100 Things I've learned in Logan

My first year at Utah State University is just about done.
I must say that it has been quite the year.
And I have learned a lot!
Since I like lists, I decided to make one.

Things I've Learned in Logan:
1. You learn a lot about yourself by living with people who are not like you
2. I have a lot more pet peeves than I ever realized
3. Taylor Swift songs CAN get old
4. Memorizing a classical piano piece should not be left until the weekend before the performance
5. Funny movie lines are to be used in real life as much as possible
6. If you want to rock climb your door, make sure you have strong enough cords
7. Snow really is as bad as I thought it was
8. As bad as snow is, the nasty 1/2 rain, 1/2 snow slush thing is even worse
9. Two words to describe my dream kiss: Paul Wesley
10. It's fun to addict your roommates to your obsessions
11. In Logan, "Southern Utah" is Beaver city
12. Your roommates really are your family
13. Sneaking out of the apartment at 1 AM can be a bad idea....
14. M & M's and ice cream are greatly appreciated by all
15. Sometimes you just had to be there
16. Midnight pizza is a lot more fun when you try to recruit people to help you raise your numbers
17. I do NOT like church activities made awkward by the bishop and his wife
18. Colored chalk tastes NASTY
19. I can survive a cadaver lab
20. Don't stand in the "splash zone" or you may get hit by butt preservative juice
21. Eyeballs are squishy
22. Always have a quote wall but be careful what you put on it because you will be judged by every person that walks into your apartment
23. The FAC always has something going on, even at midnight on Sundays
24. A printer is a necessity of life
25. Billy Joel and Elvis Presley are epic
26. It only takes one person dancing like an idiot to make everyone else feel comfortable
27. Embrace the things you dislike or your life will be miserable
28. It is possible to turn EVERY song into a Twilight parody
29. You probably shouldn't drive 12 mph over the speed limit, even in the middle of nowhere
30. Refrigerators should be cleaned out regularly or you could end up with liquefied lettuce
31. Liquefied lettuce smells DISGUSTING and you cannot get the smell out of the container even after using bleach
32. It is possible to only see your roommate once a week
33. Sometimes the bathroom floor can be a lake
34. Becoming friends with the boys next door is good
35. Setting a curfew for the boys next door because they never leave is also good
36. Make friends with the people in the music department because you will be seeing them for the next three years
37. The bishops have a secret competition going on to see who can get the most people in their wards married off (okay so this is just a theory but still)
38. The smell can contaminate your food
39. Chasing Liberty never gets old
40. The Gilmore Girls theme song is not to be sung in a normal voice
41. Training with Tammy really can make you sore
42. It is possible to laugh so hard that you can't stand up
43. Those stupid moments that you don't like to admit just happened to you happen to me often enough that they are now called "Dacy Moments"
44. Whole grain waffles are nasty
45. Fortunes cookies don't really give you fortunes
46. Make sure you buy enough bleach when you are going to color someone's hair
47. Putting your mattresses in the living room = acting like a bum for days
48. Having an emotional breakdown on the phone to mom = a care package a few days later (my mom is the best!)
49. Losing your voice can lead to being made fun of for a very long time
50. You probably shouldn't talk during movies, it makes them mad
51. When you have an opportunity to get free stuff, take it
52. It is possible to rap/chant to "We Will Rock You"
53. Most of those crazy people you see in the music department are the music therapy majors
54. A mutual hatred can really bring people together
55. Sometimes you just get too tired to care
56. A 6 hour drive alone can be made bearable with much good music and very loud singing
57. Having a crush on the boy upstairs = a very entertaining time for all
58. Cleaning checks round 1 = take hours upon hours making everything perfect
59. Cleaning checks round 2 = "do you think they'll check this or can I just leave it?"
60. Late talks really late at night when you're exhausted are the best
61. You are allowed to just not answer texts and calls -- in fact it is sometimes better just to ignore it than to let the person know what you are really thinking
62. Staying up late is great, but sleeping is SO much better
63. If the activity has free food, you go to it. No discussion
64. When a boy on your floor wants you to catch a ball, just catch it the first time or you will spend the rest of the semester dodging balls being thrown at your head
65. Your friends get married - after a while it's not that weird
66. You don't need to buy designer pants, you only need to buy yarn
67. Don't get attached to your fish, they die. And it's sad
68. No matter what people say, Betta fish do die
69. Having a piano keyboard in your apartment gives you automatic friends
70. Driving the Salt Lake freeway is not that bad but driving in Salt Lake is death
71. Pranks wars with your roommates can be very entertaining
72. Getting mail is like Christmas morning
73. Crazy late nights can be the most fun but you will pay for it in the morning
74. Singing/rocking out and just playing music with your friends can be very.... bonding
75. Grilled cheese, cereal, and Top Roman can only get you so far
76. Mom's food is the best
77. You can hear music from people's cars in your room, at night, when you are trying to sleep. It's annoying
78. Fire alarms at one in the morning are bad
79. Fire alarms at seven in the morning are worse
80. Logan has good corn
81. Don't break your elbow or your roommate might have to zip up your pants
82. Don't let your roommate give blood -- it could get a little to personal afterwards
83. Something Broken, it's the next big thing
84. Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things
85. How much water you drink can define you
86. There are many ways to rearrange the furniture and the couch does fit in the kitchen
87. Sunshine is a drug
88. If you let someone know you play an instrument, they will expect you to play it for them
89. There is a right and wrong way to put on window clings. They stick to the microwave better anyway
90. Rain boots are a necessity of life
91. Take the time to take your roommates on a music journey. It's fun
92. Plastic Walmart instruments make for a really good time
93. TVs break so then you use the 12 inch one from the neighbor next door
94. Green jackets look the best
95. Name your rock children
96. Watching the sunset on the roof is pretty fun, even if you are breaking the rules being up there
97. The upstairs portion of the lounge is a great place to spy on people, just don't laugh or they'll catch you
98. Try to impress her with your vast political knowledge
99. Look out for crock pots, sometimes they come back to hit you
100. Don't let a minute pass you buy, you'll miss it in the end

This year has been a great one. Thanks so much to everyone who has helped teach me these things throughout the year. There have been up and downs, that's for sure but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Well.... Peace out!

You Just Had To Be There

So right now it's pretty late but I wanted to blog about what has been on my mind most of today before I head to bed.

Two weeks ago in my music therapy ensemble class I was assigned to be a group leader for a big performance that we were required to do for the class. This performance consisted of combining 6 different people's drum-talk pyramids together to make it into one long performance song -- about 20 minutes long. I was terrified. I did not want to be the group leader. But I didn't really have a choice. The group that I was assigned to consisted of myself, Karli, Corinne, Sara, Ashton, and Josh. Seriously THE best group ever.

So not gonna lie, I was super stressed about all of this. Coordinating 6 different music major college students' busy schedules which included classes, work, practice time, and lesson times was NOT an easy task. We ended up having group meetings at very random times of the day and the night in some cases. We had one practice on a Sunday night starting at 10:15 pm which went until about midnight.

Today we had our last practice. It started at noon and we had the resource room scheduled until 1:30 pm which is when our performance was. We ran through our piece twice and decided that we had it down and that we didn't need to practice anymore. This left us about 45 minutes or so to do whatever we wanted. We ended up discussing for quite some time a name for our group. Maureen wanted us to have one but we were still undecided on what we wanted it to be. We came up with a lot of different possibilities that were results of inside jokes that had happened while we were practicing. All of these different names were:
1. Fancy Mallets
2. 5 and 1
3. Sara and the Dirty Looks
4. Psycho-Acoustics
5. You Can't Say That In Church..... (unless you want to go to hell)
6. The Chain
So finally, right before class, in the hall outside the classroom, we decided on a name. We called ourselves "You Just Had To Be There." We figured this fit our group pretty well and was the best combination of all the names.

Now I'm going to backtrack a little. While we were in the room practicing during our extra time (after the name conversation died down for the moment), we started having a jam session. We all sang the song called "The Chain" by Ingrid Michaelson. Josh and Sara sang the verses, Sara played piano, Corinne and I played drums, and we all sang the chorus of the song in a round. It was so much fun! And we actually sounded pretty good. This was probably my favorite moment of all the time that we all spent together.

Back in class now -- the performance went really well! We performed very first. It sounded really good! We all rocked out and had fun doing it! And best of all, the stress of it is now done. I will admit that I am really sad that I won't be spending tons of time with my group anymore. We all became pretty close and are all good friends now and I am going to miss the inside jokes and the jam sessions. Lucky for me, music therapy is a small major and I'll be spending the next who knows how many years hanging out with these people!

I doubt that any of my group members will actually read this post but I wanted to say thanks to all of them anyway. You were great and you made me job pretty easy and I had fun! Thank you!

Obsessions of Life

So I have some new obsessions as of late and I thought it would be fun to share.

1. Elvis Presley and Billy Joel music - Seriously, these guys are amazing! Today's music stinks! You cannot beat the classics!

2. Stalking the lives of my family members - Since my excursion with my friend Karli to the Festival of Colors and like activities I have really begun missing my family even more so than normal. I blame this on the fact that Karli has a little sister the same age as Amy and I got to watch a friend of Karli's and his sister interact with each other. They are close in age just like Scott and I and it made me miss him even more!

3. Movies from my childhood - I have been watching Disney movies that I watched as a kid and tonight I even watched "Three Men and a Baby." I love that movie!!

4. My new fish - I bought two new ones. There names are Marlo and Jimmy. Marlo is white and orange and cost me 27 cents and Jimmy is all white and cost 13 cents. I really wanted Gus-Gus to have some friends that could hopefully cure him of his idiocy. So far it's working, but it's only been a day.

5. Something Broken - It's a band. A great band. Made up of probably the coolest musicians EVER. I was BLOWN away by their music. Basically they are the most talented human beings I have ever heard. Yep. Oh did I mention that I'm a member? And that all of our instruments are cheap Walmart instruments from the toy section? Get ready world, here we come!

6. Movie lines - Kenzie and I have been memorizing as many movie lines as we can and we insert them into our lives as often as possible. It's like a little inside joke between just the two of us and it's always fun!

7. The semester ending - I can't wait! I get to go home where it's warm. And I get to see my family. And I don't have to go to school. And then I get to go to New York!

8. Peach cobbler and breakfast food - This weekend we are having lots of both of these accompanied by a roommate sleepover and lots of girl talk/movies/and fun! I love conference weekend!!

9. Dixie Chicks - I love them! I used to listen to them with my dad all the time when I was younger. I brought them back into my life recently and they are so great! "Wide Open Spaces" is basically amazing!

10. Writing Twilight parodies to all my choir songs - So basically all of our choir songs have boring or super sad/depressing lyrics or they are in German or Shakespeare so you can't understand what they mean. So to make the class more enjoyable, Sara and I have decided to turn all of our songs into Twilight parodies. It keeps us laughing and makes our director think that we like the songs. Win, win!

So those are my obsessions as of late. They will probably change soon, as they always do. Welcome to the life of me! :D

This Week

This week has been an interesting one, that's for sure!
Monday: First day of Spring!! Guess what that means in Logan? Slut day and snow. Yep. Tons of girls had on THE shortest skirts and skankiest outfits I have ever seen in my entire life. It was stinkin' crazy. You could see way too much of some things that you really didn't want to see. And it snowed on Monday. Ha ha short skirt girls, I hope that caught up to you! I also had an anatomy test. We are going to skip talking about that though because it wasn't the highlight of my life. FHE was kinda interesting. We combined with other wards in the stake and had an international night with food from all over the place. Basically it was a big place for the few RM's in the stake to have a little fun reliving their missions. Oh and I discovered that I HATE Vegemite. It is disgusting!! Oh and I also had a super embarrassing moment on this grand day. So I had scheduled with my piano teacher to have two lessons this week. One of which was supposed to be on Monday. Well that didn't end up working out so my piano teacher called me to let me know. Problem was that I was in class and I couldn't answer my phone. So my teacher got to listen to my voicemail that my roommates made of them singing, saying crazy things, and basically being their fun crazy selves. In the voicemail she left me she said "wow, listening to your voicemail was very interesting. Very creative." Ah! So embarrassing!
Tuesday: The main happening of Tuesday was getting the fun joy of being made a group leader in music therapy ensemble. My teacher called six girls up and said "Class, meet your group leaders." This was great except she didn't tell us ANYTHING about what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to do it. Crazy! But lucky for me, I got an amazing group so they help make my life a bit easier. Oh and we get to perform very first on the first day. It'll be grand! Oh and basically the best thing of life happened this day. My crush of the year came to my apartment! To talk to us about raising money for Japan. It was possibly the greatest thing EVER!
Wednesday: Beautiful weather!!! Too bad it only lasted one day. Wednesday I decided that Logan, Utah likes to show you pretty weather for one day and then go back to stinky weather. It's like it's saying "This is what you could have had.... IF YOU DIDN'T LIVE IN LOGAN! Ha Ha!" Thank you mother nature! Don't worry, we'll still party, even when it's cold! :D
Thursday: Today the fire alarm went off. At 8:00 this morning. Yep it was grand. I learned you get to see some fun things that early in the morning. Poor soaking wet people who got caught in the shower, crazy bed head, half done hair/make-up, no make-up, and many unhappy and tired faces. It was actually pretty funny! I also learned today that while playing piano it is possible to only modulate keys with only one hand and then end up playing a different key in your right and left hand. How does this happen you may ask? I honestly don't know! It was not what was supposed to happen in the song, but I must admit that it sounded really kinda cool. Oh! I also met with my music therapy ensemble group today. We were only able to have everyone there for like ten minutes. The rest of the time we kinda just hung around and talked. Karli and I ended up staying quite awhile after everyone left. Just hanging out and talking. It was really fun! I love my music therapy pals!

Well that's my week for ya. Not all that exciting. But hey, it's my life and I love it! :D

Spring Break!

My Spring Break is done..... :( back to Logan and the cold. But what a great Spring Break it was!

I got to spend lots of time with my family. We ate yummy dinners, went hot tubbing and shopping and watched movies and it was really fun! My dad unfortunately wasn't there most of the week because he had a work thing in Las Vegas (he always has work things now).

I also got to spend a lot of time with friends. One of the high lights was meeting up with Becca. Lucky for us, Snow College and USU had the same Spring Break this year. I kept in contact with her most of the week and I got to be her and her groups' Spring Break travel assistant even though I didn't really get to spend much time with them. But I did meet up Becca at my FAVORITE place in St. George though, THE RED ROCKS! It was dark so it was a little bit weird hiking around when you can't see but other than that, it was grand!

Along with seeing Becca, I spent a lot of time with other friends as well. More red rock trips in the daylight (and another night one), cruising around town on Friday nights, ice cream (of course!), Tangled, late night gas runs, and really really long school plays.

Lastly I got CPR and first aid certified! It was a bit awkward at first since I was THE ONLY person being taught but I got over it. The nice part about the whole thing was that all I had to do was tell my dad that I needed to get CPR/first aid certified and he talked to a guy at his work, scheduled a time, and the guy came to my house! I didn't have to drive anywhere or do anything really. And best of all, the course is normally 5+ hours and about $80 and I got in 1 1/2 hour for $10. I guess there are some perks to being the sheriff's daughter! :D

The pictures are from one of mine and Lauren's trips to the red rocks. Unfortunately for me, my mom's camera that I was using is possessed and it deleted basically all of my pictures that I took so I only have a few now.

This Means War!

I think they put something in the midnight pizza here at USU because I get CRAZY after I eat it, every time. But sometimes this craziness turns into something rather entertaining.... Last night for example. It was almost 11:00 pm and Jonathan showed up to talk to Kristy. It was 10:58 pm to be exact. We told him that he only had two minutes. So instead of hanging around for the two minutes, they left the apartment. Then Mackenzie and I decided at about 11:30 pm that we were starving so we went and got midnight pizza. As we were walking back we decided that we wanted to see if Jonathan and Kristy were still together. Turns out that they were. Hehehe lucky us! Kenzie had the brilliant idea to go spy on them. So while they were in the Bullen Hall lounge we snuck up to the second floor and tried to sneak in. Well as the soon found out, I'm a terrible spy. I busted up laughing and they caught this. This started a sneaking up on each other game which went on for quite some time. So this got Kristy and Jonathan out of the lounge. So we ran in there and stole their stuff and sent them a ransom text. We had Jonathan's coat and Kristy's keys. They were locked out! This lovely picture is of our set up of their items. They could see them but they couldn't get them. We hung the coat and keys from a lamp in front of the window.

So I woke up this morning to someone (aka Kristy) messing with the door to my room. I made a noise at her and she left. Then I got up and got in the shower. When I came back into the room, there was the note that we had left them the night before hanging from the thong on my wall.



They struck back! This actually turned out to be Jonathan's idea. Well Kenzie and I decided that since Kristy snuck into my room we could sneak into hers. So we did, while she was in class. I hope she likes the result! The note declares war.



What can I say, I have THE best roommate's ever! I love you girls!!

Snow

About half-way through my senior year of high school through the end of summer 2010 the most commonly asked question of my life was "Where are you going to school?" my reply: "Utah State." One of the most common heard lines after that was "Oh I have family there" and the MOST common heard line was "Oh it's cold there!" By the end of the summer I was ready to say thank you to the genius people for sharing that fact with me because I definitely didn't know that before and somehow I missed the thousand other people who told me the same thing. Me being a St.George girl through and through, I hate cold so maybe they were just looking out for me. Either way, they were ALL right!

This weekend we got snow. Lots of snow. Around 18 inches, give or take a little. Crazy? Yes. But what's even more crazy is that for some reason I wanted to play in all this snow. This is a big deal. Normally I avoid the snow at ALL costs. But yes ladies and gentlemen, you read it right -- I played in the snow.

It was a dark a dreary night -- well sorta. It wasn't really dark because the snow makes things really bright. It was night though. Around 10:30 p.m. Mackenzie and I decided we wanted midnight pizza. To get to the place of the pizza we had to make our journey through all the snow coming down. To shorten the story, I will just say this, by the time we got to pizza we were pretty snow covered. So after eating our pizza we decided "what the heck, we're already wet, lets just go straight through the snow covered field." So we did. This started my desire to play in the snow. So I went into my apartment put on all my snow clothes and went out and played in the snow until 12:30 a.m. The group was Kenzie, Kristy, Jonathan, Chris, Nick, and Anjeanette (for a little while). We face planted in the snow, back flopped, did gymnastics, and snow dived! It was great fun! Hopefully I'll get the pictures from Nick eventually, because they are quite grand!

That is the story of my adventure in the snow. I figured it was blog worthy because it RARELY ever happens and probably won't happen again for a LONG time.