Winter?

I've been highly disappointed with this winter. Now don't get me wrong, I love 60° weather just as much as the next guy, but I also love me some good hardy winter weather. I love the snow and the way it has of covering the world and making it look brand new. I love walking outside all wrapped up cozy and having the chill nip at your nose a bit.

But you know what I love the most about winter? How excited it makes me for spring. I feel this way about every season. I love living in Utah because we have 4 very distinct seasons with very different tempertaures.
When it's spring, I get so excited for summer and the sun and swimming and freedom.
And once that gets old, I get so excited for fall, with it's crisp air and beautiful colors.
And then I can't wait for that first snow fall and sledding and cuddling inside with hot chocolate.
And then once winter becomes dreary, I get excited for spring and the warmth and new life.
And then it starts all over again.

But with this failure of a winter we've had here in Utah, I haven't even been excited for spring, because it's kind of felt like spring since the beginning of January!
However, it has not been all bad, the warmth has allowed for so many fun outdoor adventures! Utah is a beautiful and fun place, even when it's winter and everything is dead. So here's some pics of my hiking adventures with the brothers.

And then here's this moment when I found the one patch of snow left on President's Day. Happy Fake Winter, ya'll.

Summer slushes

My last post was called "Here at the end of all things" (a beautiful reference to a beautiful movie/book series that I sincerely hope you got). I honestly did not mean for that to legitimately be my last post on my blog, but recent months have proved that to be the case. I have been so busy and having so much fun that I have no had time to blog in nearly 2 months. For shame.

But now I'm back.
You're welcome.

This summer has been all sorts of eventful and I have loved it! I probably won't recap most of it, but don't you worry, you will most certainly be receiving pictures and updates from my trip to the UK. It was AMAZING!
And when I haven't been abroad, I've been making new friends and playing oodles of volleyball and eating lots of Sonic slushes and going on hikes and doing tons of adventuring and reading good books. Overall, it has been so perfect. Love me some summer.
Though I must say, it is the absolute weirdest feeling not to be in classes. Disregarding holiday breaks, I have been in classes for the last two years straight with no breaks. So now that I am all of the sudden done, I just don't know what to do with myself. So much beautiful freedom!
Moral of the story: I'm back and rearing to go and ready to blog and tell you all of my opinions and about all of my adventures.
Life is so good.

Time for a trip? YES!

Guess what I'm doing this summer?!?!

Taking a nice little trip to LONDON! I've decided to spend all of my money and give myself a graduation trip across the ocean. And I'm absolutely thrilled!

I'm spending about a week in London and taking a train up to Scotland for 2 days. I can't think of anything I would rather do this summer. Sadly, Ryan just got transferred further north in Scotland and I won't be able to hunt him down. Up until this past Monday, he had been in Kirkcaldy which is only an hour away from where I'm staying in Edinburgh and I was going to try to meet up with him and his companion for lunch or something. But alas, that is not meant to be, which could possibly be for the best. Anyway, I digress.

London! I'm so excited!
Seeing the sights, eating the food, staying in hostels,riding the tube, just being there and getting experiences outside of Provo. I can not express to you how thrilled I am. I'm going with some amazing old friends and some fun new friends. This will be such an adventure! It's only about a month away!

It begins again.

The summer has come to an end. A terrible, tragic end. I have a feeling that this next year is going to be a relatively defining one for me. You know, with the whole "graduating from college and finding something to do with my life" thing. It's kind of terrifying.

This summer has been one of the best in the history of summers (which is a pretty long history, in case you were wondering). We created a list back in the first of May of all the things we wanted to do this summer. I must say that I am please to announce that we did EVERYTHING on this list, minus white water rafting, which I was fine with because that slightly frightens me. We took a road trip to California (one of the highlights of my summer), saw all of the awesome movies that came out this summer, ate lots of delicious food, made some incredible friends, went on lots of adventures, took pictures of most everything, and just laughed our heads off because we are that funny. We really had so much fun! I really do have the greatest friends in the universe.
As just an example of the excitement that is our lives: the other weekend, we watched 7.5 hours of Anne of Green Gables in one night. I can't explain to you the love that I have for Gilbert Blythe.

Anyway, so now it's over. On the plus side, everyone has returned to Provo, including pretty much all of my friends who went on missions. Can you believe it's been two years? I can't. I am THRILLED beyond reason to be able to hang out with those wonderful human beings again. They were greatly missed.

Ok, here's the real reason this year scares me: I am a senior. A senior in college. Remember back in the day, a full 4 years ago when I was a senior in high school? That does not feel like it was that long ago, but alas, it was. WHat am I going to do after I graduate? I have many potential plans, but they all require me to be an adult and move on with my life. Change, especially big change like this, scares me so much. Once I get going, I love it, but the anticipation of change scares me to death. Welp, we'll see what happens in this next year. It will be fun, that's a given because I always have fun. It will be difficult. It will be scary. But I'm excited for it. Life is fun... I just have to keep telling myself that.

Parade people.

I know I say my family is the best a lot, but I only speak the truth.
We are a type of people that you might not have encountered in your life, at least not at our level.
We are parade people. Weird, I know. But that's what we do.

I've grown up always going to parades and I didn't realize that this wasn't normal until I was in high school. I also didn't realize that it wasn't normal to lose your voice every time you go to a parade. You see, we cheer for EVERYONE that passes by, whether or not they are interesting or even in the parade. I mean, we cheer our lungs out for the little kids pulling the wagons and selling popsicles just as much as we cheer for the scottish pipe band or the sweet floats.

And when I say my family, I mean my WHOLE family. This is a lot of people. It's not surprising when we have a solid 40 people there on the street with us at any given parade. Uncle Frank is always shouting in the back with his wooden noise-maker that makes us all deaf. There's some specific cousins that I can always rely on for witty, hilarious comments shouted at the floats, particularly those with the pretty girls on them. The youngest brother pulls some ridiculous dance moves in the middle of the street  in the long spaces between floats. It's just plain fun.

July is prime time for parades. The Pioneer Day/24th of July/Days of 47 Parade is the ultimate of all parades. For 35 years my family has been going to downtown Salt Lake on the night of the 23rd and setting up camp on the street to save our spot for the parade in the morning. Sleeping out for the parade is my favorite extended family tradition. Like, we legitimately sleep on the streets.

Lay the blankets out in the gutter, and then party all night. We play all sorts of games, we talk, we laugh our heads off, we walk about down town. And we don't sleep. Some people try to sleep, but aren't particularly successful.
This year was a strange one at the parade for me. For one, I was missing some brothers. Ryan is on a mission. And Kade was at scout camp. Also, just lot's of other relatives weren't there. On the positive side: I brought friends. This was a new experience for them and I was thrilled. Sadly, they thought it was a good idea to go to sleep at 2 or 3 in the morning. Luckily, my cousin, Jason and I remained stalwart and stayed up the entire night, talking about absolutely nothing and it was hilarious. We were unashamedly the only one's that did not sleep a wink, though Jason did sleep through the entire parade, but that was to be expected.
So this years' parade can be marked off as another supreme success. I got zero sleep, cheered my lungs out for all 120+ parade entries (particularly the BYU float which contained my good friend and future roommate, Jessica), and just had the time of my life.
I love being parade people.

California. Here we come.

I do cool things in my life. Like take awesome road trips to Northern California.

I seriously have the best friends in the world. And we had more fun in those 5 days than most people have in a full year. We left Tuesday night, right after work and got back to good old Provo Sunday night. 4 solid days in California.

The initial reason we went on this road trip was to go see the wedding of dear Cebre and Hiram Jacob. And the wedding was INCREDIBLE. On top of that, we made it a full on vacation. We celebrated our nation's independence by watching many firework shows through the beautiful fog in Santa Cruz. We spent an entire day in San Francisco. We bon fired at the beach. We made more memories and inside jokes than I can count.

I love those girls more than anything. It was the 4 of us girls: Kaylee, Kaylee, Jenna, and Jennie. Yeah, we confused everyone that we met. And is was great! I learned so much about myself while talking to these girls this week, and I think we all reached a new level of crazy. Upon calculating it, we spent more than 36 hours in the car over that 5 day span, so it's a good thing I like these girls. We kind of took up some usual spots in the car. I drove. Most of the time. Jenna directed me. We sometimes got lost, but overall, she directed me exceptionally well. And the Kaylee's sat in the back. They cuddled, they slept, and they kept us entertained. We had a pretty good system set up. I was a pretty big fan of it. I really do love driving.

We stayed at Terra and Cebre's house the first night. We were SO excited to see them!

Best part of all of San Francisco: Tandem biking across the Golden Gate Bridge! It seriously was the most fun thing I've done in my whole life. It took me and Kaylee a couple of blocks to get the hang of it. Let's get real, those first few blocks were completely terrifying and we screamed our heads off and were plenty of free entertainment to our fellow tourists. But by the end, we were pros. And once we got to the bridge, we ate PB&Js in the middle of the GGB. It was so cool!

We went to China Town. It was radtastic. And I bought awesome things: a glow-in-the-dark Buddah, a mustache ring, and a wooden sword. I realized that I find great joy in incredibly random objects.

We went to Carmel-by-the-Sea, this adorably quaint town full of little shops and cute things. With a beach.
We went to a giant bon fire on the beach. And we wore our matching tourist San Francisco sweatshirts. That beach was beautiful. And the surfers were exciting.

Then we weddinged it up on Saturday. This is us and the beautiful bride. It doesn't get much better than this. Cebre and Hiram are so lovely and happy and perfect for each other.

Summing up the trip: We maimed the schmeagle Jack.

Camping.

I like the summer in Provo. Life is much more laid back and enjoyable than during the school year. Also, people are just more fun. Well, maybe that's not true, but probably.

So.. we went camping. Last Friday.
Yeah, that was sweet.
We set up a tent and everything.
Not that we actually slept in the tent.
No, we ended up just sleeping in the bed of the truck, looking up at the stars slash the tree we were parked under.
But it was a blast. I adore camping excessively.
Being out in nature, exploring, adventuring, and just soaking it in is the best.
I went exploring along the stream and it was beautiful. I could explore nature all my life. I found the perfect thinking perch. And I might have fallen and sacrificed my leg in order to reach said thinking perch. My leg is still achey now, a few days later, but it was totally worth it. When you find that prefect spot for thinking, it absolutely can not be beat.
We also had smores.
You might ask: Some more what?
You're killing me Smalls!!
And there was lots of campfire fun and stories and chats and singing.
We played a lot of the song game.
We swung on swings.
We played some wongo-bongo.
We just enjoyed life.

Friends are awesome. Especially good friends, and I have a lot of those. And I love camping. I would go every weekend if I could. And surprise! I'm going again this weekend.
Like I said, I like the summer. It's weird to not be at home. This is my first summer not being at home ever in my life. Good thing I live close enough to go visit those crazy young chaps. But am glad that I'm here in Provo this summer.

As of late.

Sometimes life can be a very surreal experience.
I can have a serious conversation with someone I hardly know. And the next moment I will have nothing to say to a good friend.
Maybe it's just me.
It's probably just me.
But life is weird.
Somedays your brother is a normal human being, and then the next he is a missionary in Provo, and the next day after that he is on a plane to England. Yeah, this is real life.
True that. My brother became a missionary last Tuesday night and it was amazing experience. I know that the gospel that he will be teaching is the truth and I'm so stoked for him to teach it. Then on Wednesday, due to the lack of visa-arrival, we dropped him off at the Provo MTC (missionary training center). It was sad, but it would have been way more sad had my family not been the most ridiculous and hilarious individuals in all of Provo. Then, blessings of the Lord, his visa arrived Wednesday afternoon and they threw him on a plane and shipped him off to the Preston, England MTC on Thursday
He leads quite a life. And because he is the luckiest person in the world, things just tend to work out for him.

So that's been an interesting adjustment without him. Thus far, I'm not a fan. Though I am a fan of him being abroad. Missioning and things.

Also exciting in my life: Spontaneous road trip to St. George this past weekend to the the solar eclipse. Yeah, it was sweet. My fabulous roommate, Jenna, and I were just sitting in our apartment on Saturday afternoon and within a matter of 30 seconds, we went from having no weekend plans to deciding to go on the 3.5 hour trip down to St George. SO FUN. We also went with some fabulous human beings. This is us looking at the eclipse (as stolen from Josh's fb album):

This is all 8 of us (Josh is in the picture via shadow). We were a little short on astro-glasses, so some of us went blind. Also, our names were a treat to list off: Jake, Jenna, Jennie, Jared, Josh, Kaylee, Halie, and Spencer. Someone stands out like a sore thumb...
Basically, it was an excellent 24 hour trip filled with laughter, games, banana stranglings, accent speaking, piano playing, singing, mission call opening, sun staring, driving, accent to apple inventing, and other shenanigans. I have good friends.

I'm a fan of the summer in Provo; people are always outside doing fun things, and craziness is always right on the brink of occurring. I don't even mind that I am taking a class right now. Though studying outside isn't nearly as productive as one would think.

Also, I love my job. We get some crazies up in there.

Pictures of Elder Lever departing are forthcoming. Prepare yourself.

This post was a random culmination of thoughts and events. Jumbled, it may be, but that's what my brain is like right now, so you're just experiencing my real life via blog.