prom night

a few saturdays ago, as meredith and i were walking back to our house from the local 7-eleven redbox location, we came across a peculiar sight on the main stairs of the provo city library. congregating around the steps were what looked like parents, children and, most interestingly, teenaged couples in formal attire. as we loitered around the outskirts of the gathering, we gathered that this was an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness promenade.

prom·e·nade

   [prom-uh-neyd, -nahd] noun, verb, prom·e·nad·ed, prom·e·nad·ing

1. a stroll or walk, especially in a public place, as for pleasure or display.

2. an area used for such walking.

3. a march of guests into a ballroom constituting the opening of a formal ball.

4. a march of dancers in square dancing.

5. a formal dance; prom.

so basically, it was a promenade in multiple senses of the word. a master of ceremonies announced each couple as they marched down the grand staircase amid the cheers and applause of their waiting families. 

to me, it was magical. how cool that this school makes such a big deal out of prom night, giving families the chance to see their kids, some of whom will be graduating and leaving the nest soon, all dressed up on what promises to be one of the most memorable nights of their lives!

it made me wish that i had gone to prom in my high school years. usually i don't care about that at all--i mean, i didn't really care about it at the time--but i guess every once in a while i wish i had some really awesome prom/school dance stories to contribute to the conversations that sometimes come up or to tell my own kids when they are getting ready for their own dances. it doesn't matter all that much (i don't think), but it's one area of life that i don't have a lot of personal experience with. 

this wasn't meant to be a pity party; i don't think i'm any worse off, socially or emotionally or anything, because i didn't go to prom. but i was glad we randomly came upon that promenade at the library last week. i should probably play dress up and go to a formal event sometime soon, right?

new catch phrase

i noticed a few days ago that i was saying "there you go" quite often, all of a sudden. like after every third sentence or so. a friend would say, oh, i just remembered what i have to do tomorrow, and i would say, well, there you go. it's a fairly useful phrase, if rather random.

i've been wondering why i've started saying it so much lately, why it's become such a big part of my vernacular. then, yesterday, in the car on the drive up to buffalo wild wings for 50 cent wings, i said something about it to meredith and jesse. meredith said, yeah, jesse says that all the time. and jesse said, yeah, i always say that. and that was that.

so i guess jesse is rubbing off on me, and i didn't notice. that worries me a little :)

the times they are a changin' (ever heard of that as a post title before?)

i'm still amazed at how quickly things can change. i am so happy these days, but for completely different reasons than the reasons i was happy just a few weeks ago.

in april, i started but never finished a blog post about how i felt like i was floundering--that was the word that kept coming back to me. i felt really good about a lot of relationships in my life, but i could feel myself failing in most of the other areas. and i was so stressed about it. the weight of a lot of struggles was on me. i was having the time of my life with my friends, but other important issues--school and work--were not falling into place.

now, i feel a million times better about my school and work situation. nothing is really figured out, but i have a plan and i have a knowledge that things happen for a reason. things are different with my friends, but they are different for good reasons. i'm having fun but also getting things done, which hasn't really been the case for quite awhile now.

so, i've come to terms with the fact that things change, but they change for good reason. life is all about adapting and succeeding gloriously, as elder scott puts it.

sometimes really simple things make me really happy

as most of my friends know, i have a thing for rainbows. i freaked out for days about how awesome our vast array of spray paint choices looked when it was all arranged in rainbow order. so, when i came to our fhe activity on monday and saw a brand new box of sidewalk chalk, i might have convinced a friend to take a couple pictures and send them to me.

isn't this the greatest? it makes me so happy!

as an explanation...

not to make an excuse for not blogging very consistently lately, but there are some days that are so great and so full of happiness that i just don't know if i can put them into words. and, to put it bluntly, there are some days that are just better lived than retold.

this is not to say that i am taking a hiatus from my blog (not that i think too many people would care too much anyway). but just know that if i'm not here super often in the coming weeks and months of summer fun, it's because i'm out living. and life is pretty darn good right now.

over and out. be back later.

a perfect sunday

yesterday was the kind of day that i want to repeat all summer. here's what it consisted of (i'm not going to include church on this list, though it was also great. but it's kinda something that happens all year...):

being outside from 5pm to 12:30am
walking to joaquin park with meredith
lazing in the front yard of the taj with all sorts of friends
laughing like crazy at one friend's hilarious stories
trying matzo ball soup
scootering back to joaquin park to see the solar eclipse with a ton of people from the ward
having awesome girl talk with two of my favorite girls
sitting by the hammock with a couple boys "sharing our feelings"
sitting in the hammock with several boys talking and laughing and just generally having a good time together
wearing one of my favorite dresses from 11am to 12:30am

basically, what all this amounts to is that i spent the day outside with a whole bunch of great people having a grand old time. and, i have only identified one bug bite so far; it's on my big toe, so no worries.

this morning when i woke up i could still feel the sway of the hammock.

and that is what i want my summer to be.

my relationship with hikes

so, i'm not much of an outdoors(wo)man (um, how awesome is it to put parentheses in the middle of words? pretty awesome). i like being outside, particularly in a hammock or in a swimsuit, with a good book, but i'm not what you would really call "athletic", per se.

when i was younger, i dreaded hiking. i hated going to girls' camp for this reason. and several times, i couldn't finish a hike because i felt terrible. basically, hikes are kind of traumatic for me.

a couple weeks ago, a group of us planned to hike up to the y on a monday evening. i was pretty excited. i haven't hiked in a while, and i thought it would be fun to go up there with a group of my friends. and i've hiked the y, so while i knew it wouldn't be easy for me, i knew i had accomplished it twice before. i told everyone that i probably needed to take it easy and take lots of breaks, though i felt bad because some of my fellow hikers are outdoorsmen and could probably run up to the y without stopping. people seemed supportive anyway. but maybe 15 minutes in, i couldn't go any further. i felt nauseous, i was hyperventilating, my legs were shaky. i had to go back down the mountain.

i was really embarrassed. i hate feeling like i can't do something, and i hated that i was failing in front of my friends. and i hated that i had somehow gone backwards, that i had once been able to climb that dumb mountain and now i couldn't.

this past monday and tuesday i was down in moab for the aforementioned skydiving excursion. the boys wanted to spend the rest of our time at arches national park. the last time i was in moab, for a ysa trip, was right after i graduated from high school, and i had attempted to hike to delicate arch that time. but the same thing happened to me then that happened at the y--less than halfway through, i felt totally sick and couldn't go on, even with the promise of getting to spend more time with the boy i liked if i stuck it out. i was pretty nervous for this attempt at delicate arch. i didn't want to make a fool out of myself again, and i wanted to see the sights, dang it! i tried to take all the necessary precaution: drinking enough water, wearing sunscreen, wearing good shoes.


and i did it. i made it to delicate arch, and i made it through all the rest of our hikes, too. it felt so good to finally make it to the famous arch after an abysmal finish six years ago. and i realized that i'm not a bad hiker or something--i just need to take some extra precautions. because maybe i'm just more prone to dehydration than some people? i don't know. but i did it and i felt really good. and i think maybe my intense dislike of hiking came from this feeling that i couldn't do it--but i can do it and, maybe more importantly, i can actually enjoy it. so here's to me being maybe more of an outdoorsman, a hiker, in the future. as long as i have enough water.