Up to my head in Papers!

This week I know I said I was going to go to Utah for Thanksgiving but it turned out that my Homework just kept piling up the week previously so I had to cancel the trip and do my homework. Most of the homework was writing papers, with a few other things thrown in there. So yes I was up to my head in paper writing, I would like to just throw out there how grateful I am for my parents who constantly called me to give me so much help. I also had to opportunity to Skype and google hangout with my family throughout the week, it was done often and it helped me feel like I was home for Thanksgiving :) I also got to talk with Grandma Kellar, Polly, and Samuel and family while on google hangouts with them all one day, it looks like they are all doing really well.

This Monday there was school still, it was so cold on that morning! the lake/fountain had frozen over! and yet it was still on, I guess under the ice the water was still moving enough for it to work. 

On Tuesday, the last day of school this week, my writing class had a fudge day (a day when food can be brought to class for extra credit). I made pumpkin cookies!

It was actually a really great outcome, someone in the class brought a few pizza's for the class, and then my teacher brought in two more pizza's, it was quite funny to see:) Thankfully I thought to bring in some paper towels, or else we would have all been eating on our desks.

During the week Mom and Dad convinced me to go out and get some fancy food since I was not able to go on the trip. On Wednesday I had a super nice sushi roll, it was very yummy.

and more food for dinner.

My ward put on a Thanksgiving dinner for all of us who stayed here in Rexburg. It was a very nice one, but no pictures. Thanksgiving morning though it snowed quite a bit, so now for you viewing pleasure here are a lot of pictures that I took while going out in the snow Thanksgiving morning.

sorry can't figure out how to turn it.

rabbits foot prints

 One thing I learned about this week is that I really like to spread things out when I am working. This is a picture of the table that I have been working at all week. It is now significantly cleaned up from what it was, but this is how it was during the week. somehow I just feel more comfortable when I can spread things out like this.

Well everyone that is all of the pictures for this week. not to much but hope you enjoyed the little bit. I was successful in getting all of my homework done, and in the long run I had a fun week.

Hope you all had a fun week also. 

Love 

Tesia

Journals And Water Do Not Mix!

I did not take to many pictures this week, and most of them are of snow; I guess 2 years of no snow will make someone miss it enough to want to take pictures of it every moment they get :)

This week I had 4 tests (one of which I am taking on Monday, have not taken yet) and a book I had to finish reading. This upcoming week is Thanksgiving!!!!! I will be going to Provo to celebrate with family, Hopefully we will get pictures of this event.

To start with the pictures, in my statistics class we learned about Chi-squared tests (pronounced 

k-eye-squared test) for this test my teacher brought in two bags of Christmas candy for all of us to have. we each got a few pieces of Candy and counted up the amount of each kind of color that we had. Then put our numbers up on the board, and ran the test. while the test was running we got to enjoy some Chocolate :D who can say no to Chocolate. This is an attempt to take a picture of the Candy and the board to show what we were doing. 

Here is one of the many pictures of snow that we had this week. This week we got our first legit amount of snow. It actually covered everything! something funny about Rexburg is the city does not pay for snow plows or salted streets or any sort of snow preventative measures except for 2-3 main streets. so the streets on the boarder of the campus (so a nice square around campus) and the streets with the stores on them are the only streets that are ever plowed. makes for an interesting driving experience for most people. From what I understand the highways are plowed so once you leave the city you are safe, but until then hopefully you are a safe driver and have experience in the snow.

In Chemistry this week we did a titration lab. In order to mix the chemicals we were using together we put our beaker on a heating table thing, and put a Teflon covered magnet in the mixture. the heating table has a magnet in it as well, so it is possible to turn on the magnet without turning on the heat. The magnet in the heat table turns the magnet in the beaker creating a mixing motion, and WALLAH! the solution gets mixed. It is really quite interesting because you can turn it on fast enough to get a good vortex going. I tried to get a picture of this after the lab was done, it is not very clear but you can sort of see it happening.

More snow, I believe this is the good snow fall that actually stuck to everything and stayed on the ground for a good few days. Ever since this snow fall it has been very cold! I have unpacked my heavy winter coat, so now that I only have 3-4 weeks left in the semester, I am officially all unpacked.

On Thursday I was once again on campus late at night doing my Homework when I discovered they were doing a movie night for kids (sadly no kids really showed up) they were showing The Polar Express. I was sitting out there attempting to do my Homework while listening to the movie (I really like the music from this movie) but it was very distracting so I ended up having to go to the Library. It was fun to see the movie playing though.

On Friday I finished my most recent chemistry exam and headed home. I have been having a big desire this past week for cooking something, pie type of things. So Friday night I cooked some meat pies! here are some pictures of me making the pie crust and the filling for the pies. I still have a lot left over which I am hoping to be able to bring to a pot-luck today, I am not sure if they are actually having it today, but I think they will be having it.

On Saturday Morning I woke up to a big surprise, and not necessarily a good one. I sleep right next to the window in our apartment, my shelf is the windowsill, it is deep so plenty of room to put my things. aparently though our window gets so much condensation on it and on the ceiling part next to the window frame, that the water drips onto the windowsill, (just recently saw a lot of mold surrounding the window that I am going to attempt to clean up this week). I had been keeping my journal and other things up there with the (unbeknownst to me) dripping on them consistently for the last few months I have been here.

Anyway when I woke up on Saturday I heard this dripping noise in the window and looked over there to see the water dripping down. It was dripping directly on my journal! apparently it has been doing this for a while because there was mold all over the back cover,where it had been laying and collecting water. 

Thankfully my parents are smart and I was able to salvage the journal not enough to use it anymore, but I am still able to read what I have written in it already. The pictures below are of me drying my journal off. I went and got a new journal that day, luckily for me the bookstore was having a Christmas store wide sale of 20% off so it was not as expensive as i had feared it would be.  This has reminded me that I need to pick up and write in my journal a lot more often.

Needless to say with all of this I have moved all of my things off of the window sill and found other places for them. I think the scariest thing for me was when I realized my surge-protector was also covered in water. I am very grateful that nothing bad had happened and that I guess I caught it in time!

 

 The silly thing about all of this is, I wiped off the window and all around it to get up the water, trying to see if it would all come back or it we just needed to leave the window exposed to air (we have been keeping the blinds closed, i left them open after wiping up all the water) and just a few hours later it was all back and dripping again. I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, but I would not at all be surprised if the wood surrounding the window was rotted through by this time. Oh well I guess I will put in a maintenance request and hope they can fix it, we will see.

ending on a good and happy note though, the city is starting to decorate for the Christmas season! this is a side view of the decorations outside Deseret bookstore. I love seeing all of the decorations!

Well that is all for this week. I hope you are all good, happy, and safe. I love you and hope to be able to tell you lots about Thanksgiving.
Love, Tesia

Gadgets, Turkeys, Games

To begin with this week there is not much to report along the lines of things happening up until Thursday. Monday through Wednesday were filled with studies and classes. The good news is as of this weekend I am done with the majority of my work, all I have left is my research paper, probably the hardest of all the things on my list. Anyway for your viewing pleasure here is a picture of the Onsies that the BYU-I bookstore has gotten out for selling, just to let us all know that the nights are getting colder. I was looking at them, I remember having one as a kid and loving it. anyway the smallest one they have is for a 5'2" person! there is no way that those would ever fit me. The feet on the shortest one go all the way down to the floor and I don't even reach the chest area standing next to it. So yeah I am sure the people who created them think we are all giants or they are telling us that we should all be giants.

Another viewing pleasure for you, if you look in the background near the building you will see a truck with a lift on it going up to the top of the building, this Ladies and Gentlemen is how the school puts all of the wreaths on the buildings. I was trying to get one of the men walking around on the top but they had moved by the time I got my phone out.

Some of you may have heard that I was trying to find a way of turning my tablet into a computer so that I did not have to constantly carry a heavy laptop with me around campus. Well I found this Bluetooth keyboard that works really nicely, I put the screen cover on my tablet, and then popped in the tablet into the case. So far it seems to be working well. I can't use it in my statistics class because we use SPSS and my tablet does not support that, or else they have not made an App for it. funny how we thought they had made an app for everything. So here are the pictures of the final outcome.

 To show you that I am able to get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my tablet. they don't have all the features that they do on the computer, but they can do the basics.

 Oh and the keyboard has different color back lights! not sure when I would actually really use this because I don't really use my tablet at night. Oh well its a cool feature.

 This is supposed to be Purple, but the camera apparently can't capture that shade of purple. I tried lots of different settings on my camera, but sadly no luck. so just imagine a very vivid purple color.

This Christmas tree is in the Hinckley building, I am in this building 4 days a week. The school did a very nice job on it.

And finally we come to Thursday! Thursday was my wards mid-semester activity. We had a dress the Turkey day activity. All of us were split into 5 groups. One of the members in our group was the "turkey" and we were supposed to dress them up as a turkey. The best turkey won. We had paper, streamers, balloons, tape, scissors, ect all for materials to dress our turkeys. Following are many pictures of people hard at work and their turkeys.

 This was my groups turkey, So whenever you see pictures of her you will know that this one is my groups. We didn't win, but we did a pretty awesome job!

 

 All of the groups hard at work, dressing their turkeys.

 It took us quite a few times to get the beak correct. It was a lot harder than any of us thought it would be.

Oh my contribution was the balloon tail! not the feathers on it, but the actual balloons and how they were attached was my contribution. I think they turned out really well.

 They also had dinner for us all in the end, Chili and Pumpkin Pie!
Don't worry our family still makes the best, but this stuff was yummy.

 

 

 At the end of the activity it is time to clean up! this is everyone pitching in to help put the gym back the way it was when we came.

Yummy Chili, with Cornbread in it!

 Ana and I having a fun time at the ward activity.

Next thing thing I did was went to the ballroom dance class/dance on Friday night. The way this works is at 7 for an hour they have a class that you can go to where they have volunteer instructors teach some form of dance. Then at 8 till about 11:30 they have a ballroom dance that you can attend. It is about $3 to get in, but I bought a card at the begging of the semester that will let me get in for 15 dances free. the card was $15 so I guess technically i am getting in for a dollar each time, but well worth it i believe. This Friday was Tango night. I finally understand what people mean by it is a dance you really only want to dance with someone you are comfortable with and know well. In this dance the guys hips are to the girls hips and the ribs are to the ribs also. It is a very interesting dance and seems fun. I ended up not really dancing any of the tango dances, but I did dance many of the other dances that were played that night. The one thing I really like about this dance is that even if guys come with their own girls they will take the time to ask other girls to dance, and if you don't relaly know the dance that well the guys have no problem teaching you as you dance along. I had a very fun night. Got a few dances and learned a bit more. I now know the basic steps to the cha-cha. It takes me a little bit to get started, but once I get started I am able to do it. I was not able to really get any pictures, once again, but Here is one during the teaching part of some people trying to learn the tango.

So below is something I made a few weeks ago actually but I forgot to post it then. These are chapstick bottles that I have turned into pill bottles for my firstaid kit that I carry around with me. I am actually quite proud with how they turned out.

And last but not least, last night I went to a game night in apt. 1. we played curses. It was super funny, we could not stop laughing! many of the people there said afterword that they were going to go and find it and get the game. The picture below the guy in the blue sweatshirt had a curse that his hands were super glued to his head so he had to keep them up there. later in the game he also had to talk without moving his lips, and he had to keep the front of his tongue between his teeth. By the end of the game I had to speak like a pirate, who had the hiccups, and knew sign language. It was a very funny night.

That is all for this week. I hope you all are having a good week and are staying happy and productive. Something I learned this week, It is good to work hard and study, but if you get burnt out to the point you can't do anything else you have done to much. you need to take a break every once in a while to relieve all the stress you feel!