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.

Entourage Trip to Minneapolis

So this past Halloween weekend me and Heather visited Minneapolis to hang out with the Entourage (and everyone's significant others). This is the first rendition of our semi-annual trip where it was more than the 4 of us. We all wanted to go to Minn because we knew that Jeremy was finishing up law school soon and wanted to make sure to visit while we had a chance. Plus, this was the 1st chance Heather could meet my good friends... So this is what went down:

Minneapolis Skyline at night (kind of looks like Gotham)

Thursday: We got delayed because the airport in Minneapolis decided to shut down all but 1 of its runways... now that's got to be some bad decision-making. We were supposed to get in at midnight (due to the 2 hour timechange) and we got in at 2:30am (and so did Will & Nick). Because we all got in at the same time, we took the light rail together to downtown where Jeremy picked up up. He lives in the "Warehouse District" which is a refurbished area of town that still has a lot of character, yet is still nice. We all chitchatted until about 4am, made our inflatable beds, and called it a night.

Friday: Waking up and getting 8 people ready takes a while. We got out in the early afternoon and took a trip to the Minnapolis Institute of Art. It was quite large.... large enough to get my dogs barking! My favorite place was the Modern Art section, as well as the Sub-Saharan section (see my friend Will's blog for pics)...afterwards, we all went to 7 Sushi, a very nice restaurant where I had a delicious crabcake.. .it was so flavorful

All of the crew (starting with Jeremy on left and going clockwise: Jeremy, Justyne, Heather, Riley, Nick, Robbie, Ashley; Will is taking picture)

After dinner, we all decided to go back and get ready to go out on the town. It was Jeremy and Justyne's defacto bachelor/bachelorette party since they decided to elope. We had a good time, and again made it home quite late in the morning.

Saturday: After another late start (and some doughnuts/ cold pizza for lunch) a big group of us went to the Mall of America. I was rather quite vocal about not wanting to go, but was the only one. To me, it is just a regular mall... except imagine your local mall with the exact same layout stacked on each other 4x. Plus, it was Halloween (child trick or treaters) and a Saturday, so the whole Minnesota population was there, making it difficult to move around. Nonetheless, Jeremy and Will liked an inflatable Ice Cream Cone, which was the highlight.

After the MoA, we all got ready to go to the Halloween Party at the Law fraternity (?, not sure that is what it is called) house. Anyways, it is the house Jeremy lived at for a few years (not like a typical fraternity). Nick and Robbie dressed as Mormon missionaries (not sure I agree with that), Jeremy was the Minnesota sleeping pilot, Will was Plaxico Burress, and I was Kanye West (Heather was Taylor Swift). Everyone looked spot on in their costumes, while I looked rather white for a rapper, so Heather at the last minute, painted my face black... this would go down as a bad decision, as I looked terrible. Luckily, Heather would end up giving me her blond wig to wear, so I then looked like what Will called "Zombie Rupaul". Nonetheless, my terrible costume turned into a memorable one. The other odd thing was that the party was completely dead when we showed up, so we were able to just make it our own, which was a good thing.... Later that night, the Entourage had a secret late night dinner, to just hang out by themselves, which the significant others would not know until this was written.

Sunday: Will and Ashley had an early afternoon flight this day, so we missed them on this day. So after another late start, we got up and walked to the Sculpture Garden, an area that I had been pleading to go to. This was a great decision. Lots of art pieces placed very well within a park. The most famous one is the Spoonbridge with a Cherry (see below). I took many pics at all different angles, and think this one with the Basilica in the background is the best. We spent a lot of time here, as there were interactive art pieces (including transluscent mirros, poetic benches, and a swinging platform)... We then trotted over to the Basilica to take pics of the great architecture, and a few decided to go sit in on Mass. I liked it, and we stayed about 10 minutes. ...afterwards, a good dinner at Joe's Garage.... because we missed a play at The Guthrie (dang matinee), we decided to walk the Miss River front and downtown art scene.. this was really cool and again looked like the picture at the start of this blog... but the Guthrie was awesome.

The SpoonBridge (although its hard to see how it spans the water on this pic)

Monday: We woke up at 4:40am, to catch our 7 am flight... not cool, although I thought we all handled it well. More pics are to be seen once we hang out.

My 'eye-opening' experience with Healthcare

So if you hadn't heard.. I recently had a chalazion (sounds terrible, I know... but an infected one is called a hordoleum)... but all it is a clogged sebaceous gland in the eyelid, and as a result, you get a raised bump that was about half the size of a dime. Google it, you'll find much more disgusting pictures than the one I had.

When I found out I had it, Heather WebMD'd it and found out that I should put a warm compress on it, and if it doesn't go away, go see a doctor.... I did this.... and it didn't go away. I went to the ASU health clinic and waited 4o minutes to hear the doctor tell me exactly what Heather told me... except to see an ophthalmologist instead. That was $10. Ok..

So I warm compress it for 10 more days and it doesn't go away...(by the way, warm compressing your eye really makes you pretty worthless, as you can't really do anything except lay down or watch TV). I went to the ophthalmologist and after a 20 minute wait, I was told that I had a chalazion (I already knew this) and that I would need to come back to have outpatient surgery. Again, nothing new that I already did not know. That was $35.

I wait another week to finally go in to have it lopped off... after some numbing of the eyeball and some anesthetic dropped into the eyes, he 'pinched' it off (there was some pain) and told me to keep some gauze on it for 5 minutes and would be back.... 40 minutes later he shows up to tell me all is good and that I could leave, since the damn office was closing up and locking doors anyway. He totally forgot I was there. That was another $35. Add a $5 prescription onto that, and I can't figure out if the time or $ was the big loss in this endeavor.

Really! Hulu you're awesome!

I was just visiting Hulu (for those that don't know, its a site with a bunch of videos) and on the front page was a video that looked to be a bunch of football players gathered around a coach... their jerseys were red and white and the title of the video (documentary) was 'Second to None'. I started thinking is that the Utes. It was!

Then I figured it was just a college football highlight video. It wasn't. It's a full on documentary of the Utes 2008 season on the front page of Hulu. Here's the link.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/101888/second-to-none