springtime

i can hardly believe it's already almost may! finals have come and gone and now i am in the lovely city of chicago visiting my brother todd and his family. i love getting away from school and playing with kids. they are so funny. my little niece penny is calls me rie and my niece stella is always cracking me up. on saturday on the bus on the way to the art institute she said "i always stand up on buses. it's my new thing." silly kids.

i return to provo tomorrow. but no school for me for a few months! i am going to be working on campus, TA-ing a lab and doing research full-time. it will be busy but all that matters is when i go home, i don't have to do anything! well besides my other job, but that's okay. i am just excited to read books, go hiking, and run (which is very important considering the wasatch back is in a month and a half). oh and the other exciting thing to occupy my time... volleyball!!! the byu volleyball team is playing in the conference tournament this weekend at stanford and then hopefully will be going back there the next weekend (and me too!) to play in the ncaa final four! go cougars!

liquid nitrogen and sister beck

so i was looking at my past posts and realized, (1) i haven't posted in almost two months, and even when i did, (2) i haven't posted pictures in several months (maybe that means i just need to go back to england so i'll have things to take pictures of) and (3) they are all about school and how much i'm obsessed with chemistry. so basically it makes it look like my life is boring and i'm a complete nerd. both of which are true, so i guess it's a pretty good representation. but i'm going to try to be a little more exciting today.

a couple of weeks ago, my brother jay and his family came up from arizona for the weekend. it was so fun having 5 of my nieces and nephews here to chase around the volleyball court after the games. i love those kids so much! while they were here, we celebrated my dad's and my nephew caleb's birthdays and so i decided we should make liquid nitrogen ice cream. it was great! and i got a ton of the ice cream base and a huge dewar of liquid nitrogen so my roommates and i made some later on our kitchen floor. i love making that stuff. it makes me feel really intense.


this school year, i've had the blessing of serving in the relief society presidency in our ward. the other girls in the presidency are a few of the greatest girls i have ever met and they have taught me so much. they are so sweet and fun and we have some good times. one of those good times was the week before conference when we all drove up to salt lake together and went to the general relief society training meeting in the tabernacle.
there is a bit of a story behind this. sister doxey is a member of the general relief society board and also the mom of three people in our ward. she was in charge of putting together a slide show about visiting teaching for this meeting and she decided to put our ward in charge of getting pictures for it. so one saturday, she came down with a church photographer and we took pictures of the girls in our ward being the great visiting teachers they are: teaching each other to play the guitar, going to the temple together, cooking together, celebrating birthdays, studying together. it was really fun to be in these pictures and it got all of the sisters in our ward excited about visiting teaching. well, they showed this slide show this last week at the meeting so we weren't about to miss our debut.
the meeting was wonderful but the best part of the night was when we went up afterward to see sister doxey. she took us around to sister beck, sister allred, sister thompson and all the women on the board and introduced us to them. we felt like giddy little girls meeting our heroes. these women are incredible. the spirit was so strong in the meeting and i have learned, in that meeting and all year long, that relief society truly is an inspired organization. it has brought me so much joy and i am so grateful that i can be a part of it for the rest of my life.

now it's finals time and as always, i have been significantly less productive on reading days than i planned to be. why does this always happen?

what did you do tonight?

i sat in a dark room with a bright firing laser (which can burn out your eyes), wearing awesome glasses, and staring at computer for 7 hours. yes that is how i spend my friday nights. i went in to work at 3. after helping us set up the instrument, my professor left at 5 saying "have fun, be safe" leaving me and one grad student, taylor to see how much we could accomplish before we went crazy. taylor's wife and baby showed up a couple of hours later with some food (thank goodness) then stayed and watched the office on the computer. and this whole time, taylor would collect data, send it to my computer, then i would go crazy trying to remember each step in the 13 step process i developed for analyzing the data which included using excel twice, matlab once, and scientist, a program written for windows 3.1 and which shuts down spastically after every run.

sometimes my life cracks me up. at least i was home by 10.

cup 'o dirt

First, as an update on the crime that occurred in our apartment. Nature made all things right... Chum Lee has now been taken from this world. I will be honest and say it was a relief and we have all slept better since.

Today I discovered a new favorite thing to do: go to elementary school science fairs. The BYU chemistry club was asked to provide judges for a science fair in Provo and so I got to go and talk to 4-6 graders about their projects. It was one of the best things I've ever done. The kids were so cute and it was funny to see the whole spectrum of projects: from ones the kids did without any help (spelling engine "ingen") to ones you could tell parents did for them, the ones that followed the scientific method religiously to the ones who didn't know what "hypothesis" meant. There were the classic solar systems and volcanoes. There were also some on solar power and wind power. There was even one with an absorption spectrum for chlorophyll.

I learned a lot from them, maybe not about scientific principles but about why we do science. One little kid presented more of a research project on cigarette smoking and I was feeling sad that I might have to mark her down because of the lack of hypothesis, testing, etc. But I asked her why she did her project and she said "Well my dad smokes and I wanted to convince him to quit." I'll be honest, I gave her higher scores because of that.

I realized how awesome science fairs are. Maybe it's just the nerd that I am but it warms my heart to see kids being curious and designing and performing experiments to answer their questions.

Cold-blooded murder

This is mostly for Brittnie. I promised her that I would actually post something (I mean I just posted two and a half months ago, I'd say I'm doing pretty well). I'm pretty sure she is one of the few that even noticed, nevertheless here I am, actually writing on my blog.

Since I haven't posted since Halloween, I should note that my Thanksgiving and Christmas were fantastic.

Now I'm back at school. Life is pretty joyous except a sad event which occurred in our apartment this weekend. My roommate Jenny got two frogs for Christmas: Chum Lee and Pablo Sanchez. They became like our fourth and fifth roommates, we'd watch them sit at the bottom of the tank, occasionally tap on the tank to see if they would move... you could say we grew pretty attached. However, Sunday, Jenny and I got home from church to a terrible sight. Pablo was lying at the bottom of the tank, belly up... dead. Even more distressing was when we noticed that it appeared that one of his feet was under a rock--as if he was stuck there, could never come up for breath, and thus died from suffocation. Yes, it appears that Chum murdered his friend. I took it upon myself to clean the tank and dispose of the body. We had a small funeral with only his close friends. It was a very emotional time for all of us. Chum Lee remains with us and seems suspiciously happy to have the tank to himself. It makes me sick.

magic shows and ice cream

Happy Halloween! I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this Halloween. I ate pumpkin pie ice cream, babysat my little nephew Evan, laughed at a dumb scary movie, and hung out with Laura. It was a beautiful day.

Last night was pretty fantastic too. My roommates and I had a party which included eating a bunch of food at a barbecue place, going to the sister missionary mall, buying 4 cartons of ice cream for a dollar each, and eating ice cream while watching The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and then falling asleep.

Besides eating a lot of ice cream and watching Halloween movies, most of my life is full of classes, studying, lab reports, tests, homework, etc. Although I love it, it's getting kind of exhausting. I'm pretty excited for Thanksgiving break. I love both of my majors but I'm starting to think that I really am crazy for double majoring. But then I can't decide between the two. I thought chemistry until I had fun taking my last math test (sad, but true) and then I go back to chemistry when I remember the research I'm working on in atmospheric chemistry and how awesome it is. I love solving real problems. The project I'm starting in my research is about how radical self-reactions sometimes form harmful chemicals in our atmosphere (from the pollution we generate) or sometimes form a stable compound which then blows all over the world until it reaches the equator where it decomposes and forms the harmful chemicals there. I love that once we confirm that this is actually happening maybe we can find a solution and help improve the air for people all over the world.

Speaking of chemistry being awesome, last week was National Chemistry Week. We celebrated with spirit in the Benson building... complete with liquid nitrogen ice cream and magic shows. My niece and nephew, James and Ella, came to the magic show and James told me after that he wants to be a scientist and invent things. He was pretty impressed by the huge laser in my lab and later asked if I could build him a real lightsaber with it. I wish I could. That will be my next project...

Dear America, I am happy to be home.

I thought I'd write on my blog even though I'm no longer exploring another country. I apologize, but my blog is now going to be significantly less exciting and have significantly less pictures. So you all have permission to never read my blog again if you think that sounds boring.

I am back in Provo and loving it here. I have fallen in love with the mountains and trees and just in time for the most beautiful season of the year. The trees are changing and the weather is perfect and all I wish is that I had more time to be outside in it. But I have managed to get to the mountains a couple of times in the past month. I hiked Timp at midnight the first weekend I was home. Some of my friends from the Chemistry department organized it but I invited my friends Laura and Kate. Kate left a couple of days later for Jerusalem so it was wonderful to be with her before she left. Apparently hiking Timp at midnight the weekend before school starts is the thing to do because I ran into a bunch of people I knew up on top at sunrise.


That weekend I also moved into my new apartment. I moved out of Monticello into a new complex, Victoria Place II. I have fantastic roommates and I love our little apartment.

School has started and is keeping me really busy. I just found out that I got a research grant which is really exciting but it means I need to start working more. I'm doing research in an atmospheric chemistry lab studying gas phase kinetics. I am really excited to get working on this project even though I still don't really know what I'm doing.

Even though school is crazy, I'm still finding time to go outside occasionally. A couple of weekends ago, my roommate Jenny and our friend Brian went up to American Fork Canyon and hiked to Silver Lake. It was beautiful up there and it was so nice to be in the mountains and away from school for awhile.


Last weekend, I went with my roommates Alison and Jenny and our friend Ben to Provo Canyon to go rock climbing. I had never gone climbing outside before and I loved it. I regret not going before now.

Jenny and I

Me at the top.

So even though school is trying to take over most of my life, I'm not letting it win completely. I've loved seeing my family since I've been back, especially meeting my new nephew Evan. He's a cute little kid and I am so excited to live close enough to see him. I've also joined a Chemistry ultimate frisbee intramural team. We have 7 professors on the team and our team name is the Deprotonators. We even have awesome t-shirts that are the envy of the whole chemistry department (or at least we like to think so).


Okay so maybe that's just more evidence that school is taking over my life. Oh well. I'm enjoying it.