Almost a Month Later...

All right, it's time for a break from homework and all the craziness. A lot has been coming up in the last month or so and this has been the thing to head to the back burner. My apologies to the very few who the delay may have affected.

This year I came away from November with three Thanksgiving dinners under my belt. The video pretty much sums up how I was feeling. The break was really nice-fantastic, even. I did a little bit of homework (thank goodness not a terribly large amount was required of me), but mostly spent time with family and friends, thankful to be able to do so. My last day in Utah involved making apple cider using the golden delicious apples from our tree and my Uncle John's cider press. Before you even start pressing the chopped-up apples, the weight of the apple mash on top press the bottom ones and give you, what Uncle John said, the "cider lees" (Isaiah 25:6). That's the good stuff, the most desirable of the press, and rightfully so! It was really sweet and pure. As a roommate of mine would say, it made me all kinds of happy. We didn't have any other types of apples to mix in with our own (aside from two red delicious...), but it was still a very tasty cider. Unfortunately, the day turned into the next one and it was time to head back to the frozen tundra of Rexburg and back to the grindstone.

I had given my roommate that I actually room with (referred to as a cell mate by another roommate of mine) a ride down and back and as we came to our bedroom, this is what we saw:

This just so happens to be our bedroom door

So we got brave and opened it to discover:

"Christmas came early? Hey, I had something just like this!"

If you look closely at the picture to the right, you'll see that even my Tibetan prayer beads were wrapped. Everything was so neatly packaged up in old copies of the school newspaper, The Scroll, and, as you can see, our floor was covered in them. By my desk, it seemed that the culprits just got tired and dumped the remaining stack. Cleanup was "fun", but we managed to get it all into one garbage bag. I contemplated spreading the cheer abroad or even performing a counter-prank with it (we knew who had done the deed almost the moment we saw our door), but decided to avoid prank wars in these final, hectic weeks and threw it all away.

Now it's back to the usual work, work, work, except more-so now that the semester is coming to a close. The whips are crackin' and the students are groanin'. It's hard to imagine that the piles of work we've been given will actually be gone in just a week and a half. The silver lining to that, I guess, is that it helps us stay focused on school and learn what we need to learn rather than daydream about Christmas Break and not learn a blessed thing these last few weeks. Still, it feels like a very thin lining.

On top of that is a lot of church stuff. People still having to get their tithing settlements done because they missed their regular time, others making the regular appointments, and poor Bishop Jones and I having to get it all scheduled and work it out with him being gone most of this week and having our schedule fiddled with this next Sunday. There's going to be a multi-stake meeting this Sunday in which the entire school will gather in the BYU-Idaho Center (our own mini Conference Center) from 4-6pm where we're going to be let in on the particulars of a massive reorganization of the campus-wide stakes. Because of that, we're only having the first hour of church, sacrament meeting. We'll see what goes down in the multi-stake meeting.

Penultimately, I've started seeing a young lady. Apparently I'm really good at finding someone only to have to either break up with her or enter a long-distance relationship. She and I met last year this semester at a weekly social and hit it off really well. I determined that I would ask her on a date the next time I saw her and just like that, I didn't see her again until this semester. We got to talking here and there and I finally asked her out and our first date was the Friday before Thanksgiving Break. Now here we are and things are going well. I'll keep you updated as we go along.

Finally, just some random things going on around here. One thing is that it's freezing cold up here but there's no snow on the ground. All we have are little ice mounds left over from before Thanksgiving. My roommate and I got egged the other night while walking home from swimming. The egg hit the ground and splattered a little bit on our pants, so it wasn't that bad. It was reported to the local authorities. The next day I was walking around finding eggshell and frozen yolk and whites every here and there. I went laser-tagging for the first time in ages with my elders quorum on Saturday. It was really fun because there were a lot of people-mostly kids having a birthday party. In some instances it was like playing "Whack-a-Mole". They would just keep popping up. The difference was that the "moles" fought back.

Anyway, this is rather long, so I'm ending it here.