bbq the night away

this is what a rockin' bbq looks like


and this is what someone who's gotten too many bbq fumes looks like


and this is what a 6'6" person looks like in a basement with 6'0" ceilings


and this is the solution


go team awkwardly tall

why i should not be allowed to bake (as if i need more reasons)

look how appetizingly incredible my egg and ham quiche looks! it's amazing what my domestic goddess hands are capable of...


psyche! it's actually a rhubarb tart. sad, but true. i'm not sure why i keep attempting to bake stuff and assuming it will turn out. take for example this or this. i consider myself pretty good at following directions, but throw an oven in there and my direction-following capabilities go berzerk.

let's take my most recent trainwreck. here's what i was supposed to read:


but somehow i totally skipped over that part and only read this:



which, how confusing is that? cut my rhubarb into lengths? i could only assume they meant LONG and varying lengths because that's what it means when i tell my hairstylist to cut my hair in lengths...

turns out my definition didn't so much work for this recipe. which is sad because i actually did spend a good amount of time creating varying sizes of rhubarb sticks

at least milo liked it. you can always count on your dog to make you feel better about yourself.

salt lake - where they camouflage their port-o-potties

even though it's a little bit premature, i surprised meghan with a birthday weekend extravaganza! she knew we were going "somewhere" but didn't know the "where" part. and when it comes right down to it, who really ever knows the "some" part?

here's the bug excited to tears (in the form of her tongue) when she found out we were off to slc for the weekend!

i think she was expecting a surprise trip to seattle, but for obvious reasons, that couldn't happen.

my favorite part about the bug is that you can take her anywhere and you know it's destined to be a good time. and to prove that point, we went to the world's freakiest bakery.



who eats daffodils?? i guess the same person who would eat this (cue mysteriously evil "dun dun dun" music)

ummm hello... that's the most frightening thing i've ever seen. ever

so then we moved on to happier things

oh wait...that's creepy too... who in their right mind would use the slogan "we're everywhere" and expect people to be okay with that? especially when it's posted right outside of the freakiest bakery. check out my cute butterfly shirt though.

so, i gave meghan 3 envelopes, each with a birthday surprise in it. the first one was our plane tickets to salt lake. that one was easy because she was able to open it right away. as for the other two....giving them to her right upfront was a mistake. everywhere we went that first night, she'd pull them out and just look at them. we sit down for dinner. she pulls the envelopes out and sets them next to her plate, for example.

the second envelope was her registration to walk in the ms walk, which is something she loves doing (walking AND helping the ms society). so we marched down to the front desk of our hotel and asked for markers. on one hand, i kind of feel bad for the front desk of our hotel, but on the other hand i feel like we truly graced them with our presence. the first night we were there, we marched down in various combinations of swimsuits, hoodies and dress(me)/skater(megs) shoes at 10pm asking where the closest place to get gummies was. so, i feel like they kind-of rolled their eyes when we asked for markers the next morning.

hopefully they didn't mind that we got skin oil all over their markers by tatooing ourselves for the ms walk. they didn't say anything, so maybe they didn't mind.


and then, because we have a strong history of random easter celebrations (2007, 2008), meghan came up with a brilliant idea. why don't we hardboil some eggs in our hotel room coffee pot?!? this is what happens when you reach a quarter of a century. your intelligence sky rockets. i do feel kind of bad for the next people who stay in room 603 and want coffee. and i do feel kind of bad for the front desk when said people call down yelling about how their coffee tastes like eggs...


then we dyed the eggs, of course



and then i put the carton in my purse so we could eat them all around town when we got hungry. kinda like a ziploc full of cheerios only slightly different.


and finally, the third envelope was the greatest of all the birthday gifts:


now i don't mean to sound like a broken record. well, i guess i don't since i've never said it before...but OTHER people have said it and i don't mean to sound like everybody else, but this show is incredible! we may have talked about it the entire rest of the trip. and then i may have listened to the soundtrack 3 (maybe 4, but who's counting?) times yesterday alone. i know tickets are hard to come by for this production, but it's worth it. if you have to sell your firstborn child or a kidney, it's worth it.

love you megs!!

proxy baby

sometimes i have conversations with milo that go like this: 

me: there are way cooler kid toys than dog toys a lot of the time

milo: i hear ya

me: maybe you should act like a human kid sometimes so you can play with those cool things

milo: word

and that's how we got to this point

the rest of new zealand... spewed right atcha

probably my biggest character flaw is antsiness. i love change and i love variety and i'm using that as an excuse to say that i'm bored of writing about new zealand...

so i'm sorry to all who were dying to hear how our trip ended up, but actually i'm not sorry afterall because the boy and i recorded a slideshow of our trip!! how brilliant are we?

it's in two parts because youtube doesn't like long videos (spoiler alert: it's kind-of a long slideshow) (spoiler alert 2.0: i sound like an 8-year old. this has been another curse in my life (well at least from 9 years old up). true story: i went through a quick phase (refer to antsiness comment above) where I wanted to be a radio personality and the only station that even called me back after first rounds of phone calls with about a dozen different stations was radio disney, where i'm pretty sure most of the djs there ARE 8-years old. what a crush to my dream (no offense radio disney))





on a similar note to both my antsiness AND long videos, reason #4,586 why i love the boy: he'll spend an evening watching movie previews with me. i get fidgity during movies, but i can certainly handle the 3-minute overviews! sometimes they're not even 3 minutes long - those are the REAL good ones!