they say it's your birthday

Sunday was my birthday. Woop. One year older and wiser too.

It was actually really great. I had purposely planned a really low-key birthday. I was just going to relax with my roommates, fix myself a large breakfast, go to church, and open a few packages, and take a well deserved nap!

The saturday before I had planned to go out to dinner with a few friends. M and B recommended Famous Dave's BBQ. Sounded great, so we headed over. The food was delicious, but it was soured by some unwanted entertainment... Bagpipes.

I'm not even joking. What does bagpipes have to do with good ole Idaho BBQ?! It was so loud and they wouldn't leave. Not to meantion that they had to play in every room of the restaurant, which unfortunately were all close quarters. So you heard the same song at least four times, maybe more, since their lack of knowledge of songs required them to play the same song more than once in one or more rooms.

I was not amused.

This was during the second round of "Praise to the Man"

After dinner, we headed over to M and B's home for some cake. B is amazing. She can totally convert you to tuna casserole and she can amaze you with her cake decorating skills. They surprised me with this amazing and delicious home baked cake. It feels great to have such supporting friends of quirks.

 Then they surprised me further with the most gorgeous gift. I had seen this many times in Disneyland and in stores alike. I had always been tempted to buy it for myself but I had been lacking either courage or funds. So imagine how touched I was to see when M and B had been amazing enough to find the perfect gift.

I've also been extremely fortunate to have a wonderful collection of friends and family who know me well enough to surprise me with some of the most wonderful gifts. My cute niece and nephews sent hand written cards. There were plenty of sweet treats and thoughtful cards. These are just a few of the bounty I accumulated:

 A vintage Mickey necklace. I'm getting really into gold now

R2-D2 decal for my phone. It's amazing!! It covers the entire phone. I'm obsessed.

Photos in brightly colored frames 

A vintage Beatles record brought to my by A, all the way from Russia, so everything's written in Russian but I'm pretty sure they still sing in English. I haven't had the pleasure of listening to it quite yet.

So a very happy birthday to me! I enjoyed a great day with great friends and many unexpected surprises. Including coming home to a home filled with balloons and star wars cupcakes! Yum!

Fun fact: the Beatle's birthday song "They Say it's Your Birthday" was in fact written on September 18, 1969. Twenty years before I was born. To the day. It was fate!

I would just like to bare my testimony... I know this church is true... and I really love my roommates... *sniff sniff*

But no seriously...

I have the greatest roommates ever. Ever.

I recently moved my new record player (a vintage MAGNAVOX! ... you have to say it with a booming voice) into the livingroom. We don't have a TV so I thought it was close enough. But my roommates love it. We listen to it all the time, especially Beatles or Coldplay's Viva la Vida. We get a lot of compliments on it and a lot of wandering men asking if it actually works. I'm not gonna lie but it totally throws the whole apartment together. We've got this whole, moody artsy love-dungeon feel going on and I think it fits us well.

But tonight after I came home from the gym with my cute little Ecuadorian gym-buddy (she's barely four foot and MAN can she make you run faster... need inspiration to work out? Get a feisty Ecuadorian girl! She's adorable), anyways, I come home and I'm sweaty and shaky but I fall on the floor to do my crunches before I take a shower. Suddenly my roommate Allison (Aka: Fresh... I don't know why we call her that) turns on the record player, only I don't recognize the album. So I stop, sit up.... "wait... what is this?! Who's is this?! This isn't mine!" And they all yell "SURPRISE!.. Happy late birthday!!" I was SO excited! It was totally unexpected but they went online and found my favorite Regina Spektor album in an LP.

It was so awesome. We're totally listening to it now, but I can't put off a shower anymore. I love late birthday presents! They're not even family and they gave me a gift, I don't even care it's late. It's just nice to know they care. I was feeling a little down because close friends and family members didn't even send me a card. But hey, I'm older now. So birthdays aren't as important right? Ok, I'm rambling, time to hit the showers!

My Crazy 21st

I'm SO tired because it's really late and it took forever for my pictures to load so please forgive me for not going into too much detail here. It was kind of a stressful week with things going on and then school starting. I was totally looking forward to heading out of Rexburg and down to Provo for the weekend. My really good friend and Disney roommate Alyssa and I headed out friday evening after finishing a majority of our homework. The drive was long but relatively smooth. Over the weekend we were staying with my Disney room-roommate Trysten. She and her sister live in their grandparent's basement and they were out of town for the weekend so it was all us!

Saturday, we woke up and went to breakfast at Kneaders where they have the worlds best french toast! We met up with some of the other Disney girls for a short while. It was fun but we all agreed that it was weird seeing each other outside of Disney. After a while, we went our sepparate ways for some to do homework and others to get errands done. Alyssa and I went to a mall and got our nails done... then of COURSE we HAD to go to the Disney Store!!! It was SO heartbreaking!!! We got very homesick for Disney World. Afterwards we all met up at Trysten's to formulate a plan. We decided we were hungry again so we would go out and grab something to eat at Panda Express. As we were driving down there we saw this big banner across Center St. that said there was an Indian Festival going on in Spanish Fork. We were feeling adventurous so we decided to head over there.

Trysten and her sister Kalen had lived in India before so they had all of these gorgeous clothes. We convinced them to wear their Sari's and they even gave us some authentic "Puffy pants" and everyone got a jewel to wear on our brow. We felt pretty legit. The festival was held at the temple where they have Harri Krishna or the festival of colors. It was sweet! They had Llamas roaming around that you could pet. There were dancers to watch, henna tattoos (although crazy expensive), food, shopping and dancing inside the temple. We looked around, and went in to the temple and danced. It was crazy fun! And a LOT of weird people. Trysten and Kalen bought some henna stuff. They knew how do to it themselves and we figured it would be cheaper and we'd get bigger designs that way. After hanging around for about an hour and a half we headed back to Trysten's place.

We decided that for the night, we would hang around, eat junk food (of course) and watch a movie. Trysten was such a sweetheart and bought this awesome chocolate cake and TONS of sugar! But of course, since it was my big 21st birthday we HAD to play a drinking game! No worries, there was no alcohol involved. But since we were all Disney nerds we decided that every time someone said anything Disney related or any inside joke from our time in Disney World, we all had a chug a dixie cup or liquid. We started with the easy stuff; water, apple juice, lemonade, etc. But when that ran out we moved on to the harder stuff; coke, sprite, orange soda, or milk. It got to be a lot harder than we thought. But we decided that the end result would be that whomever peed first had to streak outside in their bra and underwear. The game continued on for most of the night until Katie was about to burst! Only she had just gotten her Henna tattoo done and it wasn't dry, so Trysten's sister Kalen sacrificed herself for Katie. Katie changed into a robe and Trysten put on this Sleeping Beauty wig she got in DW so none of their neighbors would notice. We lined up on the side of the road and Kalen BOOKED IT! There were no cars as she was running out, but then as she was heading back in, a car came toward us! That made her run even faster! She grabbed her robe and ran straight into the house! We were all so shocked we just kind of stood there. The car stopped and we saw there was a guy inside it! He was looking at us so we RAN into the house and he kept honking at us and then sped away! What a rush!

After that, we all totally crashed, after a scramble for everyone to empty their bladders, we turned on the movie Juno and we all fell asleep watching it. Alyssa and I had to leave in the morning around 930 and everyone else had early church but we all crashed around 1.

It was a great night and I had such a wonderful time with those girls. I had missed them terribly. We always had good times in Florida and I'm so lucky that I was able to have them with me on my birthday.

Alyssa, myself and Trysten will our "Bindi's", the jewels on the forehead

Spanish Fork Indian Temple

The Llamas!!

Trysten really liked the Llama

Alyssa and Trysten

Trysten and I

Alyssa and I... Karen called me and I'm actually on the phone while she took this photo

Puffy Pants!! Best, most comfortable pants ever!!

Katie, Kendall, Alyssa, Me, (unknown), and Kristy

The Disney girls!! Kristy, Me, Katie, Kendall, Alyssa, and Trysten

Dancing in the Temple

Alyssa- "What the freak is he doing?!"

This picture has a lot of meaning, we used to take these kind of pictures when we were bored and stuck in line at the parks, but we never got one with all 6 of us, here we succeeded

Alyssa and I in our Aladin puffy pants

Katie and I

Kendall and I

Kristy and I

The Llama refused to let me get close to it

Kendall photo-bombing the Llama

Alyssa not liking the Llama, she was sure it was going to spit on her

Giving out "The Vibe", no man can resist it

The Cake

The Plethora of Sugar!!!

21 Candles baby!!

Waiting for them all to be lit

I hate when people sing Happy Birthday to me, I always feel so awkward

Am I supposed to cheer for myself when the song's over?

Big breath in...

and out...

Losing it...

Almost... and got it

Writing our stripper names on our "shot glasses", take the name of your first pet plus the name of your street... mine was Ebony 106, pretty bad but the others had some good ones

Alyssa and Mei Mei (trysten's dog)

Shot # 56

Shot #57

Shot #58

The Wet Bar

Hahaha! She didn't know this was happening, she was looking at my henna

Too much laughing!!

Kalen the Henna Expert, she incorporated a Mickey in each of our designs

I think here Kendall and I were sharing a secret moment haha

That dog loved Kristy

The only time when pugs are cute, sorry Mei Mei

Preparing for the Streak

My henna design, it turned out to be really really dark brown, here it's still young and my arm is slimy from Baby oil