On a tip from her brother-in-law we drove up Provo Canyon to try and hike the Stewart Falls Trail. That did not work out. There was too much snow. It was packed hard on the ground and Mallory’s car kept slipping. So we cut our losses and backtracked to Vivian park to hike up where she camped with her family one time two summers ago.

We tried to hike to a beaver dam but it was also pretty snowy and icy so we stopped part of the way up and found some logs in the sun to have a nice sit. I put my arm around Mallory and told her nice things. Just some of the things that I love about her. I told her how much I love her cute face, and her freckles, what a great nurse she is, how much I love talking to her, all the funny and crazy things that she does, how great her body is, how nice she is to me and how just generally how much I love her. She let me give her a few kisses. FLATTERY SUCCESSFUL!

I asked her if she wanted to see what I had made her. I had been hinting to her all week that I was making something but I wouldn’t tell her what. I sat on a log facing her and pulled out the paper mache heart I made her. I was sneaky about bringing it along so she didn’t even think I could have anything! Earlier she asked me why I was bringing my backpack and I told her to carry my water and granola bars. I didn’t tell her that these were merely ULTERIOR motives. I warned her against laughing when I pulled it out because she is a nurse that knows what hearts look like and although I made the best heart a computer scientist could make it wasn’t 100% accurate. She looked at it in my hands and seemed pretty impressed. She told me it was good!

I asked her if I could ask her a question.

She said sure, and I got a little nervous. Mallory later told me I had a sheepish look on my face. I opened the heart, showed her the ring hidden inside, and asked, “Will you marry me?”

She was completely surprised and didn’t know what to say but finally she said yes! I slipped the ring on her finger while she kept asking if it was for real for real or if she was gonna wake up.

I promised it was real and we kissed and I told her all the great things I couldn’t tell her this week because they were all about the ring or the heart. It was so hard keeping it a secret but totes worth it because surprising Mallory was the best!

I am so excited to spend the rest of forever with my best friend!

I crumpled up newspaper into an ovoid shape (I tricked Mallory into finding me some good models of hearts to look at online) and held it together with tape and then I covered it with strips soaked in flour and water. That, by the way, is the most basic recipe for paper mache. You can throw in white Elmer’s glue, I guess, and maybe it does something to make the end result harder? I doubt it though since the flour and water is pretty darn sturdy by itself.

Right, anyway, I covered the ovoid with paper mache and let it dry overnight three times. It felt pretty sturdy. So I cut it in TWO.

I was just sort of making things up as I went along. I used a few little pieces of duct tape to make hinges for the back of the heart and then rolled up tubes of newspaper and affixed them with masking tape to make the aorta and superior vena cava. I definitely just looked up those names on Wikipedia.

Several more layers of paper mache affixed the aorta and hid the duct tape. Then I had the great idea to put in magnets so that the heart would clasp closed.

I built little places for the magnets to sit out of paper and tape and then covered them with more paper mache. I also put a pair of magnets at the top of the heart to make sure that once it was closed it would STAY closed. I very carefully only put ONE layer of paper mache directly on the magnets themselves since I wanted their connection to be as strong as possible. I figured that more paper mache would equal more distance which would equal less magnetic force and I think physics probably agrees with me.

Some white spray paint served to hide most of the newsprint (note that I did not say ALL of the newsprint) and then I gave it a few layers of red spray paint and speckled blue spray paint as well. This started out as “let’s just see what it looks like red before I put on the non-spray paint that I purchased for coloring the heart” but it came out looking good enough that I decided to forego the unpleasant task of daubing paint on manually. Also, you may not know this about me, but I sure do love speckles.

Hooray! It looks enough like a real heart that people will know what it is but not enough that they will be seriously sicked out from looking at it. Pretty much the exact happy medium I was shooting for!

I also bought some velveteen to make a little pillow to stick in the heart. A pillow really classes things up and serves as a nice place to stick things like rings or teeth. Making the pillow was pretty tricky since I decided to continue my strategy of “winging it”. I don’t think I got the shape exactly right inasmuch as I just made it square when I probably should have made it more triangular. Regardless, I was able to wedge it in pretty firmly and sort of position a ring where I thought one might look nice.

I really doubted the pillows ability to hold onto a ring so I used a single loop of thread to affix it to the pillow. Be careful that you don’t drop paper mache in water. I didn’t do that to my heart but it would probably be ruinous.

Altogether it took about a week and a half to make the heart. I think you’ll agree that regardless of how mediocre you think the end product that it came out WAY better than it had any right to.

Next: give the heart to yo sweetie!

1. Toe touch
2. Supine hamstring stretch
3. Deep lunge and front leg straight stretches
4. Karate stance
5. Standing quadriceps stretch
6. Left, right, and center splits

This page has been my guide and it has descriptions of all the stretches except the front leg straight stretch which I saw a ten year old doing in some YouTube video after each deep lunge. It is done by kneeling on one knee while holding the other leg straight in front of you and then pressing your torso forward until you can kiss your knee. I added the knee kiss. It is optional but recommended.

FUN FACT: I have gotten pretty good at the toe touch. I can bend in half so well that I am able to palm the floor and look through my legs at my own bum in a mirror. Please, please, please do visual that. You’re welcome.

]]> http://lelanophilus.net/archives/731/feed 6 http://lelanophilus.net/archives/718 http://lelanophilus.net/archives/718#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:04:20 +0000 Joshua http://lelanophilus.net/?p=718 When I was in middle school I would crush bees and wasps with my friends and then leave them as an offering at a colony of ants. It was pretty great because stomping stinging insects that can fly takes timing and has an (admittedly small) element of danger to it. Also cool was that we could see the colony massively expanding over the course of the two or three weeks that the experiment held our attention. Pretty crazy how the addition of one or two flying insects every day gave the little colony such a boost. I guess it would be like if we had elephants dropped outside our houses to eat.

A seething carpet of ants I found on a walk last summer. I poked it with that stick before they forcibly took it from me and told me to buzz off. They probably stole that line from some bees.

Here are some great facts about ants for you to enjoy. I got them from the Wikipedia article on Ants. I only made it about halfway through so go ahead and count on a sequel.

1. Ants are related to wasps and bees.
2. Ant colonies can range from a few dozen to millions. I really want to put exclamation marks after all of these facts but doing that with all of them would probably just be annoying. Please imagine them though.
3. Most ants are sterile females. Fertile male ants have wings which makes me think that they probably got an even sweeter deal in the Ant Garden of Eden than male humans.
4. Ants make up between 15-25% of the terrestrial animal biomass. Which means that if you took all the animals on the land and rolled them into a ball possibly a quarter of it would be ants. They would most certainly be in your pants is what I’m saying.
5. The word ant comes to us from Old High German ameiza which means “the biter”. The family name for ants is Formicidae which comes from the Latin word for ant which is formica. That isn’t TOO far from hormiga, the Spanish word for ant.
6. Termites are not ants. They are related to cockroaches and I think we can all agree that that makes sense because they are way grosser than ants.
7. Most ants are red or black. But some are GREEN and a few species have a metallic luster. ROBOT ANTS.
8. Most ants have pretty crummy eyesight. I guess they don’t know any better. I wonder if that is what eagles say about humans. Whatever, eagles, our vision is good enough to play Angry Birds on our cell phones. Oh what, you don’t got any eagle cell phones and even if you did your talons probably wouldn’t work the touch screen anyway? Oh but it’s still great that your vision is so much better than ours. Go ahead and pat yourselves on the back wait what no arms?
9. Ants are shaped different depending on what they do. Queens, soldiers, drones, male sex slaves, et cetera. In theory the big ants you see mixed in with regular ants are better soldiers because they can bite better with their bigger mandibles but in practice they are the first to go because when I smite I smite the ants that stick out.
10. Usually worker ants start out caring for larvae and then graduates to digging and then eventually goes on to foraging. See, older ants are more likely to die of natural causes so we might as well have them do the most dangerous jobs. That is actually a really good idea. Mom, we need you to get started ice trucking or coal mining. No wait do both at the same time.
11. Male ants only live for a few weeks, female workers live one to three years, and queen ants can live up to thirty years! There are little tiny bugs that are older than me! And they have millions of servants. Really makes a person reflect on what they’ve done with their life.
12. Ants communicate using pheremones. This is pretty cool because in my mind it is like they smell different things and then they are like, “Nice to see you too, Cedric”. Also, a crushed ant emits pheremones that cause nearby ants to freak the heck out. Some ant colonies use the pheremones like propoganda to confuse their enemies and get them to fight each other!
13. Bullet ants have the most painful bite of any insect. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index describes it as “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.”
14. Weaver ants build their nests in trees out of leaves.
15. Leafcutter ants exclusively eat a fungus they grow inside of their nests. The biggest ants bring in leaves, smaller ants chop them up and the smallest ants chew them with their mouths and the fungus grows on this mulch. Little tiny farmer ants with little tiny pitch forks and little tiny straw hats.

ALSO sexy, incidentally, is maths. That is just a side note but a possibly useful one so remember it.

Anyway, I realized recently that doing the splits is a great way to get attention. I am all about attention.

I have decided that I want to do the splits. This led me to do some splits research into the splits. I have also decided that I am not going to be ridiculous about it like certain people.

I can hear you now. But these are all photographs of ladies, Joshua! You are a man. Can men do the splits?

Uh, yeah.

That would be most unrealistic case scenario. Best case scenario has me looking something more along the following lines in a few months.

HOLY COW is that dude sexy or what? Ladies I hope you held onto your … um … sexy meters? Because they are probably going off the charts or something now? That dude is pretty amazing, right? Someday. I’ve chronicled my best effort at doing the splits here for future generations.

I am optimistic that someday I will be able to comfortably touch groin to ground in a full splits. Just like my hero. Whoever that dude in the speedos is. I doubt that my nipples will ever be as glorious as his. OH WELL.

I loved that apple. I don’t feel nothing for you.

Right, the article says that you are twice as likely to follow through if you have written down how you are going to follow through. That this works probably has something to do with visualization. Imagining how awesome my muscles will look when I can do thirty-five pull ups in a row is good motivation but doesn’t actually help me get there. Imagining how I am going to get up in the morning and do more and more pull ups each day is forcing myself to focus on the implementation of my goal and paves the way to it.

I figured I’d write down some implementation intentions fora few of my new year resolutions.

• If it is 6:15 AM and a weekday then I will get out of bed and do exercise for half an hour. (It will probably be Just Dance 3 and pull ups.)
• If I am going to bed and I haven’t yet read my scriptures for the day then I will read them before I go to sleep.
• If it is Sunday night and I haven’t finished my letter to my mother for the week then I will finish it before I go to sleep.

Grimble gramble, groused the grue when tossling up it saw,
A rare ragnunctious rander with kithering cole and slaw.

Skipping and skapping the rander wrothe, noticing none the least,
That every skap and every skip, did nearen him to the beast.

That groutful grue with famping fangs and sheer unyielding kreel,
Would feast once, twice, and thrice again on such a framptious meal.

Its tapping trendils and trapping tendrils waited for their turn,
To pap, snack, crop and slamp away the meaty little kern.

Tho sun was shining loudly, and clouds were drifting bright,
No warning warned the rander, the plightness of his plight.

He skipped too far, he skapped too near, and soon he’d pay the price,
With swaftest speed the grue struck out and neatly snortched a slice.

Not once, of course, but twice, and thrice, for rander, slaw and cole,
It schlumped the three with kithering, and bruised on to its hole.

Tis only fair, it later shared, whilst it wheezed thru lordling sneezes,
One cannot skap and skip one’s roins, any way one pleases.