Aspectabund

Aspectabund: (adjective) Having an expressive face.
(Insert picture of me here)

Irony in a House

In an unexpected turn of events, my post about housing shopping as a metaphor for dating turns out to be true also for housing shopping. Who knew?
I am moving out of my house tomorrow, and I have no place lined up to live in the Fall. It isn't that there aren't places to live, it is that there are too many options (sound familiar?). I just want to feel good about one of them!! I just have no way to actually weigh all of the options thoroughly. I CAN'T DECIDE!
Decision making happens to be one of my biggest weaknesses. When I decide, I go for it 100%, but getting to that point is difficult. Maybe I am too picky, or not confident enough in what I want.
Here is what I think I want in housing, in descending order of importance (mostly. I'm not confident in the order either):

1. Nice roommates (hard to know considering I'm moving by myself. If I could pin this down, moving would be no problem)
2. Less than $300 a month
3. South or Southwest-ish of campus (near Willie so we can share a car)
4. A Private Room (so I don't go crazy when I start Student Teaching come January)
5. A not totally ghetto place
6. A Washer and a Dryer in my apartment/house
7. a complex so there is a social life when I want one.

Is that too much to ask? Maybe. The problem is that with my criteria I can't find anything, and without any one of those things, I am so overwhelmed by options that it might be next April when I finally do decide.
But seriously.

P.S. I am learning to hate the Branbury for littering every rental search site with hundreds of postings. I will never live there.

A Sad Tale of a Tomato Plant

Ever since I moved away to college, I have had the dream of growing some of my own produce. Not a full garden, because I don't have space or time, but a couple of plants on my balcony or something.
Well, this year that dream came true. I live in a house (a super cute house, might I add) that has a yard. I have lived here for the whole summer--the whole growing season. So I had to grow a plant. I decided on a tomato plant for a few reasons.
First, it isn't too high maintenance. Second, it can be grown in a pot, so when I move I can take it with me. Third, you can get a lot of fruit off of just one tomato plant. And Fourth, I love tomatoes.
It was a plan. So I went to Walmart with my mom and picked out my plant. My dad helped me pot it, and we were good to go. I took diligent care of that plant. I tried to not water it too much or too little. I fertilized it every once in a while. I checked on it to make sure it was doing okay.
Then the summer started to heat up in Provo -- we are in the nineties every day. With the sun beating down on my poor little plant, it started to wilt. I watered it more often, which helped, but even when the soil was damp, in the middle of the day it would start to droop. My poor plant! I still had high hopes for tomatoes because it continued to grow despite the heat.
Then one weekend, I went home to be with my family. I asked my roommate to watch after my plant and to water it while I was gone. She is a very trustworthy roommate. When I got back I rushed to look at my tomato plant, and everything was all wrong. Some of the biggest branches were gone or bent sideways! It turns out that while I was gone there was a HUGE wind storm and it blew so hard that it broke off large parts of my plant. I was so sad!
I kept watering it, and the plant survived. some of the bent branches seemed to heal that way and continued to grow. All of the baby tomatoes that had started growing on the plant had fallen off in the storm, but the plant started putting out new blossoms. My hopes were raised again.
Eventually some of the baby tomatoes actually turned red! Wahoo! I went to pick them and found that the bottom half of the two tomatoes were soft and rotten. Ew! What? There were still more tomatoes coming, though, so I would have to wait a little longer. More blossoms started to bloom near the top of the plant. I was learning patience.
One morning I went to water my plant, and again, everything was wrong. All of the little blossoms that had been there the day before were gone. The tall branches were nipped off at the top. All over the plant were branches ending in a sharp point with no leaves left. Once again, I was s confused. It looked like either 1) someone weed whacked my plant, or 2) something had eaten it. But no grasshopper could do the damage I saw. It must have been an animal... I told my roommates about it, and one of them mentioned seeing a deer in our yard at night once. In the middle of Provo! That crazy deer had eaten half of my tomato plant! Once again, all of the blossoms are gone. My plant has to start over again. And I still haven't eaten a single tomato.
Maybe I'll wait until I can have a real garden to try growing a plant again. For now, I will continue to cross my fingers that this plant will someday produce at least one edible tomato before some other disaster strikes...

The saddest tomato plant alive

HOME

Last weekend, my little brother Willie returned after serving an honorable full time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the Oklahoma Tulsa Mission.
I can't even tell you how excited I was to have him home.
As we picked him up from the airport and took him home for the first time in two years, I watched him closely, remembering how I felt four months ago. I watched him hug his parents, walk into his childhood home, and be released by the stake president. I cried for him. I also mostly cried for myself, remembering how I felt not that long ago when I went through all that. I think I've come a long ways, but I still remember how there were so many mixed emotions.
But as I watched Willie walk into our house for the first time, I looked up and saw a sign hanging on the family room wall that reads, "HOME". I thought about what he might think about when he looked at that sign. Then I realized that he might not have noticed it at all, and I thought about what it meant to me right then. To me, that sign reminded me that I felt more at home now, with Willie home. Home was now more HOME with him there. I cried again.
I'm getting a little sappy, but it is a true story about my thoughts with him returning. I am just so happy to have one of my best friends home again. Upcoming this weekend our family will be together.
Completing our HOME.

Joy

I am so happy!!!
My big news is that I received a message today from a family that I taught on my mission that they were sealed in the temple! A mom, dad, two little girls and a baby boy. I can't even express everything that I feel about that. I am just so happy that they received ALL of the blessings of the gospel. They did it! Of course, they have a whole life left, but I know that the impact it will have on their children is immeasurable.
The best part is that I know I had almost nothing to do with it. God blessed me to be there to witness the miracle of the father's change of heart and commitment, but He had been working with him all the time. This family was prepared. The spirit touched hearts. He was baptized. And now they are sealed for eternity.
Life is hard and full of so many difficulties, but really God wants us to be happy and have the fullness of blessings. He wants us to have joy. And that is what I am feeling right now. :)

Christmas in June

I know that this is my third post of the day, but I just had to share this with you.
Today I went and saw Monster's University with my roommates (which I loved), and on the way home, my roommate played for me this song.

The worst Christmas song just got even better.


 Be patient. It gets even better.

Listen to This

So I discovered this today and had to share it. It is SO well phrased.
"The Inconvenient Messiah" by Jeffrey R. Holland, BYU Devotional February 15, 1982.
I recommend listening to it rather than reading it because the transcription isn't perfect.