Janae est fiancée!

It's true...Janae's engaged! (She was in my ward last fall and on my study abroad. And her last name will be Rose--how cute is that?) So of course we threw her a shower/SA reunion/crepe party. Even Sis. Welch came! It was so great to see everyone and get caught up, especially Janae's France roommate who goes to BYU-I and drove down for the weekend. Such great memories...I love these girls!

ward date

A few weeks ago a guy in my ward organized a big Clue-themed group date. We played "Campus Clue," which is like the board game--each couple represents a character and runs around to different buildings trying to figure out whodunnit--but in this version we had extra names and weapons, of course. My date and I were Sir Hotrod (color coordinated, of course). The weapons were things like Avada Kedavra and bad puns. :) After a few rounds we ate ice cream and watched the movie Clue. It was fun!

Slow children at play

Last week when it was announced at campus devotional that Lynne Truss (the author of this book about punctuation and others) would be the speaker this week, everyone except me was thinking, "Who's that?" I love her. Nothing will cheer you up on a rough day quite like Lynne with her warmth, humor, and stickler-ness. For one hour, I forgot about everything else and soaked in her accent, her personality, and her apostrophe jokes. What happiness.

let's call it a weekend

1. anyone have a spare VW Beetle door?
On Friday I took this picture of my adorable roommates eating rice pudding before walking out the door to go to Walmart with Kristin. About 30 seconds later...
this happened. Right outside the parking lot a driver who I'm going to refrain from calling names was parallel parking and not paying ANY attention to cars going by, not even when we honked. He wasn't even sympathetic. He was like, "Oh, I'm really sorry." Sure.
2. you got swatted
But that night we went to the first basketball game and it was way fun.
interesting hat
we're adorable
Final score BYU 75, Long Beach State 65. Afterward we hung out with some friends at our place, ate Cougar Craze ice cream, and watched "The Pursuit of Happiness." Way fun.

3. knitting for the needy
No pictures of this one. We had a little RS breakfast/knitting service project that will continue through December. I'm excited to start knitting again. It was fun to socialize a little and I found out that this adorable English girl in our presidency got her mission call to Norway!
4. bridal shower
My friend Linda's bridal shower was way fun despite me not knowing anyone else there. The delicious spread (which I ate too much of) helped.


She got some fun gifts, including this cute egg timer. She said, "What's its name? Does it have a name?" That's Linda for ya. :)
Beautiful pans and a new handmixer. She also got a mortar and pestle. (I thought of you, Kaci.) I was a little jealous. I guess I need to get married and then people will give me really exciting kitchen gadgets.
Linda was doing an internship in Belgium when I was in Paris and spent General Conference weekend with me when Jacqueline was gone. We had lots of fun.


5. wardness
We had a ward service auction, money to be used for Christmas gifts for needy families. The auctioneer was none other than John Sigety. Joe's in our ward too.
This guy brought a sign with his name on one side and his roommate's on the other so he could bid for both of them. I bought a spontaneous trip to Coldstone with him. I'm excited.

6. date
No pictures of this, either. It was totally last-minute because Nichelle wanted to do something and called her friend who said hey, we're going to Laugh Out Loud (campus improv comedy). So we went with him and his roommate. It was very...interesting. But fun.

7. more wardness
We had ward conference today. Kristin and I sung with the choir. We heard from our bishop and stake president, who is FANtastic. I took Book of Mormon from him two years ago and he remembered me! He came and talked to me after sacrament meeting. After church a ton of home teaching and visiting teaching happened because everyone realized today I guess that a bunch of people will be gone next week. We're pretty good friends with Nichelle's home teachers who were here for almost 2 hours and ended up "teaching" all of us. They're great. And we stopped by a friend's mission call "revealing" party (Albuquerque New Mexico). And I made muddy buddies with Natalie and went to the MTC referral center with Nichelle and a few other girls and saw a boy...I mean elder...from my ward in France! What a great Sunday. I don't want Monday to come.

potpourri

I don't have any great blogging material but here's some random stuff to tide me over til Thanksgiving.
Our cute little pumpkin family. The big one was 27 pounds.
The time has come to say goodbye to these shoes. I loved them, but the heels are all torn up. Time to go shopping!
My sweet watch tan. I wonder how long it will take for it to fade.
Kristin carved the big pumpkin on Halloween. Isn't he cute?
Nichelle made this delectable chocolate pudding dessert to take to our ward break-the-fast.
Last Wednesday we woke up to this.
Pretty wintry, eh?
But later on that day it looked like this.
I love the ducks!
Nichelle gutted the second-biggest pumpkin to make a crisp with raw pumpkin. I was kind of hoping a food fight would break out but it didn't. :)
This is just the pumpkin, not the final product, but it was pretty good.

My chem professor is so fantastic. He's really good at making his lectures involving and almost always does some kind of explosion or demo in class. He did one a couple weeks ago that made me wish SO much I had my camera. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. On Halloween, he lectured like normal for the first half, then put on a white labcoat with something stuck inside so he had a "hunchback," and did a bunch of demos until the end of class, talking all the while in his Igor voice. It was so entertaining. This video isn't that exciting but it's what I have because he recorded this one himself and posted it on Blackboard. We were talking about gases and Boyle's Law, so of course he had made a marshmallow man named Mr. Boyle and we blew him up.

We went to the last home game yesterday. I can't believe the football season is almost over. I'm glad though--the games are fun but they kind of kill your Saturday. The band did a video game themed show with several parts--Link, Mortal Combat, Pokemon, Guitar Hero. This is Guitar Hero. I had to have Kristin explain what was up with the guard running around with colored umbrellas because I've never played the game. The Link section was most exciting, though. They played that classic music and formed a triforce. It was great. :)