Finals Week has Come!

Finals week has finally come, and what am I to do?  Should I go and take a final, or perhaps even two?  Tomorrow morning bright and early, I'll begin my finals quest.  I won't be leaving in a hurry, because I'll need lots of time to do my best.  I'm trying real hard to rhyme right now, but it's not working out so well.  So please forgive my written words as I begin this story to tell.  Ok, enough rhyming because I don't know what story to tell.  Anyway, at 8:00 am tomorrow, I'm planning on taking my genealogy final which shouldn't be too hard.  Then, at 2:30 pm, my MCOM final is scheduled and I have to take it then.  Then I'll go study for my Philosophical and Ethical Issues test and I might just take it Monday night.  If I do this, I'll have three finals out of the way on the first day.  Then, I'll have the rest of the week to finish my last two finals which happen to be the more difficult ones.  I'll probably take Physics first and do it on Wednesday morning.  Then, I'll study all day Thursday for my Physiology final.  I'll actually take this final on Friday at 2:00 hopefully.  This is what my finals schedule is looking like so far.  Things could change and might have to change, but this is the rough outline in my head right now.  Well, it's been a great semester!  Wish me luck on my finals!  Thanks blogging world!

December is Here!

Wow!  December is here and there is only one more week left in this semester.  Then, the next week is finals week.  Then, Christmas Break is here!  Christmas break is probably my favorite break of the year because it is a time when I don't have school to worry about; and, I don't even have work to worry about either.  The feeling of snuggling up on the couch with a blanket and hot chocolate, and watching football is spectacular.  There is nothing like it.  College football's bowl season kicks off with a thriller this year on December 18, the day after finals.  BYU and UTEP will square off in this year's New Mexico Bowl.  BYU has gone to the Las Vegas Bowl the last five years or so, so it's definitely time for a change.  I'm glad we became eligible to play in a bowl game this year.  We started 1-4 and things weren't looking so good.  With a few changes, the team seemed to turn around and we ended the regular season 6-6.  Well, I think we should say 7-5 because we really beat Utah.  The refs and review booth cheated.  Anyway, don't get me started on that topic.  I hope this last week of the semester goes well.  Here is to a good week!  Until next time!

Happy Thanksgiving

Three days ago it was Thanksgiving Day.  We have had most of this week off from school as a break to celebrate Thanksgiving.  I stayed here in Utah for the break, but had a lot of family come to Utah from states such as Florida, Oregon, Idaho, and Arizona.  A lot of my cousins were here which made it fun.  For the first time on Thanksgiving, we played basketball instead of football before the meal.  We usually have our annual Turkey Bowl, but it was just so cold this year that we decided to keep it indoors.  The actual meal was delicious and consisted of lots and lots of food.  There were many pies for dessert and I'd have to say my favorite pie is cherry pie.  Along with Thanksgiving comes football.  There were so many good football games on this last week.  The most exciting was probably the Boise St. - Nevada game.  Boise missed a short field goal as time ran out and the game went into overtime.  Boise then missed another field goal and Nevada made their field goal for the win.  I feel bad for Boise's kicker.  BYU killed Utah, but the refs were unfair and controlled the outcome of the game.  The Utes are the luckiest team in the history of college football.  It is ridiculous.  They had so many lucky breaks that went their way.  Anyway, I guess it's back to school now.  Next thing to look forward to: Christmas!

Ninjas Unite

I write this post as an update to the post Todd posted last week.  Sorry about all the "post" words in that last sentence.  Anyway, after one week, and after many battle wounds and carried out strategies, I am proud to report that our army of ninjas has increased from 1 to 11.  After we received our ninja last week, it was quickly stolen and we were sadly left with zero ninjas.  It was then we began to fight to try to capture more ninjas.  Our next door neighbors, at this point, had a total of 10 ninjas.  They had successfully stolen all of them from different apartments.  We tried a few times to steal their ninjas, but they were always on guard and tagged us at any attempt we made to swipe their ninjas.  In order to get some ninjas, I agreed with the guys in this apartment to go out and help them steal ninjas from apartments that still had their ninjas.  The agreement was that I would get half of the ninjas that we ended up stealing as a group.  We only came away with two ninjas, so I came home with half, or one ninja as we had previously agreed.  Before I went to bed that night, I went back to the 10 ninja apartment and looked for any way to steal some ninjas.  There was no way because their whole apartment was sitting in the front room guarding the ninjas like Dwight Howard guards the hoop.  But, suddenly, as I was sitting there watching TV with them, I saw a perfect opportunity to do some damage.  Now, I don't mean to leave you hanging as the reader, but I'm afraid I must continue the rest of this story next week.  So, stay tuned and read next week's post to find out how the story of the ninja wars ends!  

A Great Weekend for Sports

Here I am again writing in my blog after a great week.  This week has been great.  In the sporting world, however, this week has been even greater if you are a BYU or Utah Jazz fan.  First, let me start with the Utah Jazz.  The first word that comes to mind when thinking of their last 4 wins is "miraculous."  The team has been on the road for the last 4 games.  They started down in Miami where they played the Heat who proudly boast their "Big 3."  They then traveled north in the same state to take on the Orlando Magic.  From there, they traveled a bit east to battle it out against the Atlanta Hawks.  And then, just last night, they were in Charlotte playing against the Bobcats.  The amazing Utah Jazz won every single one of these games!  These aren't just any teams, but they are the best teams in the Eastern Conference, and we beat them in their own arenas.  I love the Utah Jazz!  What is even more amazing is that we were losing by double-digits in the second half of each game.  The persistent and hard-working Jazz players continued to fight and never gave up.  They always came back to win the game.  The most impressive come back I have seen was against the Heat.  At the end of regulation, Paul Millsap scored 11 points in 28 seconds to send that game into overtime.  Incredible!  Secondly, BYU's football and basketball teams both were victorious in their games.  The basketball team defeated Fresno State 83 to 56 in Provo.  The football team defeated Colorado State 49-10 in Fort Collins.  I am proud to be both a Cougar and Jazz fan!

Convincing Win

Well, I can't believe that a week has gone by since Halloween.  Time is really flying by fast.  This week was definitely a good one.  I was quite pleased with how well I did on a couple of Physiology quizzes that I had this week.  I owned the heart.  Something else which made the week quite dandy is that BYU football came away with a convincing win yesterday in Lavell Edwards Stadium.  We clobbered the Rebels of the University of Nevada Las Vegas 55 to 7.  I was hoping for a shutout, but they scored on their last drive in the fourth quarter.  This is probably because we were playing out second and third string defenders.  Jake Heaps played well and was the MVP of the game.  We were finally able to get a passing game going.  Heaps was finally able to complete some longer passes.  He threw a great pass to Cody Hoffman for about a 50 yard touchdown pass.  Josh Quezada also played well as he rushed for 3 TDs.  They were his first three rushing touchdowns of the season.  He had a touchdown reception in their first game against Washington.  I thought our defense played exceptionally well.  Before UNLV's last drive, the defense had held them to less than 100 yards on offense.  Hopefully we can continue playing like this.  If we do, we might just find ourselves bowl eligible.  Also, if we continue to get better, we might have a pretty good shot at beating the U of U up in Salt Lake.  After all, it was finally proved that they are extremely overrated after being embarrassed on their home field by TCU yesterday.  TCU annihilated the Utes 47 to 7.  I guess their easiest schedule in college football won't pay off after all.  Let's go Cougs!    

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Today, October 31, 2010, is Halloween!  So, I wish all of my followers a very happy Halloween and hope that tomorrow finds you alive and well.  For this post, I am going to talk about the many different things I dressed up as.  Chronologically, we'll start with a Wednesday night party that we had with some Spanish wards in Provo.  For this, I didn't have much time to come up with an elaborate costume, but was able to dress up as a Swedish soccer player.  I simply wore a soccer jersey from Sweden.  Along with the jersey I wore a headband, long socks, shorts, and I did my hair into a European mohawk.  The next party was on Friday.  I had the great pleasure of attending the Cougarette Halloween Party.  One of the Cougarettes, Bailee, asked me to be her date for the party.  The challenge was to dress up as something with your date.  Bailee had a tiger costume, so I decided to dress up as a caddy.  So, the idea was that she would be a tiger symbolizing Tiger Woods and that I would be Steve Williams AKA Tiger Wood's caddy.  For this, I wore a newsies cap, a polo, a vest, khaki pants, and a golf glove.  I also carried around a bag of golf clubs.  I enjoyed this costume.  On Saturday, we had another date party.  My date, Karlee, and I dressed up as Russian Sailors.  Karlee's grandma had a bunch of costumes that we were able to borrow.  And, we chose the sailors.  I attended some fun parties over the weekend.  Today, however, I don't have any plans of dressing up, unfortunately.

Fall is in the Air

Fall was definitely in the air this past week in Provo.  In fact, it still is in the air.  As I write this post, the smell of baking, seasoned pumpkin seeds awaken the ever so small, but numerous chemoreceptors in my nose.  The time doesn't seem to be going by fast enough.  I would like to eat them now.  These seeds came as a result of carving pumpkins.  On Friday, I had the great pleasure of carving pumpkins with some friends.  We each had our own pumpkin and carved our own designs into the front face of our respective pumpkins.  I happened to carve a happy face which ended up looking like an overly happy clown's face.  There were other faces, graveyards, and haunted houses carved as well.  As I looked into the bowl of pumpkin pulp and seeds, I decided I wanted to keep the seeds to bake.  So, I dug my hands deep down into the orange mush to rescue every single seed.  The process was long and messy, but well worth it.  Well, I guess that remains to be seen.  We will see how they actually taste once they're done baking.  The next night, I was able to go to two different halloween parties/dances.  I, along with some of my friends, dressed up as gangsters.  We sported the flat-brimmed caps, gang bandannas, XXL jerseys, baggy pants, and fresh kicks.  We danced as gangster-like as possible doing dances like the jerk, the reject, the dougie, and the spongebob.  It was a fun night.  There is also a story about a drunk girl that happened to show up at the more sketchy party.  That story is for another time, however.  Obviously, we didn't stay long at the sketchy party.  Well, we'll see how long the fall lasts.  The colorful leaves have been beautiful, but I have a feeling that snow will shortly arrive to the city of Provo.    

Another Week Gone By

I can't believe that another week has gone by.  The time seems to be flying by this semester.  As I was thinking about it today, I realized that we are at the half-way point of this semester.  This means that we are getting close to Christmas which gets me excited.  Well, the BYU football team experienced another sad loss to the hands of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth yesterday.  Our defense played pretty well, but our offense wasn't able to do much against their defense.  We are now at 2-5 and have five more games left.  Three of the remaining games are home games against mediocre opponents.  So, we should win all of those games.  Of the two remaining road games, we'll hopefully win one of the two so that our final record is 6-6.  This would make us bowl eligible.  Hopefully, if we obtain that record, that we get invited to play in a bowl game.  In other news this week, school went well.  I didn't have any tests this week which made it nice, but I did have a lot of Physics homework.  Physics homework takes a lot of time and thinking.  So, I spent a lot of last week's time in the physics lab doing my homework under the close supervision of physics TA's.  On Friday, one of my buddies got his mission call.  He has been called to serve in the Finland Helsinki mission.  I am really excited for him because I served in the Sweden Stockholm mission which is right next door.  I learned some Finnish while I was there, so I've been trying to teach him a little.  Well, that's all for this week's entry.  Hopefully this next week goes as fast as the previous week.

Candy Bar to a Stranger

As stated by Shayne Clarke himself, "this weekend's assignment is to buy a coke for a stranger and then to write about it in your blogs."  Well, here I am.  And, I am proud to report that it was a success.  After we were assigned this homework, I immediately began looking for opportunities to complete the task at hand.  Initially, I found myself fairly busy and didn't really stumble upon any positive-looking situations.  Also, there seems to be a limited supply of Coca-Cola on BYU's campus which didn't help things at all.  The time went by and seemed to speed up as the week went on.  Eventually, Saturday night came and I still hadn't accomplished my goal.  I found myself at a BYU women's soccer that night when I remembered what I was supposed to do.  Todd was with me and he hadn't done it yet either.  So, he ran down to the concession stand, but they were closed.  Sunday came which made it harder to purchase anything.  Luckily, I found a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup candy bar in the kitchen and immediately knew that that was what I was going to give to the stranger.  Sunday night rolled around and I went to the apartment next door for a 10/10/10 at 10:10 p.m. party.  It was there that I met her.  She was a lovely young lady with blonde hair.  I started talking with her and told her that I wanted to give her a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.  Without hesitating, she accepted.  Success!  She thanked me and let me know that that is her favorite candy bar.  We continued to talk and realized that we both know Breck Laing, one of my good buddies.  Apparently, her roommate dated him for a time.  It is definitely a small world, especially on this BYU campus.

Conference and Exams

For this post, I am going to write about the weekend, and I am also going to write about the exams I have coming up.  To start, let me tell you about the great weekend I had.  The reason why it was so great is because we had General Conference.  For my followers that aren't members of the LDS faith, let me explain.  Basically, General Conference is a conference for the the entire body of the Church.  The Prophet, Apostles, and other leaders of the Church speak during several different sessions of the conference.  They receive guidance from our Heavenly Father on what to speak about and convey the message in a way that all can understand.  It is a very happy and spiritually uplifting time for those that watch.  I was especially excited when Per Malm spoke in the last session of the conference.  He is a church leader and he is from Sweden!  He gave a great talk and spoke very good English.  I was able to watch this conference at my parent's home on their TV.  This weekend was one to remember for a long time.  Also, I need to write about the exams I have coming up.  Of course, I have the grammar test for this MCOM class. I will probably take that tomorrow after some last minute studying.  And then, on Wednesday, I am going to take my Physics test that I have to take.  I am not very excited about this one.  It is my first Physics exam at BYU, so I am a little nervous about it.  Hopefully it goes well.  This is all I am going to write about for this week.  Until next time!

Busy-as-a-Bee Week

I hope I used the hyphen correctly in my title.  As I recall, one of the rules of using the hyphen is when there is a compound adjective; however, I am still not sure if that is right.  The semicolon used in the previous sentence is placed correctly.  I am pretty sure about that.  Anyway, I will get on with my post for the week.  Because of the grammar test coming up, we have focused some of our attention on reviewing grammatical principles.  So, lately, I have been noticing and watching for grammar errors in my speech as well as in my writing.  The week was a pretty busy one.  Multiple days of my week were days when I was on campus from early in the morning until late at night.  Luckily, on two of these days, there was free pizza on campus for dinner.  I definitely took advantage of these pleasant surprises.  The semester has continued to pick up more and more speed as quizzes and midterms approach.  I have my first midterm tomorrow for my Physiology class.  I am a little nervous for it because there is a lot of material to know.  Dr. Rhees, my professor, does a great job explaining the material in class.  But, hopefully he doesn't make the test super hard.  I also have a Physics test coming up pretty soon which will be a beast.  Can an exam be described as being a beast?  I think it can.  Yesterday wasn't a very good day because of the defeat of my beloved BYU football team.  Nevada beat them 27-13 in a frustrating day.  I questioned a lot of the play-calling, but never once booed my team as other fans did.  I hate most BYU fans.  Half the fans were gone before the game even ended.  I shouldn't call them fans.  Well, that's all for this week.  I am hoping for a quick turnaround for our Cougars.  We'll see what happens up in Logan on Friday...      

Plastered in Paint (literally)

It was another great week in beautiful Provo.  The weather is still very pleasant even though the temperature has decreased slightly.  Fall is in the air, but the sun still shines and the sky remains blue.  Happiness will spread as the leaves on the trees start to turn yellow, orange, and red.  Maybe I should write a poem for one of these posts.  Anyway, the highlights of this week include: school, lots of football, and a fierce paint war.  The school part was just normal classes and homework.  The "lots of football" part is both watching and playing football.  I was invited to join an intramural flag football team this week and immediately accepted.  Roberto was the only one I knew on the team.  We had a game on Wednesday night and, honestly, our team isn't very good.  We lost 30-9.  And, not to brag or anything, but, I had all of our team's 9 points.  The other team was going for 3 extra points after a touchdown and I intercepted a pass and ran it all the way back.  So, our team got the 3 points instead.  The quarterback was going to run the ball, so I came off the man I was guarding to "tackle" the QB.  As I did this, the QB tried to float a pass over me to the guy I was guarding.  Of course, I didn't allow this to happen.  I jumped and caught the ball high above my head for the interception and, like a deer, outran the hungry, pursuing opposition.  Later in the game, I told our QB to hit me on a deep route because I was being guarded by a slow-as-molasses human.  We connected on a 60 yard TD strike.  Even though we lost, it was still fun.  I actually ended up switching teams and played another game on Saturday morning.  We tied that game 12-12.  To end on a sad note, BYU lost to the Seminoles of Florida State 34-10.  Hopefully the Cougars can turn it around and get a win against next week's visiting Nevada Wolfpack.

Bittersweet Symphony

In honor of a great band known as the Verve, I title this post after one of their most famous songs.  The reason in doing so is because this week was one of many sweet as well as a few bitter moments.  The sweetest part of the week came on Monday which happened to be Labor Day.  Because of the holiday, I didn't have school, so I chose to spend Sunday night at my parent's house.  It was fun to be with them as well as a couple of my siblings.  On the holiday, we decided to get out and do something fun.  So, we invited my two cousins from Florida and all went up to Park City for the day.  Upon arrival, we immediately got in the line for the famous Alpine Slide which is basically a giant slide coming down the mountain that you ride down on a little cart.  It was fairly busy because of the holiday, but the time went by quick because of the pleasant company.  We rode the very enjoyable lift to the top and strategically picked opponents for a race on the way down.  I ended up racing my younger brother, and, of course, I beat him by a good 5 seconds.  When my cousin finally made it down, he was a little dirty, and both he and his clothes were a little cut up.  We came to find out that he had fallen off the slide and completed a few rolls while doing so.  Miraculously, he was able to compose himself, fetch his almost lost phone, get back on the track, and speed down the slide to still beat his sister in their race.  The Alpine Slide was a sweet Monday moment.  We had a great lunch afterward as well as a quick treat at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory which really was sweet.  The bitter part of the week came on Saturday which was yesterday.  I had to witness my beloved BYU football team lose to the Air Force Academy.  Well, that will do it for this week's blogging.  Until next time!

Rookie Blogger

As the title to this post suggests, I am a first-time blogger and I don't really know what my mind wants to think of blogging yet.  I always thought that I would stay away from the potential addiction and always considered it to be a more feminine hobby.  However, in a way, I have been forced to create this blog.  Well, you see, today was the first day of classes here at Brigham Young University where I am beginning my junior year.  In my Communication in Organizational Settings class, my great professor, Shayne Clarke, assigned everyone in the class to create a blog.  And so, here I am with my first post.  The intent of all of this is to encourage us to write more.  And, as we write more, we will become better writers.  It is like this with most things in life.  The more you practice something, the better you become at whatever you practice.  So, I guess I am a little excited about this assignment.  It will be a good way to keep up on some sort of a journal.  Hopefully I'll have good news to report next week about a BYU football win over UW!  Let's go Cougs!