My classes rock. I get to read a lot of kids books, do little kid dances, and create a picture book based off of a kid's song. Basically, I like homework. Everyone should be jealous :)

Update on my family: Zach is married and on his honeymoon, Brooke is leaving on Oct. 7th on her way to her mission in Dallas, Texas, and Kami received her call to Montevideo, Uruguay and will be leaving on January 7th and going to the Argentina MTC! I am still doing nothing, but at least I am having fun in the process.

Tonight wasn't the best night ever since I went to the football game and we lost 58-24 to Florida State, but attending the game in and of itself was still fun. And it's bound to get better tonight since I get to go home in 35 minutes and watch Wednesday's episode of So You Think You Can Dance, which I am completely addicted to. Yes, it's that bad. It's just like Kayla and Kupono's Mia Michaels dance last season :)

1st Day of School

So here I am at school--sitting in the library on my computer. I always get really enthusiastic at the beginning of a new school year and this year has been no different. I got up on time, got ready, and left for school planning on being an hour early in order to get everything situated (such as my locker and creating pages to take notes on for each of my classes). I got to the library at about 8:00 and expected to have to hurry to get everything done before my 9:00 PE class only to find that I'm much quicker at getting things in order than I anticipated. To fill the extra time I decided to check my schedule online to make sure I have the right room number written down on my paper schedule and discover that my 9:00 PE class doesn't start until the second block--that is, it doesn't begin until October 21st and here I am at 9:00am on August 31st with nothing to do until I have to work at noon. I don't have any homework to work on since I haven't actually been to any classes yet and I can't even look at what I have coming up because I don't have a syllabus for any of my classes. Maybe I'll go watch Arrested Development in the LRC :)

Reset

I've decided that the reset button can fix almost anything: the computer, the internet, my cell phone, etc. Summer is like a reset button. I get completely stressed out and tired during the school year, but I'm ready to go again. Even with the stress of paying tuition and buying books I'm excited!! My classes for this upcoming semester sound like so much fun for the most part! They are: PE (where I actually get to go to an elementary school and teach PE), Children's Literature (which is the one I'm most excited for!!!!), Math (which I could do without, but it's okay because it's basically my only really academic class and it's even just teaching you how to teach math to elementary school kids), Rhythm and Dance, Art, Music, and Drama in the Elementary Classroom. Yep, I know, my schedule rocks. I'm also trying to add the advanced writing class for El Ed majors but so far I'm not having much luck. If I am able to add it, it will bring my credit hours up to 18. I'm a little nervous about that seeing as how the university won't even let you go above 18 credit hours. But I think I should be able to cope since my classes should at least be interesting. And if I'm not able to register for the writing class, I won't have any classes on Friday!!! Plus, I only work on Mon, Wed, Thurs, and Sat so I would have Fridays completely free!! The only problem I have with my work schedule is on the Saturdays when there are home football games. I bought my all-sports pass! and working on Saturdays makes it hard to go to the games. I'm crossing my fingers that someone I work with will be willing to cover for me so I can go!!!! It's going to be an amazing year! Or at least that's the way I'm thinking right now! We'll see how I feel in a month or so. :)

I find it really ironic that I almost change the background for my blog more often than I post on it. But, what ya gonna do? I'm not much of a writer and my life isn't all that exciting--so there's not much to write about anyway. The reason I'm actually writing something now is because of upcoming events in my family. None of which have to do with me. There are two upcoming weddings and two people going on missions. I hardly ever date so the weddings definitely aren't me and I'm still just 20 and therefore, not old enough for a mission. Shayla and Zach are the ones getting married and their fiances are, respectively, Dana and Danielle. I am sooo excited for both of them!! Zach and Danielle are getting married on September 18th and Shayla and Dana don't yet have a date. Kami and Brooke are the ones going on missions. Brooke already has her call--to the Dallas, Texas Spanish speaking mission!! and she leaves on October 7th. Kami hasn't turned in her papers yet but she is going to soon! She's just waiting on the rest of her dental work and her physical. I'm so excited for them!!!!!!!!!! I'm also a little sad because they are all going to be leaving me and I'll be stuck home with David and McKay--who I love, but sometimes I just need a girl around. Me and mom will just have to "cha-cha" without them!

In other news (this one actually has a little bit to do with me surprisingly), the two desks that I work at are splitting. I'm pretty frustrated with this development because it means that most of the people I have been working with I will no longer be able to work with. I really like my co-workers and a lot of my favorite people will be working at the LRC desk while I will be working at the Circulation desk. However, I will be able to get to know some new people! Since most of the people decided to work at the LRC desk, Circ has to hire all the new people. I like getting to know new people so it should at least be fun in that way--plus I still get to work with some of the old people too :) Speaking of the LRC, I recently discovered the existence of the LRC blog. It's called LRC: the blog and I was reading it the other day and one of the posts made me laugh uncontrollably. Cheryl, one of the people I work with, wrote it and she was talking about checking headphones out to people and how they follow you from the computer, to the drawer where the headphones are stored, and back to the computer again almost every time. She called it the headphones tango. It was really funny, although it might not be that funny to anyone who hasn't witnessed the spectacle approximately 500 times.

EFY

A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to EFY at the University of Utah as a counselor. It was AWESOME!!! I went to EFY twice when I was the age to go and was really sad when I couldn't go anymore because I was paying for my trip to Central America instead. But the EFY office called me up and asked me to be a counselor! It was really cool to actually be paid to go to EFY--sure, it's more work than just going as a regular person, but you still get the amazing experience! The theme this year is "Be Thou An Example" and the session director was Brad Wilcox. I believe he was actually the session director for one of the years I went as a participant, but I'll have to look that up to be sure. He is such an amazing speaker and SO funny!!! There were three teachers for the various classes (which I thought was a little weird because when I went to EFY we had twelve or something--although the BYU sessions are a lot bigger than the U of U sessions) Brother Diamond, Brother Smith, and Sister Welch. They were really good! I loved their classes when I was able to go. Plus, Brother Diamond was from England so he had a cool accent :). I had twelve girls in my group and there were two other groups in my company--one other group of ten girls and one group of 16 boys. My co-counselors were Matt and Amelia and they were so much fun! Amelia was actually a girl I went to high school with! One sad thing about Matt though was that on Tuesday (which also happened to be his birthday) he got sick and had to be sent home. Which is sad enough on its own but that also meant that me and Amelia had to control all three groups without too much help (although one of the building counselors took over the boys' devotionals so we didn't have to worry about that). But one major problem came on game night. Our group was meeting after dinner to walk down to the institute building but three boys weren't coming. And, being girls, me and Amelia couldn't go into their dorms to get them out. We had to track down a guy counselor to go in to get them and, begrudgingly, they came out. But then on the way down they started running away from the group to go back to their rooms and I had to chase them down and stop them. Then, when we were at the institute building, we discovered they were gone again. We had like half of the coordinators/building counsellors trying to find them and eventually they showed up. But aside from that we didn't really have any problems--even those boys were really good most of the time, not to mention funny. Also, one of my girls had a birthday while we were there--Baylee--that was fun. She's so cute! And I know this is random, but it's one of the things that sticks out the most to me--the dances were SO hot! It's really quite disgusting if you stop and think about it because not only was it hot, it was humid! And just where do you think that humidity was coming from? Answer: the massive amounts of sweat coming off everyone in the gym which consequently had no air circulation whatsoever. But it was still fun--although I was still glad when I had dance duty which meant that I got to go and guard the exits for the building and get out of the stifling, disgusting heat. I'll try to remember to upload a picture of my group, but I haven't put it on my computer yet

Family

This weekend I have had the opportunity to really contemplate about the subject of family. On Saturday, April 11th my grandpa Don Walter Kleinman passed away. It was a blessing for him that he was able to go pretty quickly and without too much pain, and it has also proven to be a blessing for my family as well. We have all drawn closer together and been kinder to each other in the few days since his death. It has also been a happy time anticipating the arrival of my extended family from Phoenix--some of whom will be here later today with the rest following tomorrow. Also, my sister Brooke flew in last night from California and will be here until Saturday! I love having our family all together like this. My family is the most important thing to me in the world--I would rather do things with them at home than go out with friends. And that is one of the main reasons that I love having the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my life. Through Him we can all live eternally as a family. Having been sealed together in the temple for time and all eternity, there is not much that could stop us from being together forever. It's a very comforting thought during this time of Grandpa's death. When my family went to visit my grandma and tell her the news she seemed to take it very well and I know that is a product of the comfort of knowing that they can be together forever.

Temples, Temples, Temples...

It seems like every time I hear a lesson of a spiritual nature lately it has something to do with temples. Some of these are to be expected, since I'm in a family history class, and we've been studying the portions of the Doctrine and Covenants that have to do with revelations about the temples, but I hear about them from more than just those two classes. This past weekend was the Latter-day Saint General Conference and I was surprised at how many of the speakers talked about the temples. Maybe it's just because I've been learning so much about the temples lately that I noticed it more than before, but it was a recurring lesson-learned throughout General Conference for me. There was a time in my life when I went to the temple every week with my sisters and a few of my friends. We would wake up early before we had school and go to the temple before we had to get to school. Despite the early hour we had to go in order to be able to make it back for school on time, I really loved attending the temple regularly. I felt the blessings of attending the temple in my life as well--I just felt like my life was going more smoothly than it would have otherwise. I knew the benefits that would come to my life through regular temple attendance, but I didn't fully understand the extent of the blessings. While I've been learning about the temple this past little while I have realized more of the blessings that can come from going to the temple--not only personal blessings but more about the blessings that we can bring to those who have died and still need their temple ordinances performed for them. The blessings are literally endless. A couple of years ago I went to Central America with a seminary group for a Book of Mormon lands tour. While we were there we attended a ward conference in Guatemala. With what little Spanish I am able to understand this is what I got from their Sacrament Meeting: You should do everything in your power to be able to go to the temple (whether he was talking about for the first time or on a regular basis I didn't catch)--even if it means going without meals to be able to save up money for transportation to the temple. This ward is located only a few hours away from the temple in Guatemala City but it was still quite a sacrifice for them to be able to make the trip to Guatemala City in order to attend the temple. And here I am within fifteen or so minutes of two temples with many others nearby and I am no longer attending regularly. I get caught up in life and miss out on all of the wonderful blessings of the temple--when others would make great sacrifices to even be able to go once. I think that's one reason why the messages of the temple have been hitting me so strong lately--I need to make better use of them.