Water and smoke... whew.

Okay… so last Sunday (not yesterday, but the one before) was the funniest day!  I’m going to start at the end of the day and move backwards.

 Whit decided to make some soup.  Canned soup.  Meaning… from a can.  Sound hard?  Yeah… I didn’t think so either.  I was standing in the kitchen with her, and suddenly there was this nasty smell.  I turned around to see thick black smoke coming from the stovetop.  Why, you may ask?  Because Whitey turned on the wrong burner.  Yep… the one with tupperware sitting on it!!  Now, you should probably all be aware that I’m REALLY good at handling emergency situations.  I keep a cool head and act quickly… which is really lucky because if I hadn’t been there, Whitney wouldn’t have had anyone there, jumping up and down in place, pointing, and yelling, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!  Get it, get it, get it!”  At great risk to her own hand, she pulled the orange plastic from the burner.  We were then faced with a problem.  Our landlord’s church got out at 12:00 and she told us she was coming over right after.  What time was it? 12:30.  Our apartment was smoky and smelled HORRIBLE!  We didn’t want her to come over and fear for the safety of her house.

Now lets back up a bit.  Why was our landlord coming over?  Ha.  Whitney and I decided Saturday night that we would drive to Salt Lake Sunday morning and go to Music and the Spoken Word.  So we awoke faaaaar too early in the morning to get ready to leave.  We were close to being ready when Whitney made a tragic mistake.  She turned on the water in the bathroom to brush her teeth.  I know… what was she thinking, right??  I hear an, “Uh oh,” and turned around to see the water running full strength from the faucet. She was turning the handle to the faucet back and forth, but it had no effect on the water stream.  It wouldn’t turn off.  That, in and of itself, would have been funny, but lets add another layer.  Our sink drain was plugged and would only drain really, reeeeeaaaalllllly slowly.  The sink was filling quite quickly and we couldn’t get the water off!  I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a bowl, darted back to the bathroom and started bailing the water into the shower.  We grabbed a few things (ya know… scissors, knifes) to substitute for a screwdriver, since we didn’t have one, and tried to take the handle off of the faucet.  What did we manage to do?  Strip the head of the screw, making sure that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY we were getting that handle off.  Well, great.  Meanwhile, we’re still bailing water.  Finally we realized we were going to have to call someone.  It was about 7 in the morning, and we felt bad calling, but knew we had no choice.  We called our friend, Brigham, and he didn’t know what to do, so we decided we’d have to call our landlord.  Unfortunately, she didn’t know either!  Brigham figured out how to turn off the water to our sink and called us back.  Our landlord said she’d come over after church to see the sink and figure out what to do about it.  After we turned off the water, we jetted out the door and made it just in time for Music and the Spoken Word.

So, back to 12:30 with our smoky apartment.  We ran to open the windows, only to learn something interesting.  They don’t open!  Or rather… they haven’t been opened in so long that it would probably take some serious convincing to get them to do so.  There is NO circulation in our little basement apartment, and we couldn’t think of any way to get the smell to leave.  Thank heavens she didn’t end up coming over for quite a few hours.  Yikes.

I tried to upload a couple of pictures to go with this story, but yep... still can't seem to do it.  :S

More pics-

Okay, so these are just a few more pictures from Pickleville.  I know most of you won't really care about them, but really they are just for my parents and fam who want to see more.  :)

Oh, and I had a dang fun time hanging out at the derby/Peach Days with my roomie, (well... EX roomie, I guess) DeeAura.  I thought about writing a little about it, but lucky for me- Dee put it on her blog!  If you want to read about it, go to my side bar and click on DeeAura's page.

Pickleville fun!

Okay... so Pickleville officially ended for the season. How do I feel about this? A myriad of emotions of course. (You should probably be aware that it took me about 5 minutes to figure out if #1- myriad was a real word or one that I made up and #2- how the heck to spell myriad. For those of you like me, I'll supply the definition: a countless or extremely great number. You're welcome.) I'm excited to have time to myself and to actually have my nights free, but at the same time I always feel a little sad when something so great ends.

For those of you who don't know anything about it, Pickelville Playhouse is the theatre that I worked at over the summer. We did two plays- Thoroughly Modern Millie and Chuck Wagon's Wild West Showdown (a melodrama).  In Millie I played the part of Mrs. Meers (the villain who pretends to be Chinese) and in Chuck Wagon I played Clemenine (a hoe-down towns girl) and Dallas (an outlaw). They were so so much fun and I got to work with some dang cool people- you know who you are. We started rehearsals in April and performed through the whole summer. I'm not really in the mood to write aaaallll about it, and chances are that most people wouldn't want to read about it anyway, so I'll just leave it all at that, then post some pictures for people to see. I like pictures. I'm a visual learner. I have a whole bunch of pictures, but unfortunately- I don't have them HERE. Hopefully I can update and add more picures sometime.  So, for anyone in the cast who is hurt because you aren't shown... it's not that I dislike you in anyway... it's just that I haven't gotten the pictures of you onto my computer.

(Oh- random sidenote. For anyone who might wonder why all of my posts are done in EXACTLY the same format with one picture up top and then a slide-show at the bottom, it's because I can't figure out how to put pictures in the middle of my posts. "Oh, but it's easy!" several of you might be screaming to yourselves. To that, I reply, "Yeah. Right.")

What is next in my life venture? Who the heck knows! I actually just got cast in a show-choir-type thing called the Sun Valley Carolers. Let me tell you everything I know about it: we sing. We sing Christmas songs... at Christmas time. Yup. Don't know much. I know that we go to Sun Valley (which I believe to be in Idaho, although someone recently told me they thought it was in Wyoming...) half-way through December, then perform Christmas stuff until the end of December. Beyond that... all I know is that I don't know any details. I'm sure I'll be posting more about it when I actually DO find out what is going on. Besides that, I am substitute teaching... yes I know... everyone's dream job. I actually love being in the schools, though, so it's good.  Except the time I subbed for a math teacher and he left me instructions to teach them a chapter out of their pre-calculus book. Hahaha... that was a looooong day.

I also just moved into a new apartment, however I think I'll leave that for another post because this apartment... deserves it's own post. Ooooo... got you hooked? Good. Then tune in next week- same station, same time. (And by that I mean I have no idea when I'll post about it.)

American Idol

So... sometimes my friends and I do funny things.  This... was one of those times.  :)

On July 27th (yes, I know... I never post anything until it's been over for 2 or 3 weeks) American Idol held auditions in Salt Lake City.  Did we go?  Of course we did.  :)  Please know that I- BY NO MEANS- was trying to actually make it onto the show.  I just wanted to see how all of the auditions worked and everything.  It was I.N.S.A.N.E.

It all started off the Sunday before auditions.  Whitney, Kyle (a friend in Pickleville with us) and I drove to the Delta Center to get our wristbands.  Yes.  Yes, I do know that it is no longer called the Delta Center.  I refuse to call it by any other name.  All we had to do was walk inside, show them our IDs and they slapped a wristband onto our arms.  Easy.  They told us that if we took the wristbands off, we would be immediately disqualified.  Oh, and we weren't allowed to get them wet either.  Yikes.  2 days without getting them wet.  Fun.

The actual auditions were on Tuesday.  Monday night we had a show up in Garden City, but we had to be to the Delta Center at 5:00 AM on Tuesday morning.  Yuck!  So we finished our show, slept for 2 hours, and headed to Salt Lake.  Of course we ended up leaving later than we had planned, so we didn't have time to eat breakfast.  We were super hungry, though, so we improvised.  We ran into the theatre on our way out, and scooped out the leftover, stale popcorn from our show the night before and grabbed candy and soda.  The breakfast of champions.  :)

When they got everyone inside the Delta Center, we all sang a couple of songs (over and over for the sake of filming) and cheered for forever (again- for the cameras).  Ryan Seacrest came and got a few shots (he was there for a total of about 15 minutes).

The actual auditions were so fun to watch.  They set up 10 tables across the center of the floor and sectioned them out with curtains.  Two producers sat behind each table.  They lined us up in groups of four to sing for the producers.  After each of the four had sung, the producers would talk for a second and then usually tell all four of you "No."  :)  So there were lots of people singing at the same time, and tons of people in line to go next and... it was crazy.  There were thousands of people there, and very, very few people even made it through the first round.  

It was fun to walk around the outside of the stadium- where all the concessions stands were.  Everywhere you looked, people were singing to each other, to walls, to anyone around- all practicing or warming-up or... whatever.  It was loud and crazy.  I saw soooo many people that I knew there.  It was fun because I saw people from almost every phase of my life.  I saw people I knew from middle school, from high school, from college, from choirs, from plays, I saw old mission companions, etc... It was so much fun!

We were there for a majority of the day.  It took FOREVER.  Then, of course, we had a show at Pickleville that night, so we jumped in the car the second we were done, and drove straight back to Bear Lake.  We were 30 minutes late for our make-up call.

It was suuuuuch a tiring day, but well worth the experience.  :)

Twenty... how much?

On July 21st I turned 25. I mean, 21. (Okay... really 25, but I'm claiming 21 now. We'll just have to see how many years I stay 21...)

To me, my birthday is just kind of another day because I always just sort of have millions of things going on. This year, I didn't really have plans to do anything out of the ordinary, but my dang cute friends had other plans. :)

First off- Cory invited me to his family's house on Sunday to have a birthday dinner. My family obviously doesn't live anywhere close enough to do something like that, so his family took care of it. :) It was sooo much fun! His family is super rad, and we did all sorts of things... like getting things stuck on the roof, and playing with his cute nieces. Oh, way good food, too.

When we got back to Logan (11:45-ish) it was late, so I was figuring we'd just call it a night. Wrong. At midnight (the morning of my actual birthday) his roommate, Cameron, showed up and Whit, Cory, and Cam told me that it was time to go play. They wouldn't tell me what we were doing, but... freak it ended up rocking!

First we went to the underground tunnels at Utah State. We thought they'd be hard to get into, but oh, no... so dang easy! It was super creepy, but I loved it. It was dark and there were freaky noises and it was about 230 degrees. We took chalk down and signed our names. :)

Second- we went on a hike up Logan Canyon. It's a hike called The Green Door and it is so super fun. There is this huge tunnel in the middle of the hike, and we found the cutest little bat inside it. We scared him half to death, though. Poor thing.

The last thing we did was golfing. Now, you may not have previously known that I was a golfer. The reason you probably didn't know is because... I'm not. When I say that I'm not, I mean that... I'm not. We went to first Dam and hit balls into the water. Honestly, how hard can it be to hit a golf ball?! You swing the club... that's all. But no. I swing the club and absolutely nothing happens. Why? Nobody can really say. It was dang fun, but boy, oh boy was I bad at it.

Later that day Whit and I went out to lunch and then she took me to see The Dark Knight. Then... it was back to Pickleville. Of course. :)

Such a dang fun day! Yay for being 21.

Summer

So basically you should all probably be aware that I love summer.  I really do.  The thing is... this summer has been insane!  I'm working up in Bear Lake at a theatre called Pickleville Playhouse.  I'm in two shows up there (basically meaning that we perform 6 nights a week).  It keeps me crazy busy.  I'll talk more about that in another post when I'm actually in the mood to write about it.  :)  I also just got another job yesterday.  I work as an independent contractor for a company called ChaCha.  Yep.  That's my life.

The main reason for this post is to tell you that I MOWED A LAWN.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen: I mowed a lawn.  See, the funny thing is that I had never done that before!  My older sister, Lindsay, got that job when we were kids, and by the time it was about my turn, we moved into a condo development where they mowed the lawn for us.  Then... we moved into our new house, and my little brother, Brian, was at a prime lawn-mowing age.  Then I moved to college.  That, in a nut shell, is my lawn mowing history.  Then about a week and a half ago, I got to mow the lawn at the house I'm staying in for the summer.  It only took me about twice as long as Whitney takes.  :)  The lines on the lawn looked pretty dang funny, but boy oh boy was that grass short.  I guess I'm just a natural.

GRADU-FREAKING-ATION!!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen.... it actually happened.  I graduated from Utah State University!  And, after only 7 short years, too.  :)  I majored in Theatre Education and minored in Psychology Teaching and Music.

I didn't actually walk in my graduation ceremony, though.  #1- My family lives all over the world.  It would have felt a little weird cheering for myself... plus they frown on graduates taking their own pictures... something about it not looking professional.  #2- My roommate, Whitney, and I spent the ENTIRE day cleaning out our apartment and moving.  We thought we could get it done pretty quickly, but we were sadly wrong.  It was slow-going and painful.  :)  Fun day.

The only up side about the whole day was that Whitney was stinkin' cute.  She had planned all sorts of things to make my graduation day memorable.  She's so freakin' awesome.   We didn't get to do most of the things she planned since we were moving, but still... the thought was there.

After we finally finished moving Whit took me to dinner and when we got home, her mom had set up a table full of... well... a table full of every green food that she could think of because my favorite color is lime green.  Whit also decorated my car.  I loved it!  After snacking on the green foods we watched Gilmore Girls and did pedicures.  :)

The next day, after church, I threw on my cap and gown and Whit and I ran up to campus to take a few pictures.  And yes... under my gown I AM wearing my pajamas.  Would you expect anything else?

Peace out, Utah State!