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.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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 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?
Saturday, July 25, 2009
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:
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 l
aid 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 w
e'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. :)
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 l
aid 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 w
e'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. :)
Thursday, July 16, 2009
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!
Monday, June 22, 2009
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. :)
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. :)
Bookstore Book List
So I was thinking about the books that a bookstore employee really should know about, and I started making up this list with one of my co-workers. I was hoping for something succinct, but of course when you start making a book list it's never as short as you think. So here's the 70-ish books a self-respecting bookstore employee "should" know.
1. How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie
2. Crucial Conversations Kerry Patterson
3. Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl
4. Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold
5. Origin of Species Charles Darwin
6. The Numerati Stephen Baker
7. Walden Henry David Thoreau
8. Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
9. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
10. Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
11. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
12. Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway
14. No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Alexander McCall Smith
15. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
16. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Witches Abroad Terry Pratchett
18. Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville
19. Post-American World Fareed Zakaria
20. Common Sense Thomas Paine
21. The Prince Machiavelli
22. The World is Flat Thomas Friedman
23. Audacity of Hope Barack Obama
24. Bird by Bird Annie Lamott
25. Washington: The Indispensable Man James Thomas Flexner
26. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
27. Dracula Bram Stoker
28. Les Miserables Victor Hugo
29. World History for Dummies
30. The Giver Lois Lowry
31. The Book Thief Markus Zusak
32. Chronicles of Narnia C.S. Lewis
33. Chronicles of Prydain Lloyd Alexander
34. Lincoln: A Photobiography Russell Freedman
35. A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine L’Engle
36. Circle of Quiet Madeleine L’Engle
37. Anne of Green Gables L.M. Montgomery
38. House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. Beowulf Anonymous
40. The Iliad Homer
41. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
42. To the Castle and Back Vaclav Havel
43. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie
44. Last of the Breed Louis L’Amour
45. Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt
46. Hamlet William Shakespeare
47. The Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare
48. Henry V William Shakespeare
49. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
50. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
51. The Republic Plato
52. Foundation Isaac Asimov
53. The Color Purple Alice Walker
54. Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
55. Continuous Harmony Wendell Berry
56. The End of Education Neil Postman
57. Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels
58. Family J. California Cooper
59. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
60. Tuesdays with Morrie Mitch Albom
61. The Americans: The Colonial Experience Daniel J. Boorstein
62. To Know as we are Known Parker J. Palmer
63. Paradise Lost John Milton
64. A World Lit Only by Fire William Manchester
65. Writing Down the Bones Natalie Goldberg
66. My Grandfather's Blessings Rachel Naomi Remen
67. Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
There were a few more, but I forgot which ones I had already taken off. I was trying to keep it to fifty, but now I'm thinking maybe 70 or 75, so it's still a work in progress.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Perfect
So the other night my roommate's ex-(sort-of)boyfriend was over, he's been jerking her around all year, I think the dude's bi-polar and ridiculously self-centered. Anyway he was hanging out at our apartment and quote a line from Houseguest. I identified it, of course, and he was so shocked that I knew what it was! Shawnee (my roommate) said, Kate's a movie buff, try some other quotes, she'll get them! He thought he could beat me, but check out how perfectly he set himself up:
Him: "Oops! There goes my napkin!"
Me: "What's Up, Doc?"
Him: You know that film? No way! No one knows that film!
Me: Evidently I do.
Him: Hm...okay I've got one! "It would appear we are at an impasse."
Me: I'm afraid so. I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brain!
Is that just perfect or what? By the way after that I gave him one quote from Live Free or Die Hard and he was stumped. So much for dumb boyfriends. :)
Him: "Oops! There goes my napkin!"
Me: "What's Up, Doc?"
Him: You know that film? No way! No one knows that film!
Me: Evidently I do.
Him: Hm...okay I've got one! "It would appear we are at an impasse."
Me: I'm afraid so. I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brain!
Is that just perfect or what? By the way after that I gave him one quote from Live Free or Die Hard and he was stumped. So much for dumb boyfriends. :)
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