i love getting voicemails at the gym

i got a phone call this week.

april 24th-august 9th.

heeeyyyyy jerusalem!

christmas break!

my christmas break started off with a family council. in all honesty, i usually don't see many people over christmas break other than my family. it really is the best time to do family things, am i right? but this year, i did an unmentionable thing and decided to leave my family for a week to go to san diego. i know. i had to have my mom tell my brother because i was afraid he would get mad at me. i'm not lying. so we had a family council to make a list of things to do before i left. among them were go to temple square, see the window displays at the grand america, ski, go christmas caroling, and watch it's a wonderful life, charlie brown christmas, rudolph (the original), the grinch, polar express, mr. kreuger's christmas, and elf. busy week? i think yes.

on christmas eve, we have a tradition of pushing mine and emma's beds together and then all five of us kids sleep in the mega-bed. we had ben rejoining us this year (plus we've all grown a little fatter) so it was just as comfy as can be. the beds always slowly drift apart during the night and we almost always wake up to find that someone has been pushed in the crack. jolly fun. i'm pretty sure that when we're all married, the spouses are going to be exiled to the basement or something so we can keep the tradition going. 

christmas was as eventful as always with good food, the traditional christmas jammies, church with elder ballard, and new toys. my favorite new toy? a nice electric toothbrush. have you guys tried them? they are magical. 

on the 26th, my boyfriend and i woke up super early and spent all day driving. we were welcomed into san diego by the smell of the ocean....hello, that smell alone is heaven! can i just say.....I LOVE SAN DIEGO. the weather was so beautiful and sunny. i felt the tiniest bit of pleasure calling my parents from the beach because it reminded me of when my entire family left me to rot in rexburg this summer while they went to hawaii and called me every day to tell me about snorkeling in waikiki bay.

aaaanyway, i'm an awful blogger and should be cast into the fiery pits of a negligent blogging abyss, but i would rather post a few pictures than describe everything we did in san diego. i will say this: we did the "san diego stuff." seaworld, the zoo, balboa park, mexico for two seconds (obvi), the beach, coronado, ya know, the stuff.....and it was amazing! you know it's a good vacation when you don't want to go home. i'm pretty sure when i'm making millions of dollars in the non-profit field (ha ha), i'll move to san diego.

if you try to steal the neighbor's life size baby jesus, you will be doomed.

happy new year! i hope it's a good one for everyone :) 

i hope mine brings me a crazy adventure in the middle east.
and better blogging habits...

my week in videos

can we please talk about the new hobbit trailer? i watched this last night, right when it came out and almost died. "can you promise that i will come back?" "no. and if you do.....you will not be the same." seriously? if the hobbit trailer and the hunger games trailer ever met in a dark alley.....just....yeah. anyway, when i watched it, there were 309 views. then i watched it again when i woke up this morning and there were 3 million views. 

next up: did anyone see david archuleta's announcement at symphony hall? i didn't, but my mom told me about it and i almost cried. 

seriously, david is amazing. i went on a little rant about how i would marry him in a heartbeat and then finished with "but i probably won't." and my mom laughed for like, 5 minutes straight, because the "reality" is that i definitely won't. and then i asked her if she ever had a dream that she wanted so much she thought she could do anything? 

and then she understood.

every semester....

you know that big 7 page research paper that's due on thursday that i haven't started? (well, now you do.) 

nope. 

it's due tomorrow. 

gotta run to maverick.

i need a few monsters and rockstars to get me through the night. 

ok bye. 

the circle of life

here is a picture of me coming home from india three years ago.

 yup, i look like i've been on planes and trains for 48 hours. let's turn our attention away from my greasy hair and onto the sa-weet henna tattoo on my arm, mmmkay? 

anyway. see the boy on the far right? that's jacob. he also looks like he could use a shower and a haircut. yikes, to be 15 years old. ok, moving on.... 

fast forward three years. this is jacob coming home from india.

what the? i swear i just got home from india last month. it's been three years? not cool. you wanna know what is cool? jacob got to go to the village i worked in and see my girls :) that makes me SO happy! i miss them. i miss india. i'm so happy that my little brother got to go and have the same life-changing experience that ben and i had. i hope the three of us can go back someday! 

p.s. i got this text from jacob the day after he got back. "i went to the hospital and the doctor told me i have e-coli. so i threw him on the GROUND!" 

the calm before the storm (thoughts before finals week)

-two days ago, my personal health and wellness professor made us run a mile and a half outside at 9 AM. it was 1 degree outside. that's not even an exaggeration. i pretty much waddled around the track in my ski coat. yes, i ran in my ski coat! who even said you needed to be healthy to graduate in health science?

-today, the same professor came to class and told us that he actually wasn't going to give us a final and merry christmas. indeed.

-in a week and a half, i get to go home and partake of snuggling in a chair by the fire, hot chocolate, charlie brown christmas music, homemade fudge (i love neighbor christmas treats), watching movies in the den with lots of blankets, brown sugar carmalized bacon (anna? sarah? whitman's cabin, anyone?), clementines, twinkling christmas lights, and hanging out with my family for 4 months while i'm off track!

-anyone know of jobs in salt lake this winter? here's my resume: rachael ely--will work for jerusalem tuition. previous training includes running in 1 degree weather. and eating carmelized bacon.

-i'm going to san diego in a few weeks and i'm so excited! i've never been. what's the weather like this time of year? i've only been to california twice. both times i went to disneyland. yes, i know, i'm very cultured. as far as i know, splash mountain is everything california has to offer. can't wait!!!

-ok. i've procrastinated starting a big fat paper long enough. things are about to get crazy up in here. peace out.
  

the jerusalem story

let me tell you the story about me trying to get the heck to jerusalem.

i first heard about the byu jerusalem program in 9th grade when my friend told me stories of his sister who just got back from there. up until that point, it honestly never occurred to me that the jerusalem i read about in the scriptures was still a city. (ya. i'm retarded. shut it.) 

i thought about how cool it would be to go, but i didn't look into it until my first semester of college. i was so happy to find out that byu-idaho students could apply, too. but my happiness was crushed when i figured out it was $10,000. so i forgot about it and decided to go to china instead, which was a quarter of the cost. once, in china, we were talking about the places we want to go the most, and when i said jerusalem without even thinking, i realized how much i do want to go and that i could make it happen.

i got back from china and concluded that i probably should settle down and not take any more time off school. but i think it's pretty much a rite of passage for college students to have the travel bug, so i decided that this fall i would go to ukraine with sarah. long story short, it was going to be free (plus stipends) and i figured that i would be an idiot to pass up a free semester of travel with my best friend. i was really excited. but i started having bad anxiety about it. i just wasn't feeling good about it. so i cried and dropped out and thought of jerusalem. maybe i was supposed to go to jerusalem in the fall? i spent all winter working and working and working to save up money and then it came time to apply........and i didn't get in. and i cried. but the woman at byu told me to keep applying because it's all luck of the draw and since there is a high acceptance rate, my chances of getting rejected again were low.

so this summer, i applied to go this upcoming winter. perfect! i won't be in school anyway, so i wouldn't have to miss a semester! i was so anxious to hear back from them that for a week, i sat out on the sidewalk every day waiting for the mail to come. my mom was worried that i was getting my hopes up too high. the letter finally came and.......i didn't get in. so i cried. (this seems like a theme to my story.)

i wasn't sure if i could handle getting rejected a third time, but realized that i had to keep trying or else i for sure won't go to jerusalem! so i decided to apply for this summer. all semester long, i've been thinking of the deadline, november 28th. gotta get my application in by november 28th. last week, i went home for thanksgiving and started getting my application together. i checked again to make sure the deadline was the 28th and.......i had been wrong. it was the 18th. a week earlier. i had missed the deadline. so what did i do? i cried of course. i cried to my mom about how the universe does not want me to go to jerusalem. (i promise i don't cry a lot. i'm pretty sure most of my tears are jerusalem related.)

but my parents are superheroes and while i pitied myself and said there was nothing to be done and there was no use calling the jerusalem center, they called anyway and found out that since not very many people had applied and they didn't have enough people on the waiting list, they were going to keep accepting applications for the waiting list for another week. i faxed over my application yesterday and now i am on the waiting list. several people drop out every semester, so my chances are pretty good, but i'm not getting my hopes up.

right before i faxed in my application a few days ago, i went to devotional on campus and guess what the topic was? patience. the speaker (who is my old english professor) started off by telling a story of always wanting to go to jerusalem with byu. she saved up her money, applied, got accepted....and then the program was cancelled a few days before she left. she was devastated. but the program opened a year later and she reapplied. she got in and since the tuition was cheaper that semester, she had some money left over to go on another study abroad with the byu-idaho humanities program. the point was, she looked back on that experience and realized that her plan was different than what actually happened, but it turned out so much better for her. not that heavenly father particularly cares about where we travel, but when things don't go according to our plan, we need to have patience while his plan is being unfolded and be accepting of those changes in our lives.

i seriously just gawked at the big screen the whole time. i swear people always say that a talk was written for them, but you guys. this talk was written for me.

here's the thing. looking back, i'm glad i didn't go to ukraine or jerusalem this semester. i've had an awesome few months. i got to see ben for the first time in two years, i figured out my major, and i started dating a really darling boy :) all of which i would have otherwise missed out on.

so i'm not saying if i wait patiently, i'll get to go to jerusalem in the summer. maybe not getting accepted has been coincidence. or maybe it is part of his plan. i don't know. maybe i need to spend more energy on being patient and less energy crying. (ha. ha.) maybe i'll go and have a great life-changing experience. maybe i won't go and something better will happen. whatever happens, there's the jerusalem story. and i commend you for reading all of it.

the end (or not....i hope.)