Snow Storm for the Ages

It finally snowed out here. And when I say snowed . . . I mean Mother Nature dumped snow across the entire Greater Salt Lake Valley. The radio was full of reports of accidents and backed-up traffic. I'm so grateful I don't have to take the freeway to get to work.

Kaylin texted me this morning that it took her twenty-five minutes to get to work instead of her usual ten or fifteen minutes. This is funny because all of our other roommates drive at least twenty minutes to work each day when the driving conditions are good. Kaylin and I drive about ten.

I couldn't help picturing the snow piling up and me holed up in my house. Alone on the couch with the fireplace crackling and my favorite shows on TV while I worked from home. Sounds nice, doesn't it? But really, my work is right down the street. I mean, what a crap excuse so as not to go to work. Still . . . .

Something Must Be In the Water

I dont' know what's come over me but I have entered a new phase: the nesting phase. Before you jump to conclusions, no, I am not pregnant. But seriously, I'm wondering if there is something in the water because this is new territory.

I looked up the term nesting:

Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the "nesting" instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.

This weekend I attacked my shower with a fully powered bottle of Soft Scrub and was going full steam until the bleach crept into my lungs and gave me a coughing / gagging fit. I made dinner (eggrolls, you better believe it) and afterwards decided I wanted homemade gingerbread as well. Afterwards, I decided that much of my laundry needed ironing--something I never do, those wrinkles will work themselves out on their own, peeps--and pulled the ironing board into my room so as to be closer to my freshly laundered clothes. I swept the house, took out the trash and recycling.

Whew! If only all of my weekends were this productive. Perhaps this isn't really nesting, but at the risk of sounding lazy and incompetent, I'm rarely this motivated to get so much stuff done in a single weekend.

While this newfound, unexpected, and irrational behavior continues, I'd be happy to come to your houses and launch an attack on your bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, etc.

For a small fee, of course. A girl's gotta eat, you know.

Smack

No, this present isn't sticking out of my neck; instead, this is the mid-air flight of the present as it's being hurled in the air right before it smacked me in the face.

The closed eyes are just an added bonus.

My Own Personal Weather Man

My knee has been hurting this week. Most people know I've had two knee surgeries and it seems to me that it always hurts in one way or another. Boo.

But this week in particular my knee has felt especially tender. So much that Kaylin and my roommate Carrie gave me a serious guilt trip for wanting to go to the gym Wednesday night.

"You can barely walk!" Kaylin cried. "At least take a day off from it."

I did, but I felt guilty.

"Why do you think your knee hurts so much right now?" Carrie asked.

I shrugged. "The last time it hurt like this was last month when we had our first big snow storm. It must be the change in weather."

Carrie nodded her head and looked slightly solemn, but there was a slight tinge in her face as the wheels turned in her head.

I sighed. "This totally makes me sound like an eighty-year-old woman, doesn't it?"

She burst out laughing. "It does. It really does."

Kersplat!

My mom has always liked to do the Twelve Days of Christmas during the holidays.

There have been countless holidays where we have found a family in need and delivered gifts and goodies to them as the holiday approached. There are a lot of special memories associated with this--sneaking up to the house, assembling gifts, that one bitter time when we delivered soda (a most coveted thing growing up) knowing that it was for somebody else.

Once I wrote the most ridiculous poem talking about how we were their Christmas elves here to wish them Happy Holidays. I even wrote each alternating paragraph in red or green ink . . . talk about the epitome of festive. My mom was proud of that poem, weirdly enough, and had a lady from our ward who had stopped by our house one night read it. She wasn't as impressed and even pointed out a mispelled word. Scrooge.

The best memory I have of the Twelve Days of Christmas happened when I was super young, maybe five or six. My mom had baked bread and we were delivering this bread to a family with eight kids (sounds like one loaf wasn't enough, don't you think?) on a cold December evening in the great place of Eagle River, Alaska.

Like I said, it was cold. So guess who was persuaded to deliver the bread? My dad.

He snuck up to the house, left the bread on the doorstep, and knocked loudly on the door. The next thing I see is him racing off the front porch, down the front walk, and through the gate towards our car. Everything was fine until WHAM! My dad had run into the mailbox and landed right on his back.

I'm not sure if he slipped on ice or literally ran into the mailbox in the heat of the moment . . . I was five, you see.

Here's what I can tell you with a surety--my dad was immediately on his hands and knees patting the ground trying to find his glasses in the snow. Time progressed--it felt like eons--as my dad patted (there really is no better word) the ground looking for those damn glasses. What kills me is he doesn't even have that bad of vision. Those glasses must have blended into the night.

The family, by this time, had opened the door and come out to the porch. Rather than noticing the loaf of bread wrapped in tin foil, they were granted with a different surprise--some random man on his hands and knees in the snow becoming increasingly irritated as he patted the snow. Curse words, I'm sure, were uttered.

As this was happening, a crazy woman was sitting in the front seat of our car laughing like crazy. Oh, wait, that was my mom. This may be the hardest she's ever laughed.

At the tender age of five, I was kind of alarmed by my mom laughing because I thought my dad was hurt; however, now, the image of my dad on the ground is automatically accompanied by the sound of my mom laughing. And I can't help but smile.

Christmas Is Here

Christmas is here! I am so excited. For you purists out there, Kaylin and I put up our Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that it didn't go up sooner.

Once again, we visited Temple Square to see the lights. For the environmentalists out there, I am sorry if this opinion offends your sensibilities, but I hate that the Church is cutting back on the lights! In my opinion, when it comes to Christmas you either go big or go home. I believe in conservation . . . except when it's Christmas. So this is what I'm saying, I think there should be more lights at Temple Square. I really do.

We've been watching a lot of Christmas movies at our house. Even though the Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies always fall flat at the end, I am loving them. Except for Holiday in Handcuffs. I couldn't suspend reality long enough to believe that a) Mario Lopez would fall in love with the girl who kidnapped him over the holidays; b) that girl ended up being Melissa Joan Hart.

A Memory Where My Mother Told Me I Was Not Good Enough for John Bytheway

Long before the days of tank tops being a mandatory undershirt-wardrobe item, I had bought a shirt that had a somewhat deep V-neck in the front. I was living at home at the time (this being the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college) and it was during that transition when I was starting to buy my own clothes. It felt so weird . . . so adult. I felt a little awkward spending money on myself (wish I felt that way still).

It was Saturday night and darn it if I wasn't going to go out wearing my new purple, V-neck shirt.

Except it was a little lower cut than I realized. I spent the whole night pulling my shirt up trying to cover up the girls. If my face didn't show it, I was feeling more than a little self-conscious.

The next morning (being a Sunday), instead of our usual fare of Disney TV in the family room (for my younger siblings . . . duh), my mom was playing a John Bytheway talk. I sat down, ate my breakfast, and watched it. I mean, I was a more enlightened person at this point in time. I had sat through all of the sessions of General Conference while at college and did not immediately curl up in my blanket and fall asleep. If this isn't definitive proof of my enlightenment, I don't know what is.

And then my mom turned to me with the clear intention of teaching me a lesson.

My eyes widened in surprise and then horror as I realized the lesson being taught.

"That outfit you wore last night was inappropriate. I can't even believe it. How can you be worthy of someone like John Bytheway when you wear shirts like that?"

Um . . . I don't know. I didn't really intend for it to be that revealing.

"Melissa, if you're going to be worthy of someone like John Bytheway, you cannot be wearing clothes like that."

Um . . . John Bytheway? Really?

I find this all extremely ironic since I wonder from time to time if I had pulled out the purple V-neck shirt a little more often if I would have been a little more successful at the dating game. Sadly, it's been donated to the DI where I'm sure another girl is flaunting her goodies much to the dismay of her mother.

**Clearly, this is a funny story, Mom. Perhaps you remember it differently. If so, you should start your own blog with a rebuttal statement.