Weather is bipolar, but spring is definitely here!

The warm spring weather makes me so happy! The cold and wet spring weather not as much. Unfortunately it seems to go between the two types very often, and very drastically. For example, I was at work on Friday, and we were cutting down a spruce tree at the MTC. When we started this job at noon, it was sunny and quite warm. By 1:00 it was snowing like crazy, so we took an extended lunch break. By 2:00 it was cool, but drier, so we finished that job. Around 3 or 3:30, it was sunny and started to get warm again, at which point it also began to snow again. Craziness.

Lately, I've been very aware of the little signs of spring. Leaf buds forming on the elm trees, flower buds breaking on the silver maples. Crocus flowers popping up everywhere, daffodils and hyacinths coming into bloom. The little splashes of flower color and new leaves make me so happy! I'm SO excited for it to be spring/summer again! Today I went for a walk in the sunshine for like, 2.5 hours, and got a little suntan line - yay! It's all just very happy.

Swing Champions!

It's already on facebook, but i thought i'd put a little something here on my blog anyway. This past weekend BYU hosted the National Amateur Dancesport Championships. Included in this awesome event were the class events, so the kids from the BYU ballroom and social dance classes got to compete against each other. I danced in the quickstep and the triple step. You won't hear much about the quickstep because I didn't get called back even once. The triple step (aka east coast or american swing) was a different story though. Briggs Alsbury and I practiced every day last week to get ready for this, I was pretty confidant that we would do well. We kept getting called back round after round, getting more and more excited.

Every time before we walked out onto the floor, we'd go over what we needed to focus on: high energy, high knees, smile! Our goal was kinda to steal the show, to have so much energy that people would find it hard to watch anyone but us. I think the orange shirt and tie helped as well. And from the feedback we got from friends and random strangers, I think our tactic worked quite well. :)

The final round was very exciting, especially since 4 out of 8 couples were from the same class. We did a cheer for our teacher Giovanna before we went out for the final round. It ended up that all four couples were in the top 5 - Giovanna is amazing! Briggs and I took first place and each got a special trophy. I was so incredibly happy and excited! I've never won something like this before, and it felt so good!

Landscape Major

I know you all think I'm slightly ridiculous, with all of my trees and plant classes and such, but I just have to say that I love my major, my job, all my friends from work and school, and I love life. I'm getting ready for my big competition in Atlanta in April - the PLANet Student Career Days, where I will be competing in Woody plant ID and Arboriculture Technical skills. Before you start making skeptical faces at the screen, let me explain that the most important part of this trip is not the competitions, it's the networking with major green industry companies from all over the country, which will help me get internships and jobs in the future. And one of the best ways for me to make a good impression on these potential employers is to do really well in my competitions, so I'm putting forth a lot of effort to do well. Actually, I also just want to place 1st. :-)

Also I've been spending more time with people in my major, and it's been great. I love being friends with these people! We have such common interests and understanding and future, but still so diverse in our options, that it's so much fun to talk to everyone! I look forward to being good friends with them all.

So really, Landscape Mgmt major describes about 2/3 of my life - school and work. Dance and econ and hanging out with apt. 212 is the other 1/3. I'm really enjoying life right now.

Latin Dance Competition (finally posted!!!)

The other day (now long past - like almost a month) I competed in a latin dance competition for my dance class - the rumba! We danced against all the other couples in the 185 level of dance. I was very excited for it, besides the thrill of competing, got to wear my crazy leopard print shirt from Europe, have two of my besties there cheering for me, and I got to dance with Johnny Freshman. Ok, so his name is Johnny Wilson, but I didn't know his last name for a long time, and he's definitely a freshman, so it just stuck. And no, he doesn't know I call him that. He's a great dancer. (As a side note, he also placed 2nd in the standard waltz competition which took place alternating rounds with our competition!)
As we kept making call back after call back, I got more and more excited! In the end, we placed 5th, out of more than 150 couples! It was awesome! Because my lovely friend April was there cheering for me, we have video coverage of the event! Except that i've tried uploading SOOO many times, and it never works. Even after waiting 12 hours. So i'll just post another picture instead.

poor lappy...

Right now i'm on a campus computer avoiding homework, so i thought i'd just put a quick disclaimer up, that my computer is drained of all juice and incapable of charging until my new ac-adapter comes (hopefully sometime this week). Once it comes, however, i have many pictures to download and i'll have a new and exciting blog post. In the mean time I'll just say it's been a fun two weeks mostly full of dancing, and hanging out with my friends April, Erilyn, and their roommates. :)

Flowers, flowers everywhere!

As part of my wonderful major, I'm taking a class called Herbaceous Plants. My friend April so kindly told me that this sounds like a class from Hogwarts, not BYU. Though it may seem friendly and unassuming, this class has been very difficult and demanding on my time, largely due to the fact that I have to memorize 25 plants a week, by sight, common name, scientific genus-species name (and cultivar, if applicable) and family. And then there's a quiz on it. I didn't do so hot on the first quiz, because I wasn't expecting it to be quite so rigourous. 38/50 - one of the higher scores in the class. This week though, I've been most dedicated in my learning of these plants (summer perennials this time). I visited the gardens at BYU where the plants are labelled, and searched for the plants on my list.

Then I took pictures, made flash cards, took another tour of the gardens, etc. (i'm very proud of my flashcards, and we use them at work to study, since three of us are in that class).

So not only can I tell you that yarrow and shasta daisies are in the same family, I can also now tell you what the floret pattern of the Scrophulariaceae family is, and that catmint and sage are more closely related to lavender (all in family Lamiaceae) than sea lavender is (family Plumbaginaceae).

Also, I just have to add that I love my new camera and its macrozoom settings which allow me to take awesome pictures of flowers. yay!

Dianthus - Dianthus (these are the best kind, when common and scientific names are the same!), family Caryophyllaceae

Echinacea purpurea - Coneflower, family AsteraceaeGaillardia aristata - Blanket flower, family Asteraceae

Beauty is Pain, darling!

On Tuesday (Sept 15) I bought new ballroom dance shoes! Specifically, Latin ballroom dance shoes. I love them - they're so beautiful! I can tell they will definitely help improve my dancing, but first I have to break them in.

They are a solid three sizes smaller than my previous shoes,

which I purchased on too little information off the internet. My old ones have been adequate for my purposes until now, but since I'm taking a Latin ballroom dance class now, I need shoes that fit correctly. A correct fit for a ballroom shoe is very, very snug. The shoe should be one with your foot! You can see in this picture that my new shoe fits this qualification, while the old one fails miserably. So now I just get to suffer throught tightness and stiffness and blisters until these shoes are broken in. Fun times!