Tuesday, October 19, 2010

We decide we want to be busy and productive this semester?

So our last semester up at school was kind of a boring one. Well, not boring necessarily, but very chill and…laid back. Basically we had no lives whatsoever, and you can really only spend so much time on Facebook. So as we were talking about this, we decided that we were not going to let another semester go by with us just sitting at home all day, especially since this is Maquel's last semester. At the beginning of the semester we did our best to make sure we were making plans to do stuff. We knew we wanted to see the school play, have a Halloween party, and be more involved in our ward and in school in general.
Of course once we make a plan, we go full force to make sure we fulfill that plan. As soon as we got to school we started planning a Halloween party, and joined a few activity committees for the school. It was perfect at first, the committee meetings were about once a week, and the Halloween planning was a perfect distraction that could keep us busy for hours. We were soon both called to be on the night Relief Society committee which is also bound to keep us busy.
Too soon however, it seemed like all of our plans and activities came into action all at once, got a little out of hand. All of a sudden we were busy with something every single day, and we didn’t have time to sit at all, let alone sleep. For the month of October Larissa has 2 weddings and 3 receptions that she has to make sure she gets to throughout the month, and of course her birthday as well. We went from sitting at the apartment all day trying to think of something to do, to running around trying to get commercials scripted, filmed, edited, approved and submitted, posters and fliers to design, meetings to go to, Larissa’s birthday to figure out, and a party to plan.
As we were focusing on our party, we decided to make a trip into Idaho Falls to buy stuff for it. What was sure to be an exciting adventure turned into a well…mess. We got a little too caught up with the ideas of decorating, and food, and games, and prizes…and let’s just say our budgets for the rest of the semester has been greatly diminished thanks to this party. Luckily for now we have the party almost completely ready, and all the stuff for it bought, so hopefully it won’t take up too much more time. It’s in 3 days, and then we can cross that off our list.
For Larissa’s birthday we went to Fong’s, since Chinese is Larissa’s ALL TIME favorite, and then we went and saw Inception afterwards. Maquel made her a super delicious angel food cake, and got her Swan Princess, and a cute stuffed dog that we decided to name Odin. It was a great day, and we were both thankful that we could cross it off our list of things to do as well.
The show that we’re helping with on campus is Magic Moments, which is basically a Disney talent show, and the show isn’t until December, so that’s bound to keep us busy for the entire semester. (We highly encourage any students at BYUI to audition for this, because it’s going to be amazing. And if you don’t audition then you’d better buy tickets to watch the show, or else) We got tickets for the play we wanted to go see, but only had one day that we could even consider going, because all the other days we had meetings of some kind going on. To add to our crazy mad schedules of busyness, we also have a friend Alex, who is currently in Europe with a school group and we decided to decorate his room as a welcome home/happy birthday surprise since he was away for his birthday, and for whatever reason, trying to figure out how to get into his apartment to decorate, and WHEN to get in proved to be a lot more difficult than we ever thought would be. We did manage to get in and decorate though, and we’re both beyond excited for him to get home and see it. Although we’re really thankful that we’re staying active and busy this semester, we’re wishing we had just a day, no…just a few hours of down time that we could enjoy just sitting down and maybe watching a movie…it’s not going to be happening anytime soon though. For some inexplicable reason we’re incapable of ever doing anything in moderation. We are either bored to death with nothing whatsoever to do, or else we’re so busy we have to schedule and plan every moment of every day to make sure we get everything done.
We’ll be sure to let you know how the party and show turn out…if we survive that long.

Monday, October 4, 2010

We Spend A Friday Night Getting Chased By Zombies?

It was another wonderful Friday night in boring Rexburg and we were trying to figure out what exciting things we could come up with to keep ourselves entertained. We bounced ideas back and forth from renting a movie, making some kind of new dessert, going to the haunted house or trying to find some friends to hang out with. It looked we were about to succumb to the Redbox idea when we got a text from our friend Bryce saying he was in town. He came over and kept us pretty distracted with all the fun applications he has on his phone. We quite enjoyed the app that you can use to call someone, but make it show up as someone else’s number and it disguises your voice too. As entertaining as it was, it didn’t keep us distracted for too long. We grew tired of calling each other over and over again trying out different voices, Bryce then showed us possibly the most amazing app ever created in this world…The Zombie Run (insert dramatic music here).

This astonishing game is quite simple. It’s a GPS program that finds where you are, and you pick a destination where you want to end. You then decide how many zombies you want, and how fast they can move. Once you have all of these option selected, you push start…and run from the zombies. Our first go around Larissa was driving, and we were going from our apartment to Wal-Mart’s parking lot. Let’s just say there was a LOT of screaming from Kelly telling Larissa to turn at the last minute, Bryce encouraging her to speed quite a bit, and freaking out about the zombies getting closer and closer. (Kelly would like to deny the screaming about last minute turns, she did try to plan ahead). By the time we got to Wal-Mart all of our throats hurt from yelling so much, but we made it alive without any of the zombie’s eating our brains. It was an amazing game, and Larissa wanted a chance to be the one yelling and not driving, so we played again and Bryce drove the car back to the apartment. This proved to be much more difficult though because he doesn’t know the town nearly as well as we do, and it turned into a lot more yelling than the first time as we were trying to explain to him how to cut through the parking lot and take the back roads. We did make it back to the apartment alive, but just barely. As we were laughing about how amazing this game is, we knew we had to play at least one more time, but this time it had to be on foot. We changed into our leather jackets, because you have to wear leather when running from zombies, and we headed up to campus. We decided running down hill would definitely be easier than trying to run uphill, so once we got to the top of campus we set the game up. We soon realized our fatal flaw in this plan as soon as the game started. Bryce had a hold of the phone, and he didn’t know campus at all, so we were basically just running blindly. He panicked and quite literally threw the phone to Kelly for her to take control. Kelly, with her amazing hand eye coordination, almost dropped the phone and had to juggle it a bit too get control of it. Once she had the phone we had to stop and reset EVERYTHING. Sadly a good share of them were literally right behind us, so we took off down the hill yet again, screaming and pointing at unseen zombies. As we were dodging around buildings trying to avoid getting our brains eaten we realized another error that we hadn’t contemplated, we both hate running...with a passion. But there was no going back now, we had to get to the destination point without losing our brains, we were not about to surrender to the fake zombies. After what seemed like an eternity, we did finally get to the destination point without running into to any zombies. We stayed there for a few minutes enjoying our victory and trying to catch our breaths, and then decided to play one more round on the way back to the apartment, but realized it was nearly impossible since there was really only one way to get back to the apartment, and of course that’s where all the zombies were. Sadly, we did all get eaten that time. The zombies were just too powerful, and we were exhausted. We tried one more time, making sure the settings were easier. There were very little zombies and we made them move very slowly. We made it back alive, though thoroughly worn out and extremely sweaty.

Bryce left us to go hang out with other people and we were content to finish the night sitting on the couch watching a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory trying to cool off from a thrilling night of avoiding the deadly invasion of zombies. We’ve decided one of us now has to buy an iPhone just so that we can have this application, because who doesn’t want to run from zombies on a daily basis?