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.

The One Where Heather Reads Books

The BBC estimates that the average person will have read six or less books on this list.

(Bolded means I've read it)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Too Many Cooks
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo





Only six or less? I've got 38, punks.
Some of them I've read many times (HarryPotter, duh, Little Women, Gone With the Wind) and I've actually started lots of them but didn't think they were worth finishing or got bored (Bridget Jones Diary, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness). And plenty of them I've had long intention of reading but have never got around to it (Tess of D'Ubervilles, The Little Prince, Cold Comfort Farm).

(rant One of my peeves is that when I recommend books to people, no one ever reads them. Of the few people who do read a book I recommend (or the books I force them to borrow), they tend to love it. end of rant)








And I can't end this book post without mentioning my favorite book of all time:

BAD KITTY by Michele Jaffe. Ok, if you're a guy you won't like it, or if you're a boring serious person you probably wouldn't like it either. But if you are a girl who is even remotely interested in girly things, you will enjoy this book. I remember picking the book up in the library one summer, mostly because it said "kitty" on the cover, I'll admit. I read the back cover and wasn't too impressed, but there wasn't anything else on the shelf that day so I took it home, read the first 3 pages and gave it my immediate loyalty forever and ever.
Maybe it's not the greatest work of fiction ever, and maybe sometimes it's a little silly, but,

whenever I am down, this book makes me excited for life again :)

Just read it, and then you'll understand.

so. tired.

i am so tired today and i don't know why. i'm so tired i cannot even use proper capitalization.

i feel like this cat:

how am i supposed to go to class in 40mns and stay awake and learn stuffs? i just wants to go tosleeeeeppp.

also, i want to build a blanket fort. so jealous of this foooorrrrt!

The One Where Heather Shares Random Stuff With You

GUYS!
I'm sorry I didn't post anything all during October. In my defense, reporting takes up so much TIME! Print Journalism is a major that takes up a lot of time, and it really depends on other people. You don't have control over when people will call you back, if ever. It can be frustrating. I find myself sitting around alot, waiting for people to call me back.
I much prefer it when I get to go out and actually cover an event, instead of just previewing things. Much more fun!
You get to go to things like this:

That's right, Yo Gabba Gabba. Haha, at least it made for very colorful pictures for my photojournalism assignment.

Read the article!

It was in a toy store called Blickenstaff's which was really cool. It kind of reminded me of that movie about the magic toy store that I never saw.
Mark enjoyed himself as well.

I actually think that is an awesome hat.

We carved pumpkins! For Halloween. But they're cool, so I'll let you see even though Halloween is already way in the past.

Can you guess whose pumpkin is whose?

Happy little anime pumpkin! Evil demon pumpkin!

I go through cycles when it comes to cooking. There are times when I love cooking and learning new recipes.
And then there are other times...
When I don't feel like cooking and would just as soon eat a nice pot of mac 'n cheese for three nights in a row. Of course, Mark doesn't really go for that kind of thing.
Just last week I sat there thinking that I should make something for dinner since Mark was supposed to be home soon, and I thought, Why can't we just eat tootsie rolls and milky ways for dinner? and then, Mark had that for lunch, so he probably won't want the same thing again.
What's worse, the fact that I consider leftover Halloween candy an acceptable dinner, or the fact that Mark actually ate that for one of his meals?

Games

Mark and I are enjoying newlywed life, but sometimes it gets boring with just us two around. So we end up playing lots of games.

We only had our deck of cards for a while and after we got tired of playing Speed all the time we went to Target and bought a few games with some giftcards (P.S. GUYS I'm not really an ungrateful person just a procrastinating one so the Thank You cards are coming I PROMISE!!).

Mark pretty much beats me at Scrabble almost everytime but I think that is only because I ALWAYS get Z,Q, & J EVERY TIME.

But then I get frustrated losing at Scrabble so I invented some new games to play.

The first one is called Tickle Mark Until He Can't Stand It Anymore.

Basically, what you do is start tickling Mark. He will want to be a manly man and pretend it doesn't effect him. That lasts about twenty seconds before he can't stand it anymore.

The other really fun game is called Scare Mark.

All it involves is jumping out and scaring him. It's hard to do in such a small apartment, but with a little creativity, it is possible.

(I used to jump out and scare Holly all the time at home. Holly is the best person to scare because she screams really loud and jumps really high. Mark doesn't scream but he does jump and freak out.)

My favorite day was last Sunday. Mark went in the bedroom to take a nap. I was in the living room, and I wandered out the back kitchen door because I was bored.

The window through which I creep

The blinds of the bedroom window were up about two inches from the bottom of the sill, giving me just enough space to peek in. Conventiently, Mark was sleeping on his side, facing the window.

I stared at him with my eyes as wide open as possible, wondering if the force of my gaze would make his eyes open.

After about 3 seconds I got bored of waiting, so with the lightest of touches, I tapped my fingers ever-so-gently against the window pane.

Mark's eyes opened slowly, curiously. They popped wide when he saw my creppy eyes looking in at him.

It was glorious how much he freaked out. He yelled and spasmed, then did it again. I busted up laughing, and once he realized it was just his freaky wife, he started punching the pillow and calling me the devil.

I came inside and laughed some more, ALOT more, then let the poor man go back to sleep.

I was still laughing about it later that night, and truth be told, the memory still makes me giggle.



Love ya Markie!

P.S. I added a list of the stories I have written for the Daily Universe so far this year to the side of the blog. If you are interested in things about Museums & Art at BYU, then you should probably read them. Also, if you are my mom you are probably the only one who cares. But then that is why my mom rocks and you don't. :)

August

Before August gets to far away, I thought I'd write about the most eventful month of this year. It started off with my mom, David, Holly, and Mark coming to Utah to help me pack up everything in my apartment and move it into me and Mark's new apartment that we would live in after we got married.

Mark was pretty sick during all this, and decided to share with his little fiance.

So when we finally made it back to Colorado after a hot sticky week getting invitations out and moving furniture in Utah, I had Mark's sickness (fever, sore throat, nausea) only ten times worse.
Which led me to spend a few hours on a Sunday morning in one of these rooms:

They gave me some medicine so I’d stop throwing up and an IV full of re-hydrating fluids. After about 30 seconds of having the IV in my arm, I felt soooo much better. After that, I was on the mend, except somewhere between that morning and a few hours later, I caught a wicked cough that’s still lingering even now. That’s gross if I got it from someone in the emergency room.

After that, the next two weeks were full of bridal showers, bridal pictures, ironing about a hundred chair sashes, and playing with the new family kitten, Kevin. Yes, she is a girl.

My amazing cheezburger cake made by Sister Cowser at my bridal shower. It looks exactly like a real ginormous cheezburger. I didn't even want to cut it because it was so beautiful.

And finally, the big day!

I haven’t gotten any of the photographer’s pictures back, but I do have some that my family has taken.

Yeah, I'll put up the nice ones when I have them. :)

The cake was GORGEOUS. The picture doesn't show it as well. Anyone want to help a girl out with putting pictures on blogger? I hate it.

And then, the honeymoon! Only, the first day didn’t go so well…

Mark and I were riding a tandem bike in Glenwood Springs. It was a beautiful ride, next to a river full of happy rafter and kayakers, and beautiful scenery.
Then, I lost control of the bike and went straight into a wall. Well, my face did. I could hear the people in the raft we were waving at go, “Ooooo!” before they continued to float on by.

Thanks goodness I was wearing a helmet. My sunglasses became a mangled mess, but they protected my eyes (though I did get a pretty weird bruise on my eyelid). After my face scraped along the wall, I landed on the ground with my knee and elbow.
Mark flew over me and landed on the concrete, but the little punk didn’t even get a scrape! I was a mangled mess while he got up, perfectly fine. He now has delusions of invincibility.


Oh, it hurt sooo bad. I rolled over onto my back, knee in the air because it hurt to much to put it on the ground. After a few minutes I could get up and Mark helped me move off the sidewalk and onto the side. My tooth had scraped along the wall, but luckily nothing happened to my teeth, and the engagement ring was unharmed! But I felt my face bleeding, my shoulder (ripped my Power Ranger’s shirt!), my knee, my hand, and my elbow. We called the bike rental place, but the only way to get picked up was to walk back to the rest stop we had passed a ways back.

Mark had to carry the bike, since it was impossible to straighten the frame now. I was limping along, clutching my elbow and bleeding down my face. People stopped to offer bandaids and reassurances that my face wasn’t wounded enough to scar. When we made it back to the rest stop, a nice guy stopped and after making sure I was ok, gave us some chocolate-covered strawberries leftover from his picnic.
So I got to spend the rest of my honeymoon with oozing sores all over my body and face (lots of comments from people asking me if I was in a motorcycle accident, haha.). Also, I had to miss horseback riding the next day because I was too sore to get out of bed.

I would only let pictures be taken of my "good side".

I did go kayaking and hiking, though! We went to Ouray, the so-called “Switzerland of America”. It’s a cute little town that’s basically a street lined with shops, surrounded by GORGEOUS mountains. It’s definitely worth going just for the scenery alone.

The last day of the honeymoon was the BEST.
I will have to change the side of my blog, because we went in a HOT AIR BALLOON!
And it was just as amazing as I always thought it would be.

Mark in the hot air balloon.

It’s a very gentle ride, and since you’re much lower to the ground than an airplane, you can wave at the kids who run out to see the hot air balloon, and all the dogs bark as you fly by. It was so great! I can’t wait to do it again someday.


After that we came home and after opening presents (!!! Even better than Christmas as a kid. Mark was worse than me.) and fixing some car problems, Mark’s parents drove with us back to Provo as they took his sister Jenny up to BYU-I.
I started school (working for the Daily Universe. I’m a cute little reporter now) and Mark has been going crazy at home all day as he looks for a job. We finally cleaned up A LOT of the apartment today and got a little more organized.


P.S. While Mark has been home alone, he discovered my Psych DVDs and now he’s hooked. He even bought a pineapple last night. I’m off to make pineapple upside down cake now.