Snow.

Our 2008 Christmas Tree

I do not like snow.

Growing up I loved snow, but ever since the Winter Break of my senior year in high school, I have despised it.

The first thing you need to know is that when it snows in Portland, OR, everything shuts down! The city is literally incapable of dealing with snow. There are a limited number of snow plows. This means that only the freeways seem to get plowed. But what is the point of plowing the freeways if nobody can get out of their streets at home to get to the freeways?

So back to Winter Break 2008. School got cancelled for the entire week before break was scheduled to start. While normally I would have been ecstatic about an extended break, this week was different. The callbacks for the spring musical were scheduled for that week and I just wanted to get them over with. Instead I had to stress over them for an extra two weeks. Also, the snow didn't end after that canceled week of school. I was stuck at home almost the entire time.

My family ended spending Christmas morning a week later because we hadn't gotten a chance to do any preparations. We had a Christmas tree, but no way to get to the tree decorations that were in a small storage unit we had had at the time. I ended up decorating the 8 foot tree by myself from things I could find around the house. These things consisted of paper snowflakes and pointsettas and strings of microwavable popcorn.

Flash forward to now. Imagine my reaction to walking out of my calculus lab yesterday to find that it was snowing. It didn't stick, but it was a bitter reminder of what will eventually come and stay. For a very long time.

What are your feelings about snow? Do you have a least favorite type of weather?

Favorite Movies.

Today will be a short one. Which is probably a good thing since I've practically written essays for all of my previous posts.

Here is a list of my favorite movies in no particular order.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• National Treasure
• The Notebook
• Dreamgirls
• Mean Girls

They are almost all chick flicks, but I am not ashamed. I am proud of my strong emotional, girly side!

Why I Study German.

A view of Eichstätt, the city I lived in for my foreign exchange in Summer '08.

I'm not entirely sure when I actually made the decision to learn German. It had to have been some time in the eighth grade when it was time to forecast for high school.

My grandma's old next door neighbor and best friend was a German lady named Anneliese Chavez. Anneliese was married to a Hispanic man, named Tomas, whom she had met in England post WWII. But the story of Anneliese goes back much further than that.

Anneliese was born in the mid 1920's in a small town in Germany called Weiβenfels. She came from a very large family with a father handicapped from Polio. As a teenager, Anneliese was preparing to become an Olympic swimmer when she found that she had lung problems and was sent to live in the mountains where the air was thinner to strengthen her lungs. Around age 18, she married her first husband and they had two children, both boys. Soon after, WWII struck Europe. During a bomb raid, Anneliese and her mother were running away with the two boys. Unfortunately, a piece of shrapnel hit her youngest son and he passed away.

Her husband was in the army when he contracted TB. He was sent home for Anneliese to take care of him. One day, Soviet soldiers came to their home and told her husband to get out of bed. Anneliese pleaded them to leave him alone because he was sick. Instead of leaving, they hit her in the head with a gun and shot her husband. Their neighbor had heard the commotion and ran over after the soldiers had left and took their son, thinking that both parents had died.

However, Anneliese was not dead. She was taken to the Soviet barracks as a prisoner. While there, a doctor realized that she was not supposed to be there and helped her escape. She fled to England where she became a seamstress. Her stories from this job include the time that they had to alter the coronation cape for Queen Elizabeth II. They could not try it on the soon to be queen, so they fitted it to Anneliese because she was roughly the same size as Elizabeth. (Anneliese still finds this very insulting because she thought the Queen was fat.) After a few years she met Tomas. They got married and then moved to America together.

I didn't meet Anneliese until I was in the sixth grade because she was living in Texas while I was growing up. But when Tomas passed away, she moved back to Oregon to help my grandma take care of my great-grandma. I quickly became very fond of Anneliese, even though her German boldness offended many people. I would sit and talk to her and listen to all of her stories. She taught me to knit and always let me help her with her word searches and cross-word puzzles. She had essentially become a second grandmother to me.

Jump back/forward to forecasting for high school. As I sat in the cafeteria of my middle school trying to plan the beginning of the next four years of my life, I came to the language class options. I don't remember even thinking about it, I immediately marked the box to take first year German. It was a defining moment in my life.

I studied German all four years in high school and even went on a foreign exchange trip to Bavaria for three weeks. I continued German when I got to college. And now here I am, roughly six years later, planning on a semester abroad in Berlin and completing the paperwork to become a German Studies double major with Statistics. I am very happy with my choice to continue with this beautiful language. And I owe it all to one dear lady. My German "grandma" Anneliese Chavez.

I don't have any digital copies of pictures of Anneliese.

Inception.

*****Spoiler Alert!!!!!*****

I saw Inception last night. I was hesitant to go, but I guess it was worth it. Luckily it was at the dollar theater, so it wasn't too expensive.

Things I liked:

• Leonardo DiCaprio
• The complexity of the story line
• The special effects
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Things I didn't like:

• THE END!!!!!!!

I was extremely disappointed by the ending of this movie. Or better yet, the lack of ending of this movie. Why couldn't they have taken an extra half second to make the top fall over? Most people say that they liked how open ended it was and that they got to choose the ending. Call me an opponent of imagination, but I do not like it when I am not told what happens in the end of things. This reminded me all too much of the LOST finale. I want to know that things either ended happily or badly.

So if I judging everything but the end of this movie, I would say that it was fairly good, even though I was shaking from fear the entire time. If I am judging the whole movie, including the last five seconds, then this was the worst movie ever!!!!

Friends.

This weekend our friends, Courtney and Cassy, from home visited from BYU-Idaho with their roommates. It was so much fun to see them! On Friday, Steven and I (mostly Steven) made them a Costco feast. We fed them orange chicken, taquitos, garlic bread, and chocolate chip cookies. It was mostly a dinner of Steven's favorite foods.

Tonight, we met them at the Olive Garden to enjoy their unlimited salad and bread sticks. We also visited a Mormon bookstore where we found many interesting things. These things included a 70% off hard back copy of Breaking dawn and a book teaching parents how to monitor their children's myspaces.

Then we all came back to my apartment and ate some puppy chow (or muddy buddies) and talked. I'm going to miss them so much! I can't wait until they come to visit again!

Sunshine Pantry.

Over the summer, my brother and I helped out everyday at the Sunshine Pantry located in Beaverton, Oregon. It was a truly wonderful experience to be able to help so many families in need.

My daily tasks included sorting through the bread to make sure none of it had gone bad in the summer heat, repackaging large quantities of foods into smaller family sized portions, occasionally filling boxes for the families, and sweeping up when the day was done.

The pantry was started as a cub scout project and was carried on by Sharon Straus. Sharon is hands down the nicest lady to ever walk the face of the Earth. Volunteering over the summer was completely worth it just to meet this extrordinary woman. If you are ever having a bad day, go help out at the pantry and spend the day around Sharon. There is a light in there that can make anybody smile and you will leave not being able to remember what had made your day so terrible.

The pantry receives most of its food from local stores that have excess food, the Beaverton School District, and private donations. One of the missions of the pantry is to educate the public about food usage in Oregon. Oregon does not have a food shortage problem, but rather a food waste problem. Many stores and restaurants will throw away all of their food at the end of the day when that food could actually go to a place like the Sunshine pantry, be repackaged, and then distributed to local families in need.

The Sunshine pantry gladly welcomes any donations. It is also the perfect place to help with scout projects. There is a list of items that are always needed at the pantry on it's website below. From my own experience, things in high demand are diapers, toilet paper, dairy products, and easy kid-friendly foods like Mac&Cheese.

Visit the Pantry website here to find out how you can help out or just to see what the Pantry is all about.

Chipotle.

If I had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life it would be a Chipotle burrito.

I had my first Chipotle burrito on the East Coast trip for my middle school. It was in a half underground location somewhere in Washington, DC or Virginia. (We had visited Arlington Cemetery right before it and I can't remember if we had gone back into DC or stayed in VA to eat.) I had never heard of this magical place before and did not realize how that day would change my life forever... Unfortunately, I was not very hungry at that time because they fed us far too often for my liking on this trip, so I only ate about a fourth of my food.

A few years later, my mom volunteered at a Livestrong bike ride sponsored by NIKE. Everyday, the volunteers were fed Chipotle for lunch. My mother always liked to bring home treats and food for my brother and I, so when they had extras she would bring some home for us. We did not know where the burritos came from back then, we just knew that we loved them.

The year after that, my sister and I went to a show at my high school and afterwards went to get dinner. She suggested Chipotle. I was timid because I didn't remember that that was the name of this heavenly burrito factory. I only knew that a chipotle is a kind of chili pepper and that I really hated spicy foods. I somehow agreed though. About halfway through our meal, I finally remembered that I had had it before and made sure to tuck the name of the restaurant into my memory.

It did become obsessed with Chipotle until the end of my sophomore year in high school when the best day in the history of all days occurred. Free Chipotle Day. My friends and I eagerly stood in line for over half an hour in the 90+ degree restaurant to receive our food. It was all so worth it.

Ever since then, I have been going to Chipotle whenever I have saved up 5-6 dollars. I terribly upset whenever the price raises another ten cents. I try to go to a Chipotle whenever I go on a trip. I have been to Chipotles in DC/Virginia, Portland and Beaverton, OR, NYC, Chicago, and Sandy, UT. There is one in London (the only foreign Chipotle) that I hope to visit sometime in my life.

The closest Chipotle to BYU is an hour and a half bus ride away, but is worth every minute of it. I just can't go as often as I like. But until a Chipotle is opened in Provo I will make the long journey to get my chicken burrito with black beans, tomato salsa, sour cream, cheese, lettuce, and extra sour cream and a water with lemon.

BYU Cleaning Checks.

One of the many unique things about BYU is monthly cleaning checks. Once a month an RA is assigned to come to your apartment to make sure that it is clean. The jobs are divided among the inhabitants of the apartment and rotated every month. If you pass your cleaning check, the RA puts a neon yellow sticker on your cleaning sheet and you are done. However if you do not pass, they give you a red sticker and come back a later day to see if you have properly cleaned.

The odd thing is that there isn't a punishment for never passing. Yet there is still a strong urge and desire to pass on the first time. Also, it seems like apartments only get cleaned right before the cleaning checks. This results in extremely dirty/messy apartments for about three weeks every month. I think that apartments would get cleaned more often if it were not for cleaning checks. The thought that often goes through my head when I think about cleaning is, "Well my cleaning check isn't until next week and what is the point of cleaning this week if it is just going to get dirty again and then I'll have to clean it again next week?"

My November cleaning check is tonight and for the first time, I will not actually be there for the inspection. I spent all of last night doing my cleaning assignments into the early hours of the morning. This month my duties included the toilet, bathroom counter, refrigerator/freezer, kitchen floor, cupboards, windows, and my half of my bedroom.

The jobs list includes instructions on how to complete each task. It seems like every single task includes soaking the area to be cleaned in Pine-sol. Unfortunately for me, the smell of Pine-sol makes me sick. This makes these cleaning checks even more dreadful than they already are.

Some of the more interesting things that have happened during these monthly events in the past include melting a container of Lysol wipes, attempts to kill a colony of ants that had made its home under our stove, and most recently having a spider fall on me while cleaning the track of my bedroom window.

I am looking forward to the next three hours I plan to spend on campus for a German assignment. However, after those three hours end, I must unwillingly go home where i will met by the revolting stench of a Pine-sol soaked apartment and will spend the rest of the night trying to air it out.

The Simple Joys in Life.

1. Walking through a pile of crunchy leaves in the Fall.

2. Finding the Star on the wrapper of your Tootsie Pop.

3. When the bus or MAX stops with the doors right in front of you.

4. A Reese's Peanut Butter Cup that comes in two brown wrappers.

5. Sunday afternoon nap time.

6. The last bite of a Chipotle burrito.

7. Putting on pajamas right after they come out of the dryer.

8. Finding an egg with two yolks.

9.Girl Scout cookie season.

10. Smells that bring back happy memories like glue sticks and Kindergarten.

11. Playing PIT at family gatherings.

12. Dying Easter eggs the night before Easter.

13. Staying up all night to wrap Christmas presents.

14. Getting the cat to do the same trick he has done for the past 12 years.

15. The smell of my Grandma's garage.

16. Long phone conversations with my sister.

17. Walking by somebody speaking a foreign language and understanding them.

18. Throwing snowballs for the dog.

19. Getting mail, especially post cards.

20. When the dentist compliments you on brushing and flossing well.

21. The muffled sounds after it has recently snowed.

22. Finding a penny on the floor.

23. Singing your favorite hymns at church.

24. Visiting with old friends after long absences and feeling like you were never apart.

25. Sleeping in a made bed.

26. Burt's Bees Chapstick

27.Finding that earring that you thought you lost 5 years ago.

28. Singing along with the radio and not caring what other passengers in the car think.

29. The corner bathroom in the Seattle Space Needle.

30. Watching documentaries about the ocean.

NaBloPoMo.

I have decided to join in on National Blog Post Month. 30 posts in 30 days! Can I do it? We'll see!

Today is my rest day after the conclusion of many midterms. I stayed up until four in the morning last night and still feel dead. So today is just an introduction with a promise of many more exciting things to come!