i'm grateful.

i'm grateful for so many things. i have been blessed with a good, good life.

 i have a dad who would literally do and give me anything i ever needed or asked for. i have a mom who is more amazing than words can describe. she supports me in everything i do. i have three awesome brothers who i would never trade for the world. they have my back, and they make me happy.

i have the three greatest friends in the whole world. they're gorgeous, talented, and have some of the sweetest spirits out there. most people are lucky to have just one best friend as great as my three best friends are.

i'm blessed to have been thrown into a whole new environment this year. it's helped me to find out who i really am, what i really want. it's made me way more independent, one hundred times more out going. it's helped me make so many new friends. friends that i do not know where i would be without them.

i'm grateful to have been born into the gospel, heaven knows where i would be without it. it's helped me through some really tough times.

i'm grateful for the opportunity i have had to be poor...seriously people, you haven't lived life until you look at your checking account and see one hundred dollars staring back at you. twenty years down the road i will look back on that and laugh, it's really quite comical being poor, and i'm glad that i have to experience it.

and since i'm honestly dirt poor i'm grateful for the opportunity i have to work. i got a job today, and i am so excited about it. i get to work in a home with disabled people. i get to help them accomplish every day tasks. i get to take them out on the town to have fun, grocery shop, and get exercise...and quite honestly i am SO excited for it. i cannot even wait for monday to come so i can start.

i'm blessed daily. thank you all for your examples, your prayers, and your friendship. i would not be here without you.

this november take the time to reflect on all of your blessings. it's really a neat deal this thing called life.

so provo house this crepe restaurant and i had been dying to go. i love crepes and i pass this restaurant everyday on my way to and from school. i was almost ready to just go by myself when ryan asked me on a date...and we were going to go to the crepe place! i was so excited! and let me just say, it's as good as it sounds.

seriously don't those look delish?! ryan got raspberry mint and i got strawberry banana with nutella...and it came with ice cream. just thinking about it makes me want to go back. after that we were going to go hit golf balls on the driving range but it was already closed, so we changed our plans and decided to go to jump on it.

we carpooled with some friends and it was a squishy ride. five of us rode in a convertible. we're cheap college kids.

ryan got the front, he's 6'4, we will give him a break. the kid sitting next to me has his legs under me, i sat halfway on him with my feet resting on ryan's shoulders. and natasha sat with her knees to her chest. by the time we arrived none of us could feel our legs.

after a few minutes and a little bit of blood flow we were fine. we spent the next three hours bouncing away. it was so fun, i was doing double front flips into the foam pit, side flips over huge blocks, i was in heaven. i have always loved trampolines and so a room full of them was fantastic!

we tried to get a jumping picture but my camera just wasn't having it...and also don't mind that i look like a midget.

we met some great new friends that turned out to live right next to us...we're planning a bonfire as we speak. our new friends were even generous enough to give us a ride home, hello bigger car. we were traveling home and things were great until we got off of the freeway. we heard a huge boom and then metal scraping and sparks were flying everywhere. we pulled over to this.

how that happens i have no idea, but it was scary. obviously though, we're fine. we got a ride home and the car is the only thing with damage done to it.

last year in order to get residency i had to be a registered voter. i lived in logan, and i planned to be in logan for a long while and so my voting card came through logan. well then obviously plans changed and now i'm in provo. with elections coming up dallin was all over me about voting. everyone i talked to thought that i would be fine with the voting card that i had.

well election day came around and everyone was wrong, i had to vote in logan. sean, breanne, and i were in the math lab doing some homework when sean mentioned that he had to go to bountiful to vote. i begged and pleaded, ok not really, all i had to do was ask nicely and sean decided to make a little road trip with me.

once we were getting ready to leave ryan decided to join along. we shoved three poeple into sean's mini. i wouldn't recommend it, especially when one of you is 6'4. we made it to bountiful, stole some snacks from sean's house, and then he went and voted. then we headed to logan. we arrived, i voted, and we were proud americans.

and of course you can't go to logan without visiting friends. we went to dinner with sean and ryan's buddy and after that we went and visited mel. it was so good to see her! i miss that girl. once it started getting late we headed out. we sang our lungs off on the ride home and then found out that obama won. sad day, but we tried.

i hope you all embraced your freedom and voted...even if it meant roadtripping in to logan.

weekends are my favorite, but aren't they everybody's?

last weekend was definitely a favorite...and i'm pretty sure i say that every weekend.

friday i was over and sean, greg, and ryan's...no shocker there. we were going to go rock climbing, but i had been with dallin and we got home too late, so instead greg decided to play monopoly. i hate monopoly. probably because my whole life i have had to play with dallin and he kills me everytime. mix that with my competitive side and it's just not a good mix. but in the end greg won and so we played. 

i could give you a play by play to how the whole game went. but as interesting as that sounds with a three hour game of monopoly, i'll make the story short and sweet. due to ryan's weak bladder, greg making an awful trade, and me having no mercy on sean because he had no mercy on me, i ended up winning my first game of monopoly. ever. now that's a good day. after that we just hung out and stayed up entirely too late.

i went to bed at three and was up at seven to drive home to watch kk play for regionals and to see alex.   alex just got home from germany on his mission and boy did i miss that kid. and soon as i saw him i attacked him with the biggest hug of my life. we chatted the whole way to twin and got caught up on each other lives. now i just hope he decided to go to byu.

we watched kk play, and obviously she rocked it. she's a regional champ headed to nationals. yep, that's my best friend. then alex treated allie and i to cafe rio. that restaurant makes it into my diet way more than it should.

after we made it back home i just spent the rest of the day hanging out with kk. we hadn't been home for five minutes when we realized that my family had gotten a cat...when did that happen?! so as i was unloading my car kk is just playing with the cat. next thing i know kaylee lets out this crazy scream and i glance back her arms are flailing everywhere. yep, that cat made a suicide jump from her arms. funniest thing i've ever seen. after rolling on the ground from laughter i start to unpack again. next thing i know kk says. "look brin, it's my kanga cat!"

she's a gem.

that night my mom stocked me up on more food than i even know what to do with. you see i had been eating ramen once a day for like two weeks. the only time i was eating twice a day was when i had a date. oh i cherished those dates. but now i'm loaded. i feel like the richest kid alive.

and then on sunday i got my patriarchal blessing. best experience ever. i cannot wait to get it in the mail. my mom and dad were there to hear it also. it was seriously the neatest day.

my roommate is disgusting.

seriously people, i could go on for days, luckily for you though, i wont. instead i'll just share a few of my favorite stories.

mainly our relationship revolves around the bathroom. i'm never home, and when i am, the roommate is locked away in her room. our first encounter happened when i first walked in. i was unpacking my things when she informed me that if i absolutely had to she could clear out one drawer for me in the bathroom. but that she would choose not to because she was already unpacked in there.

i wasn't interested in causing a fight and so i just kept all of my things in my own room. even my towel and robe are hanging up behind my door.

that night i walked into the bathroom and i about gagged. there was no way i was going to pee in there. so i called dallin and headed right on over to his house.

now i know i'm freakishly clean, we can all thank my mother for that, but really this bathroom is putrid. at first people were skeptical, sometimes things that are not clean enough to me are just fine with others. so i decided to document this bathroom for proof that it is in fact horrific.

exhibit a.

the sink.

between the hairballs, grime, and leftover makeup...oh yea and the used kleenex, there was no way i was going to brush my teeth in there. i brushed my teeth at the kitchen sink with a water bottle.

exhibit b.

the toilet.

hairballs on the floor, stains that i don't even want to know how long they took to get there, and the q-tip behind the seat...classy.

exhibit c.

the shower.

hair, grime, and stains everywhere.

makes me gag.

i could not take it for one more second and so one day after school i came home and for the next two hours i tried my hardest to clean that little baby up. it looks better, there are some stains that as hard as i try i just cannot get them out. all the tears, clorox, and other supplies in the world cannot remove them. but i tried, and it is now livable.

i'm sorry that it's an instagram photo, but it was all i could get of the before and after.

seriously, how does something get like this?

but don't you worry, the story only gets better...and the bathroom clearly worse.

so i had to go to logan to vote [post to come] so i arrived back in provo late, and i was honestly going to pee my pants. i run into the bathroom only to see that i had a "present" already waiting in the toilet...if you know what i mean.

it was gross, but it was by no means enough to have clogged a toilet. 

[sorry if you're grossed out.]

so i just decided to flush it. as soon as i did that the toilet starts filling up with water. i'm freaking out praying that it will not overflow. lucky enough it didn't. i knocked on courtney's door and when she answered i asked her if she had tried using the bathroom. she said "yea it filled up with water, i don't know what's wrong with it." i asked her if she had told the office..or anyone for that matter, she told me no, then closes her door in my face.

thanks for the heads up roomie.

so i call dallin asking him if he has a plunger, luckily he does, but he wasn't home, the next day i go borrow it in hopes that maybe i can plunge something out. i start plunging, no luck. i knock on courtney's door again to tell her it's still not working and i asked her if she knew where the valve was so that if i tried flushing it again and it filled up with water i could turn the water off. she walked in the bathroom and said just let me do this...flushes the toilet. once again it fills up with water...aaaaaand overflows.

courtney decides that she should probably take everything off of the floor and so what does she do?

she takes the plunger, that was just inside the poopy toilet, and sets in face-down on our counter!!! not only that but she also puts the toilet scrubbers on there. all while her toothbrush sits a mere five inches away! who does that?!

but that's not the end. what does she do after that? she says "well crap, that sucks!" walks back into her bedroom. i'm standing in a flooded bathroom, with the plunger on the sink, in tears.

i was furious.

so i cleaned it up and went back in my room to study biology. i decided to take a water break and when i'm in the kitchen my other roommate breanna tells me that we finally got our cleaning check schedule.

the way they do those here is the cleaning is split up in four different sections and each roommate signs up and then they clean their section. breanna told me that courntey got home first and so she got first pick...guess where she picked?

you nailed it, the bathroom.

i once again went and knocked on courtney's door and when she answered i tried to explain to her that i had just barely cleaned the whole bathroom, and i had again like an hour ago. not only that but the only section left was the kitchen, and i don't even have things in the kitchen.

you see when i moved in they basically told me there was no room and so all my kitchen supplies are in tubs under my bed, and when i need something i dig them out, cook, then wash them and put them away. in the fridge i have one small fruit holder space to store all of my refrigerated foods. everything else is once again stored in a tub in my room. 

i told her that i didn't think it was fair that i would have to wash their three weeks worth of dishes when none of it was my mess, and i had already cleaned her part.

she told me she was interested in switching.

what a gem.

i write this down in hopes that maybe a few years down the road i will re-read this and laugh.

 i've been thinking about it and maybe i'm supposed to be in provo to learn patience, because trust me courtney has tested my patience in more ways than one. and she has tested me to my core.

obviously this year my roommates are not my best friends, it's been hard to get used to because last year my roommates were my best friends, i hardly did anything without them. but at the same time i have seen great things come from not living with best friends. i've really had to become more independent and meet new people all on my own. it has helped me form such a great relationship with my brother because for a while he was literally the only person i knew. i go to him for virtually everything.

there's also sean, he also lives at branbury and we have math together and so if i'm not at dal's, i'm at seans. i'm sure he gets sick of me because sometimes i just show up at his house and then as soon as he opens the door i go lay on his couch and tell him that i just need to vent and he needs to listen. he's pretty good about stuff like that.

it's hard to live with people you don't get along with, but it can't last forever. and it's been good for me, i've made so many new friends because i do things to get out of the house. i attend every little activity i can find.

i'm so happy right now, life is good, and now i get to go clean the kitchen.

i'll be completely honest, halloween isn't my favorite holiday. i mean i love the occasional haunted house...after i'm done going through it. and the scary movies are nice....until you're trying to sleep alone. and as for dressing up...i dress up no matter what holiday it is. i'm just not into the whole creepy side of halloween. although i do love the fact that you get free candy!

i had my mind set that i was going to go trick or treating until i got a twix. you guys i have a serious addiction, i love twix. so that night i suited up in some footie pajamas, rocked a nice set of pigtails, and headed to a halloween party.

we arrived at the location where greg was sure the party was at...nobody in costumes was there...pretty awkward when a car full of people ages 20-22 are all dressed up nice. luckily though greg re-read his email and soon enough we were at the right place.

we walked in and there was games/candy galore. i have a sweet tooth, i won't even try to deny it. but i was a woman on a mission, and i wanted a twix. we were walking booth to booth when i soon realized that not one booth had a twix. i was pretty disappointed, but with all of the fun activities going on i soon got over it.

we hit up a photo booth, dal bobbed for an apple. he literally dunked his whole entire head just to beat greg. he's a little competitive. we then posed for a group photo.

the lady told us we looked like one of those awful pictures on awkward family photos.

i think we're pretty cute.

i went home a little sad that i didn't have a twix, luckily jake's face paint gave me a good laugh every single time i looked at him.

and don't worry about me, the next day i did get a twix.

i have such good friends.

breanne's got my back.

she's seriously such a gem.

and halloween is over, i'm not to sad about that. next up, thanksgiving. i have so much to be thankful for.

this saturday was definitely a good one.

it started out with me waking up in my own bed. which after thursday night is really a great thing to me. after i woke up i spent the next few hours in bed finishing up all of my homework in my pj's. and trust me, it was glorious. once i was all done dallin and i headed over to one of his friend's so that we could watch the football game. while we were watching the game squid texted me and told me that she was headed into provo that night. let's just say that i was pumped.

once her and her friend hailey arrived we went out to eat...to cafe rio of course. aaaand guess who gets a free meal the next time they go...this girl! love when that happens. once we were done eating we decided to make a game plan for the rest of the night. there was a huge dance that night and i could get us all in for free, but we didn't exactly have any halloween clothes. our other option was to go to a haunted house, but we wanted more people to go with us.

we were leaning more towards the haunted house and so i called my friend sean to see if he and his roommates wanted to go with us. he didn't answer and so we ran to his house and knocked on his door. his roommate ryan answered and he was instantly game. we had to wait for sean and greg to get home and so we had a ping pong tournament until they arrived. minus the three incidents where the ping pong ball was hit into the pool, it was a good time.

sean and greg finally arrived and so we all crammed into hailey's car and headed to the haunted forest. after taking faulty direction from ryan, three u turns, and chasing after a spotlight on a creepy road, we finally arrived. we piled out and were soon greeted by these lovelies.

we got our tickets and headed in. the first house was a great time, but i really don't have anything significant about it that i remember... but luckily for me i did not pee my pants this time. now that's something to be happy about.

after we finished the first house we were waiting in line to enter the second house when we heard sean laughing. all he wanted to do was get a picture with him as this nasty little skeleton.

oh that sean, he's a character.

the second house was definitely the favorite. some of the highlights:

-there is a section where it looks like half of the floor is missing and as you walk across it the wall falls in on you a bit. well it fell in on me and my life flashed before my eyes.

-there is a room where you walk across a straight platform but the walls are spinning and so it is really hard to walk straight. well the line got backed up so we were stuck in this room for about three minutes, we kept trying to jump and do tricks, which only resulted in us getting headaches and falling over.

-getting stuck in this clown room, where the two clown just laughed and followed us.

-then the clowns made the boys and girls separate. hailey is terrified of clowns. so she really didn't appreciate the one that jumped out at her. there were tears.

-hailey and greg getting shocked.

-i'm still the fastest at running away from the chainsaws.

-and at the very end there is a slide. seriously, every haunted house should have a slide. it was the ultimate favorite.

after we finished the haunted house we were all laughing and telling our favorite parts when captain jack sparrow showed up.

we had a nice little chat with him before we headed off.

once we arrived back at home the boys offered us some hot chocolate and vanilla wafers. how do you deny that? so we went over, had some snacks, and then ended up turning on a movie. we got home way too late, ate way too much, but it was a great time.

i'm so lucky to have met such great friends, whether i met them this year at school, or if we've been friends since junior high.