i am a cook

okay, well, not just me. but, clara, mom and I made the BEST food tonight. Coconut Thai chicken. Mmmm... It was so good. Here is the recipe if you want it:

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/208/HealthyThaiChickenStirFry72738.shtml#reviews

what not to wear

passport bridget. and pants.

i forgot pants. again. so now i am going to go around bloody london in a brown dress, flip flops, and a ugly black sweater. my black purse does match my black sweater, if that makes anyone (maigen) feel better.

seriously. i spent extra long packing and packed so much for this trip, how did this happen again? at least i don't have to wear a sarong to dinner again...

Son of a.....!

%^&@&$!!! They have already taken away the nonstop flight away from Salt Lake to Newark!! Grrrrr!!!!! It's only September!

I'm going to London AGAIN tonight. Yipee.

pretty little mistakes

yesterday my friend let me borrow a book called pretty little mistakes. it's like a grown up version of the choose your own adventure books and was very interesting. i read several versions. in my favorite one i ended up traveling the world on a ship and falling in love with a man named joel who also worked on the ship and we were together for our whole lives. then when i died (you die in every ending), i was reincarnated, but in every life joel and i found each other. it was quite poetic and touching. some of the other endings were not so poetic. in one of them i became, quite literally a nude circus freak who wore a chicken head while i skated around to perform. in another one i had some sort of drunken lesbian experience, and most of them involved at least some things i would never do.

but it was quite interesting to be faced with different choices, some that i have already faced in the past, but would do differently now, some that i wouldn't, some choices that i never knew existed, and to see what my attitudes were and what the consequences could possibly be. obviously the book only showed some of the possibly consequences of choices, but still, once you make a decision or choice, life is never the same.

anyway, then i was pondering today about my upcoming 30th birthday (yikes!) and i was also thinking about how practically everyone i know is pregnant, and then i got to thinking, had i stayed with a certain boyfriend a good 3 years ago (wow), and gotten married like we had talked about, there is a good chance that i could be pregnant or have a baby right now. i have never really thought about it that way. weird. of course i would likely be the same a different person that i am now, and i don't really like that girl very much, so i am pretty happy about how things are going right now. but as i shop for baby clothes for everyone, it is a unique thought, i suppose that it really could have been me.

big girls don't cry

I am LOVING the new fergie song. what does that say about me if i am okay with the singer who once peed herself on stage? i am a little worried about my sanity...but i can't help it...

Amsterdam pics

So Brian and Clara were in Rome for a couple months for study abroad, then they traveled around Europe for a few weeks. So me and mom went to pick them up in Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam. Here are a few pics. Please forgive the nudity. :)




See? I don't really know why they are naked in a tulip field, but I just couldn't help myself from being photographed with them...

The woman in white gloves

Apparently people in my life want me to be tan. Yesterday I was at home in Utah and Christine offered to give me a free pass to one of those spray on tanning places. This is not the first, nor likely the last, time in my life, in which people have tried to tan me. Despite my memory of the Friends episode where Ross goes to one of these places and it goes horribly awry, I thought it sounded like a better alternative to furthering skin cancer and less likely to give me blotches. Ha! So Christine, the helpful cousin that she is, gave me plastic shopping bags for my feet, and rubber gloves for my hands, to prevent these parts from getting orange. And I trusted her. I followed instructions, and it went alright I thought. Until this morning, when I was getting off my red-eye flight. It had finally had a chance to set in. I looked at my hands in the harsh cabin-light. Orangey-tan down to my wrist. A definite line, then very, very white hands. Remember Michael Jackson with the glove, back in the day?? I also have some splotches on my legs and arms. So I think I need to wear pants and a long sleeve shirt. Which sort of defeats the purpose of the whole tanning idea. Some fake things are very bad, and I think that tanning is one of them. So I think that after this, I am going to sun a little in the summer, but pretty much embrace my natural color.