Living inside the sun.

For some reason I have a hard time writing the final post from a vacation. It happened last year when I went to New York with Barb, and now I have one city left from my trip back east with April but it's so hard for me to finish it out. I don't know why. *This is where I would insert some insightful...insight into my psyche that would make you understand where I'm coming from... but I got nothin. If you come up with something good please let me know.

Anyway, I have now moved to Arizona and therefore have lost my go-to comeback when my mom asks why I'm not blogging. Anytime she would complain before I would just tell her that she lived with me and probably didn't want me telling the world how I made fun of her that day, but now I really do have stuff to tell, or at least I should.
I came out here a few weeks ago and was able to stay with Dave and Mandy until I found a place to live. This meant that I was able to spend a lot of time with their awesome kids. I didn't have any classes for the first week I was here, and I had a cold when I came to town so I was trying to sleep extra to get rid of that. Sleeping in does not work with little kids. Jack- my 2 year old nephew would begin sticking his fingers under my bedroom door around 8 am saying "Wake up Go-dyn!" (That's also what happened after I had been in the shower for about 7 minutes.) Good thing he's so cute.  I even got to take them out to ice cream one night- just the 3 of us. I took this picture right after Kindin was 'sharing' her brother's ice cream. I just love both of their faces in this one.
Anyway, classes started and even though I really appreciated them letting me stay and eat all their food, it was not my favorite thing having to drive 30 minutes to campus for class, go back home and shower and drive 30 minutes to FHE or institute. I found an apartment pretty quickly that's across the street from school and has ended up being pretty nice! It will be even nicer when our dryer gets fixed on Wednesday.
Classes are going great, my Accounting class has been giving me the most homework but I really enjoy the stuff we have been working on so I'm ok with it so far.

My roommate is a girl I met over the summer at institute in Idaho and we are having a blast putting our apartment together. Right after I moved in I was sick of unpacking but still wanted to be productive to I bought some wood from Ikea and made big frames and nailed fabric on to them to hang up on my wall. I also got a few things from Deseret Book to hang up- basically my walls looked awesome, but I was still sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. I bought a desk from Ikea and spent yesterday putting it together- I took pictures of the whole process just in case I didn't finish it so I could show off how close I got to it looking like an actual desk but it ended up working out! Then David and Mandy told me about a discount mattress place so Ellis and I went to just check it out and the prices were just amazing. Plus they did free delivery for students, so of course we just had to get some beds.

I had a project ready for Monday- I found some fun bedsheets from Walmart and I was going to use starch to stick them to the walls- kind of a poor man's wallpaper. Works great when you can't make actual changes to a place, and I heard it cleans up pretty nicely. Ellis and I decided to use thumb tacks and just see how it was going to look. Well, it was so easy to put up and I think it looks great so I may just pass on the starch. I might get motivated someday and take it down and at least iron it, but for now I love having the extra color. It's on the wall opposite the bed. So my room is complete. I still have a few Tupperware bins in the corner that I have to go through and decide what I really need, but I really love my room. And the desk has now been standing for about 24 hours with no sign of collapse so I already consider that a success!

Other than all that stuff, Ellis and I are just trying to not melt. One thing that was really hard for me was the shower- It would be cool water for about 10 seconds and then it would gradually get hotter and hotter until it seriously hurt and started steaming. The temperature knob is behind the water pressure knob but I couldn't get it to turn so I figured it was just going to be like that and I started adjusting my shower time accordingly. Well, after living here for a week I finally discovered that I could adjust the knob before the water was turned on, but once the shower was going there is just too much pressure to turn it. Life has been 100 times better since I figured that out.
And that's all for now, I'll get more pictures of the rest of the apartment as it gets put together. The living room right now looks- as Ellis so eloquently put it-like Ikea threw up in there. Once it gets organized it will be amazing. That's all for now, hope this makes you happy, Mom.

P.S. it's midnight and still 97 degrees outside! Insane!!