Just a Little Weekend Trip

So last weekend Cameron and I took a little three-hour drive down to Fort Worth, (also known as Dallas), mostly to see our BYU cougars play Texas Christian. We went to the game last year (it was on Valentine's Day) and had a lot of fun! So we gave it another shot again this year! I got a great deal on a 4-star Marriot on Priceline.com (with William Shatner's help), and Cameron burned us a brand new CD of awesome songs he'd tagged over the last few months on his phone. (Shazam is AMAZING)

Now, whenever we go anywhere that's outside of Oklahoma City, we do some internetting to make sure we're not missing out on any of our favorite

things. Anthropologie is obviously my favorite

favorite favorite thing of anything, and we found one of those! That's where we got this little pink guy. We loved him so much and snuggled with him AS IF HE WERE OUR OWN the whole way home. Cameron even taught him to drive (see facebook album for more pictures). We also found a Five Guys and a Mellow Mushroom, which we HAD to eat at! We realized that most of the things we get excited about finding in new towns are restaurants... We doo love our food.

Since I'm all "into" "art" now, I also checked out the museum scene and we decided to check out the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth... But all the cool people call it "The Modern" (apparently). It had some really cool "arts" and there was a big 'ole Andy Warhol exhibit which we very much enjoyed! The architecture of the building was really neat too... We took a lot of pictures outside... This one's pretty much a glamour shot Cameron took of me. But those trees in the background are actually "art"s of their own! They're huge silver sculptures.

We loved them because they looked like lightnings that were about to hug each other. (and we both like lightning and hugs). Also, did I mention that the weather was gorgeous? (cuz, it was.)

And then there was MOUNTASIA. We found this magical place when we googled "mini-golf" in the Fort Worth area and drove the 22 minutes (because that's how far everything was from wherever we were on that trip), and the magic started! Mini-golf was 36-holes great with caves and waterfalls and Texas drunkards and tiny pencils. Of course, I lost terribly, but had a great time doing it (like a TRUE winner). Then with about 20 minutes left before closing time, we decided to play a little skee-ball.

THEN! We saw this machine that was just spitting out two tickets every 30 seconds, which was Cameron's life-long arcade dream, so I obviously stayed to "play" that game while Cameron went on to actually earn some tickets. After a few minutes I got a little bored and figured nobody would take any of my free tickets while I went to play the Wheel of Fortune game nearby. I stopped the light waaay too early and only won 4 tickets. The machine started making weird noises like it was trying to spit the tickets out so i flicked the tip of the tickets so it would catch and start coming out.

THEN... I realized they still weren't coming out further so I pulled them out, and when I had pulled quite a few more than 4 tickets out, I realized that there must've been a lot of people before me who hadn't gotten their tickets... and THEN... about the time Cameron came back from his games, I realized that I had pulled out a LOT more than just what people had forgotten to grab... and probably more than could ever be debated as my fair share. But I didn't stop. I couldn't. Cameron was so proud of me. I was the queen of tickets. When we realized they were about to close the place, we used up the rest of our tokens on games that are impossible to win tickets on and then counted all of our winnings. We had like 2000 and got the coooolest toys! (as far as arcade toys are concerned, at least), and we have a really cool arcade story that actually makes us feel like we may have broken even with arcades. (that NEVER happens).

So, that was pretty much our trip. It was fun and a good excuse to get out of town before our spring break, which we're spending here in OKC... doing homework and things. I have all sorts of other trips and pictures and events to blog about, but I figured this would be much faster and easier and a less intense blog for me to get back in the groove with. I'm excited now that my sisters are all into the bloggin' stuff now! Yeah, Stephie, Mandy and Mary! And Mom reads them all. (go Mom!)

Love you guys!

Just the Things We Do in Oklahoma...

Alright, so I talked to Stephie tonight and just decided that two blog entries is just not enough. I used to be so good at making neat, informative facebook albums with all my pictures, but then I moved to Oklahoma and just showed my pictures to Cameron in person instead. So... after looking through ALL of iPhoto, I just decided to throw some pictures on here to give everyone that's not Cameron an idea of the types of things we get up to here in the "Great state of Oklahoma". (That's a real thing they say here on the radio, local news and other legitimate places... It may actually be the official "statement" of the state. I don't know.)

So this is Cameron at the Tiger-themed refreshment station at the Great State Fair of Oklahoma last year. It's actually coming up again this month so hopefully we'll get to go again and I can find some even bigger bling earrings and win an even bigger Rock Band prize and Cam and I can eat even MORE fried delicacies.

This was my costume/"gameface"for the last roll of film I shot for my filmmaking class. I'm holding the camera we used in that class. Basically the"premise" of the three-minute color film roll was my 80's pants. I'd like to tell you about how it looked, but I actually haven't seen it projected yet. I saw the light shine through it so I could kind of see how cool the colors looked, but I have to actually rent a projector to see it projected.

And That's Cam on his birthday celebration dinner last April. He got some geocaching stuff, and then near our anniversary, we went out to the lake and flew the kite I'd gotten Cameron for his birthday like two years before. Apparently it was too big for us to mail or fly back from Florida so we had to wait till we actually drove back from Florida to get it to our house. We picked up a geocache or two in this park afterwards.. Then the next weekend we camped at a really neat red rock canyon about 40 minutes away. We decided we'd go again once it got a little cooler too.

And this last one we took on another adventure day last winter down in Norman, where I go to school. I probably convinced Cameron that it would be "fun" if he drove the 45 minutes with me down to campus so I could do whatever errands/schoolwork I needed to, and then to make it actually seem like it was fun I showed him some of the town's cool places. This merry-go-round is in the middle of a really old airport, along with some awesome old tire-swing things. As you can see, the "playground" apparatus isn't very juvenile-looking and it doesn't even look very safe. But it's fun for grown-ups (like us).

Well, that's pretty much what we do. I want to write a blog about geocaching, which is one of our favorite things to do and then another one about our trip to California this summer. But... one step at a time, right?

Hawaii...

I guess a Hawaiian vacation is worth a short blog post.  For spring break this year, Cameron's family took us to Hawaii with them.  Cam's parents, his two brothers (Drew and Zac), Drew's girlfriend (Caitlin), and Cameron's dad's brother Randy were all there.   We flew into Honolulu on Oahu and stayed in Waikiki the first two nights at a Hyatt right on the beach.  This first picture is of the beach there.  It doesn't look anywhere near as crowded as it actually was.  Even if I took the tippiest toeiest steps, I was kicking sand all over everybody around me... and nobody really seemed to notice or care... very bizarre.  Also, there are SO many asians there and all the signs are in Chinese and English.  I don't really like crowds so I was happy when those first two days were over and we got to "move in" to the rental house up on the north shore.

Our house was in a town called Wailea, but the little surfing town where we spent most of our afternoons/evenings/whenever we were hungry was called Haleiwa.  Our favorite beach was called Waimea... which we liked to say like a whiny Italian kid wondering, "Whya Mea?".  The picture above this is of a view of Waimea bay from an awesome little lookout point we found by taking a little hike up around a nearby neighborhood.  The sun was just starting to set and it was so pretty!   That big rock closest to the beach always has a bunch of people standing on it waiting to jump off... and occasionally people will actually jump.  It was really fun to watch everyone get nervous once they were up there.  Cameron's dad and brother jumped, but it was too cold for me to even think about going near the water, or about taking my hoodie off.  The evenings got pretty chilly pretty fast, and I'm a little bit of a wimp about cold water.  

 One of my favorite activities was going to Kailua Ranch on the East side of the island.  It was so gorgeous and we got to explore AND ride four-wheelers! (I haven't done that since I broke my wrist doing that three years ago!) We had to leave home at like 7 in the morning to get there on time, and we spent the morning on a "private" "island" that wasn't really private OR an island, but it was still really fun and we got to kayak, lay out, AND explore!  Then in the afternoon we rode ATVs and took a Jeep up a mountain with a crazyman driver who told us about history and movies and other crazyman things.

I also loved going to the Polynesian Cultural Center, which is in Laie and put on by BYU-Hawaii.   When I worked for the BYU telefund I had to call a lot of people to see if they wanted to donate to it, so I had heard a lot of good things about it.  I also took a Polynesian Dance class at BYU from a nice lady named Tu'ia who used to dance at the PCC, so I really wanted to see the performance and eat some Lu'au food.  Cameron, his mom and his little brother Zac all came with me and I think it was a smashing success.  It was really expensive though, so I'll probably never go again... But it was definitely a really fun time for a one-time activity.

We also tried these "hot dogs" called ... something that wasn't "hot dogs" and they were pretty delicious, but there were all these pigeons around trying to scavenge for food.  We saw this one who only had one leg and we felt really bad for it and were about to give it some food, when it just walked off perfectly natural WITH TWO LEGS.  That bird was trying to scam us.   Anyway, so if you see any one-legged birds, don't let them scam you.  They just learned from a really smart old master bird that retracting one of your legs up into your body is a good way to get snacks from strangers.  And THAT is a lesson for ALL of us.

Well, there's a lot more I could say about how pretty Hawaii is, or how nice it was to be back home and in charge of my own itinerary again, or how awesome Cameron's family is at playing scum, or about how I have a ton of other pictures up on facebook and could've just posted a link instead of writing a whole blog's worth of stuff... BUT... I think I'd prefer to end on the bird story.  because it's my favorite.  WELP! See ya!

What even IS a blog?

Alright... So this post will just be all about me trying to figure out how blogs work. I always thought that making a blog would be easy and whenever I felt like I had things I wanted to say to the world, I'd go ahead and make one.

Unfortunately it's a lot harder than it seems like it should be. I got all registered and everything, chose a template, a name and a domain, (that was pretty hard, just because I had to make some serious decisions and be commited to them FOREVER), but THEN when I thought the hard stuff was over, I tried to add some friends' blogs to "follow"... and I've decided it's impossible. So, I guess this blog will mainly be for me. Like, a journal... that's online and very public. My technology self-esteem has gone down quite a bit, so maybe I'll write a post about how quickly our lives are becoming like I always imagined "the future" would be like.

Alright well, if anyone can read this and if anyone knows MAGIC and wants to tell me how to become blog friends, I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime I guess I'll get some sleep and try again tomorrow.

Oh and this is a picture of me and Cameron... the subjects of this blog. I just wanted to see if I could figure out how to attach a picture and so far it looks like success!

Great first post, huh?