Party in the U.S.A.

If you'll be in Utah January 2nd, please come

Ode to Joy

I have been spoiled by the 3 month fall on the east coast, I never knew what I was missing. I really can't bear the thought of returning to a two week fall in Utah. Utah, you're gorgeous, but really you only have two seasons: Cold and Hot. Fall and spring in Utah are bouts of indecision where it snows one day and then is hot the next. Today the temperature is a blessed 62 Degrees. Yes, please.

Other reasons to love fall:
1. The Music: My soundtrack has been Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes
2. The Fashion: Layers, scarves, hats and tights. I especially love this girl's taste.
3. The Food: Warm, rich and flavorful. I made this last week.
4. Random Government Holidays like Columbus Day and Veteran's Day

Tonight I'm planning to watch the Leonid Meteor Shower, I invite you all to do the same.

Let's play catch up

Blogging has fallen far down the list of priorities when it competes with work, school, social life, my church calling, watching Top Chef, learning Chinese and planning a cross country and then international move. However, I know that at least my parents miss getting a visual of what I'm doing. I'm stealing an idea from my friend Jenn (who was recently published here) and I will give a quick update of memorable weekends from the last five months. Never mind that I should be paying attention to a lecture on cap and trade right now.

What: Rooftop Birthday Bonfire
When: November 6
Who: Most of my D.C. favorites
After 16 birthdays tend to be anticlimactic. Especially if your 16th birthday was a surprise party at Classic Skating. Even though I've learned to temper expectations, my friends and family never fail to deliver. This year was no exception. For my birthday my roommates decorated our living room and we had a birthday tea time with Mexican hot chocolate provided by Ben. Kathy and Annie threw a "camp in" on their roof complete with a bonfire, tin foil dinner and smores. I felt so loved and I'm convinced if everyone felt this loved on their birthday we'd all have a permagrin and every Miss American's dream of world peace would come true. Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes, they were much appreciated.

What: Halloween cabin getaway to West Virginia
When: October 31st
Who: My roommate Jenn pulled together a group of ten for an ideal Halloween
We read Edgar Allen Poe by the fire, watched Watcher in the Woods (the first 2/3rds really is scary), Biked through the woods, rode through the countryside on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, ate at a small town diner and told ghost stories (I believe). It was perfect.

What: Fall Camping
When: October 16th
Who: Sloan, Cobb, Jill and Pete
The forecast for rain was 100% and the temperature was 34 degrees. I reluctantly agreed to go because I knew Peter would tease me for the rest of my life if I bailed. No regrets, no rain and I was warm and well fed.

What: A road trip through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Lousiana
When: October 9 -14
Who: Brian, Baby and Bison
The decision to go on this trip was pretty last minute. But I knew with these boys it would be cheap, original and I would laugh a lot. The hipsters didn't disappoint. The south amazed me, the scenery is beautiful, but the people that we met are really what has stayed with me. For example: Knox the gas station attendant who hung out with us when we locked our keys in the car gave us slurpees and invited us to shoot some pool. Southern hospitality is not a myth. More pictures here.

What: Katherine and Verlan's wedding
When: September 26th
Who: These two have a lot of fans. Two of the nicest people I know and they come from huge families.
The wedding was perfect. Katherine looked more beautiful than I've ever seen her. This girl has a heart of gold and deserved a fun and lovely wedding, which is exactly what she got.

What: Work Convention in Pittsburgh, PA (My new favorite city)
When: September 10-17
Who: Me and 100 of my coworkers
I love Pittsburgh. It's a gorgeous city, it has a very European feel and it's just the right size. I think having low expectations helped, but it really is charming, surrounded by water and lots of interesting architecture. The majority of my time was spent in a convention center, but I did manage to see the Andy Warhol museum, Visited Carnegie Mellon, Rode the duquesne incline, and I was really excited that I had the opportunity to bat at the Pirates PNC field.
What: Visiting the Malone's in WV part II
When: August 22
Who: Ben, Court, Jenn, Michael, Kathy and Ryguy
Our second visit to the Malone's lake house and it was the perfect summer trip. We spent the day on the lake wake boarding, bridge jumping and swimming. We played tennis in the afternoona and had a bonfire at night. The Malone's were gracious hosts and I really love meeting my friend's families.
What: Ben's inaugural D.C. visit
When: August 7-10
Who: Ben and Jenny. Friends since 6th grade
Ben and I have a long history. We've both seen each other at our best (surviving waking up to a moose charging at us) and the worst (song and dance group showcase U.S.A.). Our friendship has endured a lot and I'm really grateful that his sister's moving out here finally gave him enough of an excuse to visit. We went to the national air guitar championship (a bust), biked around d.c., visited the zoo, ate a lot of good food and slept out in the backyard. We were long overdue for some quality time and it was so good to spend time with him.

What: Annie's 30th Birthday
Where: My backyard
Who: D.C. Favorites dressed in 20's garb
One of my favorite D.C. parties. Annie has an eye for detail and fashion and threw a fabulous party that I was so happy to be a part of.

What: New York and D.C. with Kristjan
When: July 2-5
Who: Kristjan and Jenny. Friends since our freshman year of college
Kristjan and I had a great whirlwind tour of the east coast. We stayed with his friends Dana and Marlon in NYC and did as much as we possibly could with 36 in New York. We were on a quest to find the best pizza, ate a cannoli, walked the brooklyn bridge, took the staton island ferry, central park, wall street and so much more. Then it we headed to D.C. to celebrate the fourth of July by watching fireworks in our nation's capitol. Hopefully he'll be back.

China - Long Overdue

I went to China for three weeks in May. I posted once in Hong Kong, I attempted to be that travel writer sitting in front of a coffee shop finding inspiration in passing pedestrians. Then I came home and reread the post, and found so many grammatical errors that I took it down. You would think 18 years of education would teach me to at least use spell checker.

This is all beside the point. I had an amazing time in China. So amazing in fact that I am planning on moving there for five months in January. An opportunity came up when I had a meeting with a business associate of my uncle and he offered me an internship to work in the city of Wuxi an hour outside of Shanghai. I've started Chinese classes at USDA graduate school. I thought that since I can passably speak and understand three languages Chinese would be manageable. Wrong. There are tones, characters, different sentence structures, my mouth feels sore when I'm done with class. I even have podcasts I listen to and CDs in my car. Yet after two weeks of honest effort I still am only confident speaking about six words. But the trip was the perfect mix of adventure and intellectual stimulation. I also met a lot of new friends and got to spend time with old.

When I uploaded my pictures at the end of the trip I realized I had a dispropriately high amount of pictures of children, doors and food. Just an observation. Here are ten of my favorite photos and there are more here.

Old man overlooking the river at a temple in Heifei.

Taking in the beauty below moon rock in Yangshou

I noticed more women working in the fields than men in China. This was in Yangshou.

Adorable girl in a small village outside of Yangshou.

Content baby we saw on a walk through the backstreets in Shanghai.

Favorite moment of the trip was hanging out with this lady who we met on a hike. Through gestures she was able to invite us over for some fruit.

Sitting on the glass floor of The Pearl Tower hundreds of floors above the city.

Hike in Hong Kong

Hiking the Great Wall = Highlight of the trip

Ben and Court in the Yuyu gardens. My favorite place in Shanghai.

The best season (but ask me again in September)

I am always torn between my love for fall and my love for spring. I think that whenever it is either of those seasons, I claim that season to be my favorite. And so today, my favorite season in spring. The sense of renewal, a new found vigor for life, Sunday lawn games, BBQs, strawberry lemonade on the porch swing and blossoms. Oh the blossoms.

Dogwoods might be my favorite. This purple is rich, unlike any other blossom.

Nature's confetti on the sidewalk. A post earth day celebration.

Half way through my third year in D.C. and I'm still allergy free. Luckily I don't have to harbor any negative feelings towards these flowers.

Panamania

I recently returned from a quick jaunt to Panama. And like most of my Latin American jaunts it was too short, but we had a good mix of jungle, beach, and really good food (out of the nine of us who traveled together we had nine seafood lovers, unprecedented). We rented a ridiculously beautiful house right on the beach, the good life.

Also, as has become customary for me and my travels our house was broken into, luckily the guard next door scared away the intruders before they could take anything too valuable. I really think that if my passport had been stolen again I would never leave the United States again or I would have just stayed in Panama.

Here are a couple of videos that have been all over facebook, so you may have already seen them. I'm also including a couple of pictures in case your attention span can't handle a three minutes slide show.




¡Panama, Te amo! from baci on Vimeo.

Worry

I'm a worrier. When I tell this to friends, even those who know me well, the reaction I get 70% of the time is laughter. To me this is understandable, I come across as care free and laid back, and that is a large part of who I am. But I also worry, a lot. I think part of it is the oldest child in me and part of it is the obligation that I feel to take on the problems of the world. However, my history has shown that a lot of times my worrying is unjustified and an overreaction.

I remember when I was eight or nine I was babysitting and I called 911 because there was a car I didn't recognize in our driveway that had been sitting with the engine running and the lights on for about fifteen minutes. I hid with my siblings and kept my head poking up just enough to look out through the window. I stayed on the phone with the dispatcher who tried to keep me calm. I waited as the police pulled up behind the car and went to the window. When the door opened there was my mom, looking surprised, who was returning from dinner with a friend.

Then there was the time in sixth grade and the foothills behind our house were on fire. I panicked and started packing all the family albums and important documents (as well as my favorite new outfit I'd gotten that year for school that I hadn't been able to wear yet) in boxes and put them in our car. To me, we all needed to panic, but the atmosphere in my neighborhood felt more like we were having a block party and watching a fireworks show with everyone out, and families watching the fire from their roofs. It seemed to me that I was this little 6th grader jumping up and down and take everyone by their shoulder and say "can't you see how seriously this is?" Of course, another overreaction, the fireman took care of the fire and no one's house was ever seriously in danger.

Fast forward to 2009. The stock market goes below 7000 for the first time in over ten years, unemployment continues to rise, consumer confidence is plunging, and growth rates around the world are falling. On a personal level I have many close friends who are unemployed, and my family has suffered from the housing bubble and stock market drop. I am young, and even though I lost half of my 401K, I know that I have plenty of time to make up for it. It hurts me much more to think of my parents and grandparents, those who have much more invested and were much closer to retirement. I also know that there are millions living on fixed incomes and dependent on that money to pay their mortgage and for their prescription medicines who are in much worse shape than anyone I know personally.

I think that what worries me most is the fear that my children won't have the same quality of life that I have been blessed to have. My generation has lived in the most economically prosperous time in civilization, we don't know how to differentiate between needs and wants nor do we fully understand the sacrifices that we'll be forced to make. When you have an economy that depends on debt and beliefs in future appreciation in the stock market or housing values, eventually the bubble will burst.

However, despite all the bad news, I am hopeful. I have faith in God and His communication through a living prophet to guide and direct us. I have a family that loves and supports me to fall back on. My friends and I have half jokingly, half seriously, developed a "team apocalypse" and we regularly throw out hypothetical end of the world scenarios and discuss how we would respond. I purchased a emergency survival kit from costco and have been working on gardening and other "life skills" to help me survive if we return to an agrarian society. In six months, I could look back at this post and laugh that I was even worried that American was facing a permanent economic decline.

I honestly hope so, I do have a history of overreaction.

Commuting Conversations

My roommate Jenn drives me into work most mornings. Which is great for a lot of reasons, one being the interesting conversations on completely random subjects that we always seem to have. Today it was bands that Mormons like at a disproportionately higher rate than the general population.

Here is our list. Do you have any that you would like to add?

• Jurassic Five
• Aquabats
• Weezer
• Guster
• Barenaked Ladies
• The Postal Service
• Beck
  

Obama Nation

I figured before President Obama's honeymoon phase ends, I need to post about my experience at his inauguration. It truly was one of the most memorable events of my lifetime.

Sunday afternoon:

We went to the Inauguration kickoff concert that was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Because it was free we had to get their early and stood for four hours waiting for the concert to begin along with hundreds of thousands of other people. We made friends with our Brazilian and Canadian neighbors and even though we were fairly close to the memorial we couldn't see the stage because there was a podium for VIPS that had been built in front of it. We rocked out to Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, U2, Beyonce, Garth Brooks, Stevie Wonder, Will i. am and many many others. One of my favorite moments was during the invocation, the speakers weren't on and after waiting four hours for this concert we were not about to let a technical glitch keep us from enjoying it. Various chants broke out in the crowd, like "We can't hear" and "We want sound" etc continued until the crowds parted and a sound tech guy made his way to the front and to chants of "Yes, you can", yes he did and the crowd was ecstatic.
At the time, this seemed like a lot of people. Multiply this by about seven, and that's what we were dealing with at the inauguration.
I wore five layers, that's why I'm smiling.
We were exhausted after the concert. Luckily Jenn (new roommate), had a room at the Willard, about three blocks from the National Mall where we crashed on her king size bed and watched a re-run of the concert.
View from the Willard in the Day
And at night (Photo credits go to Andy)

Tuesday:

We decided it would be smart to stay at Jenn's hotel room Monday night to avoid the crowds on the metro Tuesday morning. Seems really logically considering that her hotel is only a mile and a half walk to the capitol building. I received two standing tickets to the inauguration and we figured if we left at 7:00 a.m. we could walk and get in line by 7:30 and then even if it took us three hours to get through security we'd still have an hour to get our spot. Boy were we wrong. It took about two and a half hours to walk that mile and a half. Due to gridlock like this:

and this:
Even though all road were closed off to traffic, there were so many people and not a lot of direction or authority telling us where to go. I felt really bad because later I read that a lot of people didn't end up making through security even though they had tickets and had arrived very early. I would have been disappointed if it were me, but I live here. These are people who had spent a considerable amount of money on plane tickets, hotels etc to be here for this moment and instead they were stuck in tunnels or on roads like those pictured above. Read here.
Third and final crowd we had to make our way through. This was supposed to be some sort of line, but it was more like this mass of thousands of people going through a funnel. We got really lucky and did make it through a half hour before the ceremony started. But at 11:30, when everything started, it was obvious that not everyone was going to get in, I could see thousands of people still stuck outside the gate. Then I looked over, heard screaming and just saw a flood of people running towards us. It was like the red sea had parted and people were running everywhere. In the moment I thought that was a really bad idea, but no one got hurt, and most of the people did have tickets, so I'm glad they decided to jump the barricades.
I'm somewhere in that mass of people by the reflecting pool. Despite the disorder, crowds, cold I was shocked at how well behaved everyone was. It was obvious they were just so happy to be there. A lot of times the crowd would get antsy and people would start pushing a little and then someone would say "Hey, it's Barack Obama's day, let's show some respect" or "What would Barack Obama do" or just start chanting "Yes, we can" and miraculously this would calm the crowd. Man, this guy has some high expectations to live up to. I really think though for all the millions of people there was maybe only 1/1000 that was grumpy, pretty good stats on any given day and especially considering the circumstances. Watching the inauguration was incredible, the only thing that really disappointed me was when everyone booed President Bush, that was really bad taste. Whether or not your agree with his policies, you have to show respect for someone who has spent eight years serving their country and still holds the office of President. There are things that I disagree with and I'm glad Barack Obama was elected President, but you still have to respect current and former Presidents.

Parade:

Next it was back to the Willard for a buffet lunch and to watch the parade from Jenn's room again. We had an eighth floor view of Pennsylvania avenue, it was absolutely perfect. Although that parade lasted so long. I felt bad for everyone who was after the Presidential motorcade because the spectators had to be there by 7 o'clock in the morning to claim their seats so by the time the parade was ending (7 pm) there was really no one left watching.



Not a great picture. It's through the window, but that is the Presidential Motorcade.
We were like little kids gathered around the window

Inaugural Ball:

Jenn scored us tickets to the Michigan inaugural ball. It was at the American history smithsonian, which was an awesome venue. We had a great time dressing up and we pretty much dominated the dance floor.


They had some great live bands
Dominic and Kathy. The saxophonist from one of the bands was obsessed with Kathy. He was taking pictures of her from the stage.
Half the crew at the Willard on our way to the ball.

It was an epic weekend, I wish I had more pictures from the ball, but I'm still waiting to get them.

And so this is Christmas

Best part of my day? The anticipation of sleeping under the Christmas tree. Every night in December Katherine and I are sleeping under the tree. Sometimes we read Christmas stories, sometimes we watch Christmas movies, sometimes we talk about Christmas traditions, but no matter what we do it's always magical. I recommend this tradition to all.

A performer?

This website analyzes the content of your blog and uses that information to determine your personality type.

Here is this blog's profile

ESFP: The Performer

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

Accurate? I think the second paragraph is pretty spot on and the first paragraph is hit and miss, but it's entertaining nonetheless.

The ultimate resume

I have spent this weekend at home in Utah spending quality time with my family before Bradley leaves on his mission to The Marshall Islands. Highlights have included dinner at the Himalayan kitchen with Camille and Kristjan, the Meadows Hot Pots, impromptu dance parties in the kitchen to this song, trying to beat my dad at ping pong and tennis, watching the office, napping, thanksgiving dinner, meeting our foreign exchange student from Thailand Auz, and much more. But the best part may have just happened today when I was going through my old boxes in my parents basement and came across my resume. A resume applying for the position of ETERNAL COMPANION. Yes, that's what you do when you are 14 years old in your Mia Maid class, sigh. I love that the only two areas of qualification that we needed were spiritual and homemaking. So I thought I would post this gem so we can all laugh together.

You'll see from this resume that I'm obviously qualified. I have no idea why thirteen years later I am still single.

Resume

Position: Eternal Companion

Qualifications:

Spiritual:
- Mormon
- I enjoy studying the scriptures
- I have a testimony

Homemaking:

-I can make raman, macaroni, toast and most other ready made foods
- I can make bead necklaces
- I can vacuum and clean the kitchen, but I don't enjoy it

Other preparations I'm making:
- I am trying to live worthy by following the prophets
- I am getting ready to go on a mission

Talents, Hobbies, Interests:
- Collect buttons
- I am a tap dancer

My favorite time of the year

There are so many reasons why fall is my favorite time of the year. Just look at the view from out my bedroom window and that alone should help you understand why.

There are other reasons though. Like this one.
Des, Scotty and their new baby Kai visited me on a spontaneous road trip. I love them and I love it when my worlds collide. Only those two would take a six week old baby cross country or on a bike ride.

The beauty of democracy
Staci, Leanna and I on the day I got the closest I've been to President Bush at an arrival ceremony for the President of Ghana. Whether you agree or disagree with his policies, respect is due to the office of President and it was a delight to hear him speak.
This is the closest I got to President-Elect Obama when I heard him speak at the Woodrow Wilson Center in September. When I left the speech there were hundreds of people outside the Wilson Center trying to catch a glimpse of him coming out. It has been so exciting to be in D.C. during this historic election and you can also agree or disagree with his policies, but there is something to be said for a politician who has inspired a new generation to care about politics and remind us that despite the difficulties our nation currently faces the American dream is alive and well.
November also marks my birthday. I celebrated last week in style. Joe and Courtney planned an amazing party. A "birthday off" that included a cake off, punch off and poetry off. This party was the best I've had since my sixteenth birthday party at classic skating.
Birthdays are always a good excuse to make your favorite people feel obligated to hang out with you. Here are some of my current and former DC roommates and favorite girls.
I think my face in this picture describes better than words how I've felt this week. Again, thanks to all those who helped make this birthday a great one.