The Never-Ending List of Reasons Why I Can't Go to Church

So, this list began as a list of excuses as to why They skipped church or a church activity (like early morning seminary, mutual, ward activity...) that I heard quite frequently, in real life... And some of these excuses are pretty bad, and as I kept track of them, I decided that they needed to be shared with the rest of the world on the internet. Don't be offended if you've used some of them, I'm not judging you, and sometimes these excuses could totally be used in a legit way. But, to promote the most humor from this post, I recommend looking at each excuse as if it was used in the lamest way ever, in the most pathetic situation ever, at the most inconvenient time ever. Ready? Go.

Legit Reasons Why I Can't Go to Church

1) Had a doctor's appointment (this one was used enough that it also has an abbreviation: hada)

2) Didn’t shave

3) I shaved and the boys will be distracted

4) I need to paint my toe nails

5) I’m getting sick

6) I have family [in town]

7) I have nothing to wear

8) My bangs are too long

9) The snow is too bad

10) I didn’t fix my eyebrows

11) I bit my tongue and it’s swollen

12) I had a "thing" 

13) I had to give a talk

14) I already drive to the church once a week

15) I had to pick someone up

16) I lost my basketball game

17) I won my basketball game

18) I couldn’t find my shoes

19) We had a house-showing and we had to stalk the people thinking about buying our house

20) I have dance

21) I have a zit

22) My legs are too sore

23) I'm offended

24) My nails are wet

25) I’m too tired

26) I have to clean my bathroom

27) I forgot bout daylight savings, and I'm too embarrassed to be an hour late

28) So-and-so didn’t say hi to me last week in the hallway

29) The cat kept me up all night

30) My house is a mess

31) It rained at practice

32) I was on an errand

33) I jammed my finger playing basketball yesterday

34) Went walking on water instead (AKA boating)

35) I had to observe the July 4

36) I had to take care of the puppy
**new!**

37) It's too cold

38) Going to Vegas for the weekend
39) My friends won't be there
40) My hair's still wet
41) Can't get out of the neighborhood safely

42) I just moved and I don't know anybody there
43) We were doing field work in the Mohave desert all weekend and church is too early in the morning to wake up for
44) I have to pee





45) One side of my face is tanner than the other
46) My food baby is showing
47) They announced my personal business too soon, when I wasn't there, and now I'm offended

48) I didn't do my visiting/home teaching, and I don't want to be guilted into it on the last Sunday of the month
49) I'm going to be in somebody else's ward
50) I had to drive a family member to the airport
51) I'm tired of having home/visiting teaching shoved down my throat, so I'm going to take a breather for a few weeks.

52) We were on our honeymoon.
53) We have a free coupon off church.

54. We are celebrating July 4th in the woods, where there is no church.

The Best Time to Go Grocery Shopping

They always say to never go grocery shopping when you're hungry.

This is a lie. Always go grocery shopping when you're hungry. Because that means it's mealtime, which means the stores will have FREE SAMPLES. All kinds of them!!

Cheesecake, ham, salsa, bean dip, chips, smoothies, pizza, fruit...! If you go to the store at the right time, you can literally get a balanced meal out of all the free samples. Now you may feel pressured to buy some of the things you are sampling. Like maybe there's some kind of social rule that for every three samples you have, you should buy one of them.

Don't feel that way. The person at this free sample stand has no idea that you just sampled a cream puff down aisle three and a chip down aisle seven. Heck sample one of everything! But don't get crazy- one sample from each stand now, come on. If you want more than one sample, it's probably a sign that you want to buy the product.
Just make sure that you pay attention to what samples they're giving out... You don't want to accidentally go to the stand sampling something you don't want to try. Like, nobody wants to sample lotion...

Diary of My Shopping Life

The average American girl loooooooves shopping at the mall. And normally I do. But sometimes I get really tired of people trying to sell me stuff I don't want, or sign me up for coupons I don't want, or sign me up for their store credit card that I also still do not want...
Like you know those stands in the middle of the hallway in the mall? You know the ones that have the straighteners and curling irons? No matter what I do, they always nab me. They chase me down. And I'm not even kidding.

And the ones selling skin-care products DO NOT EVER STOP TALKING TO ME.

And even when I go up to the register to buy things, they still try to sell me stuff, because just coming to the store and buying stuff on my own accord isn't good enough. This is quite annoying because it usually takes a lot of thought for me to decide if I want to buy this item in the first place.

So already, making it to the register for me is an accomplishment in and of itself. And then the cashiers have to go and ruin it!!!

But wait, there's more. Not only do the cashiers belittle my purchase, then all they want is to stalk me.

Or they want me to apply to their store credit card, which I'll be denied from anyways because I don't make enough money each year because I have expenses like tuition and whatever, and I just can't take that kind of rejection!
So basically, I love the invention of the self-check out. No questions, no last-minute sales, and I can leave feeling happy about my purchase. Bless the Inventor-of-the-Self-Check-Out's heart.

Dog Tails

This... is my dog.

She is a character. As you can probably assume from her adorable face, she's pretty dang spoiled. We basically give her everything she wants and let her do anything she wants. When she was a puppy, we'd take her on walks (well, try to), and moral of the story is that she'd just try to eat anything and everything that was on the sidewalk.

I guess weird things on the sidewalk make you thirsty though. On the hot days in the summer, she just couldn't wait to cool off or drink, so she'd multitask and do them at the same time...

We tried really hard to make these walks good exercise for her... She had a lot of puppy energy and it was always good for her to get it all out. But maybe, looking at the way by which she would recover for a few hours after the walk, maybe we overdid it on occasion.

She's grown up now, so she's figured out what to eat and what not eat on the sidewalks... She's also a little bigger nowadays. Sometimes she forgets she's not a little puppy anymore.
In physics, I learned about this thing called momentum. I feel like my dog would benefit from learning about it, if maybe she wasn't a dog and could speak English and stuff... But when she was little, she used to run down the stairs like no problem (smaller mass). But now that she's big (bigger mass), she mostly slides down the stairs, onto the hardwood floor at the bottom, and straight into the wall. Well, so, with momentum, the heavier you are, the more momentum you have, and the faster you go, the more momentum you have, so combined, she has a lot of momentum, and therefore it's harder for her to stop, and we haven't even gotten to the part about stopping on a frictionless floor...

Sorry. I just took a physics final so that's what's on my mind. What I'm trying to get at here is that she has more momentum now and slides all over the frictionless floor.
My dog is also very protective of our house. Literally, people cross to the other side of the street, because she barks so fiercely at pedestrians. What pedestrians don't know is that my dog is really just barking to get their attention. Like "Hey, come be my friend!" and it sounds like a mean bark, but as soon as you go over to pet her, she's like "Hey, we're friends!" So if you were a robber and wanted to get into our house but our dog scared you, like really, there's not that much to worry about, because after you said hi to her, she'd probably show you everything inside.

And you know how most dogs sit by the table at dinner for scraps of meat or whatever? Nope, not my dog. She sits by the refrigerator, waiting for someone to pull out the whipped cream and give her a squirt. I guess she has her priorities straight.

She's really good at getting into trouble, but really bad at hiding it. For example, she likes to go through the trash, but she gets stuck...

And, she really likes to play in the mud.

Like, A LOT.

She likes to stow-away...

And sleep in weird places...

But, it's whatever. How could you get mad at this face?

It's My Birthday

There comes a time in everyone's life (hopefully) when you turn into an adult. You begin life as a baby, and you grow up into a toddler, then a child, then a kid, then a pre-teen, then a teenager, then the awkward "everyone expects you to act like an adult but they don't treat you like one" stage, and then, after a gazillion years of being a non-adult, it happens.

But not for me, I'm going to stay six years old forever. (Hello, I Am Six Years Old) Even though I'm turning 20 this week...
but like, 20 is old!! The big 2-0. Second decade of my life. It's old. I'm almost not a teenager anymore. This takes a lot of teenaged-privileges away from my horizon. I have to like... be responsible for myself or something now. But the important part of turning 20 is that I am NO LONGER a teenager. According to my google search, I've done pretty well with living my teenaged years to the fullest. Out of the 20 Things to Do Before You're 20 list, I've done 18 of them. You can guess which ones I haven't done, I'm not going to tell you, but maybe you can use this as a guide for yourself if you're still under 20.
But the thing about birthdays is that they're the perfect excuse for everything you ever need to justify.

It's even more convenient when your birthday falls near Thanksgiving in the same way mine does, because then you can take all the things you needed to justify before and amplify them... for the entire Thanksgiving break.

What sucks about Thanksgiving break is that everyone goes home. Then you have the whole apartment to yourself. Which is good... and bad...

But then, since no one is around, you can make sweet potato casserole at 1am because you're too scared to sleep, put candles in it the next morning for your birthday, and then eat it for breakfast... and no one will judge you for 1) not making yourself a birthday cake 2) eating casserole for breakfast, and 3) putting candles in it.
Not that I like did that or anything.

I Have No Hobbies Anymore

Once upon a time, the Thanksgiving Holiday is a week away. Of course, this means that all the professors like to give you all your midterms and papers and projects and like whatever for the week before, so you don't forget everything you've learned over the break, or like whatever. In other words, this means that the week before Thanksgiving is the craziest week of your life this month, and that the two days of school you have the week of Thanksgiving become the easiest two days of your life.

The busy week is a trial in and of itself, but then, the sad part is the aftermath: when you're so not-busy that you don't know what to do with your life.

But I mean, after a while, staring at the ceiling is boring. I can only do that for so long, I have a short attention span. For a little while, I was in denial that I really had nothing I NEEDED to do RIGHT NOW, so I made up a few things for myself to do in this spare time...

After about half an hour of this though, I burnt out and lost motivation, and started wasting my free time...

This is when I realized that I don't have hobbies anymore. I know I used to have them. Something like playing the piano, reading, sports... I don't remember. But I know I had them. I used to have real hobbies like the ones that Pinterest talks about...
But speaking of Pinterest, and what it talks about... When I looked at it on this day, I remembered that I really like ear-cuffs!! Like, really like them! And I found this website that taught you how to make one out of a paper clip!!

I was super excited about this and I made it my new hobby. I made three in under an hour. I was very excited. I thought about buying a kit, or some real jewelry wire, or some cool beads so I could expand and develop my new hobby... but then I burned myself out on it. So maybe my problem isn't that I'm too busy for hobbies. Maybe it's that I have the attention span of a squirrel...

Adventures in the Check-Out Line of the Creamery

Soo, I work at a grocery store. Every other day, I stand in the same two-square foot box with my register, checking out people's groceries, for four hours or so. Now that I've worked here for a while, I've been able to categorize all the customers that come in.
Because we're on-campus, we obviously get a lot of students. In and of themselves, there are a lot of different kinds of students, but here are the typical ones:
There are Nice Ones:

Awkward Ones:

The Ones That Try to Hit On You:

Aaand the Ones With A Meal Plan:

Next to students, you would be surprised on how many people from "The Outside World" come to the Creamery to buy their groceries... Don't ask me why- overall the Creamery is more expensive than all other grocery stores (except the milk) and it's smaller than most other grocery stores as well... but it's whatever, they can do whatever they want.
You get your dad on the way home from work, stopping by to pick up some milk.

You get the elderly people, who are either very nice, or very mean.

There are some more awkward people:

And the ones that like the complain about everything:

Yeah, so next time you go grocery shopping, remember that the person at the register is a real person, with problems and a family and roommates and a facebook and a blog... and she probably blogs about customers like you... :P