-- Casino Night --
Friday night meant casino night this week at Southern Utah University. The theme was Double 0 Thunder and Shaken not stirred, so essentially James Bond themed which my apartment took that as an excuse to dress up.
Each student got 1000 credits in poker chips and to try their hand at Texas Hold'em, Blackjack, Poker, and a few more games. My friends and I spent all our time and chips playing Blackjack and discovered: gambling is more enjoyable when it is not real money.
Three hours rolled by and piling all our chips together to try to win a prize, we managed to keep 3, 850 credits out of the 4000 total. Not bad considering some hands we lost big, I say we but I never betted more than 5 credits.
Leaving the student center empty handed, we headed out with the rest of student body to Denny's to have an after-party. Our after-party lasted until about 2 before we all crashed with sore feet and overly stuff stomachs.
-- St. George --
Academy Square apartments 12 and 14 (that's mine) practically do everything together. Apartment 12 boys are constantly over at our apartment for various reasons but mainly for the TV and the free food that we frequently cook them.
Saturday rolled around with no school events to attend, no homework attempted to be done, but we needed something to do. With nothing to do and freezing weather around us, we decided to do the most logically/college-like thing to do... an evening trip to St. George.
The evening started with wandering around outlet malls and the main mall. While people shopped, my roommate [Bre] and I discovered the massage chairs and their $1 for 3 minute charge. It was lovely, expect it seemed to pass too quickly. Decisions aren't made very quickly in this group but after a few items were purchased (I got soft pretzel bites) we moved our party to Iceberg for milkshakes and fries for "dinner."
Iceberg was filling, refreshing, and a good place to sit and openly discuss what was next on our adventures. There we decided to meet and visit my roommate's [Kel] grandparents and then continue on to Dixie Rock.
On our way to Kel's grandparents house, we were blasting to music when Adele's new single came on. Our roommate's boyfriend loves this song and he sang he heart out every chorus and as much as we were laughing, we applauded him and his confidence in himself.
Kel's grandparents house was amazing. It was like something that should be in a house-hunters, parade of homes magazine. We got to know more about them, their history, and their hobbies while helping them with their cell phones and answering questions. They were the nicest couple, very cute and still tease each other -- talk about relationship goals.
Escaping the grandparent's house with all their leftover Halloween candy (they told us to take it) we made our way to Dixie Rock. Honestly, I was expecting to hike up a super steep hill, over boulders and trees to get somewhere they've claimed Dixie Rock...turns out I was over thinking it.
In Southern Utah, like St. George there are red rocks everywhere which contrast the blue skies beautifully. In St. George, Dixie State University is the big college so people have painted the word DIXIE on the side of some red rocks on the edge of town; they are lite up every night to be seen. Well, there is a small parking lot and a short path leading on top of the red rocks were you can see majority of St. George with the stars above you.
The view was beautiful especially with the LDS St. George Temple right in the middle of town. It was so peaceful...and freezing. To keep the blood flowing through my body, my roommate [Jo] and I started wandering on top of the rock checking out what had fallen in the cracks of the rocks. Suddenly Jo finds a nice water bottle and called the boys over to discuss how they could retrieve it. It look three heads (three boys), some time, and a lot of light but eventually they retrieved it. We felt so triumphant in our success that we took a picture of the three rescuers, of the whole group, and then we left without the water bottle.
Grudgingly we left the warmer weather of St. George and returned to Cedar City a little before 1 am. Our adventures and food had worn us out in hopes of a goodnight sleep.
-- Karlie's Cookies --
My first year of college my roommates and I made a lot of sweets and one of our favorites we renamed as "Karlie's Cookies." Karlie had the originally recipe and made the mistake of making them one time because we were hooked and forever referred to them as Karlie's cookies.
Now these aren't the healthiest cookies you can have but that's probably why they taste so good. One huge perk of Karlie's cookies is that one batch (no doubling or anything) makes easily 70 cookies, depending on how big you roll the dough. Knowing the amount of cookies it is able to make, I had decided on Monday that over the weekend I was going to make my first batch of Karlie cookies.
After laundry and grocery shopping on Saturday, I set out to make the famous Karlie cookies. I made quite the mess but I was having so much fun and feeling so domestic..I might need to learn how to make a few more things in the kitchen. I was only able to bake about 34 cookies on Saturday before we spent the evening in St. George but I was already receiving great reviews on the cookies.
I resumed baking the cookies Sunday afternoon and after an hour and a half I finally finished all the cookie dough without eating too much of it raw. In the end, I had made a total 114 cookies giving 16 away to neighbors and baking the original 34 cookies on Saturday.
It was so fun baking cookies, seeing people's enjoyment, and spreading some sweet-tooth love to my neighbors.
*If you are interested in the recipe of Karlie's Cookies, message me or comment below.
