Moab

Tomorrow morning I'm taking off for a fun-filled long weekend adventure in Moab, UT.

I'm really excited about it because it is my annual "hang out with the BYU engineers" weekend.

In school I had a really close circle of friends. We took every class together, studied all day long, hung out on the weekends...did pretty much everything but live together. It was awesome and I consider each of them my very best of friends.

This group of friends isn't like one of those big impersonal groups where you have the same kind of casual relationship with everyone. I have very personal and special moments that I remember with each person in the circle.

I'll start with Bryan, because he demands to be first. Actually, his goal in life is to be second place because that means he can never stop striving to be better. If you're never number one at something you can never stop. His heroes are Burt Rutan and Francisco d’Anconia. He always tries to figure out the absolute best way to do things and when he has an opinion about something it is set. Last year I almost killed him when he tried to tell me how to cook hamburgers.

Next comes Alan. Alan is huge....physically, intellectually, spiritually. He is the complete package. He is funny and sincere. He was the only person in our circle that I ever had a real crush on. One time he took me out to a canyon and we shot his guns. The first time that I ever really talked to him we were in a machine shop. I was watching a lathe I'd programmed and he was watching his drill press across the room. His coolant was splashing all over the place, so he decided to hold up a towel so he wouldn't get sprayed. Well, he wasn't paying attention and the towel got caught in the machine. He could have lost a hand.

Brittany and I could have been best friends and the greatest of roommates. We both love to read (she does it more than I), love to shop, and loved the same boy. It is only now that I truly regret some things and happened during college. If I had known then what I know now I really think things would be different. She didn't get to come to the annual trip last year and I am so excited that she's coming to this one!

James. JT. Action Jackson. He was my confident. He was my friend and ally. There are so many special moments that I share with James that I just can't even begin to describe them. I barely knew him, but decided to prank call him out of the blue one night. My junior year all of my roommates were sitting around and I told my roommate Anth to call him and pretend that she was a girl who had a huge crush on him in his religion class. She was working him over pretty well until he figured out what was going on. It was a great way to forge such a strong friendship.

An entire year of my life is wrapped up in Derek. He was the first person I said "I love you" to. He was the first person to break my heart. I am so glad that we are able to be such good friends still.

Becky is a riot. The weird thing about her is that she ended up being roommates with one of my best friends from high school. It is a quirky small little world. The most vivid memory I have with Becks is when I went over to her house one Sunday morning. We made blueberry pancakes and just talked for hours. She told me about this guy that she didn't really like but who liked her a lot and she was considering hooking up with. Fast-forward a year and they were married. Those memories are priceless.