Here It Is!

Hello All!

Life is moving along. Here are the elements of which it consists:

We do lots of homework. (though admittedly, in the same room as each other, so not as much as we potentially could. Alas)

We lounge around. (So, apparently, do our neighbors. Our hammocks have become the popular "hang out" spot)


We go to the mountains (this was two weeks ago when it was still BEAUTIFUL GOLDEN HAVEN up there.) Kim and I went and camped in a random field up Alpine Loop then got up and went running the next morning and it was so paradiscical that we took our ward up there the next day. Great choice.

Spazz Session

WE FINALLY MET RRRRRRRRRRRRRYAN!!!!!

Wedding bells are ringing!

The resemblance is striking, don't you think? And why we waited so long to meet him, I do not know when a perfectly replicated girl version of him has been living with us all along. Oh, Samwise.

I took up road biking. WHOA!!! It is the bomb!! I don't know what I have been thinking, just running around all my life. (Not that I regret it, but now I know how to enrich it!)

ANNNDDD
SUMMER RAN HER FIRST HALF MARATHON!!!

(Don't be confused by the shirt. That really is summer, not Krista. We just wanted to dress up neon)

SHE DID SO GOOD! She ran a 2:02 and I have never been more proud.What a beast!

The highlight of my life was life itself, epitomized in what I did yesterday in this layout of events:

-Wake up at 6:47 ride with Bum to Aspen Grove
-Run down 13.1 miles in 1:35 to the finish
- Dash home to play a vball game at 12
-Dash home and away to go on a 20 mile bike ride up the canyon I just finished running down
- Dash back home
-Turn right back out the door and onto a hiking adventure for 5 miles!!!
-Come home and sit down and eat a bagel. Yum.


If you do the math, that's 12 straight hours of constant go, 48 miles, and no meals. You better believe I ate my entire dish at Noodles & Company that night, something I have never done before.

And you better believe I woke up this morning feeling like I do when I wake up after marathons. Feels so good.

Fall is ending. Accounting is still dumb, but at least Shakespeare has outlived it in both the world and my mind, so I am still happy. Long live 2ft. Prosthetics, intramural football, BYU Grounds, Thanksgiving Break in 3 weeks and BASKETBALL SEASON!

This is Weird

Life is so different for everyone.

I had a weird moment this morning where I was looking at all the blogs and reviewing my interactions in the recent past with all of you. Watch this.

The other day I was talking to Dad and he just so badly wanted to know about my Shakespeare class and he also told me about his job and how it is making him work his tail off (or even if it isn't, he is, which is great) and I just thought about how Dad is just a politician guy (Char and Bum: "but he's just more neutral, just an organizer, you know, like a leader" haha) and just helping single people get married. what a life!

Mom, the mom of all moms, talked to me yesterday and said she got hit in the mouth with a wrench because she was fixing a sink! And then she posted a blog about a mustard bottle as a water bottle because that is what I used when I was in middle school! What a life to be at home and fix the house and walk the dog and remember your children who are gone from home.

Speaking of them

CJ turned 29 and yesterday I told somebody she was turning 27 or something until i remembered we are 9 years apart and I was just amazed! And when i called her on the phone she had just run 7:40 minute mile and was talking to her FOUR CHILDREN in the background. Then I read a blog about how her and Eric's relationship has reached the age of accountability (haha) and I was just blown away that there she was, just a mother and running fast miles! What a life!

So then Jamie's blog has this random picture of some flying contraption and she is just going to Hawaii with her husband and when I saw her last she just gave me this frog we have been swapping back and forth for years! years, people, years! And she just goes on road trips across the country (...exit 29. 3 miles. Rest stop...) and has a real live family with talking, walking children. What a life!

Summer came over to my house last night and gave me a haircut and told me about her college classes and how she found the perfect major for herself and the dates she went on and I just remembered when she long ago tried to tell Jamie and I that she wasn't growing her bangs out but she was but she still always had these little wispys just on her forehead (don't worry bum, I had the same problem) and I just thought, "What!? Summer is at college. With me. Because I am a college. And I used to drink out of a mustard bottle for a water bottle." What a life.

The WEIRDEST culminator of it all for me was the fact that I went to Char's blog and WHAT THE HECK THAT GIRL IS PREGNANT AND HAS A BABY BUMP! As in, there is a human growing inside of her. As in, that happened to Mom and CJ and Jamie and now they all have these real live families! WHAT. A. LIFE!

How can we just have one set of parents just living the empty nest life and one sister just running faster miles than I do and one sister just about to go to Hawaii and one sister just being initiated into the college world we have all lived before and one sister just pregnant!!!? This is crazy!

Maybe it will hit you like it hit me. But maybe not--you probably have to go feed your child or take some medicine and I have to go to Shakespeare class.

Picture Upload...

I guess my pictures didn't show up in the post I made. So much for the goodness of Picasa blogging. But here they are--you can read the descriptions which match in the post below

MarathonProvoGroundsParade!

I have to write too creatively too often for school these days, so getting my brain to think of one more creative, original start to a blog is not working. So here are some stories:

Marathon Weekend!
My camera was broken, so I don't have any pictures of the before, but I met with Dad and Bum and the Lindes and we caravanned to St. George where I then met with my peeps and we wandered around Pine Valley for an hour on this death dirt road trying to find a cabin with only a hand drawn map. Hahah it was rough, but we were laughing our heads off and happy when we finally found the cabin and went to bed (even though for most of us that meant we didn't go to sleep till much later becuase we were so excited for the morning!)

I was kind of sad we didn't have the bus ride to the start, but the start was just as exciting without. I was so excited for my friends to just get to run a marathon!! What thrill they must have been experiencing!

It was a good race, and the best part was definitely LaDon joining me at mile 19ish.



I'm so glad MarathonFoto got a picture with both of us (kind of) in it. At this point I am muttering to LaDon in my tired voice "makeahappyface!"

Stories from the race?
I mentally broke the race down into mile chunks and every chunk I would convince myself I was only running that much, so, for example, I would run one mile and say to myself, "1 of 7, 1 of 7" then when the next mile rolled around "2 of 7, 2 of 7." My last chunk was "5 miles of committment" so I did my usual "1 of 5" then "2 of 5" but by the time I got to "5 of 5" I was so delirious I could think of nothing else the whole mile and then the 2 miles after so I just was thinking the whole time "5of5of5of5of5of5of5commitment5of5of5of5of5of5commitement" hahaha

I was initiated.
All my running life I have heard tell of people peeing their pants (or worse) and I always thought it was ridiculous that they couldn't just pull off to the side of the road for just a second to pee. Well, there I was running along at mile 17ish and I took a drink and all of a sudden, without warning and completely unanticipated I just peed my pants!!! I literally had no control! haha. You probably don't want to know the rest of the details, but the same thing happened anytime I even touched water every water stop after that. At one point muttered to LaDon "hey. I peed my pants" haha he just said, "happens."
When I got in the chute afterwards and Kim came in I said, "Kim. I peed my pants" she said, "I did too!" hahahaha We smelt so bad and ended up jumping in a lake so on the drive home the poor people in the backseat downwind from the AC wouldn't suffer anymore.

Speaking of Kim

She is a stud and ran the marathon SO FAST! I expected her to run a 4:20 and also to finish last of all our friends,but no!!! She finished in 3:59:12 AND she beat 3 of our other friends! I seriously was SO SO proud of Kim. She is a stud and we had such a good time training all summer.

Anyway.
Marathon was GREAT! I am running another one on November 19th!

In other news:

Fall has come and gone. I went to ride the ski lifts at Sundance to see the leaves, but no they were closed for weather (ironic? I think so) So we took a hike instead and it was beautiful!

Also, Sarah was in town and so we put on a double date and we told the boys to dress up in their dapper Englsih garb and we had a picnic...in the Grounds Office!!! It was so quaint, endearing and wonderful. And the boys were good sports, so that made it fun too.

Sarah's gone by the way. I may not potentially see her for THREE YEARS, but regardless, one and a half is long enough. It still hasn't hit me, but yikes!! That's a long time to be parted from someone I've been with my whole life! :(


Also, The Homecoming Parade!
We woked in the office all week long to make this beauty of a float:

When I got the invoice for an inflatable cougar I was thinking life size--I certainly didn't expect mass inflatable structure of gerbil-like characteristics. Haha but Roy was of course thrilled becuase we won the "Grand Marshall" something or other award. Oh, Roy...

2ft. Prosthetics marched in the parade! We were just going to march, but at the very last second one of my friends said we could use his convertible for music. haha what the random? It was awesome!

Summer marched in the parade too, with the llama people. Hahah it was fun becuase our float and theirs actually ended up right next to each other in the line-up. Weird!

But it was so fun! I've never been in a parade and we just marched along and walking by our house was the best becuase I got to see my peeps.

We had legs with sockets as donation bowls on top and we all just carried legs. Thank you to mom for the awesome banner! haha I just kept thinking, "Who knew I would ever be walking through the streets of Provo holding a PVC leg and yelling "Prosthetics! yay Prosthetics!"? I also kept thinking "Last time I was going down a street lined with people I may have been moving slow, but I was still moving a lot faster than this!" It was almost aggravating, but fun nonetheless. And we actually got some good donations!

That is not it, but that is all the pictures I have and I will just sum the rest by saying life is good and busier than a nutcase, but I am one so all is well. It is cold in Provo and that makes me sad, but I have the goodness of job, roommates, runningness, calling and sisterhood.

One more thing: I am in a memoir class where I have to write a blog post every day (every day, people!) with various stories from my past. I never run out of good ones to write about, but if you have a favorite memory/Krista story/your story/Roy story you'd like preserved in writing, tell me and I will write it!

That's all. Go Cougs!

FOOTBALL SEASON!

It's football season, and I am lucky enough to get to work the football games! I work in the VIP tent, and there is just bounteous amounts of surprises in there, becuase who knew watching BYU could be such a luxurious experience!?

It's crazy, these people eat a NICE dinner before and then at half they come back for hot dogs and popcorn and then after we have vacuumed the whole place, they come back after the game for veggies, chocolate milk, and cookies to watch the post-game show. IT"S INSANE! But pretty awesome for me because I just walk around and take out trash and sweep and then vacuum my eyes out until we are all finished vacuuming the whole thing, which is turf carpet so it's kind of a pain, but then after that, I get to go clean the stadium!

Cleaning the stadium is SO FUN, even though it is disgusting and nasty. We are just running around LaVell Edwards Stadium in the wee hours of the morning, dancing to crazy music and dodging pillars in our crazy trash-filled trucks and bonding with real live grounds people! I also get to walk the field after the game and see how it played because then during the week I'm in charge of writing up a little evaluation for the athletic people so if media approaches them with turf questions, they can say something intelligent. I don't really make the evaluations, but I get to learn about them so when I write them up they sound a little better than if I didn't even know what tensile strength was (who knew such a thing was even important!?)


Also, Brenda and Ryan are officially together people! Just thought you'd all like to know haha. She is always glowing:)

I love my calling. I don't think I ever experienced trying to piece the beginnings of a ward together on a scale like this, but I know there are people who are still doing way more than our little presidency is doing. It's really great though, and this ward is shaping up to be quite good.

LIFE IS BUSY! But good. And, shout out to Summer, who made dinner for me and my roommates tonight. Best Southwest Chicken I've ever had on this side of the mountains :)

Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!

It happened again, ladies and gentlemen. Fame met fortune, and by that I mean good fortune.

I was walking across campus the other day on my way to work and reading the Daily Universe when I opened to a page that proclaimed the arrival of none other than BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY at UVU and I was so excited and so badly wanted to go see him, it almost made me cry that I would be at work and then at class during the time he was giving his lecture. I am no good at science, but Bill Nye certainly helped me through the hard times from Hinkle to Vavra.

I really really really really really wanted to go see him, but I just had to go to work and then I had to go to class and then I had to go back to work, so I just admitted defeat and went to work and turned on the devotional and listened to Elder Anderson give a nice talk on honesty.

Some good he did. I was so consumed hahaha that I emailed my professor and told her I was having some scheduling conflicts with a certain appointment and that I might be late and would that be a problem becuase I would do my best to get to class by 2:30?

Well, she said that would be fine and so when I left work like i usually do to go to said class, instead I drove my little Oldsmobile over to UVU and went to the lecture that had already been going on for an hour. I was surprised there were so many seats and I just kept inching my way from empty seat to empty seat until i was literally int he very front seat and BILL NYE the REAL SCIENCE guy was was standing right in front of me! I was just basking is his gloriuos science passion and he was saying so many great things and I knew i could just hop up after he was done and snap a picture with the purse real quick.

AND THEN! I realized there were so many seats open because their occupants were on the other side of the stage in a LINE that had already wrapped itself around the room!!!! I was devestated becuase I knew i had to go back to class, but I was so close to glory with the purse but I could not wait that long!

Haha never stopped me before! I went up to these students that were standing by the stage and I was dressed professionally and so I blended right in and I told them with great passion the story of the purse and my great passion for BILL NYE and they were so nice and so sympathetic--but told me to go talk to the kid on the other side of the stage. I did and I repeated my story and I had to talk over the din of people who had suddenly started talking because Bill had stopped but he was like... sure, just stand behind these three contest winners!

IT WAS AWESOME! I shinked a line of a billion people and BILL NYE and I took a picture and he held my purse even though he didn't want to! (and even though he isn't in that picture.... he really did hold it. haha)



The point is... BILL NYE! THE REAL SCIENCE GUY!

And I still made it to the end of class and I still went back to work and I can still repent for a little bit of dishonesty (Elder Anderson never did warn against wily rhetoric....)

Fall and Summer!

It's been so long since I blogged that blogger won't cooperate and I can't seem to get all the pictures I wanted and this is definitely not the order I wanted for them, but life. is. good!

We had a ward activity called Six-Minute Speed Bonding (Unfortunately, we did not call is SMSB, but it was a roaring success nonetheless). We just had 6 different 6 minute games and it was joyous, but the BEST part was we had everyone wear something ridiculous just to get them out of their comfort zone since the objective was bonding. As nearly everyone was wearing random dress up clothes from my past, It was yet another moment where I thanked the day Mom told me to bring my dress up box to college.


Haha, just imagine! This kid had no idea he was wearing a mu-mu from my great-grandma's closet!

The girl on the left is my 24th roommate, Mackenzie. She is as dear as the dearest I've ever had and feisty as they come. We love her!

And of course, Brenda and Kelcey are still around!
(Side note, since I know you are all anxiously awaiting the update: Brenda came home from the summer where she reunited with her missionary, only to inform us she wasn't so sure about it anymore! We are still waiting in suspense to see what adventures will arise on the journey to Mt. Doom! Also, she is CRAZY! Way more large and in charge, and with as sharp as ears as ever. What a dear soul!)

2ft. Prosthetics is still thriving. We had a recruiting fair and I think it will help us draw in some good potential. Bueno.

I hiked Mt. Nebo with a bunch of peeps and Summer!!

It was GORGEOUS and so fun!

(NEBO) (If you couldn't tell)

It was SO pretty and So fun and the best part was, I was with Summer!

Summer and I also went with Elise and her little sister to go INDOOR SKYDIVING!!! I tried with all my might to get pictures on, but it wouldn't work so alas. It was AMAZING and we were just flying in the air!

Also, Elise threw me a surprise party.

School is SO busy, but good. I am in a creative writing class and a memoir class and a Shakespeare class, so I write like crazy ALL the time. Also--accounting. basdfljaoiusadf. Thank goodness for LaDon.

I was all excited to make a blog of all these adventures I'm having with Summer before she did because I thought she would, but nope! She is just having a joyous college life, and so donuts are the next best thing. Which is great!!! I always knew having Sum at BYU with me would be the best thing ever, and it is.

St. George in 3 weeks and counting!