Life Update

(Forward: this post is going to just be a vomit of everything that I haven't written on here in the last month or so. Feel free to stop reading anytime. There really isn't any point to this post, except to have an outlet for some of my thoughts.) 

Hello Again!

This semester has probably been the busiest, most exhausting semester I have ever had! I say that every semester, and I'm not lying, it just gets worse every semester! It gets easier to write papers in a day, but the amount of papers just keeps increasing (11 papers total, ranging from 4 pages to 11 pages each. and 27 papers that are only a page long... you can just consider that one 27 page paper.). The amount of reading for my classes also drastically increased this semester...but I have kind of stopped reading for my classes, because there just isn't enough time in the world. My original plan was going to be to count how many pages I had to read for my classes total this semester, but because I stopped reading I gave up on that... but in case you are curious, by week 2 of classes I had read 258 pages total, that's when I stopped counting.

Next semester will probably be worse. I'm supposed to keep a positive attitude about it, so that it doesn't end up so bad, but I don't know if I can trick myself into loving all these assignments for another semester.

Big news though! Ryan and I figured out that if I practically kill myself for one more semester, then I can graduate in April! (Instead of next December!) Instead of working two jobs and taking 5 classes, next semester I am going to work one job, have one internship, and take 5 classes, and one class online. If I'm really awesome, I'll finish most of the online class over Christmas break, and then I will only have to focus on everything else until APRIL! When I'm graduating! I have officially applied to graduate and everything! I just have to find an internship and sign up for my online class and then pass everything. That's it! The end is in sight! :)

Exciting things are happening around here!

Other fun things:

Last weekend, Ryan and I went on a REAL vacation! :) It was wonderful. Normally when we take a "vacation" it is either to see his family members or mine. Which is fun! We love visiting our families! However, when I pictured our first summer together married, I pictured grand adventures. Camping, road trips, spontaneous trips to explore Utah, etc. And then we both worked full time jobs at opposite times of the day for most of the Summer. Our few times off were spent with family, because that was important to us. With holiday season coming up, I started to panic because we only get the day of Thanksgiving off, and Ryan only gets the DAY of Christmas off. (Becoming an adult is a rough change sometimes...) Before we know it, the next semester would be here with my job, internship, classes, and his full time class schedule and full time job. Pretty soon we'd be dead, and all the time to go on grand adventures will be over! .... annnnyyyyyways, I looked at EVERY Airbnb in the state of Utah that was under $50 a night and searched for one that specifically had no security deposit (I don't know about you, but we don't just have $250 to hand over to just anybody), and a small cleaning fee, that was cute, in a fun place, and maybe even with a fun benefit like warm chocolate chip cookies, hot chocolate, or breakfast or something. I love "free" things. :) I spent a couple of hours that could have been homework time to look for the best deal. Ryan of course chose the one that was in Manti, rather than one in downtown Salt Lake City. We decided on this cute gueshouse/loft type thing that a family owned in Manti, UT. They had a real wood burning stove in the kitchen area. Upstairs turned out to be a lot shorter than we thought it would be, but that didn't bother us. They had a bed, with a fancy electric heater that looked like a pretty fireplace, they also had a couch and a tv for watching movies. AND the lady that owns it made us a delicious breakfast every morning we were there! It was perfect. We got to Manti on Friday night and went to one of the few local restaurants. On Saturday, we had NO plans. It was the most peaceful day I have had in AGES. We walked around, window shopped, bought cotton candy, walked around the Manti temple, played at a park, looked at the old houses, read the historical markers, ate pizza at Roys, and finished the day off with spending time in the Manti temple, which, by the way, looks like a castle on the inside! The sun was shining and everything. On Sunday, we went to church at the old tabernacle and then headed home.

Phew! Read all that without taking a breath!

The height I mentioned. (: It made me laugh because it made Ryan look like a giant.

This is the fancy fireplace heater I mentioned. :)

Cotton Candy, one of my many weaknesses.

Roy's Pizza, Ephraim, UT

Monday was kind of a blow after that fun weekend, but we are at the final stretch of this semester, so it is doable. (Did you know that doable is a word but accomplishable isn't?)

I have been resisting decorating for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. But you can bet that I will have some snowflakes made and hung everywhere by November 24th! Also, my grandpa carved me my very own beginning of a Nativity last Christmas (which I have been waiting my whole life for!) and I have been waiting all year to be able to put it up for the first time! I also have a snowman that he carved me on my mission that has been hiding in Texas for 2 years, that I will also be getting out. I have my mind set on being creative this year, so I will probably make some Christmas pillows to put on my couch. We don't have a ton of money to spend, so I even considered stealing fir needles to make a wreath out of... but I think that I may pass on that one. I also notice all the little pine trees and chuckle to myself as I picture myself sneaking out at night to cut one down to bring home. BYU would probably notice if one of their trees was missing huh?
(Can you see now what I mean by resisting to decorate for Christmas? It is obviously on my mind, can you tell?)

Nothing to do with Christmas, but do you want to know what annoying things happened to me last night? First of all, I wasn't very tired and I was having trouble falling asleep. THEN, there was a cat outside meowing. It was quiet at first, and kind of weird because we literally have never heard cats from our room before. I have an overactive imagination, so my first thought was cat, but my second thought was evil madman/gang member trying to lure us outside so that he could kill us. (My brain escalates quickly at night.) But then it got louder and it was super annoying. After about half an hour of loud cat meowing, Ryan banged on the wall, which gave me a heart attack, but also stopped the cat noises. It was very effective. I mentioned it to Ryan this morning and he informed me that they were getting it on. Very inconsiderate of them. They probably think the same of Ryan scaring them away though. You don't have sounds of cats making love to lure you to sleep often do you? (Except they were doing the exact opposite, because they did NOT help me sleep.)

Then I had a dream that Ryan fell in love with someone else, which was pretty heartbreaking. But when I told him he hugged me really tight and told me all the reasons why he loves me more than anyone else in the whole wide world, except for Jesus, of course.

I have really strange, unreal dreams though, so I wasn't really worried. I've been chased by murderers multiple times this month, and I had a pet miniature hedgehog a couple weeks ago, my car fell into a pot hole that turned out to be so deep you couldn't see the bottom, and I have conversations that I have to clarify with Ryan didn't actually happen in real life. And, if anyone knows how to interpret dreams, if you could tell me what it means to dream about heights that'd be great.

Well. Now that I have shared all my innermost thoughts and feelings. I'm impressed that you made it so far.

Thanks for reading, I hope it wasn't a complete waste of your time.

Love, Kinsey

This is what we wore to our ward Trunk of Treat. He was really proud of his axe. The head belonged to his grandpa, and he found the closed axe handle that would fit at the store and then spent an hour making it fit. The kids at church were really impressed. Also, he grew out his beard for a 6 weeks for this costume.

Celebrating Dia De Los Muertos.

Date Night and a Social Experiment

This past Monday, Ryan and I decided to go on a date to the Nickel Arcade. As we were walking in Ryan told me, "I've secretly wanted to go to one of these places since I was 3."

Backstory: When Ryan was 3, his family went to Chuck-E Cheese. At some point during the excursion, Ryan pooped his pants. He was...and I guess still is... a bit of a free spirit. Instead of letting his parents know, he just took his pants off and buried them in the ball pit. He wasn't going to let that little incident stop his fun, so he proceeded to go down the slide and leave a nice brown streak behind him... allllll the way down the slide... His poor mother had to go into the ball pit and find his poop-filled shorts. And then he received a life-time ban from Chuck-E Cheese. After all of that, I can understand why his parents would never take him to any other similar places because, I'm sure fishing through the ball pit for some poopy pants was a traumatizing experience.  

So, he hasn't been back to an arcade/games/tickets for prizes kind of place in 20 years. I'm not sure it was as exciting this time as it was then, but it was still a lot of fun.

I was really excited to put my nickels in and watch as all the tickets came out. I was disappointed to find out that they stopped using tickets and nickels, and that now it's all just on a card that you scan to play the games. I was also disappointed to see that the prizes are not nearly as cool as I remember them being. We did get a pretty great sign though. I'll provide a picture so you can see how cool it is. I think we are planning to hang it on the bathroom door.

 

I promised Ryan that if he let me take a picture of him with the sign, that I would let him take a picture of me. However, I'm at school right now, and don't have the sign with me and I would like to just publish this blog post, so I photoshopped the sign into this picture of me.

The social experiment part of the title of my post, has nothing to do with date night, it's just something else I wanted to write about. 

School started last week. (It's probably going to be the death of me. I could take a whole blog post to complain about how much homework I've had in only one week of classes!) Anyways, in one of my classes we are learning about families in cultures around the world and about diversity and stuff. My teachers goal is to make us as uncomfortable as possible to help us get out of our comfort zones. (I'm a big fan of my comfort zone, so I'm not exactly thrilled to be spending another 3 months with this class... but "I can do hard things..." I'll try to survive.) Anyways, we have to write about 6 papers throughout the semester and they will all make us do something that isn't comfortable. To help us broaden our horizon and stretch ourselves. She also wants us to feel lots of emotions. 

Our first paper was due this week. It was the "Breaking a Social Norm" Paper. What we had to do was break a social norm. (haha, I bet you couldn't have guessed that!) In my paper I wrote about being a staunch follower of social norms. Because I am. I hate feeling uncomfortable, and I hate making other people feel uncomfortable. I go out of my way to avoid doing anything that could annoy anyone (except Ryan of course ;) and any other close friends or family), or to avoid running/bumping into any strangers. I avoid crowds, I stay quiet, I don't make comments in my classes. I stick to ALL the social norms. 

Anyways, so this assignment was difficult for me. But it turned out to be enlightening, and even kind of fun towards the end. The social norm that I decided to break was personal space. (Specifically public personal space, because I get in Ryan's personal space all the time, but that doesn't count.) I started off with small baby steps. Like sitting right next to someone in my class when there were plenty of other seats to choose from not close to anyone. (It always makes me really upset when people do that to me. It's ridiculous, I know, but I just sit there and fume over the fact that they HAD to pick the one chair right next to me. If they hadn't, I might have been able to sit by no one for an entire class period!" Not very return missionary-like of me... I'm working on it...) But, because I'm at BYU, the person I chose to sit next to didn't seem to be upset at all! In fact she decided to make small talk! And I don't like small talk, so I think I was actually more uncomfortable than she was! I tried again in some of my other classes and nothing happened, and then I tried at the library, and that didn't result in anything good to write about either.

Luckily, I have Ryan, and he is good at encouraging me to go out of my comfort zone and to be brave. He helped me to get some better reactions.

Example #1: Old lady at Red Robin
We went out to dinner at Red Robin (Ryan's favorite place, and my favorite place for fries... if you ever want to get us a gift but don't know what to get, a Red Robin gift card is the way to go. ;) Just kidding, don't send us any gift cards.) I sat REALLY really really close to this lady that was waiting for her table while we were doing the same thing. She scooted over, which is understandable, so that there was more room for me. But then I scooted even closer to her, which is when I could sense her discomfort. A fellow lover of personal space. She scooted over some more. Then when I was "adjusting myself" (aka getting even closer), my purse touched her arm and she folded her arms to take up as little space as possible. What really made me laugh was when she stood up and grabbed a menu as an excuse to get up and then sit back down like a foot away from me, as close to her husband as humanly possible.

Example #2: Walmart's Shampoo Aisle
For my next part of the experiment, we went to the shampoo aisle. (We didn't actually need shampoo.) I stood extra close to one girl that was looking at Suave shampoo. I decided that I needed to look at the ingredients on one of the bottles on the other side of her, so I just reached in front of her. Then I kept getting closer to her. She turned her back to me, and talked to her friend. Then she stepped over, and then they just left. We tried again on the other side of the shampoo aisle. One guy was looking at something so I reached for a shampoo bottle close to him. He stepped away, and then stepped again, and then walked ALL the way to the other side of the aisle to get away from me. (Normally when I'm at the grocery store and I need something, but someone is standing in front of it, I'll pretend to do something else until they're done, and then I'll grab what I need. I think that is what he did.)

Example #3: Walmart Checkout Line
The last thing I did, was get in the personal space of a lady in the checkout line. We were waiting in line, Ryan was behind our grocery cart, and I was in front of it. (One of my biggest pet peeves is when people do this to me at the grocery store. You may not know this, but there actually IS a right and a wrong way to stand in line at the grocery store in my mind.) Poor lady, was just putting her groceries on the belt thing, and I was standing as close to her as possible and reaching over her groceries to grab different packs of gum. I could definitely sense her discomfort. She moved a lot. While she was paying for her groceries, Ryan kept pushing the cart into me so I'd have to get super close to her, and she felt like she needed to move, even though it was totally her turn to pay for her groceries. I felt the most obnoxious during this trial of the experiment. But, I got enough of a reaction to write about it.

So, there you go. Moral of the story:
- I'm not as sweet as I seem in person, I have all sorts of ridiculous frustrations inside my head that you now know all about...
- If you get close to people they will move out of your way.
- I feel more comfortable when I stick to the social norms.