BTW

The exciting news from the last month:

Dana got invited to go to Papua New Guinea with his professor and some other BYU people to catch bugs for two weeks! The whole trip is paid for by BYU, which makes it possible for Dana to go. He's super excitied to be going. This trip will be really good on his resume and applications to grad school.

It's been a while (Delicious borsch)

Well, let's play catch-up on the last month:

We took finals and finished up classes without much trouble. My only "hard" final was my Russian 202 final. I studied some and ended up with a B in the class, the worst of all my Russian classes, but it's good enough for me. The brit lit final was just another test, noncomprehensive. pretty great. For folklore, our final was to show up with a "traditional family food item" and talk about it. I brough bunny buns because they're tasty good. For those of you who don't know, buny buns are just an orange roll my mom would make us for Easter. This is what they look like. I apologize for them not being right side up... the picture won't load any other way?

Then for my creative writing class, we read each other our poetry and ate "lovely food items." The food item was a required part of our final. We also had to write an essay. We all decided that our poetry professor would be sorry she asked for essays from poetry students...

Will graduated and so Courtney's family came up and my parents came out for the ceremony. It was very nice, it made me sad that I wasn't graduating yet. But the end is in sight. That at least is comforting. While my parents were here, Dana went on a feild trip to southern Utah with his reptile class and caught lizards and snakes. He had a lot of fun and brought home some new six legged pets for us. Maybe if I ever get a hold of his pictures I can post some of those on here.

Since his return we have been spending the time going to work and staying up late watching movies and playing video games and not doing homework. It's pretty exciting. We also finally had time to take our car to the shop. It was gone all weekend, but now the car runs really well.

A few nights ago, we decided to try making borsch from a recipe Dana got from a member in Ukraine while he was on his mission. We followed the recipe as exactly as we could (it's in Russian... and metric, so that makes it an adventure) and it turned out really well. I learned some things that I didn't know before.

1. one beet goes a long way.

2. a ham bone in the soup stock makes a big difference.

Here are the pictures of our delcious borsch adventure.

From left to right: 1. Softening the beet, onion and carrots all together. As you can see the beet kind of turned everything that pretty purpley color.

2. Our ham bone. We bought a pork roast with the bone inside and saved most of the roast for Sunday dinner. The little pieces of pork in the soup were delicious.

3. The finished borsch which you eat with a dolop of sour cream on it. It cooked in a 3 lieter pot and we had LOTS of leftovers. The recipe says that the soup is better after a few days, tho. Good thing the soup is tasty.