Personal History

I was born August 31, 1989 in Idaho Falls, Idaho to Paul and Jennifer Georgia. I don’t remember living in Idaho, because we moved to Hyrum, Utah when I was one year old. Our townhouse in Hyrum was quite 70’s, complete with dark wall paneling and shag carpets. I have a few memories of this time in my life. I remember taking walks down the road with my mom on Sundays. There was a place where she would pick me a cattail and I would work on disemboweling it on the way home. In the back yard, there was a fence that ran behind the length of the townhouses. Each yard had a fence between it, but those fences did not extend all the way to the back fence. My mom would let me walk through this space behind all the townhouses and play in the tractor-tire sandbox that existed beyond the stretch of backyards. The sand was the means by which I destroyed the speakers on my roaring dinosaur shoes. Yes, I loved dinosaurs. Whenever we went to the local library, I would run to the videos and ask my mom to check out “The Land Before Time.” Other forms of entertainment I enjoyed were the “People Store” which was like a library except you checked out toys, playing “King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella” which was a computer game that at the time was cutting-edge, playing in our plastic kiddie pool in the backyard, and using shoelaces and yarn to tie together doorknobs, furniture, and stuffed animals with an array of knots and tangles; thereby causing my parents much chagrin.
In 1991, my first sibling; my sister Adrianne was born. I don’t remember much about her as a baby, but apparently she became more exciting as she learned to walk and talk because I have many memories of playing (and fighting) with her. Then my brother Quinn was born in 1993. I remember even less of him as a baby. Then only thing I remember was being indignant on one occasion that a visitor thought he was female. Something my siblings and I enjoyed doing was watching my dad play archaic computer games, including King’s Quest V, Wolfenstien, a car racing game a game featuring a submarine and some malicious animals, and a game that consisted on driving around alien planets and blowing up other vehicles. Other than my siblings, I also had a girl friend who visited her aunt and uncle a couple of apartments down from me, little boy I knew who I once ran away from home with (I remember my parents chewing me out for that one), and the son of a woman who babysat me a lot. My father’s sister Nalyn came to live with us at one point. Adri couldn’t say her name and called her “Nia.” The name has stuck ever since. Even her husband calls her that now.
We moved when I was 5. My dad was accepted to George Mason University to get his Ph. D. in economics, and he was also going to work for the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. So, we moved to Fairfax, Virginia. I don’t remember much about the actual moving process, or about the apartment we moved to because we were only there for about a year. I do remember a few things, like playing with Jenny Pennington who also lived in the Cavalier Court apartment complex with us, going to the pool where a lifeguard once had to save me, going to ballet and tap dance classes, and going to what we called the “blue park.”
My mom started homeschooling me at that time. She had met a homeschooled girl in one of her primary classes who could read the scriptures where all the other kids couldn’t, and she also just didn’t like the school system in general. Years later she told me that she had started off my homeschooling experience all wrong by trying to do it like public school and just forcing me to go through curriculum. I would always counter her attempts to get me to read with incessant questions about the story and characters (“Who’s Ted?” was on of my favorites). I also thought it was unjust that only I out of the three children had to do schoolwork.
After about a year we moved again, this time to a house in Centreville, Virginia. There, my schooling (and that of my siblings) really took off. My mother got together with various homeschoolers over the years to do co-ops. The longest running one of these was with the Patten family. Mondays and Wednesdays Stephen Patten would come to our house and my mom would teach us all science. Tuesdays and Thursdays we would go to his house and his mom would teach us history. On Fridays, we would go to the Centreville stake center and have “gym class” which consisted of all the homeschooled kids in the Centreville 1st ward running around in the church gym.
I spent most of my childhood in the house in Centreville, so that is the one I have the most memories of. I mostly played with Adri and Quinn. My mom was good at involving me in social activities so that I didn’t become the stereotype “antisocial homeschooler” (which, I must add is usually a very incorrect stereotype), but nonetheless I still liked to hang out with my siblings best, as I do to this day. We would have countless epic games of pretend in our sandbox, trampoline, or plastic kitchen set, using stuffed animals, plastic toys, paper dolls or just ourselves. We usually cast our poor brother as the damsel in distress (or other female role) and Adri and I would be the heroes. One friend that we played with a lot was Kristen Havrilla who lived across the street. We liked to visit her and play Barbies, or to explore the woods behind her house.
When I was 8 my youngest brother, Luke, was born. I remember when my mom announced that she was pregnant and we were all very surprised, including my dad. I didn’t even believe her at first; there was a 5 year gap since she was pregnant with Quinn, so I couldn’t really remember what it was like. I also remember not believing it months later when the Sykes kids from across the street woke us up to say their mom was babysitting us because our parents were in the hospital having a baby. Luke wasn’t officially named until after he was born, and there was actually a good deal of debate on the topic, since us kids were old enough to care by then. Ideas like Ralph, Noah, and Gabrielle were tossed around (the last one was my mom’s idea and failed to gain any popularity). The kids, as avid Star Wars fans, eventually became set on Luke, but I guess mother had to have the last word. She wanted his middle to be Rex after her father, and claimed that “Luke Rex” didn’t sound good. The compromise was to name him Lucas Rex Georgia. I still say that Luke Skywalker is his namesake though, because no one ever calls him Lucas.
When I turned 12, I of course graduated to the Young Women’s program. At this time in my life, I didn’t have many friends. Everyone I had been friends with before had moved away and the Young Women of my ward were somewhat cliquish. I hadn’t started out in a cool group and I don’t know if I could have gotten in if I had tried. But later on I was able to make friends with the girls a year younger than me. I remain good friends with some of them to this day.
When I was about 16 my parents decided that our house was too small for us so we had to move. All of us children were quite traumatized at the prospect of leaving the home that we had all spent the majority of our lives in. For me, it was the fact that where we lived I had at least a couple close friends, and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to make friends in a new ward. I was also pretty attached to the house and my neighborhood. Luckily, my parents decided to move to Haymarket, (near Gainesville, Virginia) so we were in the same state as well as the same stake. They bought 5 acres of land to build a house on.
The process of selling our house was a nightmare. We had to keep it hotel-clean and run off whenever someone came to look at it. Despite the work we put into it though it was enjoyable to have such a clean house. Eventually, we got it sold for a good bargain to some Middle Eastern family (who decided to give the siding a horrific paint job, the front yard plastic flamingoes, and the rose bushes little to no care after we moved out).
Then we ran into another little problem: the building process of our new house was going so slowly that it wasn’t going to be done by the time we had to move out of our old one. So for a few months, we lived with my dad’s sister, Jennifer, and her husband, Juan, in Culpeper. This location was quite a bit farther south from Washington DC, where my dad worked, than our previous dwelling had been. Since he had to commute there every day, he lived in the basement of our old bishop’s house for that time.
Those few weeks were not terribly fun. Adrianne and I were lucky in that seminary was later and closer than it had been, and we did make one good friend while there. But mostly our lives consisted of trying to get our schoolwork done, sitting in the tiny room with mattresses covering the floor for me, Adri, and Mom as we tried not to get distracted by our young cousins running around causing chaos. When we did get our work done there wasn’t ever much to do except watch TV. Monday was “Centreville day” when we drove down to Centreville for our activities. These usually included the debate class Adri and I attended which was offered by a homeschool organization, going to McDonald’s for lunch, and then sitting in the Centreville library to do our homework. Sadly, we were always disturbed by the Asian invasion of high school kids who hung out at the library after school and were quite loud and distracting. Sometimes, to get out of the house, we would go to the site where they were constructing our new home and even do small tasks to help out.
Then the day finally came, November 11, 2005 that we were able to move into our house. It is quite larger than our old one, with an unfinished basement, a large open first floor with a sun room that we made into our library, and bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor that are bigger and more numerous than in our old house. We also have much more outdoors to explore. Our yard is surrounded by forest, and our property runs downhill to a little creek running through the woods.
I found the Gainesville ward to be very friendly. The first Sunday in church there a girl my age came up to me and asked if we had moved into the ward. Upon my affirmative answer she said excitedly “That’s awesome! We haven’t had new people in forever!” It took a while, as well as a very fun week at girls’ camp that next summer, to feel at home in the ward, but in the longs run it was a good thing we moved. The people there helped me to come out of my shell and be just a little bit less shy than I was before.
Meanwhile, life continued much as it had before, with school and co-ops and family time and church and seminary and everything else. At that point in my education, I was actually mostly responsible for my schooling. I was into advanced math and calculus that my mother had never taken, so I taught it to myself. I also prepared myself to take the SAT by writing essays and working through SAT help books. This gave Mom a lot more time to focus on teaching the younger kids, and taught me important skills that have helped me in college.
I got my first job the year after we moved. The place I (and my sister) worked for is called “Cox Farms,” and it is a place that I enjoyed all through my childhood growing up in Virginia. It is a fall festival on a farm owned by the Cox family. It has all sorts of attractions like giant slides, a hay ride, rope swings, a corn maze, animals, apple cider, and lots more. I applied to work for the fall season, which is basically when all that stuff is open and all the children come to run wild.
Working there was…an experience. I think if I had been more excited about my first job rather than apprehensive I would have liked it a lot better. But it was definitely a learning experience.
On weekdays I worked on “mountain team,” which consists of all those overseeing the slide/main area of the farm. I was usually at the Fairyland slide or the Jack and the Beanstalk slide. I grew to hate both of them. On weekends I worked at the kitchen area. I cashiered a few times, and prepared food a few times, but usually I was a “runner,” or someone who went and grabbed the food for the people who ordered it. It was kind of hard to remember some people’s orders and if the cashiers were dumb enough to give the receipt away too soon you had to awkwardly ask (or get the cashier to ask) what they ordered. And if it got too busy people would have to wait long times for new batch of French fries or whatever else to be done. It got crazy sometimes.
That year was when I started applying for college and trying to decide where I wanted to go. There was a lot of stress and deadlines and papers involved. In the end, I decided to apply to BYU and BYU-Idaho as a computer engineering major. In the end, I was accepted to both! Which didn’t help my indecisiveness at all. I ended up going the Idaho route for multiple reasons. I liked the idea of a smaller school, I have a lot of family out there, and I had visited Idaho a lot on vacations so I was at least a little familiar with it. And plus, it’s just better than Utah.
And so, in fall of ’07 I started my first semester at BYU-Idaho. I was scared to be on my own for the first time. But luckily, all of my roommates that semester were freshmen to and very friendly. I soon found that I was having the time of my life at college. My schoolwork didn’t do great however, and I soon decided that I didn’t want to be a computer engineer after all. I switched to mechanical engineering.
My second semester I wasn’t quite as tight with my new roommates, but I did get to spend a lot of time practicing my talent of cartooning. I also discovered a new love of metal music that semester. Not the growling, dirty, hairy man metal that most people would think of, but melodic, symphonic, or power metal, which is quite a bit more beautiful. That summer I bought a bass guitar and I now play for two bands.
I eventually ended up switching my major to geology, because engineering took to much physics and math and I’m not that smart. I am still in geology and I love it.
My third semester I met a boy. His name was Nick and he was the friend of a new roommate. I thought he was really annoying and I hated him. By the end of the semester, I decided that, while he was really annoying, he was kind of fun and I could be friendly enough to tolerate him making occasional visits to my apartment. The next semester, to my shock, he asked me on a date. Then, we had a bit of a rocky “casual dating” relationship, but it didn’t really go anywhere. I left for the summer and then came back, and decided that semester that I really liked him. Eventually we decided to exclusively date. Now he is my boyfriend of 5 months and I love him. The end.