Can YOU win it in a minute?

Last night was one of the most fun and unique group dates I've ever been on! My date picked me up and we went to his buddy Preston's house, where his roommates had decorated their apartment especially for us. There were pictures of the temple and MormonAds about celestial marriage right by the dinner table. On the table there were three pamphlets including one entitled: "The purpose of life". There were a couple more on celestial purity. It was pretty funny :) For dinner, we ate Hawaiian Haystacks which tasted amazing!!

One of Preston's roommates was playing guitar at Fredricos for the night, so after dinner, we went and watched him play while playing Uno at the same time. He did a big Jason Mraz tribute, so I really liked it. I also saw one of my favorite people in the world there, Andrea. She always makes me happy :)

Once the concert was over, we headed back to Preston's apartment to play "Minute to Win It!". I've only seen that show once and thought it was pretty entertaining to watch. Let me tell you, it's WAY more fun to actually play! Jake and I were competing against two other couples. The girls started out first by picking "tic tac toe". The game went as follows: 9 cups were set up on the table in a box-like fashion, and each of the girls had one minute to get a three in a row, like tic tac toe. I went last and ended up smoking the two girls, I got three in a row in 12 seconds! It was so fun!

The boys were next.
Their challenge was called "shot glass" or something like that. There were 3 tall skinny prom glasses with a diameter big enough for a ping pong ball to fit through. The challenge was to take a tape measure from five feet away, put the ping pong ball on the top, and slide it down the tape and place it in each of these glasses in one minute. Jake was the only one of the guys to succeed!! :) That's what you get when you have two engineers on one team. ;)

Girls turn:
We'll call this game "ping pong launch" even though I'm pretty sure that's not what it's called. The object of this challenge was to get in at least 3 ping pong balls into a laundry basket on the other side of the room by launching them with a towel if that makes any sense. It was kind of like when you play water balloon catch and toss with a towel, but the boys were holding down two corners of the towel. I'll try and show you...


Me and the boys< laundry basket and Jake throwing me balls.
(I'm the O with arms throwing the towel)
_o __
O _l - - - - - - - - - - - -l__l O
o

Needless to say, I was the only girl to do this in under a minute as well :)

The boys next challenge was called "candy elevator" They had to put string attached to two pencils glued together behind their ears and pull the gum on the "elevator" up to their mouth and eat it in a minute. Jake did it the fastest, but he missed his mouth and dropped it so we were disqualified :( I'll try and draw another picture with my keyboard...

Ok I tried drawing a picture of him doing it, but blogger wouldn't have it. So you're just going to have to use your imagination... sorry :(

My last challenge was pretty hilarious and I'm glad that no one recorded it... 5 ping pong balls were placed into an empty tissue box and that was attached to a belt. I put that belt on so that the tissue box was behind me, and my job was to shake out the balls in one minute. I think I did it in 58 seconds...I was tired after that too. You try and twist and jump up and down for a minute straight! I'm not going to attempt to draw it. I'm sure you get the jist of it. Also I'm sure you're sick of reading this. I'm sick of typing it. Last challenge ahead.

The last challenge was for the boys. They needed to bend down and grab paper bags of various heights with their mouths and place them on the table. Alas, both Jake and I don't come close to touching our toes, so we lost. I still had a blast and would totally do it again :)

Look at the last post, now back to this one, now back to that one, now back to THIS ONE!

Ok now I can talk about my awesome weekend!

On Thursday, I went and ate real sushi for the first time in my life. I was pleasantly surprised on how good it actually was! I'm definitely going back there again soon!

Friday night was a TON of fun! I went with my friend to his mission companions house for a little party. This guy's house is HUGE! They had every game you could think of: ping pong, air hockey, fooseball, poker table, you name it, they had it! J and I played air hockey and fooseball. We just won't say who won... but his name started with a J :)

After that, I invited people over to Lani's annual Green Party in honor of St. Patrick. She always throws a great party, with so many decorations, and yummy chocolate fondue :) Here are a few pics from the night. There is not one of us that can be serious in any picture... That's why I love these guys :) I can't wait to room with them!!

Josh thinks he's so buff...


One of their many attempts to take a decent picture... never ended up getting one.


We are two good looking people... haha!


Jake sat on three pillows to "appear" taller than everyone else


I told you there is not one normal picture of any of us...


Two of my favorite people in the whole world: Matt (Patt Metersen) and Lani :)






That was Friday. Saturday, we all went to a blacklight party at my engineer buddy Kyle's house. We had a blast! We danced under the blacklights and drew on our arms with higlighter. It was such a fun night! I laughed harder this weekend then I have in a LONG time... :) This makes me happy. Now for some pictures:


Flash on:


No flash:

Palm Springs!

I always love going to SWE conference! It's a great way to network, socialize, and get out of freezing Logan for a while. In the previous post I mentioned that we took a bus for 12 hours to get there, but once we got there it was really fun.

We got there around 7 p.m. and decided to look around for something to do after checking into our hotel. We discovered that it was the fair or something because there everyone and their dogs literally were there! I swear that every person we saw had a dog, or dogs were riding in strollers. Those Californians loved their dogs. The fair had tons of food, and vendors selling jewelry and art pieces. It had singers trying to earn money and one artist would create his masterpieces right on the spot using spray paint. It was incredible! I'll speak for Erin and Emily when i say this, but the glass fireplaces were probably my favorite part:





Then we ate some frozen yogurt at this wonderful place:




The next day, we went on a 3 hour hike with most of our group. We climbed little hills and just soaked up all the sun we could. When we got back, we hit the pool for a good 3-4 hours and got mildly burnt. That night we had the opening social with the other sections in our region. We saw girls from the U, BYU, CalPoli, Weber, and a couple more. It was fun because the party was right by the pool! We ate food and socialized with the other sections. That night, we "watched" exercise videos that were free in our hotel because we were too full to move!




This is us with Lucy from "I Love Lucy" She's not real, only just a statue. Also, no making comments about how awesome my hair looks in these pictures.




Erin left her wallet, drivers license and money back in Utah, so we had to go to Chase bank so she could get some money for the rest of the trip. Her mom works at Chase so Erin was able to get some moolah. sidenote: There were many dogs INSIDE the bank too! It was so funny!



This is us at a burger joint called "The Grind". I would highly recommend it. These people had great service and delish burgers and sweet potato fries :)



As you can see, all we did was eat all day every day. This is a piece of 4 layer thick chocolate cake along with his friend german chocolate cheescake :) SO YUMMY!

Saturday was the actual conference. We woke up early for a fancy breakfast and keynote speaker that inspired all of us to take chances and to not be afraid of failure. After breakfast, the rest of the day consisted of multiple workshops and speakers. Then we had lunch and another speaker. After lunch, we went and got our swag at the Career Fair and then spent an hour at the pool lovin' life. That night we had dinner (I got the Salmon) and another speaker. It was great, but I was ready to get out of my business clothes, and into my swimsuit to go to the hot tub, which is what we did after dinner.

Sunday, we walked 2 miles to go to church in the sun, and then the members there shuttled us back to our hotel. I love that church is the same everywhere you go :) We got back on the bus and headed home at 12:30 p.m. We didn't get home until 4 a.m. on Monday morning!!! It was the longest bus ride of my life... I'm glad I went, but I'm more glad that the week after was spring break!!

The Longest Three Days of my life...

Weekends are my favorite :)

I need to back up because it's been a while. I'll start with my 3rd regional SWE (Society of Women Engineers) conference held this year in warm and sunny Palm Springs, California. We left on Thursday morning at five a.m. on March 3rd on a bus for 12 hours to get there. Before I talk about that, I need to back up again. The three days before we left was one of the hardest three days of my life. On Monday, I had a HUGE Composites program due at 4 p.m. Those who know my engineering life know that I am not a very good programmer, so it takes me like 3 times longer to finish the same program as another person. I'd been working on it all weekend, and put at least 15 or more hours into it. Monday came, and it still wasn't done, so I skipped all my classes and finished it at 3 p.m. I was so exhausted after that. Luckily my awesome friend Amanda helped me find the problem with my program and fixed it. I owe her big time!

After I turned that in, I had a huge design presentation due on Tuesday at 1 p.m. My team presented and then sat through 4 more hours of other design presentations! It was such a long day. After that I had a HUGE 10% of my grade project for Instrumentation due that night at midnight. My entire class was in the lab that night, and I turned my project in at 11:52 p.m.

After THAT I had to go home and pack because we were leaving at 5 a.m. However, I had another assignment that I had to get done before I left, so I stayed up all night working on that assignment and making a scrapbook page for a SWE competition. I only got 1 hour of sleep that night, but managed to sleep for like 8 on the bus. To shorten these posts, I will terminate this one and talk about SWE conference on the next post. :)