For Family Home Evening (FHE) our ward had a pumpkin carving contest. My roommates and I weren't very excited to go because...well, we're never really excited to go because we don't know anyone and all of our activities are in large groups. Even when we just have our individual families meet, our entire ward is divided into only 3 families, so there are at least 20 people in each family. Due to the massive gatherings, it's hard for us to get to know anybody personally, especially when it seems like everyone else knows everyone else already and they already have their little cliques. But for my roommates, the promise of potential treats and for me the self-gratification that I at least attended a church acivity, motivated us to go. We also made a deal that we would each meet one new person.
Realizing that the treats were the same as usual, popcorn and hot chocolate, my roommates almost bailed. But then the ward Dad said that the winner of the carving contest would receive a prize. With that promise of a potential treat, my roommates were back in the game. We picked the cutest pumpkin and got to work. Thankfully, Kristen is really strong so she could actually carve and Hillary is very creative, so I didn't have to do anything except pull the guts out and hold the pumpkin in place. Jill acted as our social representative and talked to some girl the whole time that we didn't know. (She was the only one to meet someone new...the rest of us were busy!)
(This is Hillary with our pumpkin. It says "I LOVE BYU" with an eyeball, a heart, and a Y.)After about 45 minutes, we finished carving and looking around at some of the weak sauce jack-o-lanterns, we were feeling pretty good about our pumpkin. We waited around for everyone to finish. Everyone lined up their pumpkins and our's was still the best...and then we realized we were waiting on 2 last pumpkins...apparently the longer you take, the more creative and amazing the pumpkin turns out because these pumpkins were insanely ornate and done without a stencil. They definitely deserved to win and they won a big bag of candy each. Deflated, my roommates wanted to leave. We all wanted a reward and a real Halloween treat, so Kristen and I went to the store and bought two bags of carmel. We went home smashed up my leftover birthday Heath bars, and made the most hardcore candy apples you will ever encounter. We used apples from Costco that are the size of softballs, making it nearly impossible to bite into. Then they were so smothered in carmel that we couldn't tell where the stems or seeds or the bottoms were so we had to just eat the whole thing.
We made a couple of rules: the apples could only be eaten with hands, no knives; and you couldn't wipe your face until you finished the whole thing. This was really hard because everything was melty, the apples were huge and incredibly juicy, and a couple of us had runny noses so it was hard to tell what was snot and what was apply juice. But they were DELICIOUS. My poor roommate Hillary has braces so there was no way any metal machinery could have handled what we were undertaking. She tried to dip a banana into the carmel but the banana couldn't handle the stickiness, so she just sat and stared at us, trying not to throw up. And for some reason, someone put on Christmas music, so we enjoyed our Halloween treats whilst singing Cindy Lou Who's, "Where are you Christmas?"
(Heather, who is not my roommate, she lives next door, but she's always over. She's in my program.)When we finally finished, I was cleaning up the kitchen when someone knocked on the door. I still hadn't cleaned my face, luckily someone else answered the door because I had forgotten that I was covered in chocolate. A girl from downstairs asked if we had a clog. We all started laughing because we thought she was referring to clog dancing because we had used a plate, a pot (which got bent in the process) and a hammer to smash up the Heath bars. We thought she was asking what was making it so noisy. But then she added that their sink was overflowing and they were having to use buckets to put all the excess water into the tub. She meant a clog in the sink. We said we didn't have a clog and she stared at us and left. I kept my back turned to her the whole time so she wouldn't see my dirty face.
(Jill and Kristen)After she left we started feeling guilty because we were afraid that all our carmel had clogged up the sink and caused problems for them. About an hour later a dirty, old, (yet friendly) gentleman from the apartment's emergency pager number thingy came and said he had to go through our sink to fix the downstairs peoples' sink. Mind you, this was at 11:00PM. We still don't know if we had anything to do with the comotion downstairs, but oh well. We had fun...
...until the next morning. I was so sick. I spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom this morning, trying to coordinate with Kristen's showering schedule. Then I had to go and suffer through class and I felt horrible. But I think it was worth it.
