Happy Halloween From Xena

That's right I fulfilled my child hood dream of becoming Xena, Warrior Princess for a day this Halloween. You all remember the show, the digital wonders, and of course, the famous battle cry:

AYIYIYIIIYIYIIYIIII!

Happy Halloween

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/JZ6U5LWbGTadBWot

Confessions of a College Student

Our washing machine finally died today, flooding the kitchen. Management finally came to check it out and discovered that there was no motor! My roommate thinks it disintegrated but I think it's far more likely that previous tenants jipped it to make go-carts. Bill Cosby style.  When I got home today, she informed me of the terrible incident which was quickly followed by an apartment happy-dance. We get a new one tomorrow. I quickly took this picture for posterity so that someday I can one up my kids.

"In MY day, the apartments were sooo ghetto..."

So long rusty clanker, you were somewhat endearing; I for one will miss doing relaxing to the sound of a few semi trucks falling down the stairs.

Jason!!

This is Jason, sportingly posing for the most ridiculous picture I could think of (hey i'm an older sister, I have that right.) Jason's in his senior year and is turning, goodness, 18 next month! He plays jazz music on the drums and is looking into college engineering programs.

Kevin Porter Sneaky Snorter

Kevin just turned 13 in September.  Yeah, my little kev-O brother is 13!  He's taking up the guitar and is really good.  Here he is playing the Crashtest Dummies "Peterpumpkin head" at the campfire. What a stud.

Dad Porter Ph.D., ABPP

Dad just recieved the top notch status in his field and joined the American Board of Professional Psychology. abbreviated as (ABPP pronounced "Abip".) It's like the top something percent of or as he describes, "it's like being the "dungeon master of neuropsychologists" which is pretty cool.  In case you're wondering what dad does:

"Dr. Porter is a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist who is specialized in the assessment of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders and diseases of the brain including: Autism Spectrum Disorders, genetic disorders, prenatal and early life risk factors, Traumatic Brain Injury, stroke, Cerebral Palsy, ADHD and learning disorders, childhood cancer and epilepsy. 

Area of Expertise: Dr. Porter is a team member of MeritCare's Coordinated Treatment Center's pediatric neurorehabilitation and developmental evaluation programs and he consults with the pediatric intensive care service at MeritCare. Dr. Porter was previously an Assistant Professor of Child Development at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah and a Director of Science Curriculum for a nationally distributed educational publication. He is published in peer reviewed scientific journals. Dr. Porter is licensed in the states of North Dakota and California."

We are extremely proud and excited. Go Dad!

Cooking!

I love having a kitchen again! I love to cook and make up meals.  The chicken chowder above was actually really really good. My big vice is spices and sauces so if you're thinking of anything to get me for christmas...

Instant relief of boo-boos, head aches, owies...

My nephew and niece, Chase and Isabella, both have a magical owie-soothing cold pack (one Ariel and the other Cars.)  I was pretty excited to see this Jasmine one for MY owies!  Jasmine, was of course, my favorite princess.

The Prince's Quest

We had to watch this for our foreign film section in my...you guessed it, Film class.  It's a French, Belgium, Spanish, and Italian film produced in Arabic and English and was one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. Definately one I'll buy for my house someday.

NEW JOB

I just started working with Catering.  I've done several banquets already so I'm an expert right? And then I went and flooded the kitchen but no one knew it was me. Probably because I was leading the relief effort. haha.

THE VICE OF APT. 8

Apartment 8 has discovered the magic of nutella dipped pretzels and the nights we put on a movie everyone pulls out their pretzels and digs in.

HITTING THE BOOKS

My time is pretty much multiple angles of the above photo. Lots and lots of studying. It's my third year at BYU and I've only got this last semester to apply to the programs I want to get into. The plan is to major in Advertising with either a double major or minor in the Media Arts with and emphasis on film editing. Both programs have a lot of prerequisits to apply and are both really hard to get into so wish me luck! I'm really excited to finally start narrowing down the field now that I'm all out of generals and half way through a Spanish minor. What do I plan to do with this all you ask?
Well... I dream of being the coolest, artsiest advertiser ever and who knows, maybe I can do some film stuff as well. I have a lot of studio-art/photo-editing experience so it would be great to be the guru of film editing since everything's going digital. I could also do ads in Spanish or travel--so... we'll see.

MY BEAUTIFUL SISTER

The delay of my blog launch is due to some wonderous hacking of the above beautiful sister. Being new to the blog realm, it took me a while to get rid of the 16yr-old hoochie mama backdrop with flashing glitter hearts and destroy all the horrible pictures of myself etc.   In other words (Stacey's):

"This is blog entry is in dedication to my favorite person in the world, Stacey.  She is the greatest.  She is my inspiration and the best sister a girl could have.  I promise to bake cookies for her and give her massages whenever she wants them.  I promise to babysit her adorable kids at the drop of hat, any time she needs, and every Friday and Saturday night.  Oh how lucky I am to have Stacey in my life."

To sum up some of last year...

I went to BYU and met a lot of really cool people.  This is us making a "Y" on top of the Y mountain, except for Grace, who's "U" gesture which got her sent to the University of Utah.

I became a Resident Assistant (RA).  Our training was intense military camp style...

...and now look how HARD-CORE I am:

My really cool hall decor and nametags. The Cheesy theme was: "It takes two wings to fly." We all spent FOR-EV-ER making our hall stuff and then were very injustified when we discovered many of the guy RAs used post-it notes as name tags on their halls. lame.

Yeah we had to do all the unfortunate stuff like roommate mediations and cleaning checks but pulling the big fire-alarm made it all worth it.