THE Haircut, a "Cyborg Meteorite," and the Momentary Pillow Snatcher

Here we go on the rundown of the past week:

Last Monday we washed the car for our Family Home Evening activity.  At Wymount where we live they have a free car wash area, and the guy in the washing area next to us had a very nice Mustang that he was waxing and cleaning very nicely.  He was probably wondering why we were even bothering to wash our poor little 1999 Carolla, but she cleans up pretty nice.  We're sooooo grateful to finally have a car out at school, a first for both of us. It's nice to not have to walk everywhere, although generally we still do the 30 minute walk to and from school every day.

Last week I also chopped my hair off.  Now, before you think I just did this on a whim, I've asked Paul over the course of a month or so if he thought it would be a good idea if I got a drastic cut and he was supportive.This was pretty momentous, because ever since my hair first grew out as a toddler it's always, always been at least the length of my shoulders.  I wasn't sure what my hair would end up doing if I cut it  that short, so I was taking a chance of it looking terrible.

I walked into the salon and told the stylist I wanted to chop it off and showed her this picture as a guide for what style I wanted:

Nope, don't know who this celebrity is.

So the stylist saw that picture and said she thought we could donate the hair with it going that short.  She separated it into two pig tails and started trying to saw through them with her scissors.  It took her about a minute to get through each side and she said her hands were getting sore because there was so much hair to cut through all at once.  She was pretty excited about it since it was a "major style change" and took pictures of the cut to brag about afterwards.  They kept the hair to donate but here's a picture. It looks different now after being washed a few times than it did in this picture right after the cut, but here's the immediate aftermath:

Paul says: "You caught some squirrels!"

Sometimes I think now I look like Pheobe from The Magic School Bus or a 90's equivalent haircut.

My favorite class this semester is Persuasive Writing.  We essentially read articles, write about them, and have an open class discussion about it for the whole class period.  This week we were talking about how students in college aren't really getting out of their education what they could/should - either due to the way professors teach or because students have a "consumer" attitude towards school of, "I pay for it, I expect you to cater to me and my desires for how this class should be taught and what grade I should get."  I pointed out that in reality, I probably forgot about 90% of what I learned in college before my mission.  So, in a sense - I figure college is in place first and foremost to teach us work and social ethics, to get us to work hard and dedicate ourselves, and at the end of the day our grades are really symbols of "this is how hard I'm willing to work for future employers."  I made that comment to my teacher and he said that in the 90's he was in a webpage developing startup and one of his co-workers was an older man with a long beard and who happened to be a nudist as a hobby.  This man told my professor once, "Yep, I walked away with a Masters in English.  I figure, though, that here's what they should really do which would be the equivalent of what I went through: they should bring people wanting to apply for a college degree up to a machine and tell them to put their thumb in a little slot.  They'd tell them, "The amount of time you can keep your thumb in that slot will determine the degree we give you."  They'd then bring down a screw that would slowly press the applicant's thumb tighter and tighter and harder and harder until they couldn't stand it anymore.  "Wow, this person's still got their thumb in!  They're all the way up to Masters level!"  and then they'd walk out with their degree.  I don't totally agree with that analogy, but I do kind of think that there's enough pain, sweat, and grit put into getting any college degree that the principle does kind of apply, since the majority of the knowledge we learn in school gets forgotten relatively quickly.  College does change us and our views and perspectives in some good ways, but at the same time I think a lot of the specific knowledge training could be done on the job with a lot less college in the picture.

I talked about this idea with Paul and this is the comic he shared with me:

I think it's better than this (especially at BYU), but it kind of has a point....

This week began the saga of the mysterious pillow stealer.  It really only lasted about 3 seconds, but one night I was peacefully sleeping on my big fluffy pillow when suddenly I felt the odd sensation that my head was falling.  At first I thought I was having a shockingly vivid dream but then I realized that my pillow was actually GONE.   I rolled over and looked to see Paul with my pillow on top of his head with his arm on it to keep it pressed down.  He likes to sleep with a pillow pressed on his head sometimes, and it turns out that my pillow was the nearest one so he totally stole it.  I nudged him a couple of times with no response and then said, "Paul... you have my pillow."  He gave it back willingly since he didn't even realize he had taken it but it was quite entertaining that Paul is actually a pillow kleptomaniac at heart.  I also always seem to end up stealing all the blankets, so it goes both ways.

Paul and I made cookies last week.... kind of.  It was supposed to be a really big, momentous occasion because it was our first batch of cookies as a married couple, right? However, I generally prefer to keep most of the butter in the freezer, and Paul likes to keep most of it in the fridge.  So... we only had frozen butter available because I didn't know we had run out of the thawed stuff.  I said, "It should be fine if we just soften it in the microwave, right?"  So we did... and here's what our cookies ended up looking like.

Super hard chocolate chip pancakes??

"Cookie sheet" has a whole new meaning.

To be fair, I actually ended up liking the way especially the hard ones tasted.  Almost carmely.  We ate a lot of cookies because we had planned to share them but since they looked so weird we were embarrassed to.

We also made cheddar bay biscuits and quinoa/turkey meatloaf.  That was pretty delicious.  I really like the biscuits especially, but Paul kept using some  slang I missed while on my mission and calling me his "cheddar bae" because of the biscuits (and my obsession with cheese in general.)  For those out of the loop, "bae" is kind of like baby or whatever.  We felt pretty fancy eating that meatloaf as well.

I guess I'm promoted to a cheddar bae now.

I was trying to find a quote using the words "too many" on BrainyQuote.com this week.  You can see here what came up as a suggestion for what I might have been looking for:

I guess Brainy Quote has a problem with my parent's generation.

THE CYBORG METEORITE

Last week in my "Intro to Journalism" class our teacher told us to go out on campus for 30 minutes and try to "discover" stories.  I was thinking for sure it would be highly boring considering that it's Provo... at a Mormon campus... midday on a weekday.  However, two other girls and I in a group went out in search of something interesting.

And boy, did we find it.  At first we weren't having much luck so I asked some random dude at his locker if he knew of anything newsworthy going on.  He said that he had a roommate on the Quidditch team and that there were lab rats in the top of the Spencer W. Kimball Tower on campus.  We decided to go investigate the rats and were leaving the science building when we saw a man walking into the doors just as we were leaving.  I nudged the girl in my group to ask him a question since I had asked the last one.  She suddenly turned towards the man and just said, "Hi, uh... what are you doooiiing??"  I was expecting him to ignore us because it was inherently awkward but he said,

"I'm here to find a geology professor to get him to identify the world's first cyborg meteorite!"

Of course we asked him to elaborate.  He pulled out a rock from his pocket and it did indeed look quite unusual with some sort of silver streak in it and bubble formations all over its surface.  The man said he had found it... but we didn't get the details of why since he was in somewhat of a hurry.  We managed to snatch a picture of him with the meteorite before he ran into the building to get it checked out by one of the geology professors.  

We didn't catch his name or anything but I'm almost tempted to email all of the geology professors and see if anyone actually met with him about it.  I'm curious A. about what type of rock it really was and B. what else that guy had to say about where he found it and everything.  Not sure if it'd be worth it to bother the professors though about it.  

So this guy ran off with his rock and we went to the 11th floor of the Spencer W. Kimball Tower to try and look at the rats.  We saw that the top floor had restricted access and we couldn't reach it.  In one of the computer labs on the lower floor we asked a girl about it.  She said that she used to work as a secretary in that building and that they've really had to tighten up the security there because there had been attempted break ins to the rat lab by students because they wanted to "free the animals" or whatever.  I thought that was pretty hilarious that something like that would happen at BYU campus of all places, but apparently it still does.  You wouldn't think destruction of property would be as much of an issue here.

Paul and I had the unexpected fortune of Austin Patterson (a friend of ours from back in VA) calling us on Friday night and saying he was in Provo right then at that very moment.  We were just making dinner and invited him over to eat enchiladas with us.  It was fun to have one of our Virginia friends unexpectedly drop in.  Afterwards, we headed to an event on campus called Fall Fest.  Now, my freshman year before my mission there was an 80's theme to this party and I showed up dressed appropriately because dressing up weird for an event is far more fun than being normal and boring. So  I showed up all decked out, and it turned out that halfway through the party they announced they were having a costume contest and gave out prizes to us for the effort.  The prizes were free tickets to the Homecoming Spectacular show, which normally are kind of pricey for poor students, so it was totally worth it.  Therefore, this year I convinced Paul to dress up with me on the off chance they were still doing that contest this year.  They didn't, but it was still fun to dress up together.  We went bowling for free with some of Paul's roommates last semester and Paul beat me by one measly point.

Paul's shirt says "Ponies forever" with an 80's pony on it.  He had cool neon shorts too.  Don't judge my hair from this picture, I tried extra hard to make it look not good that night. Big thanks to Paul's sister Becca for my awesome paint splatter shirt which she bequeathed to me.

I think the final story for this week happened in a fateful moment at the Utah equivalent of Goodwill called Deseret Industries.  We went there to look for a hairdryer and measuring cups (we still don't have either of these... maybe one day we'll suck it up and buy them.)  Paul and I separated to go look for the different items and I asked a nice man after a bit where I could find a hairdryer in the store.  I walked over to the electronics area and started looking around, but there were several people already standing there.  I tried to artfully just peer around them, and I took note that there was a young man standing right in front of the last area where I was trying to look.  I peered a little bit around him to try and see if there were hair dryers, and I wasn't seeing any.  Just as I was about to leave, however, I saw out of my peripheral vision this young guy seemed to get a bit closer to me (too close for comfort) and was looking at me seemingly out of the corner of his eye in a kind of creepy way.  I felt bothered so I bolted out of that area quick to go find Paul.  I walked over to an area that had some belts when I turned around and Paul just suddenly emerged from the racks and almost gave me a heart attack.  I asked him where he had been since I was looking for him for a while and he said, "Wait, what?? You just saw me over there at the electronics...."  I then realized who the young man was who was creeping on me.  We had a good laugh over me getting weirded out by my own husband's creeping.

The case of the creeper at D.I... I'm glad Paul's a lot cuter than this Minecraft creeper

I think that's all the highlights this week!  We're quite busy with school and everything, which has made it difficult to do too much other than reading... and reading... and writing... and reading some more... it kind of never ends.  Our goals are straight A's this semester, so here we go!  Just a pillow snatcher and cheddar bae doing life together.