Home for the Holidays!

Well... finals over at last and nothing at all to do! So blogging can resume once again.
Finals were not too bad this semester; I had only two small essays and a 15 page research paper to turn in, which I did without too much stress or trouble....and voila! Tuesday of finals week and I was done! So that was really nice.
Now I'm back at home and read (for fun) to my heart's content! Ahhhhh... :)

I never did write about Halloween so I guess I'll throw in a couple of those pictures now. Our excellent friends John and Ted came to visit and join in the festivities for the weekend, and sometime during all that John and I went to feed the ducks. Those geese were not afraid of me at all, and eerily followed me wherever I went. They were rather large and gave me some fright, so I ended up spending a good amount of time standing on a picnic table, throwing large chunks of bread as far as possible in a vain attempt to draw them away from me.

As for Halloween itself. I kind of had two costumes... one I threw together quickly so I could be dressed up when I went out to dinner with my friends. I was a Masked.. Girl. Yep. It was very creative and oh-so-spooky. Mel put us all to shame with her intense warewolf costume that she put together herself.


My other costume came about thanks to Spencer. I was Kaylee from the tv series Firefly (or from the movie Serenity, based off the series). It was a completely obscure costume that probably about 2% of the general population understood, and most likely it was even less than that since I don't really look like her.


But I had a lot of fun doing it, and was proud of my DI-inspired outcome. Spencer would be proud ... In fact I need to send him the pictures since he's been bugging me about it for weeks.

John and Ted didn't bring costumes really, so Mel helped them out with some creepy makeup faces. Ted was a ghosty thing with glasses, and John was a rotten-toothed goblin. They looked pretty good!


So that was Halloween! We went bowling and had dinner and I think we might have watched a halloweenish movie but I don't really remember...

We had Thanksgiving here at home with a bunch of my mom's family. We ate delicious foods, teased each other endlessly, and had overall a marvelous time. I guess we don't have any pictures of it though, sadly.

The very day after Thanksgiving Mom, of course, went into a Christmas frenzy. We decorated gingerbread houses (see some of those photos here), put up garland and lights inside and out, created Santa's little area on our random front hallway shelf, and...ta da! bought and decorated our Christmas Tree. Isn't it Beautiful? It's kind of shorter than intended but still an excellent addition to our home for the holiday.

It's great to be Home!!

Well I've got to run, apparently our ward is having a Christmas Party in about 10 minutes that I'm supposed to go (woops) so.. until next time!

The Little (Big) Missionary Man

"I hooope they call me on a mission,

When I have grown a foot or...five!"

(Spencer's - oh rather, Elder Grierson's - theme song! Seriously.. he is TALL.)
I went home every weekend this month to hang out with my "little" brother before he left on the big mission, and we had some fun times. We watched Firefly and Serenity with Nickell and Aaron.. played some rock band.. bonded.. ate the very best meal ever at Tepanyaki!!.. all sorts of fun stuff! (I promise there was more than that and there was actual fun taking place haha.) Alas I didn't take pictures of any of that, BUT I do have superfluous amounts of pictures from the last two days with him at home! I don't have much to say about the events, because a lot of it will be repeating what my mom said on her blog so... I'll stick to the pictoral version :)

These are from the night he got set apart - an official missionary!we were all still pretty normal that night, not too much weeping or wild flailing of arms or anything like that. And then! the day finally arrived...

mom calls this his "i'm-finally-going!" dance... or something like that. :)

Then at last we got to the MTC... and off he went!
Officially starting his mission Wednesday, October 21, 2009,
I give you......
ELDER GRIERSON! (applause!!)

and of course, afterwards we went to Baskin Robins to sooth our sorrows with a little bit o' chocolate happiness.And that's that! For anyone who wants to write him and reads my blog but not my family's (if such a person exists) here is his address:

Elder Spencer William Grierson
MTC Mailbox # 317
BRA-BRS 1222
2005 N 900 E
Provo, UT 84604-1793

Write him!

School Has Begun!

Alrighty so some news... I really don't have much but I'll see what I can do.

I'm back in school now, taking 15 credits which isn't too bad. Classes are---

Slavery in the Atlantic!
History of the French Revolution!
Senior Topics: Political Culture! (Research Paper class)
Business French!
and Aerobic Kickboxing! yeah!

I'm also a UTF (undergraduate teaching fellow, basically a teacher's assistant) for a Greek History class with my favorite professor here, Dr. Frances Titchener. I tumbled into the job and I was thrilled! I still am. Basically I just help a small group of students in the class come up with good, succint essay theses that they can then use to write papers. It's a bit intimidating since I don't think I am that good at coming up with thesis statements, but Dr. T. thinks I am, hence the job I suppose. I also do whatever odd jobs she asks me to do. A couple weeks ago I got to punch holes in the students' tests and then alphabetize them! I'm glad my job experience at DMPG is finally coming into use.

I also went on a blind date to the Homecoming dance last night. That was unique. Not too bad though, we had fun and it was not so much a date as group mayhem. Plus I got brownies and ice cream at the end of the night - how can you beat that? The theme was Here, There, and Everywhere, and the attendees were supposed to dress up in clothing from the decade of their choice. My friend Muriel and I attempted a 50s look. Did we succeed? I have no idea, but I felt like I looked pretty awesome anyway. We took a handful of pictures, and once I get those I'll put them up.

Other than that not much is going on. Conference next weekend!! I am super excited, especially since I'm going home to watch with my family! And I'm pleased that fall is here, such a lovely season. Tainted ever so slightly by the winter season right on its heels. Oh well.

Oh I guess I did go to what my friends like to call a "bonfire" recently (really it's just a fire in an approved location in the canyon. Still fun.) We roasted hot dogs, sat and chatted, read scary stories while my friends acted them out in a charades-like manner... good times all around.

Jackie and I unintentionally wore matching high school sweatshirts. Oh the good old high school days...
Well that's pretty much all I've got. I will try to be more effective in my blogging habits and keep up to date with my life's doings. Til next time!

France!

Ok. So let's just admit it, I am not going to get around to writing in depth about France. Ergo I've decided this shall be my France blog...

I went!


Maybe someday, when I'm not in school, I'll be bored and want to fill in the gaps. But for now I think this suffices. SO now I can start blogging about less intimidating topics and feel a little less silly that I have a blog that is stagnating in the online world. Yay!

Update

Hello all!
This is just a quickie to let anyone who might actually read this blog know that I will soon be updating it with my adventures in France. Not enough time now.. but it is soon coming so have no fear. I guess I can update as to what i've been doing this summer, since that should only take about 2 seconds to explain.
Since being home I've just been working around the house for my mother, thanks to the extreme difficulty in finding a job in the middle of summer when i'm leaving for school again in about a month.
We had a family reunion last weekend and a bunch of the extended family came to visit. Most of you reading this probably are family so you already know about it... but I had a lot of fun! I'm very grateful for my wonderful family.
My friends and I recently saw the newest Harry Potter film, a midnight showing, and dressed up as the various characters - I was Ginny Weasley, Melanie was professor Trelawny, Jackie was "Cho" but was really more just Jackie the Hogwarts student, and Ben came too but wasn't dressed up since he'd just come from work. We also met our friend Jason, death eater, and his brother, a wizard, there. There were some very extreme costumed people! One guy dressed up as Hagrid and was quite convincing - he had people asking him to take pictures with them. I also saw a girl who had shaved her head and was Lord Voldemort ... kinda weird but I guess if you're really into it...way to go. I just wondered what she did the next day. As for the movie I really enjoyed it ... I think. Must go see it again at a normal time of day.
Soon I'll be taking a trip to Washington to my uncle's condo (yay!!) with my family. I'm quite excited for this because it's beautiful there and is one of my favorite places to visit.
And the only other thing I can think of is that I am going to attempt to paint a background for our christmas decorations. I have only painted once or twice before so I'm not sure how it will turn out, but it should be a fun project to try.
We also have a new baby lizard that is super small and cute. I'm glad we got at least one from the dozen! Check out my family's blog for that story, hot off the press.
That should be it for recent updates in my currently very normal life. I'm just enjoying my summer of relaxation (though I must admit i'm getting pretty excited/ready for classes to start again! August 24th ish) So I shall try and post soon some adventures from France, along with pictures. Until then!

Renaissance Festival and Fantasy Faire!....and Art Ball

The weekend of May 15-16 was quite a delightful one for my good friend Melanie and me. Happily we chose to step out of reality for those couple of days (and a rather high fee...) to enjoy the wonders of the Utah Renaissance Festival on friday, and the Art Ball here in Springville on Saturday.

The Renaissance Festival took place in the (almost) scenic town of Marriot-Slatersville, in a very lovely and large-ish field about a mile from the freeway. Melanie and I chose to dress up for the occasion which was not only amusing, but also gave us entrance to the festival at half price (six dollars instead of twelve - quite a nice deal I'd say). Melanie dressed as a regal maiden, in a flowing white gown embroidered with pearls, and crowned her head with a tiara of the finest worked silver. (I'm sure it was pretty close to silver..) As for myself, I chose to dress myself in the browns and greens of a peasant's garb, but of course it was altogether quite flattering. I even created a woven flowery garland for my head out of the nearby weeds - I was very pround of that accomplishment. When we arrived we looked through the smattering of shops that dotted the area, there were many lovely hand-crafted trinkets that were very tempting, but also very expensive, so we managed to resist. The reason for us coming to the fair - the highly touted full combat joust - was not until the end of the day, so while we waited we watched a rather childish though pretty entertaining magic show and enjoyed a pleasantly medieval lunch. Then as we were watching Queen Elizabeth test the magical "tyme masheen"...(which ended up being NuSkin product or something nonsensical like that)....
A swashbuckling pirate approached Mel and me with this debonair line: "Dear ladies, this is not a grocery store so please stop checking me out!" He then laughed and told us we could check him out as much as we wanted. Then he took my hand and said to me, in utter seriousness "Your eyes are so blue, they are bluer than the water in my mother's toilet. And i'm serious, really I am." And he kissed my hand. What a suave pirate, eh? He urged us to find him if we were ever not having fun at the "Ren Faire" as he called it, and then he left and Mel and I had a good laugh. Captain Lefty was his name, and he is the one with the ridiculously feathered hat in the picture. The pirate to the right of him wielded a whip and was pretty cute too.







After a trip to the stocks, it was finally time for the joust! The watchers were split in half, and one side was told to root for the knight of Ireland, and the other side was told to cheer on the knight of England. Melanie and I were seated near our good Queen Elizabeth and so were among those who were fans of England. Then each knight got a rose, and went in search of a lady that he favored among all the ladies who cheered for him. Our good Sir Michael of England stopped in front of me and asked "My lady, may I joust for you today?" To which i made some witty and appropriately dorky response like "Yes, of course.." and accepted his rose with a lovely nerdy-teenage-girl-who's-way-too-into-pretending-she's-in-the-sixteenth-century curtsy. Then the announcer said for all to hear "Of course, by accepting this favor you know that you must bestow upon your knight a kiss for good luck!" Which I didn't know, actually, but so it was. SO I ducked under the fence and entered the lists, and ascended this wooden platform that brought me to the same height as the knight (he was on a horse after all) and the announcer said "Wait! how old are you?" "twenty," said I, and he replied "Good enough!" And so I gave my knight a kiss (on the cheek...he was probably twice my age and bald besides haha) and the crowd cheered. Then they jousted four passes, and sadly Sir Michael lost, he had to forfeit after he injured his hand. And then we went home. It was a very good time for all.
The Art Ball is much shorter to explain. I promise. Every year the Springville Art Museum throws a ball in which they pick the Art Royalty for the year, display new paintings, drawings and sculptures, show off student artists who do their art throughout the night, and have a dance with live bands. This year they opened up the newly fixed up garden,which was lovely, especially with the perfect weather. Mel and I went without dates, which was kind of weird once the dancing started but we had fun anyway. We wore our prom dresses (because what else can you do with those after high school?) and looked gorgeous indeed. Overall it was a great weekend and well worth the cost. I recommend both events for anyone who likes to dress up and have fun escaping reality for a while! :)

Back Home

It's been a while and I feel I must post something. . .

I'm back home! wahoo!!
And before we left, my roommates took cute pictures in Logan. here's all of us roomies together. Even Xue Fei came :) (right bottom corner, in the yellow)

Getting out of Merrill Hall back in Logan was sort of the worst thing ever. It ended up taking four hours longer than I had planned...all of my roommates had chores including me...and I was on bathroom duty! Gross. But it sparkled when I was done. :) Packing was sort of just throwing things into boxes so that wasn't too bad, though it took hours even still. And... I was also in charge of mopping the kitchen and vacuuming all the floors so I had to wait til everyone had their stuff out of those rooms so I could do that. But my nice neighbor Harold helped me pack everything into my cute little car and off I went!

And now I must say, unpacking was far worse. haha. But after three straight days of diligent work my room now looks like I've lived here for years. Perfectly messy with stuff shoved away into any nook and cranny I could find.

I tried to get a job at a greenhouse but they, alas, were not hiring so I guess I'll just wait until July, when i'm back from France, for which i'm leaving in two weeks from yesterday!!! I'm very excited and I'm sure I'll write all about it. For now I just am at home by myself while the rest of my family works, and I clean stuff from time to time. It's very quiet but nice, though I sometimes wish I could see people more often haha.

Being home with the family's been fun though, my dad had his birthday recently and got geocaching stuff so we've been entertained with that for a while. And we went camping for mother's day weekend, which was quite enjoyable.

So that's my rather boring update. But now I think I'm going to go put on some music and clean my house! Hopefully I'll have something interesting to talk about soon, and if not, there's always my upcoming adventure to France!

'Til later...

Puddle Jumping!

To start off with, a little update.

Finals are next week, and this week has been crazy! Sure, it's "no test week"...but all the teachers have assigned papers and projects up the wazoo to make up for it. 'Tis a shame, such a shame. Luckily I only have two finals (technically) next week, but i have a few 10 page papers due as well. Pretty bad timing for the library website to quit working for a whole day! Well, hopefully it'll be back up tomorrow, and this weekend should be fun-filled with studying and paper writing galore...

But!

In just one week, I'll be done with all my assignments and tests, and it'll be summer! Wahoo!

Anywho, on another note, one day a few weeks ago our neighbor Amanda and Jackie and I noticed that it was slightly drizzling outside, not very warmly but better than snow nonetheless, and since Amanda is an avid puddle-jumper, out into the rain we went! We were rather soaked, but not really since the rain wasn't very intense. It was extremely cold - Jackie and I were wearing flip flops...we couldn't feel our feet! But it was worth it, a nice stress reliever, and we even got a car to drive through a puddle and splash us :)

Here's the after effects:
(that last one is kind of a creepy Tara face. haha. sorry)

yeah.. you can't really tell how wet we are. But it was way fun!

Recently the weather has been awesome. Warm and breezy and absolutely beautiful! Hopefully it'll be like that again tomorrow, so I can go study out there :) I'm really excited for the semester to end, and to have a month of freedom (and then to France for more school, which I can't really say is bad cause, let's face it, it's way cool!)

Finally, I have a concert this Saturday. Our school's two choirs (Chorale and Chamber Singers) along with the American Festival Chorus and the USU symphony orchestra are attempting to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's quite the adventure! If anyone cares to experience this, or can, or is interested in knowing the facts about it despite their lack of desire to come ;) it's going to be at 7:30 pm in USU's Kent Concert Hall. $5 or free with student ID. Come enjoy a very lovely cultural experience! It's sure to be quite the concert.

Anyway that's all I've got for today. And now I need to go continue my studying! (Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...)

:)

Great Song :)

As I was once again wandering around facebook, I saw one of my friends had posted a link for a song composed by Jon Schmidt, a mix between Coldplay's Viva La Vida and Taylor Swift's Love Story. It's a piano and cello duet and I think it's so upbeat and happy! And also very pretty. So, I'm going to post it cause I really enjoy it -- click here to experience the delight of Jon Schmidt! (warning: the song is 6 minutes long followed by his explanation of why he wrote it. But it's worth the length!)

By the way Spencer, if you haven't heard this I think you'll quite enjoy it.

Also, by way of an update, I must mention that the snow has left Logan again, and it is absolutely beautiful outside today! Hooray! It's about 65 degrees and is only supposed to keep warming up this week. I'm very happy about this. :)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.....oh, wait....

If you're alive and in Utah, and you have left the house today, then you've probably realized that our dear month of April has become a bit confused with her responsibilities. Today I mournfully grabbed the camera to take pictures so I could blog about the SNOW that has recently graced us with its presence here.

That's me, sad, because I'm on my way to take pictures of snow...These Pictures, in fact:So yeah. I'm really not that surprised since it snowed until May in Logan last year, and I'm really not all that upset about it. But it is not sun, which I am sad about. However sun is on the way, so I'll just keep remembering that as I walk from class to class in this lovely weather! And our apartment is glad to know we can no longer be blamed for bringing this curse to our fair city :)

Just wishing for Spring!

At the beginning of the wintry season here in Logan, my roommates and I created a marvelous snowflake artwork that hung on our window and from our ceiling. We spent hours cutting out paper snowflakes for that purpose, and the result was actually quite pretty. Then winter dragged on as it always seems to do, and when March rolled around and it was still snowing, we began to get suspicious. The few warm days that we had were cruely short lived, and the snow would always come again and dump all over the town. Finally we decided that we were cursing Logan with our hanging snowflakes and that we had to usher in Spring some fresh, new, spring-like decor. So my roommate Manda and neighbor Karla bought some of those big foam noodles, that one might use when swimming, cut them into slices and, voila! Instant foamy flowers to hang on the ceiling. That combined with some streamers made our ceiling just delightfully springy (and very girly i might add) But it is very cheerful -- and the weather has slowly been improving! Today was beautiful with 60 degree weather and an almost cloudless blue sky. My roommates and I celebrated by being weird college kids out on our catwalk. I just hope the good weather keeps coming!

Fun audition video :)

So as I was browsing about on facebook as I all too often do, I was sent this link to watch from Britain's Got Talent. I rather enjoyed it so here it is if you'd like to watch also.
Awesome Lady's Audition!

New Blogger!

So I wanted to be a fancy blogger too, and have a fun place to put some pictures and keep people who wish to know what i'm doing with life updated! Here is my new blog -- I have no idea what I'll put on it since I don't do a lot of interesting things, but maybe with this I'll be more motivated to make my life fascinating! :)