Oh! Christmas tree!

Growing up, decorating for Christmas is something my parents take very seriously. In the front yard, they cover the whole roof, all of the windows and every last tree, bush or shrub, with lights. There is at least one tree, that has blinking lights synchronized to a selection of loud electronic Christmas carols (to our neighbor’s chagrin). The lawn has a herd of lit mechanical reindeer (that the aforementioned neighbors have been know to rearrange in various naughty positions when no one’s looking.) Inside the house, there are wreaths, lights, mistletoe, snowmen, santas, nativities, and stockings. They even have 3 Christmas trees, yes THREE. My Mom couldn’t decide between two styles of ornaments AND she couldn’t bear to get rid of her grandmother’s vintage tree. So she has three different trees, now. The “main” Christmas tree is over 9 feet tall and underneath it is where my mom sets up her ceramic Christmas village that is encircled by a festive train. Every year my Mom collects new buildings, trees, figurines and other things to add to her village. It has gotten so big, that that this year it has officially been declared a “Christmas metropolitan area”.

With so many decorations, putting them up each year became an increasingly tedious process, and I became increasingly grinch-like with each successive holiday season. But now that I have my own family, I’m starting to warm up to the idea of Christmas decorations again. I mean, how can you resist the excited squeals of a two year old when you do something as simple as plugging in a string of lights?

I was especially excited for this year, because, at 2 1/2, Adgie is even more aware and excited about the world around him. As I set up our fake treea few days ago, he giggled with delight. His eyes were filled with wonder as I opened up our box filled with glistening round glass ornaments. When I was done unwrapping most of them, I got up to quickly use the bathroom. Adgie had been in a very calm mood, and had listened to me when I asked him not to touch the ornaments. But when I came out of the bathroom, I saw him standing in the box of ornaments, furiously stomping on them like a grape-stomper in a barrel of grapes.

After I threw away the broken remains of the ornaments, I went to the store in search of cheap, non-glass ornaments. I came home with a stack of pretty paper. I had decided to make little paper, origami ornaments, instead. Though it would be a little tedious, there wouldn’t be glass shards everywhere, should Adgie have a surge of destructiveness come upon him again.

About an hour of cutting and folding, I had a small collection of paper ornaments done. I placed them on the tree, and stood back to see to see how they looked so far.

I think Christmas ornaments may be for Adgie, what a red cape is for an angry bull, because as soon as he saw the origami on the tree, he ran up and grabbed the ornaments he could reach, and began crumpling them and ripping them to pieces. *sigh*
While Adgie served his longer than usual time-out sentence, I wondered whether our tree may only have lights on it this year unless I could think of a cheap, unbreakable alternative for ornaments. I rummaged through our closet for ideas and came across a big bag of colorful plastic balls. You know, the ones you might find in a ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese? They went with an inflatable ball pit that Adgie got for his birthday one year, but it had been punctured by a rowdy cousin, so I had all of these unbreakable plastic balls without a home…

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

I am experiencing technical difficulties, so I apologize for my recent lack of comments and blog postings. My laptop power cord was tripped over, yanked, and otherwise mangled by Curious George one too many times, and it finally snapped. While, I will have access to other computers, it will be much more sporadic access than I had with my little laptop.

In other news, I had sushi for Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law talked about making turkey tamales, so we were all a bit surprised when she brought out salmon and a variety of sushi to the table. Hahaha, I love sushi, so it was a good surprise. What did you have?

Aloha Friday

What is the worst, best or weirdest job you’ve ever had?

In my last post, I talked a little bit about my weirdest job: I was a counselor/tie dye instructor at a youth fat camp for a summer. Hahaha, it was an interesting summer that year, that’s for sure.

Free Stuff and Awards!

If you are anything like everyone I’ve ever met in my whole life, you like getting stuff for free. Luckily, I know where to get it:

-Over at Shrek + Fiona, you can win a bath and body gift set with a custom complete with a one-of-a-kind fragrance.

-You can win a $20 gift certificate to Bajio’s from Tyler’s Triumph. Mmmmm, sabroso.

-Memarie Lane is offering a piece of very pretty handsculpted jewelry. iMuy lindo!

-And finally, yours truly is offering a chance for you to win an assortment of international (and domestic) candy! You’re right, it’s the best prize offered on this blog! Enter to win here.

In other news, Summer, the lovely author of Summer’s Nook presented me with my very first bloggy award!

She awarded it to me under category of creativity, which, is very flattering considering I adore all things creative. Thank you, Summer!
I’m still pretty new to the blog world, but from what I have observed, I get to pass along the warm fuzzies by holding my own awards ceremony. Well, since I got the award for creativity, I thought I’d also give the awards out for blog creativity. (Also, I thought I’d have some fun, and exercise my creativity by making my own awards.)

The first two awards are for Visual Creativity:

Cristi of “The Mrs. Formerly Known as Mustard” and McKenna from “Shrek + Fiona” are both very deserving of the “good eye” award.
Cristi was a film major who minored in photography/art/design. The photos on her blog are just beautiful! It doesn’t stop there though, check out this recent post. (Also, I’ve noticed that I have a craving for pumpkin pie whenever I go over there as of late. Mmmmm.)

McKenna recently redesigned her blog (even though it already looked good). But now it’s even better. She’s a graphic designer AND she started her own fragrance company. (Also she get extra points for her husband’s halloween costume.)

The other award is for Culinary Creativity:

Summer of Summer’s Nook is sooo deserving of this award. She shares her delicious recipes, cooking tips, and makes wonderful cakes. However, these aren’t your typical decorated cakes as you can see from the photo below. (Don’t forget to check out her handmade jewelry, too!)

Congratulations, my creative friends!

Almost Wordless Wednesday

Cost of this picture I took of my friend and a dude:  $2

Memories of our time in NYC:  priceless

Bloom Where I’m Planted?

In one of my recent posts, I vented a bit about some of the quirks found in my home state. However, because of today’s events, I’m wondering if the state of Utah, as an entity, read the post, was offended, and is now trying to kick us out.

I better start from the beginning:

my DH’s ambition grows exponentially as we get older. When I first met him in high school, his career plan was to get an associates degree at a local state college and then get an entry level tech support job.

Fast forward 6 years. We were engaged and both attending a local state college, but he was now working towards a bachelors in computer science.

Fast forward 2 more years. We had been married for about a year when he was accepted as a transfer student to a local university. He now ultimately planned to obtain a master’s degree in Computer Science.

Fast forward again 1 more year. We now have our darling baby boy. One night, DH comes home and surprises me with the news that he had changed his major. Not going to change his major, he had already done it.

”What? What major did you change to?” I say in an attempted supportive but mostly frustrated voice.

”I changed it to physiology, I’m going to be a doctor! I want to help people!” He announced excitedly.

I think I kind of lost it at that point. His new goal was very admirable, but I was tired of being starving student parents. You see, when Adgie was born, we decided that it was very important to us that I be able to stay home with him, as far as it was humanly possible. While we are very lucky and grateful to have ways in which to make this work, we have zero point no dollars most of the time. In order for him to become a doctor, it meant we would be in this financial limbo for possibly 10 more years. At the time, that sounded like slow. agonizing. torture.

Although I still think that DH’s decision was brash (he has since apologized many times for not talking to me about it first), that it will eventually be a wonderful thing, and I’m now excited for the journey. Currently, DH will be getting his bachelor’s in April, and we are in the process of applying to medical school. I researched all of our choices and narrowed it down to 18 schools.

The medical school application process goes like this:

Round 1: Apply to chosen medical schools.

Round 2: If they like you, they’ll send secondary materials for you to fill out. Many require ridiculously vague essay questions like: “In 250 words or less, please give us some insight as to who you are as a person.”

Round 3: If the school really likes you, you will get invited for an interview.

Round 4: If the school really, really likes you than you get accepted! Yay! If they only sort of like you, you will get waitlisted, and then you hope and pray that after lasting through all of those rounds that a spot opens up for you.

Out of hundreds of medical schools across the country, there is only one in Utah. The University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. However, the University of Utah is BY FAR, Salvador’s best chance of getting into medical school (Salvador’s MCAT score is very competitive there, they need minorities like mad, and they give preference to Utah residents). With family and friends nearby, super low tuition, and the far superior Salt Lake Valley beckoning us, it is our first choice.

So far, DH has recieved secondary materials from almost every school that we applied to. However, today we recieved our first rejection letter and it was from the University of Utah. The problem was that out of all of the schools we applied to, the U of U is the only one that has a minimum GPA, and MCAT score requirements. Salvador far surpassed all of the minimum requirements, except for one. His non-science GPA was too low by three-tenths of a point. Yes, three-tenths of a point is preventing him from going to the U of U.

OK, Utah, we can take a hint. It’s time for us to move on*.

Aloha Friday

It’s time for the Aloha Friday question again! Sheesh, this week went by too fast. Anyway, in my last post, I wrote about some of the quirks I discovered about Utah Valley after relocating there from Southern California. So, my question to you is: 

What are some unique, interesting or quirky things about your local community?

UTAH!

…continued from “Tales from da Hood”

My parents wanted to move our family to Orem, Utah?! I wondered what it was going to be like there. I didn’t really know what to expect. I was Mormon, and I’d heard that Orem was primarily Mormon as well. I imagined it would be a lot like a larger version of my local ward (congregation); an eclectic group of nice people who shared the same religious ideals. I would find out that Utah Valley had it’s own culture that was quite distinct from the religion I was already familiar with.

My family made the move in July of 1995. The day that we arrived was a warm and sunny. Our new house had a nice flower garden and well manicured lawn, just like the rest of the houses on the block. In fact, our house looked almost exactly the same as the other houses on the block. Children were playing on the street. Two moderately priced cars were parked in every driveway. Yes, folks, I had moved to the textbook example of suburbia.

I still remember what I was wearing that day. It was an outfit just like this:

Yes, I know. I looked like I had just walked out of the movie “Clueless”. I quickly noticed, however, that nobody else did, and I began to wonder if Utah had been invited to the 90’s. As girls my age showed up to come meet “the new girl”, I noticed that most of them were dressed super conservatively. All wore nice jeans, no holes anywhere. (What?! Hasn’t anyone heard Nirvana, or of the grunge movement?) Not only that, but the jeans were rolled up at the ankle, so all could see their nice clean white socks. Shirts were ironed and tucked in. There were an inordinate amount of blondes. I might as well have been in a foreign country.

The move was difficult for me to adjust to for awhile. Utah Valley (the valley and community that Orem is located in), like most places had it’s share of quirks. My new school was filled with seemingly impenetrable cliques. At first, the girls seemed gossipy and self-righteous, and the boys were unfriendly.

There were other things to get used to as well:

UTAH FOOD

The local homemade food can be summed up in one word: “mushy”. There are lots of casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup, jellos filled with canned fruit chunks, fruit and pasta salads held together with loads of mayo. People are even prouder if it was made in a dutch oven. Meat and potatoes are staples. (The food in Utah drives my husband crazy, as he’s originally from Mexico City. He thinks Utah’s mushy food is characteristic of American food in general. I can’t wait to take him to eat in Manhattan or Houston so I can restore American food’s honor.)

POLITICS IN UTAH

I won’t go in depth into Utah politics, but politically,my husband and I often feel like this:

Yes, Utah Valley has been described by some as being in the “reddest” county in the “reddest” state. Despite this, Utah isn’t home to super “hardcore republicans.” Most tend to be moderately conservative, it just so happens that there’s a LOT of them in one place.

LANGUAGE IN UTAH

While there wasn’t as big as a difference in dialect as if I moved to The South, or Australia, there was still some language differences. A shocked Utahn might utter “Oh my heck!”. The words “mountain” and “water” lost their t’s. For some “creek” was pronounced “crick”. The days of the week for an older Utahn were “Mondee, Tuesdee, Wensdee,” and so on. “ditching school” was replaced with “sluffing school”. When a Utahn was given a “dirty look” by someone else, it was said that the person had just given them a “crusty” (I’m not sure how widespread that phrase is, it may have been only in my neighborhood). I was first introduced to the words: “hick”, “molly” (as a derogatory term), and “scones” in Utah. The word “crap” wasn’t considered a swear word, but I could no longer call someone a “bastard” without getting in trouble at school.

HOUSES IN UTAH

Like most of suburbia, there are lots of cookie cutter neighborhoods in Utah Valley.

UTAH VALLEY ART

Utah Valley’s arts are lacking to say the least. Paintings are usually very cheesy and contrived. Lots of flowerey landscapes, old fashioned dressed children playing with puppies, and religious themes are found framed in Utah homes. Many homes are decorated in a “country crafty” theme. A wooden teddy bear holding a sign that says “Have a Beary Merry Christmas!” is something you might find displayed on a Utah Valley porch. Thank goodness an IKEA just went in not too far away.

I think that this tradition dates back to when pioneers settled the valley. Since they had left all that they owned back east, they probably had to get creative and make their own decor from wood scraps. The ironic thing is that it has become a profitable business in Utah Valley, and all these “homemade” crafts are ridiculously overpriced.

(I may have been too harsh on Utah Valley’s arts. I confess that my tastes are “out there” for most people as I prefer stuff more like this:)

I have been living in Utah for 12 years now. I slowly began to fall in love with this quirky state. I eventually penetrated the cliques and made the best friends I’ve ever had. Utah Valley is frequently placed in the top ten safest places in the U.S., and it’s a wonderful place to raise a toddler. Also, even if the art scene seemed lacking at first, I realized that Utah has some of the best “natural art” found anywhere.

And who knows, maybe Utah will become architecture, art, music, or fashion’s next headquarters?

Well, probably not.