Free Museum Day

We like to catch the musuems and whatnot in Denver on their Free Days because we're cheap (I mean who has money anyway right?). The first Saturday of every month is Free for the Denver Art Museum. I had Alessandra and Ilyssa in my car (I looked up directions for the wrong city to pick up Ashley--yes I'm lame!). So we got there well before the other group. So I got to finally go to the Denver Public Library that everyone raves about. (It's been closed every other day I've been down there and tried.


We never made it out of the children's book section! I did read some libros en espanol. Well attempt to, it was fun. I could have spent another 4 hours in the children's section alone and been perfectly happy.

There was this giant checkerboard (okay, really just a bit oversized) that they played on. We found out that Alessandra's not so great at Checkers. Hah.Here I'm reading a book about Punctuation taking a day off to Alessandra, I thought it was going to be a cute book, but it was not quite as good as I'd hoped.

I only have a couple pictures from the musem. One is this one. They had a little part where you could dress up in cowboy so of course we had to take pictures (though I'm not so sure we were even supposed to, oh well?).

The little girl in the back just came running in and practically pushed Alessandra off the horse. The girl's dad didn't even try to tell her to wait her turn. It was kinda weird. Though he may have just thought we were too old to want to ride a horse. As you can see, the hats were even small for Sanra's head. Hah.

Those are basically all the pictures I took. I know, pretty disappointing. But it's partly due to my camera being a bit out of commission. Gol, I need to buy a new one. Oh yeah, Best Buy in Greeley has the worst selection ever! Someday...

Michelle, I'm not Josie Grossie anymore either!

We had a dance last night that was a Spring dance and we were told to wear bright colors. Hey, you tell me that I can dress up--and I'm gonna do it, and I probably won't do it halfway!

So of course I pulled out a bunch of the bright colored clothes I own, and tried to put on as many different colors as I could!

My friend Bryn (who I'm 'dancing' with in this picture) had these ridiculous glasses to complete his ensem, and I was wearing them right then. They make me look even more awful! Wow. But they made me think of Josie Grossie from Never Been Kissed. And I thought of an old blog post of Michelle's. Figured I'd give her a shot out.

This is most of of who dressed up, crazy, huh?
And then another one...we're crazy...hah.
It was pretty fun needless to expound upon... :)

Retreatness

So we had our Institute Retreat up at the YMCA in Estes Park. Sam and his roommate, Rhett Garrett, came out from Orem to join us. It was a great time! We were a bit crazy, of course.

Megan french braided my hair friday and I was going to just take them out to leave my hair a little crimpy on Saturday so I didn't have to wash it. I forgot jaw clips to hold the braids up while I showered. So I improvised with crochet hooks! ;)

Andy's just so tall, and funny. Lol.
Pretty cute of Sam, Sanra and me as we were gathering for our huge group picture.
I tried to count, it was over 100! Crazy! (Looks like I accidentally uploaded one of the blurry ones instead of the clear, whoops.)
Look! Alessandra's taller than Sam!!
A little photo shoot with Sam, this one's pretty cute.
Hah, I'm threatening to lick his face here.
I'm clearly disgusted at the thought of Sam licking my face...hah!
One of the group games thingies was walking with these boards. Our team was WAY good, we smoked the other team. Amanda was awesome at leading and Josh was a good caller from the back.
I did get some grading done in the car.
Yay, it was great to have Sam here, it just was way too short! Poo. At least he lives much closer now. And the Retreat was good. We also played Family Feud and Human-sized Institute Clue but I didn't get any pictures of that. Oh, we also did a 'get-everyone-through-the-spider-web-through-a-different-hole' team building type thing. I thought I uploaded one of those pictures, but guess I missed it. Whoops. Oh well. We had a good time. As always.

Austen-unfortunately-not-so-tastic

Wow, so I've completed 5 of the 6 of these movies. For those of you who don't know, I consider myself a pretty big Austen/period movie fan. A friend of mine gave them to me for CHRISTmas (from her own collection, very appropriate and economical). I'd thought of just buying it to complete my collection...

Boy am I glad I didn't. I do feel bad that my friend ever spent money on them--or really maybe anyone. But yeah, wow. I only have Northanger Abbey left, I've 'saved' it for last partly because it's the only one I've never read the book of, I've only seen one other version of it, and it's the shortest of them all (in length of course).
I don't have high hopes for it, I believe the only thing it'll have going for itself is that it's only an hour and a half.
Every single one of the other ones were pretty painful for me to watch. They were all HORRibly acted! I don't know how many of you have seen them. But I suppose if you want a good laugh and just need something to play in the background (like while you're grading or something), you could waste your time watching them. They were all really awful! I'm totally serious. Horrible crying. The acting was terrible. The cinematography wasn't good either. There was almost no music during the movie. Wow.
I dunno who these people are who wrote reviews about them saying they thought they were great, I even read a review that it was really well acted and casted. I don't understand what that person's standards are, but they're clearly low! Much of it, line delivery and what not, I feel fairly confident that I could have done a better job. Perhaps not, but that may give you an idea of how bad they were.

Okay, just wanted to take a moment to rant real quick. Now I'm almost done. Really once I've watched it I'll have come close to watching all versions of all Austen books (well definitely more mainstream versions). Somehow that's satisfying to me? Yes, weird I know...

Tim Tam Slams!

So Sam taught me about Tim Tams, an Australian cookie that you "slam." He learned it on his mission in Tahiti. Jill served her mission in the Philippines and learned about them there. Last year when Sam came out here to Greeley they talked about it.
There's a grocery store back home who carries them. So I bought some while I was home and brought them so Jill and I could tim tam slam! Haha, that was quite a while ago. But on Thursday night we finally did. Jill introduced it to Meagan Krammer too, she's the one in green, can't you tell she loved it?! We used 'flavored' hot chocolate. Hah, that means orange or mint hot chocolate in this case.

It was great watching Meagan because you could tell she was a little skeptical before her first slam, but then her face and reaction was amazing. Something along the lines of: "Mmmm...this is soooooo good [muffled]! [Then,] It melts!"

AWEsome! Tim Tam Slam again sometime!

Lembas Bread Anyone?

Okay, I think this is hilarious, stumbled across this website:
http://lotrscrapbook.bookloaf.net/other/recipes.html

LOL!

(Guess it is along the lines of a recipe for Butterbeer, but this cracks me up way more!)

Tanner Huffines LIVE: 2010

My friend Alessandra worked at a calendar place over CHRISTmas break and our friend Tanner who is on a mission has a little bit of an obsession with Zac Efron (the star of High School Musical). So she bought this calendar and we put our own pictures over the faces throughout and mailed it to him. It was awesome. It was a ridiculous amount of work because we had to measure each head after we perused all my pictures and found a picture that was roughly the right angle and size it in Word and then print it off. Oh, then cut it out and glue it on. Wow, may never do something quite to that extent ever again. Whew. Way too many hours...but it turned out AWEsome!! Here are my most favorite pages--though it was all great. A mildly more complete set of pictures is in a facebook album.
The main six of us: Bryn, Megan, Ryan, Me, Tanner, Alessandra. These pictures were some of the most fun to pick.

Devin and Sean do love to play basketball. It was fun to put people's faces over Corbin's face because his hair almost always stuck out.This was a favorite too!! I had to flip Cam's face so it was facing the correct way. Lol. Too perfect though and Bryn brushing his teeth--so funny.

I love that in this one we put Tanner and Devin on girl bodies--SO funny!
I can't believe how funny Amy's face turned out here, and Kennedy's was great. We had to leave some Zacky-poo's as himself. I can't believe I already had such a perfect picture to take over Corbin's picture here! (It's from a dance from a couple years ago.)
This was July, and I love these faces. They're hilarious! Look at my face--scary! (Course Vanessa's face that was in that same picture with me was pretty great too.)
The three girls--I just think our expressions are way funny. And now I know what I could look like with dark hair.
Look at the hands here--no words to explain...
Way too perfect that Ryan was the name of the character in the show and we could put Ryan in as the "Most Stylin' Dude." As a cowboy too--Tanner's companions will always think he's a cowboy--lol!
I think this one is hilarious. Ryan's face ended up a little bigger than it was supposed to be, but my face here is awesome with the hands the way they are...oh man, these three are one of my favorite pages.
Kristin and Bryn's faces here are priceless. And we got a 3rd arm in there--all in honor of Alessandra in Loaded Questions. :)
This always makes me laugh how huge Cam's head is in comparison to the picture, but also in comparison to Josh's!
We decided to put our back bumpers from our drive-in movie on the back! Haha. We made little smart cars.

WAY too much fun, hope you all enjoyed it! Probably not as much as we did though for sure.

New York, New York!

I went out to Massachusetts to visit Maureen after CHRISTmas! Her Birthday is New Year's Eve so we celebrated that and had a GREAT time being together. I loved getting to be with her.

This is pretty much the only picture of the two of us while I was there--we were cracked out. This is at the end of her Birthday.

The main thing we did was go to New York City!! Yee-ah!
Unfortunately we couldn't go to a show because no one was in town to take her shift for her.

This is New Jersey, we didn't get to go there either, but at least New York was a new state for me...

The Manhattan New York Temple! It's all hidden... ;)

When we first walked by we missed it because we thought it was on a different corner, and this was all you could see as you walk by...

Angel Moroni in the middle of Manhattan!
BROADWAY!!!!
It was just so amazing to get to walk down Broadway, it's just sad I didn't get to see Lion King.
Ahh, Dave...
And we walked through some of Central Park, it was great.

This should be familiar to some people...hehe
I loved all the bridges, they were all so cool!

The skating rink at Rockefeller Center.
I decided I had to buy something from a street vendor in Central Park. I decided on a pretzel. It was pretty good!
I loved the bike light! Look at how cute it is...
This is me with my spoils of the day. I bought some postcards as I always do, and if I wasn't going to buy an I heart NY shirt (I decided I have probably too many t-shirts as it is) I had to buy an I heart NY magnet. It's actually pink, and I thought it was cute. And I don't remember how much it was, but it was cheap. I really didn't spend much money.
Well except for our lunch. We ate at a place called the Stardust Diner on Broadway. I didn't take a picture. I'm way sad! I wanted to, but we walked for quite a while trying to decide where to eat, she said I needed to get a deli sandwich. We walked in just to see what it was like, but it was awesome! I loved it. Well my sandwich was actually dry and not very good, but it was the coolest atmosphere! The waitresses sang and it was SO cool. When I go back to NY, I wanna eat there just for it. I'll get a burger next time. :) It was freezing while we were there, there were times I thought my face might fall off, but it was really fun. I enjoyed my day a lot! And of course all my time with Maureen.
It had definitely been too long since we'd been together. Hopefully it'll be closer together next time I see her.

Test, this is only a test

I'm checking out Microsoft Word 2007 and its ability to type up a blog post and hopefully easily upload it to my blog. We'll see how this goes. My hope is that this will increase the ease with which to post pictures, because pictures are my favorite things about blogging and I hate blogger's photo uploader thingy.

This is a picture from Free various museum type places down in Denver. This is at the Botanic Gardens (Jan 18^th isn't the best day to see foliage, just sayin).

Emma Came!

Sigh. My copy of the new Emma came! It's so great, and I'm so excited that I had to just announce it here...I'm glad I don't have to watch it in 10 min increments ever again.

I first opened it, popped it right into the dvd player and had to watch the end! So happy...

Anybody have the time?

So I teach 3 labs right now, O-Chem 1 wednesday afternoon, and 2 O-Chem 2 labs thursday morning.

Not that big of a deal. Well labs are 3 hours long. Today was the first real wet lab of the O-Chem 1-ers. It's a full lab-time deal. It involves a simple and a fractional distillation. Kevin's lab last night went over apparently. So I was feeling the push for time.

They had a 15 minute quiz, started at 2:30, and they ended at 2:45. Fair enough. Then I had to teach them everything I know about distillations and setting them up. So I lectured and walked them through everything they would be doing. I look at the clock when I'm done saying everything I HAVE to say before they start working. It's 3:00. Well, for some reason I had a brain aneurysm (is that really how you spell it? that's what spell checker went for), and I thought, oh gosh, I just talked for 45 minutes! They only have 2 hours to get through all this stuff!

I then proceeded to 'run' around the lab like a panic-stricken crazy person trying to make sure everyone had things set up correctly with no water condenser tubes popping off and spraying water everywhere (I in doing so did cause one groups to spray). Seriously I was all rushed feeling and worried that we wouldn't get out of there ontime.

For almost an HOUR AND a HALF! At 4:20 I'd checked on everyone, had been all along, going around fixing things, making sure they all understood. I was walking back to my stool to sit for a minute, and it dawned on me! Lab had started at 2:30, it was Wednesday, this was not a Thursday 2:00 lab! My students had another hour to finish, not a half hour! I felt so relieved. I immediately started laughing, and proceeded to announce to everyone that they had a full hour and since they all had their fractional set up they'd all be good and didn't have to feel rushed.

They all (really I think all 14 did) looked at me like they weren't sure what I was talking about. They all knew they had another hour. No one else had gotten all mixed up and tried to cut the lab time short. It was hilarious to me. I asked if they had felt rushed because I'd been feeling very panicky and pressed for time. But somehow none of them picked up on that attitude of mine.

It was just me. It was really funny to me, I really did keep laughing. One of the students thought it was funny how much I cracked myself up.

Anyhow, it was great. Thought I'd share. I thought this could be short to type up, hah, I should never think things like that. I still have some grading to finish for tomorrow morning. I'm nuts.

Good night.