"Thirty, Flirty, and Fabulous"

I was celebrated for my 30th just the way one should be--with multiple celebrations!

(Beware of photo overload below.)

It started with the fam-damily a few days before my birthday at my favorite Italian joint.

As evidenced below, I come from a long line of the insanely photogenic:

Alice joined us because she likes me...

Not because of this deliciousness, I swear!

It was a good time courtesy of this handsome (and maybe halfway shaggy) couple:

Then it was my birthday on--hip, hip, hooray--a Saturday!

That evening some girlfriends and I met up for Japanese food and gnome-ish party hats:

I still contend that our hats were cuter than:

Proof positive:

Yes, I totally wore a sash (I'm a yellow, remember?):

And tried green tea ice cream:

And it was all because of this lady:

I like her. I might even like her better in a gnome-ish yellow party hat.

The next night these lovely folks threw me a little shin dig:

Dave and Michelle are two of the most down-to-earth,

enjoyable people I know. Plus they have cute kids.

We partied with some of these guests:

(The "Legendary" Benincosa Cousins--

Italian Stallions, these boys...or something like it.)

The Mennzz

And Vicky and Johnny--who we failed to snap pictures of (oopsy!)

Going with the silly hat birthday theme...

Lest you think I'm totally ridiculous, the get-up was solely to entertain this cutie:

All while his older brother did what teenagers do:

Thanks everyone for making 30 so fabulous!

You all rock!

Dear Friends,

I'm working on it. This whole blogging thing. Really.

It's just, I've had teaching and grading and playing and living to do. I've started a garden. I tilled the earth. Tilled with a shovel and my own strength, I tell you. I've been cooking more. I'm counting down the days to Cancun.

Life's busy and this 30 days of birthday celebration business was, quite honestly, an unrealistic goal I'm totally going to accomplish in one form or another.

Have patience, if you will. (I'm overrating the significance of my blog's role in your life, no?)

In the meantime, some rand-awesome thoughts I've been having:

1. An official state firearm, Utah. Really?

2. My suave and savvy, hip, amazeballs, too-cool-for-me AP students have designed a screen-print t-shirt design for our class. An AP t-shirt, folks! It features Henry David Thoreau. I'll show you all how trendy I am when I print mine and wear it the day of the exam (and thereafter). I feel like a celebrity: my class was cool enough in their eyes that they want a souvenir of the experience when it is over.

3. My birthday party featured balloons, gnome-esque party hats, Japanese food, ice cream, and good friends. I'll share the experience in pictures with you soon. Shout out to Alice for making it the best 30th a girl could ask for.

4. I spent as much on trashy dirt and rabbit poop (i.e. "compost") as I did on gasoline the other day. Both purchases are wrong on so many levels.

5. Cancun is coming! Cancun is coming!

6. I took the colors personality test a few weeks ago during a hang-out session with some good new gal pals in the ward and discovered that I'm not only a blue through and through (which I already knew), but I'm also very strongly a YELLOW? Say what? I've subsequently spent the past several weeks saying things to poor Alice like, "I did that because I'm a yellow." "I need party hats for my birthday because I'm a show-off yellow." It probably annoys her, but because I'm a yellow I sort of don't care that much.

7. The Adjustment Bureau = totally lame ending! Matt Damon's presence on the screen kind of made up for it.

8. Did you know that for two months out of the year I walk around spouting quotes from Romeo and Juliet in my mind (and sometimes out loud)? Yes, yes it is true. That's what happens when you've read it/taught it/watched it multiple times a day for those two months over the course of five years. It gets worse every year. February and March equate "[t]wo households both alike in dignity in fair Verona..." Furthermore, that poor little story is a REALLY awful plot line. One of Shakespeare's worst. And yet, so often copied.

9. Springing forward isn't my strong suit.

10. To make it an even 10, I think the first counselor in my bishopric is quite possibly the coolest man around. Word on the street is that he gave a 45 minute rant-lecture to all the fellas in our ward during priesthood meeting on Sunday about how lazy they are in regard to dating and the like. He said it is "time to push the reset button." Apparently between now and June our ward is practicing dating one another. Personally, I'm looking forward to extra-good people watching in sacrament over the next few weeks. I also think that my church needs to hire this guy as an official spokesperson who visits all singles wards. He could do firesides or something.

P.S. Sorry for all the uber-LDS slang in this post.

P.P.S. I'm really do promise to do SOMETHING about my birthday posts.

Countdown to 30: Day Eight

Diet Cocola: totally worth celebratin'

Countdown to 30: Day Seven

I have some incredibly intelligent, talented, creative, brilliant, funny, and endlessly entertaining siblings who love me to the core. We are each unique and individual--different from one another as night from day. And yet, when together, I feel like I'm with "my people." I feel I make some strange sort of sense.

This is all of them--"Yours, Mine, and Ours."

I'm the baby.

I was loved by all. Naturally.

(So I say.)

And sometimes this being loved business included mauling.

With a side of: "Because you're the youngest, that's why. Now go get it."

Like I said: these are my people.

(Sister-o-Mine, we evidently need to pose in front of the camera at the same time.

But, as always, thank you for engaging in my goofy posing games while on vacations.)

(Watch for the signature Brooke & Wendy pose again in this post.)

If only I had this one's height.

(Told ya it was coming.)

And a more recent picture of me and the brother.

(Have I mentioned how much I love this picture of me and my boys?)

(Also, in searching for photos for this post, I've realized I need to start posing in front of the camera more often with the Dad siblings--sheesh, Rookie!)

I can't imagine loving, fighting, laughing, playing, teasing, celebrating, torturing, admiring, commiserating, living my life, complaining, or hanging with any other siblings but these. I'm lucky to have so many crazy kids to call my very own.

Half or not, I call you all ALL mine.

Thanks for putting up with 30 years of this:

Countdown to 30: Day Six

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

~ Mary Oliver

Have I mentioned I'm downright smitten with Mary Oliver's poetry? And Pablo Neruda's translated poems (how I long to read their originals and understand each word). And there's Whitman and Pinsky and Swenson and St. Vincent Millay and Cummings and on and on and on. I am smitten with each of them. With poetry in general, really. Words, frankly, and all that these morphemes and syllables and sounds are capable of creating.

It was a boy that got me into it (poetry, that is--and isn't that always the story?). The boy is long gone, of course. But the poetry. Oh, how the poetry stays.

"Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly,
you'll find yourself, and that,
and only that, can be the happiest
or bitterest hour of your life"

~ Pablo Neruda

Words are musical. Words are art. Words, when it comes right down to it, are one of the best ways in which we communicate our inner selves to the outer world.

Countdown to 30: Day Five

At one very low point along the old musical taste timeline, I dug these guys:
Joey McIntyre was my personal favorite. My sister, Tammy, and I would endlessly discuss John/Jordan (her favorite brothers) and Joey. And how one day they'd all come a-knockin'. Even if it was in our dreams.

Before NKOTB I remember loving Cindy Lauper and listening to pretty much whatever the older siblings enjoyed: Depeche Mode and R.E.M. (from the brother); even Milli Vanilli and Garth Brooks (from the sisters).

I've since gone through my Hip-Hop/R&B phase in 6th grade. This was around the time I'd call the local college radio station DJs, pretending I was much older than my 12 years, and dedicate songs like "In the Still of the Night" (a la Boyz II Men) to 12 year old boys who didn't know I existed.

In high school it was all things Broadway (with a little bit of Jewel, Sarah McLachlan, and other Dawson's Creek/Lilith Fair fare scattered in). Ragtime was my favorite. Then Into the Woods. The summer after I graduated I bought a Discman with my first paycheck. I recall listening to West Side Story as I walked (okay, maybe I skipped) in rhythm to the bus stop.

Until I realized just how nerd-a-licious my tastes were. And that boys listened to something a little bit tougher. Which was the impetus for my pop/punk/ska/rock phase. Blink 182. Weezer. Incubus. Sublime. Beck. Good Charlotte. Foo Fighters. (Whom I still adore--Rock Star Boyfriend, anyone?)

And then I became an upperclassmen. I'd taken Women's Studies 1010 (for 2 weeks). I was a serious-minded English Major. I bought all my clothing at thrift stores. It was an era of Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos and Chaco Sandals and bandannas in my hair.

And then I mellowed down the hippie-granola-vibe. I'm now smitten with everything from Glee to The Frames to Alicia Keys to Regina Spektor to Debussy to Ray LaMontagne to The Weepies. I've discovered that I don't really like what's on the radio--beyond NPR.

And the beautiful thing about music--it always takes me back. "The Right Stuff" still gets me dancin'. How can you not laugh and feel young and careless when the music of your lifeline comes drifting through the air? I celebrate music. Even the eras of really bad musical taste--and there were many. Each song is linked to a memory, a someone in some moment somewhere I haven't been in a very long time.

Here's to the stuff that makes my toes tap, my hips sway, my mind surge with memory. Here's to music. I delight in it.

Countdown to 30: Day Four

Once upon a time
I was blonde-ish, bald-ish, and kind of doofy looking:

But guess what?

They kept me anyway.

Maybe because I matched the set?

And then I turned into someone even doofier looking:

(But Grandma and Grandpa insisted I stay.)

Unfortunately, I only got a little bit doofier:

And then it went from bad to worse:

(My mother chose my glasses. But you never would have guessed that on your own.)

Until I turned into a beautiful swan.

Then again, maybe not: