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. :)

BYU vs UNLV: a video essay

Hope fades...

...and makes a comeback.

It's all over!
That was way fun, but it was a real nail-biter. Only one home game left...let's not make it quite so close, eh guys?

pipe dreams

On Sunday Kristin and I went to an organ recital in Salt Lake at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. She's in a beginning organ class so we went with some other people in the class and her teacher, who's an adorable Ukranian grad student.
It was interesting to contrast a newer American cathedral with all the ones I went to in Europe. It was beautiful, but very different--smaller interior, less stone and more wood, less ornamentation, brighter colors, less stained glass and much shorter overall. The art was a lot different--there were several borderline creepy/disturbing depictions of Christ and the crucifixion. It was also weird to see scriptures on the wall in English. Kristin's teacher pointed out that they seemed to be about as "anti-Mormon" as you can get from a Catholic perspective.
From the outside, though, it could totally be European if it was bigger. Looks kind of dungeon-ish in this shot. (And it even had gargoyles, my favorite!)
The organist, Delbert Disselhorst, was amazing. He played everything from Handel and Bach to pieces published this year. One of them had a violin part also and I loved it.
A small taste of the music. This was his little encore/postlude so I didn't feel guilty about recording, but the actual stuff was way cooler.

Six Lakes

I went camping last weekend with my friend Hope and the Outdoor Adventure Club. Time to bust out the REI gear!
Think we had enough wood?
Putting up the tent in the dark was an adventure.
We made tinfoil dinners (yum) and then roasted anything we could get our hands on...hot dogs, apples, bananas, chocolate...
And we did a little exploding. Wait for it... (don't worry, we were totally safe)
The next day we did a little exploring and tried to find the "six lakes" which were really ponds. The weather was perfect.
One of the cows near the campsite who decided to start mooing at 3am like its life depended on it.
Some of the guys went fishing in one of these puddles. It was catch-and-release so they didn't keep anything except...
this ginormous crawdad. Yuck.

Our excitement for the day was Hope getting a bee sting. She wasn't sure if she was going to have an anaphylactic reaction or not so we just waited it out and ate roasted marshmallows. She ended up being fine, but I'm glad I had my EpiPen.
It was a fun little getaway. I'm excited for the next one!

mini-reunion

Last week a few of us from freshman year got together and caught up. Jacqueline and Stephy I was already caught up with, but it was really great to see the others! One is going on a mission soon. This picture is our strugglin' attempt to document...after the others had left. :) Stephy, Emma (who wasn't actually in our ward but hung out with us) and me. Good times.

Ode to the MOA

Okay, the mystery post is back. I added some stuff (got a little carried away) and then forgot to publish. So here it is.
Since I want to blog and have no better material, here's a reflection on some of the museum's past and current exhibitions. It's not the Louvre, but after all, it is one of the top university art museums in the nation. It's too bad I'm not more of an art person. My appreciation for some of this stuff has gone up, and for some of it...well...
Of course, my all-time favorite is

Paths to Impressionism: French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum
I think this was the first Monet ever in Utah. What a milestone!
Pissarro, Lacroix Island at Rouen
John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet painting by the edge of a wood













The Intimate Eye: Drawings by Burton Silverman

Not that exciting. Although this girl kind of reminds me of Molly.


















Architecture of Absence: photographs by Candida Höfer
I think these are kind of cool. She likes libraries and palaces.




























Print study room favorites
Renoir!!! I love his piano stuff, especially this one:

Angel with Child, Giovanni Vitalba
















Cliché and Collusion: Video works by Grant Stevens
This one is supposed to be about how the media affects us. Some of the screens had actual video, some were words with music and some were words with audio narration--except the narration didn't exactly match. They had names like "Learn your ADDs" and "Think right now."
That's the artist. This setup had its own room and was called Turtle Twilight or some such thing. Didn't get the point but it was very relaxing to sit in there in the dark and listen to the pseudo-music and watch the color float across the screen when there was no one else in the gallery. There was another separate room that had words going across three of the walls like a screensaver, a disco ball in the middle of the ceiling, and some old love song playing.









Splendor and Spectacle: Images of Dance from Court Ballet to Broadway
This was kind of fun because it was up during my beginning ballet class.



















Minerva Teichert: Pageants in Paint
I'd never been a huge Minerva fan but she definitely grew on me during this show, one of the best exhibits I've seen at the MOA.
Queen Esther
Love Story
Miracle of the Gulls
First Vision


















American Dreams: selections from the museum's permanent collection that will be on display for eternity
Some samples:
Riding the Girder, Mahonri M. Young
Abraham Lincoln—the President, Avard Fairbanks. I'm a fan!
Fallen Monarchs, William Bliss Baker
Premier Chagrin, Daniel Ridgway Knight
SEFA, Frank Riggs. This one is supposed to be a bird-like figure representing America's fascination with flight.
Crossing the Mississippi on the Ice, C. C. A. Christensen
Grain Fields, Edwin Evans (inspired by Monet!)
Smokey Face, N. C. Wyeth
In the Sun, Julian Alden Weir
Round Dance, Maynard Dixon. Gotta love Maynard. We sure have our share of him.
This is my favorite. Not really, but it's better than the next one...
Quite possibly my least favorite piece of "art" ever. So hideous. It's called "Seer." It's supposed to be all about Utah and was built specifically for this spot. I think everyone who works in the MOA has a secret or not-so-secret desire to destroy it. And the inspiration for the shape supposedly came from...
the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which I have also seen. It's way cooler.

















Turning Point: the demise of modernism and the rebirth of meaning in American art
This is probably my favorite from that exhibit. And the only one I'm posting. I like blue and yellow, but this is the rebirth of meaning in American art? Come on.














Just Enough is More: the Graphic Design of Milton Glaser
He designed this. Around this time half of campus went through a phase in which they wore our "I love BYU" shirts all the time.
A little weird, but at least these bright colors are recognizable objects. I can't do abstract, as you've probably noticed.




















Windows on a Hidden World: Japanese Woodblock Prints
This just opened a few weeks ago. I always enjoy watching the woodshop guys build and paint a new exhibit. Sometimes more than looking at it. :)
I have to admit, the fine detail in these is pretty amazing considering the tools they had to work with. And I like snow.
But do I really want to look at this? Slightly frightening.



















Dismantling Geneva Steel: photographs by Chris Dunker
I don't even know what to say about these. They're cool in a way, I guess. He's a good photographer but I'm not really interested in looking at photos of a steel mill being torn down. I really like the way they set it up, though--the walls are all black so the photos really stand out, almost like they're lit up.





















Beholding Salvation: Images of Christ
Nativity, Brian Kershisnik


Adoration of the Shepherds, Eustache Le Sueur
Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda, Carl Bloch. This is definitely my all-time favorite MOA work. Its home was Copenhagen from 1883, when it was painted, to 2001, when it came to BYU. It's one of the few paintings from Beholding Salvation that's still on display, and was actually talked about on campus. Very cool.