truth friday??

haha, so i really thought truth friday would be a super cute title.... until i actually thought about it. i really am not sure why i thought it would be clever. probably because i missed wordy wednesday this week and have been awake since it was officially thursday. truth thursday makes more sense. :)

anywho, truth friday it is! 

first bit of truth: it is 3:52am. i am awake, making 5 blankets for a service project on saturday. why am i up right now doing these?? because i have to spend all day tomorrow making a brain cake for masey's make a wish party. (yeah, i thought that was a clever idea, too until i realized that cakes are a LOT harder than the cake boss makes em look...good thing i gave myself a few days and few cakes to practice on) yeah, yeah. why tonight? you might be asking. well, tonight because i am a procrastinator. over a month ago, i decided that 5 blankets over the course of a month are completely do-able and not even inconvenient. well, 5 in a month is not inconvenient. the problem comes when you rationalize that 5 in 3 weeks, or 5 in 2 weeks, or even 5 in one week are not inconvenient, either. my problem is that i let myself decide that 5 in 2 days was plenty of time. until i realized that i will have approx. 3 hours of free time between now and when the service project is. unless you count sleeping hours, of course!  so, long story short (can you even say that after the long story??) i won't sleep for a few days, but cancer families will have blankets!  haha

i am more excited for the wizarding world of harry potter than disney world... i plan on making myself sick with butterbeer and letting a wand pick me. oh yeah, and sending out postcards from hogsmead by the dozens. let me know if you are going to need one :) dinner at the three broomsticks is going to round out my day. i really don't care if we do anything else, and it's entirely possible that i will start a campaign to go the first night; just for the butterbeer.

it was not until i was probably 22 that i realized that not only can people hear you when you sing in the car with the windows down (i guess i assumed that the wind from driving had an effect on their hearing, too..) but i was even older before i realized they can hear your music even with the windows up. i guess i am not very observant.

i feel incredible guilt when i kill spiders. all i can think about after the fact is that they have a purpose, and a soul. all i can think of when i see them, is to kill them. i hate them so much. i also feel like they know when i've killed a spider recently. they are always looking for revenge.

when i was 14, i shut the window in the shower and broke a nest of eggs open. there was literally a shower of tiny spiders down the wall of the shower, followed by a HUGE (ok, so probably normal sized) mama spider. yes, i was standing in the shower with them. no, they would not be washed down the drain. yes, some of them escaped and are now roaming the house, waiting to attack. the thought still sends shivers down my spine, and now i always precariously reach over the entire shower to shut the window, just in case.

i like most glee versions better than the originals. but i did not like this episode of original songs. i hope they don't make a habit of it.

i hit a racoon once. it was nasty hearing the bones crush.

there is a stack of four suitcases in my laundry room because i am too lazy to take them back downstairs (i'm gonna need to pack in just a few days!)

i have had a recipe for bacon-wrapped jalapeno chicken bites open on my computer for three days, just in case i forget that i want to make them. they sound so amazing.

ok, last truth bit: it's now 4:46 and i am dead. the rest of the blankets will have to wait!

wordy wednesday

a lot of my cousins do something called wordless wednesdays. basically, on wednesday you post a picture of your stinkin adorable kids and don't put words. pretty simple, right?  well, i have no stinkin adorable kids, so i decided to do my own wordy wednesday. you basically post words on a wednesday. super simple.  my kind of post.

so, i sprained my ankle (again). apparently, walking and thinking are too hard for me to do at once. i was seriously just walking, not even super distracted, when i felt my ankle pop. next thing i know, i was on the ground. could it happen in one of the many dark, deserted walkways at uvu?  nope. it was in the most crowded section, at one of the most crowded times. sometimes i hate my life.

i also cut a bunch of hair off. i can't remember if i already blogged about it, and i'm kinda too lazy to look. so, there you go!  i cut my hair!  i donated it to locks of love, and imagine that a cute little cancer girl is running around with a pretty new wig. (i don't care what vili says. that's what happened to my hair) now that i cut off all the ends, i am realizing that my hair is really dark!  i can't wait for summer and my light brown hair to return.

mason prays that our food will "nursery shrink" our bodies. every time.

i am going to disney world in 13 days. yeah baby!  i am so excited. in case any of you have never spoken of the big dw with me, here is the scoop: when my parents were prego with me, they took my older siblings to disney land. that was the only trip my family ever made there. thus, i have lived a sheltered and deprived life, having never been to disney world/land. in 13 days, i'm going to fix all of that, and to top it off, i am going with mason. i hear going with wish kids is pretty awesome :)

when we lived on maui, we had chickens. i had a love/hate relationship with them. the hens were cute enough and laid eggs, which i was always mortified to find out my parents ate. my chicken was called spotty, and he was a rooster. i know what you're thinking but he was not your typical crow in the morning and walk around all day, rooster. he was a filipino fighting rooster, and he was mean. he would peck at our feet and chase us out of the yard every morning when we had to feed/water them before school. (remember that i did not ever wear shoes to school in maui) randomness before the real reason i'm telling you this story: eventually, we moved back to oahu, and gave the chickens to our uncle. my evil rooster, spotty, became a champion cock fighter just like his father. i guess meanness was truly bred into them. hurricane iniki was coming, and we had to board up our windows, etc. i was so offended and traumatized that my parents wouldn't let us bring the chickens inside with us. we had to leave them in the carport, and i was sure they were going to die (they didn't). oddly enough, i don't remember anything else about the hurricane but that. i still might be a little bitter about it :)

vili and i went to a panel type thingy on human trafficking. basically, we learned that, as far as that panel was concerned, human trafficking is any time you do a job and are coerced, forced, exploited, or abused. (something like that. i can't really remember, and it's not really important.) the important part is that vili decided that he was a human slave as a child because he had to do chores and clean. i think he just wants to explore the possibility of getting a scholarship from it.

as excited as i am for disney world, i am about a hundred more times excited to try butterbeer at the wizarding world of harry potter. yeah, you're jealous.

and who says i can't put a picture of something Wonderful for Wordy Wednesday??

march madness

well, i came into this world in march. the 7th, to be exact. 1986 to be more exact. 9:42 on a friday evening if you are picky.

25 years ago:
pretty in pink was #1 in the box offices that week. the color purple and out of africa both made the top 10. the rest are obscure movies i've never seen. (on second thought, the only one in the top 10 that i've seen at all is out of africa) my birth year was designated an international year of peace by the united nations. the country was still reeling from the space shuttle challenger disaster. the chernobyl disaster killed thousands and affected millions in europe and beyond. halley's comet made an appearance (i don't remember it :) pixar animation studios began. the mir space station was launched. geraldo rivera would open al capone's vault, to be disappointed by a mere bottle of moonshine. 6.5 million people linked hands in hands across america; they raised some 30 million dollars to fight poverty and hunger. fergie married prince andrew. desmond tutu becomes the first black anglican bishop in south africa. it was the centennial of the statue of liberty's dedication. a day in the life of america was shot (nope, i'm not in it, but i could be!) it was a world cup year (mexico). sara came out and hit #1 on the billboard hot 100 charts.

march 7th, 1986 was a beautiful spring day, the temps were in the 50s and 60s. that day, crews found the challenger's crew compartment on the ocean floor, including each of the 7 crew members' bodies. when my mom went into labor, she got to drive herself to the hospital because my dad wanted to wait for a load of rock to be delivered. i guess the new-ness of babies wears off by the 4th :)  i was born at holy cross hospital in salt lake, and my entrance set the stage for the rest of my life. all three of my mom's older kids had 'backed up and shot out' as she puts it. she and her doctor were expecting that same thing with me, but they had never met me. after quite a while of hard pushing, the doctor decided to get the forceps. the moment i heard him say that, i backed up and shot out. he barely had time to catch me.  i guess i'm only as stubborn as it is beneficial to me. (and yes, my dad made it in time. barely :)

my name was latu siale lolohea (latu after my dad's eldest sister, siale because gardenia is my mom's favorite flower) i was 7lbs 2oz, 19 inches long. by the time my blessing came around, my name was changed to latu sara lolohea. the biggest reason? my grandpa struggled enough to pronounce latu and lolohea, he didn't want to have to remember siale as well. so, my mom named me sara, after the jefferson starship song (which hit #1 in the charts a week after i was born), and an ancestor of hers that was 1/2 navajo, 1/2 paiute. it was a inspired choice; i've always had long, indian straight hair. just like my namesake. :)

i was a happy baby, but a definite mama's girl. when i was two, my mom led the music in relief society (and had another baby) i refused to go to anyone but my mom, so i spent the length of each song screaming at her legs. the sweet old ladies in the ward would try to take me and soothe me, but it wasn't long before they all decided to just let me be and sing over my screaming.

my young childhood was pretty idyllic. i have nothing to complain about. i grew up in hawaii (which i did not appreciate until we moved to utah and i realized the difference) in elementary school on maui, i used my first computer. the computer lab monitor made us wash our hands before we touched them. we didn't want to spread viruses!

a lot of things happened between then and now (it's been 25 years!) but there is one thing that did not. never did i ever think i would be turning 25. i guess i thought that once it really happened, i would already be old and it would not feel so weird. unfortunately, that did not happen. i am trying not to focus on it, 25 is not that old, and it's not like i can change it. so, here's the year(ish) in review:

one year ago today, i was looking forward to trips to arizona, hawaii, and france. i was working at pcs, and had no plans to quit. i began playing rugby and found a love of my life in that game. in june, i quit pcs and began working for a web design company. i went back to working 9-5 and decided i hated it. especially in the middle of summer and its sunny goodness :)  in september, i quit that job, broke my sternum, and cancelled my trip to france. october found me working for a group home, which i promptly quit when masey was diagnosed with medulloblastoma in november. christmas was low-key and i started school in january. that about brings my year present.

(hopefully everyone has stopped reading by now, cause here's where i start explaining my life)

this past year has been the most profound of my life, spiritually speaking. i started the past year determined to stop making poor choices. i am ashamed to say that my resolved was short lasted. life started happening, and it was so easy to reorganize my priorities, all the while promising myself it was temporary. it was effortless to forget the changes, move on and continue to fool myself into thinking i was happy. throughout the past year, though, i have discovered a love for the Lord that i could not have known otherwise.

i needed to regress once more; to experience the sorrow of sin and the contrast of true happiness. i do not want this time in my life to be some sort of 'a-ha' moment; to be a huge jump in the graph of my progression. i want it to be just any other time in my life, where i try to be better by taking tiny steps. i do not want this moment in my life defined by one huge step, but by the tiny steps i am consistently making. that sort of progress is progress i can easily manage.

i know now that i will never have an experience like those in ancient days, where an angel appears to me, all thought of sin is eternally gone from my mind, and i become nearly perfect in the blink of an eye. i am just an ordinary nephite, trying to overcome the same pride cycle that my ancestors have struggled with for thousands of years.