Favorite TV Shows of All Time

In my 19 years, I have watched some pretty good shows on television. These are some of my favorites:

Recess


Arthur


Looney Toons (Bugs Bunny)


Full House


The Brady Bunch


Most of My Favorite Nickolodeon Cartoons


And my current favorite tv show, Gilmore Girls

Lazy, Crazy, Hazy Summer Days

Hiking was one of our favorite family activities in the summer. We use to do alot of it. And we always wore these cool, crazy-colored wind breakers. Most of our hikes were in the Uintah mountains, which don't seem to get too warm in the summer.

Basically anything with the word "swim" has always appealed to us, even if we had to swim in a dinky little pool in our backyard. It was still fun! But poor Emily was too young in this picture, and had to sit back there in her stroller. He he he!

This is me, trying to make my way out of Grandma's pool. It's funny that this pool seemed soooooo deep to me when I was little. I remember thinking that sharks lived at the bottom of the deep end.

Swimming at Grandma's in the summer, has always been a cousin favorite. We still have swim parties, just not as often as we use to.

This is the house we lived in a long time ago.

I went visiting teaching today. The lady we were visiting was telling us about the crazy things her kids have been doing this summer. It all brought me back to those lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer when I was younger. Our old house was in a circle, or coldisack (however that word is spelled). We were constantly outside playing with all the other kids in our circle. My best friend, whose name was Michelle lived in our circle too. Maddie was best friends with her older sister, Amanda. We had some theory going that Maddie and Amanda were the witches, and they became active whenever the dark clouds were out. Michelle and I were the princesses, and we became active whenever there were pink, sunset clouds. We liked eating raspberries off of Amanda and Michelle's raspberry bush. We loved jumping on the trampoline with sprinklers underneath. We loved riding our bikes around the circle as fast as we could, or until one of us wrecked. And of course we loved playing barbies. We did lots of crazy things, such as throwing pebbles at passing cars. (This however was not the best idea, and we got in trouble for it.) Sometimes we would pick grass, and make little bird's nests out of the piles we had picked. I remember one time, I snuck 2 eggs out of our fridge, and layed them in our grass. I had Amanda and Michelle convinced that they were turtle or chicken eggs, so Amanda cracked them open to check. On of our favorite things to do in the summer, was to set a tent up in the backyard and sleep in it. We would always get so excited and hyper while my dad would set it up for us. But Natalie usually chickened out and ended up sleepint in the house. And if we were not doing one of these mentioned crazy activities in the summer, we would be found swimming at Grandma's pool with our cousins!

RTOTD (Random Thoughts of the Day)

*Eighty-Eight degrees sounds so much cooler than 90 degrees, even though they are only 2 degrees apart.

*I often wonder what inspires Nedge to blog about some of the topics she blogs about.

*What if what we want in life, really is not what we want at all?

*I think seasons 2 and 3 are my favorite seasons of Gilmore Girls.

*I love the sport of swimming and I feel like I am never going to get away from the pool.

*I have recently become addicted to chocolate soymilk, and I really need to go pick some up from Harmons.

*It is funny to call "Harmons" "Hormones."

*I don't know.

*Why is the rum always gone?

Kiss The Tree!

In some of the recent comments ya'll have left me, Kristen mentioned a little phrase about "Kissing The Tree." I have had requests to further explain this, so here it goes. When I was in 10th grade, we watched this movie about bullies in my health class. It had actual footage of kids being bullied at recess. My favorite scene dealt with a group of girls. This group of about 5 girls were bullying another girl. They grabbed her, walked her toward a tree and began yelling "Kiss the tree!" They forced her head towards the tree, and made her kiss it. Well, I took this scene as something hilarious, and I began to make fun of it. It has been a little inside joke with the original rebel miamaids of the Prairie 8th ward for quite some time now. The next funny part of this, is that Jeff Tree's last name is "Tree." This makes it really funny to say "kiss the tree," if you know what I mean.

Love or Infatuation?

Lately I have found myself stuck pondering the thought of love and infatuation. Infatuation is a more a short-time obssessive crush on someone, while love is more of a long-term thing. But can infatuation lead to love? Is it ok to be infatuated, but inside really hope it does not lead you to love someone? I feel like love an infatuation are the most commonly mixed up emotions of people my age. What happens if a person becomes infatuated AFTER they have allready been in love? I think it is a scary feeling for that person, but perhaps it is a feeling that they long to have once again. I feel so naive. If only I could run in to a Love Doctor, then maybe I would not feel so confused or scared of what the love or infatuation outcome may bring. And now, a quote from the Beatles: "All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need."

Two Jeff's? How Can It Be?

This picture is kind of hard to see, but it is really cool. Elder Larsen's sister e-mailed it to me today. This is Jeff Larsen, on the left, and Jeff Tree, on the right, at the MTC. This picture was taken back in about February, when both Jeff's were in the MTC at the same time. Cool, eh?

"The Horror! The Horror!"

My phone fell into the pool this morning. It is not working, but I am letting it dry out. Oh my lanta, I hope it will work again!

The Promised Hiking Technique Video!

In my last blog, I promised that I would post the hiking video Natalie and I made in Yellowstone. Here it is! Natalie is the star of this hot one!

Howdy Partner: Yellowstone and Wyoming!

My family and I just got back from an excellent vacation. We went to Yellowstone and to Jackson Hole Wyoming. Everything was awesome! Our vacation began on Thursday, June 7th, which happened to be my birthday. Our first major stop was the Idaho Falls Temple, pictured above. It was pretty, and we were able to use the clean bathrooms in the visitor center. The above picture includes Emily, my grandma Stapley, Maddie, Ben, and me. My dad and Grandpa Stapley were taking our pictures, and my mom and Natalie were wandering around temple grounds.

When we got to Yellowstone, we saw lots of animals. We saw like a buttload of buffalo. We even got stuck in a stampede of buffalo. There was a huge herd of them trying to cross the street, so we had to wait for about 30 minutes for them to move. We also saw deer, elk, a fox, geese, ravens, and we even saw a grizzley bear with 2 cubs, and chip munks. We also saw Natalie, she was quite the little animal.

This is me in the car, driving through Yellowstone on my birthday.

My sisters and me at Old Faithful.

There were all these cool painted buffalo all over West Yellowstone, Montana.

This is my famous "licorice smoking" picture. I think this was taken on Friday, as we sat through buffalo crossing traffic in the upper loop of Yellowstone.

Yellowstone lake was ginormous!

You are now looking at the Grand Teton Mountains in Wyoming. I love Wyoming! I always have, and I hope to live there someday.

Ben, Maddie, Natalie, Emily and I on a trail above the Yellowstone River.

These cowboy boots were the coolest decoration ever! This was at the Bar J Ranch in Jackson Hole, which was really neat. I want to live there so bad!

This is a picture of the Grizzly bear we saw in Yellowstone. You can't see them in this picture, but there were 2 baby cub bears following this mama bear. It was really cool to see a wild bear with her cubs!

This is a the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

These cowboys here are the Bar J Wranglers. They are a cool cowboy band in Jackson Hole Wyoming. They are at the Bar J ranch. When you go to this peroformance, you get a HUGE western dinner. I had BBQ Beef, and it was amazing! Then you get about an hour and a half of this hilarious and awesome western band. This was my kind of vacation!

I had a blast, and I wish I could go back. Before I end this blog, I have to document some conversations that happened on our trip:

Conversation 1:

Grandma Stapley: "I just wish I knew where we were."

Grandpa Stapley: "Well, we are in Yellowstone."

Conversation 2:

Ben climbs into the car

Maddie: "Ben you smell like a port-a-potty!"

Ben: " A port-a-potty?!?!"

Lauren: "Ha ha ha!"

Conversation 3: (this conversation occured many times with various members of our family)

Dad: "Look, there's a beaver dam."

Lauren: "A beaver what?"

Dad: "Dam."

I have a video Natalie and I made in Yellowstone on proper hiking technique, but it is not ready to put on here. I will put in on my blog tomorrow, so make sure you come back to watch it!

Marry Poppins For a Day

I have been so tempted, all day, to find an umberella and see if I could fly away in the wind, like Marry Poppins. It has been so windy today. When I was coaching my swimmers today, I thought I was going to blow away! There seriously could have been a tsunami in the swimming pools. At practice today, we video taped the swimmers' freestyles. Throughout the summer, we do this for every stroke for every swimmer. With this, the swimmers are able to watch themself swim, to see what mistakes they are making in their strokes. I remember being video taped when I was on the swim team. It really helps with technique, plus it is fun to see what you look like when you swim. Anyways, I got to be the camera girl. The wind was blowing like crazy, which was making the camera go crazy in my hands. The lane lines in the pool were being blown and swayed by the wind. It was quite the experience. The most exciting part was when I had to go chase the KYAT team roles when the wind decided to take them for a little ride.

Congratulations!

I just wanted to publically congratulate my bestest and favorite Natalie Edge (also known as Nedgie Wedgie) on graduating from pre-school....I mean high school today. Nedge is super awesome, super nice, super cool, super spectacular, and any other thing super you can think of.

I also want to wish my friend ShayLee good luck. She joined the Air Force and will be leaving shortly. We were able to go to her goodbye party tonight. I have known ShayLee since kindergarten. We were in the same class and I have pictures to prove it. It is way cool to see friends begin to make huge career decisions or mission decisions in their lives, yet it is soooooooooo hard at the same time when they end up having to leave for a while. Good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget.