Boldog Karacsony, Mele Kalikimaka, Feliz Navidad and ...

DONE. OVER. COMPLETE.

And it feels so good. Sweet, sweet freedom is mine. And I am going to sleep the day away.

You know what else feels good? Seeing my grades come in and being quite acceptable. I may have put myself through severe sleep deprivation to do it, but this has been a successful semester.

I'm a survivor, I'm gonna make it.

But right now... I kinda feel like this:

This semester has been a lot of work, and I'm not done yet. The past two nights I've been up past three working on assignments, and still had a seven am final to get up for, directly followed by another final. I then went and collapsed on the floor of my friend's room for a couple hours before working on yet another paper to be turned in today by five. That would be nice if that were it, but I still have lengthy beast of a paper to get turned in by eight tomorrow morning, at which point I plan on sleeping the whole dang day, followed shortly by a Flight of the Conchords season two marathon. These next two and half weeks will be a wonderful break from school related stress, and then it all starts up again!

The photo is one from March, goofing off at the beach with some friends. I plan on actively incorporating the beach into my break plans, because otherwise I may never see it again, what with my seventeen credits and all for this next semester.

It's a small world after all!

Alternate title: I know people who know people. 


A couple weeks ago, I was sitting outside enjoying some sunshine and chatting with one of my classmates before walking into class. She mentioned that she's been trying to find a public health internship in Ghana, but has been having a hard time because she has no experience in the area. I've been spending a pretty good chunk of time with the African Club this semester, and have gotten be friends with a lot of the Africans here. There are nine Ghanians here on campus and I remembered a conversation about the Ghana medical system I'd had with one of them, so I offered to get her in touch with a couple people to see if they could help her out. 


Fast forward to today at the end of our anthropology class: I was just leaving when Rachel, my classmate, told me that she had an internship! Maxwell, the guy from Ghana that she'd been talking to, has a brother who works with the military hospital system over there and said he could help get her an internship and that everything will be final in the next couple of days so she can start working on her visa stuff and all those necessaries. How exciting!


I've probably mentioned it a million times already, but I love my school and how international it is. My english teacher may curse me for saying this but she also taught me to quote my sources... According to wikipedia, BYU-H has a  higher percentage of international students than any other baccalaureate institute in the US. I was looking around my classes today and saw students from Guam, Tonga, Samoa, the Philippines, New Zealand, Mongolia, Japan, Hong Kong, Burundi, Sweden, Wales, Brazil and Mexico, among many others. I work with other students from Taiwan, Macau, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Korea. There are so many opportunities to learn about others cultures and backgrounds and to make connections that will last a lifetime. I'm sure that as I go about my career, I'll have the chance to visit some of those places and to have people I call friends to say hello to, and that is an awesome, awesome thing. 

African Club before our performance at Songfest in October. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

The Christmas lights are up in the plumeria trees and the Aloha Center is all decked out in the season's best, including blow up penguins with cotton batting snow and trees decorated with hula girls. Isn't this what Christmas is like everywhere?

Here's a poor college kid's Christmas count down. I got the package earlier this week, donated the popcorn packing to the birds and decided that I wasn't going to open anything else until Christmas, but I needed a reminder of when that will be. (...also, I kind of broke that goal. I opened one part yesterday and shared with friends who all raved about it. Thanks James!)

Here and there and everywhere.

As I was looking at my old posts, I realized I managed to not make a single post on my trip out to Utah this summer, and at the same time that I don't have any more recent pictures that I really want to post right now. So guess what! You're getting Utah pictures!

Like I mentioned a long time ago, my paternal grandparents are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year (the real date is sometime this month, I think) and so they got a couple of townhouses up in a resort area in northern Utah and all but one of their twenty-nine descendants made it out there to spend the weekend together. It was a little touch and go as to whether or not I would be able to go, but in the end, I did make it and it was a good time for all. 

Some, but not anywhere close to, all of the cousins. 

I'm not really much of a Utah person for a variety of reasons, but even I had to admit that the area we were staying is gorgeous.

We happened to be there the same night as a big hot air balloon festival just down the mountain, so we stopped by for a little bit and watched the balloons. Everyone decided to leave at the same time, so there was a lot of traffic and we were stuck in the car waiting to leave the parking field for a while, but there was one of those moments of absolute perfection where I was sitting with people I love more than anything, singing loudly to Journey, laughing and couldn't have wanted anything else right at that moment. Those are the best.