YES

I JUST GOT ACCEPTED TO BYU!

This is what happens when I have free time

My.... cork board? Pin board? What do you call these things? You put tacks in the them?

This is on my wall- hence the awkward angle

I'm Back!

I am typing this on my recently returned laptop that has been so graciously fixed by Dell.
Life is going well! I got into BYUI and should hear from BYU any day. (I may or may not check my application status every hour and it is a huge source of stress in my life, but I digress) They have to let me know by the 28th.
I went to the Young the Giant concert with Stacie and IT WAS AMAZING. I got two tshirts ( and no, its not excessive, that is a perfectly good number of tshirts for your favorite band)

I have taken my first tests in my collage classes and Psych is a breeze and Biology is not. I just find psych so fascinating and biology so boring. Its kind of a problem. I have 101.5% in Psych and 70.6% in Biology. Case in point.

I finished The Bell Jar. Disturbing and very interesting. Overall I liked it.

We just started Hamlet in English and I am reading Slaughterhouse Five on my own.

Best part of my evening right now is watching the Olympics with my parents! I seriously enjoy it so much. It makes me miss skiing and want to go very badly. Good thing that Idaho and Utah have the best snow around.

I recently watched Ender's Game

I was disappointed- just read the book, its so much better, the movie leaves out so much.
I also watched Upside Down and my goodness, it was such a terrible movie.

The Kite Runner

So I finished. It made me sick, it made me cry but what an incredible story. My views of Afghanistan have completely changed, mostly because up to this point I didn't have a view and was completely ignorant. The relationships between Amir and Hassan, Baba and Amir, Amir to Sohrab, have so much to offer. The forgiveness, the loyalty, the lies and deception, the love, the fear, the healing- I have never read a more powerful story. I felt drained when I finished, its the type of book that takes I lot out of you. For having such horrendous accounts of the actions of humans, the message of hope is still a prominent theme. It made me think of how blessed I have been to simply be born where I was born and how stable our county is and how very thankful I am for that.
Quotes:
“When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
“It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out."
“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it"

Chowmein,
A-somber-at-remembering-this-book-but-overall-content
Holly

An Abundance of Katherines

This was my 3rd favorite John Green novel (1: Looking for Alaska and 2: The Fault in Our Stars) and I thought it was original and funny and quirky and had resonances of new beginnings and moving on and it was just great. And I don't even like math. The story is about a child prodigy (not genius)  who is now no longer a child, who has only ever dated girls by the name of Katherine and so far has been dumped by all 19 of them. He then tries to come up with a mathematical prediction of how a relationship will go and who will be the dumper/dumpee ect.

Great Lines:
"After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting"
"You matter as much as the things that matter to you"
"Books are the ultimate dumpee's; put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they will always love you back"
"I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter."
"Dating, after all, ends only one way: poorly"

Later Vader,
A-still-wrestling-with-conscious-in-regards-to-ice-cream
Holly

Dry Spell Explanation Among Other Things

My good and wonderful laptop has been malfunctioning in perhaps the most frustrating way- the keys don't work. So after hours rewording my question on Google and delving deep into the hardware of my good and wonderful laptop, I have nothing to show for it (oh and on Saturday the internet was down. I literally wanted to scream and there were some ice cream curses to the technology god) So today I called the Dell help line and talked for a half an hour to some very nice Indian men who could speak barely understandable English and in the end they are sending me a box, I am sending in my laptop in that box and then in their magical warehouse or computer hospital they will fix my good and wonderful laptop (or just send me a new one). Because of this technological difficulty, my Netflix watching has decreased dramatically and I have decided this is a good thing because I was spending way too much time on it and honestly, How I Met Your Mother has a lot of trash and Bones has a lot of gore. Another reason is that while on my technology-malfunction-Netflix-fast I was able to finish two books. So maybe less Netflix is a good thing.
Mom and Dad are gone! This is a happy thing because grandma is in town to watch the children and I suddenly have very little home responsibilities.
The long story short about my technological woes is that I have to use my moms desktop to blog and frankly I am behind in the blogging department and have a lot of stuff to write about but it might take a few days

Only you can prevent forest fires,
A-slightly-pessimistic-when-regards-to-laptop-issues-but-overall-happy (mostly because of the ice cream she is about to consume)- Holly

Castles,Coasters, Losing Ones Self and Adventure as a Whole

Today is MLK day! Happy day celebrating a wonderful man who gave really good speeches and united people. But, let’s be honest, really the reason everyone likes milk day is that we don't have school! I, of course, did the appropriate thing last night and stayed up till 3:30 watching Bones and How I Met Your Mother. This morning I got up on time though and helped clean the house and then went to Castles and Coasters with Stacie and Sabra and lots of other people and it was great fun. First of all, I haven't ridden a roller coaster since I was like 12 but they had never bothered me. Today was the first time that I was like "So that’s what the expression 'having your throat in your mouth means'" and life made a lot more sense. It was great though, the rides were still really fun but I did have a fabulous headache to accompany them. Probably because I stayed up so late. Anyway, on the way there I had Sabra and her trusty iPhone to tell me where to go but I left early because I had to get home for dinner and FHE. Castles and Coasters are on the other side of Phoenix in a really ghetto area and with the iPhone, it took about 40 min to get there. Well because I was leaving early and by myself I had no iPhone to guide me. I got the general idea before I left but then I was on my own. Of course I timed it just so that I got the brunt end of rush hour traffic and a car crash that reduced the freeway to one lane. And of course I missed my exit to get on the I-10. So I was alone, in the worst part of Phoenix, needing to get on the complete other side of town. So I just went were I recognized street names- namely 7th. So I went right through downtown Phoenix to the other freeway (no, I have no idea what it was) and then saw the exit for Sky Harbor. I drove through the airport and when I got to the other side, there it was- the exit for the 202. And there was much rejoicing. You have to understand though, I was giggling with nervous giddiness from the time I missed my exit to about the time I got home. I was completely lost, and I was having an adventure. I realized that I love getting lost, not if I don't have anything to lose. I remember once talking to a friend of mine and saying that he didn't strike me as the kind of person to get lost and he thanked me as if it was a complement and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was kind of insulting him. I have no fear of getting lost but I am fully aware and open to the possibility. For me, it’s just an adventure waiting to happen. I want to get lost. I don’t know if I have ever felt as free as today, driving with the music blasting, completely and totally lost. And in the end I learned stuff. Today was the first time I had to navigate through really crazy traffic, I had to find my way through downtown Phoenix and now I have a better vision of how it’s all laid out. 

So I really like getting lost. I could not stop laughing.