You Know You're at BYU When...

• Your ward sets you up on dates for a ward activity. And makes it formal and prom-ish. It was a reallly fun night though, my date was from Houston.
• You take your roommate out for a hot bachelorette party at the mall and a barbeque place.
• To celebrate staying up until 2 a.m. to see our roommate come home for her birthday, we drank apple bubbly and ate homemade smores candy.
• To escape finals reading days boredom, you go to Chik-fil-A just to get holiday shakes. This is the first time for Kylie to ever go to a Chik-fil-A.
• You are so happy about the shakes, you take pictures of them.
• You go shopping at Wal-Mart for FHE service.

The End of the Pranks Wars....hopefully

After cleverly planting someone to offer us Divine Comedy tickets for our apartment and closest girlfriends, apartment M27 had asked about 30 people to help them fill our apartment up with newspaper while we were gone. Deceived! Betrayed! Here are the photos.

Neil thought he was so clever to make witty signs about our cereal ninja and broccoli days. We actually didn't even see they had planted signs all up the stairs leading to our apartment cause we were so mad when we got home
Sorry this is in reverse order...but after the cleanup, the fishbowl had a HUGE stack of trash bags simply full of newspaper. It was popular to jump on from the stairs I think (I didn't actually see it happening, just the pictures).
Of course the ward/other people we didn't even know helped cleanup afterwards. How nice.
Me suffocating in the newspaper.
The evil boys of behind it all.
Pelting Jeff to the face with newspaper!
Only a fraction of how many people got in on this. I guess we were kind of labeled the cool apartment for a night....
As soon as I got home, I got thrown into the paper. Such a crazy night!

I Need Somebody to Love

Nothing else would make me tolerate Beiber unless I was forced to dance to it a thousand times at EFY and then realizing, hey I DO need somebody to love. Thence was the idea to make a music video for FHE born (although not sure this won't repel instead of attract boys with our "awesome" dance skillz). Taking place in our parking garage, two of the boys helped get different angles with two different cameras (one of which was my canon!) and the girls dressed up like the dumb thug Beiber is and just had fun. I'm the one in a black hoodie and snow boots that forgets we are doing the chorus at one point and just walks off dancing without realizing it haha.

Brought to you by the LoieLaurel channel on Youtube once again.

My Little Pony Costume

You will need:

One pair of sparkly rainbow false eyelashes (I got mine at Smith's, aka Kroger). Makeup is pink and turquoise eye shadow, bright pink blush, pink lips, and of course, sparkles! If I would of had time, I would have done my nails all colors of the rainbow as well.

Next, you need one cheap baby pajama set that has rainbow unicorn attachments. I got mine at D.I. on the cheap and just cut off the unicorn parts. I wish I would have taken a picture of the mutilated pajamas outfit, it was pretty funny. Basically, you need a rainbow tail, a head that has a matching rainbow mane (the sparkly horn was a bonus), and of course, shiny wings! I also picked up a sheer pink long cloth-thing I found, it had sequined hearts all over it, and little ribbon bows on one side. I knew I wanted it, and I should have done something more creative with it, but since I was pressured for time, I just wrapped it around a modest white skirt. If I would of had more time, I would have printed the my little pony logo and taped it to me, with a little rainbow symbol to pin to my hip, and maybe even some face paint designs (like how the ponies are painted or something...) I added a yellow cami with a borrowed light purple shirt from my roommate so as to look girly, colorful and sparkly as much as possible (how else do you dress yourself as a pony...).

Finally, you enter the Halloween party as the finished product, Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony! This is me with my roommate as Jelly (her name is Jill, and her fiance is Jeff, so he was Jif peanut butter).

As goofy as I look, I thought it was a pretty big hit. I feel like anything retro is always appreciated at these parties.

Here are more pictures from the party if you want to see other people for more ideas. In these pictures: sailor girls, Edward scissor hands, breakfast, peanut butter and jelly, crazed brazil fan, mexican man, mystery woman, and goth rocker (which was really scary cause it was the straight laced eqp).

Some other ideas I liked that I saw there were Calvin and Hobbes, cowboy and indian (this was a couple), Syndrome from the incredibles, a gypsy who held a small orb like thing telling everyone their futures all night, and the wicked witches from Oz (one was from the "south" and had a fancy dress plus a cowboy hat on to be unique, the other was the typical green one from the west, etc.). I also had thought about being a mad scientist with my nerd glasses, roommates chemisty lab coat, crazy hair, and rubber boots.

I hope this post inspires those of you still wondering what to dress up as for Halloween!

Carving Pumpkins

For FHE, we carved a pumpkin to show off at our ward Halloween activity this Saturday. I was the mom last year when our group won the pumpkin contest, so we had to come up with something awesome again. We are creating the death star from Star Wars, and it won't be carved all the way through, more like sculpted part-ways. One of the guys in our group carves wood and metal, so he had lots of power tools. We used them to carve on our lines we drew. Basically, it was an awesome new way I have never carved pumpkins before. It was like taking a dentist's mouth drill to a pumpkin--really fun!

Although, I wish we would have played some Halloween music to make it more officially Halloween time. When I mention it up here, almost everyone asks "what is Halloween music?" and then thinks I am weird for listening to creepy music to get into holiday spirit. What were they raised on?? So I went home and made a "Carving Pumpkins" playlist so the next time I carve pumpkins, I will be prepared! Please feel free to refer to this playlist for your own family Halloween party, FHE, carving of pumpkins,etc.

Chronicles of Nostalgia

I was just thinking how I wanted to journal/blog about random memories that come to mind that I don't want to forget. I felt like today's experience was a good place to start this new project, "Chronicles of Nostalgia"...man I'm creative.

Today in class, we discussed what were the oldest commercials we could remember. Considering the age group in college right now, most are 90's kids. I came home to look up some of the ones we talked about, and good ol' YouTube brings up other stuff you might like. I forgot about sooo many things, and I had a huge feeling of nostalgia today. These are mostly food or toy ads.

• Nestle: Wonder Balls, Pocahontas chocolate bars, Cool Creations icecream (usually with Disney characters). I always sing the wonder ball song.
• Dizzy Grizzlies. These were Teddy Grahams with chocolate and sprinkles on one side.Todd used to make fun of me for trying to spin mine just like on the commercial.
• Skip It. Catchy "skiiip it, skiip it" jingle. I remember ours was bright pink, and the counter broke, but I still skipped it all the time.
• Bagel Bites, true these are still around, but they don't sing the "pizza in the mornin', pizza in the evenin', pizza at supper time!" anymore.
• Old Reese's commercials, "This is how____eats a reese's. Remember there's no wrong way, to eat a Reese's"
• Uh Oh, Spaghetti-o's
• Ring Pop's, Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops
• Electronic diaries. there were a couple of different ones, but I totally got one one year for Christmas and loved it, but I could never remember my password.
• Gooze, anything slime related was a huge hit
• Zoobooks, but call now and get the exclusive tiger poster!
• "Nickolodean magazine please!" I remember thinking it would be so cool to mow messages into the lawn after that.
• Pizza head from the Pizza Hut commercials
• Bop It. Obviously I loved these commercials cause I asked for Bop It one year, and Bop It Extreme the next.
• Kool-Aid man always busting through the walls, "Oh Yeah!"
• Creepy Crawlers
• Loreal Kids shampoo. I always had kids at school tease me calling me Loreal Kids Shampoo.
• 3-D Doritos chips, even mini ones!
• Huurrayy for Chef Boyardee!
• Pepsi girl
• Giga-pets

Prank Wars Continued

So after the boys sent us the broccoli crap and nonsense riddle, they also dressed like ninjas and stole things from our apartment again. One of them got in a small-scuffle-or-whatever, with Loie. Basically we hadn't even had a chance to retaliate, and they were just making us even more fired up. We waited one more day and night, and then struck.

Here is what we did far away and close up. We hung 2 things. First, was an old black banana that Neil had given us forever ago that we forgot about, so we thought we would "return it". The other thing was Neil's prize zuchinni that was huge and weird, and we happened to have stolen it. On the banana, we put a picture of Jordan's face with his eye's x'd out (jordan is really skinny, hence he is the banana, haha) and a party hat on, hanging from a string from the balcony above (more guy friends of ours). For the zuchinni, we drilled a hole through it to put the string through it. We attached a picture of Neil with his eye's x'd out and a party hat as well (he is really tall and bigger than Jordan, so he was the large zuchinni). It was too heavy to hold up though, so we were forced to cut off a large chunk. We decided (ok, maybe it was my idea) to make the zuchinni look like it had guts coming out of it. I can't remember whose idea it was to add red food coloring.

One of their roommates texted us this morning saying, "And girls call BOYS morbid and violent...yeah right!" I simply said "morbid....or clever and awesome....whatever way you want to look at it." Yeah, that's what having 4 brothers had done to me; I think guts coming out of a vegetable is hilarious. This morning, one of the guys put a sign out that said "M11 was here" (that's our apartment name).

To tie in with our string theme, and to make the whole thing more of a "prank" we tied their front door knob to the stairwell so that it wouldn't open and they would be forced to use their balcony to go to class, and therefore see the master artwork. It really was so genius and well planned. Somebody cut it before I could get a good picture this morning.

This is most likely to be continued...

Monticello Prank Wars

Sunday the boys of Apt 27 declared war by charging into our apartment with tshirts covering their heads. They somehow ended up locking us out of our own apartment. When they finally let us in (with the assistance of another of their roommates), they were hiding. When they came out they threw pillows, chips, blankets, and even a broom (in a javelin-throw type way) at me. They stole Loie's cereal. Basically, they have asked for war.

So that night, with our good friends Gwen, the mastermind of all things devious, we plotted revenge during ward prayer. They all left to go to ward prayer, with their lights off and door unlocked--perfect. We quickly replaced all their cereal bags with junk (paper, old caramel corn, dead flowers we had hanging around that we cut up...) and notes that said things like "you smell like broccoli...and poop!" (reference to potter puppet pals on youtube) and "this is how you steal cereal" and stupid stuff like that. We put food coloring in their milk so it turned pink (just to throw them off with their already strange new cereal) and we got a guy friend to go back to their bedrooms and put honey on their bedroom doors. Then we painted "an eye for an eye" on their balcony sliding door.

Well, we didn't hear much that night, so we entertained ourselves by taking ninja pictures of holding their cereal hostage. We posted them in the morning to facebook so they would know who they were messing with.

Monday night, we made up a series of clues/rhymes that led them to their cereal. They actually caught us spying on them during the hunt, and chased us down which scared us, but later they kept going anyways. We had hid the cereal in a washing machine in the laundry room.

Well, this morning (Tuesday), we were up super early doing homework and keeping an eye out for funny business. They had been measuring our door yesterday, so we were a little paranoid. However, somehow they still timed it this morning without any of us seeing what they dropped off. In reference to our broccoli comment, they pureed broccoli and what looked like crystallized ginger (and who knows what else). It looked like cat barf.

It smelled horrendous. There were stupid little broccoli heads sticking up out of the shoe box that held two plastic cups overflowing with the junk (see the video). The cups had messages, which then had 9 letters we were supposed to decipher. We still are not sure what the message says...I guessed "zebra foul"...but basically they just gave us fuel for our next prank. I think we might clean their windows with this stuff.

The New Family Home Evening

One of our FHE brothers did spray paint art on the streets of San Francisco for a summer. There really are just cool tricks to it, you don't necessarily have to be artistic. I really want to try this on my own sometime (we didn't have time that night, because it started raining after this video). Who says FHE is lame now??

Missionary Moment

With a new semester, comes new visiting teaching assignments. I got an awesome new companion, who was already my friend and we both did EFY this summer (even though in different states), so you can imagine our nerdy excitement to be teachers together. To add to this excitement we got assigned the ONLY nonmember in the whole ward. I will call her Mary for this post. She is from Guatemala, and lives in the only house in the ward. No one seemed to know much about her. We were determined!

Sunday we went over and she was not there, so we stayed and chatted with her roommate, asking her questions about her. Not but five minutes later, guess who should walk in?? Mary. She told us we were really lucky to catch her. She also asked immediately if we were her visiting teachers. She had had them before, but they would just come by and visit like a friend. We responded by "well, would you like a lesson?" She said yes she would! However, she has also been sent missionaries plenty of times, and didn't like that, so we agreed to meet back up on Thursday to give her a special lesson. We stayed and got to know her that day and we were so excited she was so chill and willing to work with us.

Thursday comes around, and all the sudden, my companion and I end up with a MILLION other things that came up right around the time we said we would teach Mary. I had our first girls intramural volleyball tournament game, and we were on a winning streak, but also could not forfeit any more times if not enough girls showed up. I was also supposed to have a flag football game before that, and dinner group that ran late. My companion had canceled a date, and was wanting to go to a workout class later. I tried and tried calling Mary to see if we could come earlier, but she didn't answer her phone or the door. My companion and I decided we would push everything aside for our original 8:00 pm appointment. We prepared for about a half hour, using preach my gospel, an old talk from her brother, and lots of prayer and discussion. We decided to talk about families (which worked well because the vt lesson this month was even about strengthening families). We were sooo excited and feeling great and were hoping she would be there.

We get there. That same roommate comes to the door and we discover Mary is not home. We were soooo sad, but I had randomly decided to bring along the notepad we had used to write some scriptures on and we sat at their table writing a note and chatting with that roommate. For some reason this took about 15 minutes. At 8:15 who should walk through the door?? Mary! She gave us big hugs and said sorry and she somehow left her phone home that day and she would never let this happen again. We were just so excited, we went right into the living room and started with a prayer soon after that. We went into the importance of families, and how we love them and want to be with them forever; Mary loves her family, she has a German dad, latina mom, a younger sister and older brother. We talked a little about the temple because she had had questions about hat before. It was a really good discussion and I shared my testimony about families and personal experiences, including a little about Ally, and how I have peace in my life with the knowledge of the gospel. We also discussed being children of God, and we are all kind of a family. We also said even though not all families are perfect (including Mormons), that the truth is always the same, and if we live our life like the Family Proclamation says, with faith, prayer, repentance, etc and basing our homes around Christ, happiness is possible. I also bore my testimony to this, and how the gospel was just good.The Spirit was so strong, my companion and I definitely felt it, we just hope Mary did too. We think she did by some of the expressions on her face and honest questions she asked us. She is going to watch conference this weekend with another friend, so maybe something will really strike home with her!

I know I learned a valuable lesson about trusting in putting the gospel first in my life. We could have just given up and done those other things, but we decided this was such a unique opportunity to share the gospel, we would definitely put visiting teaching and the Lord first. Even though our first visit "counted" for this month, we would have missed out on soo much more if we would have left it at that. Not only did I get an awesome experience, but someone got to hear my testimony and learn a bit more about the church. This is also an even stronger testimony of putting a little more into visiting teaching (even though I do try to most of the time). How appropriate considering we just heard the general Relief Society broadcast! Can I just say I love Relief Society? It really is such an inspired program. And even though Satan in trying to prevent us from building the kingdom, the marvelous work continues to move forth!

Who would have thought I had missionary opportunities in Provo??

Field Trip!

I am in a class called RMYL 189, and its Careers in Recreation. It's a one credit, one day a week, one block class. It's only the second week of school and we went on the best field trip I have ever been on.

We went to 7 different recreational facilities and interviewed administrators/managers/ big wigs of those places.

I had captions and descriptions for why i took the pictures I did, but the set up of my blog doesn't space it out right and it jumbled everything.

.

After this, my camera died, so I missed the entire second day to take pictures, sorry! Basically we toured Aspen Grove, Provo Beach Resort, ate at Magleby's (highly recommend it, it was sooo delicious, especially their famous chocolate cake), and then went to the Marriott Hotel on Center Street, which is international and full service, so that was cool, and we got to tour the presidential suite. This was an introduction to things you can do with this major, and I feel like this was a big help for me. However, I am still not sure of what emphasis I should do. Thoughts?