Olympus High School Class of 2000 Alumni Website

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Aaron is 3 years old

Yes folks, it is that time of year again, the time where I drag my hubby up the canyon to look for Moose! Yes, he grew up in Park City and had families of Moose living in his backyard so he thinks this is absolutely ridiculous but I think it is super fun! Here are two we saw on Saturday!

And here are two I saw with my dad last week on a short trip up Parleys.

I am happy that I have a cute hubby who likes to come home on his lunch break to hurry and build a snowman with Lance. I absolutely despise the cold – yes living in California and Arizona for four years did that to me – so I am happy Speen likes to play in the snow with the Goose! This snowman is from the short storm we had last week.

And this is the 9 foot snowman Speen and Lance built on Saturday in 50 degree weather! It was hilarious, it took up all the snow from our yard and by the end of the day all the snow on our entire street had melted and then you see this 9 foot snowman, it was pretty sweet!
Shows how big it was next to little Tallie!

And finally Speen and Lance showing their excitement over their creation!

Good work boys!

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Snowmen and Moose!

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During my extended stay in northern California, Kyle flew out

It’s nearly 1:30 AM and although I’m supposed to be sleeping so I can get up with Kyle tomorrow morning, I’m wide awake because I can’t get my brain to stop worrying about all sorts of nonsense. Not major life catastrophes, mind you, but random things that aren’t even really a problem and which I can definitely do nothing about tonight.

I think I’ve officially hit the point of having said “yes” to too much. By the time I came home from California, I was overextended beyond belief. I finally just sat down and prioritized so I could figure out which things I need to focus on and which things I need to let slide. Although I now feel like I could probably go to bed, I’ve also created a new micro-worry: the “no” that comes after the “yes”.

According to my list, I said yes to about eleven things that I’m going to have to let go. Each is a rather small commitment, but when I add them all together they turn into a whole lot of time that I don’t have. Sigh. This is the problem with being the girl who says yes…it almost inevitably leads me to being the girl who says “I thought I could but I can’t. Sorry.” That girl is definitely a step down from being the girl who says, “Sorry. Can’t.” in the first place.

Le sigh. Anyone have any Emily Post tips on backing out of things you committed to during a delusional fit of productivity?

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Too Much of a Good Thing

I’m home! It’s temporary, since we’re off to housesit for my father, who is spending a few weeks in Argentina with the wife and kids, but it’s still so good to be back in my old, boring life.

I did have a lot of fun while I was in California and worked with a lot of great kids. I thought I’d share some photos from the last dress rehearsal. I apologize for the poor quality…I really need to upgrade my camera gear so I can get some low-light pictures…

(good shot of Kevin)

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Dress Rehearsal

As part of my 101 in 1001 project, I’ve been on the hunt for meat that I’ve never had before. I’m a big time carnivore (going to the zoo makes me hungry) so the challenge of finding new meat was actually pretty difficult. After scouring the grocery stores and butcher shops here in Utah, I figured my best bet would be to wait until I was on the coast and then find a fish I’d never had.

Well, as it turns out, the coast offers lots of meats that I’ve never had before, as long as you’re shopping in the right place. When we got to California last week, we stopped in at an Asian grocery store to pick up some snacks and I was greeted with a whole case of meats that didn’t sound familiar. I debated long and hard about whether to get a pair of beef hearts or a pound of pork bung (don’t ask, I have no idea), but ultimately I went for the weirdest of the weird: pork uterus.

I’ll have you know, my family eats some really weird stuff and I usually only get to eat certain things when I’m in California, including fresh crab backs (the fat lining the shell is edible) and little fish fried up like french fries.

BUT, even though I would think of my relatives as being adventurous eaters, they were all grossed out by the pig uterus. Super grossed out. As in, tried to pay me not to eat it.

I would not be deterred, even when I pulled it out of the package and found out that it was even weirder than I thought it was. Apparently a uterus is a V-shaped organ attached to the cervix that sort of resembles a wrinkly tube.

Nobody else seems to be into eating pork uterus, because I couldn’t find a single recipe online, so I had to sort of wing it. I sliced it up, cleaned it really well, and then heated up some oil, ginger, and green onion.

When I added the uterus pieces, they immediately turned white and started to shrink up and harden. This part was actually a little gross, because as the tissue constricted it squeezed all of the blood out of the tissue and into the pan, so I had to drain it a little bit. After a while, though, it just started to look like macaroni and I only had to add a little soy sauce and cook it for about five minutes before it was done. I didn’t want to overcook it, since it was getting harder and harder by the second.

Once it was in the bowl, it wasn’t scary anymore and it smelled really good…sort of like liver, but with a strong pork aroma. And the taste? Delicious! I’m serious, this stuff was really good! It was like rich, salty, pork-flavored calamari and I ate up half the bowl before my stomach started to tell me that I wasn’t supposed to be eating that much uterus all at once.

Unfortunately, I did have the worst dream that night about giving birth to a litter of children. So I think the uterus was a one-time meal, but hey! One more thing off my list!

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Adventures in Pork Uterus

Want to hear a story?

It’s even illustrated (if you consider the mandatory scrapbook pages that every Utahn teen must make “illustrations” and not “terrible attacks on photos that never wanted to be associated with construction paper”).

In the eight grade, I was almost failing out of school. Boredom and general apathy towards life kept me from finishing my homework or attending my classes, so I rocked out a solid 1.5 GPA, much to the horror of my teachers and parents and all those concerned adults hovering around my adolescence. In a random act of intervention, my English teacher stepped in and asked me to be a part of the drama program. We had done a theater project in which I had drawn costumes for Pygmalion and she used this to talk me into doing the costumes for the school play, knowing that I was friends with Katelyn (an extra..party guest #2, I believe?) and some of the other girls who’d be on stage.

Oddly enough, I really took to it. I liked the social side of being involved in drama and I liked the creative side of sewing the costumes. It’s true that my early designs were a little…off. The jester’s costume was kick-ass, but I dressed Cinderella’s godmother like a giant banana adorned with sparkly, metallic, ruffles. Hey, you can’t win ‘em all.

Drama led to getting my grades up and enrolling in drama classes when we made the jump to Sr. High. I tried to get involved as a costumer my sophomore year, but it wasn’t until my junior year that I was allowed to do all the costumes for a school production. I did the costumes for our fall musical and really got into all the period pieces and creating something different for everyone. That production saw about 300 costumes, but I loved it. It was crazy and exciting and different…and it was enough to make me sure that I wanted to be a costume designer for the rest of my life.

And then, it turned into work.

After I did the musical, I did all the costumes for the school productions until I graduated. This included the Shakespearean Festival…a production that apparently needed all new costumes, laboriously hand-sewn, and usually made out of materials you aren’t supposed to sew with. My least favorite conversation introduction in the history of the world is, “I was at the thrift store and I saw this shower curtain and thought of you…” To the 1% of you out there who will ever direct a theatrical production in your life: just buy fabric. Don’t bring curtains and drop cloths to your costume mistress and ask for reproductions of the gowns from Shakespeare in Love. You might get them, but she’ll hate you forever.

To be fair, those costumes were beautiful. They had no business at all being involved in a crummy outdoor production at a high school that couldn’t get it together enough to actually put up a set, but the costumes were gorgeous. So it was still sort of fun. Almost. When I wasn’t missing class to launder someone’s sweaty tunic or spending my lunch period sewing up the crotch of an old pair of tights.

My senior year, I even got to wear the costumes I was making, which sort of upped the fun factor. I did all the costumes for the school play, which meant sewing pretty dresses for myself and Bryttin. That was fun. Kind of. And I got a couple of awards for doing it. Also fun. For those two minutes that they mattered.

Ok, it was officially pretty un-fun by that point and it led to a major blow out with my drama teacher and a few months of lost sleep. I don’t know when the work of sewing all those gowns managed to grind my passion into a slimy pulp, but I know it was right around the time I got a full-ride scholarship to the University of Utah for theater studies. I was so over costumes at that point, I never wanted to see another zipper…but I went and I made myself this promise: “This will all have been worth it when they’re flying me out to big cities do to the costumes for big Disney productions.”

Fast forward: my mom and I are flying to California tomorrow to do the costumes for Beauty and the Beast. We’ll be gone for a week, during which we will likely be stressed, overworked, and vaguely panicking. It occurred to me that I got exactly what I asked for ten years ago. And you know what? My today self doesn’t like being overworked and buried in thread much more than my yesterday self did. Just goes to show that you shouldn’t kill what you love to do by turning it into your job AND bargaining with your future self doesn’t always pay out the way you think it will…

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A Long Story to Make a Short Point

It’s apparently Retro Week on Facebook, so I’ve been treated to seeing all manner of acquaintances in their smaller and cuter versions. The photos range from cute toddler versions to geeky high school versions, with everything in-between. My husband took the geeky high school approach, even though I was trying push the cute toddler approach on him. Alas, I guess I’ll just have to share his cute toddler picture right here:

Full House audience response on 3. Ok, 1, 2, 3…aaaaaaawwwww….

I post so much Carly-of-yore crap on this blog that I thought it would be redundant to shove my retro picture in the faces of my Facebook friends, so I’m not playing along this week. I also didn’t disclose the color of my bra last week and I totally missed the whole Big Bird thing. I haven’t even shared any Farmville eggs recently. I’m a Facebook failure.

In all honesty, I guess I don’t feel very retro about my retro pictures. Now that I’m almost 30 (well, almost 27 at any rate), I feel like I should look back at childhood photos and smile fondly at the cute tot I used to be. Instead, I just look at pictures and think, “I do not feel any older now than I did then.” This is true regardless of when the photo was taken. It’s sort of a bummer to look at a picture from 1987 and realize that you may have achieved no personal growth whatsoever.

Case in point: As part of my Christmas present to my parents, I pulled a bunch of old home movies off of their VHS tapes and turned them into digital files so I could burn them to DVDs. This process involved me watching every minute of all those home movies, since there’s no way to make data leave VHS tapes any faster. (Thank God for new technology!)

A bunch of the home movies involved my little brother and my family in California, but one tape from 1988 is just me. It’s footage from my kindergarten graduation, where I was valedictorian. (Read that last sentence as much as you like, but it’s not going to make any more sense.)

While I was watching the tape, I realized that I still had the same dopey expression, the same hand gestures, and the same general air of “I’m wishing that I wasn’t involved in all of this but I’m also too bored to really care that this is going on. I’m smiling, but I want you to know that I’m not really invested here.” I swear that I don’t actually feel like this most of the time, but apparently I’ve had this facial expression as my default since birth.

Le sigh. Perhaps I’ll know that adulthood has hit when I can muster up some real nostalgia about my childhood. At the moment, it really doesn’t seem very far away. Biggest fear = at ninety, on my deathbed, I’ll fade away with a surprised look on my face, telling Kyle that I can’t possibly be dying because I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!

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Retro Week

Everyone’s doing a best-of-the-decade post today and I have to admit that it didn’t even occur to me. I don’t mind jumping on the bandwagon, so here we go…

• Crazy drama stuff with the drama kids.
• Graduation from high school.
• Started college life at the University of Utah as a theater major.

• Declared as a communications major with a focus on journalism.
• First major relationship begins.
• Summer trip to California with my girls.

• Dropped out of college to teach full time.
• Started working at Walt Disney World in the college program.
• Met my future husband.

• Went back to college as an art major with an emphasis on photography.
• Started working at Sam Weller’s as a bookseller.
• First major breakup.

• Visited Kyle in Ohio for the first time.
• Moved to the children’s department at Sam Weller’s.
• Got accepted to Ohio State law school.

• Graduated with an English degree from the University of Utah.
• Spent a month and a half in London with Michelle.
• Moved to Columbus, Ohio, to start law school.

• Finished my first year of law school.
• Did summer school at Oxford and went to Disneyland Paris with Kyle.
• Started working at the Commission.

• Got my own apartment for the first time.
• Wrote my first book.
• Got engaged.

• Moved in with Kyle.
• Graduated from law school.
• Started working full-time for the state of Ohio.

• Got married!
• Adopted Charlie and Scout.
• Moved back to Utah with Kyle to start our next chapter…

Hmmm, it’s been a pretty good decade!!! Can’t wait to see what I’ll be posting on 12/31/19.

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Everyone's doing a best-of-the-decade post today and I have to

Updates on the 101 in 1001 project:

It’s been more than a week since we got back from Disneyland, but I still haven’t sorted through all the photos yet. Luckily, I haven’t been procrastinating in all my endeavors. I made an original goal to accomplish one of my 101 every single week and I’m still going strong. (It’s true that I’m doing all the easy ones first, but can you blame me?)

• I’ve read my third memoir. This time I picked Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay, which is a memoir of first-time motherhood. The writer is a blogger and the book is very popular, so I was excited to read it. It was actually pretty good, although not fantastic, and her constant humerous references to alcohol are sort of unfunny in light of the fact that she revealed to her blog audience that she’s actually an alcoholic. It’s all fun and games until there actually is chardonnay in the sippy cup.

• The daily goals of photoblogging and drinking water are still things that I’m attempting, but it was so annoying to have to log in every day and update it that I’m not longer keeping a strict count. I’ll just have to give myself a thumbs up or thumbs down when the project is over.

• I sent my random care package, but I don’t know if it’s been received yet…

• I joined a gym with fitness classes included and it shouldn’t be too hard to find one that I’ve never taken before. I’ll let you know when I pick one.

• We’re at 80% on the church we want to join. We’re only hung up on the fact that it’s a 30 min drive every Sunday morning.

• I’m taking Kyle to see Les Mis at Riverton High School this Thursday, which fulfills both my musical requirement and seeing a creative arts production where I don’t know anyone in it.

• I woke up and photographed the sunrise, but apparently I was really sleepy because I can’t figure out what I did with the camera after that. When I find it, I’ll share the pictures.

• We’ve been invited to Universal Orlando but I don’t know if we’re going. I’d really like to see the opening of that Harry Potter land, though…

• I’m at 97 followers on the wedding blog…only three to go!

• And last, but definitely not least, I’ve met three of my five people from the internet. While we were in California I had lunch with Hope, J.Darling, and Luis, who are all long-time readers from the days of wedding planning. We had such a fun time and it was really great to meet them in person, since I feel like I know them all so well. I also met Hope’s fiance Mike and his friend Andrew, but I’m not counting them towards my five since they aren’t blog readers. Plus, they were sort of dragged along, much like my sweet husband. (Kyle: “You want to have lunch with internet people? Did the Craigslist killer teach you nothing?!?!”)

So, all in all, the project is going strong. I’m actually really happy with it and I strongly encourage everyone to start their own list and share it.

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Updates on the 101 in 1001 project:It's been more than a week

So, I’m still lovin’ on my 101 in 1001 list. I appreciate all the offers to help…it sounds like I’m making popovers with Bryttin, playing Backgammon with Schovy, and meeting a whole bunch of people from the internet in the near future. In fact, I got so many responses to #70 that I’m probably going to have to break the California people into bunches and spread them across a few trips! I even got an invite down to Mexico to meet a reader, so soon I could be blogging from south of the border…

Oh yes…and thank you to all of my friends who let me know that I could send them cards and care packages randomly. It’s not random if you guys tell me to send something. Just sayin’. Now I’m going to have to send all those care packages and cards to everyone who doesn’t read my blog.

I’m actually pretty close to having a bunch of them done, probably. A couple of people have said that they’ll put up their own lists, so when I actually see one I can check that one off. I’m hitting a new restaurant on Monday with book club that I’ll be joining, swapped four books on paperbackswap.com, and I bought the piano music for “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” I’m even at 90 followers on my wedding blog, which is awesome. I thought I was in the mid-60s still…it’s going to be a lot easier to get 10 more instead of 40 more before Kyle turns 30!

I have to admit that there are a couple I’m nervous about. For one, I’m not sure if there’s a historical monument in Utah that I haven’t been to. My parents were pretty ecstatic about all the old crap in this state when we moved here and as far as I know nothing else has been deemed monumental. There’s also the water one…I had to chug two glasses of water last night before going to bed and then I had to get up and pee all night. I hate drinking. Honestly, I’m not putting a requirement on the amount I drink because if I have to do three shotglasses of water and call it good, I want to make sure I have that option!

(And don’t even get me started on why I hate drinking…it’s just one of those things that I can’t explain. Some people hate green vegetables and some people hate stinky cheeses. I hate the act of drinking. It’s boring and it makes me feel like a water balloon. I can’t explain it.)

What else…oh, it turns out that Kyle doesn’t want to go camping and I’m not that crazy about camping, actually, but since it’s on my list I guess we’ll go. Do you think being in a cabin in the middle of the woods counts as camping? Or maybe building a blanket fort in the living room and sleeping in that? It’s going to be a little silly if I drag Kyle out into the forest and make him sleep under the stars because I blogged about it once, especially if we have to buy camping equipment. I guess I should have thought that one out a little bit more…

Anyway, I’m starting to think about my holiday shopping, so if anyone has any recommendations from Etsy, let me know so that I can tackle #9…

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So, I'm still lovin' on my 101 in 1001 list. I appreciate all

On Saturday Bryan told me that he wanted to take me on a real date this weekend not one of our Home Depot dates. So we were going to go to the Zoo and then out to dinner.

We had so much fun walking around Hogle Zoo. It was such a nice day and its been a long time for both of us since we had been there. We loved all the newly remodeled exhibits. Then we went to California Pizza Kitchen for dinner. This is a very special place because this was where we went on our very first date. We talked about meeting there for the first time, how nervous we were and how much we liked each other. After dinner we went back to Bryan’s house. Just as I was sitting down Bryan said “Hey I just had a thought. Why don’t we take the truck up into the mountains and watch the sunset?”
The sunset was amazing. Bryan got down on one knee and purposed. I say Yes!!!

He designed this beautiful ring at The Gem Smith. I love it!!!

Heather put together a little family brunch for us Sunday morning. Then we went to dinner with Bryan’s family. Thank you to everyone for being so excited for us and all the congratulations.

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He asked and I said Yes…