What have I been up to this holiday break?

Well, where do I start? The holidays started for me in mid December, around the 18th. I had just finished writing a good 1/3 of my thesis and would spend the next 3 days or so with Heather doing Christmas parties (one at the workplace & one at the family). The workplace party was a bit awkward, but there were fried bananas.... B-A-N-A-N-A-S! The family party was much better, including good food and good compnay. Afterwards, me & Heather visited the family house in Flagstaff, where we were able to have our own little Christmas. We exchanged presents, hit the town, and lounged around. Presents included DJ Hero, clothes, Arizona book, art book, smell good items (ie soy candle), and a few other things. I have in that time, become quite good at DJ Hero, and Heather believes that I've already beat the game basically.

After Flagstaff, I began my journey home by heading to San Diego to visit Will and see the Utes play Cal in their bowl game. As I have told Will many times, the day of the 23rd was well executed in terms of time and activities. We began with a hike at Torrey Pines, catching some good vistas of the ocean and landscape. Next, we picked up our cheap Field Level tix (row 23 ironically enough) for $30 a piece. This was followed by a game of Frisbee golf, which I had never played. I can't throw a frisbee, and it doesn't help when the holes intersect one another, meaning that frisbees are flying over your head at any time. However, I logged a few pars.
Finally, after a brief stop at Chipotle (love the vegetarian burrito), we began our travels to Qualcomm Stadium, where the Utes would easily handle Cal for their 9th straight bowl win, the longest active streak in NCAAF. Don't get me started on this stat, as I might ramble for a while!

[Need to insert pics Will took of the game here]

Amazingly enough, we decided to leave the game at 9pm and begin our drive home to Lehi, so we didn't arive the evening of Christmas Eve. We got to Mesquite by 2:30am and woke up in time to finish the drive off by 3pm the next day (including the time change into the MW time zone). Again, I was impressed by our brief 36 hours together.

In Lehi, I have stayed busy. I have played some pick-up bball twice now, went snowboarding (soon to be twice), went to Wendover with the Entourage and lost some money, and obviously spent time with the family during the holidays. Christmas was great, even though some say it gets boring with age, I still find the giving and receiving of presents to be quite enjoyable. What awaits me for the rest of the break will be less fun and more work... I am about to continue my work on my thesis and further my jumpstart on getting done by April/May, in time for graduation.

Elves dancing?

Heather made these videos that are pretty cool... they are videos of elves dancing around to funny music... but the elves have photo cutouts of people's faces.

Me and Heather: http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/usyORejuSPwbhIQ6?cmpid=ey_fb_friend

The Entourage (me, Will, Jeremy, & Nick): http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/HKvGAhU593UKV5Wq?cmpid=ey_fb_friend

Check them out, they are quite funny

(1) Odd things my girlfriend does...

I will be periodically posting things Heather does to enlighten others on who she is, to make fun of her, and to help me remember all the great things about her :) . I do so only because I love her.

1. She wears turtlenecks despite the fact that she does not like things touching her neck. As a result, she spends time holding the 'neck portion' of her shirt away from her body or puts it over her face. This only happens when she thinks about it touching her neck. I really thought I would have to cut it off most recently when she wore one.

House is on fire!?!?

Sorry for the gap in between posts... classes just ended and papers/presentations are finally done.

Yesterday (Friday) I woke up and decided to do a little work on my thesis. I worked throughout the day from 11am to 2pm. During that time I turned the heater on for the first time this year (that's a nice pro for living in PHX) for a total of 10 minutes. This is an important fact for later in the story.

At around 2pm I went to the kitchen to make me a veggie burger (yep, I know but its microwaveable and pretty easy to eat; plus I had 2 vegetarian roommates for 2 years). I had the microwave and toaster going (love toasted buns) and all of a sudden I smelt smoke in the kitchen (crazy how fast it surrounds you). I believe I was cutting cheese when I realized it was around me. Anyways, I went in panic mode and popped up the toaster to find the buns not even cooked (not the toaster), stopped the microwave (not that), put the vent on to get the smoke out, but it was already getting to the living room.

Now I'm in semi-panic mode. I'm thinking that its my fault. And the only thing that it could be was the heater, considering it was used for the first time in a year. I have now abandoned my lunch, running around the house to clear the smoke out. Meanwhile, the fire alarm in my room goes off. Full panic now consumes me. I go to the fire alarm to try and stop it... don't succeed in this. Now I'm thinking that I've somehow started this smoke/fire, and will be responsible for all the fire trucks/services that come to the house. I open the front door to get the smoke out and run out to already see a cop outside the condos. He yells, "there's a fire, you need to get out" and I yell, "all I did was turn the heater on for 10 minutes.... and it wasn't the toaster". He yells back in quite a confused daze, "there is a fire, you need to get out and help me get other people out of their apartments". I yell, "I promise, its just smoke in my place."

I then see about 3-5 fire trucks pull up and begin to realize that there is a fire in the condo that is directly on our backside (aka we share a wall, which turns out to be a fire wall luckily). I proceed to get others out of their condos. One guy was sleeping the whole time and firemen had to go in and wake him up as smoke filled his room, which is crazy. Turns out that a candle (I think it may have been illegal substances) set the fire in the place behind us, and clear (not black, thankfully) smoke filled our whole house. Now we are in the process of getting everything back to a regular, non-campfire smell. All in all, we (me, roommate, and his cat) are ok, I just stink like smoke all the time.