Surviving Ebulliophobia, What the?

So it has come to our attention that we might need to explain how we came up with our blog title. For those of you who don't know, Ebulliophobia is the fear of bubbles. Now don't worry neither myself or Kylee are actually afraid of bubbles. When we came decided to start a blog we needed a catchy and/or a unique blog title name.
 So we got our creative minds rolling, we tried a lot of things but nothing could come to our mind. We then started about where we live, Rexburg, Idaho. Rexburg Idaho is a small town, well sort of, the signs when you enter the city limits say population of 26,000 give or take a few hundred people. But the nearest "big city" is Idaho Falls and even then it's not that big compared to Boise, Salt Lake City, Cincinnati. But anyways, Rexburg is like a bubble. Also Rexburg is mostly populated with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so you don't see a lot of smoking or drinking or tattoos or any of that stuff. You see a lot of college students though as BYU-Idaho is located within the city limits. When you go to a big city and see people smoking, drinking, dressing immodestly (to Mormon standards) you get "shocked" back into the world. O yeah, this is what it's like outside of Rexburg. Essentially, you live in a huge bubble in Rexburg.
 With that Kylee and I both are ready to move on and leave Rexburg, Idaho. Thinking that Rexburg is a bubble and that we are ready to leave, we decided to roll with bubbles. From there it was all down hill, we thought what could we do with bubbles as our blog title. We then thought surviving the bubble, but that still wasn't creative. Then I (yes I'm claiming to come up with the idea) thought a fear of bubbles and surviving them. Hence Surviving Ebulliophobia was born. So essentially we're surviving the bubble until we move to a big city or where ever our lives take us. 
 I grew up 15 minutes from a big city (yes I'm a city boy); I'm use to driving a short distance to a big city with professional sports games. (o how I miss going to Reds games and being able to watch them on tv every day.) I miss the city. I have friends out here and they're great, but I miss all my friends back home. I'm not in any way a small town type of guy. I don't like dry weather as it is out here, I actually enjoy the humidity (who admits that?) Although it is nice to drive 20 minutes and you can go hiking in the mountains. So I may or may not be counting down the days until I move to a bigger city than Rexburg. Don't worry I don't actually have a count down going, just a general idea of when I'm moving, sometime in 2014, when I go to graduate school. With that, here's to Surviving Ebulliophobia

The Irony of an English Major's Life

*sigh* I'm sure all you readers out there found the post by my dear fiance in which he informed everyone that he was a published author. *sob* I can't believe he beat me to the punch! I spend all my life (8 years) to get published for my outstanding, literary texts (Harry Potter fanfiction), and the boy writes an essay for a 100 level class, and he gets published on a website!?

I am so proud of him. :) Not only does it give me something to be dramatic about, but it makes my little writer soul giggle from the total irony. Don't worry, World, I will be next. (I also want it to be known that I definitely edited that essay. *cough*)

MOVING ON...

Plus the men in our lives, of course

That Mormony day of Conference came our way last weekend and even though I had a paper to write at some point (due the next day), we still took time out to enjoy friends, family, and the prophets of our time. Which turned into a load of adventures.

We ate amazing food, climbed trees, smeared rust on our hands, and explored an abandoned home with the rustic, cloudy sky adding a tone of suspense and drama to our ramblings. To top it all off, not only did we soak in some "wise words of wisdom," but we all took a little nap through some of it as well. In all, it was a good day to proceed panic laced finals and essays.

Hope your conference weekend was just as unproductive as ours. :)

Universal Language

 Many people say there are several types of a "universal language". The two most common are the language of love and the English language. For my English class that I took last spring we had to write an article about a topic that we believed in. For part of the assignment we had to submit our paper to This I Believe. This is a website where people around the world can write a short essay on any topic that they believe in. There were so many topics that I could have chosen from. I wanted to be original, well as original as I could be. I chose to write about my time in Madagascar. In particular that even though I was new to the country I still could connect with the people. I wrote about how soccer is a universal language. That anywhere you go outside of the States (because soccer outside of the US is popular) you can play soccer and have an instant connection to the people. I submitted my final paper to the website without any prospect of anything happening.

First month in country and already made some friends

 Throughout the day I check my email pretty regularly. This evening I checked my email and I received an email from the administration from thisibelieve. In the email it said that my essay had been reviewed and was now on the website. So I'm a published author. Granted that it's on a website with thousands of other writers but I still think it's impressive. I never really thought of myself as an author of any sorts. It also took the website just about 8 months to get back to me. But, hey they have thousands of submits each day. You may say I'm not a published author but at least I have a published piece of work. You may read the article if you'd like to. Here's my published work. You are more than welcome to email me and let me know what you think or you can just leave a comment on this page.