Wait, what's this? An update? Oh yeah, I remember those

Sometimes life is hard, and after I have a couple weeks (or a whole semester) of intense college, things slow down, but I'm just so burned out from all the college that I have a hard time motivating myself to do the little bit of homework I have.  It feels a bit like this:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html
(there are one or two examples of scantily censored profanity, if reading that sort of thing would offend you)

The point of all this is that I've had a busy Autumn, but I'm coming to the tail end of it, and I'll try to post in this again, since it's how I keep in touch with my family, and that's important.  Otherwise we'll have way too much to talk about when Christmas rolls around.  The other point is that I have a little bit of chemistry homework, and I'm just not in the mood, but then I am a Perkes after all.  Back to work.

~Some sort of Wizard
P.S. - this weekend it got snowy

Not sure why this was sideways before

and the living is easy

Once again it's been too long.  Nothing too momentous has happened, but there have been lots of adventures.  Here's a short list (in reverse chronological order) :

Today I made Teriyaki chicken and rice, banana muffins, and taffee, and played some games, like Jenga.  Turns out that if you play jenga to the inception music, it becomes the most dramatic thing you've ever done.  But in all fairness, that's probably true for anything.  Today was also my last week of church here at centennial.  Next week is stake conference, and then I get kicked out when my contract ends, and roughly a week later I'll be moving in to my new ward.  So hopefully more adventures will ensue.

This past week my parents and Isaac came out from mississippi and we had all sorts of adventures.  Not all of them are pictured here, but we backpacked in the Uintas and went up to this resevoir where we swam.  I was hoping for cool rocks to dive off of, but didn't find any at the reservoir.  Cami and I did swim across the resevoir and back, which was wonderful, and inspired me to start swimming again, once school starts I can swim in the pool again, so hopefully I'll keep my motivation and make that happen.  We did find a great place up in the mountains to swim, but as I was swimming, there aren't really any pictures of it, though I did get a cool shot of the rock we jumped off.  Check out my google+ for all the pictures.

 A couple weeks ago, some friends and I hiked Timpanogos peak.  We left early enough to see the sun rise as we were starting the hike, which was beautiful, and definitely worth waking up a little early (I'm not convinced that making it to the peak to see the sunrise is worth it.  That hike was tough). On the way down we hung out at that little lake that you can see, and there someone swam.  I probably would have swam, but it was cold (the air, the water obviously was too), and I was wearing jeans.  So no swimming there.

 I watched the Dark Knight Rises (after watching the Dark Knight on a projector in our apartment) it was great, I think it ended the trilogy perfectly, and while it wasn't as much fun as the other two, it was a great movie.  My summer has been pretty evenly split between movies and outdoor adventures, which is great.

 My scooter turned 4000, which is cool.  I'm still working on fixing it up since i crashed a while back, now I just need to switch out a wire so that the blinker will work again, then I can get my license (since right now I don't think it's technically street legal, and so they probably wouldn't give it to me) Also pictured here is my smart phone, which has been great.  Actually all of these pictures were taken on my phone, which made it easy to post on my blog.  The future is totally happening these days.

 More cooking, I made stuffed french toast, with cream cheese, brown sugar, and cinnamon.  It was fantastic, although not quite as good as when my roommate makes it.  We've done a lot of brunches.  I'm getting fairly decent at making pancakes and waffles that put iHop to shame.

And it's now been over a month, but I visited Mississippi and got to check out the new Perkes house, of which I approve.  It was my first summer back in mississippi since 2008, and it sure was hot.  I'm not quite sure how I survived all those years down there, but i definitely appreciate the weather here in Utah.  I managed to make it up to Jackson for the first time in a long time and spend some time in the old stomping grounds and see some people.  That was fun.

So that's about the gist of my life.  Summer is winding down, and I still have a few adventures to fit in before the end.  This next weekend I'm headed down to Zions, which will be great.  I also read on occasion, I've read quite a few books this summer, which has been nice.  Next on the list is the Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451.

Summertime really is one of my favorite times.

"Grateful for the Moisture"

 I just got back from my trip to Mississippi.  It was pretty fun.  The new house is great, but Mississippi weather is still a bit unpleasant. Here's some pictures:

We went rug shopping.  It was fairly unsuccessful

Incidentally, I got a smart phone.  It's my new favorite thing, and the camera isn't too shabby

There are squirrels in Mississipi.  This one was chilling on our fence.

It's raining here in Utah today, which is good, we've had lots of fires, and some were still burning, so hopefully things have calmed down a little.  I know I've been in Utah for a while when I'm grateful and a bit relieved when is starts raining, even though it means getting all soggy while biking around.  So that's the news.  I need to get a new 30 day goal for this month, waking up early was a good call last month.

11 Future Experiments

As the result of a TED talk, I decided to take on a 30 day challenge this month, and maybe every month.  I've been waking up at 8am every day, and trying to do something meaningful.  Admittedly, sometimes the meaningful something is going back to sleep, but for the most part it's been a month of productive mornings.  Today I went on a 25ish mile bike ride.  Yesterday I got ready for Church.  Saturday I was camping, and I woke up and read in my hammock and gathered a bit of firewood.  I've also been reading Walden by Thoreau, which is a good catalyst for life changes.  Here are some possible future 30 day experiences:

• 30 days w/o facebook 
• 30 days of vegetarianism (Turns out Thoreau talks a bit about not eating meat)
• A Picture a day for 30 days
• No text messaging for 30 days
• Writing in my journal every day for 30 days (or my blog, but my journal would be more meaningful)
• Draw/Paint something every day for 30 days (there was a time when I wanted to be an artist, now I just doodle)
• Learn a new magic trick each day and perform it for someone
• Practice Piano every day
• Spend one month learning a new skill, practicing it each day: Archery? Guitar? Basketball?  Dance?  Sewing?  Fishing?  There are a lot of options for this one
• Learn, and use, a new word a day
• Learn a new language (I think I could make a lot of headway in any of the romance languages in 30 days)

So those are some cool things I could try in the future.  If you have any suggestions, let me know, I might not do them, but then I also might. If nothing else, it would make for some good blog material.   

a list:

A short list of adventures yet to be achieved this summer (some may be combined):

Sleep under the stars
Go mountain biking at sundance
Backpacking
Southern Utah
Do a triathlon
Create a triathlon
Make donuts
Go tubing
Play pool spoons
Hike Timp
Play baseball in the sandlot

I'll keep adding to this list, and crossing things off as I go, feel free to make suggestions.

No rest for the wiki'd

It's June!  Summer is finally here and flying by, it's been a while, and I've had some exciting times.  There's all sorts of stuff on facebook, showing my adventures, but here's what's been going on:

That house rents out their hose for $20.  It's a racket,
but absolutely worth it.  

 I got called as the ward fhe co-chair, so I get to occasionally organize even more expensive expansive activities than before.  For our opening ward fhe we set up a slip-and-slide at Rock Canyon Park, which, as you can see, has a pretty decent hill.  It turns out our tarp wasn't as long as we had hoped. (Happily it's longer than it looks.) The grass at the end really just made it more fun.  I'm back in my ward from last summer, so I've also been going on crazy bike rides with my Bishop, having game nights with the people, and we even took a stab at another pool movie night.  It's wasn't perfect, but it went a lot better than last time.

Thanks to Dan for the action shots

 A few weeks ago I went out to california to do a mud race with Amy, it wasn't quite as muddy as I had expected, which was absolutely fine with me.  It was extremely fun, and I managed to get 18th or so overall, which is not too shabby, considering I only ran about three times in preparation for this.  But it was a blast, definitely not the last time I'm going to do that.  California was great, it was cool to see my Wade nephews, who are pretty awesome.  Katie's right, Tanners 'Aye' really grows on you, especially when he's dressed in pirate garb.  Now I just need an excuse and an inexpensive way to visit the east coast.  I sort of fell in love with california, to be honest.  It's really rather beautiful, and windy winding roads in the dark are exciting.  My friend Dan came out, which made it an adventure.   The summer of one thousand adventures is going well.

Muir Woods, basically Middle Earth. 

 In addition to vacations and adventures, I organized an intramural team, which was one of the best decisions I've ever made.  It turns out captaining a team and getting people together and stuff is actually really rewarding.  We didn't quite win, we had some bad luck and two of our best girls were unable to make it to one of our playoff games.  But I realized that having organized, official matches in soccer is entirely too much fun to avoid, and I'm pretty sure I'll be doing this for the rest of college and after.

There are some other things going on; work, research, my ongoing attempts to figure out the balance between being impossible to please and settling, but there's really nothing of note in that regard, so once something exciting happens in work, research, or dating, I'll try to get around to writing it down.  In the mean time, I'll be living the dream here in Provo.  For all my doubts, this place turned out alright.

Another month, another title

Well, I used to be so good about updating things.  It's always a shame that the amount of time i spend writing in my blog is inversely proportionate to the amount of interesting things I have to write about.  Someday I'll find a balance of semi-regular, semi-interesting things.

These days have been busy.  I've been taking on a lot of projects.  I got into a lab doing research science. That's sort of great.  The thing about science is that actual research is mostly pretty dull.  A lot of pipetting and other monotonous chores, and then at the end, if you're lucky, you get some sort of result.  I'm also discovering that there are a lot of gremlins in research. But it's good to be doing practical stuff.

I'm back to teaching at the MTC, so my semester of carefree, go-in-when-I-feel-like-it days are over.  It's good to teach again though.

Over last semester I volunteered as a tutor at the local alternative high school, which was fun.  It made me realize that I'm not sure I could handle teaching high school students.  They're great, but they can be hard to motivate.  Anyway, it turns out they needed someone to head the after school soccer program, so I volunteered for that.  It's been a lot of fun, basically I go and play soccer with as many of my friends as I can convince to go and with as many kids as can be convinced to stay.  Eventually we're going to try to set up a tournament type thing, and then maybe get a soccer team going.  That would be fun.

There's actually been a lot of soccer recently, I organized an intramural team with some of my friends, and now we're working on teaching some of our friends how to play soccer.  there are some basic skills we struggle with.  Like passing.  But that's been great.  I didn't realize how much I've missed consistent, organized, competitive soccer.  It's the best.

Other than that I've been trying to get ready for this mud race in a couple weeks.  I only have nine days to find two more people and one car to carpool to california.  And at some point in the mean time I should still get in slightly better shape.

So besides soccer, teaching, and doing research, there are all sorts of little adventures and injuries that keep me going.  That and I saw the Avengers, which was great.  On the superhero movie scale from 1 to The Dark Knight, it was definitely a 9.73.  Way good, well done Joss Whedon.  Well done.

I need to do more things that are photo-worthy, then my blog would be more interesting.  I'll get on that.