WDR

WDR is the name of the poem I found tucked away in a box of treasures that I was sorting through the other day. I have no idea when I wrote it, my guess is that it was for our first anniversary or something. You'll need a little background information before the poem will make any sense.

Blaine and I started dating when we were 16. Our sophomore year of highschool (before we were 16) we hung around in the same group of friends. I really wanted to break in to the inner circle of boys within our group, and so I kind of invited myself to play hockey with them in the afternoons and on Saturdays. It was the most fun thing ever! Hockey is a blast.

I am sure it probably bothered them that a girl came out to play, but I really tried hard, even breaking my hand in an effort to impress my friends. Well actually, I broke my rollerblades in an effort to impress my friends, the breaking of my hand was a really embarrassing result of breaking the blades.

So we played hockey our sophomore year and the following summer, we got lagoon season passes. A girl will do funny things when she is in love with the two boys she goes to lagoon with every day. Like the time I strapped myself between them and got hoisted up a ten thousand foot tower, where one of them pressed a button and sent us plunging towards the earth and our imminent death. Any of you who know me at all, know that I must have really been in love with Blaine to do that. Like....for real.

When I was 16 I started working at Winder Dairy. I worked in the "Country Store". A little store that served lunch and sold milk and other dairy products. I also had a night job there answering the voicemails that had come in throughout the evening and changing customers orders accordingly.

Blaine's uncle was a pretty high up manager at the dairy, and Blaine's family lived across a field from the office. So Blaine got the opportunity to do some pretty classy odd jobs. He got to get all the milk that had gone sour and dump it out (which explains why Blaine doesn't like milk!), he worked in the icebox pulling orders, he stapled advertisements to bills (which had to be done late at night and I sat in an office off of the room where he and his cousins would staple the ads on), and most importantly - he got to bag compost.

That's right! Behind the Country Store where I worked there was a heaping pile o' compost. And Blaine's job was to take that heaping pile o' compost and stuff it - with his bare hands - into bags and seal the bags, stack them on pallets and get them ready to sell.

It was a glamourous job.

You may not know this about Blaine, but he is extremely motivated by money. He is a hard worker and always has been. So while my crush for Blaine intensified through playing hockey and going to lagoon, etc. If I wanted to spend time with him, I usually had to go out after work and sit on a heap of cow manure and talk to him while he worked.

Yeah.

That's love.

Flinging yourself off of a giant tower, sitting on heaps of compost, etc.

And now, my poem.

When I Fell in Love or WDR (Winder Dairy Romance)

When people talk of love and various romance

they always mention moonlight and a special sort of glance

they all claim they fell in love with just a look or two

funny, cuz that's not the way it was with me and you.

When I knew I loved you it was no starry night

we were hot and tired, playing hockey in daylight

And if there was a special glance, there was no candle glow

it was likely one of fright, Scott's hockey stick in throw

Though now I see your features with the tenderness of silk

when I fell in love with you, you smelt of sour milk

You'd always wear that old sweatshirt, it looked better than a tux

and ever doing all you could to earn a couple bucks

I dare not think of where we'd be without the aid of Bill*

or conversations in the compost with many bags to fill

Many folk would cringe to think of shoveling cow manure

but my best memories were made while smelling like a sewer

Though the contents of this poem seem silly or untrue

it was under these conditions that I fell in love with you

It did not happen all at once, there were no trumpents sounding

but through the years my best friend started making my heart pounding

Winder Dairy is renown for milk that is quite awesome

I'll remember it, however, as where our love began to blossom

I think I have a career ahead of me in poetry, no?

*Bill was a funny older guy who worked at the dairy late at night and would talk to Blaine and I individually, and much like we were in junior high school would relay messages (without our express permission), and it was kind of through him that we both figured out that the other was interested in us. As a side note, Bill looks 100% EXACTLY like Mr. Noodle from Elmo's World. I am not thoroughly convinced that Bill is not moonlighting from his Dairy job as Mr. Noodle.

Apples to Apples

The next time you think that you should postpone dinner by an hour so you can run to the store really quick - you should probably consider that if you put your hungry toddler in your basket and your fresh produce in your basket, when you unload your groceries you will find a whole lot of things that look like this....

Costa Fortuna

So, um, I know that I was like the last person on the Earth to get my hands on an i(insert type of mp3player here). Luckily I went straight to the top and went for an iphone. I just don't listen to that much music so it never seemed important. Plus Blaine has had like.....every type of ieverything that has even been invented. So I keep trying to download these apps that were saying I needed some sort of software upgrade. So today I figured out how to plug in my iphone and update the software. And all sorts of magical things happened when I plugged my iphone into my computer, who knew? Probably my favorite thing is my computer sucked all of the pictures off of my iphone so now I have all of these great photos from times when I didn't have a camera.

Like the day on our cruise when we woke up at port and there was a cruise ship parked next to us named "Costa Fortuna" but when I looked out the window I only saw "Costa Fortun" which I thought said cost a fortune, which I thought was a hilarious thing to name a cruise ship. You won't find Janssen or I on a ship that so blazenly announces that it is expensive.

Or the time that we got to go to the jazz game on Thanksgiving. (When I am a professional photographer I think I am going to specialize in self portraiture)


And when we saw Brian Regan LIVE !



And that time I drove all the way to Oregon to visit one of my besties there. Again, try to not faint in awe of my self portraiture skills.



And a personal favorite when I woke up one morning to find minnie mouse (complete with bows!) sitting at the kitchen table. I love the nose. LOVE.


The only picture of my kids with the big man himself.


And last but not least, there were over 200 images of my carpet. Every angle, every lighting, every inch of carpet has been captured on my iphone. Thank you, children.

Opinions

Okay, this post is neither funny nor interesting so if you are not a deep blue true and true friend who wants to voice their opinion about where I live, you are excused.

So, we live in Lehi. In the basement of a really nice house. It's a really nice basement. Seriously, I've never seen such a nice kitchen. We have tons of living space, tons of storage space, and it seems to me that we are getting a pretty sweet deal. We like our upstairs neighbors (important when sharing a house!) our landlords are very nice and accomodating, BUT it just hasn't clicked for us here.

Perhaps it was the rodent infestation in the fall. Or that, even though it is a nice walkout basement, with a lot of light....it still is kind of dark and even the lightbulb lighting isn't too good and I think that did nothing but contribute to my boggy depression for the last eight months. I really do think that I suffer from SAD.

And the commute. Well, I don't use this word lightly, but the commute sucks.

It's about 35 minutes if the weather is clear and Blaine leaves at the crack of dawn and all the stars align. But usually it is more like 45, and if there is a BYU game, or (Heaven forbid) SNOW...it could take up to an hour and a half.

It's the worst.

So, we kind of want to move.

It is written into our contract that we can sell our lease. Which we would have to do because our lease isn't up till the end of August and I would want to move before Gwen starts kinder.

So that's the other thing, Gwen got into an awesome charter school near here. She will have the opportunity to learn Spanish, Aarabic, and Chinese in kinder and then choose which language she wants to persue for the rest of elementary. There are 160 kindergartners on the waiting list for this school. I am not sure what miracle of miracles got us in. But we got it. And her class would only have 19 kids. And I have a friend who will carpool with me, and I already bought some uniform clothes (uniforms! Call me crazy but I love that!).

So we've been causually looking around for a new place. At one point I decided that the Charter school was reason enough for us to stay in Lehi and we went and looked at a townhome nearby. It was about the same price we were paying. I thought it was great, Blaine was indifferent. So I just kind of forgot about it.

And now the people who are renting it out wrote me and offered us a free month and reduced rent if we move in. Hello! Awesome! It is slightly closer to Blaine's work, Gwen could still go to the charter, and it would be cheapity cheap. Plus it is in a set of townhomes filled with people just like us, with two or three kids not yet in school. It's next to a park, we would have a carport instead of just having to park on the street. Etc.

But it's still a beastly commute.

So I guess my question is this.

Is an awesome school and cheap housing with younger families worth a beastly commute? It's been really great for us to be somewhere less expensive right now (thank you idiot renters! Not you current renters, the old renters who smoked and had the three giant dogs and stole my lightbulbs), but we miss Blaine. He leaves at 7AM comes home at 7PM and somehow in all that only gets about 9 hours of work in. Imagine if he had a shorter commute.

I hate to sound all school snobby, I'm really not, but how could I take a really great opportunity for Gwen away?

I guess I could be consoled by the fact that after we went to the kindergarten registration she said she would have rather stayed home and gotten kidnapped than gone to that school.

Hmmmm. What would you do?

subconscious

The other day we went out as a family. Everyone that I got ready was wearing light blue. Me, Gwen, Ben, and Ivy.
It wasn't on purpose.

But that happens more often than not. Apparently when I feel like wearing a certain color I subconsciously also choose that color for my kids.

Though I don't think about it, or plan it, I just randomly grab their clothes and yet we always look like some insane family that always color coordinates.

Happened again today.

And I was extra impressed with myself because I didn't even realize they had dresses this similar until we had been out sidewalkchalking for a good thirty minutes.

I have a pretty stylin' subconscious.

In other news. I am taking a week long hiatus from facebook. And I am ashamed to admit...it is KILLING me. I didn't get to whine that I forgot to make a special dinner for Cinco de Mayo. I didn't get to ask the masses if they would prefer Disneyland or river rafting in Moab for a family vacation. I didn't get to tell everyone how much I hate being a landlord (the freaking garage door crashed down on my renter!). I didn't get to ask for tips on using gimp or post the hil.ar.i.ous photos I tried to edit (I accidentally turned Ivy into a very alienesque looking creature).Or how sad I was when fifteen minutes after starting to swim with our family the childcare lady from the fitness center came in because Ivy was still freaking out. And how I was mad at the lady for not letting Ivy take in her pacifier. Or or or or or.....

So did the world end? Does the facebook world miss me? I like to think so, I like to think things in the cyberworld has come to a grinding, lifeless halt in my absence. No funny stories, no hilarious videos or witty status updates. Just boring old boringness because I am missing from the perpetual party. I've gotten two emails from concerned friends (thanks Mom!). That was nice.

But I will press on with my hiatus. Though I have noticed I am filling up the time in my day that I used to spend on facebook with drinking cherry coke, so I am not sure that I am better off.

And in other other news. Did I mention our Texas garage door crashed down on my renter? AGH. If it's not one thing... I need to plant a money tree.

I miss you facebook.

Lots and lots.

Someone tell me if the world ends and I don't know because I am not on facebook.

Puhleaseeeeeeee.

Pretty please.

P.S. If someone knows any gimp tutorials just post the links on my wall.....er...email them to me. Or Heaven forbid call me and tell me about it. Send me a letter. Smoke signal, whatever people who don't do facebook are doing these days.

Okay, the end.