blessed weekend.

After a pretty grueling week full of papers, midterms, and various other activities that somehow demanded my attention, I made it to Friday. I actually spent the first six hours of Friday (from midnight to six in the morning) beginning and finishing a paper due at 10 o'clock of the same day. About three hours later I was up and heading towards campus again... no wonder my roommates have already prognosticated my cause of death: sleep deprivation.


But I definitely hadn't finished doing hard stuff. At six o'clock (exactly twelve hours after I called it quits on that humanities paper) I showed up at the basement of the JFSB, which had been transformed into Ancient Rome.




Yeah. For the next four hours I was a Roman dude and my Roman History class played the Roman game. The future of Rome was in our hands--it was a toss-up between Brutus, Cassius, Octavian, Antony, Cleopatra, Agrippa, Cicero, heck, even I, the humble Balbus (Balbus meaning "stutterer" in Latin), could have come out on top. This game, mediated by my professor who meekly took upon himself the role of Jupiter, was like a combination of Mafia and Risk. Anyone who has played Risk with me knows how terrible I am at that game. Anyone who has played Mafia with me knows that I somehow end up dying no matter what. Well, that held true in this game. Lucius Cornelius Balbus (that was me) was the first person to die in our version of the Roman revolution. It was my dang loyalty to Octavian that did me in. I was stuck in Rome when all of a sudden Brutus, Cassius, Antony (who had made an alliance with them!?) and a few other of their lackeys marched on in and made a massacre of everybody who had direct ties to Octavian. Which was me. So I died and then spent the next two hours as a shade, taking orders from Pluto. It wasn't really that bad, I was freed up to go the vending machines and Janus felt bad for the shades at one point and brought some brownies to the underworld.


Once Octavian marched on Rome for the second time and Brutus was betrayed by Cicero and Trebonius, it was over and Pluto set me free to go home and get ready to go camping. So I went from the underworld to Mona, Utah. I realized on the way, though, that John Bennion's directions got pretty vague near the end.


1) Leave BYU and all your worries behind (yea!)


2) Head south on I-15 until you get to the Mona exit (about 35 miles). You will pass by Spanish Fork, Payson, and Santaquin. If you get to Nephi, you've gone too far.


3) Turn right at the end of the off ramp and head west to Mona (about 1.5 miles).


4) Turn left in Mona and travel south a tad over two miles. You will see a cluster of 3 houses on your left. Also a large yellow barn. I will put a sign on their mailbox.


The problem arose when I got to "Turn left in Mona." Like, I know that Mona is not exactly a bustling metropolis, but there is more than one possible left turn in Mona. I even tried to counteract this by following my odometer very carefully and making a left turn exactly one mile and a half after the off-ramp. Instead I found myself heading for a creepy-looking factory type thing with lots of weird lights and the only left turn after a mile and a half was a dead end. Anyway after swallowing my pride I called my friends and they were able to guide me to my destination.


A little side-note about Mona: it became a city at the end of 2000, because it managed to get its population up to 850. Bravo.


Happy people, smiling faces, and a warm fire were waiting for me, even though it was midnight by the time I showed up. I had brought the necessary food items for a "weenie roast", and I can't believe what a great activity that weenie roast turned out to be. It was a raging success. It might have helped that most of the group were half-starved because nobody brought enough food. At any rate we roasted up all the dogs and used up my humble loaf of bread.


Instead of sleeping in a tent I opted to sleep under the stars. My last experience of sleeping under the stars was extremely pleasant. It also happened to be in August. So when I woke up Saturday morning after maybe? sleeping four or fiver hours, I felt little pinpricks of cold landing on my face and realized that it was snowing. I checked the clock, it was 6:58 AM--time to get the fire going again.


After an incredibly lucky feat of starting the fire from last night's embers (Christian's matches were failing miserably; I blame the matches, not him), the few early risers among us sat around it while the snow fell on us and the fire. It was a lovely morning.


I should give Saturday night some attention though. Katie, Becky and I bought sleds. Because that's what you do when you are excited about snow and sledding. Without sledding winter would be just that much less fun. The best part is that we actually went sledding last night--we tested out the our durable plastic discs and they worked great even with just a dusting of snow on the hill at Rock Canyon Park. I had some pretty epic wipe-outs.


So lesson learned from Saturday night--even if you think your plans might fail, go through with them. They might actually work and and you'll have a great time.