Oh joy.

I can't recall being this massively, overly, outrageously stressed in a long, long time. Between Sterling Scholar, X-Press (Solo & Ensemble, plus trying to pay off all the money I owe), Chemistry, writing for the newspaper (county and school), getting ready to go to college, working on Scholarships, writing millions of essays for said scholarships, trying to not become a hermit by staying involved with SOME school activities (not all), being completely broke, all while attempting to patch up a relationship or two, I feel like I might actually collapse at any moment. This is getting ridiculous, folks. Just plain ridiculous.

Oh... it happens.

I have been struck by the need to blog aimlessly. I've started working on Sterling Scholar the past several weeks, and it's really gotten me thinking about what it's all about. I realize this sounds hokey, but I really mean it. I can't help but wonder what the point of it all is, besides having something nice to put on a résumé/job application, and having a handy portfolio full of all the reasons I am a wonderful person. (Ohh the jokes...) My point is, why put myself through all of this work and stress to come out with a little book of my accomplishments? In reality, I think the answer is not so that I can see what I've done in the past, but so that I can know what I am capable of and willing to try in the future.

Another thing I've been thinking about are the actual categories within a category: Scholarship, Leadership, and Citizenship. All of these things are essential to become a decent Sterling Scholar, so that made me wonder what exactly each one means to me. This is what I have come up with:

Scholarship
In Alexandre Dumas’s all-time classic “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a weathered Abbé Faria discusses with the young inmate Dantes the priceless reward to come if Dantes will assist in the escape. “My freedom?” asks Dantes. “No,” answers Abbé Faria. “Freedom can be taken away, as you well know. I offer you my knowledge.” This brieft, yet powerful statement effectively preaches the immortality of education. If a person has nothing else in their life, an education will help them succeed.

Leadership
There are two kinds of people in the world; those that follow, and those that lead. Nothing would be possible, nothing would be accomplished were it not for such men and women that lead us through our fears and hopes, darkness and light, tragedies and miracles. Followers and leaders, the epitome of symbiosis, are what make the world go ‘round.

Citizenship
Everything in our lives and our world depends on others. Where would such things be without the precious few who make caring worthwhile? Those who go the extra mile, those who care just a little bit more, who sacrifice time and effort to make things a little easier for others… these are the individuals that keep our society together.

This might sound kind of abstract to you, but it's really important to me. Already, Sterling Scholar is a huge part of my life, and I honestly believe it's all going to be worth it. Even though I've already been accepted to the University of my choice (hurray!), I don't see why I shouldn't put forth the effort to be further noticed by scholarship people and future employers.

And thus ends my thought process. For the moment.

2010 Honor Choir

Clear back in November, I think it was, Mrs. Terry asked if anyone would be interested in attending Honor Choir in January. Since I missed the opportunity to do All-State Choir at the beginning of the year, I was all over that. The catch was that it cost like $75, which I did not have in time to pay for Honor Choir, so I didn't think I would be going... until Mrs. Terry handed me the music a week before pass-offs. :/ I got to work and learned all of the songs in time to pass them off and be eligible to go to Honor Choir.

I ended up being the only Alto II going, but I guess that turned out to be not so bad. The girls that went besides me were Kelsie Blake & McKenna Terry (Soprano 1), Sara Carling & Lexi Cox (Soprano 2), and Christi Cox & Johanna Bowman (Alto 1). The boys that went (I don't know what parts they sang) were Tyrell Reidhead, Aaron Downward, Matt Vaughn, Andrew Corry, Ben Cserepes, Ian Hiscock, Blaine Allan, and Landon Croteau. The fifteen of us, along with Mrs. Terry, Mr. Terry (our bus driver), and all of their kids left after school on Thursday. The drive up was pretty long, but it was also fun. We stopped in Fillmore for dinner, so I got ahold of Rendon and Clay and had them come over to say hi. We got to our hotel in Salt Lake around 9:30, which gave us some time to play around in the pool, and I went running in the exercise room. My roommates were Kelsie and McKenna, and we had a pretty good time.

Mrs. Terry's 1st grader just being ridiculous. That kid kills me.

Friday morning, we all headed to Taylorsville High School for our rehearsal that began at 9 am. At first, I was assigned to a seat on the back row next to a girl named Cassandra Anderson, who looked ridiculously similar to my sister-in-law, Kristen. She acted like her, too... it was weird. After a while though, I was moved closer to the front, where there was an empty seat from someone who didn't show up. There, I sat next to a girl named Anna from Pine View. She was pretty sweet.

Me and Pine View Anna before the concert. Again, my flash is out of control...

The practice actually wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. We would sing for an hour and a half, get a fifteen minute water/potty break, sing for about another hour and fifteen minutes, then have a 2 hour meal break. We weren't dismissed to go back to our hotels until 9:00 at night. Through the practices, most of what we did was just singing the songs while using different techniques that our director taught us.

Our concert was at 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, but the women had a practice at Abravanel Hall at 8, which went until 11. The boys came in at like 10 so we could have a mixed practice (there were two songs that the men and women choirs sang together), then we were dismissed at 11. I appreciated this arrangement, because it gave me a chance to go to lunch with Keith and Rachelle. We went to this little place downtown called the Tin Angel Café, and it was a way cute little place. I ordered House-Roasted Lamb on Ciabatta. (: We got back to the concert hall in time for me to be in my seat at 1, and the concert began.

This was at the Tin Angel Café... obviously.

Due to a series of uncontrollable traits (i.e., the fact that i'm an Alto II and I'm on the "taller end of average"), I ended up being in the balcony, rather than on stage. There were so many girls at Honor Choir, that they couldn't even fit all of them on stage. The taller Alto IIs and Soprano Is ended up getting stuck up in the balconies on either side of the stage. Oh well... that meant I got to sit in the same place the whole time, rather than going off and on the stage for when the boys came on. Plus, I had a good vantage point to take pictures.

The boys on stage before the concert. There's a lot... and there were even more girls.

The concert went really well, I think. I teared up once or twice, actually. I loved when the boys sang, because they just had some really great songs. One of them, "Jump Down, Spin Around" was pretty dang funny. Some other ones, like "Vive L'Amour" and "Dona Nobis Pacem" were just beautiful. My favorite part, however, was when they were warming up and their director went to the piano and began playing Celine Dion's song from "Titanic." Then the boys all came in in their falsetto and sang "Neeeeear, faaaar, whereeeeeeever you are...". Then they went up a half-step and did it again. I got a video of this phenomenon (there were a few hundred boys doing this, by the way), but I don't dare even try uploading it on here. Oh well.

We ended up getting home at like 10:00 Saturday night, after another extremely long bus ride. It was a pretty fun trip though, in the end. I mostly hung out with Blaine, Ian, Landon, and Ben the whole time. That fact is mainly what kept me occupied the entire trip. In all reality though, I really feel like Honor Choir was worth it. I learned a lot, and it's not something I'm ever going to forget. Thank you, MerTer. (:

Blaine and Landon on the bus. They didn't love my flash very much... ha.

Adventures!

Friday morning, my friend Brianna invited me to go ice skating in St. George (weird, I know) with her and our friend Chelsea. I'd never been before, so I thought... why not! I'm not feelin like a big long post, so I'll just sum it up and post some pictures. We left at like 4 in the afternoon, went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner (we had so much fun there), then went to the Dixie Igloo. After two hours ice skating, two bruised knees, two blistered & bloody ankles, one throbbing behind, and a slightly hurt ego, I decided that ice skating is not my thing. It's actually one of my biggest phobias--walking on anything that is not stable. i.e. ice, loose rocks/dirt when I'm hiking, roller blading, etc. The three of us at the rink. The person that took this picture is a friend of mine that was in my city at Girls State, she went to Freedom Academy, and she was the the SUU Distinguished Scholars thing a couple of months ago. I seem to run into her everywhere! Also, this was the second picture taken. The first one, I kept sliding towards Brianna without meaning to... oops.

Me in my ice skates... as soon as this picture was taken and I realized I then had to actually get on the ice, I kind of panicked. I looked at Brianna and said "Suddenly, this does not seem like such a brilliant idea..."

After we got done with ice skating, we went to Wal Mart and just played around for a little bit, then headed home. Good times.

This is Spongebob. Hello, Spongebob.


Chelsea located some footie pajamas that were only slightly too small... she's so cute in this picture. haha

Oh, Sleep... how I miss you so...

I have been having some strange sleeping habits lately. I heard somewhere that how you behave in your sleep is a reflection of something that is going on in your life at that time. If that's the case, then my life has no idea where it's going. I mean, even the way I sleep is different. I have always slept on the right side of my bed, and I've always been most comfortable on my right side, facing the rest of the room. But I realized recently that I have been favoring my left side instead, facing the other side of my bed. I know this isn't very interesting to you at all, but it's strange to me that in a matter of weeks, almost everything about the way I sleep has changed from how it's been my entire life. Let me give you an example of one of these nights that happened a week or two ago.

I went to bed one night at about 10:00 wearing my Girls State pajama pants and a Quiksilver t-shirt. Once I fell asleep (on my left side), I started having crazy dreams. This is not unusual for me. I have always been known to push the limits on what the term "weird dreams" even means. But what is strange for me is to have one person in my dreams more than once. Every night for the past couple of weeks, all of my dreams have had one common factor of one person. It's really weird.

Anyways, that same night, I woke up at 1:17 am, got out of bed, and was standing in the middle of my room before I realized what was going on. I also realized that I was then wearing a pair of basketball shorts and a Kanab Volleyball t-shirt. Still, I was very conscious of what I was doing. In my head, I thought "My options are a) get a drink of water. b) go pee. c) take out my retainer because it's bothering me. d) go back to bed." I knew that all of these were productive except "d", so I went ahead and got a drink of water, then went back to bed.

At 3:04 am, that same thing happened. This time, I was wearing some Aeropostale short shorts and my Freedom Academy t-shirt. (why do I change my clothes in my sleep?!) Again, I had those options. This time though, I picked b and c. I even brushed my teeth before I went back to bed.

5:40 am, the cycle repeated, with option D being chosen this time. I was in my SUU sweats and my "I ♥ Zion" shirt. You probably don't believe me when I say that I was wearing different clothes every time I woke up, but I wish I didn't believe me. This cannot be healthy. Oh and by the way, all of the clothes that I had been wearing previously were put back in the drawers where they belonged. They weren't folded or anything, but they were back where they were supposed to be. At this point, it was almost a game with myself when I went back to bed to try and guess what I would be wearing the next time I woke up.

I did not wake up again until 9:30, but I was still dead tired for some reason. (Maybe because I wasn't really sleeping when I was asleep?) Too tired, even, to check and see what I was wearing. Shoot. When I did finally get out of bed for the last time at 10:55, I was wearing some stripey Victoria's Secret pants and my KHS StudCo shirt. Baffled? As am I.

Oh and meanwhile, the whole time I was asleep, I was having the same dream. Even when I would get up and then go back to bed, the dream would just pick up where it left off. It started out with me just driving, because I knew I didn't want to be home for some reason. I ended up driving by an old-fashioned service station in Fillmore, where I saw my friend Clay. Unfortunately, Clay had blonde hair... it was weird. Anyways, I went over to talk to him, then Rendon came out of nowhere and was like "Hey, I was just about to take Lucille to come down and see you!" (Lucille is his car.) Then Hayden and Chase and Tristan and their whole little crew started coming out of thin air basically, until it was me and this huge group of Fillmore boys. We ended up going to Clay's house to watch movies and play Wii throughout the whole night. Finally, I went home the next day, only to learn that my mom had witnessed a mafia killing, so my family had to go into Witness Protection and move to Kenai, Alaska. And we didn't get to fly there or take a U-Haul, no no. We had to drive our Subaru containing me, my parents, Kimberly, and all of our belongings that we could fit in there, all the way to Alaska. But then the road ended, so we had to hike the rest of the way to our new home with all of our stuff. I distinctly remember sitting down in a few places and just crying. It was real sad.

So the point of this post is mainly just so I can talk about it. Because it's been really strange to have the only steady routine in my life be suddenly turned upside-down. You know? And to all of my siblings, I would like to offer this as an excuse to why I'm so tired all the time: even though I do go to bed early and wake up late so you'd think I'd be getting enough sleep, I'm not even really resting when I sleep. So there.

Well, it's here.

I feel like I need to do a good post on the New Year--I just feel like I might be the only person in blogland who hasn't done this before the actual New Year. Oh well.

I have come up with several "New Years Resolutions", but unfortunately, they mainly consist of things that I probably ought to be doing on a regular basis already. Such as writing in my journal, drinking more water and less soda, saying my morning prayers, etc.

However, in light of what is to come this year, I am the tiniest bit terrified. There will be so many changes. Though a lot of them will be good, I won't lie that I expect a few will be pretty hard to cope with.

• Sterling Scholar
• Graduation, and all that that implies. (Final choir competitions, last chance to get into high school games for free, the end of my childhood, etc.)
• Cruise to the Bahamas in June (?)
• Moving out to live on my own.
• Going to college.
• Kimberly coming home from her mission. (Whoo!)
• Boys in my own grade leaving on their missions.
• I'm going to turn 19. (Not like that really matters a whole lot. Just thought I'd throw it out there.)

Those are just the things that are for sure going to happen. Who even knows about what family/friend weddings & babies will occur, or if some other grand opportunities come along for me. I mean, this time last year I had no idea that I would be going to either Girls State or Freedom Academy, but those turned out to be two hugely life-changing weeks. I can only hope that I get lucky enough to ever have such amazing experiences again.

My point is that no one ever really knows what life has in store for them, and certainly not for an entire year. I hope and pray that this year will be all it's cracked up to be, and then some. I hope the same for all of you. This will be a good year, but only if we make it so.

Happy New Year!