Literally Losing Your Buttocks

I feel I should be concerned that this person is on facebook instead of in the ER.

What it Means When You Say Literally



Haha...and then while I was trying to represent "Literally LMFAO" I found out that it's this thing with "I'm sexy and I know it"
And I am happily in ignorant bliss.

Not Not Crush

John confessed something to me the other day.

"Quick! What is the actress's name who plays the reporter in the Hope?" (he means The Help)

"Emma Stone" (saved by Elise)

"Thank you! I certainly do not not have a crush on her."

Me to Amanda: "What a jerk I married! Boo!!" (teasingly, of course)

"Well I do not not have a crush on Hugh Jackman."

(I wish I had an iPhone)

Success!

It's about time!
Thank you witty, amiable skank!
                 (only because of the hilarious though inappropriate Easy A. It's actually a compliment.)

Merry Holidays 2011

People Apparently Deserve Hate and Loathing

I didn't think it was possible for someone to totally and completely misunderstand something as simple as universal love.
Whoops. My bad.

I'm not going to go into the rest of what this dear friend of mine negates.
Right now I'm just blown away that someone could so adamantly believe this!
"There is no way all people deserve love and respect"?
Really?
REALLY?
Augh.
I do love this friend, despite the fact that he has gotten logic completely baffled.
But there are definite reasons I no longer have deep conversations with him.

For context, these are my comments:
"Whether something is wrong or not is not what's important. That's a personal decision of what you value as truth. Regardless of your personal definitions of "right" and "wrong" ALL people deserve love and acceptance. (That includes those who think something is wrong that you believe is right)"
on this article:

I'm Christian, unless you're gay

After his comment, I'm in no mood to accept arguments on the article. I thought it was nearly flawless. Just shut up if you disagree. Argue with someone else.

P.S. Some uplifting would be nice.

Procrationalize

Deciding that our school system is counter-productive to true education was a very bad move for me.
I already know how to successfully and happily procrastinate. I really did not need to perfect the art of rationalization to go along with it.
Deciding that as long as I don't fail my classes (meaning I'd have to pay the government back lots of moolah) and as long as I felt I learned something, my grades don't matter to me...that was a very bad move.

So here I sit, lovingly working on homework, then I realize I completely forgot about a huge part of the portfolio due tomorrow.

And I don't care.

But I should.

But I don't.

Also, I hope that getting into the English program will give me a little ego popping. Yes, I said I hope my ego pops. But hey, I'd like to see you not have a fat head when every time you turn in your first draft written at 10pm the night before it was due you get an shining bright A.
Yes. Every time.
I think the last time I got anything less than glowing remarks on something like that was in High School.
My first year in High School.

(that teacher and I didn't get along)

It's ridiculous. When I can pull off an A with my eyes closed and without really caring much about the assignment, and with avoiding every possible bit of work...

Yep. I am way too full of myself.

So, once again, I am hoping that being an English major in English major classes will change that. Then I can be on the same plane as people who also get A's without trying. Because that means I'll actually have to try.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Or maybe it will just make the perfectionist in me go on overload and I will explode.

That would also be nice, I think. 

Pictures

I love taking pictures. I always have. I once thought about being a photographer, but then I couldn't fit the class into my schedule so I forgot about it, then I looked at real photographers' pictures and I realized I had absolutely no talent.

Then I married John.


This is Angelo:

He's John's step-dad. He is brilliant.

He may not be the best photographer, and he certainly doesn't get paid for it (though that's more personal choice than anything else), but he knows cameras and he knows sights. He's funny because he takes pictures most people won't think of, and some people don't like. He's a candid, behind-the scenes kind of guy:

This is actually one of my favorites from the wedding

He's given a camera to pretty much everyone in the family.
Let me rephrase that.
He has willingly permanently loaned all of his personal favorite cameras to everyone who has asked him for a camera to borrow for just a short while.
(we'll ignore the fact that he likely does this just so he can buy the newest best thing)


I, as it turns out, am no exception.
First, I sent out weekly family letters. Eventually pictures got mixed in. Eventually Angelo told me about some that he adored:

The food he liked because he loves taking pictures of food and Carol doesn't get it. I take waaay too many pictures of our meals. I tried stopping unless I had a real reason to want a picture. I've gotten better. Usually.

But Alma with his Jenga house? Sure it's a nice enough picture but there's nothing special about it. But both Angelo and my own hubby told me it was a great picture and that they love it. Hm.

Angelo told me I have a great eye. Well, ever since John got me a camera to document our life with I've worked on getting shots I like better, but I didn't know what a good eye meant. I still don't.

I was working for Angelo, selling camera stuff on eBay, and my family had our Reunion, so I borrowed the "work camera" for the week. He told me I could/should whenever I wanted to, but it's his expensive piece of equipment so I didn't want to cart it around all the time...but the family reunion was worth it.

And I came up with this:

These are pictures I can't get enough of. Especially the one with Ella and Michael on the frogs at the pool. That may be my favorite picture that I've ever taken. This last one with Ella on the lawn, too.

After the reunion I prepared to give Angelo back his prized possession. Except by then he'd bought a new and better prized possession and decided that I should keep this camera as long as I took lots of family photos.
I have taken lots of family photos.

However, I want to share more of my favorite pictures as my favorite pictures. I snap shots primarily to document my life, so I share shots to show that documentation. On occasion I'll share an obviously blurry picture because I love the moment it captured, even if my capturing of it wasn't excellent. So on occasion I'd like to share pictures because of the capturing as well as the moment.

Now, I have to warn you that I adore my nieces and nephews. So on occasion my obsession with them might cloud my view of what I really like about the photograph. Also, I may like something others may not see. But that's why this is my blog and I get to do what I want. :)

How to Bake a Pumpkin

 Start with a pumpkin. (If you want to)

Then give a crazy man a big knife.

Then tell him to be good or else.

Slice the cute little pumpkin in two.

Scrape out all the guts and seeds and give them to Brin so she can make amazing bread.

 Water them pumpkin so it can grow.

Bake the little bums.

Smooch the crazy guy (VITAL step!)

Dance with a puppy. (also vital)

Get pumpkin goo all over your fingers.

More, private! MORE! I said ALL over your fingers!

And then promptly forget all about taking pictures because your hands got gooey.


=D

Um, if you really want to know, google it. That's what I did.

Michele's Letters

My sister-in-law Michele writes the family every week. I love love love her letters/emails. John's and my letters started in Mexico because his Dad requested them (he wanted us to write every day, actually. Hahahahahahaha), but when we got back I started them up again largely because of Michele's letters. Her style and my style are different, which in part saddens me because I want to write letters like her but it wouldn't be natural, but it works out in the end because they really should sound like me since they're about my (and John's) life. 

Michele's letters are loving, nostalgic, and funny and they show that she is everything a good mother should be. I mean a real good mother, not a modern mother who crafts every thing in sight and takes her kids to every possible extra-curricular. Not that doing that makes you a bad mother, just that doing that doesn't make you a good mother. 

Anyway, Michele's weekly letters boost my spirits and just make me happy.
Her pictures also make me happy. This one I couldn't get enough of, especially if you know Katherine.

Junioritis

I was sick for a week (still getting over it) so I stopped caring about school.
Oh, except that I stopped caring about school about a month in. Ugh.

I was supposed to be all excited for school. I tried.
Fail.

Now I just hope that my grades sing a different tune.
Hope hope hope hope hooooooooope.

Okay, so I'm really not that scared about my grades. Perhaps that is just my lack of caring...but I'm pretty sure I'm okay. Blah.

School is silly. I feel like I'm learning a ton but I'm too worried about my grades to keep learning so I I just get apathetic until I remember the consequences of failure so I stress and still totally forget about learning anything... The school system should get an F, not me.
A whole GPA worth of Fs.

But there's always the pressure that I am worth nothing if I don't graduate.
Lalala everything is gonna be alright. Oh yeah.

Grateful a Day: Baking

Today I am grateful for my ability to bake. 

I may be too picky to experiment and cook real food, 

but I thoroughly enjoy making goodies. 

I especially love baking goodies for others, with reason.

Just sayin'

This is spurred because I went to a pumpkin patch today. I can write more about that later. The point is, I LOVE baking. I love baking cookies. I love baking bread. I love baking pretty much anything.
But, I'm not all that good at cooking. This comes three-fold:

• Growing up, my experience in the kitchen was pretty much tied to the goodies...by my own choice. So I don't have a lot of background with making real food. 
• I am good at following recipes. I don't understand the science of baking well enough to change things up.
• I am quite the picky eater. This means I don't like certain things in my food...which makes me want to change things up. 

So, though I can usually succeed in making dinner and stuff, I have no idea where to go to be better. If it were up to me, John and I would eat microwaved frozen burritos every night. Or maybe toast. But that's kind of disgusting, no matter what it is.
Real food is hard. It takes preparation, motivation, time. It also takes the ability to remember that food needs to be taken care of. That part is especially hard. Why do we have to eat so dang often? Every day? Really? Didn't I just make dinner?

At the same time, I still enjoy cooking real food. I'm just not as good as I want to be because I want variety.

Grateful A Day: Reading

A grateful a day keeps the grumpies away.
Or something like that.
In any case, I am posting one thing I'm grateful for on each day until Thanksgiving. I should probably do this all the time...I'll think about that later.

Today I am grateful for my ability to read

and my talent to read well.

This is spurred because I am struggling in Spanish. I realized today that it is very hard for me to stop and think about what I'm reading because I'm so used to simply already understanding it. This doesn't mean concepts, but actual words and structure. I have no memories of reading something and having to go slowly so that I could figure out what the words are and how they relate to each other. Now that I'm taking a Spanish class and have things to read, sure I can skip on through the words...but I have no idea what I just read, and not because my mind was somewhere else. I have to stop and evalutate each word individually and also in relation to those around it, or even the basic direction of the sentence gets lost. It's bizzare to me.

I have always attributed the majority of my intelligence to the fact that I can read well. (I attribute others' perception of my intelligence on the fact that I've never known how to keep my hand down in classes.) Some may dispute this, but I stand by it. I love reading, and I've learned a ton with my experiences in reading many different things.

I am a Horrible Aunt.

So, on facebook earlier this week this happened:

So...this is interesting because I am also friends with this person:

And so when the first Jennifer requested my facebook friendship, I was confused. I figured it was the second Jennifer, but I was already friends with her. She is my sister-in-law's sister. She's a handful of years short of being old enough to be my mother and she's just the type of person you don't see running around making multiple facebook pages -- or even spending all that much time on the one she already has. So the back of my mind was confused, but I overlooked it. Especially that cute but cheesy picture of the wolves.

Then this happened:

Which is weird because this was into the ""Lynn Nelson Family" group, defined as:

Lynn is my Daddy.
So my brother adding my sister-in-law's sister made no sense.

Then it hit me.

...

But it's okay. I just never refer to my darling Jenny Ann as "Jennifer Christensen."
That's awkward.
So it's natural that that combination would not make me realize that my Jenny Ann got a facebook account the day she turned 13.

Also it's okay, because John said that when he saw

He thought of

Whose name is not nor ever has been "Jennifer." (at least we're pretty sure)

Have You Ever Been to Mexico?

Anti-bacterial

I am sitting in class.
I am blogging from an iPod.
I am blogging about a "pocket-bac" hand sanitizer.

courtesy

I was early for class, so I sat outside. I was bored. How did I entertain myself?

Did you know that if you turn a small plastic bottle around and around that a small bubble forms and attaches and detaches from the main bubble?
It made me happy.

The bubble is now squished out.

The end.

Zzzzzumba

I enjoy dancing. I am uber jealous of all those lovely ladies that grew up dancing. You're dead lucky, ya'll. (Not that I'm going to kill you from jealousy. That would be breaking a commandment...or two)

Instead of growing up dancing, I grew up believing that dancing was bad. I was never taught this, I just never got to and that had to mean it was bad? I still don't understand my younger self.

Anyhow, then I grew up (a little) and I decided that dancing was far from bad, I could dance, and I loved to dance. But lack of 15+ years of already knowing all this had prevented me from logically pursuing that dream much further.

I still try.

When signing up for classes, I wanted to take a dance class. Unfortunately none of them worked for my schedule. This made me quite sad.

So, instead, I decided to give Zumba a try. It wasn't all that appealing to me, but everyone is raving about it. Usually that's why things aren't appealing to me. But that's beside the point.

I don't like Zumba.
I understand that it is much better than aerobics or whatever, in that it gives you more of a workout and it's more fun. That's fine and dandy, but I don't like aerobics either.

I don't like exercise for the point of exercise. This is one of the many reasons I am not model material. I don't enjoy exercise. I'd much rather be doing something fun.

I do enjoy running, but NOT because it is exercise. I enjoy it because I enjoy seeing the world around me, I like the chance to think, and I'm good at it. (Therefore, I a treadmill would never be used in our house.) But since I am so out of shape, running is not currently fun for me.

So I want to dance. Dancing is fun, and I get to learn and grow.

Zumba is just work. I'm done after about ten minutes. Unfortunately the class is an hour long. Ah well.

Breather for Thoughts

So...school has completely overwhelmed me. I don't even know where to start to explain that. So I won't.

However, school has also given me tons of things to think about. At least an average of once a day I come up with some completely brilliant idea that I really want to share with the world through this, my creative outlet/aka blog. But whenever I'm near the computer and remember these things, I have to think about all the homework I'm behind on, or soon to be behind on. So I can't blog. Instead, I procrastinate.

How does that make sense? It shouldn't, but it does to me. Because blogging takes at least a half hour, usually more like 3 or 4 hours, though occasionally 2 or 3 minutes. Surfing the net, video games, and other simple, non-committal time wasters take "10 or 15 minutes" and are therefore justifiable temporary stress releases. Hahaha...so we won't talk about how those "10 or 15 minutes" are the real reason I'm overwhelmed with school.

Anyhow, I just wanted to get on here and mention a few thoughts that have come lately. Hopefully someday I can find the time, energy, and lack of complete laziness to elaborate. But for now I want to at least get my thoughts out.

1) I love love love my husband. I never tell anyone that enough. I think he's the most wonderful man on the planet and I feel overwhelmingly blessed to have married him. He's given me everything a girl could want and we have a relationship that is better than even I imagined marriage would be.

2) Despite my many shortcomings, I love being me. I am of great worth and I do have a lot to offer this world and especially those around me. I may not be talented or committed or driven the same way others are, but I am very valuable. The way I wish to live my life is not something to be looked down on.

3) I am a dang good friend. I may not have always thought that, and I definitely didn't think that others agreed with that, but I'm realizing that it is true. I know I can be awkward to meet sometimes and I'm not smooth at starting friendships, but once you mean something to me you're part of my life forever, and I'm not going to let that slide. I make the effort to spend time with people, or at the very least keep up with their lives. Not everyone can keep track of everyone, but I manage it, and that's something to be happy about.

4) I have a fairy tale life. Get married, go off and do awesome things, still have a social life, hubs gets a great and very secure job, buy an enormous house, become a cute housewife, be prepared (enough) for children when the time comes...I am ridiculously blessed.

5) I'm still a talented writer and a critical thinker. Don't judge my blog too harshly; this is me being very casual. I'm intelligent and I'm good at expressing my many opinions in the right context. I love feeling accomplished when I've written a good paper or when I'm learning a lot in a class.

6) I love my religion. It simply cannot not be true. I love how complex and yet incredibly simple it is, all at once. I love how much I can learn and understand and grow in the gospel; yet the most growth comes from the simple things I've been taught to do since I was old enough to talk.

7) This won't make any sense, but:
I love how I handle stress. I simply don't. Stress doesn't allow me to work; it forces me to crumble and be incapable of handling anything related to the cause of stress. So I don't stress. I find ways around stressing. I start to stress and I have to force myself to take a breather. There's no way stress is the answer, so I don't allow myself to deal with it. The things that I love never cause me real stress. Not only that, but when I do stress and then take a breather so I can function, life is so much more beautiful. I can thoroughly revel in the things that bring me joy.

Um...that's it for now. :)

OK Stick Man

:)

Random PRTSC

Sometimes, I take a screen shot
(you have a little button that says "PRTSC")
because my life is hilarious.
      ...and my life exists on the computer?


Of course I save the hilarious bits, but they're only so hilarious if I don't share them.
So I am going to share
Because they are hilarious.

Crime Scene Hot Shoe

Am I the only one who thinks this picture looks like it was taken straight from a crime scene?

Facebook Anniversary Reminder

Thank you, Facebook. I had no idea.

John Smack Brin

I swear, officer, I just ran into a firewall!

Volatile Savings

Disclaimer: 

I have never been to a crime scene.

I know when my Anniversary is.

John does not beat me.                                                   (physically or at games :P)

We are fairly smart with our finances. 

The Sing-Off

Woot!

BYU's Vocal Point competing in 'The Sing Off' show

The most awesome, coolest beat boxer ever and BYU's Vocal Point's percussionist

is totally John's best friend

(besides me)

that dude

And we get to watch him in this show at his house next Monday for the 3rd Season Premiere! 

(we're watching it at his house. the show isn't at his house)

FB This Day in 2010: Best Hubby

Perhaps it was true that day...

But it's true every day!

Dull Family Moments

Every month on the first Sunday we Nelsons have a "Family Chat."

I love the idea of having this time to talk with all my family, getting caught up with more than just the "weekly" letters only a couple of us send out. It's different to have a conversation, even electronically, instead of just a general "here ya go" of lives.

Unfortunately, our chats are not as successful as I envision. This has led to much discussion between John and I as to what could fix that. I'm not here to go on and on about solutions or vent about problems. 

I'm here because I think I'm hilarious, and I think my family's reactions are even more hilarious.

Yup. Nothing.

Ah. There we go.