Nancyann

It has been nearly 6 years since I graduated High School and my family was an intricate part of my life. I gained a great appreciation for my family and came to understand how unique it was while on my mission, but I was gone. Even after I got home from my mission, any time I spent back in Missouri, my family was no longer involved in the most exciting part of my life to the extent that they were while in High School. It’s now been nearly two years since I have been home for more than just two weeks at a time. But even before then, even when I was home for the summer, I was working full time and heavily involved in Institute activities. This has been the first semester that I have actually had family even close to me while out here at BYU. And it’s not just any family, but Nancyann. I love Nancyann. Of all of my siblings, I think that we are the most alike. We’ve been buddies as long as I can remember. This is one of my favorite pictures of us together…



Having Nancyann out here this semester sure has made all the difference in the world! We didn’t spend as much time together as I would have liked, but in all honesty, we saw each other a lot. We had two classes together every Tuesday and Thursday. And not just any classes, but our Marriage Prep class and our Beginning Tap class. They were two of my favorite classes and having Nanc in there with me just made them that much better! It was so great to be able to practice with her for Tap and to talk about the things we learned in Marriage Prep. Not just that, but it made it a lot easier to do my projects when I had her to talk with and bounce ideas off of.

Aside from school work, it was so much fun to have someone to go to performances with. We saw a lot of shows, from a percussive footwork performance to the Shanghai Circus. We watched Tartuffe and As You Like It and went on quite a few double dates. From ice cream sculpting




To a photo scavenger hunt





To a percussion ensemble performance including a steel drum band, we kept ourselves rather busy. It was a lot of fun to be able to have someone to set some of my friends up with that I wanted to double with and more than that, someone that I could get input about the girls I was spending my time with from. There’s nothing like having someone who knows you and your history as well as she knows me confirm that the girl you’re crushing on is a great girl and more than worth pursuing to help you make up your mind. It sure helped that her and Julie hit it off right away and were instant friends! Aside from that, it was so nice to have her here to talk to about whatever it was that was going on in my life that I just needed to talk to someone about. Because she now knows all of my friends telling stories about them takes half the time because I don’t have to explain who they are and their personalities and why things are funny. She already knows the context.

I can’t wait for the end of June to get here! I’m moving into a new apartment complex tomorrow and only know a few people there. It going to be fun, but it will be so much better when she comes back and is in the same complex as I am! And what makes it even better is when she comes back out, Marshall is going to come with her! I can’t wait! This summer is going to be a blast! Here are a couple more pictures of us…

(EFY 2008)

(Hanging out with Nancyann, Marshall and some friends from the Institute some time back in 2006)

Folk Dance

Well, I haven't exactly been very good at updating you all on what's going on with me. Well, this has been fun semester, mostly :-D. As far as folk dance goes, I have been having SO much fun! I've got some really good friends that I've made on my team and it's really just been a blast. We did a really fun dance for our end of the semester performance Spring Festival of Nations. It was a Hutzel dance from the mountainous region of Ukraine. One of my friends posted a video of it on facebook, but I know not everyone has facebook, so someone else posted a different video on youtube. I hope you all enjoy!

Last Weekend

Wow, it sure has been a long time since I last posted here…Well… The semester is about half over, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t ready for it to end. But, then again, at the same time, I’m really enjoying most of my classes and don’t want a few of them to ever end.

Alright. Well, for starters, I love folk dance. It’s awesome! I have so much fun and I have made so many good friends from being involved in folk dance here at BYU. Last semester I constantly had something going on with folk dance. This semester, however, has been much more laid back. So when I got an e-mail a little over a month ago from my teacher asking for some volunteers, I jumped on it and volunteered. There was a conference held by a group who does research and whatnot on 18^th century culture, literature, life, etc. One of the guys who was involved in setting it up somehow knew my teacher and contacted her asking for some help. We got a group of 4 couples from my folk dance team together and practiced outside of class a few times learning some dances from the 18^th century. It was a very unique experience, but still lots of fun. We learned about 4 or 5 dances and taught a few to the people who were there at the conference. I think that my teacher got a video of the performance, but I don’t know for sure. Instead of posting a video, I’m just going to post some pictures. I’m just stealing all of these off of facebook, so most of you have probably already seen them, but whatever.

This is the whole group. Aren't our costumes the coolest!?



Here's a closeup on my costume.



And my awesome ponytail.



When one of the guy's ponytails fell out, we realized that they turned into pretty sick mullets :-D



The other guy took his off, but us three enjoyed our mullets probably a little too much.

Anyway, after the night was over, the guy who had invited us gave some money to our teacher to cover her expenses and included was $50 for each of us who helped participate! It was pretty sweet. I hope you enjoyed the pictures half as much as I enjoyed last weekend.

3 Dance Classes

My schedule this semester is quite different than I expected it would be. I had anticipated that this would be my last semester here at BYU, but through a series of unforeseen circumstances and a strange twist of events, I'm going to be here until next April instead of finishing this semester. It's going to be a lot less stressful, which is nice. But by making that decision, I realized that I don't have to take the classes I was previously planning on taking. It works out much better this way, trust me. :-D Well, one of the changes was that I am doing at least one more semester of Folk Dance where as I assumed last semester was my last one. I'm VERY excited about this. I am also in beginning tap dance and the beginning world dance class.

First of all, the beginning world dance is a class that I could probably sleep through and still get an A in. That isn't a bad thing, and I most definitely will NOT be sleeping in that class! Easy as it is, it is still lots of fun. Most of the dances we are going to do in there are dances that I have done before at Rec. Nights (a Rec. Night is when the whole folk dance club gets together and they play songs that we do folk dances to). There may be a few others I have never done before, and there are also some that I haven't ever really learned, I just sort of picked them up as best as I could over the past two semesters. So it'll be fun to actually learn them properly. But I'll most likely pick up on the dances and have them down pat before half the rest of the class really knows what's going on :-D. Oh, and my teacher for that class is really cool. His name is Rustin, and he was my beginning clog teacher. It's going to be a fun class.

Beginning tap. I'm SO excited for this class! Nancyann decided to add it with me, so that will make it even more fun. But I have always loved watching tap and wished I could actually do it myself. Clogging was fun, but I think tap suits me much better. That class might require a little more out of class work than my other dance classes, but I will actually enjoy practicing for that class, so that makes ALL the difference. The short and long of it, I'm stoked for tap!

And last, but most definitely not least, my Folk Dance team. Ahhh... So much fun! I'm on one of the Wilk teams, which means nothing to probably 99% of you. Basically, the Wilk teams are much easier than the RB teams (we meet in the Wilkinson Center instead of the Richards Building). There is somewhat of a hierarchy of teams. The Wilk teams are usually the people who just made it onto a team, the RB teams are people who have been dancing for a while (my team last semester, 9RB, being the best of the RB teams), and then you have SPAC and PAC (Spring Performing Arts Company and Performing Arts Company). Because I wasn't even planning on dancing this semester, I didn't even try out for SPAC. I'm on 10WSC and my teacher is the same one I had my first semester doing Folk Dance. She thinks very highly of me and was rather surprised to see me in her class the first day. In fact, she actually told me that I should have been on SPAC. It's a nice change going from the intensity of 9RB and barely keeping up to already know half of the things we are doing and catching on to the rest really quickly. I will kind of miss being pushed and stretched to see how much I can do, but it's also lots of fun to actually know what's going on and to be able to help others. Plus, when you do partner dances and you actually know what you're doing, the girls have more fun dancing with you! :-D

So anyway, I have at least one dance class every day, which is really nice. My schedule isn't quite as conducive to naps as it was last semester, so I'm going to be really tired all the time this semester, but I'm still very much excited for it. Anyway, I just thought I would let you all know how much fun I'm having and how much I'm enjoying being so involved in dance. Aren't you jealous? :-P

A Much Needed Update

Wow, well, there has most definitely been an eventful month or so... Well first of all, for those of you who don't already know, I am once again single. When I made the decision to end it with Paula, over a month's worth of frustration, anxiety and a whole mess of other less-than-fun feelings all seemed to dissipate. I could go into a whole explanation of why I decided to break up with her, but I won't. Basically, we weren't nearly as right for each other as we thought. Most of the pain was dealing with crap before I decided to end it, but there was still frustration and annoyances after it was over. I wish I could say I was completely over everything, but I'm not completely over everything. The relationship, yes, I'm over that. It's just the residual junk that is inevitable when a relationship that close/intense ends. Whatever. Even with all of that staring in my face over Christmas break, I still enjoyed myself while I was at home. I got to see friends and family that I haven't seen for quite a while. I did come to the conclusion, though, that I don't want to go back to Missouri this summer. I love my family and my friends there, but there isn't enough there to warrant living at home all summer. And I'm probably not going to take any classes either, so I'm just going to be working early morning custodial, probably sleeping all afternoon and hanging out/partying all night! I'm really excited about it, but I still have a whole semester to enjoy before I get to the summer! And I really do think I'm going to enjoy this semester. I have 3 dance classes :-D all of which I'm really enjoying. Nancyann decided to add beginning tap at the same time as me too, so we now have two classes together. I'm excited. It's already been a lot of fun having her out here, even though we haven't really done much of anything yet. We are planning on doing a double date this week or next and I'll probably just set her up with one of my friends. As I was thinking about who I could set her up with, I realized that almost all of my really close friends are either dating someone or are girls... I do have a few people I could set her up with, but really, almost all of my really close friends are girls. Anyway.

So I went on my first date in a long time on Saturday. I took one of my really good friends from work. She's in a beginning clogging class and we both had to go to a percussive dance performance. Well, there was one not too far away on Saturday, so I went over to her place and we walked to the theater. It was a really fun performance, we both really enjoyed it. After the show, we walked back to her place, had some hot chocolate to warm up and talked for about an hour. Then I headed home. It was just really simple, but it was a lot of fun. Like I said though, now I just need to figure out who I'm going to set Nanc up with and who I'm going to go with for our double date we are planning... Hum.... I'll attempt to be better about updating my blog this semester... No promises though, I know myself too well :-D. Anyway, I'm hungry. I'm going to go get myself some lunch or something. Later!