A Public Retraction

I like to be right. I pride myself on being right a lot. I'd like to claim that it's all genetic (I can only remember my father being completely wrong twice in my entire life) but really, I just like it. That being said, when I am wrong, I like to think that I'm a big enough person to admit it.

You see, you may remember that we had a discussion on baking. And I was quite adamant that cookies made with shortening could never be as delicious as cookies made with real butter. Then I had Derrall's cookies on Friday night when the EQ doorbell ditched us.

And this is the part where I admit that I was wrong. In fact, I may even request a copy of that recipe because, "boy oh boy" were they delicious. I suppose that on occasion, shortening cookies may equal, or, dare I say, trump butter ones.

The end.

PS:  y'all should check out my blog.. it's in it's early stages, but I like it :) In Pursuit of Domestic Goddessness

Chubby Bunny

Hello again fellow dinner group people! As many of you know, last Sunday we carried out an exciting and dangerous activity called "chubby bunny." Derrall won with sixteen marshmallows, but Scott gave him a run for his money with fifteen. The rest of us choked around eight, but Adam was there as medical support, so we felt reasonably safe. If any of you ever just really want a marshmallow, please stop by my place and pick up a bag or two (we may have over-estimated our abilities when buying marshmallows).

The beginning--before Lindsay and I had to throw the towel in.

Very cute both of you.

The top two competitors.

I'm pretty sure this one is my favorite, the dino-squirrel in action.

Playing a strategy game that continues to haunt me.

Apparently Kevin can fit an apple in his mouth.

I'm fairly certain these pictures are a firm testament to how incredibly cool we are, and how incredibly cool dinner group is--I like to think of these sorts of things as the "dinner group underground."

Happy Birthday Derrall!

The Pirates of the Dinner Group never disappoint. Thanks to Lynda, Kevin, and Sarah, we had yet another fabulous birthday dinner group celebration, complete with party hats, mood music, and cupcakes. Here are some pictures from the event:

Captain Heath, our fearless leader, fixin' to run his cutlass through them hornswaggled cupcakes!

Thar he blows!

And last, but not least, here is the awesome birthday video I was telling all of you about:

P.S. I have watched this video so many times. Something about it just tickles me. Enjoy!

Why We Should have a "Celebrate Wearing Glasses" Day

While at dinner group tonight I am afraid that some people may have gotten the impression that I think glasses are less cool than contacts. I don't think that, and I'm pretty sure people who wear glasses are incredibly amazing. To prove this I went in search of important people that wore/wear glasses (instead of doing my Arabic homework). Here are a few of my findings.



My Dad :)

My Arabic professor (and his wife, I think you get double points for that).

The Dad in Calvin and Hobbes (and only cool people read these comics).

Dilbert: Enough said.



 Elton John: I don't really know much about him, but I do like "Candle in the Wind."



FDR: Woot!

John Lennon: Exceedingly cool.

My Mom (ignore my sister and her corn, although she wears glasses too).

Sarah Palin: She knows how to wear glasses.

Me: Of course, I had to appear on this list of cool people. I'm the one in the green skirt.

Bill Gates: If he isn't cool, who is?





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My favorite stuffed animal that I have had since I was born, Cornelius, yes, he is named after the elephant doctor from Babar (see the above picture).


Well folks following that parade of extremely cool people that wear glasses I hope any confusion about my stance on glasses has been cleared-up. Maybe we should have a "celebrate wearing glasses day" and have chocolate cake and party hats and make the people who don't wear glasses sing to the people who do. 



Volunteer Fireman Day

So last week we decided to celebrate volunteer fireman day. Yes sir think of all those under appreciated volunteer firefighters out there! Quite by accident, I assure you, it happened to correspond to the birthday of Kim C. So we ended up singing to her and having birthday cake. Chocolate cake is pretty hard to beat... 

Kim blowing out the candles

Birthday cake before we ate it

Kevin and Scott

Julie and Kim

The whole dinner group

Picture of everyone is fireman birthday hats

Calvin and Hobbes

Because I can't think of anything to write about (except making fun of LDS romance novels, and that isn't very nice) I decided to share a Calvin and Hobbes comic that I found on the internet (hopefully it isn't illegal) that I thought seemed very fitting for all us students.


So unless you can write titles that sound equally unintelligible, academia might not be for you. :)

Maeser building

I am currently in my new favorite study spot and thought I would share it with you guys. Hopefully it is new exciting news for you, too, and I'm not just dumb for never knowing it existed until now. Someone in a group in one of my classes last semester told me about this spot and I finally came to it today. In the basement of the Maeser building is a room called the Honors Library. There are six tables with six chairs at each of them, four comfy leather chairs with footstools, and even three beanbag chairs. Even the carpet in here seems nicer. I am the only one studying in this room. It is amazing. I got enough homework done that I decided I would post about it on the blog before I have to leave my new found sanctuary. And now I do have to leave for class. Hopefully you guys can enjoy this lesser known spot, too.

Are there sock eating monsters?

So this morning I got up, showered, dressed, ate breakfast, and was getting ready to head out the door when I went to my drawer to get some socks. To my annoyance I found 1 blue stock, 1 gray sock, 1 black sock, another slightly different blue sock, etc.. Well you get the idea. So my question is given that:

a) I don't share socks with anyone else
b) I put all my dirty laundry in the basket at the end of each day
c) I wash all of my colored clothes together
d) I put all of my clothes away after they finish drying

Given those facts I ask where do the mates for all my mismatched socks go? I'm beginning to wonder if my laundry basket doesn't have small little sock eating monsters. I think they are probably cute little creatures perhaps a mix between teletubbies and gremlins, but extremely annoying.

So you might be wondering what socks did I decided to wear? Well I think the socks I finally found are the same color but one can never be too sure. If I see you staring at my socks at dinner group I might growl slightly and blame it on the sock eating monsters that live in my laundry basket.

Am I the only one that has these pesky little monsters?

6 Word Memoirs

In one of my classes, we've been practicing different techniques that teachers can use to get to know their students. I ended up finding one I really like, called the six word memoir. The idea comes from the author, Ernest Hemingway, who believed that you could tell a story in six words. The memoirs can be silly or sincere-- you just write six-word phrases about yourself. This is Hemingway's-- "Brand new baby shoes. Never Worn." Here are some other memoirs I've seen that I like:

"It is very, very, very, complicated."

"I never got my Hogwarts letter."

"Finally learned "weird" is a compliment."

Pretty clever, huh? Anyway, they're fun to read. And once you start writing them, you'll find they can be addicting. If anyone wants to write their own and post them up here, it might be a fun way to learn more about our friends in the dinner group.

Here are some of mine:

*So happy in the warm sunshine.

*I was a skunk for Halloween.

*I frequently regret quitting piano lessons.

*Still coping with being an adult.

*I enjoy rhyming random words together.

*I have always been a stinker.

*I like dancing while washing dishes.

*Guilty Pleasure: I love Pat Benatar.

You probably feel like you know me pretty well now. Maybe too well. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with. Have a great weekend! Dinner group starts on Monday! I'm so excited!

Making the bed

Like Sarah, I feel like I have to have something intelligent, or witty to say. I feel neither of those today, but I wrote this in a supreme act of homework avoidance.

This week I have worked almost half again as much as I worked last semester. I won't complain, I LOVE my job! My boss is quite possibly the sweetest lady ever. 

Yesterday I showed up to work and she said "I believe you might feel like you're back at the inn today." She was right. I didn't clean, but I stripped and made up 3 beds in very short order.

I enjoy making beds. It's clean work, it allows me to stretch and use muscles usually left unused, and even though you start with an unruly pile of sheets, blankets and pillows in the end you have a beautiful bed (or at least the way I make them is beautiful).

Every time I finish a bed I have the same thought. I am transported back to Ms Reichl's senior AP English class. I loved that class, I loved reading and analyzing and writing about it. I loved looking for interesting parallels and, she was a phenomenal teacher. 

One unit we covered was poetry, and as a part of that we had a segment on poetry performance. They apparently make poetry videos; like music videos, but with poetry rather than music. It was... interesting. There was one though that has stuck with me in the time since then. 

There was a woman who was a maid or a housekeeper or something like that; she was wearing the black uniform with the white apron. She performed the poem while she was making a bed, it was something about how boss lady say do this, boss lady say that. But her closing line is the one that has stuck with me. She said "Mama said if you make your bed, you have to lie in it. Lucky for me, I make a [darn] fine bed." 

And so, after making beds at the inn all summer, and having occasional days of bed making at my current job, in addition to my own bed, I'm glad to echo her words. 

"Lucky for me, I make a darn fine bed."

Why You Shouldn't Try to Go Down Laundry Chutes: A Personal Experience

Dear all,

It appears that I am somehow expected to come up with brilliant and witty posts in the very near future, I hate to break it to everyone, but it is difficult for me to do anything that fits that criteria, much less anything that people as brilliant and witty as yourselves would find brilliant and witty...this leaves me in a hard spot. However, I would like to bring it to everyone's attention that I have just lost my $20 BPA-free BYU water bottle. I just discovered it this very minute. I was pondering what deep insights I might be able to bring to your attention, decided that I might be able to think better with a drink, reached down to my backpack and discovered that I left my water bottle in my last class. I'm not happy. Not happy.

With that little announcement out of the way I will continue. This morning as I was getting ready to come to school I was struggling to remember how to work the shower (someday soon I will have to blog about our shower and its ability to leave me feeling like a bamboozled maze rat every day of my life, it's a bad feeling, being bamboozled by your shower) and I thought back to all my other stupid moments and decided that I might as well share one, since I can’t think of anything really deep.

First off, I have to say that I blame it all on the "Carl" books. For those of you not fortunate enough to be acquainted with these books, they are books for very small children, all pictures and no words. The books are about a large black dog named Carl and a little kid. I was about 8 or 9 when we got a new Carl book that was about the dog babysitting the little kid. The book went through and showed all the fun and crazy things that the dog helped the little kid do; however, I was struck by one activity in particular. The dog let the baby slide down the laundry chute, which was constructed like a slide. I noted the overjoyed expression on the baby's face and thought with great delight of our laundry chute. I determined that I would slide down our laundry chute.

I hied my way to the bathroom and opened the cupboard that the laundry chute was inside, anticipating a fast, fun ride. I should mention that my younger sister was there watching me, she plays an important role later in the story. Sadly, due to some lack of cognitive development I did not think to observe the differences between our laundry chute and the one in the book. The chute in the book was a nice little wooden slide, our laundry chute was a hole cut in the floor that opened onto a shelf some five feet below in our basement laundry room. Well, I managed to get into the laundry chute till just my upper body was still above the floor. Then, to my horror, I discovered that I was stuck. My legs were dangling below the floor, and my upper-body was stuck above it. I tried to pull myself back out but my arms were too short to get much leverage, my darling little sister went down stairs and tried pulling my legs to get me the rest of the way down but that didn't work either and I just got more stuck. So there I was. I began to think I was never going to get out—I was going to be stuck in the laundry chute forever—so I began to cry and call for my Mom.

 I still don't know how my Mom managed to not die laughing when she found me stuck in the laundry chute, but I don't remember a single chuckle escaping her. She pulled me out of the laundry chute, set me on my feet, and asked me what I was doing. Between sniffs I told her the obvious, "I was trying to go down the laundry chute and got stuck."

That has to be one of the more defining moments of my life, and there has to be something deep you can learn from it besides “you shouldn’t go down laundry chutes,” but I will let all of you decide what it is. Happy blogging!

Cereal is not as tasty as dinner group...

As my first post on the dinner group blog I just want to state the quality of food I eat each day has fallen considerably since dinner group stopped for the semester. As much as I like cereal for breakfast and dinner I will be happy when we start up meals again next week.

Also I mentioned a few days back I'm interested in creating a book group. I'm mainly interested in books by C.S. Lewis but am open to other ideas. A few of us mentioned we might start with a book or two from the Chronicles of Narnia. We will have to talk it over in dinner group if people are interested.

Cats are great pets - delicious even

It's true, and next Thursday you will discover the truth of it.
-Scott