"BIG A STAR STAR" SHOW! (as my dad calls it...)

I found out about the Big A** show through listening to the X96 radio station. I bought tickets right after I had heard about it. My wonderful boyfriend came with me along with my sis and her friend. It was a blast! We saw Switchfoot, Anberlin, Neon Trees (by far the best band that we saw?), and Panic at the Disco (the lead singer got malaria, so the other singers pitched in to help). Pictures are more fun than words so here you go:

Right when we arrived, it was starting to rain = Lauren looks like a wet dog :)


Lead singer of Switchfoot. He literally was 15 feet away from us!!


Us with Brogan Kelby... yeah we didn't know who he was either...

Just hangin' out :) waiting for Anberlin


Anberlin in the flesh!!


After we saw Neon Trees! Best one by far, and notice by my wet bangs that it rained...

If he pulls this face, I can't help but laugh :) Us watching Panic at the Disco.

I had such a good time at the concert! Nate always makes my weekends more fun :)

Catch up time!

It's been a while since I've written. I'm not worried because there's maybe 5 people that read this blog haha.

So going back clear to November 24th! Nate came up for Homecoming weekend :) He got to Logan Friday night and we went on a triple date with his cousin Trevor, and Amanda (my roomie) and Matt (her beau). We started off clear out by the Wal-Mart in Providence. The goal was to flip a coin, and if it was heads, you turned right and if it was tails, you turned left at a stop sign or stop light. The goal was to get to Chilis in less than 30 minutes and the loser paid for everyone's dinner. We could only flip this coin. We started off going in circles, and I tried so hard to be honest each time. Sometimes when Nate would say, "Ok we NEED a tails on this one" magically it would happen... (I didn't cheat... maybe). Anyways, we were last to the arrive at Chilis and I was so nervous that Nate would have to pay... but all the boys were nice to him and he only paid for me :)

Miniature golfing with my date. Isn't he handsome?


I love this girl!!

He had never seen the Logan temple before, so we went there and took lots of pictures. I'll only put a few up...

Right after becoming true aggies!

Chicag- OH! So close...

I'm in the beautiful city of Chicago for Annual Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Conference!! I'm so excited! What could be better? I'm missing school, and I don't have to do any homework for the rest of the week. I miss Nate, but I'm seeing him next week :)

The trip here started out as a good one. We flew from Salt Lake to Minneapolis and I sat by the coolest woman. People who know me know that I'm a very friendly person especially with strangers, so naturally I asked her where she was from and where she was headed. She said, "I'm going to go see my boo, you know girl? He's a football player up in Wisconson" She busted out her sweet iPad2 and showed me a picture of him. "He's fine right?" She's dating a Green Bay Packer! Crazy huh? The more I got to know her, the cooler she became. She is a legit model and knows all these famous people. She told me she's been modeling since she was 18 and she's traveled all over the world for her job. "I tried bein' married for six years, but he was the wrong guy for me." She knows tons of famous people. Once again, busted out the iPad2 and showed me pictures of her modeling and a bunch of pictures of her with famous people like Nelly and Little Jon and Sean Paul. I just kept thinking to myself, her life is SO much different than mine is. I'm just this geeky Mormon and she has people make her look stunning every day. I've never met anyone like her in my life. It was such a fun plane ride. Oh, one more thing that I can think of right now. I felt really cheap sitting next to her with my "Engineers are Sexy" shirt and my worn out jeans. She had to have been wearing $300 jeans at least, and she was wearing a head wrap thing. She looked legit. I can't imagine living that kind of lifestyle. Having people buy you extremely nice things, having your own body guard and driver, staying in a mansion in Africa, going to Paris, Germany, etc...
Even though she's extremely cool and I was a little star struck without really knowing her, I'm still grateful to be going to school and living in Utah, and dating the most fantastic man ever :)

Tomorrow is workshops and more workshops until I pass out from fatigue. More updates tomorrow!!

Get Dirrrrty!

This weekend was a blast! Friday was Madelyn's birthday. She turned 18! Look out! Now she's old enough to buy dry ice! I didn't see much of her because she went on a date :) I on the other hand had to go pick up our packets for the race on Saturday. It was pouring the whole drive home. I went to Nate's house looking like a wet dog, but he didn't care. He was just excited to see me :) I said hi to his family and then we went to my house for dinner and my family's company. He had two tests on Monday, so we decided to have a study party at his house with his cousin, Amy. I brought my homework over and tried to work on it, but all of us were having a hard time focusing. I was so tired so after a while I fell asleep on Nate while he was talking to Kyle about cars (can you blame me for falling asleep?)

Saturday was the Dirty Dash in Soldier Hollow! Let me say something, this is the best way to get a workout in! The Dirty Dash is a 10K run in a whole bunch of mud and nastyness! We climbed over walls, crawled through barrels and trudged through swampy smelly mud water, and I found mud in places I didn't know I had. Here are some pics:

Before: (Actually three minutes before the race started...we were running late)


Almost done! (I love my sis :) )


Throwing Megs in the mud


Can you believe Nate kissed me covered in this? He's the best :)


Look at how blue our eyes look with all this mud around our faces!
One guy looked at us and said, "Woah, your eyes are creepy..." Haha I love it!


The group:


Once I got all cleaned up and pretty, Nate took me out to Red Lobster for the first time! I'd never been there and we were both excited to eat all the shrimp we could. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but just imagine one good looking couple because that's what we are :)

Overall, pretty freakin' awesome weekend! I just have to work really hard this week because this weekend is homecoming week at USU and Nate's coming up for the dance!! I can't wait!

First two weeks of school

This weekend was a great surprise. I was kind of bummed because I wasn't going to see Nate this weekend (I know it's been 4 whole days since the last time I saw him) because I was planning on studying for the GRE and doing homework with some classmates. I was asking Emily what her plans were for Friday, and she told me she had to go to Salt Lake for a scholarship dinner, and she was taking Josh. I was like, WHAT?? you're going to Salt Lake? I want to go with you and then you guys can meet Nate! So as they were in their dinner, I met up with Nate and we went to the Gateway. We actually ran into Megan's friend Heather and decided to eat with them at Z Tejas. Heather told me Megs was actually coming so we stayed and surprised her when she sat down :) It was great to see her and even better being with my cute boy :)

Here's a picture of us at the restaurant. Pay no attention to the Asian stunt-double pretending to be me. She just gets really squinty-eyed the happier she is :)

Life as I know it...

This is Nate :) We've been dating for a little over 2 months (2 months and 6 days, but who's counting?)



We met at a singles ward activity over the summer and have been together basically every day during the summer, give or take a week or two for family vacations. He is a great guy and I miss him a lot now that I'm up in Logan for the final year and he's home going to SLCC and working.


I've had a ton of fun with him during these past two months. We've had kind of a weird summer together and more hospital dates then I would have liked to have.

During the beginning of July, Mads went in the hospital for open heart surgery and due to recovery problems, stayed there for the entire month of July. So for all of that month, I would go to work and then go to the hospital until 9 or 10 pm and then go home and hang out with Nate for like an hour or so and then go to bed and start all over again. I think Nate came up at least 4 times and I loved it!

Then in August, his twin brother Brad went in for Scoliosis surgery. Brad has Cerebral Palsey so after the surgery, he ended up going to South Davis Hospital in Bountiful, and after a long three weeks, he finally came home! Everyone was excited!

I love being around Nate. He makes me a better person and his family is just as awesome. I'm going home this weekend for Labor day to see my family and him :)

I'm going to try and update more often.

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. :)

Just because I don't want to do homework...

A week or so ago, my dad sent me this email that I will display in one moment. Usually chain emails are really dumb, for real! But this one had me laughing for a good 10 minutes straight. So for your entertainment and pleasure:

WE ALL LOVED HIM,

Please join me in remembering a great icon of the entertainment community.

The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and trauma complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71.

Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, the California Raisins, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies and Captain Crunch.

The grave site was piled high with flours.

Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy and lovingly described Doughboy as a man who never knew how much he was kneaded. Born and bread in Minnesota , Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with turnovers. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes.

Despite being a little flaky at times, he still was a crusty old man and was considered a positive roll model for millions.

Doughboy is survived by his wife Play Dough, three children: John Dough, Jane Dough and Dosey Dough, plus they had one in the oven. He is also survived by his elderly father, Pop Tart.

The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

Oh when you're goin' on a date, you put on a shirt, and you drive...to the DAAATE!

Based on the title of this post I obviously went on a date tonight. But I put on more than a shirt. I put on my coat because we went to a USU hockey game. Also it has been snowing ALL day today, and tonight wasn't any different. I'm pretty sure I couldn't feel my toes the entire time but I still had fun. USU played Texas A & M, who are also the Aggies. We had a small cheering crowd that would cheer, "Let's go Aggies!" I hope they weren't cheering for the other team because that would be rather foolish. We beat them 8-0 anyways. During the game, I almost got hit with a speeding hockey puck that flew over the glass and grazed my hair. It was kind of intense. It would have been cool to get a black eye from it, but seeing as I have an engineering conference in less than a week where you have to look really nice, I'm glad I ducked.
After the game, we drove through the blizzard to a place called zeppes, and Italian ice/custard shop in Providence. We got a gelata and let me tell you it was heaven in a cup! I highly recommend anyone in the cache valley area to at least try it.
After much slipping and sliding on the road, we made it back to my place, where my date thought it would be funny to throw me in 1.5 feet of snow. It was funny for about 10 seconds, and then it was on. After a few minutes, we were both covered and freezing, so we went inside and drank some hot chocolate. I roasted his mug, so he couldn't drink it for like 5 minutes. Mine was just right... oops. It was a great date and I hope to see him in the future :)