Friday, November 25, 2011

gluttony at its finest

Thanksgiving break.  Those two words represent my first days off of school since Labor Day, and I spent at home in Salt Lake with my family.

What did I do during these few days off?  Sleep, watch movies, and of course eat a lot of food: turkey, stuffing, rolls, carrots, fruit salad, pie, sweet potatoes, and twice baked potatoes.









So, in the Taylor family there are a few traditions that are attached with Thanksgiving.

  1. Have a turkey that no one really wants but feels the need to have
  2. Have twice baked potatoes as opposed to mashed
  3. Watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Thank you Steve Martin and John Candy for giving us a witty movie to watch to go along with the delicious potatoes and rather bland turkey.

Del: You know you nearly killed me slugging me in the gut when I wasn't ready!  That's how Houdini died you know!

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

you think you're prepared

Over the weekend I rediscovered how miserable it is to watch a football game when it is just above thirty degrees outside and your team is leading by several touchdowns.  With conditions such as these, fans tend to leave the stadium which in turn makes it even colder and the game even less enjoyable.

I thought that I was pretty well prepared for the cold weather.  I wasn't.  Not even with two shirts, a sweatshirt, a jacket, a hat, a pair of gloves, and two pairs of socks.  The cold weather still made me freeze, and since Idaho was practically handing us touchdowns the game didn't have much to offer.

By the time the fourth quarter finally began Rachel and I had decided that we had had enough of the cold, and that it was time to leave.  So we did. 


Rachel and I went back and warmed up and enjoyed the rest of the night warm.  Maybe we were warm from the knowledge of our win, or maybe it was the heater.

It was the heater.

Monday, November 14, 2011

calculus is cool

TOMS has now made it possible for me to show off how nerdy I am by wearing shoes that have calculus printed on them.  Yes, calculus.


Purposes these shoes serve:
  1. They provide footwear
  2. They show off my love for calculus
  3. They provide me with integrals to solve when class is boring.

Friday, November 11, 2011

domo arigato, mr. roboto

I love ice cream and I love robots.  If I combine these two things together, I would.  So I did.  I went to Color Me Mine and I painted a mug with robots I had designed on it.  That is how my love of robots is represented.  My love of ice cream is represented in the size of the mug.  I figured that if I got a large mug, then that means more volume which in turn means more ice cream I can fill the mug with and the consequently consume.

My sister came with me and she has this strange fascination with organic chemistry so her mug consists of a giant reaction.  Clearly, my mug is better than hers.






Wednesday, November 9, 2011

a trip up north

Tarah lives in Logan and I live in Provo.  We both get separation anxiety from the lack of seeing one another on a regular basis.  Okay, that is an exaggeration, but that isn't the point, the point is that we miss each other.

This predicament is what gave me the brilliant idea to take a road trip up to Logan, and take some friends along with me.  After all, what is a road trip without anyone else to share it with?  

As it would turn out only Rachel and I would talk during the driving portion of this trip because people from Nampa are really good at sleeping in cars.  I was forced to stay awake because I drove, and Rachel claims that she can't sleep in cars, but I think that is just a cover story for her real intentions.  What could those intentions be?  Keep me awake so that we would not crash, which would consequently preserve all of our lives.

This trip to Logan also turned out to just be an excuse to eat a lot of food.  We got there on a Saturday afternoon, dropped the Nampafolk off so that they could be with their other Nampa friends and then Rachel, Tarah, Tarah's roommate Sara, and I promptly went to Angie's to have lunch.  To anyone familiar with Angie's you will know what I mean when I say we did not clean the sink.  To everyone else please find out what that means.

We went back to Tarah's for about an hour and then decided more food was necessary and went over to the Crepery.  As the name would suggest, crepes are sold here, and yes, they are both authentic and delicious.




Smiles due to the consumption of delicious crepes

After the Crepery came an excursion to this mysterious and wonderful place called the grocery store.  A large assortment of foods are sold here along with other things.  I found out that this is where people have to venture to when they don't have the Cannon Center available to prepare all of their food for them.

Obviously it had been a while since the last time I was in a grocery store, so it made the whole experience rather exciting.  I felt like I was completing a scavenger hunt as I searched for the ingredients necessary to make my spaghetti alla carbonara.  I had made this a couple of weeks prior to traveling up to Logan along with a couple of girls from my Italian class that helped me to translate the recipe (yes, the recipe was in Italian, and no, none of us are professional cooks so we had not made it before). 

The meal turned out to be a great success complete with garlic bread, salad, punch, and of course the spaghetti alla carbonara.  I know that sounds like a lot of food.  It was.  Especially because we were all still full from all of the previous food we had recently eaten, but just the same it was still delicious.


After dinner we bundled up and took a trip to a corn maze and met up with all of the Nampafolk.  Let me just begin by saying how much I detest being scared, so why I would pay money to do so I am still not sure.  With the help of my friends and the use of logic I was able to smoothly go through the experience without being too scarred.  My friends allowed me to cling to them, and I used my logic to essentially give commentary on our experience.  I could be a great narrator.

To continue with the eating trend we went back to the grocery store (I hadn't been for months and the I went twice on the same day!) and bought some ice cream toppings.  Basically ice cream and conversation finished out the night.  It was fantastic.

The next day we bid our friends farewell until we could see them at Thanksgiving and headed back down to Provo.  Rachel and I talked, the others slept (no surprise there).  It was a great drive to top off a great weekend, and hopefully I will be able to go back sometime soon.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

a countdown to halloween

Most people have calendars that countdown to days until Christmas.  My roommate and I broke away from this traditional idea and instead had a countdown to Halloween.


My mom made this a few years back and I have to say it is my favorite Halloween decoration year in and year out.  I thank Kevin for giving it up this year and letting my roommate, Hannah, and I have it instead.  We greatly appreciated it.

We would trade off even and odd days, she got evens and I got odds.  Every other day offered a new surprise, and it made October go by a lot faster than it could have.  When Halloween arrived it seemed as if October hadn't even happen, it went by so quickly.



I reverted back to my age old costume of dressing up like I am from the 50s, and then made Rachel do the same.  To me the 50s represents the golden age of fashion, and I love to dress up like I am from then, and I don't just do it on Halloween.  Halloween is just an excuse to dress however I want without anyone thinking twice about it.  I love Halloween.