Mother Goose: Innocent Nursery Rhyme Author, or Bankrupt Philanthropist?

My family is weird.  Ya know how Santa comes on Christmas?  Well, in my family, Mother Goose comes on New Year's Eve and gives presents to children.  I'm not sure if they have to be good or not.  I'm also not sure about a bunch of other things.  Like, Why doesn't Mother Goose come to everyone?  Why New Year's Eve?  How does she get in the house?  Is she actually a goose, or does she just call herself that?  And where do the famous nursery rhymes come in?

In order to find out, I asked a bunch of my family members about Mother Goose.  Turns out, they all had different theories.

One theory is that Mother Goose is just that--a goose.  10 feet tall, in fact.  She carries the gifts in her ginormous tail feathers.  And as she flies off into the night, she cries, "HONK!  Happy New Year!  HONK!"

Theory Number Two:  Mother Goose is not actually a goose. She's an old Grandma.  Very similar to Mrs. Clause.  She owns a goose.  She rides it, in fact.  Now, I've seen geese, and they're not big enough to ride.  So, either this goose is inherently magic, or it eats those little pills like on Alice in Wonderland, that make it grow or shrink depending on which one it eats.

Who knows.

And, apparently, she only comes to some houses.  Like, not even all our state, or our county, or even all of our city.  In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the only house she comes to.  Weird...

So, if you ever want to find out more about Santa Clause, read a book or watch a Christmas movie.  There are none of those about Mother Goose, so good luck.  Oh, and happy new year.  Or something at the end of February.  Honk.

Hold the Carrot

In the middle of our adventures this morning, Jamba Juice called.  They asked us to please never ever ever (like ever) apply for a job there.  In fact, I think we could get them to pay us to NOT work there!  Why you ask?  Great question.

Last night, we had an Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon with some friends who had never seen it.  It's a wonderful show and if you haven't seen it, you'll love it.  Anyways, as most marathons go, this was a call for major amounts of junk food.  We did not skimp.  Double stuffed Oreos, donuts, two bags of chips, jelly beans, 3 bags of popcorn, and a tube of cookie dough.  Unfortunately, a better part of the food was eaten that night.  Katie and I stayed up even later after this watching a chick flick.  We woke up this morning wondering what to have for breakfast.

After so much junk food, we were so sick to our stomachs and overloaded on sugar that even Pinterest's deliciously sugary recipes had no appeal.  That's when you know it's bad! We have recently acquired a blender and thought it would be a fantastic idea to make a smoothie!  We thought we would throw in all sorts of healthy things such as an apple, strawberries, yogurt, and juice.  Having seen my parents my make an extremely healthy smoothie everyday for years, I thought, "hey! why not throw in some of their ingredients!  You can't even taste the carrots they put in!"  I just received some free carrots from our cooking class so we pulled them out.  I grabbed the biggest one thinking the bigger, the healthier!  Can't go wrong with that right....wrong. very wrong.

We threw the massive carrot in and cranked that puppy up!  Excited to taste our masterpiece, we grabbed a spoon and tried it out.  Note to the audience: carrots have a very dominant flavor.  It tasted heavily of carrots!  This is not how we imagined our delicious fruit smoothie turning out.  What else could we do but add in more ingredients to make up for the taste!  Lots and lots of strawberries were added and a splash of juice. Repeat.  No matter how many more ingredients were added, it still had a slight taste of carrot we could not shake.  We finally cut our losses and gave up at the point when our blender was full.  We could not repeat anymore.  That smoothie was about as smerfed up as it would get.  All in all, it was still pretty decent!  Although we might have just been saying that to make ourselves feel better...please just let us believe the former.

There might be vampires in this post. Possibly.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are now several weeks into the semester, and you know what that means. Cookies, you ask? No. Don't be ridiculous. (Okay, fine. I'm willing to share my cookies. Actually I'll pay you to eat some of my cookies. That's a lie; I won't. Just come eat some.) No, getting this far into the semester means that it's time to plan out the rest of our lives, or else we will die alone living under a bridge with no college education and only really crappy snacks. At least that's what I presume will happen. These past couple of weeks, we have been tackling what is probably the easiest of the upcoming life decisions: housing.

Our journey began at the campus housing fair. Actually I didn't go to this, I had pesky commitments like "work" and "class" to attend to, but Jessie, Katie, and Sara did. Apparently at least one apartment complex guaranteed marriage. They brought back many fliers. An intimidatingly large mountain of fliers, in fact. We decided that naturally, the only logical time to look through these fliers was three in the morning on Friday night. Luckily Katie was there to rethink my decisions, as my attention span capped out at about twenty seconds, and I placed at least three options in the "no" pile because they were too complicated to read. Eventually, we narrowed down our options.

And then it was time for apartment hunting! We didn't tour any sketchy, we-might-be-murdered looking places at all! Nope! Not a single one! It also wasn't hailing, and we didn't knock on any doors and ask random strangers to show us their apartments! And none of the places smelled weird at all! And we didn't base our decision at all on how the apartments smelled! That would be ridiculous!

Anyways, we finally decided to live at Glenwood, land of the many dead animals and antler light fixtures. We're irrationally excited about this. Anyway, when contract signing time came, I learned just how efficiently my friends can stalk me. They found my home address, emergency contact information, and social security number all without any input from me. I'm not totally sure how concerned I should be about this. But it's official now; we have a home! Or, you know, we will in like seven months. And it's a beautiful, wonderful place and there's only like one vampire lurking in the path to campus. We'll almost definitely survive. Sara beat him off with my purse the first time, and only minor injuries were sustained.

I hope you all are having a fabulous week! Smerf! (I'm bad at this.)

Part 1: Surprise Field Trip to Area 51

Traumatic. That is how Katie and I would describe the adventure we had on Wednesday. The term "adventure" is used very loosely. Adventure implied that fun was had. They are usually memories that you can share over tea and crumpets at a reunion with your friends and say “oh remember that time we…” and everyone falls out of their chair laughing. No. This was not one of those times.

It was just another Wednesday, or so we thought. I needed to go to the Bio Lab but somehow Katie convinced me to go to the Pendulum Café with her. It probably wasn’t that hard to be honest; I love food. So we start walking in the direction of the ESC, but we didn't realize until too late, that there is not a door from the direction we had come. Us being our lazy selves, we find the nearest door to enter through instead of walking all the way around. We fool ourselves for a few moments thinking we know exactly where we are. Oh how little we knew. All we could see around us were white walls and closed doors, an occasional set of lockers here and there. The only thing we were thinking was, "oh my gosh...what country are we in and how do we get back to Provo.." Katie literally did question whether we actually were still on campus.

We have absolutely no idea where we are going and how to get out, so we do the natural thing: instead of going back out and going through the familiar door, we start wandering halls, randomly choosing directions. Katie starts to panic. Now you see, when she panics, it doesn't turn into wide-eyes, cowering in a corner, or hyper-ventilating. Katie starts rambling, more so than her normal speech. She says anything and everything that comes into her head and usually it involves some shouting...okay a lot of shouting.* Nearing her breaking point, she stops in the middle of the hall and says "Jessie. Is this a government base? Are we trespassing? IS SOMEONE GOING TO DRAG US INTO AN OPERATING ROOM AND TURN US INTO ALIENS?" I did the normal thing and laughed at her, but I secretly wondered if there was some validity in her statement. It after all is a science center. There is a human cadaver lab on campus, why not alien experimentation? It did match my previously suggested theory of being in Area 51. Finally, I suggested we go upstairs. Katie brushed it off, but then we came across a staircase and she suggested going up.... Oh that's a fantastic idea! Why didn't I think of that...

We emerge to real sunlight and find ourselves at the end of a hallway that'll take us straight to the café. You cannot imagine the relief we felt, especially Katie's as she had stated that she was on the verge of smerfing from exhaustion and lack of food. We raced over, got our lunch and enjoyed a pleasant meal while trying to put the experience behind. We walked out, decided I would find Katie in the library after I was finished with biology. I bid her farewell and walked toward where I believed the lab was. I thought the traumatic events were done for the day. Again, how wrong I was.

Normally, this would be where I would tell you the second part of this story. If you've read our previous blogs, you know we're not normal. I have decided to wait and tell you the second part of this story later. One, this is a very rambling blog and you can only take so much of that before you zone out. Two, it'll give me something else to write when Katie tells me it's time that I write another blog. So despite the fact the second is a selfish reason, the first is for your own good. You're welcome.

*this is katie. i would like to say that it was not shouting. it was raised voices. ladies don't shout.