tired.

today was one of those emotionally draining days.
i don't like to complain. so i won't.
but at the end of today, i just wanted to crawl into my bed and escape all of the thinking that the day involved.
i think i should just go and live in the mountains. i'll eat berries and fish for my food. no more worrying about school, boys, selling swimsuits for a job... or any of that other silly stuff. just me and the birds. and possibly bears. (hmmmm this plan is starting to sound less and less appealing...)

*breathe*

tomorrow's gonna be ok.
it always is.

whatcha got in there?

22.

what's in my purse right now.

23.

favorite vacation.

(you thought i was going to say jerusalem right?)

but i have to say that the best vacations have been the ones with my family.

pizza face is josh. (fyi)

24.

something i've learned:

life. it is a crazy thing. and it doesn't always go the way that you want it to.

(but there is ALWAYS a reason for what happens.)

(are you noticing that i'm just trying to finish this???)

25.

do the shuffle. on my ipod.

dead girls dance - oberhofer

whoa - we the kings

we are pilots - shiny toy guns

what kind of fool am i? - rick springfield

beautiful disaster - jon mclaughlin

time awaits - the kooks

mockingbird - rob thomas

behind the sea - panic! at the disco

joy to the world - three dog night

never grow up - taylor swift

26.

my dream wedding...

just go look at my pinterest and you'll get the idea...

but we can't forget this place!

like pretty much ever other mormon kiddo, i've grown up singing the words to the song - 

"i love to see the temple, i'm going there someday..."

and i am.

someday.

(currently workin on the dating/boyfriend part right now...)

27.

around town...

oh little town of rexburg, how still we see thee lie

(but for once... not under 10 feet of snow!!!)

pic courtesy of wikipedia. ha.

(i think i'm missing my summer/fall/warm/decent weather right now...)

potato fields outside of rexburg.

sand dunes.

please tell me you are jealous and are coming to visit me soon!

(my evil plan is workinggggg!)

28.

something that stresses me out.

handsome men.

i just don't know what to do with myself around them...

;)

29.

(almost done!!!)

3 wishes.

wish 1:

that i could marry superman.

dum-dum-de-dum...

wish 2:

i could have hair like this everyday.

wish 3:

to spend all day in bed.

no homework.

no alarms.

no deadlines.

no stress!

30!

we made it folks!

(this pic makes my nose look HUGE.)

to wrap this up (finally)... and hopefully you haven't been bored to death...

5 good things that happened to me during this challenge:
1. i got over sharing pictures of myself.
2. it got me writing.
3. consistency? not. at. all. (but it has motivated me for the next time i decide to do something like this again!)
4. it actually got me blogging! part of the new year's resolutions... to write more diligently. we'll see how it goes!
5. i tried to think outside of the box. maybe it worked, maybe it didn't... but baby steps are what we're working on!

taking liberties in the kitchen.

i keep hearing this sound lately.
it sounds a lot like a woooooooosh...! 
and then i realize that it is life. as it goes rushing by. 
i remember when i was a kid, and the school year seemed to go by. soooooo slowly. what happened???
we're already a month into school, and i barely feel like i've even gotten settled in.
it's times like these that i realize that if i don't start DOING something, the whole semester is going to go by and i won't have done any of the things that i wanted to! 
so my list of pre-planned adventures for the rest of the semester:
     go on a hike
     watch a sunrise
     have brunch before church (since it starts at 2!)
     have a very merry unbirthday tea-party! 
     have a pie social, potluck, waffle party... basically any party with food involved. especially fall foods.
     go to the dunes and have a bonfire
     train for a half marathon. (this will be tricky since i barely have time to do my homework... let alone run!)
     keep my room clean. ha.
     read a book a week. (or maybe every other...)
     stop procrastinating. 
that being said... i'll make this short. :)


my sister and i wanted to make these:

and we kinda did. but not really.

i have this problem with following recipes. if i don't have something, i will either leave it out or stick something else in. sometimes this is good... other times not so much. (honey and sugar don't make an adequate brown sugar substitute in cookies. just sayin.) 

we didn't have any brown rice.

did that stop us?

nope.

this ended up being more of a throw-whatever-we-have-available-in-the-fridge type of recipe... but we were both HUGE fans. definitely gonna make it again. 

here's the real recipe. 

this is what we did. 

2 large green bell peppers, bottom trimmed, cap end cut off and diced, and seeds removed
1/2 large onion, diced
1/2 lb. ground beef

1/2 leftover yellow bell pepper in the fridge

2 jalapeno peppers

1 eggplant (it was headed downhill and needed to be used!)

1 tomato

1-2 cups shredded cabbage

salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

(i'm pretty sure we threw in some chili powder and red pepper flakes in there somewhere...)
1/4 cup grated mozzarella cheese

preheat oven to 375F. trim bottom of bell peppers so they have a flat surface to stand on. cut off a fairly generous amount of the stem end of peppers, then remove seeds. (our bell peppers were monsters!) place hollowed-out peppers in a baking dish that you've sprayed with non-stick spray or olive oil.

remove stem part from the pepper caps and trim off any white membrane, then dice pepper caps and the onion into fairly small dice. cook hamburger until done, add whatever spices you suit your fancy, then add in onions (and in our case eggplant) and cook until tender. then add in peppers (i made sure to dice the jalapenos up reallllllllllly tiny... i hate getting a bite of pepper that is a little too big. because my tolerance for heat is basically non-existent.) last of all, add in cabbage - it doesn't take long to cook. remove from heat and add tomatoes. i didn't want them really cooked, and i knew that they would get cooked more in the oven. 

stuff the filling mixture into the hollowed-out peppers, using a spoon to press the mixture down so it's tightly packed into the pepper shell. the recipe we found didn't say that we needed to pre-cook the peppers... i was hungry anyway. and when i'm hungry, the lazy, speedy way is the ONLY way. (we actually saved the extra "stuffing" and had in the next day in an omlette... also a BIG success.) 

bake peppers for 30(ish) minutes, then remove from oven and put a generous pinch of grated mozzarella on top of each pepper. put peppers back into the oven and bake about 10-15 minutes more, until cheese is melted and lightly browned. serve hot.

believe me... this was good. and super healthy! 

:)

a random side-note:

one of my roommates is our cousin - who is currently taking a culinary fundamentals class... i'm sure she comes home every day and is mentally making notes on how not to cook. just take a look at jess, and don't do any of these things. but oh, what fun we have in the kitchen!!!

and just for kicks and giggles.

how i feel today. 
(minus a few of the less-than-honor-code-approved behaviors.) 

--------------------------

i haven't been thankful in a while.

today i am thankful for sweat pants.

after running around in a skirt all day, i love the feeling that you get when you can just sit down in the sweats and not have to sit all prim-and-proper anymore! 

hellllllo unladylike behavior!

(just kidding...)

and belts.

that come to the rescue when:

pants are too big.

shirts are too baggy.

you lose your backpack.

don't tell me you never fantasized about carrying your books to school with a belt.

maybe it was just me...

making up for lost time...

today was our last long field trip.

it was a very sad day in the life of jessica ellis.

i'm gonna miss this.

our first stop was to qumran... 

where we were diligent scribes...

and took a bath in a ritual bath...

i don't know if that is actually ok or not. 

;)

i've only been waiting my whole life to see this.

and i think only my dad can really understand my excitement at seeing cave #4.

this is for you dad!

another shot of cave #4

jars that were found inside of the caves, that contained many fragments of scriptures.

i didn't tell you about my eye.

you see the little red blotch there?

i was giving someone an airplane ride...

and my knee made contact with my eye.

you didn't know i was that flexible, huh?

but it sure makes for a good story!

(you also didn't know airplane rides could be dangerous!)

my ariel and i on the bus!

heading toward MASADA!!!

this bus ride was awesome...

we totally made up a song to help us study for our ancient near east class.

 masada

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

:)

at one point, the jc students had to walk up that.

no joke.

i would have died.

luckily, we got to ride the tram up.

this section of masada is called the hanging palace

this is a view looking out from the top level of the hanging palace - you can actually see the bottom of the seige ramp that the romans built in 73 ce...

what no one else saw, was the guy taking a picture of the crazy american chicks.

i saw you buddy.

this was the room where they found the "lots"

this is the room where the remaining 10 zealots wrote their names on pieces of pottery, and one piece was picked. that person was to kill the remaining 9, and then finally take his own life.

this is what happened - they set fire to the fortress, leaving only enough food to show the romans that they died willingly - and not because of starvation.

walking down to other levels of the hanging palace

i don't know why anyone would want to take a hot bath here...

that sounds totally ridiculous to me.

today was a day for songs.

megan and i made up a sababa song.

(sababa means cool in hebrew)

it goes to the tune of hakuna matata.

i know you want to learn it.

so here ya go.

sababa masada

it's a wonderful place

sababa masada

it's a zealot craze!

it means no romans,

for the rest of our days...

it's our live free - die hard philosophy!

sababa masada!

(sababa... masada... sababa... masada...)

have you seen enough cisterns yet?

i didn't think so.

this is jess.

jess likes to pretend to be a bird.

or maybe she's just trying to find an excuse to air out her armpits...

we'll never knowwww...

see the dead sea?

it's way up there in the top left...

the seige ramp as seen from the top

ninja pic.

or maybe we should just call this "zealot stance"

jeffie (haha... jefferson), meg, and i

the synagogue where the leader of the zealot movement probably convinced everyone there to take their lives rather than become slaves to the romans.

the next part of the field trip was to a wadi by the dead sea.

we went to wadi david (the biblical story related to this is when saul and his soldiers fell asleep in the same cave where david and his followers were hiding. david had the opportunity to kill saul, but chose instead to cut a piece of his clothes off. he later used this to prove to saul that he was not trying to kill him)

there were tons of beautiful waterfalls, but considering it was mid-summer, they were probably fairly small.

now, when you read about the "valley of lemuel"

...think of this.

i like ashley's idea.

it was hotttttt.

we look way too nice and composed in this picture...

this is more like it.

holding to the iron rod is a little bit difficult when it burns your fingers off...

the dead sea is back there somewhere...

so i will have to work on getting ahold of some pictures of us in the dead sea. 

but, i didn't trust myself to take my camera anywhere near that water.

i'm so proud.

this is like a rite of passage for me!

anyone that wants to be a part of the sandal-tan club should contact me asap.

so that we can get an awesome tan picture too.

:)