Assisted Dating Yellowstone Blood Alarm

All right, so it's been a whole week since my last post. What is there to tell? Seems like there's a lot, actually.
This picture right here is from last week. The nice early-October, panic-inducing flurries. Rexburg does this every year. There's the harbinger snows and then it goes back to Fall for a little while. We are currently in the Fall phase; otherwise known as the calm before the storm. I'm just hoping for a few more days of good weather because tomorrow I'm planning on a date that involves outdoor activity. Keep your fingers crossed.
This last Sunday held some excitement. I finally got my two assistant executive secretaries set apart and they are ready for action! That brings a nice relief to me. They were a part of roughly twelve people to be set apart that Sunday. Right after Sunday School- as we were just exiting the classroom- the fire alarm went off. The entire Smith building (where our church is held) was evacuated, meaning about 3-4 wards dumped out onto the sidewalks and lawn areas. The alarm was the real deal, so the fire department, police department, even campus security showed up and we were all dismissed for the day. With that announcement, we lost about half the people who still needed to be set apart for their calling in the huge migration off of campus. The rest of us went to another building and borrowed some rooms. Everyone else had to come in on Tuesday to be set apart.
The cause of the alarm, you ask? Well, in the clerks' office, there's a little box right under a smoke detector. There was an arch between wires that sent off just enough smoke to set off the detector and the rest is history. Nothing too exciting; no flames, no billowing smoke, nothing of that nature. Thanks goodness, too. Turns out the Smith is an older building and has no sprinkler system set up in it. Therefore, if there really was a fire, there would be nothing to suppress it and it would crawl easily through the building. That brings to mind something that a lot of less-active members/non-members in the mission would say to my companion and I when we would invite them to church. They would say something to the effect that the building would burst into flames, explode, or demolish in a horrible fashion if they stepped one foot inside the door. Now, if a less-active or non-member had stepped into the Smith this last Sunday, I might have believed them about that kind of spiel.
This last Tuesday we had our weekly campus-wide devotional. This week the speaker was Elaine S. Dalton, the General Young Women's President of the Church. She had a very good talk that she presented. In that talk, she, like so many other general authorities, chastised the guys/tried to light a fire under us about needing to stop just "hanging out" with girls and asking them on dates. I find it interesting how the young women don't catch anything about dating, like how to stop messing with a guy's head/playing lots and lots of "games", making yourself available, etc. Anyway, a part of that let us fellas know that when a girl says "I'm busy", that we should try again and make it more personal. After all, persistence without being overbearing is key in many aspects of life. Overall, the address she gave was great, encouraging us to "Dare to do greatly".
In Anatomy and Physiology II, we've been learning about the blood, that life-giving, life-stealing connective tissue coursing through our veins. I'll try to keep it brief. Basically, I learned how Jaundice occurs and is eliminated, which is related to why human waste is the spectrum of colors that it is, and exactly why the blood type O- is the "universal donor". I also learned about hematocrit (red blood cell percentage) and lipid-profiles (cholesterols, fasting glucose levels, things of that nature) in lab today along with the blood typing. There was equipment for us to do our own blood tests if we wanted to. The only one I was really interested in was my lipid-profile, but you have to fast for 12 hours beforehand and I had failed at that. I already know my blood type and I knew that my hematocrit test would result in a higher-than-normal number. It's all fascinating stuff, per usual, but takes a lot of focus and brain power. Thank goodness I'm out of the days of this...somewhat.
As a closing note, this weekend has some real promise to it. One reason is that there's a bunch of us who are planning on a trip to Yellowstone National Park. That's two times in almost as many weeks. This time we head to the southern portion of the park for attractions like Old Faithful and the like. One of our friends has never been, which inspired this trip, and she's in for a real treat!