Temple Square Trip

 We found out recently that we had all let Delaney down. We were talking about the lights at Temple Square when she informed us that she had never been to see the Christmas lights. We all laughed and figured she was joking but when she remained resolute in the fact that she had never been, we all realized that we never taken her. How do you live in Sandy your whole life and you've never been to Temple Square to see the lights?? Norman and I go every year, and Miranda and Josh do as well. We had to correct this terrible error. So the Thursday after Christmas we all headed down town for some Hatch Family hot chocolate, the lights at Temple Square, and some delicious Italian at Biaggi's. The weather was wonderful! It was almost too warm for a coat. The night was filled with laughter and I fell even more in love with my family! They are the greatest! And I love every moment I get to spend with them.

I should be studying....

But instead I'll give you all a quick update!! School is crazy! The first three weeks I had no homework. None. My dad would come home from work and be like "shouldn't you be doing something?" But I really had nothing to do. After my first weather discussion in front of the department however, it has been nonstop. Assignment after assignment and this week I have 3 tests in 2 days! Ugh...I really should be studying but I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around working so hard. But after Thursday it will be Fall Break and things will finally calm down.

And today I began applying for graduation!!!!! Oh to be done! I can't wait! Yes I took the GRE this summer with the idea that maybe I'd go to grad school but I think a year off will do me good. I cannot even comprehend going to school for another day let alone another 2 years. I want that diploma in my hand and say goodbye to school forever!

That's how I feel today anyway. But yep, all that's left is for someone in the business department to sign off on minor and I will be on the track to graduate next May.

In other exciting Oliver family news......

JOSH IS GOING ON A MISSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I cannot even begin to put into words how excited I am for my brother and how proud of him I am! I know that we will be blessed so much because of his decision and that we will grow so much closer as a family. My dad will have a hard time saying goodbye to his favorite son for two years so we'll all have to be sure to give him some extra love, but he too is proud of Josh. The mission call gets here on Wednesday which is a miracle in and of itself. I was so scared that because of General Conference, my brother's call may have come while I was in California for Fall Break. But it's coming on Wednesday! and we're waiting until Thursday night to open it since my dad and Miranda have to work on Wednesday. I'll be sure to let everyone know where he is going!

Oh I just want to know now!!!!!!

Taking a break

For the longest time, I have been promising friends, family, and myself that I would commit to blogging. But for some reason I find the months go by, and many things that should have been blogged about have become such old news. Recently however, I believe I have found the problem that keeps me from blogging.

Facebook.

It's evil. Ok maybe not evil. I just feel as though I've outgrown facebook. When I first opened an account, it was right before all my friends from high school were leaving for college and I was moving down to Provo for my first semester at BYU. It started out as such a great way to stay in touch with my best friends and a great way to help make new ones. But as time went on, Facebook began to take on a different role. It became the biggest distraction in the free world and the source of almost all of my procrastination. People started adding me on Facebook just to add me, or to stalk my pictures, or to get to other people. I don't know. All I know is that people were adding me with no intention of ever communicating with me. I shouldn't add these people, but it's another person to look at their pictures and read their statuses and basically take all work out of getting to know a person. It's really creepy when you're talking to someone about an experience you had and they cut you off and say yeah I saw you talking to someone about it on Facebook. I don't want these people knowing everything about me. And I only put a fraction of what everyone else puts on Facebook.

So I'm going to try my best to distance myself from Facebook. Hopefully this will help me with my procrastination problem. Also, I think I will be a much better blogger as a result. It's so much more personal anyways. I love sharing stories with the two people that read this blog haha and I've got some pretty entertaining stories to tell. So keep reading and I will keep you posted on all the happenings of the Oliver family!

Happy Birthday!!!

Today is my dad's birthday! I just wanted to take a second to say how much I love him and what an incredible dad he really is! He is the best and I honestly don't know where I'd be without him.

Happy birthday dad! You are the greatest!

Yeah......

I am currently taking a forecasting class and it is really hard. I know nobody trusts the weatherman and they watch the news thinking that it really couldn't be so hard, but I promise you, it's way hard!! Every Monday and Wednesday 20 of us sit in a computer lab for an hour and a half and try to put together a forecast. It is an hour and a half of total stress.

Well my stress was amplified today when I sat down to do my forecast and I realized that the date of my forecast model run was old. A MONTH old! No wonder I've been struggling so bad in my forecasting class. I've been looking at the same model run for a month. It's my fault for saving the tabs when I exited off the internet and not refreshing them. I thought something was weird last Wednesday when my precipitation model was about 12 hours behind everyone else's. Yeah I felt really smart. And by really smart I mean my face was bright red and everyone was laughing at me. Hopefully the rest of the class turns out well

I'm Awesome!

I just wanted everyone to know that I won the family NCAA bracket!! Haha! I feel so awesome right now! I beat Mike, Chris, Josh, and my dad. I understand it was total luck and I had no real strategy, but I won and I was running around the house singing "I am the champion" last night. Better luck next year boys!!

Not Promising Anything....

I'm not promising anything, but I do want my blog audience to know that I will be trying my best to be better at updating the blog. There's a lot that has happened since December 2009...A LOT!! I was debating on whether or not I should just forget about all that has happened (at least when it comes to this blog) and start from the present and go from there. But life seems so much more interesting when you look back at all the things that have happened in the past year then when you look at what is happening now. So I won't be writing about everything...But definitely the big events. I will do my best to tell the Oliver family story and I guess I'll start with pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to me! (Josh turned 18 and I turned 21 before this wonderful event but nothing too exciting happened around that so we'll just move on.)

About a week after my birthday, I went to Gold's Gym on a Tuesday morning to continue getting ready for the 5k my dad and I were going to run with Mike in May. A 5k doesn't require too much training, but I was also not in any kind of shape and I at least wanted to make a decent time. I didn't have class until 3:30 on Tuesdays so getting to the gym at 10 would give me enough time to run and still accomplish all that I hoped to before leaving for school. Little did I know what would happen next....

My favorite part of Gold's Gym is the cardio cinema room. It is a movie theater, but instead of chairs, there is exercise equipment. As wonderful as the cardio cinema room is, if there is a bad movie playing it is terribly disappointing. When I walked in on this Tuesday morning, the original Karate Kid was on. No offense to anyone who does really like this movie, I'm sure it is great, but I never want to see it as long as I live....

20 minutes into my run my knee gave out and everything went into slow motion. I can remember thinking to myself, "hurry and grab onto the hand rails!" followed shortly by, "nope it's too late for that, I'm going down." I then started to wonder what the outcome of this would be. As I hit the treadmill I thought to myself, "I wonder if the treadmill will start to move me?" and as it did I thought, "I wonder when I'll be thrown off?" All this must have taken place in a few seconds but it felt like minutes to me. As soon as I was off the treadmill and was laying on the ground next to the treadmill behind me, everything returned to normal time. As I lay there trying to catch my breath, several people came running up to me to make sure that I was ok. I had been running pretty fast at the time that this happened so I was trying to catch my breath and couldn't answer anyone at first, and they ran to go get help. Lying there, I straightened out my leg and felt it pop back into place. Phew... At least this way I wouldn't have to be taken to the doctor to have it popped back in like Delaney and Josh did. A trainer walked in and asked if I could walk and when I told him I thought so he helped me up, and miracles of miracles I could! But I also could feel it starting to blow up like a balloon so I had to get home quick. The first trainer was helping me out the cinema room when a second one walked up and made me fill out an incident report. Oh my goodness...it took forever and I just wanted to get home and lay down. I almost shouted at him that I wouldn't sue if he would just let me go! But we finished just before I hit my breaking point and I started to walk out with the trainer helping me. Just as we were about to leave...2 ambulances and a firetruck showed up! I don't know what that was about so I just kept walking. When they walked in and asked for the girl who was injured, the trainer standing next to me told them oh this is her. UGH....There had to be nearly 15 people standing there waiting to take care of me. One of them looks at me and said, "We were told you were unconscious..." Well I sure hated to disappoint the man, but I definitely was not. They kept asking me over and over, did you hit your head? do you want us to take you to the hospital? Can we check your vitals? No, no, no, NO!! I was sorry that so many of them showed up and there was nothing for them to do, but after three dislocated knees in less than a year I knew the financial cost it had been to my dad, and I also knew my knee well enough to know that I would be fine. As I'm arguing with the EMT's and firemen trying to get home, I turned around and everyone and the gym had stopped and were just staring at me....

The most embarrassing moment of my life!!

But they finally let me go home and I laid around the house doing nothing for the next week. The recovery process took awhile but I healed up pretty well until China, but that's for another post. Here is some photo documentation:

Bruises, as a result of my fall


I know it looks bad because of the ace bandage but it really didn't make it look much worse than it really was...
After going to work and being on my feet all day, all the swelling went to my ankle hahaha so funny!