good-bye, june!

i can't believe june is over. i can't believe our summer is close to half over. i can't believe 2012 IS half over. TIME IS MOVING SO FAST.

this week, tommy went gallivanting across the world to japan for the week (he went to a statistics conference there) and i went to irvine. yes, our trips were pretty much the same in coolness. he went to shrines; i went to church. he went to japanese gardens in japan; i went to a japanese garden at the huntington library in pasadena. he saw monkeys; i hung out with my little brother and cousin who acted like monkeys. it was pretty much the same. he's just landed at the airport and is on his way back AS I TYPE THIS. yes, i am very excited to see him.

the only useful thing i did this week was working on the quilt i'm making for baby boy. i shouldn't spoil the surprise for all of you avid readers, since it's not officially done, but i'm too proud of it to NOT share. CHECK IT OUT! I AM THE QUEEN BEE QUILTER OF THE WORLD! (seriously, i am so excited about it. maybe i've found my calling in life.)

the most awesome thing about the quilt is that i made SO MANY MISTAKES and you can't see any of them once you sew the thing up! so no worries. it's definitely a beginner's quilt. 

i'll post some more pictures of the week later. the world traveler is almost home! 

you're the voice

once upon a time, i watched hot rod at my friend rhett's house.

it was okay.

but there was that one scene where they're walking down the street, heading over for the big jump, and people start following them and this song starts playing, people are singing and bonding, and then the big riot starts up and people start smashing windows and cars.

that one scene made the whole movie worth it. i laughed so hard. and i LOVED that song.

and i just found it and have been listening to it on repeat (on youtube) all day long. it's such an awesome power ballad. so here, let me share it with you:

(note that the video is just dumb pictures of flowers--but it's the music you should be focusing on anyways. ENJOY.)

subletting

we are subletting the apartment we're staying in here in santa monica. this guy posted his apartment on craigslist, and we emailed him, and then we skyped, and then we sent him $1600 for the first month's rent and $800 for a security deposit. crazy? YES. it was a bit terrifying up until the moment we walked into our apartment and knew that it really existed and that we really had keys to it and all that jazz. but hey, it worked out!

when we skyped with him, the guy said that he "wasn't sure if it would be too small for two people." this made us laugh, because it's at least the same size as our apartment in provo. i don't know what he thought we were expecting, but we obviously are not very fancy because it's working out just fine.

there are some odd things about living in someone else's place, though. for example:

-who knows how well he washes his dishes and cleans the bathroom? there's no dishwasher here and there weren't many cleaning supplies. husband of the year did a fabulous cleaning job in the bathroom after which the mysterious dirty smell has pretty much gone away.
-he doesn't seem to believe in using a dresser, so we hung up whatever we could and are literally living our of our suitcases all summer for the rest of our clothes.
-he didn't seem too concerned with clearing out much of his stuff for us when we got here. pretty much all of the shelves/drawers/spaces are full of his stuff, so we just spend have all of our stuff sitting in piles all around the apartment.
-we don't know ANYTHING about this guy, so we've been trying to act like sherlock holmes and learn whatever we can about him based on the stuff he's left around the apartment. like:

• a guitar
• movie scripts interspersed with his actual books on the shelves
• gun shells in the front room
• a smashed iPhone just left sitting on the side table
• a really nice bike tommy's been using to get to work
• canadian mac and cheese in the kitchen
• asian (chinese?) vases on the bookshelves
• a bong in the front room
• jay-Z's autobiography as a coffee table book
• mayonnaise and mustard in the fridge that both expired over a year ago
• no DVDs but several movie posters on the walls
• NOTHING for the oven (no cookie sheets, pans, or hot pads--he's obviously not a baker). 

old sherlock would have a field day subletting someone's apartment. unfortunately, we're not very skilled--all we have concluded is that he's probably an aspiring screenwriter and away for the summer doing a creative writing workshop (based on how he told us he was going to iowa for "school" over the summer).

the funny thing is, we're also subletting (kind of) our apartment in durham to some friends in the ward who sold their house earlier than they actually wanted to move. it makes me wonder what they're learning about us and what they think of us now that they're living in our space. . . . i kind of doubt that we're half as interesting or eclectic as this character.

like and dislike

LIKE:

i am in love. IN LOVE. with the santa monica farmer's market. it has such good produce there, and it's helping to satisfy my sudden cravings for ALL THE FRESH FRUIT IN THE WORLD. all i want to eat is fruit, all day long. i am chris farley in the french fries skit, only with nectarines.

unfortunately, i just am not a fan of the "fruit" they are selling at albertson's. (yeah, check out that sarcasm i loaded in those punctuation marks. take that, albie's!) i mean, how hard is it to get a good nectarine at the grocery store? VERY HARD, apparently. this is where the farmer's market saves me. i bought about 20 nectarines yesterday, and they are already gone. now i have to wait until next week's farmer's market.

DISLIKE:

does anyone have a BB gun that they might let me borrow? i'm going to use it to shoot the crow-like bird that camps out outside our apartment and squawks like a run-over jack-in-the-box all. day. long. it's not regular crow cawing--it is infinitely worse, punctuated about once a minute with a prolonged squeak. getting the BB gun was even tommy's suggestion.

santa monica observations

1. i've never seen so many hybrid cars per capita in one place in my life.

2. there are more Whole Foods Markets within two miles of our apartment than any other store (four of them).

3. no matter what grocery store you go to, though, you have to bring your own bags. if you forget them, they DO NOT offer plastic bags--paper only, and they're 10 cents each.

4. there are always people walking and biking everywhere. it is AWESOME.

5. going along with that, there are sidewalks! everywhere! and bike lanes! who would have imagined? oh, wait, no, that's just durham that doesn't believe in those things.

6. there are only good-looking, fit people here. well, they're all fit, at least.

7. EVERYONE has a dog, and most of them are the short fat sausage kind that look like their legs were chopped off.

it's not like all of southern california is like this--irvine, the home of ALL the SUVs, is definitely not on the same wavelength.

it's kind of funny to see how different it is from durham, especially. i absolutely LOVE the ability to walk practically anywhere you want, and wish we could do that in durham--we can't walk ANYWHERE from our apartment in durham. this is definitely a fun place to explore and live for a few months!

a day in malibu

no city in the l.a. area sounds fancier than malibu. i've never really been there, but i will say that the parts that we saw did NOT seem that fancy (to be fair, we only drove along PCH which has the best and the worst of beach life along it). but saturday, we ended up spending most of our day there. we started off the day by going to the getty villa, a museum for roman and greek art and artifacts that is built exactly like a roman villa buried by the eruption of vesuvius in pompeii. 

the getty villa building and grounds are really beautiful even without the art inside of them, even if you're not very cultured art appreciators like tommy and me. you can see the ocean from the villa, and walk around the fancy gardens. i don't have the energy to 

side note: the villa it's modeled after is called the "villa de papyri," or the papyrus house, and it was owned by julius caesar's father-in-law. when they discovered it buried in the vesuvius lava, they found an entire library of papyrus scrolls that had somehow magically been preserved perfectly by the crazy volcanic conditions they'd been under for 1500 years. so cool!

i hate having to ask people to take pictures of us. why would we want over half of the picture to be of the ground? COME ON, stranger!

and then we went for a hike in topanga state park, in the mountains just north of santa monica and pretty much in malibu (as far as we could tell). the whole hike smelled just like california to me--like all those runs i did in peter's canyon in high school. we hiked for a good long ways--i was really wiped out by the end. my stamina definitely is decreasing as my size increases with this baby.

at the end of the hike, tommy said he was proud of me for not having to go to the bathroom the whole time. that's the low i've sunk to, and i'm not even six months along yet.

it was an awesome weekend day, and we weren't even done yet--we ended it by playing tennis at the park near our house, and watched the 5th star wars. man, we are amazing.

tommy eats at restaurants!

actually, we both ate at these restaurants yesterday. but we only took pictures of tommy at each one, so it looks like he was there by himself, haha. but that's okay, because the main reason we went to both of these restaurants was because of their names and their connections to tommy. 

exhibit a:

the moweses told us about duke's--they said it was delicious, amazing, situated right on the water (literally, RIGHT on the water) in malibu, and they especially recommended the hula pie, which was this little beauty in the picture below: macademia nut ice cream disguised as a pie with a lot of hot fudge sauce. we were sold at the hula pie, but when we heard it was called duke's, we thought we might as well go and show our support for tommy's school. we went there at lunch time and just ordered the dessert (we were on our way to go on a hike and had a picnic and DIDN'T want to spend $20 per plate). the waiter loved us.

as we left, tommy accidentally gave the parking attendant a $20 and told him to keep the change. then he realized what he'd done and went back and exchanged it for the $5 he originally intended to give him. my hero! so the parking attendant guy loved us too--we got out of there in a hurry.

exhibit b:

we went on our hike, and then thought we might as well finish off an excellent day with an original tommy's burger, complete with chili. no explanations needed as to why we decided to go here.

tommy had a good food day all by himself.