The Silly Saga of an Epic Enterprise (Part--The Last...finally)

Okay, I've been having a hard time trying to figure out how to end this.  Partly because I really enjoyed it so much and don't want to stop thinking about it.  BUT here it goes.  The end.  Sunday, and the departure home.....  (deep breath).

First I woke up to the smell of Mama Crookshank making her world-famous strawberry french-toast.  SO GOOD!  It's like music to my stomach! :D

Second, sometimes when I am with Eric and Mike...we tease each other.  Relentlessly.  Like so much that sometimes people think we hate each other.  But we don't.  And it's great!  :D  This day, so many Abi-themed jokes were flying, I couldn't keep track of them.  Let me just say, it's a good thing I can laugh at myself because these boys find everything there is to laugh about, and it's hilarious! :)

Third, Sundays like these that confirm my knowledge that the Church is true.  It's just so happy and amazing!  I loved this Sunday!  I got to sit next to Mike and Eric again in Sacrament meeting (just like the old days at BYU!) and we sang and had a grand time.  Audrey gave a wonderful talk, Devin played the organ like a champion, and the talks were very insightful--focused on patience and fathers. (It was Father's Day.)

Fourth, I'm so happy I get to go to Relief Society.  Mama Crookshank couldn't go with me because she is working with the Primary children, but Eric introduced me to a wonderful Sister Donaldson, and we had a grand time!  I just love the sisterhood of the church.  It's wonderful, and I felt so loved and welcome!

Fifth, I rode a motorcycle.  Eric took me on a motorcycle.  I've never been on a motorcycle.  Was I scared?  You bet.  Did I love it?  Absolutely.  He gave me all the pointers and told me what to do...and I was anxious... and it took a while to get used to...but it was so fun!  He drove me through T-mec wine country, and it was such a sunny, warm, beautiful, happy day....I just loved it so much.  So great!

Sixth, naps on the trampoline.

Glorious.  I was on there too...but I just don't sleep like these guys!  Oh well!

Seventh, Sunday walks.  They're just as therapeutic in Cali-five-nia as they are in Idaho.  Perhaps more-so...because there are palm trees.  Which happen to be one of my favorite things. ;)  While these boys continued their beauty-sleep, I walked to this beautiful place to call my own, wonderful Daddy and wish him a happy Father's Day.

I sat there and had a nice visit with him.  It was wonderful.  And I love that man.  Some other sights I saw were these:

>sigh< Beautiful....

Eighth, as I said, Mike and Eric are ridiculous.  And they make fun of me.  Which doesn't exactly bode well for serious dinner-time conversation.  Needless to say, we visited for a while, but those to boys just would not hold still! (I, of course, was a little saint. ;)  )  Anyways, after a while of trying to keep order, Papa Crookshank excused us, the college kids, from the dinner table because we couldn't pay attention.  We disrupted everything.  How embarrassing! ;)  Haha  

Ninth, the whole family went on a walk later to a grassy field where we all played catch (with a football, frisbee, and racquetball...at the same time).  We were so silly, and it was loads of fun!  We also played crack-the-whip, and then I started a grueling game of "No Bones."  Can I just say...greatest game ever invented.  The end.

The rest of the night was filled with Bang!, Father's Day gifts, The Man from Snowy River, silliness, plenty of disruption from Eric, Mike, and I, and visiting with Eric for a long time.  It was such a grand day!

. . .

The next morning, we woke up, visited, packed, wrote love-notes, hugged my Crookshank family goodbye, and left to pick up Carissa to go back to good, ole P-town.  It was a grand 10 hour drive full of visiting and joking and tons of music.  Country, because all of us like it and there would be no complaints, and we also listened to the theme-song of the trip: The Calendar by Panic!.  It's so good.  And I still listen to it at least once a day.  I'm fond of it. :] Here is a picture collage of the road home...

 We stopped in St. George on our way to eat Wendy's by the temple... ;)

So lovely!  The END.

Okay, sorry the Saga (and each post in it) was so long.  I 'pologize!

:]

The Silly Saga of an Epic Enterprise (Part 4)

Now this. This was a morning to remember.

I woke up earlier than usual, and started reading Pride and Prejudice (which was my entertainment of choice as I waited for Mike and Eric to wake up). I got ready for the day, and soon after, Mike and Eric rolled out of bed. Eric grabbed his guitar and made his way to the top of the stairs to play around. I sat there listening and reading with Ruffles (abandoned by Devin) crawling all over me. I grew up in an atmosphere of constant music, and starting the morning like this was quite wonderful.

Shortly thereafter, I folded up our blankets, and took them upstairs to put them away, and as I walked back down, I glanced over the balcony and saw one of the funniest sights my eyes have ever seen. I told you Devin was the bird-whisperer, right? Wellllll, I looked down the stairs and saw him practicing hymns for Sacrament Meeting. There he sat, astride an organ bench, playing away with the expertise of a champion. And then I noticed that his right foot was at a rather odd angle. As he played, he was holding it out to the side, and there, perched on his toes, sat Ruffly-Bird just as content as could be. It made my morning. :)

This was the day Bryce, Hillary, and Carissa were to join us at the beach for some sand, sun, and surfing lessons. However, they’d had a very late night at Disneyland, and they were wiped. And not ready yet. But they needed to be. Because we needed to go to the beach. ;) Therefore, Eric, Mike, and I took it upon ourselves, naturally, to get them up and running. We jumped into Roger, and drove over to Bryce’s. We snuck into his house (I won’t tell you how because its a secret), and right as we were slipping silently up the stairs (Mike and Eric were to jump on Bryce, and I was to go wake Hillary and Carissa), lo and behold, Bryce comes around the corner, and stops us in our tracks. He had evidently just woken up, and had (in his groggy, yet sensible mind) found the sense to stop our brilliant plan before we could even begin to carry it out. Blast! :]

Well, we made sure that they were all completely roused from their beauty sleep before we left them with instructions: don’t bother showering, get in your swim-suits, eat breakfast, and high-tail it over to Eric’s. Simple plan. Or so we thought...

Well, we headed back to Eric’s abode. As we knew would happen, we were all dressed in our beach-stuffs, and packed everything we would need for the day long before the other three had, so we sat down on the couch to finish The Road to Eldorado. We did...and they still weren’t ready. So we went outside and wasted time...

....and they still weren’t ready... Little did we know, they were putting together a full-blown dinner for us to have later that evening. (Thanks guys!) Well, we eventually left--Mike, Eric, and I in Roger, and Bryce driving everyone else in the Tahoe because we had to have room for the surfboards. Yippee!

Off we went to San Elijo! We were headed for another day at the beach!....another (unexpectedly) SUNNY day at the beach! Eric has changed me forever...well, he’s changed my style of driving forever. When he isn’t on the freeway, he drives around with all the windows down and his music playing. :) It’s the best way to enjoy the warm weather. This day, instead of his normal Anberlin or whatever he listens to, he put in his beach music. That’s right. We listened to Jack Johnson the whole way there. :]

There’s nothing quite like a sunny, happy, warm, fun, fantastic day at the beach with all your best friends (except for Ali. We missed her a lot.) We played in the waves, and boogie-boarded like crazy people.

Bryce and Mike made an arch.

Hillary, Bryce, and I made a moat. Aaaaand all o’ us (but mostly Eric and Mike) made a pyramid that rocked.

So much so that people would stop and take pictures of it all day...

Eric’s goal for the day? To teach us all how to surf. Accomplished? Well, I know how to, but the ability is lacking. Mike tried...

and is not defeated yet. He’ll get the hang of it someday. As for me, I lack the coordination and strength needed. I am determined, though. I will try it someday, and I’m almost completely determined to ace Eric’s face with my skill. That’ll prolly take at least a semester of BYU-Hawaii to accomplish, though. But hey! I wouldn’t mind! :D

Eric decided to surf for a while by himself,

and there were enough boogie-boards for the rest of us, so we spent a lot of time riding the waves and avoiding the abundance of seaweed together. There was so much, and it made our experience rather comical!

We tried water-bending the waves to do what we wanted (none of us have sufficiently mastered that art...yet)...

We were silly as could be. Later, Bryce left to take pictures, and Eric finished surfing to join us. He taught us one of his family traditions. When a good wave is coming, he and his cousins (Jaden and Brendan) shout to each other, “Take it Gandalf! You must take it!!!” Hahaha! It cracks me up to think of those fantastic boys, and the phrase makes me grin as I type this. Pretty soon, we were yelling it at each other, and it was grand! :)

PARTY WAVE!

The day was finally ending,

and the water was getting cold, so we rode a few more waves, laughed a lot more, and left the water to clean up, and watch the sun set. Most of the time it was behind the clouds, but when it came out it was absolutely lovely.

We packed up and left to visit my fabulous Chumbley family where we visited with the whole clan, sat around a warm fire, ate both organic and inorganic hot-dogs with J-Dawgs Sauce (the only way to eat them), laughed, visited, skewered more water-bottles, quoted movies, and thoroughly enjoyed this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

>sigh< It was such a wonderful evening, and I couldn’t love all of those people any more. It’s just not possible. Mama Chumbley has a “Do not watch TV” sign that cracked me up!

Alas! The night had to end (very late), and we regretfully went our separate ways once more....

It has now come time to tell you just how muchI love these people. And after I’ve told you, you still won’t be able to fully understand. They are absolutely wonderful. Someday, I will write about the practically-sealed FHE family of Fall 2010. Let me just tell you that I love them so much. All of them. They are each such beautiful, strong, loving, kind, wonderful, talented, amazing people. They have made my college experience the best it could have ever been. I have never been that close to a bunch of people I wasn’t related to. I love them so much, and if you ever meet them, treat them well because they are fabulous. These are the people that have made goodbyes (even temporary ones) almost unbearable to me. I miss them so much when they are gone. Eric can attest (Mike was asleep) to this. As soon as we got in the car and headed off, I missed my Alissa Fred like crazy. I just love them all too much, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Oh well! :)

The Silly Saga of an Epic Enterprise (Part 3)

(Continued from previous post...)  :]

The next, wonderful day, I awoke to a foggy morning and a report that it was supposed to be cloudy/slightly rainy at the beach--which was our plan that day while Bryce, Hills, and Carissa went to Disneyland.  I had been hoping for a sunny day because I had never been to the beach when the sun was out.  Still, I was not to be discouraged!  We were going to the beach, and it was going to be wonderful!  Haha!

We got all ready, and drove to Escondido (we were happy we could find it!) to get my beloved roommate Alissa Fred-Anne.  She's so wonderful!  We barged into her home, and visited for a little while with Ali and Mom (her mom, this time.  I have a lot of parents :)  ) before kidnapping her and taking her to Oceanside Beach.  Guess what we saw when we got there.

SUNSHIIIIIIIIIINNNNNE!!!!!!

Sooooooo much sunshine!!!! :)

If it had been possible, I would have been even more excited to be at the beach! :D Due to the amount of glorious, heavenly sunshine, we slathered ourselves silly with sunscreen, and while waiting for it to dry, Alissa Fred and I painted our nails with Del Sol color-changing polish.  It's wonderful!  My clear polish changed bright red in the sunshine, and I loved it!  Oceanside is a wonderful place to just swim and play in the waves, so we spent hours swimming, dodging waves, and body-surfing.  Eric brought a couple of boogie-boards, and Mike and I learned how to use them.

Yeah.  They're champions. :)

I'll be honest, I struggled with the boogie-board.  A lot.  I live 14 hours away from the nearest beach, and it takes me a while to get used to it.  I did figure it out, though, after a long time of trying, and I found it to be rather fun.  After a long while playing in the splendid water, we went to bask in the glorious sun, visit (Mike fell asleep...again....), and be warm.  It was soooooo warm there!  Eric tried to teach me to play catch with my left hand.  I've never struggled so hard in my life!  Re-learning to throw a football was hard enough, but left handed?!?  That's just ridiculous!  :)

This girl.  She's amazing. :]

After spending hour upon wonderful hour at the beach, we decided to leave and find food.

Mike and Ali modeling our beach stuffs.  Mike truly was blue! :)

We went to a little Mexican restaurant there called Colima's.  It was so good!  Eric, Mike, and I got California Burritos and they were GINORMOUS!  People walking down the street would double take at the size of them, and we could hear people talking about them...and us....awkward.... ;)  Hahaha

Afterwards, we headed to....someplace....I don't know where it is.  Prolly because it's a secret.  Anyways, we went to a place where we could actually get a fire pit.  Mike and Eric, being the men that they are, chopped wood with the hammer (weird, right?) and built the most sufficient fire I have ever seen.  

And then we roasted marshmallows!   And put them on the only thing we had....OREOS!!!  So good! Try it!  I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before!

We had so much fun visiting and being silly.  Ali was the brilliant person who led us to this place.  Brilliant, I tell you!  She planned it so well that when the sun went down, this was our view...

(Sorry it's blurry…)

The beautiful San Diego skyline.  It was wonderful!  We stayed there for a long, fantastic time eating, chatting, laughing, inventing stories of kidnappings, mutilating water bottles with red-hot skewers...

...and burning gasoline.  Yup.  There was a family of awesome people that needed to get rid of some water-tainted gas, and they asked if they could use our fire.  It was the biggest, awesomest fire ever, and they were such funny people!

Ali was oh so correct when she said I would be wiped out after a day at the beach.  Eric and I visited all the way home while Mike slept, but when we arrived and sat down to watch The Road to Eldorado, I couldn't keep my eyes open.  I was so wonderfully, delightfully, sublimely exhausted.  Besides....I had to be ready to do it all over again the next day...

:]

Tall Tales

So today I was polishing splash (which takes a veeeeeeryyyy loooooonnnng time), and I had plenty of time to contemplate....

I remember going to a fireside for youth once where an almost-taller-than-me lady spoke.  She told of her many adventures and awkward moments that had occurred because of her height.  There was the time a man in Texas yelled at her across a very busy street to ask her what in the world her parents fed her.  Of course she told the story of buying her very first pair of high heels, and she couldn't leave out the time she went to Japan and was asked to take pictures with lots of enthusiastic and short Japanese people.  Then she told the story I remembered best.

She told about walking into a building when she was in college.  She was wearing a pair of her favorite, four-inch heels.  A man held the door open for her, and asked her (as I get asked many times):

"Why in the world do you wear those?"

"Because it makes me feel feminine," she confidently replied.

"How can you feel feminine when you're taller than everything masculine???" he asked incredulously.

A very good question, my friends, a very good question indeed....

One of Daddy's favorite ways to introduce me is this: "Half of my children are taller than me, and one of them's a GIRL!"  Hehehe!  To be honest, I don't know where this height came from.  I'm taller than my parents, and all four of my grandparents, and I'm pretty sure I'm taller than all of my great grandparents were.  I've been taller than all of my teachers since second grade.  Luckily, I was blessed with two brothers, a big-big one and a big-little one, who can give me a little perspective.  I have a few friends who help with this as well (Michael Alan, I threw that one in for you ;)  ).  As long as I am shorter than them, I am okay, right?

Well, the fact of the matter is...it doesn't matter.  It all comes down to what Ma always told me: "At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is what you think and what God thinks."  That's all.  Me--I've learned to like myself and my height.  It makes for some interesting, if awkward, conversation.  It keeps me laughing all the day because of the funny situations it presents.  Yes, and though I have grown to enjoy it, it still causes me grief somedays--but it's nothing I can't handle...usually...  As for the Lord, I'm still working on that.  It's a process, you know, and it's going to take my whole life to get there!

Now my only worry is a conversation I had with Dad at work today.
I'm going to have to find myself a real, manly man someday.  If my height doesn't make me un-feminine, maybe all the skills and such Dad is teaching me will.........  BUT I doubt it! :)

Fabulous Freesomes!!! ....

Okay, I KNOW it's supposed to be "threesomes," but what isn't better with an alliteration?  Hmmmm??? (Juuuuust kidding... ) ;)

BUT it's true!  I've been blessed my whole life long to belong to some of the awesomest, coolest, and, dare I say, best looking threesomes that have ever existed in the history of this galaxy.  Honest!

It started in second grade with Elizabeth and Julianne, continued in fifth grade with Cynthia and Morgan....then in high school, I became a part of the group called....

Hawkeye, Guster, and the Kid in the Candy Shop.

TAH-DAH!  Hahaha!  Funny story about this picture...but it was (surprisingly) the only one I have of our manifold adventures.  That would be Me, Lis Lucy, and Emilie Susanne.  They're GREAT!  I love these girls to the sky and back.  They have been grrrreeeeeaaaatt buds with me, and I'm a big fan of their beauteous selves!  We have ransomed the world (which is precisely what is depicted in this photograph).  Our legendary adventures have been the stuff of legend in the metropolis of Declo.  No one that has ever met the three of us will ever forget us. :) This next picture pretty much sums up the three of us together:

Complete with kisses.  Yup.  That's us in a nutshell!  Hehehe :]

The next one started at the beginning of my freshman year at BYU.  It is the union of The Queen, Love, and Yusuf Mohammed:

Actually, we are the girls of apartment 133, Me, Alissa Fred, and Marie Morgan.  And we only used our aliases once.  Still, we had many epic adventures as we spent this year as roommates.  I think we went to bed before 2:30 a total of....four times during the past school year.  We just loved to stay up and have tea time and share stories of life and liberty...but mostly the pursuit of happiness.  :)  I was truly blessed beyond belief with these beautiful, wonderful girls, and I love and miss them VERY much.  Like, more than I can say (even though we've only been apart for...not even 2 weeks).  I'm ridonkulous....

Another epic threesome that happened this last semester is that of...the wonderful, practically-sealed custodial workers at the ASB:

My absolutely dashing brothers, Eric William Thomas Henry Floyd Archimedes Mordecai, Miiiiiiiiiiiiichael ALAN, and I had some epic adventures as we worked.  (Duster sword-fights, anyone?)  We were pretty much the life of the crew.  They are part of my wonderful practically-sealed FHE family of which I will tell more (toooons more) later.  I was at their apartment during last semester all the day long.  Needless to say, I love them.  We grew to be practically the same...which is why we're all wearing green in that picture...and all of us are raising our right eyebrows....yeeeeaaahhh. :)  Mike got both Eric and I hired there, and I can't possibly thank him enough!  That job was by far the smartest decision I made during Winter 2011.  Jus' sayin'...

Another of my favorite threesomes actually started at birth...well....Tyler's birth, anyways.  We have always been close, but the three of us didn't actually become (figuratively) welded together until this last year while we all were at BYU together.

Thomas Olaf, me, and Tyler Dan.  These boys are my cousins, and a girl has never been so lucky to be related to two such wonderful/handsome/smart/sweet boys as these!  We were all born within five months, and we have loved talking about life, school, family, blessings, problems, girls/boys, everything with each other.  I have many memories of hunting for crawdads, teasing, wrestling, playing games, breaking rules, visiting, and much much more with them.  They are two of my best friends, and even though my boys are leaving me for 2 years missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (one in Guam, the other in Panama) you can bet we will be writing back and forth.  I'm glad to have these boys because our adventures will last into the eternities!  I'm so excited! :)

The last threesome is the one for this summer.  It, too, started at birth, but only this summer will it be a threesome, and an epic one at that.  Here are the key players:

Okay, I know it's a dreadful picture.  I look a mess, and Max is half out of the picture, but this is Max, me, and Madi--the great!  We are the youngest three in a family of six, and we are all that's left of my parents' ponderous posterity (See?  Alliterations are alluring...okay, i'll stop now.)  Haha!  I love these two to death, and we are together for the summer to make some awesome memories, and I'm excited to spend some more time with them!  I'll give you updates from here on out because the summer hasn't started yet, and there are epic adventures to be had!  Now off and away YOU go!  Go make some of your own!  All the day long... :)