Back to school, again...

Being home for Christmas was wonderful, it kind of felt like I never left! And then I somehow ended back up here in Rexburg. Actually it was a pretty long process since we left at 5am PST and got to Rigby about 1:30am MST, so about 19 hours straight in a car- good thing I liked the people I was riding with! So I got up here to Rexburg, huge thank you to the wonderful Stokes family, on the 2nd. So I got to volunteer for the freshman orientation program since they had some people not show up and I happened to be here.

It was a ton of fun, I got to sit at the complex I lived in my first semester all day and sign everyone that came through up for Get Connected. My partner, Bobby, kept telling me to talk more- and then would tell me that I really should talk less because once I started talking I was having too much fun to stop. I caught something and had basically coughed to the point that I had a scratchy, near non-existent, voice. The second day of Get Connected, we were assigned to breakfast and lunch set-ups, which didn't really require very much but I was okay with being behind the scenes. That evening was I-Night (kind of a pre-semester, school-wide carnival.) I got assigned to run the laser tag booth with a kid, who I think was named Cody. It could have been a lot of fun- but the equipment kept not

working, so frustrating! And on top of that, I kept having to try and get people's attention to give them instructions with no voice. Man my voice was dead at the end of the night, throat lozenges didn't even have the slightest affect anymore! But it was still worth it and I'm glad I got to participate. My roommates showed up slowly over the course of the weekend. All of my roommates remained the same, except for Jordan went home and Melissa joined us.
My schedule changed a few times over the course of the first week, but the courses I am taking are: Food Service Management, Culinary Fundamentals, Cake Decorating, Writings of Isaiah, Infants and Toddlers, and Math for the Real World.
Food Service Management is crazy! First of all, we're a class of 5. Just when 30 starts to seem small... But our resumes were given to the business students and they interviewed and hired us. There's 3 companies and they all wanted to hire as many of us as possible so it was interesting to see how supply and demand functioned in that scenario. So basically, I get to help run a business selling a food product which I will help design and price and such. We're going to the Outdoor Learning Center for a few days to do team building activities and to decide what product we would like to try and sell, it should be fun.
Cake Decorating is so great! I love that class. This is my first cake for the semester, we're

working on the next one right now. I spent a good two hours yesterday piping trees- you use a stiff frosting and pipe lines off of a ice cream cone and it looks like a tree, it's pretty great except for it feels like your fingers are going to fall off. My roommates, as well as Laurel and Allie's  roommates seemed to appreciate it. Amanda was telling me this morning that she liked that I was in the class.
And Culinary Fundamentals, good thing I like cooking. That class has been really informative, but the labs make the long class sessions worth it. Well, the first lab was proving that you could recognize a type of cut and then cut the product perfectly to that size and shape, but today's lab was very different. Today we de-boned chicken and made stock. I decided that I like dissecting organs in an anat&phys class more than I like working with raw meat... you would think it's similar, but it is in no way similar! Here, have some pictures to go next to the picture of my lovely cake. Wonderful looking, right? Since my boning knife is
brand new, it cuts through bones really easily. And let me tell you, cutting through a spinal column sounds downright awful.
I went and saw The Book Thief with Allie this past weekend- it is so good! I would recommend though that if you're going to go see it you read the book first, just to prepare for the emotional nature of it- I don't know, I'm assuming that everyone else will cry through the book which probably isn't the case. But yeah, it's really good.