Finally Friday

A few things that are random that are on my mind:

My pea plants are doing awesome! I hope they produce.Good work little pea plants! Keep on growing!

Other plants are doing well. For Family Home Evening, Andrew and I talked about Alma 32 and how to gain faith, we need to plant seeds in our heart. Andrew planted summer squash in his heart and I planted broccoli in my heart. We are glad that both things are doing well.

We leave for Hong Kong in just a few days! I'll be outta here next Thursday. :D

I did not wake up for the Royal Wedding, but I did watch the highlights. I liked Queen Elizabeth's happy yellow dress and I really liked Kate's wedding dress, but not as much as I like MY wedding dress. I hope they have a marvelous day!

Kate Middleton's dress. Very nice. Source.

My wedding dress. Sorry Kate, mine is perfect. Photo by Dirk Widdison. (PS - I'm on the homepage for Dirk! I'm the one in front of the blue garage door. :D) For more wedding pictures, check out this post.

My brother Matt got his mission call on Wednesday. He will serve in the Colorado Springs mission and he leaves August 31! I'm really excited to finally have a missionary sibling. :D

(That's Matt)

My finger does not hurt as much as it did yesterday. A piece of egg shell stabbed me under my fingernail--OWWW!!!

Paper rewrites are going well but I still need to do a lot of work and probably shouldn't blog.

Tomorrow I am hostessing a baby shower for my friend Michelle and her baby boy. I love hostessing things.

I really just want to go hiking but I haven't been able to go since I went snowshoeing in Green Canyon.

All in all, it is a good day. And it will be a good weekend.

Easter Photo Shoot

When I was a little girl, my mom always made the girls Easter dresses and then they would take our picture by the flowers. I've made myself a few dresses, but since I hate putting in zippers, I sometimes buy a new dress. So, on Easter Sunday before church, Andrew put on his Easter tie and I put on my Easter dress and we went out for a photo shoot. There aren't many flowers at the end of April in Logan, so it was quite the hunt.

Andrew by a tree. Isn't he handsome?


We finally found some daffodils by the Institute! I knew the Church wouldn't let us down. I love my Easter dress! It is kinda Jackie Kennedy-esque. Plus, daffodils are my favorite flowers, except for hydrangeas.

Family Easter picture. How cute.

Happy Easter everyone!

Easter Time + End of Semester = Bad News

I love Cadbury Eggs almost as much as I love Lindt Truffle Balls.

And since it's Easter Time, I've had a ton of those amazing pastel, sugar-coated, smooth chocolates. I think I ate like 20 since I got home from work. At least I exercised today, right?

It is also the end of the semester and I am so tired. Yesterday I was motivated. Today I am not. I have fought this lack of motivation thing for a few weeks, thanks to the looming burden of revising major papers and a thesis proposal. So instead, I bum around on blogs.

This blog thing has gotten worse cuz I'm trying to only get on Facebook once each day. So instead I blog stalk for a lot more. I'm not sure if this is healthy. But I do think that blogs are more interesting than Facebook cuz I get to know people.

So the moral of the story is: sometimes it's good to bum around and eat Cadbury eggs, and I can do it every so often as long as I get my other work done.

And my pea plants are doing so well! I hope they grow and make lots of yummy peas for me to eat! I love peas! Probably more than I love Cadbury Eggs (heresy, I know).

My Funny Body

I am definitely an apple body shape. My torso is way short, my waist is relatively small, my hips are huge, and my thighs could crush your head. Plus, my bosom is tiny.

This week I had to buy some more underclothes and I looked at the sizing chart at the store. I used the measuring tape. And I had to laugh.

Hips - 44"

Waist - 32"

First off, it is awesome that I have a foot of difference between hips and waist. Second, although I wish I were thinner in my hips, I'm glad I could still find humor in this.

For the kind of underwears I was looking at, the 44" hips were almost to the next size up and the 32" waist were in the next size down. I laughed so hard--it wasn't very reverent so I felt bad. I bought the ones that would fit my hips. They felt like they were falling down all day! So I took the unopened ones back and got the smaller size which made me feel awesome.

I am just shaped weird and I always will be. :)

International Updates!

Andrew and I just booked plane tickets and a hotel for Hong Kong! Exciting! We are leaving right after Andrew finishes with finals and are returning before he leaves for Washington. In one month from today we will be in Hong Kong!

We found some killer deals for plane tickets, so we decided to just go. We will be using our tax return to fund this. Plus, we don't have real jobs and we don't have kids. This is the best time of our lives to travel the world, at least until we are retired.

And I'll get a stamp in my passport!

I'm really really excited and Andrew is so excited to get to go back to his mission. We will visit his old friends from his missionary days and eat great foods and hike epic mountains and speak Cantonese and look at Hong Kong harbor and go to the Temple and just have a great time!

This is a picture of Hong Kong that Andrew took when he was a missionary. :D

Topaz Internment Camp

During Spring Break in March, Andrew and I drove to Delta in Central Utah. We went there because the site of the former Central Utah Relocation Center, popularly known as Topaz, is a few miles out of Delta.

After Pearl Harbor, Anglo Americans on the West Coast were very worried about the threat from the Japanese Americans who lived there. Although ultimately not a threat, the government required all Japanese Americans (included U.S.-born citizens and their immigrant parents who were not allowed to become naturalized by racist legislation) to leave the West Coat. They were forced into internment/concentration camps for World War II. Topaz was one of those camps.

Since I am doing a lot of research on Utah's Japanese American population, and I had never been, we decided to spend a day at the camp.

This Delta home is a former barracks that Japanese Americans would have lived in.

An actual barracks at the Topaz museum. The barracks were built with flimsy materials and covered with tar paper. In the extreme cold of Great Basin winters--these sucked.


This is the ruins of a garden created by a painter, Chiura Obata, outside of his door.

I found a drain from the latrine area.

What's more American than Coca-Cola? Please note the rusted nails to the side. These were just left on the ground after the barracks were dismantled.

Terra cotta cover for a flue. A flue is part of a chimney. The people only had little stoves to warm their rooms.


I'm in the distance. In the foreground is the Buddhist Temple garden area. Note the large and distinctive rocks in the area.

We found some pieces of china that went together! There were tons of broken chinaware. We pretty much rummaged through their trash piles.

Ahhh, the Great Basin. How'd you like to move from San Francisco to this exotic locale?


Part of the barbed wire fence is still standing.

Being at the Topaz site moved me. I had read a lot about Japanese American imprisonment. It's unlikely that I will ever know what it is like to be falsely incarcerated because of my race, and I didn't really experience it. But just being there--realizing that people lived here and tried to continue on with their lives--was impressive. I hope that this sort of thing never happens again. I hope I have the courage to oppose injustice when I see it.