aquila ha vinto

For those of you that don't speak Italian, the title says "eagle has won."  Yes, aquila won the BYU Palio! To many this may seem trivial, but to me and the rest of my aquila family, this is a victory that will be always remembered.  FORZA AQUILA!

Oh, and yeah, those are ciucci (er...I mean pacifiers) in our mouths.  They symbolize rebirth and are the prize for winning.  And yes, I will cherish mine forever.

ego vobis valedico...

MMXI

(I say goodbye to you 2011)

Thomas and Caroline got married!

Holi Festival, Utah style, with Tarah and her lovely sister Leslie.

I graduated high school!

 I traveled to Hawaii.

I met Parachute!

I moved out and started college at BYU.

The Cannon Center is delicious and Waffle Friday's was born.

I met these lovely ladies.

Dr. Egon Spengler is still pretentious and Cisco is still socially awkward.

Lucy learned to dance over Thanksgiving.

Michelle still does strange things, and those crescent rolls are still delicious.

Christmas was awesome.

aquila per la vittoria...del quarto posto

Translation: Eagle for the win...of fourth place

Fourth place.  I blame this on sabotage.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, it would be best to start at the beginning.  The palio is an age old tradition of Siena, Italy.  You know, the giant horse race that takes place twice a year and is what life in Siena is based around.  The city is divided up into regions called "contradas" and each contrada has a mascot, which range from a snail to a unicorn.  Children grow up hoping to be a flag bearer or better yet, the jockey for their contrada. 

The BYU palio is pretty much the same thing except no horses are involved.  Well, no horses in the real sense of the word that is.  Our palio uses humans as horses and Italian classes are each designated a contrada to represent.  Three students from every class would be horses and another student would be a jockey that rode piggy back.

My Italian class was given the contrada represented by the eagle or aquila.  Once I had this information I took a visit to wikipedia to find out about the real contrada of aquila.  What did I find out?  Aquila hasn't won the palio in years.  In fact, they have close to the worst statistics of all the teams.  My initial thoughts?  Great, my team is cursed, and we are going to lose, but at least our mascot is cooler than a snail.

Even though aquila is cursed, and we were most likely going to lose, we were also going to give it our best shot.  With this attitude in mind we found four students that were willing to sign the waiver and risk the possibility of getting a rug burn.  Who are these clearly courageous people?  They are three strong, fast boys and one very petite girl.  With three strong and fast boys to act as our horses and one very small jockey our odds were pretty good.  As we sized up our competition we realized we had the smallest of all of the jockeys present at the palio and horses that the other teams admitted to being afraid of.  Our odds of winning began to look better all the time.

Before the horse race began we had a banquet, took photos, and tried to out-sing every other contrada.  Which we pretty much did with the words of our inno:
                             
l'uccello nostro
è il più grosso che nel mondo non ha eugual
chi combatte col suo rostro
presto vinto nella polvere cadrà

Translation:
our bird
is the largest in the world and has no equal
who fights with his beak
won in the dust the competition will fall soon

A pretty menacing chant if you ask me.  I can honestly say that I would not want to fight an eagle, especially if it is not afraid to fight with its beak.

All of us were sporting one of the aquila colors: yellow, blue, and black.  Also, we cheered the loudest and had our very own aquila gang sign that would occasionally get thrown up.

Katie's mom kindly mind these palio scarves for us because we wanted to have what we like to call "palio clothes" and match one another.  Oh, and so that we could openly show off our aquila pride.

We then paraded around the Wilk cheering on our teams.  Turns out there were other events going on in the Wilk and everyone was apparently being loud because they told all of us that we needed to quiet down.  Were they successful in making us do so?  No, not really.  And once the horse race began it only got louder.

The horses and their jockeys were called to line up for the beginning of the race, and once this occurred that atmosphere of the room suddenly became much tenser.  The whistle blew and the horses were off.  They didn't get far before an inevitable tripping transpired, taking down several teams in its wake and leaving them sprawled upon the ground.  Aquila was one of them.

Our horse and our jockey were soon back up and in the race again, but far behind the other competition.  It would take a really fast runner to make up the loss that we had suffered, which we just so happened to have.  Our jockey hopped on to the back of our second horse and they were off.  It seemed as if you blinked you would miss them they were running so fast, passing one team right after another.  

We were just a few teams down from being in the lead with one horse left.  We passed a couple of more teams and ended up being in fourth place with istrice turning out to be the winner.  We cheered until it seemed as if we would lose our voices, and then congratulated our team when they were finished and just had a really good time being with one another as our own little Italian family.  

By the end of the night we were known as the team that was really loud and constantly kept cheering for our team.  I am very proud of this.  

So even though we didn't win first place in the race, we did win first place for being the loudest and most annoying of all the classes there.  That is what makes us better than the rest, especially you istrice.

you think you're prepared

Over the weekend I rediscovered how miserable it is to watch a football game when it is just above thirty degrees outside and your team is leading by several touchdowns.  With conditions such as these, fans tend to leave the stadium which in turn makes it even colder and the game even less enjoyable.

I thought that I was pretty well prepared for the cold weather.  I wasn't.  Not even with two shirts, a sweatshirt, a jacket, a hat, a pair of gloves, and two pairs of socks.  The cold weather still made me freeze, and since Idaho was practically handing us touchdowns the game didn't have much to offer.

By the time the fourth quarter finally began Rachel and I had decided that we had had enough of the cold, and that it was time to leave.  So we did. 

Rachel and I went back and warmed up and enjoyed the rest of the night warm.  Maybe we were warm from the knowledge of our win, or maybe it was the heater.

It was the heater.

a trip up north

Tarah lives in Logan and I live in Provo.  We both get separation anxiety from the lack of seeing one another on a regular basis.  Okay, that is an exaggeration, but that isn't the point, the point is that we miss each other.

This predicament is what gave me the brilliant idea to take a road trip up to Logan, and take some friends along with me.  After all, what is a road trip without anyone else to share it with?  

As it would turn out only Rachel and I would talk during the driving portion of this trip because people from Nampa are really good at sleeping in cars.  I was forced to stay awake because I drove, and Rachel claims that she can't sleep in cars, but I think that is just a cover story for her real intentions.  What could those intentions be?  Keep me awake so that we would not crash, which would consequently preserve all of our lives.

This trip to Logan also turned out to just be an excuse to eat a lot of food.  We got there on a Saturday afternoon, dropped the Nampafolk off so that they could be with their other Nampa friends and then Rachel, Tarah, Tarah's roommate Sara, and I promptly went to Angie's to have lunch.  To anyone familiar with Angie's you will know what I mean when I say we did not clean the sink.  To everyone else please find out what that means.

We went back to Tarah's for about an hour and then decided more food was necessary and went over to the Crepery.  As the name would suggest, crepes are sold here, and yes, they are both authentic and delicious.

Smiles due to the consumption of delicious crepes

After the Crepery came an excursion to this mysterious and wonderful place called the grocery store.  A large assortment of foods are sold here along with other things.  I found out that this is where people have to venture to when they don't have the Cannon Center available to prepare all of their food for them.

Obviously it had been a while since the last time I was in a grocery store, so it made the whole experience rather exciting.  I felt like I was completing a scavenger hunt as I searched for the ingredients necessary to make my spaghetti alla carbonara.  I had made this a couple of weeks prior to traveling up to Logan along with a couple of girls from my Italian class that helped me to translate the recipe (yes, the recipe was in Italian, and no, none of us are professional cooks so we had not made it before). 

The meal turned out to be a great success complete with garlic bread, salad, punch, and of course the spaghetti alla carbonara.  I know that sounds like a lot of food.  It was.  Especially because we were all still full from all of the previous food we had recently eaten, but just the same it was still delicious.

After dinner we bundled up and took a trip to a corn maze and met up with all of the Nampafolk.  Let me just begin by saying how much I detest being scared, so why I would pay money to do so I am still not sure.  With the help of my friends and the use of logic I was able to smoothly go through the experience without being too scarred.  My friends allowed me to cling to them, and I used my logic to essentially give commentary on our experience.  I could be a great narrator.

To continue with the eating trend we went back to the grocery store (I hadn't been for months and the I went twice on the same day!) and bought some ice cream toppings.  Basically ice cream and conversation finished out the night.  It was fantastic.

The next day we bid our friends farewell until we could see them at Thanksgiving and headed back down to Provo.  Rachel and I talked, the others slept (no surprise there).  It was a great drive to top off a great weekend, and hopefully I will be able to go back sometime soon.

true blue

Blue foam and a slip 'n slide.  Combined.

This is true blue football.  A BYU homecoming tradition that is very well attended, and it isn't just by the freshmen.  The appeal of playing in blue foam attracts many different ages of students.

The blue, foamy students quickly make those without any foam on them blue as well.  Literally.  The foam will stain both skin and clothes.  It washes off quite easily, but to be safe, it is a good idea to wear clothes that can be ruined.

Yes, all those people standing in a line are waiting for their turn on the slip 'n slide.  Yes, I had to wait in that line.  Twice.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely.

I went down once on each of the slides, and the left slide is far superior.  The hill is slightly steeper, and the foam pit at the bottom is bigger.  In fact, the pit is so tall that when students come sliding into it they can't be seen until they stand up, and then try to reorient themselves.  The foam covered their eyes (unless they chose to wear the goggles) so they would sort of stumble around while trying to find where their friends went.  It was quite entertaining to watch, but not very much fun to have to experience.  Not being able to see or hear makes finding your friends rather difficult, but these consequences are a small price to pay for the fun that will be experienced from sliding down through the blue foam.

If you ever have the opportunity to go down a slip 'n slide covered with firefighter foam this is my advice: keep your mouth closed, the foam will make you feel like you're suffocating if you have the misfortune of inhaling it.

smurfs live in cougarville

The homecoming game.  It is played only once a year, and it sure feels great when it is won.  One thing that can make this feeling better?  Knowing that you are one of the best fans in the stadium.

Face paint.  This is your ticket to knowing that you are one of the best fans.  Granted, the other fans will probably give you looks that range from obvious envy to a look that clearly shows that they believe you are crazy.  Hannah and I definitely got to experience having these looks directed to us, and it is pretty obvious why we did.

Yes, we looked like smurfs.  I am completely aware of this observation, and I am even more aware of how awesome we look.  

Thankfully the cougars won the game, so it was worth staying at the stadium until 11:15 at night.  Even if a win against San Jose isn't very impressive and the second half of the game wasn't very exciting, I'm still very appreciative for a win.  This way I got the chance to leave the stadium looking great and with an exceptional attitude.  So, thank you BYU football for being victorious.

No, smurfs do not actually live at BYU.  Except on game days, when they do.

  

friends, family, and football

Remember all of those people that you knew in high school and then you parted ways you went off to college you wouldn't have to see them anymore?  It was a relief to not have to see some of them any longer, and for others, it was quite saddening.  I knew plenty of these people.  This past weekend I was fortunate enough to have the chance to see one of the people that I was sad to part ways with.  She is one of my best friends and her name is Tarah.  I saw Tarah almost everyday last summer, up until we had to start college.  Tarah going up to Logan to attend Utah State, and me going down to Provo to attend BYU.

Last weekend Utah State came down and played BYU, and in the last couple of minutes of the game, the cougars managed to pull out a win over the aggies.  While I was elated from the cougar victory, I can't say that much for Tarah.  She was heartbroken.  I can understand this, if the tables had been turned I would have been the same way.  

She was disappointed

I forced her to smile

Salt Lake City, our families, and general conference was what topped off the weekend.  Tarah and I were able to get together one last time on Saturday evening and while we were together we continued our summer tradition of eating ice cream with some other dessert mixed in with it (this time it was a cookie) and planning on watching a movie, but never ending up doing so.  

It would be expected that I wouldn't learn anything from this exciting weekend, but I did.  First, I learned that I will always love it when my football team wins.  Second, spending time with an old friend and family is great.  And last of all, being able to have ice cream with my old friend is a great idea, especially when that ice cream comes with a chocolate chip cookie.