Loomis!

Cody, Cody’s parents, two youngest sisters, and I headed to California on Easter Sunday.  It stunk to miss church but the drive was really nice.  We had some interesting weather.  Rained super hard some of the time and was really windy, but very pretty.

When we were actually getting into the Loomis area, it started getting really, really pretty.  It made me laugh because to get to Loomis, you take the Auburn exit and drive through Auburn, and that’s how you get to my house in Washington too.

This is Cody’s “I’m super excited that I’m in Loomis” face.

His house was in a really cool little street.  It even has a cool name!  He lives on Autumn Lane.  Maybe not quite as cool as 120th Ave, but pretty close. 

His dogs crack me up.  I think that’s what Cody was most excited for- seeing his dogs.  Ukiah loves riding the motorcycle with Cody or his dad.

 

Sunday night we played Settlers of Catan. Cody won and I was super grumpy the whole time because he kept attacking me in the game.  I have since developed a theory about why Settlers is a terrible game, but that’s for another day. 

Monday we went to the foothill bridge.  It’s the tallest bridge in California or something.  It was really cool, but super windy that day so we look super weird in all the pictures of us together.

     

We also mowed the lawn.  That was another thing that Cody was super excited about coming home for.

 

The last thing we did on Monday was ride bikes around Fulsome Lake with his mom and sister.  It started off really steep and I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle it but the beginning was the worst part and it got to be really fun.  I haven’t ridden bikes in a really long time, but I always really enjoy it when I do.

  We had a big long list of things that we wanted to do while we were in Loomis, and we knocked a ton of them out of the way on Monday!

People actually celebrate Easter?

The night before I went to California, I went up to Bountiful to stay at Cody’s grandma’s house.  His mom teaches Zumba, and so all the girls (5) wanted to do it with her.  I did it with them and felt pretty dumb the whole time, but it was fun.

We played Rumikub after.  I wanted to cheat so bad.  Cody and I were laughing because our plan was to rearrange all the tiles on the board until it was a total mess and then say “Oh. Dang. I thought that was going to work.”  We didn’t actually do that because his older sister Shayne and her husband finally won, but if it had taken any longer, I probably would have cracked.

 

Cody’s family is weird because they actually celebrate holidays.  Like Easter, for example.  We haven’t celebrated Easter by hiding eggs or baskets or anything since I was five years old or something.  But we made cupcakes and dyed eggs.  The cupcakes came out of this book, What’s New, Cupcake which was a really great book that had designs to make a bunch of different and cool cupcakes.  We tried to make the Easter Egg.

This is what it was supposed to look like, but I have doubts that this person actually made it work because it was impossible.

The other ones are apparently easier, because they had done some of them before and it had worked, but ours turned out nothing like the above picture.  So we improvised.

Here are the final products.  Mine is the lame one in the back that looks like a baseball diamond.  Or at least I hope it does, because that’s what I tried to do.  Cody just laughed super hard when he saw it though, so maybe it doesn’t.  His is the one that’s even lamer in the front- the evil smiley face one.

We also dyed eggs.  We each made three.  I’m not sure why I don’t have a picture of them.  I made one where I wrote “Hide me in the OVEN” on it with white crayon and then dyed it.  I thought it was pretty clever.  And pretty much everyone made a camo one.  I knew that if I tried too hard, mine would look stupid so I made a camo one that was grass against a sky. 

Cody’s camo egg was a total cop out.  He just used crayon, so it looked the best.  He’s a cheater, but his was the last one found the next morning, so I guess it worked.

I didn’t really understand the whole “finding you own eggs” concept at all.  I just assumed that everyone just wanted to find their eggs, you know- end goal and all, but apparently they wanted to find their own eggs themselves.  Took me forever to get that- everyone was getting mad at me because I would tell them where theirs were.

Oh well.  Mine were easy enough.  I only had to look for two of them because apparently the Easter bunny can read and put mine in the oven. 

My parents are going to be rednecks someday.

Mom, Dad and I went shooting with the Evans family after Jamie’s graduation.  Dad pretended like he wasn’t excited at all, but we all knew he was.  :)

Before we went, we met up with the Evanses, and they made Cody and I stand back to back to measure us.  I, knowing that I was definitely taller than him, but knowing that he thought he was taller than me, tried to get out of it, but his sisters were determined.

This is Cody explaining the rules and his family paying tons of attention. 

 

 

 

The funniest part of Cody explaining all the rules was when he talked about keeping your finger out of the trigger until you’re ready to shoot, and Dad said “I forgot, I can’t shoot” to me and Mom, holding up his dead finger that he broke last year playing dodgeball with the teachers. Mom and I were laughing so hard, but Cody thought he was joking.

Cody helping Mom out.

Mom was embarrassed because Dad wore his Jazz jersey.

 

Dad loved it.  He ran around trying all the different guns.  We’ll leave it to Clark to tell us what kind of guns these are.

Mom and Dad shooting together.

It got pretty cold. These are Cody’s sisters, Randi, Whitney, and Kaitlyn.

I wasn’t very good at it.

Apparently, no one thought I was very good at it, because I got help from a lot of people.  ;)

Cody and I shooting.

And my camera got stolen after awhile. I came back to find lots of pictures of butts and these:

Cody had brought some mannequin heads from his house. Mom didn’t approve even a little bit, so we weren’t going to use them, but somehow they still got out there (probably Cody’s dad).

When we were driving home, Dad told stories of smelly ammo cans and river trips and Dad and Cody talked a lot about Cody’s major and his internship he was leaving for.  Afterwards, Dad told me that yes, Cody was a redneck, but it was okay because he actually had his life in order.  It was pretty funny.

But the funniest part was that we were driving home from this and Mom really had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped at McDonalds right off of University and both Cody and Mom went in to use the restroom.  A couple minutes later, Mom came running out and got into the car at lightening speed.  A minute or two later, Cody came sauntering out, thinking he had tons of time because Mom wasn’t out yet, and got into the car.  Mom said something like “What took you so long” and he started, super surprised, looked around at her and said “Who are you??”

Mom was pretty proud.

Tangled

Did I ever mention that Kate and I went to see Tangled twice in two days?

 

One Friday, Kate and I were both dateless on one Friday night, and so we decided to go on a night hike. We went above the temple. It wasn’t that dark when we started out. These pictures make it seem like it was a lot darker than it really was. Don’t worry mom!

 

Afterwards, we wanted to watch a movie.  We were deciding on a good one, and then both had a crazy urge to go see Tangled. We checked the Provo dollar theatre, and of course it was all sold out. We were pretty disappointed, but the idea of seeing Tangled had now overwhelmed us. Like Inception.

So we went up to Sandy.

We thought it would be sold out up there too, so we ordered them online at Fandango. 
It wasn’t necessary.  There were like 20 people in the theatre. It was a pretty ghetto theatre.

We LOVED it.  The whole way home we couldn’t stop talking about it.  We were glad that we had a half hour drive so that we could cover every single one of our favorite parts. 

Somewhere in that drive home we started reminicsing about Au Pair.  Remember that ABC Family Original Movie?  We had the strongest desire to watch it.  So even though it was about midnight, we found it on Youtube and watched it. 

What a great cheesy movie.

The next day, we still just wanted to talk about it the whole day.  We talked about it so much that Jessica and Bobby decided to go see it that night.  We went to the PowderPuff game, and then decided to go see it again that night.  We got a few more people to come see it with us, and bought more tickets off of Fandango.

This story gets funny, I promise.

After we bought tickets, we went over to La Casa to watch the BYU Basketball game.  While there, we bragged that we were going to go see it in 3D that night, and a bunch of people wanted to come.  They looked on someone’s phone to buy tickets from Fandango, and this is the conversation that followed:

Jon: It’s the 9:35 showing right?

Christina: No, the 9:40 showing

Jon: There is no 9:40 showing.

Christina: Yes, there is. I remember because we checked it twice.

Jon: Well, it doesn’t have one listed. Look.

I look. He’s right.

Jon: Maybe you should check your confirmation.

I check, and see this:

You see the error? I’ll make it bigger.

Apparently there are two Cinemark Movies 8 dollar theatres that exist.  I had bought five tickets to the showing in Albuquerque.

We were all laughing pretty hard.  Luckily, the story ends well. I called the two theatres, and although it was sold out, they told me that if I brought the confirmation, they would let us in.

And it was worth it. I liked 2D better than 3D, but that’s just me.

My favorite quotes:

Flynn Rider: I could get used to a view like this. Yep, I'm used to it. Guys I want a castle.

and

Flynn Rider: You know, I can't help but notice you seem a little at war with yourself here... I mean, I’ve jut picked up little pieces here and there: overprotective mother, forbidden road trip…

Pudding Poster

I know that we look rather evil in these pictures, but I thought I’d share them anyway. 

After the priesthood session of General Conference, I went on a date with my friend Cody.  We went to Zupas, which I had never been to before. It was really good. The mango salad was amazing and so was my sandwich, which was something ham related.

Afterwards, we went back to La Casa and made a painting out of pudding.

This is Cody fixing his flowers. He’s in floral design this semester, and was unhappy because his flowers were wilting. Haha.

This is the poster we made.  It’s a country scene.  We thought we did a pretty good job with the horse and the dead tree. We used three different kinds of pudding: banana, pistachio, and butterscotch.

  

We left it on the table in the middle of the Terrace so that everyone could enjoy it as much as we did.

Hare Krishna

Hare Krishna. What a great tradition. If this was near any other college in the US, it would be party town USA. Not that it wasn’t here, but we do things a little differently. Obviously.

Before”

 

Andrea and I got smashed when trying to buy the chalk.

About midway through I insisted that we take a group picture before the giant chalk throwing. Good thing too. We actually look decent in this picture, unlike every single picture taken after the throwing, in which we all look disgusting.

Me, Kate, Zach, Mckenna, Lucy, Brett, Nate, and Andrea

I also saw Logan and Rachael there, so that was fun.

I didn’t take a picture afterwards, but here’s one someone else took. We look good eh?

And just for the record, I had pink streaks in my hair for about three days.  My ears were a little longer, and didn’t look nearly as cool.  :)