Grey's Anatomy at 2 a.m.

Edit: probably you shouldn't read this.





I finally caught up on Grey's Anatomy. And this past week's episode?

OHMYGOSH SHONDA RHIMES WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?

I AM ALREADY A CRYING EMOTIONAL MESS AND NOW THIS?

No more African child for Meredith and Derek? Young mother patient with the son and the husband and Avery messed up her first operation and the screws he put in to fix her spine fell out and are now shredding her heart to tiny pieces? And Teddy has to operate on her while her own husband is throwing up blood and he needs an operation because a tumor is growing in his chest? So Yang has to operate on him and she doesn't know that it is her mentor's husband she is operating on? AND HE DIES?? And the poor child whose face was half torn off from a dog bite and Derek has to operate on his brain? And Meredith and Alex go to a tiny rural hospital to bring back a premature newborn child and their ambulance breaks down in the middle of the rainy night right on a hill on the curve so no one can see them and if they get hit the ambulance could blow up because it is full of oxygen? And they have to call back to the hospital and while Derek is listening the ambulance gets hit BY A CAR. WITH MEREDITH AND ALEX AND THE TINY NEWBORN CHILD SHE PROMISED THE MOM BACK AT THE TINY HOSPITAL SHE WOULD TAKE CARE OF IS INSIDE. AND DEREK WAS LISTENING. AND THE PHONE WENT DEAD. SO HE DOESN'T KNOW IF SHE JUST DIED. And they are actually ok but they have to take the baby out of the incubator and go out into the night in case the ambulance BLOWS UP and they step outside and there in front of them are three bodies laying on the road from the car that hit them. AND THAT IS HOW IT ENDS. THAT IS HOW IT ENDS, PEOPLE. NOW WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO? She has tiny baby in her arms who needs to stay wrapped up in the blanket and they have to manually pump her breathing tube thing because she can't even breathe on her own and there are people lying in the road who need their help but they can't just leave the baby because it takes two people to keep this poor child alive because HELLO SHE ISN'T EVEN BREATHING ON HER OWN and OHMYGOSH WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN I CAN'T TAKE THIS AND YOU LEAVE ME HANGING AND IN TEARS AND WHY IS EVERYTHING HORRIBLE FOR THESE POOR DOCTORS AND I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO BE HAPPY AND I JUST CAN'T TAKE THIS SHONDA RHIMES WHY??????

174 days til graduation

Sometimes I daydream about what it will be like when I graduate.
It's pretty much going to be awesome.

I hear lots of other people in my major talking about grad school or (*gag*) law school as we near the finish line. (I just can't fathom why anyone would want to go to law school. It sounds as appealing as encasing my legs in cement and throwing myself into the middle of the ocean. And that's probably what those law school grads will want to do when they finish with a hundred thousand dollars of debt and realize the country is currently flooded with law school graduates and there are not enough lawyer jobs for all of them.)

I'm not into that kind of thing. I just want to be done. I've been in school since I was six years old! I'm sick of it. I'm tired of paying tuition, of homework, of deadlines, of pointless classes, of stress and anxiety and sleeplessness. I'm ready to move on!

It's just getting to graduation that's the problem.
Some days I'm so busy going from one class to the next, running to the computer lab to do homework in between, and on top of that working 20 hours a week, that I don't even have a chance to eat until I get home at night.
Thursdays are the worst--once I went all day and didn't eat anything til 1 a.m. (Well, that day I came home and was talking to Mark for the thirty minutes I got to see him that day before he went off to work, and was so exhausted I fell asleep right after he left. Woke up three hours later STARVING!)

And then I registered for classes on Tuesday night and realized that for my final semester I will be taking twenty credits. TWENTY. I had a little emotional breakdown that night. Poor Mark had to comfort me, haha.

The next day, after some sleep, I realized that nine of those credits would be my job, which I would be working at anyways (yay for a new job that counts as an internship! but anxiety at working almost 30 hours a week now...), so it's the other 11 credits I need to worry about. And since I'm a person who procrastinates classes she doesn't want to take, one of those classes will be statistics.
frowny face :(

Basically I complain every day about how I want to be graduated. That is all.
Have some pictures.



Here is Mark on his first day of school:


How cute!


Here is Mark helping me rearrange our bedroom furniture:

He was so excited, you can just feel his enthusiasm.


And here is a picture of us being cute together with some autumn leaves:

Also I was not wearing makeup. Oh well.

Books I read this summer

My last post was a little angry. I'm sorry. Can you tell I'm not enjoying my first week back at school?

But I wasn't lying when I said I read about 116 books. I read A LOT. There's no way I will remember everything I read, but here's some of the ones I remember/have strong feelings about:

Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex:
This is number 7 in the Artemis Fowl series, and I know it's for middle-schoolers, but ohmygosh, I love this series. And this latest installment is, in my opinion, one of the best. Usually the books are about Artemis being the super-smart 14-year-old criminal mastermind who saves/occasionally exploits the technologically advanced hidden fairy population in Ireland he has befriended.
And #7 was like that, except different. It had a different feel about it, which I LOVED. Instead of following the same tried-and-true formula, Eoin Colfer shook it up and gave Artemis a mental condition, the Atlantis Complex, which he developed because of meddling with magic and feeling guilty about the past crimes he had committed. So instead of everyone depending on Artemis, his friends had to save him. All the same surprise twists and turns that I loved about the previous were in The Atlantis Complex, but, like I said before, in a different way.





What Happened to Goodbye:
Sarah Dessen's latest novel wasn't bad, but it didn't blow me away like Just Listen did. The main character, McLean, lives with her dad, who moves around a lot because of his job. At every new place, McLean invents a new persona, a different character to be. And like every other Dessen book, the broken girl meets The Boy, makes a Best Friend, and overcomes her Family Issue. Her books have gotten a little formulaic, but she's talented enough to pull it off, because she makes her characters so unique and interesting. Eventually, McLean survives everyone finding out about her many personalities, makes up with her mom, and gets a boyfriend. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed reading the book because Dessen is so awesome at writing interesting characters and scenarios. If you haven't read any of Sarah Dessen's books before, I highly recommend you do, all her books are really great.








The Time Traveler's Wife:
I really loved this book. I saw the movie when it came out a few years ago, and it was just OK. But wow, the book is amazing! It's about this guy who has Chrono-Displacement disorder, a genetic mutation that makes him randomly travel through time. He can't control it, though it happens more when he drinks or is stressed. He shows up at some place in time, usually during his lifetime, (though he does go further into the future a few rare times) and at a place that he usually familiar with. That's how he meets his future wife when she's only 9 years old. Through the years he shows up and visits her in a meadow behind her house. Of course, he was in his thirties when he would show up, so when she finally meets him in a real world setting, he has no idea who she is. She knows so much about him, but he has no idea who she is. Audrey Niffenegger (what a last name!) handled the complexities of time travel really well, and the book flowed well. Definitely a sweet love story.







Need:
I don't even know why I'm telling you about this book. It's about a girl who finds out she is half-pixie. Yeah. One of those books. The characters really annoyed me. The story annoyed me. And yet, I still read the sequel. Which was even more annoying. I told you I read a lot of books this summer. Even ones I didn't like, because Provo library does not have a good selection of books. Also all the good books are always checked out.







Delirium:
Officially the last book of the summer I read. I actually finished it just last night. Delirium is about a dystopian society where love is a disease they "cure" when you turn eighteen (like a lobotomy of emotions). Of course, the main character Lena gets "infected" a few weeks before she turns eighteen. Usually I love dystopian books (The Giver, The Hunger Games, Uglies, Matched (which is only slightly better than this book)) and maybe those other amazing books have ruined all others for me, because I didn't enjoy this book very much. It actually took me a week to finish it, and this summer I was averaging 2-3 books a day. I thought about it and pinpointed what went wrong: right from the beginning, Lauren Oliver tells you everything. The whole history of the society, the whole history of the character. There was no suspense, no sense of mystery that keeps the reader going because she wants to find out more. You know everything, about the "cure," about the new organization of the United States, how dissenters run away to the woods, why she lives with her aunt and uncle now. There was nothing to look forward to! But after reading The Hunger Games, where everything was so intense and crazy and I never knew what was coming, I guess reading about a girl who mildly takes a stand in the name of love seems a little hippy-ish and lame.

Dear Professor

Dear communications professors,
Please stop asking everyone in the class to stand up and share what they did over the summer. My classmates full schedules of summer classes and internships in Washington D.C. and New York City make my accomplishments of watching every single season of Psych, Smallville, Grey's Anatomy and reading approximately 116 books this summer seem so much less amazing.

Dear weather,
Please stop being 99 degrees every day. I have to actually go outside during the daytime now and I don't like being a sweaty mess.

Dear air conditioning,
Don't ever change. I love you just the way you are.

Dear Provo,
I hate you and everything you stand for. And all the people living within your unholy borders.

Dear BYU,
Thanks for causing me so much anxiety, sleeplessness, extreme stomach pains and for taking all my money! Here's to one last year!

Dear Mark,
You are cute. And I like you a lot. Thanks for being the best husband and putting up with my grumpiness. You are my little chocolate mouse pie, my squishy teddy bear, my dollop of sour cream!


Love,

Heatherwhoisperpetuallygrumpybecauseshedoesn'tlikeschool

summertime

This picture pretty much illustrates how I feel about summer.

I'm not one of those people who looks forward to summer. It's hot and I get all sweaty when I go outside. I HATE being hot and sweaty. gross. I can't even walk up the short hill to get to work every afternoon without wanting to die, it's so hot in this state.
The best thing about this summer is that I don't have roommates who always turn the AC off. I bask in glorious coolness all night long, and not wake up in a pool of my own sweat.

ducks

When I see a duck:

Normal people:

Me: “ Duck, duck,duck, come here duck”

New mattress!

After months of pain in our backs and legs (and Mark getting chronic tension headaches), we spent a week sleeping on a decent mattress at my parent's house. That finally sold Mark on what I have been trying to convince him for weeks--we needed a new mattress! He was actually more insistent on it than I had been before.

I had already shopped around and knew which one I wanted--from Sam's Club. Best price for the kind of mattress we wanted.

Of course, Mark didn't want to pay the delivery fee, but since we don't have a truck/big SUV and neither does anyone we know, I told him to stop being cheap and just pay the fee. But he insisted, and he strapped that baby on top of our little car and drove it home (I put on sunglasses and hid my face. Some BYU girls walking down the street pointed at our car and laughed, and Mark stuck his head out the window and laughed back at them. That actually was pretty funny.). So we brought our new purchase home without paying any delivery fees or getting pulled over, so I have to give him that one.

At least we used rope.

Speaking of cheapness...

Our landlord is having new doors installed on all the units, and while they are very nice doors, I am a little annoyed he got rid of the screen doors. I liked having a screen door. While the note the landlord left us said that he was having a friend install the doors, I don't think his little handyman friend thinks too highly of him.
He was this little old Cambodian man with a very thick accent, and he was pretty funny. Now, I learned pretty quick that our landlord is a DIY kind of guy when I realized that to get the outlet to work in the bathroom the lights had to be turned out, and Mark says the texture on the wall looks like it was done by an amateur. He also comes around and mows the lawns himself once a month, and hand delivers the gas bill instead of mailing it like a normal person. But our little Cambodian friend was like, "What kind of landlord mows own lawn?! You ever see that? He very cheap."

The landlord didn't even want to pay the guy to paint the wood around the doors (now bereft of screen doors, boohoo), saying he'd do it himself.

The handyman wanted us to realize just how rich our landlord was. I was like, "Yeah, I know. I send him a check every month."


But, our landlord does keep the place up really well. I almost feel like something is wrong because I'm not calling in work requests every other week to report some new disaster.
It is nice to not live in a place that is constantly threatening to tumble down on top of us.

Still, I do wish the the guy would spring for bigger water heaters. I haven't shaved my legs all week.

awful blogger

I've been terrible about blogging lately! It seems like there's nothing really interesting for me to say.
Mark asked me the other day why we don't have a "couple" or "family" blog, since this is really my blog. I told him that if he wanted one, that meant he had to write in it too. He didn't like that idea too much, hehe.



I'm loving my new job as a Copy Editor for the campus newspaper, The Daily Universe. It's so nice to have a job with a purpose instead of just pretending to dust the same picture frame day after day like at the MTC. Also, I don't work with a bunch of weirdos like I did at the MTC.

Lots of people ask me, so I will explain what a copy editor actually does. While the mechanics of even a smaller paper like the DU are pretty complicated to explain (actually, I think someone told me once we have a circulation of like 18,000 so that makes us a medium-sized newspaper, but I don't know if that number is accurate), basically we get design the pages of the newspaper.
We work with a program called InDesign a lot, which I love since it was my best friend when I went to BYU-I. We place the articles on the page, add pictures, edit the articles.
Newspapers follows a format that is called AP style, which has lots of rules for how you abbreviate states, spell certain words, and use commas, among many other thousand things. On top of that, there are many rules to design--which fonts to use where, size of headlines, spacing, etc. On top of are all the annoying things that go along with working on computers, like when your dang picture won't stop stretching itself out and you can't figure out why.

It seems like a lot, but it's really not that bad. I had experience in InDesign before, and after I design my pages, at least two other people look them over and tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it. I'm loving my job, even though now every time I pick up a magazine or newspaper I am obsessing over the design and layouts instead of reading the articles!


In other news, our new apartment is awesome. We enjoy sitting on the floor just because we can--we just aren't used to actually being able to walk around without bumping into things! And we eat at an actual kitchen table instead of sitting on the couch for dinner. Weird.

Sorry it's been so long

but I'm done with finals now. and I have a job.

oh yeah.

The Tale of the Horrible Apartment

When Mark and I first moved into this apartment, we decided to go with it because it was really cheap rent.
But you get what you pay for, unfortunately.
You get wonderful things like:

• Ginormous nasty bugs The first three months I stored pretty much everything in the fridge. Cereal, sugar, flour. After it got cold, the bug invasion slowed down, but they would still hang out in the sink at night ans scatter when I went to get a glass of water at midnight. Once a bug fell from the ceiling right in front of me while I was brushing my teeth.
  
• Bug spraying Because those delightful bugs have infested the whole apartment complex, they have to spray all the apartments on the same day. I think we've had it done, oh, about 4 or 5 times. It's so great because you get to wake up at 7 am to clear every single thing out of your kitchen and bathroom cupboards. And since this apartment is the size of a shoe box, everything is crammed onto the living room couch and armchair. We love it when we see that little note hanging on our door that notifies us they're going to spray the very next morning. Gee, thanks for the warning.
• Crumbling walls One day the ceiling started leaking in our bathroom. Dripping water. Even better, the wall underneath it started crumbling away! I literally touched it and it crumbled away in my hands. All along the length of the wall. And when they had a repairman come, he told us he didn't even fix a leak, just re-plastered the wall. There was a fine coating of white dust all over everything in the bathroom, and all over the bookcase in the hallway.
  
• The lovely neighbors The people who live next door are Indian, we think. It took us a while, but we figured out that it is a mother and her twenty-something son, who goes to BYU (we think--definitely some college somewhere, at least) who live together. In a one bedroom apartment. Yikes! But the best part is that this lady loves to make what we like to call her "sacrifices" on the wall outside by our back door. The concrete is permanently stained with the oil she pours over her little leaves and tree branches, and there's always a nice pile of crumbs that about a dozen birds come to feast on every day. She also has a creepy picture of a snake hanging on her back door. She also has a shopping cart she took from Smith's sitting out in the back, full of pine tree branches. We think she stripped the trees at the park.
  We like to blame the people upstairs for everything that goes wrong. If we can't find the remote, we say the people upstairs probably took it. If we run out of milk, the people upstairs drank it all. If there's dishes in the sink, the people upstairs made the mess. We mostly don't like them because it sounds like they purposefully stomp around up there. They also like to sing annoying show tunes. And at 7am on Saturday morning, they like to smash two trash can lids together as loudly as they can. (Just kidding. I don't actually know what the heck they are banging up there but it sounds like two trash can lids.)
  
• Sewage coming up the kitchen sink One morning Mark walked into the kitchen and the kitchen sink was overflowing with orange water. It smelled so nice. Turning off the water didn't do anything. It did stop eventually, but not after flooding the whole kitchen. It was truly horrible. Mark cleaned it up really well though--the whole place smelled like lemon cleaner for a week--no joke. When the repair guy came, guess what he said the reason for the flooding was?
  
  THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS!!!!
  
  Apparently they dump everything down the sink, even though it doesn't have a garbage disposal. And it all backed up into our kitchen. I glared at the back of their heads in church that Sunday.
  

The day of the flooding was pretty much the breaking point for us. We had had enough and withing two weeks we found a new place to move into and sold our contract to some other unfortunate couple. I felt bad pretending that the place was so wonderful, but I'm pretty sure the only reason they wanted it was for the cheap rent. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

The decision to move out was reaffirmed on Wednesday when our apartment started filling up with smoke. Turns out, two of the washing machines located just downstairs from our front door started smoking. There was so much smoke I'm surprised the things weren't on fire. Mark stopped the machines and I put a note on them saying "Broken. Don't Use." I called our manager because she wasn't home, letting her know what happened. Not an hour later the crazy lady everyone avoids (because she will complain about her life to you for 15 minutes) went down to the laundry room, ripped the signs off and threw them in the garbage, and then threw all her clothes in the machines. Yep.
Lucky for her, the machines have yet to start smoking again.
The manager never did call me back.

But it's ok...
Because before this month is over, we are GONE.
FOREVER.

I CAN'T WAIT TO MOVE!!! YIPPEEEEEE!!!!

I go to college

When I Walk Down Hallways:
In my head:






In reality:

Oscars

Mark and I went to see Harry Potter 7 again at the dollar theater tonight. I loved it even more the second time, I think. But when it got to the part where Ron joins them again and Hermione is mad at him, all I could think about was this:






That was from the Oscars on Sunday, in case you missed it. ;)
I mostly watched the Oscars because I really like Anne Hathaway and wanted to see her host. I think she did a pretty good job, except they made her act so ditzy the whole time. But she really had to ham it up I guess because her co-host James Franco was so DEAD. I mean really, I thought you could act? I wonder if he was high the whole time or what.

But I did like this part:



*snort*

and this part because that is totally what I'd do in that dress.

Little Things

--The song ending right as I park the car

--Long naps

--Funny commercials

--Being caught up on all my homework

--Finding a good book to read (that I haven't actually read before!)





It was nice and warm today, which made it feel like spring. However, I don't WANT spring to come.
It's only allowed to come after I get my SNOW DAY!
Also, I think I'm turning into an insomniac. :(

I want this dress

This dress is marvelous.

It's like the kind of dress I always imagined in my head when I was little and pretending to be a magical princess going to a ball where the prince would fall in love with me but then a thief trying to take over the kingdom kidnaps me and the prince has to try and save me but really I'm super good at archery so when he shows up I help him take down the bad guys and we save the kingdom and get married the end.

It's just that kind of dress. And I was just that kind of kid. :)

Old Essay

I have to write a "Literacy Narrative" for English 312, my Persuasive Writing class. Actually, I stayed up til 2am last night writing the first draft. Ugh.
I went looking through my old essays I had saved on my computer to see if some of the essays I've written before would work. (Every single English class since junior year of high school has been exactly. the. same. What's the point?) Unfortunately, the old essays won't work for this class (darnnit) but I did come across this other one I wrote back in the summer of 2009 for English 150. It was a "Personal Narrative" essay. I've always kind of liked it, so I guess you can read it too.
Ta da!

Moths Against the Glass

I watched the fan making lazy circles over my head every time car headlights raced across the ceiling. I held as still as possible, trying to stay cool in the heavy summer night’s heat. I wish my parents would buy an air conditioner, I thought. Holding still wasn’t helping me feel any cooler, so I flopped over on my stomach. This pillow is so flat. And these sheets are so scratchy. I closed my eyes and started counting sheep, but the clicking sound of the old ceiling fan as its propellers spun like the world’s slowest helicopter knocked against my ears, and visions of fields with fluffy sheep disappeared. I opened my eyes, sat up, and pulled the cord, turning off the fan. All it was accomplishing was pushing the hot air around. I lay back down again, staring up at the ceiling once more, watching the blades lose their slow battle against friction. As I watched the blades circling ever more slowly, and noting that I, in fact, did not feel any difference in temperature, my eyes slowly started to close.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Though I was right at the cliff’s edge of sleep, my eyes snapped open at once.
This summer was the worst for moths. They were everywhere across the state, the population at the highest point it has been at for the last twenty years. They flew out at your face when you shook the curtains or opened cupboard doors. Just last night my father sucked thirty of them right out of the air with the vacuum hose.
I hated moths. They were gray and dirty and dissipated into a poof of dust when I hit them with the fly swatter. Every night before I turned out the lights I made sure my room was clear of them. In my imagination, moths rested on my face while I slept.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The window was pushed open the tiniest bit, which is how the moth must have gotten in. I could hear it hitting its head repeatedly against the glass, probably wanting to get out of this hot bedroom as much as I wished I could. I watched it fluttering against the window, stopping every once in a while, catching his breath and staring out the glass, wondering why, if he could see where he wanted to go so badly, he could not get there.
Stupid moth, I thought. Why doesn’t it just go out the way it came in?
I knew there was no way I would be going to sleep now, not with that moth in the room. But I was so tired, overheated, and annoyed, that I didn’t want to get up and let the moth out.
I listened to it banging its head repeatedly, the thudding against the glass like a muted musical note—a child striking B flat over and over again. The heat sat like an elephant on my body. In my mind, heavy thoughts pressed down even harder. Worries about money, family, and relationships chugged slowly in a counter-clockwise circle in my mind—things that have been plaguing me for weeks. I don’t do well with stress, and this summer before college had me at the Peak of Stress Mountain. Everything seemed to set me over the edge, and this moth was the breaking point.
I lay there in my bed spread-eagled, thinking about everything I needed, everything I wanted, and everything I couldn’t have. Any way I looked at it, I couldn’t see a way to fix things. In most cases, they weren’t “fixable” at all—things just were the way they were.
Another car rolled past the house, and I watched the light grow bright, and then disappear. When I was little, before I understood the way light bends, I thought those lights meant a car was driving straight towards the house. Now that I’m older, that little worry seemed silly now. I listened to the sound of another car; one with a loud engine and music turned up to eardrum-shattering decibels, and then laughed out loud. Maybe I hadn’t grown up at all, if I was worrying about things that I could do nothing about, and, honestly, will seem silly with time. I shook my head clear it of those sluggish thoughts, pushed myself out of the bed, and went to the window to let the moth out.
The moth was gone. I looked high and low for the insect, but it was nowhere on the windowpane or the curtains. He must have finally found his way around the glass and through the slim space. I smiled a little, and then pulled the window all the way open.
The outside night air was breezy and brilliant with shining stars. I looked up and down the empty street, letting the cool night air wash the heat off my skin, wondering where moths went on quiet nights.