, that sounds fun! Keep on doing what you're doing, but I'll have to ask you to stop if someone calls in and complains about it." After that, Jess and I left back to our dorm. However, we weren't done with our revenge. Not at all.

We wanted to find water balloons to get them back. However, we didn't know where to find water balloons at that time of night and quickly. It was around 11:30 p.m. by then. I had a bag of powdered sugar in my room, so we decided we would throw that at them. They were already covered in water from the water balloons, so the powdered sugar would stick nicely. In the hallway, we ran into Monique who told us that she had balloons! She joined in our revenge plot and we filled up four water balloons with super cold water and got a container full of powdered sugar. We ran up from the bottom of the parking garage and attacked with the water balloons and powdered sugar and we had a lot of fun! I really needed something fun like that to relieve the stress of finals week.

Coincidence? I Think Not!

So this post is a little different from my normal stuff, but interesting, nonetheless.

When dealing with the Book of Mormon, a lot of people I've known have said that it's fake and that Joseph Smith made it all up. Sometimes it's hard to try to find ways to convince them that it's not just some big hoax that was completely made up. However, I love finding little things that just fit with the Book of Mormon histories that help to provide evidences of its truthfulness.

Some examples of these little things are:

•  the way that things are phrased in the Book of Mormon, which fits the style of ancient hebrew poetry, which Joseph Smith wouldn't have known unless he devoted a lot of time to the study of ancient hebrew poetry
• the Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl, who, according to wikipedia, was "the patron god of the Aztec priesthood, of learning and knowledge." Although in many Aztec descriptions, Quetzalcoatl is represented as a snake type figure and not all the descriptions match up with Christ's visit to the Americas, there are many similarities. Part of the reason that Cortés was able to conquer the Aztecs so easily was because they believed him to be Quetzalcoatl returning to the earth, as he said he would before he left. So, it may be kind of a stretch, but this bears many similarities to Christ's visit to the Nephites; establishing priesthood, promising to return after he has left.
• there's some stuff with word selection and translation, but I don't remember which words, and I'm too lazy to go back and look that up
• Other stuff that I'm too lazy to look up, because mainly I just want to get to the fantastic story that my geology professor told my class today

And here's the fantastic story!

So in the Book of Mormon, in the beginning,  before Lehi's family has started their journey across the ocean, there is a land they stay in called Bountiful. This is where they stay after they have left Jerusalem, and before making the boat. It is described as east of Nahom, where Ishmael was buried. Well, Nahom is a real place that has been discovered on the Arabian peninsula. It is a place that already had a name, so Lehi did not name it, and archaeologists have discovered a place called NHM (in semitic languages the vowels are spoken and not written) which seems to match up pretty well with where the Book of Mormon describes it to be. So that seemed to match up, but people wondered about the land Bountiful, where it is written that there was much fruit and honey, and also plenty of wood to build a ship, and iron ore to make tools. To many people it seemed that a place like this could not exist somewhere on the Arabian peninsula where Lehi's family traveled. Well, my geology teacher was asked to travel over there, because he had previously worked in that part of the world and had good connections, to see if he could find a place that fit the description of where Bountiful was described to be that contained iron ore. Also, this iron ore was molded with wood fire and bellows, which normally cannot reach a temperature high enough to melt iron. 

Anyways, my geology teacher was off on this expedition, and was looking for a place that would make sense. What he found was this place called Dhofar. It is this little area by the ocean that is green and beautiful. Everywhere around it is desert, but this area receives monsoon rains which are stopped by the mountains surrounding this place, so all of the rain is dumped in this area, causing it to be green and lush, with waterfalls and springs. There is plenty of vegetation, so here is where Nephi could have gotten his wood to build his ship! 

However, there was still the problem of iron ore. In order to have iron ore, it is necessary to have igneous rock formations. Most of the Arabian peninsula is not igneous rock, except for a section right by the Gulf of Oman, and one more tiny, little section, in Dhofar. Well, my teacher was investigating this and found a strange mixture of minerals in a rock one day. There seemed to be calcite along with iron. He found this because of the rusty color of the iron, but it didn't appear to be anything that iron usually mixed with. Anyways, he took a sample of this rock to perform some tests on it. In order to hold true with what the Book of Mormon said, this iron had to be malleable by being heated to temperatures that could be produced by a wood fire and bellows, a task that seemed impossible to do because of the high heat necessary to melt iron. However, when tests were performed on the rock samples, it turns out that with this mixture of calcite and iron, the calcite acted as a catalyst that lowered the melting point of the iron, so it was indeed able to be melted at temperatures that could be reached by a large wood fire and bellows!

I thought that this was pretty amazing. Even though it is not solid proof that the Book of Mormon is true, it is definitely something. Joseph Smith wouldn't have known much about the geography of the Arabian peninsula or about the one tiny little place with vegetation, or the fact that it contains a very rare mixture of minerals that could do what the Book of Mormon says. 

Anyways, that's just some thoughts I had. I thought it was really interesting :) I'm not saying that you have to believe it, or that this definitely means that it's true, because the only way to know that is to pray about it, but it's fun to think about.