A New York Minute

After Christmas the fam headed up to New York City for some good times. Here is the classic Megan and Jessie picture in NYC. You may recognize the restaurant Roxy from MK and A's movie New York Minute.

Here we are in front of the NYC temple.

We stopped in at a cafe for some delicious sandwiches.

We traveled via subway like the true new yorkers we are.

Even though it was absolutely frigid outside, we couldn't resist having Jamba for breakfast. (I recommend the mango peach topper)

Megan and I tried to scout out Dan Radcliffe, but we couldn't find him even outside his theater.

We went to Magnolia's for some wonderful cupcakes. The german chocolate cupcake is the best.

Me and the baby at Magnolia's.

We ate delicious caesar salad and legit New York pizza at Bella Vita.

It was a lovely trip overall. Yay family!

Feliz Navidad

Christmas festivities began at the Livingston house with the decorating of the tree.

Max helped out by dressing up as Santa (just like Max from "how the grinch stole christmas").

The tree turned out positively smashing. The best tree on the block, if not the state of Virginia.

We opened up our one present on Christmas Eve and were completely surprised to find pajamas once again. This year we matched, which is always exciting.

Christmas morning brought many excited squeals. Emily got her first American Girl doll, which was super exciting. She got Molly because they look alike and Megan and I already have most of the others.

This year's best present given goes to Emily, who gave me this fabulous poster of Joe Jonas looking oh so sexy.

All in all it was an excellent Christmas.

Chili's

In order to celebrate the end of the semester and in the spirit of Christmas, the roomies headed out for a delightful outing to Chili's. The evening began of course with a serenading of "Lovebug" on the way to the restaurant. The song has become a theme song of sorts for our apartment because it's just so darned cute. Upon arriving at Chili's, we were seated and ordered and then commenced with the Christmas festivities.

Each of us had brought a gift for someone else...only we didn't know who. Rather than drawing names we thought it would be fun to read a story and pass a present to the left with the word "a" and to the right with the word "the." I began reading the story (which we had printed off at the last minute and had not read before...turned out it was about a witch attacking a town in Japan and a Samari saving the day) and things seemed to be going according to plan.

Then we hit a glitch. When the story finished, we were each holding the present we had brought, so we decided to read the first paragraph again. Low and behold, when we finished that paragraph we were once again holding our own gifts. Finally after reading another paragraph we were each holding someone else's gift.

All of the gifts were fabulous and unique. I gave Maggie some beautiful plastic clips for her hair and a toy FBI set.
She found them quite useful.

I got a Jamba Juice gift certificate from Lyndi, which I was of course THRILLED about.

Lyndi got a strippling warrior and a book about love from Maren.

Maren got some super awesome chapstick from Danae.

Danae got some toy animals and a sticky hand from Maggie.

Basically the food was delicious, the gifts fantastic, and the company even better.

Finals

I have spent everyday since last Wednesday dedicating my life to these things we call finals. Lucky for me, all my finals were scheduled for the first half of the week so I am almost finished. I now only have one test left: ELANG 223, more commonly known as intro to editing. The midterm for this class was a breeze, so I am not too concerned...except that I forgot to do the readings as we went, so i now have about 23 readings to do from this lovely book pictured below.


Who knew linguistics could be so frightening! (but it actually can, so far I have read 3 articles on plane crashes that could have been prevented if the pilots or air-traffic control people had a more in depth understanding of linguistics)

Pseudo-Family

As an FHE group we decided to take some family pictures in coordinated outfits.


The classic "family tree" picture:



A non-flattering but almost artistic picture:

The family hug picture:

Almost as presh as my real family.

Happy Birthday Baby!

7 years ago today my favorite baby girl was born. What a cutie.

Happy Birthday Emily!!!

There are Ewoks among us

This creature is called a pygmy tarsier. Apparently it was believed to be extinct for the past 80 years, but was recently rediscovered in Indonesia.

...or was it...

What doesn't quite fit with this story is how Luke Skywalker came across a whole community of them in 1983 during Return of the Jedi. Did George Lucas perhaps visit Indonesia and keep his rediscovery of the pygmy tarsier a secret so that he could use them in his movie and claim they were not from this world? Just something to ponder.

Movies

Tonight i had the wonderful joy of watching back to back movies for my film and Spanish classes. Within ten minutes I ran from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" to "Diarios de Motocicleta."













Talk about a contrast! The first is a musical featuring Marylin Monroe and a series of mishaps as she seeks a rich husband. The second is a depiction (based on the journal he kept) of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's travels through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela that led him to become the Marxist Revolutionary we know him as today. I would highly recommend both movies, though maybe at separate times.

Halloween: final take

For the ultimate halloween experience, one had to merely drop by Applewood apartment #7, the residence of Kristin and Kelsey aka Watson and Holmes.

They had set up a "bar" in their kitchen with "margaritas," pumpkin cocktails (made from a recipe designed by Kristin), and what was affectionately called the hard stuff, but more commonly known as dr. pepper or mountain dew.

There was pretty much everything you might need for a rocking good time: strobe light, dancing, and a bog machine (a bubble machine that fills each bubble with fog so when it pops the fog is released). Sara and I modeling the fog:

The old and new roomies all coming together. So presh.

Halloween: take 2

On Halloween we hit up our ward party in Provo Canyon. Maggie, Meryl and I tried and failed at the donut eating contest.

Alex pretty much wins for best costume in my book...possibly because he made the wig himself.

The nerd and the Extra Terrestrial were certainly having some good times together. Who would have thought that an outer space creature and an electrical engineer would find common ground?

The lovely roommates: a nerd, Wendy, Mizz Peacock, the Hawaiian, and E.T.'s girlfriend (or something along those lines...it's slightly open to interpretation).