"College isn't the place to go for ideas." --Helen Keller

Oh, I beg to differ, Helen Keller! These pictures are proof that college is the place to go for great ideas. If you could only see the thousands of others! Oh, sorry, that was in bad taste.
Helen Keller was blind.
So, the other night, I came home from a walk to find Jen alone in the bathroom, with a facial-cleanser beard, making faces at herself in the mirror. Just one of those impulses, I guess. But it looked way too fun to just giggle about it and go to bed, so I joined her and we took about 80 pictures and it never stopped being funny to us.
What a great weekend.
It's spring break here at the moment, so we've had lots of time to just be silly and lazy and eat lots of good food. Ashley and Kathleen are out of town, and we miss them, but to console us we have the company of Buddy the Rat! Our friend Christian is also out of town, and he needed someone to watch his pet rat while he was gone, so we're rat-sitting. Buddy is way cool. Here's a picture of him, hanging out on Annie's shoulder. And Annie looks like Amelie in this picture.

School was off Thursday and Friday, so it's a 4-day weekend. So far, we've:

Made and eaten chocolate trifle
Watched at least 4 movies (including The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night")
Made fake beards and moustaches and taken pictures of ourselves (but you already knew about that)
Slept in until 1:30 in the afternoon
Blatantly disregarded unneccesary chores
Gone on long walks
Talked leisurely while listening to music in the kitchen (although we do that a lot anyway, but these times it had a different quality since it was during vacation)
Hung out with our temporary pet rat
Cooked luxurious meals like chicken curry and scones and eaten them luxuriously
Had a slow-motion kung-fu death fight
Discovered new balancing games on The Orb
Read whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted
Discovered that Annie can actually RUN on all fours...as in on her hands and feet. Really bizarre-looking.

Isn't that a wonderful weekend? It's just so gosh-darn pleasant. I had to work for part of it--until midnight last night--but coming home has been like...not working. Um, wait, lemme think of another way to phrase what I'm trying to say. It's like coming home after school on the last day of the school-year. Even though you still had to go to school, while you're there, you don't mind, and when you come home, it's almost like you were never at school at all. Because all that matters is that you have endless days ahead of you, filled with a staggering amount of possibilities. And home is almost bursting with freedom and happiness and laziness and doing whatever the heck you feel like doing!
Yeah, its more like that.
Even though it's only a 4-day weekend. (Aside--love how "spring break" at BYU-Idaho is 2 days off of school.) We usually have really nice weekends in my apartment anyway. But it's pleasant to sit there and look over the last 3 days you've enjoyed and think that it's still not over.
This weekend has also included several fabulous realities. Two today, one special and one just silly, but I'll share them both. Silly first. Today I was on a walk and as I was passing a house, I noticed a flag-pole in the corner of the yard. It was in the corner closest to the street, so I also noticed the small plaque in front of the flag-pole. So of course I leaned over to read it. It said, in gilded letters:

"ON THIS SITE, IN 1879, NOTHING HAPPENED"

Isn't that great? I was so happy. Okay, now special. It was just really cool, and I don't know if I can do it justice in words, but I'll give it a try. We were watching a movie in the living room this evening, and the living room lights were off. I noticed through a crack in the blinds a brilliant orange color. Now, Rexburg is known for it's gorgeous sunsets, and it looked like one of those famous ones. So I went to open the door and take it in for a moment. But when I opened the door, it was like another world. It was a gorgeous sunset, all right, startlingly orange tinged with pink, spreading over the clouds and taking up the entire western sky. But we were looking at it through a filmy mist of softly falling snow. I can't describe what it did to the light, or what it felt like to be a part of it. It was like this crazy Wizard of Oz kind of moment. To walk through a darkened, blandly-colored house and open up the door to a dazzling, completely different world. It was so surreal, like watching the sun set on a different planet or something. It was really cool.
We also discovered this weekend that there's actually an incorrect way to use a stethoscope. Like, as in, if you put the ear-things in the wrong ears, it doesn't work and you can't hear anything.
I thought it was a lie, but my roomates a nursing student and has a stethoscope and we tried it and its true.
Totally, bizarrely true.
To all you Mormons out there, enjoy General Conference tomorrow!
Good night, and good luck. Over and out.