Funny stories

I know, I know I never post anything, but I just had to share some of the things that have been happening at work lately.
First of all, EFY has started, so there are all these adorably stupid teenagers walking around. My favorite conversation:
Kid: Do you have construction paper?
Me: Construction paper?
Kid: Yeah, like, nice paper?
I tried not to roll my eyes at him before I told him where the stuff was. Then we had this one girl come in looking for a book called Chiasmus in Antiquity, but she could not get that out to save her life. The closest she got was Chee-asmus in Iniquity. And even after we got the title sorted out, she still couldn't say it right!
But then just as I start to think that the customers are the funny ones, this kid that I work with, Parker, comes to work and has to tell me about this word that he learned while reading Shakespeare. He says "It sounded like a really cute, affectionate word, but then I looked it up and it means whore!" What was the word? "Um...don't remember, I should go look at a thesaurus!" Okay... So he finally finds the word--strumpet! See isn't that a cute word? He told the other guy who works mornings, and Frank says, "It kinda sounds like trumpet." And Parker says "Yeah! Or strawberries!" Haha I just laughed. Smart kid, but as Momma says, evidently he doesn't watch the same movies that we do.
New titles:
Android Karenina
Little Women and Werewolves
In Cuba I was a German Shepherd
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

2009 Book List

Okay for those of you who have been waiting in breathless anticipation, here are the books I read this year. Or as far as I can remember. Can't say that I was all that faithful in writing down what I read. And frequently I find myself just skimming a book or glancing through it while I'm at work, and I guess those don't count. I have a few plays on here, but I didn't put all the plays I've read this year on the list because...well, there's a lot of them.
Total count is:

62

So not as many as Stef, and not as many as I would have predicted, but a respectable number nevertheless.
Here's my list:
1. Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo by Obert Skye
2. Forging the Sword by Hilari Bell
3. Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley
4. The Octoroon by Dion Boucicalt
5. Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix
6. The Safe-Keeper's Secret by Sharon Shinn
7. Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret by Obert Skye
8. The Dream-Maker's Magic by Sharon Shinn
9. Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn
10. A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen
11. Wren to the Rescue
12. Wren’s Quest
13. Out of the Dust
14. Wren’s War
15. Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith
16. Mystic and Rider
17. Thirteenth House
18. Dark Moon Defender
19. Reader and Raelynx
20. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
21. The Naming
22. The Riddle
23. Fire Arrow by Edith Pattou
24. Hero’s Song by Edith Pattou
25. Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George
26. Dragon Flight by Jessica Day George
27. Dragon Spear by Jessica Day George
28. Hourglass Door
29. City of Bones
30. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
31. Scarlet Moon
32.Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
33. Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
34. Furies of Calderon
35. Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
36. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
37. Impossible by Nancy Werner
38. The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer
39. Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer
40. The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer
41. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
42. Sabriel by Garth Nix
43. Lirael by Garth Nix
44. Abhorsen by Garth Nix
45. No Place for Magic by E.D. Baker
46. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglala by Mari Sandoz
47. How to make someone fall in love with you in 90 minutes or less
48. The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenger
49. Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
50. Maze Runner
51. Chalice by Robin McKinley
52. Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
53. The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer
54. The Body Finder
55. Graceling
56. Venetia by Georgette Heyer
57. A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer
58. The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer
59. Dragonsdale
60. The Sorcerer of the North by John Flanagan
61. Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
62. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

To echo Stef, just because I read it doesn't mean I liked it. Time Traveler's Wife in particular was just about the worst thing I have ever read, and I would highly recommend that you NOT read it. Others I quite enjoyed, and I have some new favorites.
Any bets for 2010?

Things I Have Learned

I figured since about everyone else has posted something, I might as well get on the bandwagon. This has been a really interesting new semester, and I thought I would share some things I have learned so far:
1. If you're going to let your visiting teaching coordinator do the assignments, make sure you spell out EXACTLY what she needs NOT to do. For example:
a) no girls teaching their roommates
b) no girls teaching themselves
c) EVERYONE needs visiting teachers
d) EVERYONE needs an assignment
e) NO we cannot leave it the way it is if it's MESSED UP!!
2. Don't start watching NCIS at nine o'clock, you won't get to bed before midnight.
3. Don't start reading a Georgette Heyer book the day before the last day to take a major history test.
4. Even if you only get 19% visiting teaching, the stake president still won't remember your name or your calling until you remind him. So no need to hide in corners.
5. Sometimes it's just better to know, even if the answer is no.
6. Post-structuralism freakin' warps my mind
7. I do have the power to run three miles uphill without stopping.
8. When you start making more money, somehow you always end up with more bills, even if you don't change anything you're doing.
9. Monday is a lot easier if you do your homework on Saturday.
10. You get a lot of funny looks and questions when you put pictures of attractive British actors that no one has heard of or seen before on your desktop. (Richard Armitage, of course!)

I've only been to the Emergency Room once this semester so far (no, not for myself), so we're doing better than last year, and I finally managed to get over a very annoying crush I had for a long time (see #5). I still have no one called in my Relief Society but a presidency and a couple committee chairs. I think I need to be more annoying.

New Semester! Yay...

Just a general update, the new semester started Monday, and I have now been to all my classes, and decided that I approve. I have now decided that I am a Theatre major with a History minor, so I have Dramatic Literature and Play writing as well as World Civilizations to 1500 and US History from 1877. I also have an Old Testament class. I think my favorite thing about the different classes were the teachers' pet peeves. My Old Testament teacher is so emphatic about the "Your cell phone will NOT go off in my class" rule that if you break it you have to either bring doughnuts for the whole class or take 15 points off your final grade. My US History professor gave a half hour speech about how cheaters will burn in hell, then another half hour about how texting and spell check are destroying civilization.
My Play writing professor kept us for only a half hour of the two hour class, all we did was brain storm play titles, introduce ourselves, and then pick a title out of the pile to write a 10 page play about by Thursday. I got "My Hands are Bananas". What would you write?
Our Relief Society is full again, we have 125 girls--the next largest in the stake has 100. We won't fit in the room we're in, so I talked with bishop about maybe getting us two rooms? Sunday he said they'd found us a second room we could use. It's a High Council room, how many people can it fit? About twenty...how is this a solution?

My ultra-super long day

So this actually happened last week, but I wanted to include pictures, so it's taken me a while to get to where I can actually post it. So here goes:

Last Friday I woke up about nine (this will be important later), went up on campus and studied for a few hours, then took a mid term for my theatre class. That went until about 2:30, immediately after which I went to work because we had to clean up the massive sale we had. This included a lot of pushing and pulling very heavy carts, and climbing up and down ladders to put overstock books away.

I worked until 8, so a total of a little over five hours, then went home and went grocery shopping, talked with my roommates for a while, and got ready for the ward hike. Around midnight I went to bed, but I kept thinking about other things I wanted to take with me on the hike, so I think I dozed off a little after 1. At 1:15, I got up, grabbed my stuff and left for the hike. :) You can see how this is going to be interesting, right? We were hiking Mount Timpanogos (no idea how to spell that), so we wanted to start from the base at 2 am. When we got there bishop asked for a volunteer to police the back of the group and make sure no one got left. I volunteered, and we started off. After about 45 minutes, I ran into Brittany, who was really struggling with the hike and didn't know how much further she could go, then we ran into Steffanie, who had a massive ear infection and was getting a massive pressure headache from the elevation. So that was our group:
With Brittany on the left, Brother Petersen from the bishopbric who hung back to help us out, and Ray who was Steffanie's "buddy" and stayed back to help her, and Steffanie closest to the camera. Brittany and Steffanie both just got slower and slower as we went, and Steffanie just got in more and more pain, though she refused to turn back, so we never made it to the summit, but we got to see a great sunrise:
Which was followed by great scenery:
And just a side note, you see that snow? We had to cross those a couple times, and they kinda freaked me out, 'cause they were so slippery and some of them ended in steep drop-offs...
I dunno, they just freaked me out. Anyway, Brittany finally gave up about here:
Where we could see the summit, but didn't actually make it there. The rest of our group did, though, and they said it was pretty cool. Brittany and I turned around and headed back, but Steffanie refused, she said she HAD to make it to the top, so she went on about another mile before she just laid down next to the path and Brother Petersen left her there while he went on to the summit. :) Then when she had found a suitably male person to help her back down the mountain, she went down. Ray had gone on before a few hours before Brittany and I turned back. On the way back we got to actually see more of what we'd walked through, and it was gorgeous!
It took us a couple of hours to get down, maybe two and a half hours to get down, and we'd spent about five getting to where we were, so we got back to base around 10. There were actually a few really hard-core hikers in our group who ran down the mountain, so they were there before us. We all stretched out on any available surface and tried to go to sleep. Mostly rocks, or cars if we knew whose they were. Maybe an hour and a half or two hours before we hit base my period started, so to say that I was distinctly uncomfortable would be to rather understate the case. A group of us finally left for Provo and got back around noon, at which point I....went to sleep? Nope! I showered, got dressed, talked with Cassie for a while, and went back to work!
I worked from 2 to 6, and was in a good bit of pain from cramps for most of the time, but my boss took pity on me and didn't make me spend the whole time on a ladder. I spent the last few hours sitting and entering stuff on a computer, for which I will love her to the day I die. I did pull a Belle pose for the camera, though. :)

After that did I go to sleep? No again, after work I went to dinner with Karma Sue and Lindsey, two of my mission buddies, and my best friends here in Provo. We try to do something every week, because we're all too busy to have a normal social life and it's nice to talk with humans for a while. Usually we go to a movie, but I told them there was no way I was going to stay awake in a dark theatre, so we went to dinner instead. Aren't they cute? Lindsay never smiles normally for a picture, which she has come to regret as she has seen the mission scrapbooks of some of her companions...:)
So I got home around 8:30, and made it to bed around nine, making for a full 36 hours with no significant amount of sleep. It's an odd feeling, isn't it? But it was certainly a very valid reason to miss sleep!

P.S. I will be hiking Timp again this summer, and I will not be volunteering to stay at the back next time. :)

People you meet at the Bookstore...

So this week they've been having a Books for Young Readers Symposium here in Provo, and tonight they had an author meet-and-greet and book signing for about six authors, and at least one more just showed up to mingle. So I got to meet Shannon Hale, Jessica Day George, Linda Sue Park, and Brett Helquist, as well as couple others, but not as much. Shannon Hale and Jessica Day George were my favorites, they were pretty much how I would imagine they would be. Shannon Hale was chill, but nice, and Jessica Day George was a little hyper but super excited to be there. I didn't get anything signed, because I was just working and didn't have any of my books with me, but it was fun anyway!

Road Trip

So this last Thursday my friend Rachel was going through the temple before her wedding on Saturday, so I talked Karma Sue (Sister Mitchell of Prague fame) and Steph (Sister Young, my second child) into going down to St. George with me. We left Thursday morning and drove down in time for the session, then went to see Grandpa Forsythe afterwards.
We took Karma Sue's car, but she only let either one of us drive for about forty-five minutes because she wanted to sleep, then every time we went over a cattle guard she would wake up in a panic and grope for the wheel. It was pretty funny.

Steph slept most of the way.
Then she was mad at me for taking her picture. :)
The next day we went to "The Proposal" with Sandra Bullock, and it was actually really funny. Rather crude at a couple of points, but really rather surprising. It wasn't predictable, which was my favorite part. We wanted to go to Zion, but we didn't want to go in the middle of the afternoon because it was so dang hot this weekend. So we went to the movie, then left right after. We decided to do the River Walk, because it kind of let us see the whole scenic drive with a not-too-difficult hike at the end because Karma Sue just got surgery on her knee and we couldn't do anything too strenuous.
We had a great time, and it was so great to be back in Zion, though our house in Springdale looks like crap. I swear we stopped every fifty feet to take pictures.


On the way back we stopped by Forsytheville, and Karma Sue had a good time talking with Daddy about kids and schools. Momma asked us after a while if we needed to go rescue her, but we told her she was probably having a great time. :)