Party like the Oscars

If anyone knows anything about me, it's that I like to party.

And by party, I mean eat fancy food, wear fancy clothes, be with cool people, eat more fancy food, spill fancy food on your fancy clothes, and wrap it all up by midnight.

I know. I'm pretty hardcore.

So when my invitation to the Oscars went missing (somehow I think it is related to sequestration...) I thought we had to bring the Oscars to Provo. After all, the only thing better than beautiful celebrities in all their fineries is a bunch of Mormons in old prom dresses chowing down after a long day of fasting.

The best thing about living in my dad's basement -- besides the free rent and reliable heat -- is a TV with plenty of seating. In our last house we had our TV in what we called "The Dark Room," because it had no windows. But it was also small enough that when we put our couch facing the TV there was not enough room to play the Kinect. And since you know I've got to get my Dance Central on, that just wasn't an option.

Poor Jason realizing we didn't have enough room  by breaking the light fixture. With his head. On our second night in the house.

So, we did the only other sensible thing and we positioned our couch so it faced a blank wall. While that left us room to shake our groove thang, it meant we had to do all of our TV watching from pillows on the ground. Even though this set an awesome, ethnic mood, we had a max capacity of about 4 people for TV-watching unless you weren't afraid of non-spousal-spooning.

But to get back to our Oscars party... my dad's basement not only has enough room for classic family room fixtures like an air hockey table, darts, and something that involves basketballs, but also plenty of people to enjoy the Oscars without bursting their personal boundary bubbles. There's even room for defunct exercise equipment! Yay!

We took advantage of all this space and invited some of our favorite people to watch the festivities with us in their black-tie-finest. To make sure they didn't feel out of place in their haberdashery we laid out the red carpet and set the celeb mood.

 

 

Seriously. I dare US Weekly to pick a worst dressed from these people. They are all pretty stunning.

Apart from sparkling conversation, my favorite part of any party is the food. Initially I wanted to take this opportunity to make only food that is fancy and really hard to pronounce, but since no one likes to eat that kind of food except me, I stuck with more traditional appetizers and just tried to fancy pants them up.

I made buffalo chicken strips with blue cheese dressings and celery shavings, fried chicken and waffles, smoked BBQ pork sliders on brioche buns, garlic parmesan popcorn, pear and pecan gorgonzola salad, brie and peach crostinis, chocolate peanut butter cake balls, and white chocolate marionberry cake balls. We also had delicious homemade oreo cookies, brownies, and a full mocktail spread brought by delightful guests.

Since the Oscars can be kind of boring, especially when you are on the media slow track and waiting for movies to come to the dollar theater, we had bingo sheets to keep people interested. Congrats to Hanna for winning the illustrious $10 iTunes gift card for getting the first bingo!

Jason always stresses out when I tell him about the parties I'm planning because he knows that there will be at least one or two freak-outs in the ensuing days when I clean the house from top to bottom in the middle of the night. Or I will spend hours cutting and taping logos to make a backdrop. Or dipping and breading endless chicken pieces. Or jumbling words for bingo.

But he has now realized that he can't fight it any longer. I only have two speeds: turbo or hibernation.



So thank you everyone who made this Oscars party unforgettable.

All My Dreams Came True

As I'm sure many of you know, Jason and I have taken the very adult step of moving into my dad's basement. Every time people ask me where we are living now I feel like I am obligated to add a sheepish grin when I say we live two bedrooms down from the room that I once draped in purple and filled with beanie babies.

But the truth is, the move has been awesome. We have a house that stays the same temperature all year, a magical dishwasher, and a fatty couch that never disappoints. And all this without our dear bank account losing a cent. It has been great.

There has, however, been a downside. Throughout the years, our basement has become a receptacle for things we are too lazy/sentimental/frugal/lazy to throw away. In fact, the half of our basement that isn't finished looks like the Room of Requirement when it turns into a place for hiding things. Except there are fewer horcruxes. And sherry bottles.

So I've taken it upon myself to slowly tackle sections of the house to get rid of things like a 30 year old printer, baby-sized ski boots from before the age of plastic, and even an extra trampoline set. My cleaning sprees have gotten so furious, in fact, that I threw out my beloved American Girl Doll, Samantha -- whom they no longer make. Even though I deeply regret getting rid of Samantha (Jason even went down to D.I. the next day to see if they still had it) I don't regret all the extra space it gives us to store and access things we actually need. Imagine that!

During one of my projects today, I stumbled across a huge box that was filled with my old stuffed animals. Some of them, at least. And while I was throwing them all in the D.I. bag -- even the beanie babies with their tags intact -- I stumbled across this gem:

Adorable, right? Not only is he a perfect mix of a bear and a puppy, but he is also taking style tips from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Waiting for his significant other by a piano, no doubt.

But if you think he is nothing more, you are sorely mistaken. Just take a look at this!

Growing up, I thought this was the sneakiest hiding place in the world. I thought it was so good that if the Nazis were to come after me, I would probably try to hide in the back of this bear-dog. It was so good, in fact, that I wouldn't even be able to find the things that I put in there. Dogbear just had a way of looking so inconspicuous I would never think to look in him.

This sneaky quality of his made it zero surprise to me when I saw that something had stayed in his zipped up bowels all these years.

Inside I found the long-lost key to a diary, which is also long-lost. But even though the key and the diary were never reunited, I am pretty sure I savagely ripped all the pages out of the diary's spine in order to read what was in those locked pages. I may never have learned how to pick a lock (not even one as complex as a diary from Pebbles in My Pocket) but I still knew how to get a job done.

But the best part of the discovery was this crumpled up paper. Was it a treasure map to more beanie babies? A dirty secret that I tried to get off my chest? A darling note written to my loved ones?

Nope.

In very terrible cursive, the paper reads:

"I like a positive but sensitive buff guy but he still has to be hot and a good kisser"

That's it. No particular person I was writing to, no reason for writing it, not even a period at the end of the sentence.

At first I was embarrassed that I would think this was the most important thing I could leave for all of my posterity. After all, dogbear was the best time capsule any one could ask for. But then I realized that I got everything I wanted. I bet dogbear-note-writing-me would have given current-me a big ol' high-five and even a good-game-smack-o-the-bum for landing a "positive but sensitive buff guy" who is still "hot and a good kisser."

So, dogbear-note-writing-me, this blog post goes out to you. Thank you for shaping my taste of the opposite gender at such an early age, and making sure my tastes survived the test of time.

No Spare Parts

It all started around 11am when I started to get sharp pains in my stomach, which for the majority of my life has been a signal to shove food down my mouth. So I self-medicated by eating all the food that was around me. 

Big mistake. 

I should have known that my instinctual medication wouldn't have been the best treatment. I'm not a dog that magically knows to eat grass after it eats an entire container of rotten cottage cheese (not that I did eat, or have ever eaten, an entire container of rotten cottage cheese).

So by this time, the pains had progressed from aggressive hunger pains into pains that felt like someone was using my intestines to make origami.  

When Jason got to my office I was balled up on the lawn, in a dress, and not caring about the poor children that were passing me to go into the dentist's office next door. Hopefully my mournful moans made them feel better about their fillings. 

My origami intestinal pain had now turned into a pain that made me feel like Hercules when Hades zaps his power. Except Hades, for me, was the massive slices of pizza that I had eaten for lunch to make me all better.

I was trying to figure out where to put my arms and my legs so that my muscles wouldn't have to hold them up, meanwhile telling Jason that I didn't need to go to the doctor. All I needed was a hot compress. I wasn't going to shell out a copay just to have someone in a white coat tell me I had really bad gas. 

Luckily, though, my dear husband spiritually guilted me into going to the ER by giving me a sweet blessing that said we should do all we could to get rid of my pain. I figured "all we could" meant a little more than curl up on the ground and watch Netflix. 

Once at the ER, it was barely lickety split before they found out that it was my quiet little appendix that was making all this hubbub in my body. However, lickety split had about 3 hours of intermittent waiting dispersed but I was enjoying the daydreams induced by dilaudid too much to care. 

I was definitely coherent enough to know that an appendectomy ranks barely above a hangnail when it comes to things that most people go to the ER for, but there was definitely a little part of me that wasn't really excited to hear that my little appendix would be leaving me so soon. After all, I had only had the guy for 22.9 years, you would think that the manufacturer would have a better warranty than that. 

Especially after I saw this little cutie on the old interweb:

Doesn't he look like something you would want to hold on to forever? Something that you might even be able to add to your constantly appreciating beanie babies investment? Granted, there were definitely some less savory pictures that I found, i.e. the bacteria filling that makes your appendix turn citis-y, but I was still feeling a little preemptory nostalgia for my appendix.

As I was preparing to get rid of my appendix (this mainly consisted of keeping my hospital gown somewhat in the closed position while multiple doctors were telling me that I couldn't wear my toe-rings into the OR) I realized that I have about reached the end of my spare parts. 

Way back in the winter of '98 I got rid of both of my tonsils and my adnoids; then in '08 I nixed all four wisdom teeth. Now, I'm typing this without any help from my appendix and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Like a kid who got his training wheels taken off too soon. 

To commemorate this loss of appendix, I composed this crappy haiku. I wish I could say that pain meds make me suddenly poetic, but I think they just make my face swollen. 

My dear appendix,

I hardly knew you were there

Til you screwed me o'er. 

Completely untouched image of me on pain meds

Are You There Blogger? It's Me, Alex...

Usually, when I don't blog for almost a year, I start the rebirth post with a sappy "Forgive me blogger for I have sinned, it has been yada yada days since my last post..." type of apology to the anonymous blogging world and, of course, an iron-clad promise that I'll do better next time.

But I decided I'm not going to do that today. Instead, I'm going to start with a silent pat on my own back and a "you're welcome" to absolutely no one in particular.

Although I'm not going to apologize, I do feel like I have to do somewhat of a recap of the last... 8 months? that I've been ignoring this blog. Plus, I just did my annual camera to computer picture upload so I've suddenly got all these memories that I have to archive.

P.S. these will not be done in chronological order because I'm not a machine.

I made one of the most platypus-like faces known to mankind. Oh, I also ran a marathon.

We watched the most epic, and last, installment of the Harry Potter movies. Stay tuned for when Jordyn Canady and I remake the whole series into movies that actually do the books justice!

I went on a honeymoon! Of which this is one of the only pictures. Since I can't fully document it I'll just say, it was beautiful, we got tan and ate a lot of beans.

Our honeymoon tour spanned from Provo to Phoenix to Mazatlan to Portland to Island Park to Provo and since Jason's mom was nice enough to load us up with a ton of house stuffs, we had a most epic Budget truck ride from Portland on. Jason is pictured because he did most of the driving.

We celebrated my third favorite holiday with a totally legit pumpkin carving fest. Thanks to some overachiever on pinterest, we even carved SANDVIK in the back of it.

We were murderers!!! Well we went to a murder mystery party anyway. My character was this awesome heiress who was also a bootleg driver who knew how to handle a Tommy-gun. Jason was a sexy gambler who ran the bootlegging business. Needless to say, our characters also had a steamy romance.

We got a Kinect and Jason got a little too competitive and completely smashed the light fixture. With his head. So we spent one of our first nights in our new house cleaning up glass off the carpet and out of Jason's flesh.

 Oh, and I got married to my favorite person.

 Which is most likely the best thing that's ever happened to me.