A blog about quilts, some cute, some awesome, some darling, and most importantly some adorable.

A few weeks ago, I spent some time with my cousins, two of my Aunts happen to have a nice little online quilting business. Here is the link for anyone that might read this blog that isn't in my family. http://patchplayquilting.com/ . Anyways, my Aunt Lori was watching some quilting videos on youtube. The lady in these videos used words such as cute, adorable and darling quite often to describe the fabric, and other quilting jargon she was talking about. My cousin and I could not restrain ourselves and had to make jest of this lady and her silly quilting talk. My Aunts then proceeded to inform us that it was necessary when making quilts, quilt blogs and other quilting paraphernalia  to use these words and use them often. They said it wasn't easy to make a quilting blog, my cousin then informed them we could make the best quilting blog ever. They joked that we couldn't. In that moment I accepted their challenge and decided to make a blog post about quilts. So here it is.

First off, I decided if I was going to blog about quilts I would have to find some dang good quilts. Ones that were awesome and that I would buy and maybe some that were cute.

First off we have one of my favorite things and that is BYU. This quilt is pretty awesome, not as awesome as the one my sister made me for my birthday a few years ago but still good.

Okay this next one is just darling, my favorite part is the little striped car, I imagine that is the car Wheres Waldo would have if he had one.

Um this next one is just amazing and I would proudly display it on my wall

I think dogs are pretty cute sometimes, so why not find a quilt with dogs on it

My grandma also is a quilting genious but I didn't have a picture of my tennis quilt she made for me when I graduated. This one is ok.

My Aunts will both appreciate this next quilt

And finally last but not least this adorable little thing, who doesn't think gnomes are adorable

I may be mocked for this blog, but Aunt Kaye and Aunt Lori, I have completed your challenge, and I daresay that this blog was cute, adorable and darling.

GRE scores

I promised everyone I would update them when I got my GRE scores back. Well I have them. In all honesty they aren't that great, for some reason I have just been doing really bad on tests lately. I got a 157 on verbal reasoning which was in the 77th percentile, on the quantitative I got a 153 which is in the 65th percentile and on the written portion I got a 4 out of 6 which was in the 48th percentile. The scores are in the range of 130-170 so I am pretty close to the middle. Hopefully that will be good enough to get me into some of the schools I want to. I am banking on my experience to outweigh the less than spectacular test scores.

On to applications

Well I finally decided on the schools I am going to apply to, the last one took me a while to decide on but here is the list.
Penn State
Oregon State
Utah State
Ohio State
Boston University
Texas A&M

Now the real fun begins, I have already started trying to contact professors and I am getting ready to fill out applications and get letters of recommendation and all the jazz. It take a long time and I am wishing I didn't have as hard of a course load this semester so I can get it all done, but alas I'll do my best. Of all those schools I am not sure which one I want to get into the most. I also decided that if possible I would really love to research about bark beetle infestations and how to detect them using satellite imagery, for some reason that has been on my mind lately. Yeah its weird and nerdy and stuff, but it is a big issue right now in western forests. If I get into Penn State or Boston U and get funding then I will probably go because they are really good schools and it would be a great opportunity. So there it is, I appreciate all the prayers that have been said for me while I am going through this whole process I know that I will end up where I am supposed to whether that is here at BYU or in hot and humid Texas.

Narrowing down the list

So I am in the midst of my graduate school hunt, and I thought I would update everyone on where I am looking. Right now the list is pretty big, I have been able to narrow down a few choices, and I already know I can stay at BYU if I choose too. I thought I would see what everyone has to say on where they think I should go. As it stands right now I am going to apply to Utah State, Penn State, and Oregon State. After those three I am not quite sure, I have made an exhaustive list of schools and pros and cons. I am planning on picking 3 more schools and applying to 6 in all. The list I am looking at includes these schools

Orgeon
Boston University
Wisconsin
Ohio State
Colorado
Texas A & M
UC Santa Barbara
San Diego State
Arizona
University of Idaho

I am looking at others but this is the main list. What do you think?

DC

I went to the east coast last week, it was a great week, kind of hectic and stuff but very fun, so here is how it went. My name was spelled wrong on my airplane tickets even though they said they had fixed it. Apparently security is lax at the San Jose airport because they didn't seem to care that my name was Jerome on my tickets. We had layovers in Denver and in Chicago so it was a long day, we left at 7 in the morning and got there at 7 at night. Probably the worst part of the trip was leaving the airport. Humidity, I hate it and will never be able to get used to it. Then I heard the cicadas, probably something I hate more than humidity. But besides those unfortuante things Virginia was pretty and very green. We spent the next day at the NASA research center at Langley. I didn't really do anything here because they were just practicing for the presentations and I was just presenting my poster so we listened to all the presentations and stuff. Basically what I learned here was that the research center I am at is the best of all the DEVELOP locations I am so glad I decided to come out here because we have great advisers and much better projects. The next day we took the train up to DC, we were supposed to stay in Virginia and do nothing while one of the guys in our group went to DC so we just paid our own way onto the train and I bunked with Abdel who was the other guy from my center that went. We were an interesting group. Abdel is in high school here and is Muslim so he was in the middle of Ramadan so he had to get up at 4 every morning to eat and couldn't eat till after 8 30. The girl that came with us was an agnostic and then there was me the Mormon, haha it was funny, but we had a good time. We spent the day in DC doing the usual DC stuff.

The next day we went to NASA headquarters and our poster session and presentations. A bunch of the top earth scientists came and I presented my project for about 5 of them. It was really awesome.

Friday we journeyed home. They were a little more strict in DC so getting onto the plane was a hassle but I made it. I really hate traveling, its not my thing. I made it home successfully and it was a really fun week. Even though I hate the humidity I decided it wouldn't be too bad to work in DC its a nice city. Thus ends my DC adventures.

Pictures and work and stuff

So I have some pictures of my field work and I thought everyone might like to see, the white/ yellowish flowered plant is pepperweed, As you can see from some of the pictures there is a lot of it. For those who don't know my team picked me to represent us at the national DEVELOP program poster session. So I get to go to DC for a week! The first week of August I will go with our mentors here and two other people from the other teams and we get to go present our work for some of NASA's cheif scientists! We also might get to meet the NASA director! It should be fun and a good break from work. Things have picked up a lot and we are much more busy now than we were before. I had a breakthrough on Friday and was able to get one of the models I am in charge of to work. I also went with my roommate to an MLS game on Saturday. It was a 0-0 draw so it wasn't the most exciting game but it was fun to get out. Their stadium is tiny as you can see in the picture. This week we are probably going to go to a baseball game, oh and Harry Potter comes out, and yes I am going at midnight, why would I not? I will miss going with ya'll but I am sure you will have fun without me, and you won't have to listen to me complain after when I am mad that they left something out.


























Here is my team, as you can see its an interesting group, haha.

American as apple pie

I won't elaborate much on my 4th of july weekend because there really isn't anything to elaborate on but I did make an apple pie from scratch. Somebody mentioned it earlier in the week and I figured I would give it a try, so here it is. The crust may not look good, but it did taste much better than I thought it would. I actually think I did a pretty good job.