Carry Me

My favorite sounds tonight.

Olde Tyme

If you ever lived in Utah as a kid, I am certain you went to Lagoon at least once a summer. And I am also certain that you remember the black and white photo shop in Pioneer Village where you could get your picture taken as a 19th century saloon girl or gunfighter. And I am willing to bet that most of your parents were not willing to pay whatever ridiculous amount of money they charged at said shop to get such a photo. Am I right?

So when Emily came out to Colorado Springs and we walked by such a place in our touristy wanderings, the 12 year old me was just bursting to do it. It turned out that 12 year old Em was pretty easy to convince as well and next thing you knew this happened:



I'm thinking I ought to crop that cleavage, make it my Facebook profile photo and see what if it has any effect on my relationship status.

But don't worry, after we satisfied our inner 12 year olds, we let our inner Olympians out as well.




Sonic drinks are very, very important staples of our training you see.

25

Coming home to Utah is always such a blur. We stay up late, I never manage to see everyone no matter how much running around I do, I drink a truly disturbing amount of Diet Dr. Pepper and then suddenly it's over and I am exhausted and happy and just a little bit dazed.

This trip has been really fun. My sister came to Colorado Springs on Friday to help me put my apartment together and keep me company on the loooong drive home (but oh! to live within driving distance of the family!). It's been just about a week I almost have Morgan convinced that I really am a member of the family.

One of the best parts of being here though has been the social overload. Remember that I totally love my new job and I'm enjoying the new apartment and the new city but it's been a lot of new. 2009 was an absolutely exhausting year. I was miserable for the first three months of it, I changed jobs twice and I moved to a brand new place for the first time in a long time. So I'm having a great time and feeling happy and blessed and all kinds of other superlatives but it's also been a long year of being "on". Learning new stuff, working hard, trying to make friends, being a wee bit concerned about the utter lack of dating prospects-it all combines to wear a girl out. So when I sit at a table with the girls I grew up with and we laugh about junior high crushes and Sunday School teachers we hid from and babies and husbands, it feels like watering a half dead plant. It's been a week stuffed full of those kinds of moments-friends from all stages of my life who just fill me right back up and put back all the emotional electrolytes I lost in this nutso year. I feel awfully lucky for my job and the move but of all my embarrassingly large haul of blessings, I am most thankful for my adorable family and my share and then some of good, good friends. A roommate a few years ago teased me that some people collect stamps-I collect people. I am pretty sure I have a Sotheby's worthy collection because I've been laughing and smiling nonstop for eight days.

Now I'm going to go fill up on getting attacked by my brothers and quilting with my sisters while we listen to Sufjan Stevens. Bliss.

Intro

My baby sister (who is 18 and really isn't a baby at all) started a new blog and it is awesome.

Start here

I'll post this week if I ever stop cuddling with Morgan.

Heist

I went to Vancouver last weekend for a final site visit before the Games and got pulled into a little adventure we like to call "ticket pick-up". That's when four of us go to Canada with empty suitcases and come back with about $2 million in tickets. Yep.

Step one is to go to the Organizing Committee and count out about 14,000 tickets to make sure we got them all. Here is Nancy opening the ceremonial first box.


Then the cute ticketing guy explains to us how to read the ticket.

Awww, look at me with my stack of Speed Skating tickets...notice how I ALREADY look tired and this is BEFORE we spent 22 hours in a conference room counting, counting, counting.
Being at the Office meant seeing several people that I like quite a lot. Scott and Bev from the Salt Lake Games came down to say hello. Bev and I keep in great touch but I hadn't seen Scott in seven years. Aside from a few more gray hairs though, he was the same delightful guy who used to bring us to our knees laughing way back when. We got telling stories and I am pretty sure the interns with us thought we were insane. It felt so good to see them, even just for a few minutes.
Here is the ticket counting machine that sort of makes you feel like you are doing something illegal. Although pretty much the whole experience made me feel like I was doing something illegal. Can you imagine the looks you get at the airport when four of you come through the TSA with nothing in your carryons???
And here is two million dollars worth of tickets.
We spent the next two days counting, sorting, and assigning tickets to all of our National Govering Bodies. We were watching Ellen while we worked and what should be wandering eyes should appear but John Mayer! Wearing one of the Ralph Lauren sweaters our athletes are getting! The very sweaters I have been counting for the last month! Full circle my friends.
And if you are wondering how we got all those tickets home? No armored car, no bodyguards. Just four ladies and our suitcases. The station manager in Vancouver was nice enough to come in early and walk us through the airports so we could get right to the plane with no waiting. You sure get a lot of curious looks when you are being waved through every checkpoint plus customs. Definitely the way to travel folks.Our bags were all crazy heavy. I was pulling mine down from the overhead compartment and said something about it breaking my back and the guy behind me said, "heh, must be all that gold bullion you have in there." I made nervous eye contact with Lisa and Brittney and we all giggled like dorks. We are very subtle.

I was so dead tired when I got home I thought for sure I would just fall into bed. Instead I grocery shopped, did laundry, cleaned my house, got a pedicure and wrapped Christmas presents. I'm hoping there is something like sleep under the tree for me next week.

The end.

Down

As you may have guessed from reading this thing lately, life is pretty good.

I do have a complaint though.

I have had zero zero zero time to write in the last three months. Don't misunderstand, I love being busy! I love feeling really good at my job again! I love getting to do new and interesting things!

But I miss writing. This has been an insane week of Games Staff Training and I had to give not one or two but three presentations and I finally feel like a human again. I desperately want to write about that but it's 10:25 and I'm so friend that I just watched two straight hours of television to give my brain a break. I get to the end of the day lately and I'm completely spent.

But there are tulips on my table (MY table!) and the apartment is warm and my bed is cozy and the sunshine wakes me up every day and I'm going to Vancouver in two days. And yesterday I cried at work and not because I was sad but because our Director of Paralympics brought us all to tears with his closing remarks. And that folks, is why this girl is going to keep the murmuring to a minimum and get to bed.

This Christmas

All I did this weekend was sleep. I managed to pull myself out of the house to go for a failure of a run, go to a parade with my friend Heather and her family, hit an hour of church and get a tiny bit of grocery shopping done.

Other than that, I caught up on a few shows and watched The Proposal so I could stare at Ryan Reynolds for awhile and I slept. At first I was feeling really guilty about sleeping away my weekend but then I realized, hey self, you've been pulling 12-14 hour work days for about three weeks so it's really possible that what you needed was a whole bunch of rest.

I've been listening to a whole bunch of Christmas music while I slugged around. Here are some of my favorites for your enjoyment!

These guys went to school with my friend Lori and they are really quite fantastic.


The Weepies



Is it even Christmas without Nat King Cole??



If you can get your hands on Sufjan Steven's Christmas albums, do. Fantastic.



This is Judy Garland and Bing Crosby doing Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer and it's one of my all time favorites. It's so clever and fun.



How wonderful are the Beach Boys?? This little gem is just a perfect example of everything they were so good at-fun lyrics, great harmonies, and catchy catchy tunes that stick like crazy in your head.



Make fun of me if you want to but I love Justin Timberlake and I think this is such a pretty version of one of my favorite classics.



And finally-Taylor Swift doing Last Christmas!!! What could be better??



I love Christmas!

Finito

So we finished counting all the apparel for the Games today. My shoulders hurt, I've been dirty for like three straight weeks and I'm sick to death of cardboard. But today when we stacked all of our pallets neatly against the walls and our 30,000 items were all accounted for I might have done an actual dance of joy.

Here it all is-every scrap of Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Podium wear and a whole bunch more fun stuff you get if you spend your entire life training your head off. (psss, those stacks are six deep friends. I'm ready to die.)

My coworkers are going to kill me

But then again, this pose took zero coaxing so...


Oh I love my job.

Last Christmas

I looooooove Christmas music. Love it! And these days I love the show Glee too.

So when I found a version of the cast of Glee singing Wham's "Last Christmas" I almost died.



Hooray!!!

Fact

Pretty much all you need to know about me in one sequence of events from this evening:

I took a nice quiet bath for about half an hour. Immediately after getting out I scrubbed the tub, mopped the floor, washed the bath mats and vacuumed the entire apartment.

Because seriously, relax? How would I even do that?

Bless You

I was going to write a long post about the differences between Thanksgiving 2008 and Thanksgiving 2009 but instead I'm going to rip off my friend's Facebook status from yesterday. It's pretty perfect.

Without exaggaration, if one year ago today somebody would have shown me today, I would have wept for joy. What a miraculous year it has been for me. Blessings from above and I am thankful indeed.

Bring Him Home

One day when I was 11 or 12, my mom brought home some tapes she was very excited about. She had seen a segment on 20/20 about a new Broadway musical and was so struck by one of the songs they highlighted in the story that she went right out and bought the soundtrack. I was just a wee thing but I still vividly remember her putting in the tape and finding the song (hey remember tapes? the fast forwarding to get the song you wanted? that was awesome) and playing one of the most beautiful songs I had ever heard as loud as she could get our stereo to go. We had speakers left over from my dad's college rock bands days so that is kind of saying something. I used to love to stand right next to those things when the music was loud and I could feel it thumping right into my chest.

The musical was the adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" and the song was "Bring Him Home", Valjean's prayer to save the wounded love of his daughter's life.

If you are unfamiliar with the story, Les Miserables is basically about redemption and atonement and my mother fell madly in love with the musical. She got so good at talking about it that Relief Society groups and Book Clubs all over the valley would have her come give her presentation about it complete with selections from the play. She finally got to see it in LA a few years later and then on Broadway a few years after that. So I grew up with the story and the music as a staple in our house and it was rarely played quietly. I still know every single word to every single song. When I went to New York for high school graduation I finally got to see it on Broadway as well and it was every bit as amazing and inspiring as I expected. I was slightly outraged at my classmates who like "Phantom of the Opera" better.

So if you want to know why the Twilight phenomenon with it's creepy codependent love story and shirtless werewolves is so annoying to me, blame it on the woman who raised me. It's not that I was above teen drama and romance-I used to listen to sad little Eponine sing "On My Own" to a Marius who didn't even know she was alive and cry my guts out. But my mother loved this musical not just because the music is fantastic and the story is engaging but because there is depth and truth it and you can't watch it without feeling something real. And watching it isn't exactly homework-the play ran for 16 years on Broadway and 21 years in London. It won eight Tony awards, and grossed 1.8 billion dollars worldwide-it was a phenomenon too. It's not too much to expect that something can be obsession worthy and still maybe leave you a little bit better.

My iTunes spit out a bunch of Les Miz tonight and after I was done sobbing I managed to find the clip of that 20/20 segment on YouTube. I had actually never seen it but it shows the first time Colm Wilkinson sang "Bring HIm Home" in rehearsal and I honestly think if you can watch this and not feel anything you might want to have your soul examined.



Then here is a full version of the song from the 10th Anniversary performance.



My poor future children. I'm going to make them read Pride and Prejudice and watch Romeo and Juliet and go to museums. They are so going to hate me. Unless of course I get kids like me and then they will totally write a nice blog post 23 years later about how awesome I am for introducing them to greatness.

Thanks Mom.

A Room of One's Own

I've done a fair amount of adult things in my life. I'm a college graduate, and a returned missionary. I've managed million dollar budgets and moved across the country not once or twice but three times. I've bought cars, flown to foreign countries by myself, and even have a 401k.

But the most grown up I have ever felt was this week when I moved into my first apartment all by myself. For the first time in my life, I'm the only person who lives here! It's all mine to clean up or mess up and build forts in the living room if I want.

I've been pretty lucky in the roommate department over the last 15 years of living with people. I have generally lived with good, well-adjusted girls in cute apartments with low drama factors. But when I moved to Colorado I decided it was a good time to try getting my own little space. I found a cute place near the mountains with a lovely view of the city. All week I've fallen asleep to the twinkling lights of Colorado Springs out my bedroom window.

It's been way, way too much fun. Anyone who has ever lived with me will know that I'm spending an inordinate amount of time in my towel instead of proper clothing and I don't think I've turned the stereo off since I moved in.

One thing I haven't really done over the years is to collect more then clothes, CD's and books. I have more shoes then I can fit in the giant walk in closet but I don't own a couch or a skillet. So yesterday I spent more money in one eight hour period then I have in my entire life setting up a kitchen and getting some key furniture pieces to build around. My sister who is much better at making things pretty than I am is coming before Christmas to help me hang art on the walls and figure what to do with the inordinate amount of space I have in my bathroom. My OWN bathroom. Yep, first time for that too.

I went to a Dixie Chicks show a few years ago and this song really hit home for me. What I dream about has always been a bit different from a lot of the girls I grew up with. Not better, just different. A little spot of my very own was always on the list and although I'm finding I need more patience in getting where I want to be than I ever imagined, there is a special sweetness to finally getting there. Even if you take a long, long, bumpy road to get there.

Backyardigans

So this is ten minutes from my house.

Hey there is a guy up there!
Oh hello deer.

I need to make some friends so I can take less awkward photos of myself.


Not a bad place to call home eh?

Factory Girl

So I may not actually be cut out for a life of manual labor. We spent this week counting every. single. piece. of apparel the athletes will get in February. The sense of pride I will get when I see Bode Miller on the medals stand, knowing I have touched not only his jacket but his tights AND his socks *might* not be worth the fact that now I have to spend the weekend moving my OWN clothes across town and my nails are already all broken.

However, this is the week I discovered Fanfarlo. If you don't like them yet, try harder. Their album Reservoir is so fantastic and you don't believe me, trust my friend Heather who knows far more than I do about music that is awesome. If this hadn't been such an exhausting week I would be in Denver RIGHT NOW watching them.

But I caught up with Coach Taylor and Liz Lemon tonight and despite my whining, that ain't a bad Friday night.

I Wear Sneakers

I'm just going to admit it. I am a tad bit obsessed with Taylor Swift. You're laughing. That's OK, I'm very comfortable with it.

I put "Love Story" on a running mix earlier this year because it's has this great building chorus that is so perfect for hill climbing and it opened some sort of floodgate. Next thing I knew I was picking up her CD at Target and now I know the whole album by heart. I know!

But hear this, if you were ever a 15 year old female living in the suburbs this little album hits ridiculously close to home. Even if you like to think you were a fairly serious teenager with a lot of important things on her mind, life was still about and crushes and dances and football games and boys who didn't seem to realize you were totally perfect for them. And although it's really easy for adult me to look back at 15 year old me and be dismissive of the way she felt about stuff, I listen to this CD and I remember that it really did feel like the end of the world when that kid really did want to date the head cheerleader instead of me. And since one day I might actually be the mom to such a 15 year old I'd like to keep a little link to that part of myself.

This is my favorite thing to sing along to. Try it, it's really fun.

You Belong With Me

Whirl

I'm back from my whirlwind trip to New York. From the moment I landed Sunday night until I nearly passed out on my forecasting project Thursday evening we honestly did not stop moving. The event was fantastic though and if you caught a glimpse of any of the Today Show on Wednesday morning you definitely got an overload of Olympic spirit. And like I said, I was scurrying around behind the scenes.

This is just a quick clip from the ice right after the hockey segment. If you don't follow hockey, the silver haired gentleman is Jim Craig from the 1980 US Hockey Team that beat Team Russia and went on to win gold. The guy sitting down is Mike Eruzione who scored that winning goal and the tall, handsome fella (who was so darn cute I got a little flustered when I introduced myself and said, "I'll be helping you get dressed this morning.") is David Backes who currently plays for the St. Louis Blues and will most likely end up on the US Hockey Team in Vancouver. And then you'll see three time Gold Medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines who was the event emcee getting a few photos of his own.


Needless to say, it was a spectacular day. And aside from offering to help a professional hockey player change his clothes (which he seemed cool with by the way), I was beyond excited to be back in event mode. Stuff like finding a tailor who would do emergency embroidery on a jersey, getting athletes to and fro, and tracking down size 11 black shoes at midnight for an emcee who only had brown lest one of our sponsors have a fashion heart attack the next day-this might all sound like a nightmare to you but I was practically walking out of my skin with with joy. I might not survive the Games if it continues to feel so good.

I got on the plane on Friday completely exhausted but still managed to flirt with the cute stranger who ended up next to me ORD to COS and then slept for 12 hours. Today I picked up the keys to MY VERY OWN APARTMENT, the first time in my life I get to live all by myself. It's been a good week people. I hope yours has too.

(The only photo I got of myself. And I'm wearing a swoosh.)

Apple

I'm in New York this week for work-got in late last night and seriously haven't stopped moving since.

But if you happen to be in the city on Wednesday, come down to Rockefeller Center and you can try out a Luge and try to get on the Today Show background. And if you have a Tivo, set it for 9:30 EST because Nike and Polo will be unveiling the Opening and Closing Ceremonies uniforms as well as the Podium outfits. And you can imagine that somewhere behind camera I am running around like a crazy person.

I seriously love my job.

Future Olympian

The Olympics are in a little over 100 Days. My nephew is super excited.


Babies in hats...what could be cuter????