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.

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

La Vie En Rose

As I keep getting older, I keep expecting the fun to drain out of my life. Sad mentality, but it's how I feel. And as this is my third year out of high school (where, as everyone who watches MTV knows, the end of your youth is had) I imagined that I would have to spend this summer in a suit and penny loafers doing adult things like taxes and Mavis Beacon.

But I was so happily wrong!

This summer has definitely been one worthy of looking back on. I've spent most of my time in a swimsuit or my chacos, I've made friends in small towns,
(Note the beautiful St. Bernard that was too gorgeous I had to pull my car over to make his acquaintance, and luckily it was captured on camera)

I made the rope swing in Mona my byatch (even though I incurred 3rd degree rope burns, massive bruises, smatterings of broken blood vessels and two lungfulls of pond water), I've danced my face off,

I've gone topless almost everyday, I've indulged in multiple Harry Potter Festivities,


I've crawled my way up to the top of a mountain, and I survived swine flu and being a gospel doctrine teacher (I don't know which one was harder on my system).

Most of this was made possible by the fact that I didn't have a job or school most of the summer, but I'm going to attribute most of the awesomeness to just the common euphoria of summer. I've been born and raised in Utah, home of the 2002 winter olympics, but I think I've come to the conclusion that winter isn't really for me. I'm sick of wrapping yourself up like you're last night's leftovers before you venture anywhere outdoors. And finding things to do that are inside unless you want to lose a favorite extremity.

I want to live in a place where shoes are only worn to church. Where no one cares about their hair because it's just going to get wet from beach/pool/lake/sweat. And the night air reaches the exact temperature of the outside layer of your skin so that you've reached a temperature homeostasis with the world.
An endless summer.
Because summer's too pleasant to be miserable, too hot to worry about anything, too warm to be in a hurry. Summer's like one of those friends who you love so much, and you know they love you too, but they never come around often enough. And where I live they only come around for three short, but glorious months. So please Summer, don't go now. Sit back down and have another otter pop with me. I'll even give you the pink one!

Screw Punxsatawney Phil

So... It's winter.

STILL.

And apparently it will be for an extra six weeks because of some East coast yuppie of a rodent. What kind of a holiday is Groundhog day anyway?

I watched this year's festivities, always eager to involve myself in another holiday hoping I can overeat and go shopping, and not only was I disappointed, but a little disturbed at the whole thing. Thousands of people come to watch these respectable grown men (I assume they were respectable because they were wearing top hats) pull this thing (what even is a groundhog? I think they're like ligers and don't exist anywhere except in trendy zoos) out of a box and stroke it like it is their firstborn child. Then they proceed to call this overgrown hamster all these grandiose names like "the seer of seers, prognosticators of ALL prognosticators". You're kidding, America. This is the best we've got? No wonder we can't figure out the economy crisis, or how to get our troops out of Iraq--our best man is in a cage in Pennsylvania. But in case you thought this was enough action for one year, there's more! The respectable top hats set Phil on a tree stub and hold him in place (from what I could see I don't even think he had legs to move on anyway) then all of them pull out instruments that I haven't seen since eighth grade Geometry and they start measuring the gerbil's hypoteneuse or something, but apparently that part is really important because right after that we get the big prognosis:

MORE WINTER

Thanks bud.
Now don't think I'm anti-seasons, I love the seasons. Winter is great when it is Christmas time and you don't really have to drive anywhere, you can just sit at home in your embarrassing socks and sip hot cocoa while watching old VHSes.
But then Christmas is over. And suddenly winter is miserable. You're stuck wearing practical shoes that make you feel like a school teacher from the early nineties. The nose is constantly precipitating and forces you to be a sniffer or a blower. Both are unattractive. Then your hands are so cold you feel like a villain from a Disney movie because you're always rubbing them up in the middle of your chest; you might as well be muttering "I'll get you my pretty!" That's a real friend winner.
I don't hate winter. It just doesn't make me quite as happy as summer.
So I've stopped recycling, I bathe in gasoline and key every hybrid car I see, just to do my part in speeding up this whole global warming thing.
Be the change you want to see in the world.

Philosophy, Shmilosophy

So after spending about an hour trying to read Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (and by "trying" I mean staring at a lot of little black circles and lines while letting my mind formulate its own philosophical questions like: What color was my retainer in third grade? Do I eat enough fiber? If I learned the "Single Ladies" music video, would Beyonce be my best friend?) I've finally come to the conclusion that sometimes school is hard, just to be hard. I don't think my professors really believe that someone in the professional world will ask me how Aristotle cured Polio (I still haven't finished the reading), and I probably will never think about this text again once I take the test. 

With 19 credits and a huge tendency to procrastinate, I spend a fair amount of my time looking like this little girl. But at least I know I'm not the only one in the world. In one of my classes I was engaging in one of my favorite pastimes: Laptop Spying; when I stumbled across a real gem of a note-taker. This student provides full commentary to the boring bullet points our professor provides. Commentary like "I wonder if this guy in front of me knows how bad he's sweating" and "Never eat Taco Bell before another 3 hr evening class again" keeps going to class worthwhile. But the first thing that drew my prying eye to his MacBook screen was this:

WHY AM I HERE???! 

I don't even know who Jeffrey (original spelling) Chaucer is, much less how the black plague influenced his ideas on the aristocracy!

Thank you. Thank you God for letting me know that not everyone at BYU was born writing thesis statements in MLA format while playing a piano concerto they wrote while they were helping the orphans in Somalia. There are some mortals out there. Even if we're too afraid to admit that we don't keep our Organic Chemistry textbook to use as reading material for that next plane ride we have to our prestigious internship in Washington DC to anyone but a Word document, it's OK. There are dozens of us, DOZENS!

I'm Home! Now What...

My country tis of thee,
Land where the water's free,
Of thee I sing.
Land where the dollar's used
Brits' slang won't me confuse
Back to plain old BYU
Let freedom ring.

I know you've heard the rumors, and they are true.
I am home.
[insert elated cheering here]
Christmas and New Years have been great, I've had some big activities like eating, watching my favorite TV shows, (DogTown, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, America's Next Top Model etc.) eating some more, snowboarding, (too bad my little sister's already better than me) a little more eating, coming to the realization of how out of shape I truly am at good old Gold's Gym, and of course, eating still more. It's been kind of lazy. But I do start the real world of BYU in about 10 hours, and seeing how I haven't been to a real college class in... well, longer than it's been since Paris Hilton had her last DUI that's for sure, it might be a little bit of a culture shock.
Although I am looking forward to having a little structure in my life and having more to do than just eat and entertain myself during the day, it's going to be a bit difficult to step back into the competitive world of Cougars. To combat this anxiety, I decided to make some New Years resolutions. 4 days late.

1. Stop procrastinating. As you can see my New Years resolutions done on the fourth of January is a telltale sign of what a big part of my life this is.
2. Get a job. This is probably going to mean a lot less America's Next Top Model.
3. Stop wasting so much time. This is definitely going to mean a lot less America's Next Top Model.
4. Make friends in ALL my classes. I'm starting to think that this post displays my social skills as somewhat under par, but really I'm a pretty friendly person. Mostly. There's just something about being in class that shuts me down. But not this year.
5. KEEP THESE RESOLUTIONS!

Yes. I realize the last one is kind of covered in the fact that the aboves are "resolutions" and not just some happy thoughts on life, but I thought if I typed it out it might help me realize it. That's why it's in all caps too. I once heard that if you typed something in all caps then it is the online equivalent of yelling. So forgive me for raising my voice. I'm just excited to start school.