Nightmare on 13th Street

So along with Halloween comes the joys of haunted houses… as many of you may know, haunted houses scare me to death, no matter how lame they are. The lame-o Terror Ride at Lagoon still scares me every time. Our folk dance team went to Nightmare on 13th street a few weeks ago. We all got paired up with our haunted house buddy. Mine didn’t quite know what he was in for. :)

We were waiting in line and it’s like an amusement park where they have the line snake back and forth a whole bunch in this room while you’re waiting, but they have stuff there to entertain you/scare you. So we’re not even in the haunted house yet and some loud noise goes off or something to scare me and I end up freaking out, falling and laying flat on my back… in front of everyone in line. Awesome. The kid I was with, Brian, helped me up and he says, “Just try to keep a hold of my arm okay?” I think he felt silly for not catching me, which he shouldn’t cause he had no warning but it was pretty funny all the same.

So then we are in the haunted house for maybe 1 minute and we are walking down a hallway and this guy starts running at us. So without even thinking I start running backwards (still facing forward)… faster than I even knew was possible, with super human strength… dragging Brian with me, which was a feat cause he’s a tough guy. Eventually there is no more hall and I slam into the wall…hard… with Brian, and fell to the ground. I look over and… I BROKE THE WALL. That’s right I ran us into it so hard it actually broke. Awesome. Brian helped me up and says, “Man I’ve got to hold on to you better!” I think then he realized just what he was in for on this little trip. Ha ha. The rest of the house went as usual scaring the crap out of me but I didn’t break anything else. Brian was a good sport to stick with me too and try to keep me on my feet, he did say it was the best haunted house he’d ever been to… probably cause he was laughing at me the whole time.

Meeting New Friends

So as promised in my earlier post, I have moved to a new house... with the INTERNET, hooray!

As with moving to a new place comes starting a new life and making new friends. It’s seriously the pits! Don’t get me wrong I am totally excited to have new friends, just not to excited about the weeks ahead of sitting by myself and being totally awkward in trying to meet new people. The whole time I’m meeting new people and going to activities by myself, I’m thinking, “Okay be confident… so sit with those people they look nice…okay I can’t do it, I’ll sit here alone and hope someone sits by me.” Does anyone else do this but me? So here’s a story from my first weeks in my new place.

So I went to church for the first time… alone. I managed alright but definitely not my favorite day of my whole life. It was followed by going to the fireside…alone. At least I saw one friend there. But the following day we had a BBQ for family home evening and I decided I would be brave and once again go alone and venture out to start making friends.

After family home evening I reflected at the sheer awkwardness of meeting new people. One girl that I got to be sort of friends with actually told me that she, “Usually just likes to meet people to go on dates, but meeting other girls is okay sometimes.” Basically telling me she liked me, but would like me better if I was a boy and took her on a date. Awesome.

The awkward of other people can only take us so far though, the true gem is that of my own awkwardness. So now that I’m out of school and only working that’s really the only opening of conversation people can ask me about. The conversation usually goes something like this:
“Just working? Oh, so what do you do?”
“I’m a software engineer… “ (and because no one really knows what that entails)… “I write computer programs.”
Then one of the following statements:
“Whoa, I never would have guessed that! You don’t look like a computer nerd.” (This I take as a compliment but what they are really saying is, “You’re not a boy.”)

“So how do you actually WRITE a computer program?”

“Oh.” (That usually ends the conversation. They have decided that I am not going to be a fun person to start chatting with and they are best to end the conversation before getting locked in.)

If they are super polite and ask more about my job, the conversation does not end well. Either they get so bored when I am explaining it that their eyes glaze over or at the end, since they weren’t really listening they politely say, “I have no idea what you just said.” Followed by a nice smile and change of subject or an extreme interest in something across the room.

This all started last Thanksgiving with my own family. A few people asked me about my new job and in my excitement for working for a company that wrote software that saves soldiers lives I was all too eager to tell them about it. Well after the first few long descriptions of what I did, people stopped asking. I think behind my back they were spreading the word… “Whatever you do DON’T ask Molly about her job!” With my mom being the primary instigator.

But I have since learned to be aware of my boringness to others and try to avoid the subject of my job usually. But tonight, it caught me off guard. One girl asked me what I did and then responded that today she had to Google to figure out how many kilobytes were in a megabyte. So I asked her what she found out. She replied, “1,024” “Yep, Great Job” I said. Then the table conversation turned to how weird it was that it was that number. Isn’t it kind of random? Yeah, so weird. Why isn’t it just like 1000? Well they were asking questions and my mind was going and the words just started coming out. I couldn’t stop them. I started to explain that computers run on bits which can only be 1s and 0s and therefore the bits had to be in powers of 2 so it doesn’t work out to be exactly 1000…on and on…When I was about half way through there was a voice in my mind, trying to harness all the social skills I had to stop myself. STOP! Stop right now, that’s enough. Bits and bytes? Why are you talking about this? This will earn you -5 cool points! But I couldn’t stop in the middle of my explanation. I just continued as I looked at the 4 pairs of clueless eyes staring back at me wondering what planet this girl had come from. All the while continuing to explain and ignoring the voice in my mind that was blaring like a siren alerting the death of my future social life in this ward.

Classic Molly moment, figuring more talking will somehow work my way out of the awkwardness I have created… instead it deepens it. So for all of you nerds out there, who make jokes about atmospheric pressure (no joke, I did it without even thinking just 2 days ago), I have posted my nerd score. I’m happy to report myself as a “high-nerd.” Feel free to take the nerd quiz if you’d like!

High School Musical

One of my latest adventures was last Friday… for those of you who aren’t up on the culture of a 10 year old, it was the opening night of the movie High School Musical 3- Senior Year. Brook and I decided to go; we reserved the last two seats together. The theater was almost sold out! To make the night an even bigger success Brook bought us matching shirts that said “BFF” on them. (once again for those of you not up on the pre-teen culture, it stands for ‘Best Friends Forever’) We were originally looking for High school musical shirts, but couldn’t find any on such short notice. We went to dinner before and got quite a few stares at the matching shirts. So we showed up at the theater with a million people half our age and quite a few moms and a few dads that must have been good sports. We weren’t the only ones that dressed up for the grand event.

The movie was fabulous, listening to all of the girls squeal whenever the main character, Troy, came on the screen. I even joined in a few times. Most of the time we were laughing, fully enjoying the cheesyness of it all. But during one of the hip hop dances both of our jaws just dropped cause we fell in love with one of the dances, We vowed to learn it. :) Afterwards Brook and I talked a stranger into taking our picture by the cardboard display for the movie.

Us kissing Troy… following the example of a group of 6 year olds before us!

Moab

As I mentioned earlier in my posts I have finally earned my passage to travel with the family to Moab. They have gone the past few years to ride dirtbikes on the slick rock and because of school and my minimal skills I got left behind, but not this year. We had a blast! This trip brought lots of adventures. It started out with a new bike. My dad decided it was time for me to graduate from my 100XR up to a 200XR. So he spend weeks before getting it all cleaned up and set up so I could ride it, thanks dad! The main thing about the bigger bike is… it’s bigger. It has bigger tires, which are better for riding up big boulders and it’s taller (not good for my legs) and it weighs more (not good for my girlie muscles). All in all I loved riding my new bike, it only presented a problem when I got in a spot I couldn’t touch or when I tipped over. Sadly to report when I crashed with the bike on top of me I couldn’t lift it off so I just have to wait for one of the boys to come pick me back up. They were pretty good about keeping an eye on me and taking care of me though.




So I rode better than I think anyone thought I would, even myself. My skill consisted of point it uphill and give it some gas and hold on. I didn’t fall too much, but when I did, I made it count. I came home with bruises everywhere! One of my favorite parts was riding on the slick rock. It’s neat because they have white dashes painted on the rock to show you the trail. After a while of riding my dad stopped me and informed me, “Molly, you don’t have to touch every single white line with the front of your tire, you can go off a little bit or take a wider turn if you need it!” ha ha. I think following the path with exactness gave me a confidence that if I just pointed it where I was supposed to go, my bike would go there.



I wore my pink riding shirt to alert others of my riding level, and as Bryan pointed out to me, “cause then you look more professional in the pictures.” Turns out it also has more useful reasons. I got to one difficult part to ride up and my dad wasn’t there to show me where to go up and there were people all around waiting and watching so I just gassed it up these rock steps and I didn’t crash, but I didn’t make it all the way up either but before I knew it 4 boys ran to my rescue in order to rescue the pink shirt motorcycle chic. They pushed my bike the rest of the way up… no problem. Another thanks to the pink shirt! Although, after a hard day of riding my dad informed me that I had graduated to a whole new level and that I deserved a red shirt now, like the rest of my family! ha ha.

So I have to take a minute to brag on my Mothey. Sorry to all of you, I don’t mean to cause offense but, I have the coolest mom ever. A few stories to illustrate my point. The first was my mom got thrown off her bike riding on a tough part. She got thrown headfirst into a large pile of sand. Not everyone gets to witness their mom thrown from a dirt bike. (Don’t worry she wasn’t injured) She rolled over and her helmet was filled with red sand, she couldn’t even see out of it. Her body was shaking she was laughing so hard at herself. Classic.

She always keeps up with us in all the adventures we take and to be frankly honest she kicks butt at motorcycling. Probably my favorite part of the trip happened on the hard part I mentioned earlier. A bunch of boys from another group came riding over it and they were barely making it up and out of control (one almost hit me). My dad sent Bryan back to offer to ride my mom’s bike through. She declined cause she thought she could do it, and she was right. She and rode up it like it was no big deal. Surpassing all these grown men with her motorcycle skills. I couldn’t help but let out a loud cheer yelling, “Yeah! Go MOM!” That’s right boys… my mom just kicked your trash. Pretty much she’s amazing.

Bryan posing silly

One of my falls (thanks for getting a pic mom!), after James pulled my bike off me, I was stuck between my bike and the rock ledge to my left.

We rode one day in the rain... all day long! So here we are in a beautiful canyon that we found in our rain ponchos!

The famous mural depicting the "Poison Spider" trail that I rode.

To get this picture was quite a feat. One of us would have to set the camera up on a ledge and then press the auto timer and run across a crevice and around to the rest of us and sit without looking too silly! All in all the vacation was fabulous and very much needed!

Girls Night Out

Me, Erin, Sara, Whitney, and Lynsi

I just wanted to do a real quick post on the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. A few weeks ago my girlfriends and I went on a hike up to Ensign peak and it was pretty cool. But along the way I stopped dead in my tracks because of this enormous spider. I exclaimed, “Girls! There is a HUGE spider right here.” As I back away in panic. (For anyone that doesn’t know I have a mega fear of spiders and have nightmares about them attacking me all the time.) Everyone thought it wasn’t really that big of a deal until Lynsi came back to look and screamed because she saw this little guy in the trail…


Yeah… biggest spider ever. I wasn’t going to post this, but at Lynsi’s request it made the blog. Enjoy!

Just Another Weekend Home

I went home for a weekend in September for my motorcycle boot camp in order to prepare me for being able to take the family vacation to Moab this year to ride dirt bikes. The weekend was fun filled and started out on Friday evening with my Mothey and I both taking our skills test to get our motorcycle endorsement on our drivers licenses. We both passed and now all of the Masons are licensed motorcycle riders! Yahoo!

When I arrived home on Friday afternoon my dad informed me that Bryan and him we going to be taking a helicopter flying lesson in the morning. He casually asked if I wanted to do it. OF COURSE! So Saturday morning we all went down to the historic Red Baron Hanger to prepare for our first helicopter lesson. The lesson went really well and the instructor was really impressed with all of our talent and said any of us would succeed if we pursued a career in flying. I felt that I caught on pretty fast to all of the controls and was soon flying it all on my own. It was such a fun experience to try something totally new. I never know what to expect when I go home!

Dad, me and Bry

So after that we came home to go out motorcycling. We went on a hard trail but I did rather well only falling a few times and breaking one motorcycle part. :) My dad said I passed, so I earned my passage to ride in Moab!

New Rommates

With moving also comes new roommates. Unfortunately it has taken me so long to post that I have already lost Camary, cause she moved back to Canada yesterday and we are feeling her loss already. But I’m still living with Chirsty and we are looking forward to a new girl moving in this week. So a little about Camary and Christy, they love to have fun and be silly and they love organic food! They were both on vacation when I moved in and as I started to move my food into the kitchen I noticed that there was no other food in the house, just vitamins and protein drinks. Now part of this was because they did go on vacation for 2 weeks and hadn’t left much food. But I joked with my mom about meeting these new roommates and what I was in store for. I told her I felt like I was sneaking food into fat camp by moving all my super non-organic food into the house. But all has turned out well and I am happy to report that they eat food, even if it’s organic M&Ms (which are called sundrops!) :)

So we decided that we had to have a roommate initiation night so we could all play together and get to know each other better. So… our night consisted of going to a dollar store and buying 3 of something (we got carried away and did 3 things) so that we would all have something the same to start our roommate time together. The adventure at the store was great all of us shopping and trying to hide everything from each other as we pick out our goods.

Then we had a great gift giving ceremony when we got home. Complete with music and dancing around and playing with every gift as we got it! The gifts were fabulous, they included dart guns (which started a war), boxers, glass goblets, pom poms, and my own special touch… safety goggles. We had a blast opening and playing with all of our gifts. Here are a few pictures from the fun night…

Me, Christy, and Camary

Posing with our bags of gifts
Celebrating with out new toys!

After we finished with our gifts we went out dancing. Here we are all dressed up in our dancing outfits.

And here we are ready for church the next day. As you can tell they are both way more fashionable that I am and I’m hoping that some of this fashion sense will rub off on me from osmosis. Love you girls!