Diapers

If you meet a dirty diape
Do not let it stay!
Quickly change the diaper out
and throw the mess away!

No one likes a stinky diape-
Change it for a fresh!
Make the world a better place
by throwing out the mess!

Naptime Reflections

I'm so glad when Emma takes naps!
Glad as I can be!

Clap my hands and shout for joy
then hurry and tidy

Get my scripture study done
Practice piano, too

Curl up and read a book . . .
then I nap too!

Pregnancy-- the real truth

This week I had an epiphany.

I had eaten breakfast in the morning, and a short while later, I was already hungry again, thanks to the growing child inside of me.  As I started frying up an egg, I joked to Spencer about my never-ending hunger.

That's when it hit me.

I know what's going on here . . .

Pregnancy changes women into hobbits!

Think about it. 

When we're pregnant, we get fatter, hairier, and need to eat every two hours!

Totally hobbit-like.

I just hope my baby turns out to be a normal human, and not a baby hobbit.

Now, please excuse me-- it's time for my second breakfast.  Mmm.

Caught in the Act

When your husband is as prolific a photographer as Spencer, you never know what you'll find saved on the camera memory card.

I'm looking forward to hearing the story behind this one!

My New Favorite Word

If I could describe myself in one word, it would be:

Sesquipedalian!

(Runners-up would include bibliophile, pulchritudinous, pragmatic, bijou, rococo.)

I love words!

Someone has too much time on his hands???

 One of my co-workers found this on Craigslist.  I think someone has too much time on his hands.


I have a stack of moving boxes I am willing to give to the needy. They are free, they are brown. They used to have my stuff in them. Some are small, good for books. Others are large, good for hiding when your mother-in-law knocks on the door of your new place. The pile includes two wardrobe boxes - before I had these two boxes, I didn't really feel like I had a wardrobe; I just felt like I had clothes - you too will feel special if you come take these. These boxes come from a smoke and pet free home - we had a pet before we moved, but now we can't find him. I am just heartbroken about it. I would feel somewhat better if I had more room in my garage, so you will really be helping me if you come take these boxes. All of these boxes have experience; I got them off Craigslist from a lady who moved here from Ohio. It's kind of exciting using Craigslist boxes; after you move, you get to open the box and discover whether the green marker that says "Christmas Snow Globes - Bathroom" is correct or whether the red marker that says "Office Books" is correct. I am a bit of an optimist - I was exhausted when we finished moving, but I saw the "Christmas Snow Globes - Bathroom" box on my way to bed that night and could hardly sleep. The next morning, I rushed down to the garage to see if I somehow scored an entire box of Christmas Snow Globes that I could use to decorate the throne room. Unfortunately, I guess I will just have to start collecting my own bathroom Christmas snow globes because the box just contained office books. An added bonus is that you get to write stuff on the sides of the boxes after you unpack and before you put the boxes back up on Craigslist - seriously, you should have seen how hard I was laughing when I wrote "Grandpa's tonsils" on the side of one these boxes and envisioned your wife reading that when she is packing up your place. Nearly all of these boxes have flaps and are corrugated. You may want to hold onto the boxes; you may need a place to live in a few months if you bit off more than you can chew when you bought your new home. I am sorry if I misled anyone by putting the words Magic and Goats in my posting title in a shameless attempt to have more people see this posting for free boxes. If you agree to come get the boxes and I find a magic goat in my new place before you get here, you can have the magic goat. Please don't call tonight. To entertain my neighbors at a barbecue once, I hypnotized one of my boys and told him that every time he heard a cell phone ring, he would cluck like a chicken and try to run people over. It was a huge hit at the barbecue, but I couldn't bring him back out of the hypnosis and if someone calls my house this late at night, it is very disruptive for the boy that was hypnotized and his little brother who ends up getting a bit trampled in his sleep. Tomorrow morning, call 375-3550. Ask for Elvis. That number is my wife's cell phone. Her name isn't Elvis, but I believe that every transaction on Craigslist is just a bit sweeter when the King plays a small role. Did I mention the boxes are free and have flaps?

Once and For All

This is the paper you wanted to write
Well tonight is the night that you can
Just get this done and by dawn's early light
you can finish the fight you began

This time I'm in it to stay!
Think about seizing the day!
Think about Micah who's longing for me to come play.
Tell him I'm on my way!

Jeff if you're still counting pages
Wake up and read 'em and weep
You got your deadlines and papers and grades
Yeah, but I've got a bed-- I need sleep!

Once and for all something tells me the tide will be turning!
Once and for all there's a fire inside me that won't stop burning
Now that the choice is so clear
Now that tomorrow is here
Watch how the mighty will fall
For once . . . once and for all!

This is to even the score
This ain't 490 no more
This ain't just me with some pie in the sky
This is do it or die!  This is war!

Once and for all I will finish this dumb hist'ry paper
Once and for all I'll be ending this Alcott themed caper
Five thousand pages to write.
Five thousand reasons to try.
Better to die than to crawl
Either I stand or I fall
For once . . . once and for all!!!

Poetic urges

All this intense paper writing and stress has found an outlet.
Unfortunately it's not in writing my paper . . .

Today the poetic urge struck me and all my pent-up stress released itself into the written word. 

I still haven't finished the poem I just started, but when I went to save it, I discovered a poem I had forgotten I had written.  Ironically, it's from the end of a term last summer when I was spewing out another paper.  It has been sitting in my computer file unnamed and unnoticed for the last nine months.

Until now.

Without further ado, I present a silly, but fun poem about that awful time of semester-- when deadlines are looming and your mind just goes blank.

Writer's Block

My brain is fried

My thoughts are limp

Like noodles overcooked

and left to drip into the drain

I cannot sit another hour

My thoughts will not behave

they wriggle and wiggle and

slither right off of the page

I will never get finished

I’ll stay here forever

My eyes will cloud over

My rear will harden

I’ll be stuck in a chair

Full of despair

And everyone walking by

Simply will stare

At the statue before them

A struggling girl

Stuck with her brain

in a never-ending whirl

Oh the cramps!

The misery!

The endless agony

The . . .

I’ve got it!

An idea for my paper!

Here goes!

Sounds like fun!

I just discovered a cool new tool (thanks to my Computers and Family History program).

It's called Audacity.

For those of you that don't know, it's a program that allows you to create sound files and edit them yourself.

Check out what I made:

Powered by Podbean.com

It's a duet between me and myself!  Pretty sweet, huh?
(I admit, I've always wanted to sing a duet with myself.  That's one dream to check off my list!)

Anyway, I hope this post works (I haven't tried embedding a sound file in my post before, so hopefully it works alright).  And I encourage you to try out Audacity (you can Google it and download it for free if you want) to have some fun with audio recordings.

Yippee!

Lackadaisical Locker Leasing

Lackadaiscal Locker Leasing is right. Or maybe Lousy Locker Leasing would be a better description. Regardless, this post is not actually about alliteration (although that would be a delightfully diverting post to write)-- this post is about lockers. And fiascos. And BYU.

I know what you're thinking. . . BYU? Do anything wrong? Never!!!!

Alas, BYU is not the pinnacle of perfection (despite the plethora of "proofs" dutifully supplied to the Daily Universe letters to the editor by overeager zealots). As evidenced by debacle that ensued when I tried to rent a locker Wednesday evening.

I signed up for two P.E. classes this semester, Water Aerobics and Weight Training. So, I paid for a locker and then dutifully tramped over to the RB women's locker room to get my locker assignment. The girl at the desk handed me my locker assignment, rattled off the rules, and then sent me on my way.

There was just one problem.

There was already a lock on my locker.

I trudged back to the desk and explained the situation to the girl at the desk. She grabbed a massive pair of lock clippers (which looked something like this ) and cheerfully trotted over to cut the lock for me.

To our great surprise, once the lock was clipped and the locker was open, we discovered that the locker had already been assigned to another student.  The student employee apologized and assigned me another locker.

The second locker had a lock on it, too.

I went back to the desk, yet again, and the employee assigned me a totally random locker on the same row.  I checked it out and thankfully, it did not have a lock on it (although it did have a towel left in it-- odd).  So, I locked it up, glad to have that fiasco out of the way.  Or so I thought.

The next morning I woke up and discovered that I had missed a couple of phone calls.  Upon listening to my voicemails, I was appalled to hear an all-too-familiar voice say:

"This is [insert name here] from the Richards' Building women's locker room.  It appears that we accidentally assigned you a locker that was already assigned to someone.  Please come by the locker room and talk to us to get a new locker assignment."

I have got to be the only student in BYU history to have been assigned four lockers in only two days!  The girl that helped me originally insisted that she had never EVER heard of anyone before me getting assigned to a locker that had already been assigned.  But, here I am-- living proof that BYU's locker assignment program desperately needs some revamping.

I guess I should be more grateful.  After all, I did finally get an unoccupied locker.

And hey, at least they weren't in charge of issuing my social security number!

Chocoholism

Just in case you couldn't tell, my new blog background is chocolate.

Anyone who knows me well knows why.

Random Lists

4 Jobs I've Had
1. Religion/Family History Reference Assistant, Harold B. Lee Library
2. Server at the MTC Cafeteria\
3. Telesurveying (may I die before I do this again-- 3 weeks was 3 weeks too long!)
4. Secretary, bills manager, lawn mower, orchard pruner/waterer/picker/canner, gardener, helper with everything else Dad wanted to do (including painting, calking, sheetrocking, mudding, putting in pipes, putting in electric lines, pulling up carpet and any other remodeling work). Pretty much I was free manual labor (okay, maybe not free as in cost, but free as in way too readily available. No wonder I started looking around for other options!)

4 Things I Do Instead of Going to Bed
1. Email/Facebook/Play around on the computer
2. Look at family members' blogs or update this blog
3. Listen to my roomates' never-ending dating traumas or share my own dating traumas (in an apartment of 4 girls, there just never seems to be enough of this. Someone always has a creepy guy interested in them, or wants to get back with their ex-boyfriend or can't decide which guy to date, etc. etc. etc. It's enough to stay up every night and expound upon.)
4. Read cheesy but captivating books like Twilight and the newest Harry Potter.

4 Most Common Cravings for this Week
1. CHOCOLATE. (I'm not even sure if this can accurately be counted as a craving any more. It's more like a fact of life. I'm awake, I want chocolate.)
2. Boo berries (I'll be honest-- after Danielle's blog post I had them on the brain. Luckily, since it was actually Halloween they were on sale for only $1.50, which relieved most of my guilt over giving in to such frivilous urges.)
3. Anything with cheese in it, but especially a ham and cheese sandwich (sadly my ham seems to have disappeared into that black hole in the back of the fridge that always manages to swallow up the food you know you had a day ago).
4. Fresh fruit. Obviously I need to go grocery shopping some time soon . . .

4 Special Features of My Apartment
1. My bedroom window, with no screen on it. I discovered this within a couple of days of moving in, when the flies started mysteriously appearing in the apartment. One side of the window is covered with a screen, but for some reason the other side isn't. At least it makes a perfect location for launching water ballons or other treats at unsuspecting victims below!
2. The half-performing microwave. Every time I warm a plate of food up, I pull it out to find half the plate still ice-cold and half the plate near boiling. Doesn't that go against some law of physics somewhere? Light and dark can't be in the same place in the same time. I didn't think heat and cold could be either.
3. The Fishbowl. Monticello is unique in that it has 2 apartment complexes that face each other, with a gap somewhere between 15 and 20 feet apart. The common area between is appropriately called the fishbowl because at such a short distance, everyone can hear and see everything that goes on in all the other apartments. Example: The other night a girl from the ward came over to share her latest dating trauma with our apartment. As we were all listening and discussing it, one of my roomates got a text message from a guy that lives in the complex directly across from us, in the basement (we're on the 3rd floor). The text said "We can hear you from here!" Yikes.
4. A peculiarly high engagement rate. Girls that live here seem to catch marriage like the plague. The girl that lived in this apartment before me just got engaged a couple of weeks ago. The apartment next door, where I used to live, had at least 2 people get engaged there in the last year. We'll have to start taking bets on who's next.

4 Books I've Read over 15 Times
1. Beauty (by Robin McKinley)
2. A Little Princess ( I used to pretend that Mom was mean Miss Minchin when she would make me do my chores and I was Sara, the heroine, who never retaliates, but meekly obeys and makes everything better by imagining that she was a princess.)
3. The entire Work and the Glory series. I'm not sure exactly when Janel got me hooked on them, but I found an entry in my journal, dated 3-12-95 that noted that I was reading the Work and The Glory volume 4. After that I re-read them regularly, especially around Christmas when I knew we'd get the latest volume.
4. Pride and Prejudice

4 Projects I can't Seem to Finish
1. Writing my life history. Oh wait, I haven't even started that one. Dang.
2. Organizing my room. Every time I swear to, another pile of stuff appears. Maybe fore my new year's resolution . . .
3. Scanning the family photos for Mom
4. Memorizing The Ride of Paul Revere by Washington Irving. I've started it half-a-dozen times and every time I get stuck after the first page.

4 Silly Things I did in 4th Grade
1. Read every baby-sitter's club, Sweet Valley Twins, boxcar kids, and Nancy Drew book ever published multiple times over. Did I really not have anything better to do with my time?
2. Convinced myself that half of the boys in my class secretly had crushes on me and confided my hunch to my best friend, Megan.
3. Felt bitterly disappointed when my pumpkin/easter mobile/anything else we made in class never won any of Mrs. Heilesons' regular art contests. I guess art just isn't one of my talents.
4. Got scared to death after watching the movie The House With a Clock In Its Walls in library time and refused for years afterward to even look at a John Bellair book or have a ticking clock anywhere in my bedroom. (The plot involved an evil sorcerer who left a clock inside a house that was really a bomb that could go off at any time.)

4 Goals I Have Made Every Time I Have Made Goals
1. Get to bed early (obviously the time this list was posted answers any questions about how well I have succeeded at this goal)
2. Practice the piano more.
3. Organize my time (and not wait to do homework until 2 hours before it's due)
4. Be more outgoing-- talk to people instead of waiting for them to talk to me.

Monkey Business

Why are practical jokes so much fun? I never can seem to get tired of them (as long as they're not the really mean kind). Case in point:

Today at work I was at the desk when I noticed that one of my co-workers had left his facebook account up at the desk. First of all, he wasn't supposed to be using facebook at work. Secondly, that's pretty risky leaving your account open where anyone can get into it . . .

I think you can guess what happened next.

Suffice it to say that the next time my co-worker opened his account, he was more than a little surprised to see that he had a new profile picture. Instead of the usual self-portrait, someone had posted a picture of a monkey.

Luckily I didn't get in trouble for changing the picture. My boss even agreed that it was a better picture than the one my co-worker had chosen for himself, and suggested that next time I find facebook open at work, I should change his password as well.

What better way to end the week than a little monkey business?

The Top 10 Things I Refuse To Do

1. Watch The Office. Just because everyone else is doing it. I refuse to blend in with the crowd.

2. Go to a football game. Why would I want to sit for 4 hours and freeze to death watching a bunch of people jump on top of each other when I could be home cuddled up in a blanket, reading Pride and Prejudice for the 100th time? Okay, maybe if a really cute boy asked me to go with him . . .

3. Eat brats. Barf. Same goes for sauerkrat. Who in their right mind would want to eat bloated, greasy sausages and pickled cabbage?

4. Go bulimic. Read Suzy's blog for details.

5. Go on a roller coaster. I can just get the stomach flu again for a much cheaper price.

6. Talk to Confederate Man again at work. For those who haven't heard this delightful story, he's a patron who comes in, wearing a confederate hat (to make a statment, I think), and proceeds to talk with anyone who will listen for at least 1/2 an hour straight. His questions range everywhere from "Where did Spencer W. Kimball say that the Adam-God theory was false?" to "Have you heard about how the Sword of Laban is supposed to remain unsheathed until the Second Coming?" Talk about weird. It's somewhat reminiscent of my days on the mission. Fortunately I learned a good trick back then: "Ignoring is bliss!" I think he's finally starting to get the hint. Either that or he's just too absorbed in researching whether or not Adam had a bellybutton.

7. Give up on reading the Old Testament. I may have started it over 2 years ago, but I'm not giving up now. I finally made it to Nahum and I'm determined to hold out until the end. Only 27 pages to go!

8. Go tanning. With my fair skin, I don't think skin cancer will need any extra help.

9. Let Becca leave any more moldy bread on my car. Pranksters, beware! I'll be plotting a comeback for any knaves foolhardy enough to try.

10. Go without dark chocolate for longer than 24 hours. I think I might start experiencing withdrawal symptoms if I did. Or at very least, I'd be perilously in danger of losing my membership in the Wilson chocoholics club, and that would be a tragedy.

Pizza and PDA

The other day some friends invited me to come with them to Brick Oven and get pizza. A pretty harmless scenario . . . or so I thought! But, as the waitress sat us in our table, I noticed I was directly facing a couple in a booth. They were both sitting on the same side, which I thought was a little strange, but people do strange things some times. I joined in some conversation and forgot about the couple in the booth until I absentmindedly glanced over a few minutes later. They were kissing in the middle of Brick Oven! Honestly, who picks Brick Oven for their make-out site? I know this is BYU, but there are still some rules to protecting innocent eyes. And #1 should be "No Making Out in Restaurants!" Unfortunately this couple hadn't learned rule #1 yet. To my great amusement, after we started snickering, the guy turned around and scanned the room, like he was checking to see if anyone was watching. What does he think everyone else is going to think? It's not like slobbering on each other in public is exactly inconspicuous! But, apparently exchanging germs in plain view of the world is more important than enjoying a good meal. Maybe next time we can reserve the banquet room-- I'd like my pizza without PDA on the side, please!