i have great aspirations

all i want in life is to make just enough money that i can go to costco and buy all the $12 containers of nuts and chocolate-covered raisins that my heart desires.

byu january 2008. we sure love us some costco hot dogs.

NCAA

i just filled out a bracket for the first time. what a momentous occasion. i bet my three minutes of time spent on filling out that bracket will beat many people's hours of deliberating and debating. sadly enough.

all i can say is, i only gave byu two rounds of winning. you KNOW they're not going to go any farther than that (if they even get that far).

(and don't worry, all you busbys out there, i think unlv will win at least one game.)

pet peeves

pet peeve #1: celebrities.

we were driving home the other night and britney spears' new song came on the radio. (i hate that i even know it is by britney spears. and it's been stuck in my head CONSTANTLY lately.)

and tommy said, "wouldn't it be nice if you could just vote some celebrities out of office? like, i'm sorry, britney, but you are no longer famous."

yes, that would be nice. you know what, lindsay lohan? 95% of americans think you are a ridiculous human being. you are no longer famous. bam. hello, kardashians--you are completely worthless celebrities and you must now pay a fine to the rest of the american population for dumbing them down on your tv show. bam.

(wouldn't it be satisfying?)


pet peeve #2: improper uses of quotation marks.

in the elevator at the sevys' apartment building, it says on the wall:

"ASK FOR ELEVATOR KEY TO STOP ELEVATOR" (or something to that effect).

also, this happens a lot on t-shirts and company cars.

"McMillan family reunion 1985"
"The longest race in America!"
"Your best bet for cleaning your windows"

but WHY are those statements enclosed within quotation marks? did somebody SAY it? who said it? why does it matter if somebody said it? WHY DID YOU WRITE THE SENTENCE AS A QUOTE when it clearly is not?

ugh. this is one of my serious editing pet peeves.

post-edit: my friend allison sent me this website, and it is a PERFECT illustration of what i mean when i talk about improper quotation marks.

spring break

hallelujah, we got a week off! so naturally we sped our way up to d.c. to visit the sevys again. although we spent most of our time rocking the babies, we had time to do some fun things like visiting a few smithsonians and arlington cemetery, taking a jog along the mall, and walking through georgetown. here is some proof:

at the museum of american history, me with dorothy's red shoes and a funny wwii propaganda poster.

outside the museum of natural history with lindsay, mayah, and asher.

our date walking around georgetown, after we had some delicious indian food and ben and jerry's.

our run up and down the mall--something i've wanted to do for a long time! it was awesome.

there stands thomas leininger, strong as a stone wall! (at the battlefield of bull run/manassas with the statue of stonewall jackson.)

arlington cemetery and the tomb of the unknown soldier.

and, as promised, a few more pictures of the cutest babies in the world.

and last night, we got to see the foxes, who happened to be visiting from idaho falls. devin, tommy and jimi all lived together in the dorms about a billion years ago and were roommates right after their missions. luckily for us, devin and cathy live about eight minutes away as devin goes to duke med school and jimi's parents live in high point, so we all got to have a reunion last night. it was great to see them AND i think i now win the prize for blogging about it first.

kylie and braxton: bffs.

yep, so it's been a great spring break! the panic of school is starting to set in again since we haven't thought about it since last week... whoops. we're getting right on that.

little women

when i found out at 9:30 this morning that my only class of the day was canceled, i closed my computer and promptly did nothing productive the rest of the day except for read little women. it was a lovely day.

(it's even better that the book i'm reading has "to denice, from kaylene and rob, christmas 1985" written in pencil on the front page. apparently my mom took the book from grandma and grandpa's house and then i took it from our house. sorry, denice!)

remember how last semester i read the whole anne of green gables series in a week? this kind of felt like that--revisiting old friends and loving them so dearly even now after years since last having read them. i LOVE this book, probably mostly for the sentimental reasons i just mentioned. and i am now just itching to go watch the movie.

(i will say--the movie always makes me feel so weird about the whole amy-laurie-jo love fiasco. i feel like it's so weird that amy and laurie end up together... but i don't feel that way in the book. much better done.)

i've been reading other types of books lately--good books, books i've been wanting to read for ages, but books i haven't been totally absorbed by. (like the scarlet letter. i mean, has ANYONE ever been enthralled by the scarlet letter? i just felt like i had to get it over with because i felt guilty for just reading the sparknotes when i was supposed to read it in high school.) but reading little women felt just like reading used to, like it should--i wasn't waiting to see when i would get to the next chapter and painfully turning each page as it went. i was in the story. kind of like the millions of times i read harry potter.

i miss reading like that. and i can't wait to find more of it.

what would you do with $40,668?

i mean, i would probably buy justin bieber's hair.

no, really, i cannot think of A SINGLE THING i would rather spend $40,668 on.

but wait--it wasn't even ALL of his hair. it was just a piece of it. what are you going to do with that? you can't even make it into a collar or a watch-band or anything.

i would have held out for the whole head of hair.

ok go

so i know that ok go and their music videos are probably familiar to everyone by now. but a few days ago, tommy sat me down to show me this video his mom had told him about (she's pretty trendy to know about these things) . . .



and about halfway through i realized it was OK GO!

and i realized why the video was so cool.

and it threw me back to my summer in ithaca in 2005 when i discovered ok go the first time. i spent almost a month there doing this cornell-summer-high school thing and staying with annie and wes. (it was the best, by the way, annie, if you're reading this.) coincidentally enough, alec was there that summer too, and he introduced me to this music video (he was always the one to give me music ideas throughout high school). i spent pretty much the whole four weeks watching this video over and over again and listening to brand new's the quiet things that no one ever knows. and when i keep saying "this" video i do mean THIS video:



i mean, seriously? how cool is the slow-motion fight moment? and how many takes do you think it took to do that all in one shot with no mistakes?

i really thought a lot about that when i was seventeen and loving this video. i loved it so much i bought two of ok go's cds and then i realized i only liked their videos, and not really their music. but i can still watch that dance video over and over again and still walk away impressed.

anyways, just thought i'd lighten up your first day of march for ya.