5 of the many reasons why i love being home

5. I can shower basically ANY time of the day in a shower that doesn't always look dirty as much as you scrub and scrub and scrub it (my home shower is ALWAYS spotless though due to my mother's regimen cleaning schedule) and not have three other girls needing to get into the bathroom at any time. There is also a lock so I will never feel like I could be barged in on by ANYONE at any second.  

4. My bed is probably the 5th comfiest bed in the world...with high thread count sheets that are cool to your skin to get into and 6 pillows to smother around you and enough room to roll over and not fall off (never happened but still it's a likely possibility with such tiny dorm beds)

3. I don't have to eat cafeteria food. Sure the parfaits, the muffins, the chocolate milk and the omelets were pretty delicious...but they are not exactly the best choices to live off the entire year if health is taken into consideration. I get complete healthy meals with vegetables that I never exactly craved in my life until I didn't have them. I now consider any meat that is not chicken or hamburger a delicacy.
2. I don't have to do laundry. I realize that this is a rare occurrence in the American Family these days so I do not take for granted a mother who washes my dirty clothes with love. At school, every two weeks...that was as long as I could push it until I ran out of socks and underwear...I would have to haul my gargantuan laundry bag down six flights of stairs then make a trip  back up to grab my basket and laundry supplies. Once my laundry was complete, I would have made around a total of 6 trips up and down those stairs to get all of my laundry done. Needless to say, that was about my whole Saturday.
1. My family is usually less than a room away to talk to. Even with today's communication advantages of cellphones, texting, and skype, it's still just not the same as living with the people you love and having them always there to chat with. I love that I can step out of my room and most of the time find my mom in the kitchen - baking something delicious - or go upstairs and watch tv with my dad while having conversation, or even going downstairs to watch Zach play video games and try to pry into his life.

A Second Reason to Love St. George

In the last week here, Richard wanted to make sure I saw at least a little bit of the cooler parts of the outdoors, hence the Red Mountain hike. On a hiking craze, he took me to Zion's National Park which is about an hour and a half away from St. George and is like nothing I've ever seen, it's so beautiful and huge! The pictures we took won't do it justice, but we went hiking up Angel's Landing and it was such a gorgeous view that I enjoyed between more huffs and puffs up the hiking trail. Most people we past along the trail were quite friendly smiling and saying "hi," which also made it a fun experience. We even saw a boy that looked about two years old walking up the trail on his own, hand-in-hand with his dad and we were quite impressed. 

One of the Reasons to Love St. George

There are so many active outdoor activities to do in St. George, as you can see from my past posts, and I haven't experienced the half of them in my first year of college down here. Richard and I went this afternoon to Red Mountain and spent about five hours of hiking. Needless to say - it was QUITE the workout. The view was gorgeous, making up for the sliding, falling, tumbling down the mountain afterwards. Richard was much more graceful about getting down. 

 First steps of the journey

 Taking a break, catching my breath

You can see the temple from everywhere, even at the tallest point in the St. George Valley. I love it!

Makin' History in a 3 Minute Massage

In the spirit of "D" week, Dixie had a night where they set a world record of the LARGEST MASSAGE TRAIN IN THE WORLD!!! You're looking at numbers 195, 196, 197, and 198 - a very vital section to the 659 person train!

wednesday: the best part of the week

I have a new show obsession that I look forward to every week. Modern Family on abc is the funniest show ever! The character of the dad in the more traditional family is so hilarious...I don't usually laugh out loud during TV shows, but I'm basically in tears of laughing fits in almost every episode of this new show. If you haven't seen it you need to check it out.

Spontaneity

This post is long overdue, but it seems like the longer you go without posting, the harder it is to post about anything - even if it's tiny. Which is a truth for many things in life I suppose. I also owe a special thank you to my amazing, genius friend Bronson who helped me fix my blog to my exact standards.

Within the last month, my roommates and other friends have been trying to create more adventure in our lives. This includes: camping (sounds sane enough but there's more to the story), road tripping, rearranging our dorm room, caving, cutting/dying/fixing/re-dying  hair, singing at concerts with COLBIE CAILLET!!, plasma donating, and everything in between.

Camping

Camp grounds are extremely hard to find in the dead of night, twenty minutes out of civilization. If you can't find them, the side of a hill will do just fine. And apparently, there are no forests in St. George, so if you plan on having a fire, weeds just won't cut it. Thank goodness for Wal-mart. Also, a legitimate sleeping bag is highly recommended, allowing you to stay warm enough to get more than a cumulative amount of 45 minutes of sleep. This will also prevent you to finally insist on leaving at 5 a.m., much to the discomfort of your camping buddies. A quick, yet effective way to clean up in the wee hours of a frigidly cold morning (it was January and yes it's even cold in St. George on a January morning) is to throw everything in  the tent, collapsing the supports and use it as an untraditional bag. You may need two or three people to drag it to the car and squash it into the trunk. Follow this and you will getting a camping experience you will never forget!

Road tripping

Natalie and I spent fourteen hours in a car together on a quick get away to Phoenix to stay with Eric, Cori, Erin, Quintin, and Audrey over Valentine's weekend. The views of hoover dam were phenomenal and there were some other quite interesting stops along the way. We stopped in a pow-dunk town called Wikieup that had World Famous hot dogs that were uncooked unless you got them deep fat fried and had some crazy, bright green relish on them - they weren't famous for nothing. Every single person who had ever entered that restaurant left their mark, with signatures covering everything from the ceilings to the floors (yes, even the toilets). We had a good time being entertained by the almost three-year-old Mr. Q who finally got Natalie's name right by the end of the trip calling her Lady and Camilla since he thought she was my roommate. 

Rearranging

Trying to go against the norm, Camilla and I decide to switch things up and rearrange our room, making bunk beds to have more space. With the doubts of many in our minds, we were able to set our room up exactly the way we wanted - without any help from the opposite sex. We even got the steel pegs nailed in tight enough so my bed won't slip off Camilla's and squash her in the middle of the night. Needless to say, our room is very feng shui now.

Caving
Ever since reading the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites, I have always wanted to go into a cave and find a secret passageway to another land. Sadly, when we went to the lava caves in the Snow Canyon Park, there were no such entrances, but it looked pretty magical to reach the end cavern that glowed with the remnants of glow sticks on the walls. It only took 3 gigantic bruises, 6 painfully hard times of banging my head, and Camilla's warnings of "Watch your cabeza! That's your head." echoing throughout the cave to get out successfully in one piece.

Hair Experimenting
On a random, hyper night Camilla entrusted me to dye and cut about 5 inches off her hair. I was a little leery, having never cut hair before, but I didn't tell her this until after I was done and everyone was raving about her hair. They were very shocked. And can you believe that a dollar store bleaching kit didn't produce the flowing, golden locks shown on the cover on Ashleigh's hair? She didn't seem to think so beforehand, ignoring my blatant recommendations that she should not do that to her long, silky, vibrant auburn hair. Yet again, thank goodness for Wal-mart. Her hair is now the color of Medium Golden Cappuccino #37.

COLBIE CAILLET!!!!
Yes, I got to watch Colbie Caillet in person sing some of my very favorite songs - Bubbly, Lucky, and Fallin' For You! Apart from the only other concert I've been to, the Spice Girls, I actually got to sing along because I knew the words! I only knew the words to one song of the Spice Girls because I wasn't allowed to listen to them when I was younger. Apparently, their lifestyle choices and their clothing didn't set very good examples for 8 year old girls. Even if hearing my favorite songs live weren't enough, I got to shake her hand and get the top left quarter of my face in a picture with her!

YES, that IS a picture of my eye in the same frame as COLBIE CAILLET!!!!!

Plasma Donating
Who knew that selling your body could make so much money? All I have to do is keep my iron levels up and show up twice a week to get poked with a needle and watch the yellow part of my blood get separated and collected in a bag, and I get paid for it! Moving aside the fact that I kind of feel like a cow being milked amongst the other fifty people in their doing the same thing and the scars in the crook of my elbow that make me look like a drug addict, it's one of the easiest ways I've made some extra cash.

More to come on our college adventures!

The Running Club

So three weeks ago, I sort of got bullied into manning the booth for the Running Club during Club Rush in the middle of campus. At first, I thought was a joke the entire time some friends of ours were planning it during dinner conversations in the Cafeteria, but it is now an official club at Dixie State. It turned out that I could get a lot of recruits just with a smile and handing them a V8 juice, but more then half of them have yet to show up to a meeting.

The president, Richard, had always been pestering me and Camilla to join him on runs since the end of last semester. We always came up with very believable yet lame excuses to evade waking up at 6 in the morning to run. On Monday night, after FHE there were no excuses left and three members of the club actually came up to our dorm room to make sure we committed to going with them that night.

We jogged on this cool path on the outskirts of St. George for two miles. I didn't expect to absolutely love it so much and I found myself wanting to jog the distance back to where we started even though Camilla and the rest of the people didn't. Richard, in impeccable shape and not wanting to leave me on my own at 9:00 at night, ran along with me. We ended the last stretch of in a dead sprint where I'm happy to say I really held my own and gave him a run for his money, and I'm totally addicted to that feeling after you pushed yourself so hard and accomplished so much. The entire time felt so amazing that I think this is one of the things I'm going to look forward to most through the week for the rest of the semester.