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A brief update from Brittany...

Heather has been nagging me for a while about writing something on our blog. So here ya go, Heather. I wrote something. :)

I guess I'll give an update about what we've been doing this Spring. I've been working as a Heritage Halls Conference Assistant for BYU Housing. Just as the title states, I help with conferences such as EFY and Women's Conference. This includes (but is definitely not limited to) preparing the buildings, check-ins, roving, towel exchange, check-outs, and working at the front desk. This is Rochelle (a desk attendant) and I doing check-ins for Women's Conference:

The next picture is of my co-workers, all of the Heritage CA's. Our managers took us to Tucano's, a Brazilian restaurant during training last week. We're an attractive bunch, huh?!?

The job is a lot of work, but it's super fun, my co-workers are really cool, and the benefits are sweet! I get my own three-bedroom apartment and a meal plan for FREE! Plus an hourly wage. Because I work close to 40 hours each week, I'm not taking classes on campus. However, I am taking one independent study class, PDBio 120 (The Science of Biology). In regard to this class, motivation has definitely been an issue... Anyway, I miss having roommates, but I LOVE having my own place! I have four extra beds, so for a while, I had three mattresses stacked on my bed. I get the bathroom all to myself and cleaning the apartment is only necessary once every few weeks. And cleaning the entire place takes less than an hour. Having to share an apartment with five other girls again in the Fall will be bittersweet. I've accumulated enough stuff to fill almost the entire apartment. I converted the three bedrooms into a storage room, a getting ready room/office, and a sleeping room. When my old roommates/friends left after the winter semester, they gave me all of the stuff they didn't want to ship or store. It ended up being a LOT of stuff! I have a plethora of random items including a couch, 2 TV's, 2 DVD players, a Nintendo 64, a computer, and lots of food. So yeah...I'd rather not have to re-enter the real world of sharing an apartment and paying for my own food and rent!

As for my free time, I spend most of it at Heather's place and I almost feel like I'm an actual roommate. :) Last weekend, Heather was kind enough to make room for me and we both squeezed into her twin-sized bed on Friday and Saturday nights!

So now about Heather. She works at the Creamery and is currently taking classes, including a polynesian dance class! She has four roommates, all of whom are AWESOME! Becca and Kari were our roommates in the Fall/Winter. The other two, Avery and Alyssa, have lived in Heather's new apartment for the past year and they are so much fun! Avery is from Utah and is an Anatomy TA and Alyssa is from New Mexico and is our FHE mom. Also, our new ward is AWESOME! Everyone is so friendly and welcoming. Way different from our freshman ward.

So. Now a few of the fun things we've done lately. For Becca's birthday, we went to Brick Oven Pizza Restaurant:

The next picture is of Avery, Heather's roommate, and Chad, one of our FHE brothers. He served a mission in Carlsbad, California and is from Illinois.

The food was greasy but delicious!

Becca and Ben! Ben graduated from high school early and lived in Heritage last Winter, so that's when we met him and became friends. He is one Chad's roommates and therefore one of our FHE brothers!

One Saturday, Heather and I got 50-minute massages for $15 (thanks to coupons!) and then walked 17 blocks to get Mexican food. Another day, 10 of us went to Comedy Sports, a comedy club in Provo. (I had coupons to get everyone in for $5 each) It was really good! I will definitely be going back. Hopefully, pictures will be up soon. We had a barbecue for two FHE siblings' birthdays and went to another barbecue at Bippy's ward. (Bippy is Heather's brother). I went to the opening night of Iron man with some of the other CA's and then I went to it again two days later with Heather. One last fun happening: Heather is learning how to drive a stick-shift! Bippy is teaching her. We went to a parking lot yesterday and she did SO well. Way better than I did my first time. :)

So that's just a brief summary of our recent happenings. I've spent every weekend so far with Heather and her roommates and I'm so excited to move in there in the Fall!

~ Brittany :)

Farewell to Fall and Winter

So, I'm sitting in Brittany's new dorm as she unpacks the MILLIONS of new things she accumulated these past few days, and its been making me think about this past two semesters. I guess I always get a little sentimental at the end of something when change is about to happen because even just seeing my dorm and my room completly empty almost made me tear up.

Fall and Winter semesters were a lot of fun, even though I am very glad to have those classes over with. There were the pranks, the dancing (for me--Christmas around the world and getting my head kicked open. story for another time), Brittany's RHA conferences (stories for another blog time Brittany?), friend's visting, apartment hunting for next fall, lots of birthday parties, and... um.....hmmm..... wasn't there more? Well whatever, sorry if we missed something big but both mine and Brittany's minds are drawing a blank. But it was fun nonetheless!

This past week has been insane. What with finals finishing, packing all our crap, saying goodbye to friends we won't see for a long time :( moving, and long hours at work, idk about Brittany but I am so tired. And guess what?? The new term starts this Tuesday... fun stuff

The night Matthew was leaving, Alyssa, him, Brittany, and I had a Martinellis celebration in honor of finals ending and people leaving.

After a lot of all the crazy stuff, Brittany, Bri (semi-roommate from these past semesters), Teddy and I got the chance to relax a little and go to the mall.

Even though Teddy, Eric, Alyssa, all our roommates except a few are gone, this next few terms have promise. What new memories will we make? What is my new off campus housing going to be like with a new roommate (yeah, Brittany has left me for 4 months. grr)? How is Brittany going to like her new job? How often will we all see each other? Is Sterling ever going to show up after Mattew leaves in June?

Well...here we go!

~Heather

In lovely procrastination

So, I'm totally supposed to be studying for geography for my final that is in about 7 1/2 hours, but I really have no motivation to. I'll pass the class and so for whatever reason I have the hardest time caring (sorry mom, if you're reading this. I promise I'll still study tonight and do well...)

Anyways, since it is midnight thirty, and Brittany is fast asleep cause she's the good student like that and I'm the insomniac (spelling??), I thought now would be the perfect time to tell you all about my dear friend Carl.

Brittany has provided my late nights with much humor even after she is unconscience, due to her alter-ego, Carl. She talks, giggles, grunts and twitches in her sleep a lot! Sometime she will wake up and it won't be her though---it's some deep, gruffy voiced version of Brittany that glares at me and makes me afraid for my life! After multiple times of this happening in the middle of the night and in the early morning when she first wakes up, I decided to give this other side of Brittany a name, and Carl was officially born!
(Don't worry Brittany, I cropped off the bottom half of the picture)

Sightings are rare and I am usually the only one priviledged to meet Carl, but our friend Ben Wright has seen him awaken shortly at around 7:45am when she just crawled out of bed.

One night, I was up late reading and studying for geography (hey! much like I will be doing tonight!) and I was sitting in my desk chair, but facing my bed, away from Brittany. Because of the amount of intense studying I was doing....*cough*... I didn't notice Carl turn over in the bed at all and next thing I know, he's yelling "What?!" at me, peeking out from under Brittany's eye cover she sleeps with, not moving a muscle but just staring at me. Creepiest thing ever!! It scared the crap outta me, all I could do was laugh! At that, Carl blinked, glared some more, and asked again, "What??" so through nervous giggles, I asked what back. "Didn't you say something to me??" "um....no? I've barely even been moving so I didn't even make any noise" "Really??" "yeah...I'm sorry?" "Hmmmm....*mumble**grumble*" and he rolled over and went back to sleep. In the morning, I asked Brittany if she remembered that. Not at all.

That's another thing about Carl: he comes and goes without his host body even knowing he was there! She never remembers anything I say that she does, and I think she still wouldn't believe me to this day if Ben hadn't gotten that sighting of Carl as well.

One more story, then I'll end this long post. Another night, I was again up late studying (pretty sure it was geography again. man I can't wait to get this class out of the way!) when I see out of the corner of my eye Brittany sit up quickly, reach for something invisible, and smack her hand on the shelves just above her bed, when Carl yelled out "Crap! Ouch!" When I started laughing, he glared at me again (he must really hate me, he always glares...) and I asked what he was doing, Carl grunted as he laid back down, "I thought something was falling..." I told him, no, nothing moved and asked if he was ok. That's when I thought Brittany was waking up enough to be Brittany again because her voice was getting less gruffy and back to its beautiful self, so I asked, "Are you going to remember this in the morning?" Carl/Brittany laughed a little and said maybe and went back to sleep. Morning came. No recollection whatsoever.

I love my roommate :)

~Heather

Oh sweet Summer, How we miss thee

We really miss the summer semester, it really was the best semester yet and we all got so lucky that we were FHE brother and sisters and stayed great friends.

And while some of us may go our seperate ways, because of missions or new apartments or Vienna (amanda!), we'll always remember our fun times in the Summer of '09!

~Heather

The War that Wages When We Should Be Studying!

Yet another thing Heather and I have in common is our love for pranks! Lucky for us, two of our neighbors, Sarah and Brianne, decided to enter into a prank war with us. It started when Heather and I stole their lightbulbs and they responded by rearranging stuff in our room, hiding things in our room and in the kitchen. From there, things started to get a bit out of control. Here was our next prank:

After stealing Bri's keys, we spent an hour hurriedly foiling their room. I got 1000 square feet of aluminum foil from Costco and we used almost all of it!

The next picture is of Bri as she vowed to get revenge. After taking down all of the foil, we created a massive foil ball, which we eventually turned into an aluminum foil elephant.

After a few weeks, they still hadn't pranked us back, so we attacked with a little reminder of our war. During those weeks, we went around campus at night, collecting massive numbers of newspapers. We had been hiding them in locked suitcases, our closets, under out beds, and anywhere else we could stuff them. Finally, the day came. We set Bri and Sarah up on a date and while they were gone, we enlisted some help. Several guys rigged up a contraption made of a broom handle and vacuum cord to unlock their door and numerous other people from our building helped us with the prank.

It took less than two hours with all of the help. When Sarah and Bri came home, Heather and I hid in the massive pile that filled the room. Hopefully the video of their reaction will be coming soon!! After helping Sarah and Bri clean up, we had over 30 large trash bags full of newspaper!

We were definitely winning the war!

One day, about a week later, while Heather and I were at work, they got their revenge. They covered our walls, window, lights, and floor with black trashbags, rigged flour and rice crispies to fall on us, and set dixie cups filled with beef stew and water (random, I know!) all over the floor. AND, they stapled the cups together. Because of the lack of light in the room, I stepped right in the cups, getting the nasty concoction on my shoes. :) Also, they left a layer of crumpled newspapers on the ground and stole all of our clothes! Here are the pictures:

Due to end-of-the-year craziness, including finals, we still haven't pranked them back. BUT, they will be living in the Elms next year as well, so the war is not over... :)