The Year in Review

Well, I thought it necessary to write about all the cool things that happened to me this last year. In all reality, it's been an awesome year.

This blog post is going to focus on all the cool stuff I did.
To start off, in January, I moved into Cinnamontree with a couple of my mission buddies. This was by far the most exciting semester I've had. Earlier, they had built a bar in the apartment and, being the cool people we were, threw a bunch of parties. We had a toga party, Hot Rod party, and many more.
One of such was an ugly sweater party. For this party, we made home made eggnog. To this day, I'm surprised nobody got sick from drinking it.
















This semester was...I'm not sure what you would call it, but I went on a date a week, and didn't ask or pay for a single one. They were either blind dates, or the girls asked me. Still no success tho.

As the semester came to a close, I got the offer to go to Oregon. It was a 9 credit hour program where we studied marine biology in Charleston, OR. It actually wasn't something that I usually do. In fact, it took a lot of convincing to get me to go. But in the end, I went. It was super cool. I think I'm going to live in Oregon someday. It was awesome. The friends I made there were also awesome. I stay in contact with most of them still.







Before leaving for Oregon, I bummed a ride off of some friends to Arizona because I haaaaa a deiwnd I was visoring i'd Mesa.













After Oregon, I came home, and bummed around the rest of the summer. We went to Red Robin a lot, and watched a ton of movies.





Near the end of the summer, my family decided to take a vacation back up to Oregon. We lived there as a family about 20 years ago. On our trip, we mostly camped on the way up there. We stopped by the Redwoods then went back and visited a bunch of places we liked to go as children, but mostly, we just relaxed. We rented a beach house and just relaxed.






Unfortunately, the rest of the year wasn't too eventful. I was in organic chemistry and other biology classes. This combination sums to doing almost nothing but studying. I turned down 15 blind dates, and went on three of my own choosing. I'm living with some pretty cool guys...mostly, and we've had a pretty chill time.


One highlight of the semester was that I was a TA for a computer science class. I've found my calling in life. It's been awesome.
Alright. So maybe it wasn't THE highlight. It was super fun.  But the Space Center was totally awesome!! For those of you who don't know, the Space Center is a place where dreams come true. It's an elementary school that has different rooms built like space ships from Star Trek. They have missions that groups of people go on (usually elementary students) they give you costumes, etc. This is the real deal.


As the year came to an end, my knee started hurting...worse. So I got it checked out. Apparently, I've been living on a torn meniscus. So I got that fixed. The result: I'm on crutches for 6 weeks, and off the basketball court for 6 months. But at least it'll be fixed.
And that's pretty much my year in a nutshell.

Roommates

Well, to start off, I'd like to mention that I just had surgery.  On my knee.  So if you're reading this, two things:
1.  If you haven't come to visit me and give me attention, shame on you!
2.  Be aware that I just took some pain killers and things might not make sense.

After moving away from home, one tends to have some interesting interactions with other people.  As crazy as it seems, not everyone is like a brother or sister who have somewhat similar work ethics as you.  Roommates are definitely full of surprises.  And I, for one, am an expert on the situation.  I've lived in 6 apartments at BYU.  That's a total of 22 roommates.  On my mission, I lived in 9 different cities, with 17 mission companions.  In this blog, I hope to highlight the best... or worst of these experiences.

The first general habit I have noticed about roommates is that they are generally lazy. Time and time again, I've found myself cleaning dishes.  There's one roommate who who refuses to believe that his dishes he uses for mac and cheese are ever... his.  He loves mac and cheese (especially when it's mine.  I bought a box of 15 and only ate 3.  He ate the rest and wouldn't admit to the fact.  I watched him go to my cupboard several times for my mac and cheese. I'm fairly observant.  He thinks I'm stupid or something?). Well, he happens to be the most frequent consumer of mac and cheese (MY mac and cheese) in our apt and ALWAYS leaves his dishes out.  It would be nice if he at least rinsed out MY mac and cheese from the pan (come to think of it, it's prolly my pan too....). But no.  Leaves it out 'till it gets all crusty and nasty.  Oh. Also the strainer.  How hard is it to clean out a strainer?  If you do it right away, it's just a quick rinse.  In all reality, that's what cleaning dishes is: just a few minutes. If you don't have time for that, you seriously have to get your life looked at.  It's like microwave directions for a poptart.  Seriously?  If you are too rushed to have to microwave poptarts, you gotta get rid of something.  Find more time. The best part is this roommate never does anything worthwhile.  So many times I see him on the couch just watching TV. Lazy buger....
I guess, in reality, I could just dedicate a whole blog to his behavior... but I won't.  There's another roommate that I had who found a sale on chili... apparently.  Two weeks, almost every day, I would find a bowl of chili sitting on the counter.  He wouldn't want to eat it the next day, so he'd put it aside and get another bowl of chili.  Almost every day he would do this.  For two weeks. This is also the roommate who had his own band. And they would practice every Friday night.  And believe me.  It wasn't often enough.  That was the semester I started cussing...  This was also the roommate who locked me out of my bedroom because he and his girlfriend were goin at it. Did I mention his band played sucky music? He had an accordian, a piano, guitar, bass, violin, trumpet and a banjo.  Really?? Wow. Exceptional!
Mission companions are always fun.  I had one who liked the temperature of the apartment at exactly a gazillion degrees.  Apparently he was an extremophile.  What's funny isn't that he liked the temperature so high, but that he would walk down the stairs, look at the thermostat and say: "Who changed the temperature to something reasonable??" Really?  There's two of us living here.  Of course I'm going to be the reasonable one here.  You, are crazy.  If it wasn't you, it was me.  There's no reason to be non-confrontational about it.
Oh it buggs me when roommates use my stuff. Eat MY mac and cheese, or, get this, I had one use my bath towel. Really?  And he was fat.  I had to burn it after that.  He wiped it all over his... fat.  Gross.
One of the most entertaining roommates was Scot. Super great kid. He was a freshman.  Poor guy.  Super socially awkward! He also had a problem with sleeptalking/walking.  I'll share the best experiences.
I don't really sleep a lot.  One night, while I was not sleeping, he woke up, and walked out of the room.  I asked him: Scot, where are you going?  Oh, I'm thirsty.  20 minutes later, he went back to bed.  He must have been really thirsty.  The next morning, while I was eating my marshmallow maties, he says: did our apartment flood?
No. Why?
Because all my books are wet.
Apparently when he was really "thirsty" he was dreaming about how our apartment was on fire and so he put his backpack out with the convenient glass of water that was in his hand.
Next story happened one of the nights I actually slept.  I woke up to him yelling.  I looked up and he was about to step on my face.  our beds were about 3 feet apart, and at the head of the beds was a mini fridge. He was standing on the fridge and about to jump on my face.
Scot!  Scot! Stop! What are you doin?
I've gotta cross this bridge!  It's about to fall apart, and I can't go back!
No Scot. It's not a bridge.  But the fridge will prolly collapse if you don't get off it! It took some more coaxing to get him back in bed.  But by this time, I was pro. at convincing him that he was asleep and needed to get back into bed. His bed.
Well, this isn't the most exciting blog post, but it's an attempt to fill my time while I'm down.  Either way, Merry Christmas! Maybe I'll write another later this week...
Until the next time!