The best 3 years

Happy anniversary to my best friend.

Its been a great 3 years and I couldn't be happier.

I love you Seth!

BALOOOOO!!

I've been spending all day with this guy:

He was so excited to see us again! Especially Seth!

Claude gave him a kiss...

...And we found out that he thinks he's a wiener dog now.

Not to mention I was so happy to see Hammy this year! He's 14 years old! I don't know how many more times I will get to see him, so I'm trying to spend as much time with him as I can.

I'm so happy to spend Christmas with all of my furry buddies! I got a new lens that lets me get up close to these guys. I'll leave you with this one:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Models

Hannah and Sofia came downstairs wearing Pattie's shoes and I asked them to model them for me. I didn't give them any instructions, and this is what I got:

Adorable! These girls are naturals!

Bubbles

Aunt Margie came over the other day and brought Matti a bubble making machine for his birthday! The kids were having so much fun, so I decided to get some pictures of it. Enjoy!

GRADUATION

Today, I graduated from BYUH with a B.S. in Pre-professional Biology and a minor in Biochemistry.

It was such a great day and I am so lucky to have family that flew all the way out here to support me.

I feel so liberated!

Here are some of the photos from today:

These are my adorable shoes that I got lots of compliments on! They gave me some hard core blisters before the commencement ceremony even started. But at least they were cute right? My shoes were the only thing that you could see with my gown on, so I had to make sure they were cute!

The 4 Biology graduates! We did it!

Walking in... I was the 4th to last person in line.

Finally getting my diploma! I worked SOOOO hard for this thing! (Sorry its a little blurry).

The polynesian lady who read my name actually messed up my middle name, Ku'uipo, which is crazy because its such a simple Hawaiian word.

Everyone got me so many leis! Being Hawaiian is awesome. My mom and grandma brought a TON. I had to push them down just to be able to see!

My in-laws, Pattie and David flew out here to support me too!

Here are Jen and I---so much fun to get our diplomas together!

It was so much fun to walk around and visit with my professors, since they all know me pretty well by now (I've been here all 4 years).

Dr. Kinghorn and I, one of my favorite professors:

Amy and I. We worked so hard to finish BIOL 493!!!

My research mentor, Dr. Gold:

And me with my favorite person/photographer!! He was my personal paparazzi and followed me all around the commencement ceremony. He just kept telling me how proud he was of me. I love him so much.

Going out to lunch at Ted's afterwards. I had to take off about 10 pounds of leis.

I'm FREEEEE!! For now, anyway! I can't wait to go home for Christmas with my family and my sweetheart Seth, go to Disneyland, shop at Anthropologie, and see my baby fatty! This semester was really hard on me so I am more than ready to relax and enjoy the holidays.

WAHOOOOOO! Life is great.

Hi, remember me?

I'm baaaaack! Well, sort of.

Ok I would say that now most of the craziness has blown over (I call last week "The Perfect Storm").

I actually have time to blog right now, but its been so long and so many things have happened that I don't even remember where I left off.

So the last week was insane...I've probably pulled all-nighters every other night trying to get all of my big assignments done and study for exams, and let me tell you....I AM TIRED. But I'm sure all of you are too, trying to finish up the semester, right?

Some of my accomplishments over the last few weeks include:

-Going to the Kona temple on the Big Island.

-Finishing my 493 research paper and poster.

-Presented research in front of faculty and bio students (I was more nervous about this one that any of you can imagine)

-all of my unit III/IV exams

-all of my homework assignments (There were so many!)

-Found a new place to live

-Booked flights home

-Got a lot of my Christmas shopping done

-Got invited to BYUH President's luncheon with Sister Julie B. Beck

-Finally wrote that awful Abraham paper!

Wow it really feels so good to say that I've done all of that! Now all that is left is moving out of our apartment (and into a new one) and finals... which is still a lot to do, but knowing that I'm graduating next Friday kind of makes me not care anymore. I swear once I grab my diploma I'm just going to start crying and tell everyone how tired I am and how excited I am to move on. Biology/Biochemistry kicked my butt. Please don't make fun of me if that happens.

Anyway, I'm so excited to go home and see family/friends/baby bulldog! And I'm excited for the next month or so! The fam comes out next week and I'm excited. This month is going to be so awesome.

I'm so excited to see you, San Diego!!!! :) Countdown: 9 days!

Ok, now I'm going to move on to post about the big island and other things, b/c I have so many pictures!

Graduation

I'm graduating!

...In two weeks! Just thought I would get that excitement out of the way.

And life couldn't be better.

We're back from the Big Island--what a fun trip! I have absolutely no time this week to blog. I have my research presentation on Friday, a Biochem exam, a religion paper, a kinetics assignment and my research final paper/poster to work on. So I will post soon!

Have a great week! Isn't it awesome that its December all ready?

Over the weekend...

Today: Homework, work, study.

Tomorrow: Statistics test, Biochem quiz, religion homework, laundry.

Thursday-Sunday: Fly to big island, temple on Friday, hiking, exploring, and well-needed relaxation for a few days.

Monday: Back to reality.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Phone services

Seth and I have been T-Mobile customers forever.

...and they have been absolutely TERRIBLE.

So here's the deal: we have our bills on automatic pay, so that we pay our bill on time every month. T-Mobile mixed up our credit card information, and put another random credit card in its place for 4 different incidences! And then that random credit card (of some totally random person!) didn't go through, and they NEVER told us that our bill was overdue....so when we finally called and asked about it, they had charged us a ton in late fees.

And the funny thing was that they tried to actually make us pay these fees when it was their fault in the first place!

Mixing up people's credit card information is pretty serious in my book. What if they put our card info onto someone else's account? Or someone else's on ours? Scary.

And lets not forget that this incident has happened FOUR times. And their customer service employees gave us so much attitude and were so difficult to work with to correct the problems.....and they always tried to make it seem like it was OUR fault for THEM mixing up our credit card information.

Crazy. Just Crazy.

Oh and I get terrible service out here. I drop almost every other call that I make.

Anyway, to make an incredibly long story short, they won't let us get out of our contract. So we have to miserably wait it out, which isn't too long.

Sooo...in the meantime I am scoping out other service providers.

What cell phone company are you with? Do you like it? Why/why not?

Anthropologie

My heart belongs to a place called Anthropologie.

I feel like this store just screams my personality! I absolutely love all of the things that are in there (with the exception of their prices though). In fact, whenever I show Seth something from Anthro online, he usually says "That is definitely a Lacey shirt!"

One of my favorite things to do when I go home to the main land is hit up all of the Anthropologie stores and look at all of their amazing stuff! And the countdown has begun until I get to visit my beloved store. Some of my favorite things from this season:

Scalloped Dots Skirt

Dripping Blossoms Tee

Falling Ribbon Cardigan

Wind-Rippled Tee

Reveille Jacket

Remembering Violets Dress

Blushing Faille Dress

Garnet Glow Dress. This one is my absolute favorite! Isn't it just perfect for the holiday season?

It would look so adorable with a cardi and some tights! This is on my Christmas list for sure.

I wish Anthro would lower their prices so I could buy everything! For now everything will just

have to sit on my wish list.

I love you Anthropologie!

Volcano National Park: Day 3

I think the last day we were there it rained the hardest. I was so hard to get up that morning in the freezing cold, rainy weather and put on our dirty wet clothes! Though you have to admit, I looked pretty hot in that dirty yellow raincoat that I had to wear...

Ok, actually the tourists probably thought I was homeless because I was so disgusting.

Anyway, we left the cabins at 7am and drove off to Mauna Kea. It was so rainy, our professor couldn't find his way around the roads, so we ended up just driving in one big circle.

Soooo....we headed off to Rainbow Falls in the meantime. The waterfall was pretty big because of all of the rain Hilo had gotten that weekend.

Like I said......homeless!

So after spending some time over there we headed to another lava tube. This one was a real lava tube--no pavement, railing, or lights.

It was pretty scary actually because we all had dinky flashlights and couldn't see anything. Of course our professors each had a hard core headlamps on, but that didn't help the rest of us! This tube went 7 miles, and eventually went underneath the ocean. We didn't go more than a half-mile because it was pretty rainy and wet, and we (students) couldn't see anything. Plus we were tripping on everything and it was only a matter of time before someone got really hurt (which probably would have been me anyway).

Our next stop was Mauna Kea. We finally found our way over there, and drove up to about 5,000 feet elevation. The weather was a bit more clear up there, but it was still freeeeeezing!

We didn't end up going up to the 14,000 feet elevation level because our professors were afraid someone would get altitude sickness, which apparently had happened before. So, instead we went up to 9,000 feet. We went up to the hunting areas on the side of Mauna Kea to see if we could find the Palila bird around some Mamane trees, which were abundant in that area.

I like this picture because you can see Mauna Loa in the background:

The trip ended with one big, awesome TEST. We had to be able to identify various plants and flowers seen on the trip and its status (endemic, indigenous, introduced...), as well as the geological formations and volcanos, and how they were formed....blah blah blah. It was really hard. I know I did well on the biota section with all of the plants and conservation issues, but the geology portion was ridiculously hard. We were all grumbling about that afterwards. Eh, I guess I'll find out what I got next week! I'm just glad its over.

We took the test at a local drive in called Blaines. Once again, I had the most delicious sandwich of my life. Unfortunately I inhaled it before I could take a picture.

And lastly, here's a picture of the hard-core professors that took us:

They could probably have their own survivor-man show.

We flew back into Honolulu at about 9pm that night. Seth came and picked me up so I didn't have to ride back to Laie in the junk bus! I was SO EXCITED to see him! We went straight to Jack in the Box and grabbed me some food, and then went home. It was so nice to be with my love and go to sleep in a warm bed with clean, dry clothes!

Overall, the trip was quite the experience. It was rough, but I learned a lot and got to see some things that I probably wouldn't have had the chance to if I didn't go. Even though the weather was terrible, I'm glad I went and I'm glad I had some good friends to go with me. :)