Beating the Busy Life

I apologize for being so late in posting about my Christmas break! You can be sure that I'm not turning in my school assignments this late. I have been rather busy, though, since break ended. Classes are definitely starting to push me just a little, so you have to stay on top of the game. But enough about the present, let me jump back a month and show you what's been happening.

I'm so excited about my new Canon Rebel SLR camera I got for Christmas!!!!!! Thank you parents for that one :D I spent all break practicing with it, because it's got quite a set of bells and whistles to it. Here are some of the shots I made:

The rest of the shots are from Spokane's New Years celebration called First Night Spokane.

The famous trash-sucking goat!

I was especially excited about the chance to try out some sweet fireworks shots. Here were the best two that I managed:

So yeah, I had a bunch of others, but I don't want to bore you all with my growing feddish of taking photos :P I hope to be able to get a bunch of other really cool shots in the future.

I've continued a ton of volunteer service from last semester, especially for the church. I continue to go to the Missionary Training Center to be taught by the Spanish-speaking missionaries. I've also discovered this really cool website put out by the church called Helping in the Vineyard. The actual link is http://vineyard.lds.org, and is directly tied to http://create.lds.org, which is a service that allows members to submit media and other services for the church to use in it's various productions and projects. So instead of sending a church photographer all the way to Africa to get some photos down there, they can just put a request on the site, and African photographers can just upload professional-quality photos of whatever is needed! Right now, you're able to submit photos, video, music, audio programming for Mormon Channel Radio, and you're also able to provide your services as an actor, translator, genealogical indexer, and computer programmer, with future plans of adding a graphic design element, and a writing section!!! There's a ton of stuff you can do obviously! So I've gone and started translating stuff into Spanish, and happened to find a club here at BYU that works together on the translation projects in all the languages we can. It's a lot of fun, and helps me feel like I'm accomplishing something rather useful in the world. I also put together some panoramas I took of church historic sites and the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and submitted them through the site. I'm happy to say that they were accepted by the reviewers and are stored away somewhere in the church's massive media database!

I also recently took a simple job at the MTC cafeteria, just to get an income coming in. I now have three different nametags that let me just walk into the MTC (alright, the black one is kind of expired, but the other ones do the job :P ). They just can't keep me out!

School's going pretty well. A couple of projects have kind of beaten me up recently, but I finished them all the same, and am now treading through midterm-week. It's weird, but it seems like all of your classes, regardless of major and semester, all collaborate and put all their midterm exams out at the same time. I had one at the beginning of the week, one I have to take today, another that has to be taken before the end of tomorrow, and my second Spanish midterm on Monday!!! Lots and lots of tests! I've been doing pretty well though, so I'm riding on my confidence for this one. Speaking of though, I unfortunately must go and study :P
Have a good day!