New Blog Location

I’ve moved the blog over to blogspot because the templates are more fun and versatile. so the new blog is gooberventura.blogspot.com

Crazy 8 Meme

My sister tagged me, so here goes:

8 Things I’m passionate about

• My religion
• My family
• American History
• Literacy
• Learning/Education
• Respect
  Good literature of all shapes and sizes
• Freedom

8 Things I want to do before I die

• Learn French, Italian and Portuguese
• Visit Spain (again )
• Visit Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada
• complete a scrapbook
• get married
• have children (after getting married)
• go on a $1000 shopping spree…. just once.
• see the pacific ocean. (okay, so I’m easy to please…)

8 Things I often say

• “Oh shiz.”
• “Nerd.”
• “No me toques,” or “No touchy!”
• “Oh, my bad.”
• “Wendy’s?”
• “Well, I’m off to take a nap…”
• “Aw, now it’s just awkward.”
• “That’s ’cause I’m the favorite.”

8 Books I’ve recently read or am currently reading
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Culture and Values: a Survey of the Humanities (my humanities texbook)

my political science textbook

my finance textbook

aaand, that’s really it. I don’t do leisure reading when I’m in school. (no time)

8 Songs I could listen to over and over

• You Are Loved by Josh Groban
• Lullaby sung by Josh Groban
• Don’t Forget Who’s Taking you Home sung by Michael Buble
• Can’t Buy Me Love sung by Michael Buble 
• Look After You by the Fray
• Say Anything by Cartel
• Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin
• Good Morning Baltimore sung by Nikki Blonsky

8 Things that attract me to my best friends

• easy going/not easilty offended
• humorous
• good conversationalists
• honest
• high standards
• don’t mind my lame jokes
  readers! (or are always learning)
• just plain, good company

8 People I think should do Crazy 8s (I’m really sorry about this. I’m apologizing ahead of time for tagging you)
uh… I don’t know 8 people with blogs… and the ones I do know my sis already tagged. So I guess the buck stops here!

Finals…and snow!

So there’s a bit of a learning curve, apparently, with driving in the snow. And if you’re a little slow you almost die. The end. Okay, it hasn’t been that bad, and if there weren’t other cars on the road the sliding would actually be quite fun. It’s just those other cars… Minor details. Anyway, other than the cold things have been going well. I had my first internship interview yesterday, which was pretty exciting. I thought the interview would only last 20 minutes but I was there for nearly an hour… so longer than I expected, but I think it went well. I find out Monday or Tuesday if I got the internship or not. If I do I have to sign an NDA! cool, no? Hee, hee.  (it’s a tech company, in case you’re wondering)

Finals are looming, but I might be able to be done by Tuesday (the second day of finals), so they’re not looming too largely . So this time next week I will be free…. FREE! BWAHAHAHAHA! Okay, I’m done.  

Proud to be a Cougar…

Not only did Dad decide to make 7 pies for the 5 of us for Thanksgiving, and my Thanksgiving involved beans, rice and some amazing mole (I love being Mexican… okay, half-mexican… same dif…), AND we saw a great flick: August Rush (HIGHLY recommend it), but BYU pulled it out again in the last 3 minutes of the BYU vs. U of U game. The entire game was probably the most stressful 3 hours of my life. Forget tests, this game was important. The two teams were so evenly matched it was a battle for the field goal for most of the game. All in all, it was nice to rub it in to the U of U grad folks. I can’t wait to see my Uncle Hiram .

 This week I aslo discovered what the big deal with the “scrabulous” application is on facebook. It is pretty much the best invention ever. Essentially, it’s a way to play scrabble with other people on facebook without having to stay online for the entire game. You can take your turn and then just check back on occasion to see if your turn has come up again. You can also have as many games going at once as you’d like. I currently have 5 games going with various people. It really is a blast. We just need to talk Montse into getting a facebook profile so she can play with us (I have games going with all my siblings except her    ).  

Another great discovery of the past week is that I only have two and half weeks of classes left before finals. Other than regularly scheduled reading for classes I only have two papers left before my finals, so I’m pretty excited about that.

Week 2

• Okay, the check list last week helped a lot to keep me motivated so I’m doing it again this week. So here it is:

 Monday

• study for finance exam
• read Kant chapter
• write Nov. 12th summary

Tuesday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (6, 8, what’s the dif?)
• review finance material 
• take finance exam (not as well as I’d hoped, but much better than the last test!)
• study HUM readings (I’ll do this Wednesday afternoon)
• label art in C & V book (I’ll probably do this at work or between classes on Wednesday)
• write summary on Kant chapter (I’ll have to do this one first thing Wednesday morning)

Wednesday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (zzz…)
• print out Kant summary
• study art in C & V book
• study terms from lecture and C & V book
• write essay responses
• write Nov. 14th summary

Thursday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (I was up until 3 a.m. studying for my humanities test and I woke up at 9 a.m. and started studying again.)
• review HUm readings, art, terms and essay responses
• take HUM exam at 8 a.m. (I took this at 4:30 because I had to get some questions answered from the teacher and get some more studying done before. But I think I did really well on it, so I’m quite pleased with the results )
• write 3 PL SC summaries

Friday:

• 6 a.m. wake up 
• write remaining summaries
• write journal on optional lecture
• write journal 8 
• write Nov. 16th summary
• read Rousseau chapter
• read Hume and Burke chapter

Motivation part II

In and effort to keep myself motivated for this beast of a week before me, I’ve decided to post my daily to-do list. This list I put up on my bulletin board every week. Its ability to keep me motivated has mixed results, but as a reminder of what’s due it’s fantastic. I also like playing with the markers, so it has some entertainment value as well. In any case, here’s my to-do list for the week. I’ll edit it daily so you can all see what I actually managed to get done or didn’t. Any motivation suggestions would be helpful.

Monday:

• 3 a.m. wake up (okay, there was a wee little nap in there, but I set a limit on it!)
• COMMS quiz (this took nearly two hours when I thought it would only take one, lame)
• study for PL SC exam (went much faster than I thought, but I still skipped class so I could be ready in time)
• take PL SC exam at 1 p.m. [asked my co-worker to cover for me at work so I could take it at noon. Turned out to be a good idea because it took me 3 hours! 150 multiple choice/true-false and 4 essay questions. I got an 89% on the multiple choice format, so I'm quite pleased with the studying results (who knew there was a correlation?) I won't find out about the essay questions for a while, I imagine]
• meet with COMMS partner

Today ended up being absolutely fabulous! I couldn’t believe I got everything done when I wanted to. I also got an exam score back today for my Humanities class and it was much better than I expected, so that was a very pleasant surprise. Our teacher also informed us the test isn’t until next Tuesday instead of this weekend, ALSO a very pleasant surprise. Anyhow, it’s only eight, so I guess I can get a jump start on Tuesday.

Tuesday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (whoops! definitely slept in…)
• finance chapter 8
• finance chapter 9 (I got most of the chapter done, just didn’t finish) (finished it Friday night!)
• finance chapter 10
• write 3 PL SC summaries

What happened to Tuesday you ask? Me too… It mainly started with my not getting up as early as planned. I did study a great deal of my finance, but chapter 9 ended up being more of a doozy than I expected so I was working on that for a few hours. Good news is I think I got most of the kinks worked out and I bumped into a friend who is doing really well in the class and he’s going to help me study for the exam. As for the summaries, I came home from work, ate, showered and then went to bed. Too tired! But I’ll try and get them done an Wednesday in addition to the other ones planned.  

Wednesday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (hurray! I’m as surprised as you are that I did this.)
• write 3 PL SC summaries (and I still have an hour before I have to leave for class! also, I found out I wasn’t as behind in my summaries as I thought which was a nice motivational push)
• HUM Dante reading
• 7 p.m. HUM lecture
• Nov. 7th PL SC summary (meh, I’ll do it tomorrow morning… way to tired right now)
• study for HUM exam (I found out my HUM exam isn’t until next Tuesday and Wednesday, so I might omit this in favor of finance which starts Thursday)

Today I actually did pretty good. I was busy most of the day, so despite not getting everything done I still feel like it was successful.

Thursday:

• 6 a.m. wake up
• review finance chapters 6-10
• get any additional finance questions sorted out

Uh… yeah.

Friday:

• 6 a.m. wake up (the football game was last night so, despite going to bed at 10, I couldn’t fall asleep until after 1 a.m. because my roommates were still bouncing around… oh well. I ended up getting up at 8 to clean fro cleaning checks)
• review finance material
• write Nov. 9th PL SC summary
• take finance exam at 1 p.m. (haven’t taken the time to sufficiently study for this yet, but I’m planning on taking it Saturday morning) 
• study for HUM exam [the exam has been pushed until next Wednesday (a day later), so I'm taking the time to study for my finance exam instead]

Saturday:

• study for HUM exam or take it if ready (studied for my finance exam instead)

So that’s my daily to-do list for the coming week.  I tend to imagine I can accomplish more than can feasably fit in a day, so as you might notice the beginning of my week is heavier than the end of my week. Most of it, though, actually has to get done! So comments, suggestions, encouragement, etc. would be highly appreciated. I’m hoping if people are actually seeing if I’m getting stuff done or not it’ll give me the push I need to get it done. Thanks!

The Art of Motivation

So this weekend I have a test. It actually started yesterday and, as I only have one class today and one hour of work, I technically have the entire day to study so I could take the test tonight and enjoy the rest of the weekend. After crawling out of bed at 8:30 a.m. I did my hair. By ten I found myself at the grocery store. I only needed two items and since the goal of going was to get the procrastination out of my system (hey, you do what works for you), I decided I also needed to look at makeup. My two item trip came out to a $103 dollar splurge at Smith’s. Who goes binge shopping at the grocery store? I do, apparently. (On a side note, I bought a lot of other stuff other than makeup, so it wasn’t all on makeup!)

When I got home I, of course, had to try the makeup on. I should post some pics. I showed my roommate (for those of you who don’t know, I wear makeup maybe once a month, if that, and when I do it’s pretty low key like some eye shadow and mascara, not foundation). My roommate’s reaction was the highlight of my day.

Erika: *hands waving up and down* “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”

Me: “So it looks okay?”

Erika: “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”

Me: “…”

Erika: “It looks sooooo good!”

Me: “K’ ” *prances off to room to do nails… *

By the time I was done being a girl it was time to go to work. Good times. I’m still going to attempt to take my exam tonight, though. We’ll see how that pans out.

*sings* I’ve got personality…

Vanessa got me to take this personality quiz…. freaky how well this turned out.

you are lightcyan #E0FFFF

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You’re smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people’s conflicts well. Your saturation level is very low – you have better things to do than jump headfirst into every little project. You make sure your actions are going to really accomplish something before you start because you hate wasting energy making everyone else think you’re working. Your outlook on life is very bright. You are sunny and optimistic about life and others find it very encouraging, but remember to tone it down if you sense irritation.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

School, work, nap, work, school, nap…

I guess I should write on this thing more often… It’s kind of hard to think of stuff to write about when your life pretty much revolves around school and work (and the occassional nap, ). But a few hilights fromt he past month. I got new shoes from piperlime and a new “study” chair from target. Suprisingly, the chair actually helps. It’s comfy enough for me to stay there for a while but not comfy enough to fall asleep in. Not that I can’t just walk three feet to my bed for that, but it’s still managed to be an effective way to get me to study more, hee.

 I also took my first two exams in the past week. The first one was no bueno (it was for business finance). I figured out that I’d need to get 106 on the next two exams in order to pull a 90 in the class. Which, considering the exams are out of 100, isn’t actually possible. But I got the grade I deserved, so better luck next time (erm, I mean more studying ). The test I took Monday was a quite a bit better.  Not as well as I wanted it to be, but anything’s better than a 58. Not that that’s what I got on my finance exam (but it is). Mostly I was pleased with my ability to guess the answer, haha. It was for humanities and involved identifying artwork (author, name of piece and style, oi), literary passages (author, name of piece, speaker and significance to overall piece), definitions (points for creativity?) and 2 essay questions. I did fine on the artwork, there was only one I couldn’t identify (and I think it ended up being the Parthenon…meh, like I’m ever going to Greece).

After the artwork the first two literary passages popped up (it was on a computer). My first thought was “no bueno,” but I ended up guessing right 4 out of the 5, so I’m okay with that. Although, Tuesday morning while I was doing my hair I realized that, despite me guessing right, I don’t think I TYPED the right answers in the boxes. But I really can’t remember, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Good times. Really, I haven’t worried about my grades on tests since my first one at BYU (I got a 45%, cried, called my mommy, and I haven’t cared since…. crying, as it turns out, doesn’t make your grade any better). 

School seems to be going well, overall. I’m behind in essentially every subject, but this week I have a lighter load so I’m hoping to get caught up. Work is absolutely fabulous. I love my job at the copy center. My co-workers are a blast to work with and I usually enjoy the projects we get to do. So much so that I started some of my own for when there’s down time (which there usually is in the evenings). This week I finished up a project I started last week for a Christmas gift for one of my nieces. It came out really nice, so I’m excited to see how the rest of my projects turn out.

So life is busy but good at the BYU. I’m enjoying my classes and work and since they consume the majority of my time it ends up being pretty nice.

the art of educating…

I just read this in the news. It’s about an 11-year-old kid who’s starting college. But that’s not the incredible part: he’s the 4th in his family of 8 kids to go college by age 12. Pretty neat story, check it out: http://www.al.com/news/independent/index.ssf?/base/news/1188771334271510.xml&coll=4