some other stuff

A few weeks ago, I started tutoring a boy in Korea in English through Skype. It's a pretty sweet gig - I do it in my pajamas. The only problem? It's at 6:30 in the morning. Come daylight savings, it'll be 5:30. Yuck. It especially sucks on Wednesdays and Thursdays when I have to leave for the MTC at 7 to get to work on time. So I have to be ready before the tutoring. That's a 5:30 am alarm time, folks. Goo. To make matters worse, our house is really open. That's not worse - that's actually fabulous. The problem, though, is that no matter where I go to do the tutoring, my roommates can hear me and I wake them up. So I have resorted to the only place I can find in the house that is secluded enough to let all my roommates stay in their blissful little dormant state: the downstairs bathroom/laundry room. That's right. I sit on the toilet and put the computer on the sink and talk to my little buddy in Korea. That's actually where I am right now but he hasn't gotten on Skype yet. Our lessons are only 30 minutes long and he's already 20 minutes late. The great thing? If he's late, I still get paid. So I've been getting paid to sit here for 20 minutes looking at facebook. I think that's a reasonable trade for making me get up at 6:15 when I normally wouldn't get up until 8:30.

The following picture is of my dear friend Angela. She doesn't live with us and on a regular basis she's pretty bitter about it. When we first moved in, we noticed this little ledge in the living room that seems to serve no purpose except to offer an unreachable decorative nook. We've never put anything up there but we decided that was Angela's room. If she ever comes to visit, that's her space. Now I'm going to seemingly go off topic, but don't worry. It all will tie up in the end.

Since we moved in about a month and a half ago, we have had to replace the batteries in 3 or 4 smoke detectors. Ridiculous. One of them happens to be at the very top of our slanted two story living room ceiling. Read: impossible to get to. We endured the supersonic beeping for several days and finally decided to take care of it. Angela was the brave volunteer who mounted the decorative nook to replace the battery. Getting her up there was probably the best part. After some failed attempts at what seemed like pretty safe means, we finally got her up there through a good ol' cheerleading move. She stepped into mine and Aubrey's hands and we lifted her up. That's right, I was a cheerleader in 5th and 6th grade, and yes, I was a base for the mounting. And yes, I was awesome.

So here she is when we finally got her up there:

We then realized it was her room and that she should probably stay there and enjoy it for a minute.

An equally funny part was trying to get her down. She wanted to just jump onto the couch but it's pretty far and we were pretty sure she'd either break herself or our couch. So finally, she turned herself around and slid down into our arms. What a team we are.

Last week was my beautiful, loving, kind, helpful, funny, wonderful roommate Aubrey Shuler's birthday. To celebrate, I made some de-lish veggie pizza, which is not pictured. What is pictured, though, is her accident with a package of melted chocolate. Oops... You can't tell, but she got it all over herself - hair, face, clothes - and on the counter.

Afterwards, we surprised her by going to get pedicures. While the lady was working on mine, she asked me who did my toenails last time. I responded that I did. She said (in her fabulous Asian accent), "Oh. Look like." Then laughed. It's ok. I'm not offended. They look fabulous now, though!

It is now 7:00 which means my Korean friend never showed up. And I just got paid for blogging. I'll take it.