I've been tagged...

Brenda tagged me, and I'm supposed to open my 4th folder and put the 4th picture on here. This picture may not seem exciting, but this is the day that I really met Dave. Our ward went on a trip to Moab, and this picture is of Horseshoe Loop (or something like that) Dave and I rode down together in the same car, and the rest is history...
I will tag anybody that reads my blog. I don't know if I even have any followers, but if I do, tag, you're it!

I've been tagged!!!

I've never been tagged before, so this is kind of exciting.

8 TV shows that I watch
The Office
The Amazing Race
The Biggest Loser
What Not To Wear
I really don't watch anything else.

8 favorite restaurants
Olive Garden
Chipotle
Jack in the Box
El Rincon
Any Mexican taco stand (if that counts as a restaurant)
Taco Bell (I know, weird. I like their tacos though.)
Panda Express
Paradise Bakery

8 Things that happened yesterday
I woke up.
I came to work.
I argued with a patient on Medicaid that was trying to get a free pregnancy test. As if it isn't already enough that she gets free Medicaid, now she needs a free pregnancy test because her $3 copay is too much.
I went home and ate borsht for dinner. Yummy!
Dave called me! Hooray!
We went to FHE and watched people carve pumpkins.
We bought pumpkins so that we can carve them tonight.
We watched Iron Man. I really liked it-good action movie.

8 Things that I look forward to
Seeing Dave
Graduating from school
Summertime
Not having to work at the call center
The birth of my first nephew!
Not having to live paycheck to paycheck (although I don't know when this is going to happen)
Getting married (no, I am not announcing anything. I just look forward to getting married one day and having somebody to share my life with)
Christmas tree cutting

8 Things I love about fall
Crunchy leaves!
Going outside and breathing in cool air
The colors of the leaves changing
Wearing jackets that I haven't been able to wear all summer
Hoodies!
The fact that Christmas time is closer
Halloween and all the candy
The first snowfall. After the first one, I'm not a huge fan, but the first is pretty.

8 Things on my wish list
I wish that I was done with school.
I wish that I wasn't poor. (this will go away when I am done with school and don't give all my money to the University of Utah)
I wish that I didn't have to get ready for bed at night by washing my face, flossing, and brushing my teeth. I wish I could just go to bed at night and skip all those steps.
I wish that I was in shape so that I could buy a bike and ride it to work.
I wish for world peace. (that was a joke. The second coming is coming-world peace isn't going to happen.)
I wish that bread wasn't so bad for you. I love bread.
I wish that Diet Coke wasn't so tasty. I really really like it and sometimes it soothes me.
I wish that I could know what people are thinking sometimes.

6 people that I'm tagging
Amber
Brenda
Jill
Doug
Milin
Danice (if you read this)

Celebration!!!

Guess what. I am done with school for the semester!!! This has been by far the hardest semester in my college career. I had 3 classes that kept me crazy busy. I am so glad to be done. So what am I going to do with my three weeks of freedom? Anything I want! I am going to go to work and work 8:30-5:00 and then I will be done! I won't have to go home and worry about getting any assignments done or anything. Do you know how this makes me feel? Very happy! Ecstatic! Thrilled! Jovial! Blissful! Delighted! On cloud nine! And any other word that Microsoft Word 2007 doesn't have in its thesaurus to describe the happiest person in the world. Can I just tell you it was so nice yesterday handing in my three huge assignments and walking out the door of the ghetto annex and knowing that I have three weeks of freedom. And do you want to know the great part of next semester? I only have 1 class! Hooray! I would be jumping up and down for joy right now, but my computer is on my lap, and I don't want to break it. Anyway, life is great!

Livin la vida loca

Ok. Seriously people. I'm very busy lately. I know that people want me to update my blog, but that definitely is not my priority right now. I'm right at the end of this crazy summer semester, and it's insane. I swear all my teachers plotted with each other and wanted to give us the hugest assignments possible at the end of the semester. I got this crazy assignment yesterday to do a budget, and it's really hard. I also have a 7 page paper to write and a 6 pager. Why do they do that to us?
Even more important than school, I have been dating somebody! His name is Dave, and we have so much fun together! I seriously am addicted to him. We have done so many fun things that I just don't even know where to start, so I won't really start anywhere. Just know that he's amazing and that I'm having fun.

While we were there, I rolled my dad's four-wheeler. It was scary. I tried going up this hill that was too steep for my driving skills. I couldn't go anymore and got stuck. The next thing I knew, we started to roll. Luckily Dave is a quick thinker and kicked the four-wheeler out of the way so it didn't land on us. I knew I liked him for a reason! So yeah, every day is an adventure with Dave. I'm having fun working full time, going to school full time, and dating Dave full time. If you have any questions, let me know.

I just realized I never posted pictures of my bruises from the 4-wheeler wreck. So here's a nice picture of what my leg looked like. It really really really really hurt.

Hooray for Wyoming fireworks

So from my previous blog, you might know that I had some sparklers from Wyoming down here in Utah. One night I was talking to a friend about how I have this massive amount of illegal sparklers from Wyoming and how I had no idea what I was going to do with so many of them. He had this genius idea to build a sparkler tower. He came over on Tuesday, and we were playing around trying to figure out just how this was going to work. After he experimented with some things, we decided that if we tried to build a tower, we would lose too much of the sparkler stuff off the sticks so we just played around with them in other ways. He ended up bunching a whole lot of them together and we stuck it in the ground. The pictures aren't that exciting, but here is what it looked like before we burned it.

We each took four matches and held it at the bottom central point to light them. All of the sudden, it burst into this huge fireball. You couldn't even tell that it was a bunch of sparklers because the whole thing was this massive ball of flaming roundness. We both jumped back and were laughing so hard. Who knew? I wanted to get pictures of it, but I was laughing so hard that I couldn't. So if you want to try something very entertaining, go to Wyoming, stick a whole lot of sparklers together and light them. But I would probably recommend lighting them with maybe some longer matches.

I'd like to thank my sponsors

Thanks to my good friend Amber. Thanks Amber for having an amazing camera. Thanks Megan for your super counting skills and talents at making a U. Thanks to me for the cool ideas. Thanks to Milin and Judy for taking the time all those years ago to make 3 Amigos costumes. Who knew I would need it some 6 years later? Thanks to the state of Wyoming for selling fireworks year round and for not reporting people who buy them and smuggle them across the border to Utah.

I had to take some pictures for my homework using different kinds of flash photography. Here is what we did.

So this is actually done all in the same shot. What you do is put the camera in a dark room. Amber's camera has a setting where the shutter will stay open for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or 60 seconds. With the camera in the dark room, your subject stands in one position (that's me on the left) and you shine a light on the subject. Because the shutter is open for 15 seconds, it records what flashes in the light. We then turned the light off, and I moved to the middle and Amber flashed the light on again. Etcetera, etcetera. Megan has wicked good counting skills and was able to help Amber time it just right.

This is done with sparklers. Yes, I did use a whole lot of matches to get them started because the wind kept blowing them out, but I finally got it done. I thought it was kind of cool.

Here we were just playing around. Sparklers and cameras are so fun! Who knew the things you could do? Thanks to whoever invented the digital camera and for Amber for buying a good digital camera that does what I need it to do.

Sorry Grandma, domestication is not for me

So my grandma is convinced that if I will be domesticated, I will get married. I have heard many times that if I learn to sew some guy will fall madly in love with me and I will find my Mr. Right. I try time and time again to tell her that it's not economically smart anymore to sew like it was back in the day. Material costs money, it takes a lot of time, and it just is a pain in the butt. Now the reason I was inspired to write this blog is because I decided it would be nice to make a baby blanket for my friend who is having her 3rd child. I went and found this super cute flannel material and decided that I would tie it with yarn. Sounds easy, right? Well, it ended up taking about 4 1/2 hours just to tie the dumb thing! Of course it was my first blanket ever, but it was a pain to do. I still have to finish the edges, and who knows how long that will take? I really don't believe domestication is my thing. If it means that I'm going to be single for the rest of my life, so be it.

Picture-taking adventures

So I'm in this digital photography class. Sounds sweet, right? Well, I'm sure it would be way sweet if I had an SLR or anything but my point and shoot camera. But I don't, so I go to class and listen to the teacher talking about adjusting your aperture, ISO, F-Stop, and many other terms that I don't know what the heck she is saying. It's seriously probably the longest 6 hours of my week. But the good news is that it only lasts 6 weeks, so I'm sticking with it. Yesterday we actually got some tips on how to position your picture, so that will be exciting to practice with that. Anyway, so here is a sample of some pictures I took last weekend. Pretty much I'm not very original and have just copied my good friend's ideas. She's very creative. But I thought the pictures were kind of cool. My next assignment for the class is to take a picture of the same thing twice, telling two different stories. I am going camping in Moab this weekend and want to hike to Delicate Arch. My idea for the picture telling two different stories it to take a picture of just the top part of the arch from this part of the hike where you climb over a little shelf-like thing. After you climb over the shelf-like thing, you see the arch. It's like when you are going somewhere exciting and you get over the last hill and can see everything. So I'm going to do one shot from this shelf-like thing, and then take the second picture of the whole arch. What do you think? Does that tell a story? Maybe? I'm thinking one story could be that there's just this little arch, and then the second story will be this breath-taking arch that is really cool looking. Hopefully...I've only hiked to Delicate Arch at 11:00 at night, so I don't really know what it would really look like. But I'm sure you'll see.

Where did the term "mormonja" come from?

So some of you might be wondering where I got the word mormonja. Or some of you might not be wondering too, but I figured I might as well catch anybody up who may not know. Back in the days when I was on my mission, we would have to explain to certain men that we could not date because that was just the way it was. Well these certain men just didn't seem to understand, so we decided to use a word that they might be more familiar with-nun. We decided to start saying that we are like the nuns of the Catholic church and that we can't date. Well, since I served my mission in Spanish, that word was "monja." So me and a companion decided to combine the words "mormon" and "monja" and called ourselves mormonjas. I really like the name and decided to make it my email address, and now my blog title.
Now do I really plan on being a monja? No, it has not been in my plans to be single this long. In high school, I thought that if I wasn't married by the time I was 20 then I would just give up hope. Well, now that I am 26, I have still not given up hope. Even thought I have been through an interesting dating experience that I won't ever mention in detail on my blog, I still have hope that one day I will have a good relationship with somebody and that I will be able to love. It really is in my plans. Until that time though, I will continue to be mormonja.

Blogging and my exciting life.

So my friend got me to finally start my own blog. I'm pretty sure she's the only one that will even read it, but hey, who cares? Maybe one day word will get out. So here goes to my blogging...

On Friday night my roommate and I went bowling. It was way fun. I remember when I used to be good at bowling and always got over 120. I miss those days. I'm now lucky if I break 100. Saturday I tried to take pictures for my photography class but wasn't able to get the right shots that I need, so I gave up and just sat outside because the weather was so nice. Saturday night I went to the Living Traditions festival in Salt Lake. I think it's the only place in SLC where you will see so much diversity. There were all sorts of interesting people there.

Today I went to my friend's son's mission farewell. Yes, I have a friend that is old enough to have a son that is going on a mission. It's always fun to hear a premie give a going away talk and then see how much they change after their mission. They had Italian food at the party afterwards. It was by far the most amazing mission farewell food I've ever had. My friend's husband makes lasagna with some veggie sauce that has carrotts, celery, onions, and red peppers. It was amazing. I now have something that I would like to experiment and try.

Well, that's probably boring enough for now. Hopefully life will be more exciting and I will actually be able to write something that will be interesting for people to read.