So I am stuck in the Salt Lake City airport for about five hours. I decided to take a little internet break and then basically I am going to walk the airport and count how many times it takes to walk the whole thing until my flight leaves. Fun stuff huh?

I got on here to blog because the people watching is amazing here. You can’t help but listen in on conversations or watch people interact with each other. I’ve always been a fan of people watching since the days of high school when we would go down to the Strip and watch the tourists walk around.

I especially love the elevator music playing in the background. Right now it’s playing a flute version of the Spice Girls song “Two Become One”. Amazing.

Right now there is this guy yelling into his phone “Don’t you dare tell anyone, anything! Don’t you dare!” I seriously feel like he is going to beat whoever it is on the other end of the phone. He is still yelling, yet he mysteriously hid himself in the silver cubicles that the pay phones sit in.

Then there are the questionable people that you are not too sure you want to come into contact with. I heard this lady in the bathroom stall next to me muttering. I even told myself she has to have someone in there with her. No she didn’t. As I was washing my hands, she walks out all disheveled and continues muttering to herself and then goes “And see…they even control how much soap we get too!” and looks at me using the automatic soap dispenser. I quickly looked in the mirror and jetted out of the bathroom. Creeeeppy.

Anyway, I’ll keep this short. Off to New Mexico again!

Liesl did my hair on Monday (which looks fabulous, by the way!) and we always get to talking about the old times when we lived together and even before that. We had some good times. So we decided to have a little mini reunion on Monday night at Applebees with Jonny, Jeff, and Britt..good times!

GOING!

GOING!

GONE!

I’m in New Mexico right now enjoying my summer vacation off. Today was really fun. Mike and I went to this lake called Elephant Butte and met up with Kimball Hakes and their singles ward. I knew Kimball about 2 years ago and met Mike through him.

Anyway, we had such a blast jumping on a trampoline tube, kayaking, paddle boating, wakeboarding and tubing. I thought these tubing pictures were really funny. I was so scared! I was screaming my head off the whole time. Good times!

I love this picture because this is seriously the epitomy of how my hair has been the last month. It is so “staticy”. Is that even a word? But seriously, I have had the worst case of static cling with my hair. I need some recommendations on shampoo.

ANYWAY! Besides that, here is a pic of the gang on the Narrows Hike. Good times had by all. I really am so glad that Levi and Julie invited me and I am really grateful in so many ways that I made it out alive!

If you want to see more pics…go to my facebook. 🙂

Today I finished my nanoscience class and I am so excited so it totally put me in a good mood. So then I decided to drive to my moms to get my mail and I saw there was a farmer’s market. I stopped by to check things out and I had so much fun! It’s so cute to walk from booth to booth and get fruits and veggies and sample things. I am such a nerd, but I loved it. This is what I got.

If you look closely, there is some Winder Farms milk in there (it’s skim!). Their milk is the best! My mom orders it and I totally hopped on the bandwagon.

I went to open my mail and I officially have my passport now! Woohoo!

This past week I have been taking some classes towards my masters. I get paid 1000 dollars for six days and get three graduate credits for it. It is all based around nanoscience. Seriously, when I first read that on the application I was totally weirded out and had no clue what it was. So I found out its this big trend now where scientists look at things that are really tiny (not microscopic..but even smaller than that..which is nano) and they have studied that things that are nano have different qualities than normal things that we can see with our eyes. The qualities of nano-technology will supposedly make things like 10 million times stronger, faster, more durable, etc.

Side note: I will spare you the math and science lectures that I have had. But I’ll tell you what, today I totally lost it. I sit with this really funny group of guys. During a lecture on protein self assembly (yes I know, nerdy), I totally lost it laughing so hard that I had to almost leave the room. So it’s been way fun to meet new people, and really funny people might I add.

But anyway, as boring as it sounds, it’s actually kind of cool to see some of the stuff that they are making out there. Like look at this clip on a “nano shirt”:

So anyway, I’m just putting that out there for you guys to start looking at it. It’s amazing how much science has learned and is learning. I’ve been studying it if you have any basic questions…kind of nerdy huh? 🙂

So I have never had the joy of having two swollen ankles. Is this what it feels like when you are pregnant? Cause if so, my hats off to pregnant women!

I am suffering the wrath of hiking the Narrows today. If you have never hiked the Narrows, it’s a sixteen mile hike through Zion National Park. They claim for it to be one of the most difficult trails in the park (alongside Angel’s Landing). The first half is totally deceiving. It’s a beautiful meadow and a tiny river that you have to cross here and there. Then you start walking through a river and spend a lot of time in the water…and then bam..half way through..you officially have to cross rapids, swim with your pack on, and pretty much pray for your life cause your legs feel like they are about to die from slipping on rocks and holding you steady as rushing water is trying to push you down river.

I have never seen my life flash before my eyes until yesterday. The people that I went with are total tigers. They were booking it down hill. Meanwhile, my knees were killing me and being the idiot that I am, I take the minimum medication for it, so I was dying! Thankfully, this guy David was hurt too, so we were the last people out of our group of eleven. So back to my almost death experience. There was one part where the water was really deep. I seriously could not think of a way to safely get past it, so David decides to swim it. Because we were trying to stay together (safety in numbers), I went for it too. I consider myself a pretty good swimmer, but when you are wearing boots and a pack, you start to sink. So here I was, trying to swim, totally sinking, and I can’t grab anything cause the walls and rocks are slippery. So pretty much I thought I was going to die. Then, David holds out his pole and pulls me toward him. He seriously saved my life!

Anyway, long story short. We made it in 11 1/2 hours (which the website says it takes 13..woohoo!).

As for the picture, going home our tire went flat, we had to drive on a donut, we got pulled over and told to go to Walmart and get a real tire, and basically ended up driving home at 50 miles per hour cause Walmart couldn’t help us. We hardly had any sleep the night before, so we were dying! This was the longest, yet really fun, day of our lives!

Yesterday my ward put on an activity where we would slip and slide down a huge hill at Desert Breeze Park. Normally, I just go and watch the chaos, but concluded on Sunday after crying about not having friends on this side of town, that I was going to participate and I was going to have fun if it killed me!

Thankfully Brittany called me yesterday afternoon from work to tell me she was going to go too. I totally thought I was going to be alone in the whole ordeal.

But it was a good time! Britt and I went first together and I totally flew right past her and rolled about twenty times at the end of the hill. We then decided it would be fun to have ten people go at once and pretty much dogpile at the end of the slide.

On the last run, I was the last in the group to go. Unfortunately, there was a huge hole in the middle of the slide. All I remember is my body going one way and my arm going the other (my arm got stuck in the hole!). It’s just a bruise but I seriously thought I broke my arm! Haha.

Good times!