The Universe is generous and kind and good

This morning I was thinking that maybe I used up all my good karma to pull through on the bar.  Then I called the Gap store again (despite the fact that I called them five times last night until they pretty much asked me to leave them alone), and sure enough, they have my phone.  Bless you Universe, bless you Karma, bless you phone.  I'm back in happy mode.

Karma is broken

I am so angry right now guys and I'll tell you why:  I lost my brand new phone.  At the Gap.  I'm pretty sure.  But its the Gap at Park City which is an hour away and I have called them and called my phone (which I know for a fact was on with the ringer on full volume when I lost it) and they say that they can't find it.  Its not in my car, its not lost in the depths of my purse, its not in a pocket.  I was talking to my mother on it while browsing racks of clothes, then when she took another call, I kept my phone out and waited for her to call me back.  She called me back while I was in the dressing room changing, and I know I set my phone down on the bench afterwards.  That is where it has to be.  Or have been unless somebody took off with it. 

And right now I feel like a total moron.  Because I don't do this.  I am not normally a really flighty person about this kind of thing - locking keys in the car or forgetting backpacks/wallets/computers at home (sorry Jess, I'm not criticizing, I'm just sayin').  Although I have left my purse with my passport in an airport bathroom once and freaked out about it and had to hunt it down with the airport police after somebody took it to an airline counter.  But still, that was an isolated incident and I've been fastidious about this kind of thing ever since then. 

But what really gets me, is that in the last week I had a friend misplace her phone and another friend dropped his phone in the toilet.  Since they were both on Sprint and I just switched to Verizon, I offered my old Sprint phone to them as a replacement.  Because hey, I wasn't going to use it and it was a really nice phone.  And I'm a pretty nice person, you know?  So the way I see it, if karma really exists, the Universe owes me a phone, right?  Grrrrrrr...

Results are in ...

And we both PASSED the California Bar Exam!!! 

Some like it hot

This blog post is not about the movie "Some Like It Hot," (although that title does have something to do with the story I am about to share) but if you have not seen the movie, then I am devastated.  And you are missing out on the funniest movie of all time.  Marilyn Monroe with Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis dressed in drag.  You will be in tears.  Promise.  Although be forewarned that Ms. Monroe's wardrobe is quite scandalous.

No, this post is about how last night I did something dumb.  I entered a chili cook-off here in Farmington.  I don't even like chili.  But it was for a church tailgating party and at the time I signed up the event director seemed pretty desperate, so I figured, "what the hey?", and wrote my name down.  Then I went home and googled "chili recipe" and got almost nine million hits.  Yikes.  I went with the first chili recipe that sounded interesting to me, a non chili eater.  It was for Maui Chili and called for pineapple and chicken.  It even has its own website.  (I only made 1/4 of the recipe and omitted the beer, for fairly obvious reasons.  Namely - church cook-off and the fact that I don't drink or buy beer in the first place.  I don't care if the alcohol "cooks off," because I still have my suspicions that that is a myth.  Paul suggested non-alcoholic beer.  I still said no.)   

It looked like chili.  It smelled like chili.  And when I tasted it, it tasted like chili.  Until the jalapeno peppers and cayenne pepper kicked in.  Then I couldn't taste anything.  Since I have never cooked with these two ingredients, I think I underestimated their potency and used a little bit too generous of a hand.  I panicked and tried to cool down the spicy-ness of my batch of chili with sour cream.  Then with an extra can of diced tomatoes.  Then with extra cornmeal thickening.  Nothing worked.  I don't think it tasted bad, but then, I am not a chili eater.  In fact, I kind of liked the pineapple and chicken part, but the tomatoes and beans burned baby.  It was mortifying.

At that point there was nothing I could do, so I talked my parents into taking two cars and made my mother carry the chili in, hoping that whoever was setting up the contest would assume she had made it, not me.  She had tasted it too though, and knew of its spicy-ness, so when I showed up I found out that she had made sure that I would get credit.  Turns out my chili was the first in line for judging.  I don't know how the judges could taste anything else after tasting my chili, so my guess is that the results of this particular cook-off were skewed. 

And that is how I sabotaged all the other chili contestants at a church chili cook-off.  And won first-place, not in the overall category, but for the Spiciest Chili.  That's me.  Spicy.  This is really terrible photo, but we only had our phones thinking that there would be no way we wanted to document this funny little get together.  Everybody was told to wear their school apparel, so that is why I am wearing my BYU Law sweatshirt.  Paul wore his U of U Law sweatshirt. 

After the awards were given (only 4 of them - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Spiciest, which is ambiguous and could mean worst, but lets not go there, and, just so you know, there were probably about 15 entries too, so don't think mine was merely a pity placing so that everybody got an award), a number of people went straight for my mouth-burner and loaded up on it.  The oldest guy (Brother Stoddard) there was in his eighties and he was super cute and came over to me to make sure he got the right chili.  I watched him eat two full bowls of it.  He saved me from complete embarassment.  Turns out there is a whole group of people who only eat chili if it has major heat.  Weird. 

One other quirk to share before I end this now rather lengthy blog post.  I also made a dessert.  And I always hold an unofficial competition at these kind of potluck type events (family reunions and such) that I don't tell anyone about where I watch to see whose dessert goes first and fastest.  Paul knows that I do this and I'm pretty sure he gets a kick out of it.  What can I say?  I was born with a competitive streak a mile wide.  Like that girl on Glee.  Its kind of a big deal to me.

Anyway, I kind of hover around the dessert table just to observe, but not conspicuous enough to draw attention.  And I don't tell anyone which dessert I made because that would be unfair to the other (unwitting) contestants.  I have a whole theory about how the winning dessert has to be different enough that it is not something that people will make for themselves, but not so unusual as to cause people not to try it.  I have to admit that the running was tight between my fruit pizza and somebody else's brownie toffee trifle.  But mine pulled out strong in the end.

Behold and salivate:

Okay, maybe three photos was a little unnecessary, but I just couldn't say no.  Paul took the photos, as usual.

All-in-all, it was a pretty interesting/weird/fun night.  But I don't think I will be entering another chili cook-off any time soon.

Coming out of retirement...

Not me, just my name tag. See, when I got home from my mission over six years ago, I brought extra nametags and gave one to each of my sisters and my mother for when they went on missions. My youngest sister Jessica got her mission call today. I pulled it out of the mailbox (it came to our parent's house) and called her immediately (as promised). She was in the library at BYU and told me that I had better not be teasing her or she would scream. I swore that I wasn't teasing and she said "Okay, I will be home in one hour. You call mother. I will call father." I said (three times), "Drive SAFELY," just to make sure she got the message.

She was so cute opening her call.  I have a photo progression to prove it:

No, she wasn't called to New Jersey.  That is a face of pure joy.  She is going to Uruguay.  Montevideo West.  Spanish speaking, of course.  I am SO excited for her.  So, so, so, SO excited for her.  And me.  Because when she finishes her mission, you KNOW I am going to go pick her up.  But mostly for her because this is a dream mission call.  She is the same sister who did study abroad in Mexico so her spanish is pretty good already.  She is pumped and has been running around the neighborhood to tell each of our neighbors.  She goes straight to the Argentina Missionary Training Center on March 11th, so she has a pretty long wait.

I'm so proud of her.  She is such a good person and will do such a good job as a missionary.  And I hope she takes my nametag with her, even though hers will be in spanish and say "Hermana Casebolt."  And I am going to miss her like crazy.

Upbeat

You know when you are driving down the interstate and see a car with its blinker on but the car never changes lanes?  And the blinker remains on for more than a minute and you think that the driver just forgot about it?  That may not necessarily be the case.  They may be listening to Enya.  Because the other day we had Enya playing in the car (e-confession - I really like Enya, so hate on haterz) and hit the blinker to merge.  The conversation went something like this:

Paul:  "Wait, do you hear that?"
Amy:  "What, ... is that really...?"
Paul:  "Yeah, it IS!"
Amy:  "It totally is!"
Paul:  "Perfect synchronization!  Wow."

We had huge moronic grins on our faces for the next couple of minutes listening to the blinker tick like a metronome in sync to Enya, never losing ground on her tempo.  As the song finished, Paul turned the blinker off and we both looked at each other with this the-planets-have-aligned kind of amazement and agreed that that was awesome.

A is for Apple

Today I went to my mother's first grade classroom and volunteered.  Paul went too.  We worked with my mother's students on their math - counting by 5's and by 10's, naming shapes, naming the days of the week, naming the months of the year, etc..  Turns out I would fail first grade because the kids had to be able to identify a rhombus, trapezoid, parallelogram, and hexagon in addition to the easy circle, triangle, and square.  I had no idea what the first two (rhombus and trapezoid) were and was admittedly a little foggy on the parallelogram although I could have figured that one out if my mother hadn't pointed to it first.  Both my mother and Paul were laughing at me over it when I expressed my confusion.  This is a rhombus (why they can't just call it a diamond, I don't know):

Anyway, Paul and I each took a student out to tables in the hallway to test them on the various topics.  After about 20 minutes of testing and rotating through students, I overheard Paul with a new student, a little girl, down the hallway.  The little girl was singing through the days of the week for him and he was struggling not to laugh.  I could tell because he was making a silent wheezing noise that is his old man laugh.  I don't think the little girl noticed because she was so focused on her song.  It was awesome and we had a great time with those kids. 

Also, today I climbed a tree - two actually.  Leaves.  Branches.  And me.  Not that I was up high or anything - they were just a couple of apple trees, but still.  When was the last time you climbed a tree?  It has been years for me.  Maybe since I fell out of one at my grandma's house in Texas when I was a kid.  Or since I ran off with my friend Jenny Wood in second grade to hide in a tree after eating half a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough while my mother was out of the room.  I'm not a very competent tree-climber and I'm certainly not as agile as I used to be.  Or maybe its just that proportionally trees are smaller now than they used to be and that makes getting good footholds and balancing on thin branches more difficult.  But gosh it felt really good to climb those trees.  Freeing and fresh.

We went down to Orem to help Paul's brother with some painting on the house he is remodeling, and I saw that his apple trees were pretty loaded down.  So I offered to pick the apples and use them since Paul's brother and sister-in-law still haven't put in their kitchen and the apples were just going to go to waste.  There is something so sad about letting all those beautiful apples rot on the tree and I just couldn't stand the thought.  Dave said "sure", so Paul brought out a ladder for me to climb up to pick the apples, but that just wasn't working - I couldn't get high enough, and a lot of the lower apples had been pecked at by birds, so I ended up balancing on the thin upper tree limbs to harvest the fruit.  Is it still a harvest when you didn't do any of the planting and nurturing? 

I ended up with two very full bags of sweet apples - maybe 15-20 pounds I'm guessing.  They made our car smell so good for the drive home and they are already making my parent's kitchen all apple-scented delicious, and they haven't even been cooked. 

Now I'm not sure what to do with them.  I have a slightly crazy inclination to try bottling apple pie filling and giving it away as Christmas gifts, but I'm super intimidated by that notion.  I've never tried anything like that and I'm not sure I really care enough.  But then, I can't often resist a challenge, can I?

Why?

One thing that really creeps me out:  when people post on their blogs about how it was their anniversary and so they sent the tots over to their parent's house and went to a hotel less than thirty minutes from their home and then they post a photo of the bed in the hotel room.  That's it.

** Just so ya' know, I have nothing against hotel room photos when they are included in a travel blog post simply to show where you stayed.  In fact, I have probably done this myself and I am pretty sure I have chosen a hotel based on somebody else's blog post recommending it.  The aforementioned creepy posts have the sole, not-so-subtle "you know what happened here" quality to them that gives me the heebie jeebies.