Homework? Nah... I'm going to blog

So I'm sitting here in the library... unable to focus on the O-Chem lab I should be preparing for so I'll catch up on my blogging. I have a lot of random thoughts so this is your fair warning that I'm going to be jumping all over the place.

This past Saturday Per went to her first high school dance. She didn't tell me that she had been asked to homecoming until Thursday when I had called her for a different reason entirely and it just kinda slipped out. Last week was one of those weeks that I was absolutely freaking out about living in Salt Lake because I felt clueless and helpless about my family's life. I texted Perri for some reason while I was in class assuming she'd answer me later but she answered right back and kept talking to me for about a half hour. I finally told her she needed to pay attention in class and that I'd talk to her later but she responded telling me she was at home not at class. I asked her why she wasn't at school and she said it was because she had a heart condition and she'd been at the hospital all night. I told her she was a dirty rotten liar and asked why she really wasn't at school. Then she sent me a picture of her hospital bracelet. I began the freak out. I told her I'd call her as soon as I got out of class and that was probably the longest 10 minutes I've had in a very long time. I finally got her on the phone and she was being the basic vague Per that she usually is. I tried to pry as much information as I could out of her but she'd been up at the hospital all night so she was sleep on top of her indifferent attitude. As I was finishing up the conversation with her I mentioned that she probably wasn't going to be coming down to spend the weekend with me like we had discussed before because of the fact that she was on a portable heart monitor. She said "Yeah, and I got asked to homecoming so I guess I've got to go to that" I probably burst her little ear drum when I screamed at her for not telling me sooner! So I decided that even if she didn't care if I was there or not I was not going to miss my little sister getting ready to go to her first dance.

 I worked Friday night and then got up Saturday morning and headed home. When I got there Per was getting ready for her day-date where they were going to go paint-balling and the rest of the family was getting ready to head out to Miles' last regular season football game. We sent Per off with her date and then me and Mom went out in search of shoes for her to wear to the dance. We found a pair and headed back out to Hyrum for Miles' game. They won and when it was over we headed back so I could pick Perri up and take her to get her hair done. When we got back from getting her hair all done we went to work on the large red splotches that were left all over Perri's neck and chest from the stick tabs and tape from the heart monitor. We used some odd remedies that I'd heard friends had used to get rid of hickies because that's what these kinda looked like and then in the end we wound of covering what we couldn't get rid of with make-up. All in all it turned out pretty well and she looked absolutely breath taking when Trevor came to pick her up!  You'd swear I was her mother with how emotional and how excited I got overt this whole endeavor.

I went to church with Waylon and Zach on Sunday and then of course hung around long enough for my parents to feed me dinner before I headed back to Salt Lake for a fireside I was planning on going to with a friend. I picked her up and we headed to the Institute building to hear Elder Paul V. Johnson from the first quorum of the seventy. I was so impressed with the talk he gave. One of the first things he asked was how many of us in the audience were married so I was worried it was going to be one of those "Get married and have babies other wise your life is incomplete" sort of talks but it definitely wasn't. He talked about adversity and trials and things we can use to help us get through those things. He talked about how we can be doing everything right and trials still come up; sometimes again and again and again until we just don't think we can stand it any more. We think that we've just barely made it over one trial, that we're doing life just great and then the next one is there waiting and glaring down at you. Then he said one thing that I really loved, he said, "Life is not a theory class, it's a lab class." Granted this probably meant a whole lot more to us students than it would to someone who's been out of school for a while but it struck home with me. Sometimes you're doing everything right, you know exactly what you should be doing in life and how and why you should be doing those things and that's the theory part which everyone has to figure out at some point. But then you have to go to the lab where you actually have to get your hands dirty. You have to act on the things that you know. And sometimes that means trying the same thing over and over again until you get the right result that you have read about in the literature but everyone has to figure it out. Now my best friend that is a sociology major didn't really love this because she hasn't taken a lab in the 2 and 1/2 years she's been here going to school (Pretty sure they don't exist in the sociology major's world) but for me as an ESS-Phys kid that just basically spends my whole life in the chemistry building it just made so much sense and I loved it!

So now I've rambled on her for a while I still don't know what I'm doing in my Chem Lab that starts in just over an hour. Moral of the story.... I don't know :( Haha All in all it really was a fantastic weekend. I'm super pumped for the USC vs Utah football game on Thursday. Per has softball game in South Jordan on Saturday and then I'm headed home for General Conference and the first part of Fall Break before I have to come back and work :) Well... I hope you all have a fantastic week! Laters!

Love Dan