whoa

it's 1:30 in the morning and my room is an absolute disaster, as am i. tomorrow i'm leaving provo and all i want to do is watch gilmore girls.

never ever again

never ever again will i rent from keystone realty in provo utah. this is obviously partly because i'm now graduated. (did you know that? well, i'm graduated.) but also because i think that the landlord is cheating me and being a jerk. he made me cry today. i cried to my landlord. i'm so pathetic. but i'm angry and he won't let me get out of my contract and a lawyer will be contacted and i cried to my dad and i need to pack and i don't want to.

never ever again will i walk across campus as a student. although today i wasn't a student i walked across campus for the last time for a while. i didn't realize one week ago wednesday that when i walked up to take my religion test in the jsb that that those would be my last steps on campus as a byu student. i should have taken a last walk for nostalgic purposes. i didn't though. but i did do that last walk today and it made me just a little sad. maybe that's why i cried to the landlord, i was already feeling emotional.

never ever again will i feel the same satisfaction of pulling into visitor parking on campus and being able to answer truthfully this time to the, "are you a byu student?" question. there was just a silent thrill when i answered "no". and i didn't fib a little like when i used to park in visitors parking for my 4:00 class at the art museum and i'd get there at 3:57 and parking was still illegal to students until 4 but i figured since i was only pretending to not be a student for three minutes it wouldn't matter because at 4 i could park there anyway. but this time i could completely answer no. "no i am not a student sir because i graduated last week! can you believe that? one week ago i was actually a byu student, but after last friday i wasn't anymore? sorry, am i talking too much? oh, yeah, i'll take the sticker. bye!" and no i didn't really say those last things, but those are the exact thoughts going on in my mind as i answered my "no" with a smug smile.

never ever again will i be able to just run over to cafe rio for a lunchtime salad. it will be a much bigger affair the next time i do it. it will be a destination stop not just a quick pop in. although that could change if i ever settle in utah, but i'm not counting on it, and i'm not hoping for it.

never ever again will i be able to go to the provo temple to surprise my missionary sister cami. but it was worth it and i just wish i had ended my day with the temple instead of starting it and ending with stupid landlords.

never ever again will i be posting from provo utah, as a semi student that is. (well, i suppose i can't really say that because who knows what will happen to me in the future, but as far as things are going now i am planning on only coming back to provo for visits to friends and family. i guess there could be some postings happening then, so maybe not never ever again.)

April 27th

is an important day for you to remember because it's exactly two months until my birthday. Consider this fair warning that my birthday is in exactly two months from today. June 27th. I expect you to help me celebrate. Oh, you won't be in the same house, city, state, region as me? Well, you are more than welcome to send me a Facebook message, or email. Yay! Don't forget, two months!

Well, today was my first OFFICIAL day as a college grad. I

1. slept in
2. took Emma to the airport for England
3. hit up Target
4. cleaned my room while watching Gilmore Girls
5. made a book

Sounds like a highly successful day to me!

And don't forget it's two months to June 27th!

graduated

i didn't have a thing to do today except sleep, and that's what i did. but of course i figured out other ways to waste time. like toning up my math skills that i haven't used since high school. i figured out this little puzzle:

(and yes, there really is an answer)

alum

More pictures and an actual post to come later!

2 days!

I have two days left (not counting today). The finals I have left to do don't even count. How great is that? Fabulous.

I'll be working on a lot of books for the next week and a half. If you want me to make you one and are willing to pay, I will make you one. Just leave me a comment with your favorite color. My only stipulation is that I have full artistic control. (Don't worry, it will be beautiful.)

Missionaries!

I said I was going to give updates of “my missionaries” I forgot until today. I need to do something to keep my mind off my ensuing bad grade in Calligraphy. I’m going to get a B in Calligraphy I know it. How ridiculous is that? Very I think. And now I only have one more real final and a few bookbinding projects to do! Hooray! And I have four days to do it! Double hooray! Usually I’m doing this the night before! I suppose I should feel grateful then that my hardest finals were yesterday and today. They weren’t even that hard because it wasn’t like I was trying to salvage a grade or bring up a B+ to an A- by doing well. I’ll just do my thing and be happy with my B+ or B or B-. It’s not like I’m trying to get into Medical School or something. Nope, they will still give me a diploma even if I get a B in Impressionism and the Arts or in Southern Baroque Art or in Calligraphy for that matter (I just thought my countless hours in front of the TV practicing my letters would at least get me an A- no matter how bad my letter slope is). Ok! Back to the missionaries!

JESS has been transferred to Kuala Lumpur which is the capital of Malaysia. But she had a really dramatic experience in Miri last week. Here it is:

The biggest news of the week is concerning our most recent convert, Langu. We went to her house on Saturday night because we're starting to teach her 10 year old daughter who is so cute and loves church. it was a random stop in, because another appointment fell through. Well, we walk up to her ghetto house, her creepy husband is sitting by the door smoking and drinking and we ask if Langu is home and we look back, and she's sitting in the back room by candlelight just crying. So we go in and find out that they had a big fight about him drinking and she hates it that he's always drinking. So then both of us tried to have a go at him, try to get him to realize that his wife is good and beautiful and all this stuff. She said he threatened to kill her and all this stuff. He was just drunk though and everything we said he didn't care about it, and I was SO MAD at him, I had to hold myself back from just like yelling his head off. Eventually we just had to leave though even though we didn't want to, so we said a prayer with her and she ended up smiling when we left.

We found out Langu's husband had hit her after we left the night before, and we knew she didn't want to go home. So we told the RS president, then talked the branch president and tried to figure out what to do. Basically, we ended up taking her home to pack up all of her stuff and get her last kid. Elder Dean drove us over there with her. We walked into the kampung, her husband came out and started making ridiculous comments to us, and then their neighbor, this totally independent Iban woman came out and started yelling at him to get away from us. So he slunk back inside to drink more. Then Langu just packed up all her stuff, Sister Clark stood guarding the door so he couldn't get in. Once he found out that his wife was walking out on him, he came out and started asking her for all of her money, and Langu went ballistic. She started hitting the door and yelling at him in Iban, like, "I don't have any money! You have it all!" I asked her neighbor what goes on, and she said every single night they fight, he hits her, sometimes doesn’t let her eat, throws the kids around, spends all the money on alcohol and cigarettes, etc. I just couldn't even believe it. Here we didn’t' even know, because she won't ever talk, but all we knew was that she liked church, and kept coming and liked us and had the biggest smile when we came over. So before we knew it, every single woman in the kampung was sticking their heads through the windows and doors yelling at him to get away, telling us that the "orang putihs" (white people) where coming to take her away from her evil husband. It was the craziest thing. So we left with her 3 kids, her stuff in probably only like 4 little bags, and got into the Deans car and drove her away.”

CAMI has now been in the MTC for a month. Here’s what she has to say,

“It has been 3 weeks, and I still can hardly say anything in Finnish. ha ha. Ridiculous language. There’s a new sister from Finland who just came in last night and she's going to Croatia, and she looked at all the charts in our room and was like "I don't know how to read those, and I have no idea what they mean." English just doesn't translate to Finnish very well, but it's fun when we get the sentences completely right, which hardly ever happens. We watched "the testaments" in Finnish on Friday with English subtitles, and it sounds really cool. Like there's a lot of "l's" and "k's" and rolled "r's" and they say they're vowel sounds kind of in the back of the throat. It’s just cool. I’m excited to be able to really speak it. Right now it's fun to try and pronounce everything correctly. Oh, by the way, all of the eastern Europe country missionaries like hate the Spanish-speaking missionaries because they always walk by us and are like "holla, hermanas" and then they start trying to say sentences in Spanish that end up being like "voy a cafeteria" and we're like "hm, wonder what that means." ridiculous. Basically we're all like if I went Spanish-speaking, I would only have to be in the MTC for like a week it's so easy. And the mama Finns get offended when they're called "hermanas." (I remember feeling the exact same way. But people are needed to serve everywhere, and thanks to the Tower of Babel we have lots of languages to learn. Some easier than others.)

Great day

It's been a great day! I saw this. And then came home to have this video in my inbox.

Karma

A few years ago a friend was getting married over Thanksgiving break. She needed to sell her contract for Winter Semester and I was coming back from Vienna. I agreed to buy it. As the weeks wore on I felt uneasy about the contract. I can't remember why now, but I did. I backed out just days before her wedding. I felt terrible and put her in a horrible position. She was probably so stressed out about her contract.

Today I just got the phone message equivalent to my contract-backing-out-email.

I guess I deserved it.

To Do

Find this cool old card catalog generator here.

EIGHT DAYS!

Every good long study session needs to start with a good strong procrastinative blog post. So, here it is!

I have 8 days left as an undergraduate. Eight. E.I.G.H.T. I can't even believe it.

And I'm really excited about it too.

Eight seems to be the magic number today. I have eight hours to finish a paper due by midnight. I have one page down and 8+5 pages to go. It's about Edgar Degas. And somehow it evolved to be mainly a study of his misogynism and his depictions of nudes. Appropriate for BYU? Debatable.

I had a dream

I had the craziest last 24 hours or so. I procrastinated my entire final project for my Southern Baroque Art class and the final project was due about an hour ago. I stayed at the library till 2 am last night. The best part about that was they played Clocks over the loud speaker. I can't remember the last time I stayed at the library until closing. When I lived on campus maybe? But it's pretty exciting to hear Clocks played over the loud speaker in the whole library. It was definitely worth it. I probably shouldn't have been procrastinating so much at the library last night. It's always a bad call to take a "quick" perusal of the 5th floor. But I came home and went straight to bed after I had finished maybe 2/3rds of my project.

I planned on waking up early this morning which I did, I took a shower, got dressed, emailed myself my project so I could finish it on campus. I was running late to work so I drove and parked in the visitor's parking by the Law Building. No one asked if I was a student so it was perfect! As I walked across the street to the Wilkinson center I realized I forgot my computer and really didn't want to use the computers in the computer labs so I turned around to go back to my car and I couldn't remember where I had parked. Then I ran into Blake Lively as Serena van der Woodsen. We chatted like old friends and I told her I couldn't find my car. She said she'd help but we stayed where we were sitting and chatted for a while. (By now you've probably figured out that this is all a dream.) But we sat there and talked for a while when some guy with blonde dreadlocks came over and kept staring at us. He offered to help find the car too, but then all of a sudden we were in some random room. I walk out the room and we're in a huge warehouse wehre people are learning how to be architects. Some random guy from my ward was there. I was confused. Dreadlocks boy comes over to help me find the car. I have no idea where it is. I realize I'm going to have to tell my boss I'm going to be late for work.

I woke up really at 8:15 instead of 6 like I planned to finish my paper. I was supposed to be at work at 8. I didn't go in because I didn't have my stuff finished for my class. I realized too that some pages I had copied and then quoted in my paper didn't have page numbers on them. I spent 45 minutes in the library trying to track a stupid book down that was in the library (according to the computer) but not on its shelf. I was so annoyed. I didn't site page numbers.

But. I'm done. And I just have to write another paper for Monday and then all I have are finals and art projects left to do.

Oh, and 13 days.

Blah

I feel like I'm having a blah day. I have a huge paper due tomorrow and what am I doing? Blogging. Wow. I'm a horrible procrastinator. It's awful when I know I'm probably going to be up all night writing a paper about Georges de La Tour and sifting through terrible articles reviewing a collection of paintings for the most recent exhibition and French articles that I cannot understand. I offered to cook dinner for someone who was too stressed to do it their self, not knowing that I was going to be gearing up for a long night. But I don't really want to change my paper topic to something perhaps more accessible because I like La Tour. He has really cool paintings. See:

Clockwise: Christ with St. Joseph in a Carpenter's Shop; Education of the Virgin; Dream of St. Joseph; Adoration of the Shepherds

See, they're really cool. I'm discussing the use of light and it's connection to spirituality in the Counter Reformation. Boring right? But I don't want to do something else either. Bah. I should be working on it right now.

Another reason I'm having a blah day is that we started intervieweing people for my job. That means I really have only a few days left. 14 to be exact. I only have 14 days left in college. Wow.

A few years ago right before the sixth Harry Potter book came out my family took a trip to Seattle and went to the Experience Music Project museum there. You can get your picture taken to make you look like a real rock band. We named our band 14 days because that's how many days it was until the next book came out. So now all I can think of is Jess's wailing during our recording session singing "Fourteen daaaaayyyss-uh". There were other lyrics too that the musical genius' wrote (Emma, Cami and Jess), while Rachel and I attempted to do back up sounds. I can't even listen to the CD because I sound so dorky.

Speaking of dorky. I got a package for Easter yesterday from my mom. She's fabulous. There was a big Easter egg filled with candies and edible grass. I liked the grass, it had a slight apple flavor:

Other than the edible grass, the best part of the day was mission letters from my sisters! Yay! (Updates to come later.)

100

This is my 100th post yay!

I had a really busy weekend that didn't include school work at all!

Here's what went down:

Friday
1. Caught up with Amy and went over to the Sweet Tooth Fairy bakery. We got Peanut Butter Chocolate and Toasted Coconut Cupcakes to share. (Unfortunately I didn't have my camera.)
2. Dinner at Cafe Rio with Amy, Cath and Linds.
3. Mission reunion. Highlight of that is that I saw a bunch of people I haven't seen for a long time. I should have taken more pictures, but here are the best and cutest girls there.

Left: Three mission generations-- my trainee (Mary Clinger), me and my trainer (Cheryl Catts)
Right: Old roommates-- Natalie Jackson (now Pace) and Lacy Gibb

Saturday
1. Got up right before General Conference and sewed some books while I watched.
2. That night I went shopping at The Gateway in Salt Lake with my sister and cousin. I spent too much money but the highlights are a cute headband and some owl earrings.
3. I got talked into visiting Amy with the promise of getting a ride home. I'm easily persuaded and ended up spending the night at her house.

Sunday
1. Lots more Conference.
2. Delicious French Toast at my aunt and uncle's house.
3. Watched Slumdog Millionaire while I cleaned my room. And this is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It was incredibly good.

Monday
1. Work.
2. Class.
3. Dinner group. And I made this for dinner:

Chicken With Tomato, Orange and Rosemary Couscous

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 1 pound)
¼ cup dry white wine, such as Sauvignon Blanc or water
1 cup sliced zucchini, cut into 1/2 inch slices
1 can (14.5 ounces) chopped tomatoes, drained, or 1 cup chopped fresh tomatoes
1 teaspoon fresh or dried rosemary
1 package (5.8 ounces) Near East Roasted Garlic and Olive Oil Couscous mix
¾ cup peeled, seeded and chopped orange

1. Season chicken to taste with salt and pepper. In a large skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add chicken; cook 5 to 6 minutes on each side, or until no longer pink inside.

2. Meanwhile, in large saucepan, combine wine, 1 cup water, zucchini, tomatoes and rosemary. Bring to a boil over high heat.

3. Stir in couscous and contents of Spice Sack. Remove from heat. Cover; let stand 5 minutes.

4. Fluff lightly with a fork. Stir in chopped orange and serve with chicken.

(I got it on the back of the Near East couscous package.)

And this for dessert. Both were delicious.

(This is my roommate Amy. She decorated them.)

Nostalgia

I'm feeling nostalgic today.
I had a mission reunion last night.

It made me think a lot about my mission.
I've been thinking a lot about just my life lately.
I am so happy with all the things I have been able to do.
I wouldn't exchange any of my experiences for something else.

April and a pathetic attempt at an apology

April seems to be a life changing month for me. Two years ago I was finishing my mission and coming home. Coming home to two sisters in college, one about to graduate from high school, and a third who was no longer a little girl. Now two of those sisters are on their own missions, another is getting ready to follow in my footsteps of multiple study abroads, and the third will be finishing her sophomore year of high school soon. I'm finishing up college this month with graduation in 22 days and attempting to get my life sorted out.

A few days ago I was thinking about my mission. (I think about it a lot because Cami and Jess are gone on theirs.) I was realizing that the highlight of my mission was two days and two years ago. Ewa's baptism. As I was thinking about this I was thinking about how God does not make worthwhile things easy for us. (That's why I haven't had some fabulous revelation telling me what to do with my life.) I wanted so badly for Ewa to get a knowledge that the church was true but I obviously couldn't make that decision for her. But when she did make that decision, I have never felt happier and I don't think I've been that happy since. It doesn't seem like it was as long ago as it was but I thought I'd share a couple pictures of Ewa and the wonderful person she is:

These pictures are from her baptismal day (duh); our last lesson; and saying goodbye at the train station.
And yes, the polaroid-esque pictures make it seem like my mission was in the 70s or something. I told you I'd been home for a long time!

Ewa is great. She is the kindest person I know (even if she says she isn't, she really is). She is so thoughtful. She sent Jess a package in the MTC and I know she's already planning a summer trip up to Finland to visit Cami (even though Cami will be in the MTC until June 9th. Yep, she still has two months just down the street in Provo). She's like our sister, and I know she thinks of us as her family too. I am a bad sister. She wants to skype with me. I didn't send her a birthday present and so for her birthday present from me she wanted to skype. I never responded to the email. Yep I know, me, jerk. I can't speak Polish. I've been home for two years. And now a note for her: Ewa, I have a confession. I'm proud. (My dad lets me know all the time.) And I'm embarrassed of my Polish. I'm embarrassed that I don't always understand the conversation. I don't like feeling stupid. (Pride) I know you wouldn't want me to feel dumb, but I do. I feel terrible. So Ewa, this is my pathetic attempt to apologize for no birthday present and to let you know that I still love you and think of you often. I hope you are having a wonderful day and that all is going well. Love, Lauren