Fall, Friends, & Firsts

Friends, I have just experienced my very last first-day-of-school at BYU. It's sad to realize that after this fall I will have to voyage out into the real world, away from the safety of a campus where people ride unicycles, wear medieval clothing, and in general, are a peculiar people. It's also weird that after three years of complaining about tests and homework and how hard BYU is, I've come to a point where I actually love our university so much. I--LOVE--BYU! And I don't care who knows it! :) Eleanor Roosevelt once said that, "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." As the new school year starts, I hope you all will be able to live up to that statement and live life to the fullest, even if it feels like all you ever do is take tests or go to class. Life is too much of an adventure to pass up :)

Anywho, I was maybe a bit too excited about school starting, and I may have made everyone get their first-day-of-school picture taken, so here are just a few tidbits for you to enjoy!

The gentlemen of my life right now:

The sisters of my life forever:

And of course, me:

Stay positive!

Newbie Zoobies

A long, long time ago at a university not very far away, I was once a freshman. Eager to learn about campus and my new settings, I diligently participated in new student orientation with my roommate, Ellie-BellyButton. Well, you can imagine our dismay when we arrived to find a group of--not thirty, not twenty--but TEN students in our orientation group. Not to be rude in anyway, but our Y-group leaders (as they are called at our university) were kind of flops. By the end of orientation our group's numbers had dropped to a paltry three students. And while they say two's a party and three's a crowd, let me tell you something--three is NOT a crowd.

So when I signed up to be a Y-group leader this year, I swore to be infinitely cooler than my predecessors. I planned, I prepared, and I pitched myself into new student orientation with everything I had. And while I may be slightly biased in my assessment, I have to say, NSO was a smashing success! Group Yellow-18 was THE BOMB, and the new students who came were such troopers--we averaged 20-22 people at each event! We had sooooo much fun--from learning each others names while playing frisbee and attending the "Traditions of Honor presentation:

...to building the letter 'Y' in Lavell Edwards Stadium:

...and attending the women's volleyball game:

...NSO was such an adventure!

I am so lucky to have had the new students I did! (And yes, it was worth walking in the heat for two days straight with a balloon tied to my backpack so that they could find me!)

Great Expectations...

Have you ever had a project that you envisioned would be a project to out-do all other projects? A project that--if executed correctly--could be your personal Colosseum, your Mona Lisa, your Canon in D? I seem to have a lot of projects like that. My lofty plans, however, seem to be constantly thwarted by the fact that 1) They always involve something I'm inexperienced in, and 2) There's just so much other stuff to work on in life that it takes me a MIIILLLIIIOOONN years to finish!

This week, for example, I set out to build a rabbit hutch. Yeah. It's a little bit extreme even considering some of the crazy stuff I've decided to make in the past (ear-hats, anyone?) J-bug recently acquired a bunny named Oreo, though, and after convincing her it wouldn't fit in a hamster cage, I decided to make her a rabbit hutch.

This is what I envisioned:

This is what I had at the end of the day:

Tom Magliozzi of NPR's "Car Talk" once said that happiness equals reality minus expectations. But sometimes it is just SOOOOO hard for me to let go of that picture I have in my head of how I think life should work! Guess I need to keep working on that... In the mean time, though, it's a good thing I don't make rabbit hutches for a living :)