Education Week

Last week I had the opportunity of attending Education Week for the first time. I have been wanting to go for a few years and seeing as this may be my last opportunity to go while we live close to campus I decided to do it.

Let me just say that Education Week was so much fun! I'm so glad I went. I didn't do classes all day because Buttercup needed to go out every few hours, but I did do 2-3 classes per day which I think was plenty for me because I was exhausted by the end of the week.

For those who don't know or haven't been to Education Week before, let me give you a brief description. It's like school, except it's all the really cool and fun classes that aren't usually taught at school and there is no homework. There were classes on anything you can think of: religion, media, political-ish, gardening, organization, family, stress relief, cooking, you name it! For all you Upward Bound-ers out there, it's like UB but only a week long instead of all summer.

The classes I took were on time management, home organization, media, a cooking demonstration with Chef Brad, family history, personal finance, safeguarding homes from pornography, and square foot gardening.

I hope to implement the things I learned from these classes to help me become a better version of me. I also hope to come back again sometime and learn even more about neat things.

A Chef Brad creation!

Devotional with Elder Holland

Look at how full it is!

Second time for him and first for me!

Growing a Green Thumb

After seeing 2 tulip plants and a hyacinth plant, Dallen and I decided to put in a flower bed alongside the fence at our apartment. This is the first time we had a garden of any sort. Ever since I took Floral Design a couple years ago I thought it would be great to someday grow cut flowers. Our apartment already has rose bushes, so I enjoyed making mini-bouquets (really just cutting one here and there when they bloomed) with them.

I look forward to seeing the asters, dahlias, lilies, and Liatris spicata blooming. So far we got all the asters and dahlias in. Tomorrow we'll put in about half of the lilies and liatrises. There is a lot of purple/magenta/pink going on with the flowers we chose. The tiger lilies break that trend with their orange. It'll be good to have something a little different, especially come Halloween.

The reason we chose the flowers we did is because they are pretty low-maintenance since most of them are perennials, so they'll grow back year after year (with the exception of dahlias--they can be though if you put mulch on top of them at the end of the growing season to keep them warm throughout the winter). Since we already had a few rose bushes and tulips, we wanted flowers that got along with what we had. Dahlias and asters fit that qualification. As for the Tiger lilies, we chose those because they have some medicinal properties and are edible, but the main reason is because that is what my grandma had when I was a little kid and thought they were pretty cool flowers. As for the liatris it provides another line/filler flower. I wanted flowers that would look great in a bouquet.

I hope all the flowers will blossom, as this is the first time ever gardening on my own. I also hope after we do all the initial weeding that the weeds will stay at a minimum. Weeding is sure a lot of work (I used to hate doing it as a kid--always afraid of pulling out the actual plant instead of the weed), but it is rewarding when I see how far we have come.

This is only the first half of the first section. There are 3ish other sections.