Provo Winter

My only fun news for this weekend was Kayla and I went to Thoroughly Modern Millie on stage at the Fine Arts Center.  I've only seen the movie before, so I loved all the differences in the play.  There were a bunch of new songs, and a lot of the characters had a lot different personalities.  My favorite difference, hands down, was that one of the Chinese guys falls in love with Miss Dorothy, and saves her from Mrs. Meers, and she ends up with him instead of Mr. Graydon.  I had a lot of fun listening to the music and imagining dancing swing to it.  Awesome!

These are some pictures I've taken of our winter.  

These are the stairs going up to campus from the RB building (that's the building with all the dance studios and the swimming pools and stuff).  These are some of the stairs I used to have to shovel, with my old crew. That's a LOT of stairs.  Now every time I walk up them, I have a great appreciation for the fact that there's not snow on them.  
We had a really funky rain/snow/ice storm the other week that left snow iced onto every surface like tree branches and power lines.  I thought it looked really cool, so I took pictures.

Swingin' Good Time

I'm sure everyone's heard, but I just thought I'd blog the fact that I'm now on the BYU Swing Dance Team!   I tried out a week ago, and found out the results on Tuesday.  As you can imagine, I'm SUPER excited about it.  On Tuesday when I found out, I was bouncing up and down and had this ridiculously huge smile on my face all night.   

I'm not exactly sure what team does, though.  I know I have team practice Tuesday and Thrusday nights, and there is a dance every Saturday night.  I think that we do both competitions and performances, but I really don't know.  I guess I'll find out sometime, right?  As it is, I'm looking forward to improving my swing dancing a LOT. 

As a kind of related, kind of not, topic, I've started exercising a lot more this week.  While watching two hours of training videos for the Tree Crew, I realized that I'm going to need a lot more arm and core muscle than I currently have.  Also, my roommate Kayla is talking about her eating/exercise diet, and that's helped motivate me as well.   Lisa and I went to water aerobics last night at the Provo City Rec Center, and it was so much fun!  In a painful, muscle-fatiguing sort of way.  So I think I'll be doing Water Aerobics Monday and Wednesday nights, Swing Dance Tuesday and Thursday nights, and some combnation of them and/or other activities on Saturdays.  It'll be so good for me!  And don't we all just love the feel of sore muscles?  I'm just excited for spring when I can do more out of doors! 

Day of Happiness

Today I've been very happy at many little things.  It rained this morning! I got to use my cute plaid umbrella for the first time.  My French test was easy.  In French class, we watched part of the movie that my entire UofU 1010/1020 course was based on.  It brought back some fun memories.  It was such nice weather at work!  I was working in my t-shirt, and normal leather gloves instead of my insulated ones.  I actually got to work on some trees today, which was exciting, since I really didn't know what I was doing, and no one else was there for the first half hour.  I texted Lindsay all during work, which made things so much better.  I walked home barefoot!  This was amazingly happy.  It was such beautiful 45 or higher degree weather, with sun and everything.  And it's Friday!  I get to watch movies tonight with Jerin (she got her wisdom teeth out today).  Over all, just a great, happy day!

And this is me at work.  I wear my sunglasses the whole time - eye protection, you know. 

Ok, I need some feedback.  Do you guys like my short posts, or should I save it for when I actually have something to write?

Moving on!

I just had to post a short blog about the new happiness in my life.  We, the Tree Crew of BYU, have finished taking down Christmas lights!!!!  That's all I've done since I transferred crews, so I'm pretty excited to be moving on.  We even did a couple of hours of pruning today.  I'm just so excited to be trained for tree climbing and bucket riding and chain sawing.  Real tree stuff.  I also just had to love the Danger! sign on our trailer.  I love the weird, random signs like this.

What a day!

    Today has been a long, busy, rather productive sort of day.  I realized last night that I had utterly failed to use the holiday to do homework, and that I had a ton to do today.  Yay for me, I managed to get done everything that I needed to!  Mostly because I only went to work for one hour instead of 3 or 4 like i normally would on Tuesdays.  

    Tonight was Swing Club!...and Swing Team try outs!  It was really fun!  I was a bit nervous, just because I'm not very experienced.  We did handstands against the wall (one of the lifts involves the girls doing handstands), which I rocked at - yay tumbling and gymnastics!  I didn't do so hot on the jazz choreographied part, but not terrible.  Then we did partner dancing, with switching partners every couple of minutes (which was good, since there were a lot more girls than guys).  I've never done blues swing before, but I did ok, even if it was awkwardly NO personal bubble.  And a lift, which turned out pretty well.  After the jazz circle (think, people showing off at a stake dance, in the big circle...yeah. like that), which i went into once.  I did a round-off back-handspring, just to see if I could.  I could, if i did a step out.  I think that earned me points.  All in all, pretty good, I think.  I'll know if I made the team on Saturday night or Monday sometime.  I'll let you know!

    Also, just as a side note, I was a sadly unpatriotic person today.  I didn't watch any of the inaugeration.  In my defense, I was on campus for about 14 hours.  I'll watch some coverage of it sometime. :)

En Francaise!

Today was pretty happy.  I went to the French speaking lab, which is pretty much just practicing speaking one on one with a native French speaker.  The happy part is that I actually felt pretty good about it - I could explain things like my parents and little sister living in Holland, both my brother and my sister are getting married, and I'm studying landscaping.  Sometimes I couldn't exactly tell what she said, but I understood the gist of the questions, which was a good thing.  I'm improving!

   Work today was pretty good.  It wasn't too cold, maybe in the forties when you were in the sun (Which I made sure I was, all the time!).  We got a lot of trees done, with all the lights off them.  It helps when we actually have the truck with the hydraulic lift bucket.  So maybe on Tuesday we'll be doing something else!  I was up in a ladder unwrapping lights off branches for most of the four hours, which is a big improvement than standing in the snow and wrapping the lights up, like I mostly have been.  It's interesting at work, because there's a broad spectrum of work ethics in this crew.  There's some people that work hard and don't goof off, look for stuff to do, etc.  And then there're some people who do a lot of standing around or driving the van around.  Of course, when they do work, they get a lot done, but that's kinda beside the point.  I'm definitely trying hard to be one of the hard working ones, mostly because then it's not so boring or cold.  We didn't have that much of a range in my last crew.  So, yeah, work's going pretty well so far.   

      And now it's the weekend!!!

Short and sweet!

   I think, from now on, I'm going to write little shorter blogs more often.  That way I can write when i don't have something monumental to say.   

    Last Saturday I went to a Wyview "Dance through the Decades" Dance.  It was kinda fun, but mostly I really liked my outfit.  It was that dress I found at the DI when I went with Mindy Hall after Christmas.  I don't know what decade I was dressed as though.

    For work this past week, I've been working with my new crew.  It's an interesting collection of individuals.  I think pretty much everyone on the crew is a Landscape Management major, and most of them are emphasizing on Arboriculture.   I was a little scared of some of the crew members at first, but I think it will be a fun crew to be on.  I even got to be up in a tree the other day.  We're taking down Christmas lights right now, which is a pain, because 1) it's really cold, and 2) the lights are done Temple Square style, which means there's about thirty strands to a medium sized tree (medium is about a foot diameter trunk).   It'll take forever!