happy birthday, logan!!
my little sister is nineteen today! wow. it makes me feel quite young, actually...almost too young.

reasons logan & i were best friends in heaven, and still are here on earth:
1. she always turned off the light at night when we shared a room. i think God knew i needed help with overcoming the "monster-under-the-bed" phase.
2. she is a wonderful cook and baker. again, i think God knew i would need extra help with that.
3. she has a beautiful smile that is absolutely contagious. she simply emanates beauty and happiness.
4. when we shared a room growing up, she walked me to the bathroom in the middle of the night when i was scared. she gave up many hours of precious sleep because she had to share a room with me.
5. even if she insisted we were too old, she would still play barbies with me. she would even keep it a secret from my friends.
6. she puts up with my horrible singing in the car.
7. she must have just known i was lonely here on earth so she came a short sixteen months later to be my best friend. we were destined to be "the little girls" of the family. i can't hold onto that role by myself...
8. she kissed my best friend kellen in the back seat of mom's van in the first grade. i wish i could have seen the look on my own face.
9. she will drop everything to come pick me up from class, or run an errand with me. she is simply selfless, and i aspire to be like her. i can't say that about many people.
10. because the wall does, in fact, wear pink panties. :)

ultimate frisbee!!

Last night Tyler and two of his roommates had an intramural Ultimate Frisbee match. For the first half of the game, it snowed like crazy. Instead of falling vertical, the snow fell horizontal, as you can see in the pictures. But they were such great sports about it, and went on to win their game! :)

maximizing space at its finest

ch-ch-check it out. a rotating kitchen. it's fully functional, with a stove, dishwasher, microwave, and sink! it rotates 180 degrees. fancy, but completely unnecessary.

48 days.

Fall is finally here! These past two weeks in Provo have been my absolute favorite weeks of the year. Every tree has become a vivid orange, fiery red, or bright golden yellow. (My pictures below just don’t do justice.) It makes me grin every time I see a beautiful fall tree. I think to myself, this is why I’m in Provo. It’s not so bad after all. But alas, it’s raining today. And the broadcast for snowy skies is not far off in the distance. And most of the brilliant, glowing trees have already lost their leaves or are beginning to. Now I'm thinking to myself, why did I ever come to Provo? I hate the snow! At least I can be grateful the warm weather lasted until the first day of November. Yesterday I wore a summer dress, and was perfectly content.

Below, you can see my first attempt at making fudge, the real way. Logan and I busted out the old-fashioned candy thermometer and everything. The process took us about two hours. The directions say not to stir it too long, because when it begins to harder, immediately pour it into the pan. That's exactly what Logan and I did, but one stir too late because the fudge literally fell from the bowl into the pan in the large clump you see below. They're not kidding when they say it hardens within seconds. My second attempt (no picture, unfortunately) went a little better. Tyler and his roommates ate almost the whole pan, so I take that as a good sign.

Tyler and I went to see Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband a few weekends ago on campus for his major. It was a large event sponsored by Ernst&Young, and was actually pretty elaborate. They gave us cookies, candy, and a free cd, all on top of a 2-hour concert. We had a lot of fun. :)

Below we have three of the four #131 boys. Dustin was...I'm not sure. A hick. A redneck. Someone drunk. Tyler was a Newsie, and Ben was B Money, the Provo rapper.

After bowling on Halloween, we went to Tyler's Intramural Ultimate Frisbee game. They won, for the second time this season! (Coincidently, both games they won were the only two that really mattered this season. Way to go!)

Aaaaaand, last but not least, I dragged Tyler to Target to register for our wedding. I've heard awful stories of it taking people 3 trips of 4 hours each to register (12 hours...jeez!), but it only took Tyler and I 3 1/2 hours total. Tyler had a lot of fun with the scanning gun, as you can see below. This is him testing out which pillows we wanted - medium, or hard. I think we got some of both. Tyler was a really good sport. He put up with my back-and-forth decisions and just plain indecisiveness. He really is so patient with me. :)

Life has been going well for both of us. I've got a few big projects coming up, but luckily my last set of midterms went well. Next on our list: find housing!

logan is the most beautiful person in the world.

today i took pictures of logan for my photo class. i truly think she is the most beautiful person in the world!

my little sister is so beautiful.

a few of my favorites.

every class period, my graphic design teacher shows us videos from artists around the world. the first one is a video about procrastination. how appropriate for a college student. the second ones...these were some of my recent favorites, by keith loutit. he makes our world look miniature, does he not? (i recommend watching the last two in HD. the option is on the video on the right.)





Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.


Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

oh, living at the colon(y)...

I love pranks. but poor JP (our maintenance man)...he's replaced the Y on our sign about four times in the past few weeks. The sign has been like this for a while now, so I think he finally gave up. I'm just waiting for someone to pull a prank and name it "The Polygamist Colony" or "The Nudist Colony". Too bad I don't vandalize public property.

these are the moments i know heaven must exist.

tyler is wonderful.

but you already knew that.



i'll be the first to admit i was a little bit of a jerk to him this past week. i regret it. even though he was really sick and had two midterms (a good excuse) i was still a little upset that the only time we actually spent together was doing homework. i just wasn't myself the entire week and he didn't deserve that. in the end even though i was the problem, he made up for it and brought me flowers into work on friday. he's such a good guy...frankly, i didn't deserve anything. but he was the bigger person and really impressed me. that boy never ceases to amaze me.

this past weekend was great. we watched a lot of the office, which i am now addicted to in my spare time, and went to the football game. i didn't enjoy the cold weather at the game...but at least it didn't rain or snow on us. i finished a lot of homework, and started preparing for my next huge history of graphic design test. (which, by the way, i got a 94% on last time! but this next test has 3x more information to learn. boo.) my graphic design classes are going well i think. i really enjoy them but still wish i was more proficient. i really want one of those drawing tablets for your computer so i can just draw directly on my screen and not have to scan everything in (which is an inconvenience because my scanner at my apartment is broken). so i'm going to look into that this week.

church was wonderful yesterday. there was a fireside put on by our stake president and his wife, and i regret not going, yet in retrospect i desperately needed the alone time. i got so much homework done and really just relaxed from the crowd of people that practically live at our apartment each night (sometimes it's too much for me to handle). my roommate alicia shared some highlights with me about the fireside and the counsel they gave. it's neat that we're both on the same spiritual level/page and can talk about things like that. i loved it when we read the book of mormon together earlier this year and would talk about the stories and ask eachother questions. it's really good to have someone you care about reading right along with you; they give so much further insight on little things you may not even notice.

overall, life is going well for tyler and i. it's those little moments of peace and satisfaction that i love the most...those little moments where everything has fallen into place, and i just sit back and smile at my life. :)

bragging rights...fo' sho.

i have to take just one moment and brag about my man.

right now he is at priesthood session, and he took his deacon-aged cousins because they didn't have fathers of their own to take them.

and then he took them all out for ice cream.

tyler is so special. i don't know what i did to deserve such a great guy.
he's going to be an amazing father one day.

you've begun to feel like home...what's mine is yours to make your own.

I feel like I owe you all an apology because I've barely talked to any of you. I'm sorry. Life has been so busy I can barely keep up with it.

I wish I had pictures to show you, because that's why people seem to post in blogs. People show pictures. Perhaps I'll add some later.

School started for Tyler and I and it's been really hectic. It's been hard to fit in time to see each other every day; for example, right now he's sitting here reading for homework while I'm typing this blog post on his computer. That's how life is for us. It seems like every spare second we have to spend with each other, we're consumed by homework. Lame sauce.

My graphic design classes have been intense, but have been going fairly well. I generally get good feedback from my teachers on my sketchbook work, but I can tell that my computer work (using adobe illustrator and photoshop) is below average right now. I feel like my classmates are kicking my butt in illustrator. But I'm slowly getting better, and in my spare time at work (which has been a lot lately) I look online at tutorials. It'll come to me eventually.

Today I just had my first out of four tests for history of graphic design. I studied for about 8-12 hours this past weekend, and hopefully it paid off. I think I possibly got an A. If I did, I decided I deserve ice cream. :) I think this semester, even though I'm only taking 14 credits, is the hardest semester yet for me. I'm brand new in my major and am being introduced to so many things all at once. I've decided this: there are so many things that are simply innate in artists. We have a sense of composition, color, and artistic reasoning that is just ingrained in us that no one else seems to have. Creativity comes easily to us. Naturally, I've got the creativity aspect covered. But then you have to throw in the technicalities of your specific major, and for me that includes computer programs like photoshop and illustrator. They're still fairly foreign to me and even though I have the artistic background, I can't seem to put the ideas in my head into a concept on the computer yet. I'm really struggling right now, I'm not going to lie. I know I'm in the right major, and I know it's where I'm supposed to be, but I get so frustrated at the inability to fully convey my ideas.

I think that's enough ranting for tonight. I really just wanted to post and say hello to my family...and tell you all I'm sorry for ignoring you and putting you off these past weeks. You don't deserve it. I love you guys. :)