The Journey Over II

MADE IT THROUGH FINALS!!!!!!!!!
Too bad my grades aren't published till this Saturday :/ But with the end of finals comes a big day: move out of Helaman and move in to Heritage! It was really sad to say goodbye to all of my friends in Helaman. It's amazing how attached you'll get to people when you're with them for 8 months! The moveout was on a rainy Saturday. I had a friend who lives in Provo help transport my things with his family's van.

This is the extent of what I had to move over. Yes, I have a tv! A buddy of mine was getting rid of it and I was offered it. So yeah, tv for spring ;)
Got my last shots of the Cannon Center before I headed out:


I discovered where the new mailboxes are going!

So yes I had to store my things in the apartment basement when I got there because they were still closing down the building from winter semester. I killed time by trudging through the rain to get lunch, buy textbooks, and discover the location of my classes. I got back and found this to be the initial state of my room:

After about 4 hours of Jeffafication, I managed to get this:

This room is smaller than the room I had in Budge, but it is complete with a walk-in closet:

...and this is the kitchen:

I'm pretty excited to see what life is like over here! Classes start on Tuesday so not much down time :/ Oh well, bring it on!

Springtime

HOORAY FOR SPRING WEATHER!!!
Sorry, I had to get that out :)
Well I finally found some time in between finals to get a blog out to yall! I've taken 4 out of my 5 so far. Pretty well on mission prep, felt good about calculus, 80% on Comp. Sci. 124, 74% on American Heritage (so glad I got a decent grade on that), and just Comp. Sci. 235 left. Good thing I only need to get a 41% on it to guarantee an A in the class!!! :D Don't worry, I'll still do my best just to make sure. As time passes, I become more convinced that Computer Science will be really good for me...especially because of this:

...big comp. sci. meetings that provide you with an unlimited supply of free pizza!!

Life was pretty hectic for the past couple of weeks, as expected, because of last-minute labs, papers, projects, and then studying for finals themselves. But I've made it through this my second storm now and am ready for a third! I'm really sad to be leaving so many of my newly-made friends though. It always astounds me how close you can get when you're with a group for 8 months. I'm guessing it's nothing compared to the feeling of leaving the mission. Speaking of which, my stake president called me tonight and informed me that he has submitted his portion of my mission papers, which means the countdown has started! I'm am so excited; you have no idea!!! So 3 weeks or less is what we're looking at right now. Care to make a guess? ;) I'll have a group up on facebook where you can toss a guess if you'd like. (again same notice from last time I did something off of facebook: don't add me as a friend just to get into this group. It'll die out a week after I post the call on it, trust me) I don't know where I would like to go, but I do know that I'll be relieved if it's somewhere where spicy food is not in rich supply. If I get called to somewhere like that, I feel the food will be comparatively worse getting used to than speaking a different language! But yeah, I can't wait!

New updates of the Cannon Center:

I'm honestly considering seeing if the student newspaper or some other group at BYU will want these pictures I've been taking. It's usually cool to see the construction of the building that you've only seen the finished product of.

My last final is tomorrow, I move into my student apartment Saturday, and I start Spring classes on Tuesday...wish me luck!

The Sky's The Limit

Even though I'm right at the head of finals' week, I miraculously found time to fly home and back in a short 24-hour period! Due to tight scheduling conflicts, I needed to fly home to get my stake president interview for my mission papers! It was a truly rich and rewarding experience talking with him for an hour and a half. In this short time, I was also able to celebrate Easter with the family, including participating in the col-de-sac easter egg hunt.
I was fearful of a rather boring flight back, until many things happened. I first discovered that my particular flight back to Salt Lake City was going through commercial test runs for a new inflight Wi-Fi system! We were invited to pull out our laptops, cell phones, and anything else with Wi-Fi to try out the system and see how well it worked. I definitely took advantage of this and whipped out my laptop (once at 10,000 feet of course). Internet worked great! I first came to this little screen:

Which led me to this nice little homepage:
It seemed like a typical Yahoo! webpage until I noticed the flight tracker.

I was actually able to track the plane's location, travel speed, estimated time of arrival, and altitude all in real-time!!! I was thoroughly impressed! I could even look up large attractions or special locations that I was flying over or nearby and then bring it all up in full screen:

I took the survey afterward and (unfortunately) there was a question asking how likely I would use the service if Southwest were to charge (I think) $4.30 for it. Of course I put a resolute no there, but I still enjoyed it while I could! To top it all off, I had the most amazingly hilarious flight attendant crew ever! It consisted of these two guys that were totally laid back, wise-cracking jokes left and right, and even singing a couple of Southwest jingles! We were taking off and as I was staring out the window, all of a sudden I hear "When you wish upon a star...." over the intercom!!! XD Complete parody of the song advertising for Southwest; it was priceless! I was thoroughly pleased with that flight.......except for the fact that TSA searched my suitcase...my bag weighed 45 pounds containing supplies for my student apartment I'm moving into for spring term. I discovered the dish soap and jam jars leaked out of their respective baggies onto some of the contents of my suitcase and cost me a half hour of cleaning upon my return to the dorms...yeah it wasn't too happy, but all's well now!