Last week
Tyler and I celebrated one year of being married. One thing I’ve noticed about
a lot of my married friends is that they move a lot. They’re young, their jobs
take them different places, and they’re not quite settled yet. Frequently I’ve
seen couples posting about their anniversary on Instagram with a cute picture
of them and a caption breaking their first year into numbers like “4
apartments, 3 states, 2 dogs, and 1 year of bliss!” Unfortunately, I am neither
cutesy enough to write a caption like that nor do we have enough events in our
lives going on. If I were to make a caption like this, it would read “1 state,
1 apartment, 1 year of marriage, and 2,555 Oreos.” (Yes, Tyler eats 7 double
stuf Oreos every night. I had a friend once say, “Tyler..that’s the guy who
eats the Oreos, right?” So yeah, he’s the Oreo guy. I know what you’re
thinking: How did Nabisco choose Shaq to advertise Oreos over Tyler? Does Shaq
even eat Oreos? When will this injustice be corrected? All are obviously
questions that keep me up at night.) I decided this caption didn’t really
include some of my favorite memories from our first year, so I’ve broken it up
into a few more numbers:
50 fake
Donald Trump tweets: My favorite website I
discovered in this past year is a place where I can generate my own Donald
Trump tweets. I send them to Tyler regularly and pretend they’re the real deal. This one I sent during my summer break in attempt to get Tyler to stay home with me:
Luckily President Trump helps us settle some debates as well:
10 trips to Cafe Rio: There’s no secret that this is one of my favorite restaurants.
What most people don’t know is that when we bring our leftovers home, I insist
on labeling them if there’s a chance anyone else will eat them.
3 trips to Rexburg: In the past year we’ve been able to take a few trips to Rexburg to
see my family, one being the weekend before the 4th of July. I thought it would
be perfect, because Rexburg was going to be having their big fireworks show
while we were there. I use the word ‘big’ loosely, because the fireworks show
is shorter and not as grand in comparison to other shows we’ve seen, but we
still thought it would be a fun night out. My family spent the whole day trying
to get Tyler to lower his expectations, since he hadn’t seen the Rexburg
firework show before. “The firework show is much longer in Utah,” they warned
him. “But it’s still fun to go.” My family and I went out to the park that
evening and set out our blankets with the rest of the town, waiting for the
show to start. We waited as the sky got dark. The fireworks never came. Some of
the families with younger children gave up and went home. The fireworks never
came. Some of the older families and teenagers packed up their things. THE
FIREWORKS NEVER CAME. So yes, after a day of telling Tyler to lower his
expectations, it was only fitting that we waited for hours in the dark until
realizing they were canceled. 
8 Utah Jazz Giveaways: One thing we love doing together is watching the Utah Jazz. We
always try to attend a couple games during the season, but something that is on
our bucket list is to sit front row at one of the games. Luckily, the Jazz
sometimes host Facebook giveaways for front row tickets, so we enter them. ALL
of them. Not only do we both enter them, but after entering them we always
pretend like we’re going to win, even though the chances are incredibly slim of
actually winning. We remind each other we’ll need to leave work early the day
of the game, we discuss having to cancel previously made plans, and every
single time we don’t win we act surprised. “Maybe they forgot to call us, and
our tickets are waiting at will call” we wonder, as we search for another
contest to enter.
3 Orange Chicken Attempts: Before getting married, dinners for me mainly consisted of
quesadillas, spaghetti, and whatever my mom made the family for dinner the
previous night. Once my parents moved further away from me (and my GoFundMe
project to purchase a private jet so I could still use food from my parent’s
pantry epically FAILED) and I got married, I decided to learn how to cook. One
night I decided to try making orange chicken in the crock pot. I put the
ingredients in the crock pot before going to work, came home to a delicious
smelling apartment, sat down for dinner, and it was TERRIBLE. The chicken was
so dry it was essentially like eating the Sahara Desert covered with orange
sauce. We both pretended it was fine for a moment, but it was clear the next
day after work when we both brought home our tupperware still full of orange
chicken that we were supposed to eat during lunch how terrible that meal had
been. I swore off orange chicken for months, promising Tyler I’d never make
orange chicken again, and used it as a reference point for other meals. (On a
scale from orange chicken to 10, how good was the new recipe we tried?) A few
months later, I went over to my aunt’s house where she served a delectable
orange chicken. Apparently I had temporary memory loss and forgotten the first
orange chicken fiasco, so I asked for the recipe. I made it, telling Tyler, “If
this turns out bad, I’m never cooking again.” We tried it. IT WAS STILL THE
SAHARA DESERT OF CHICKEN. How was this possible? I promised Tyler again that I
would never try making orange chicken for as long as I lived. A few months
passed, and “Easiest orange chicken you’ll ever make!” and “Orange Chicken: If
you can’t make this, you probably also got a D+ in your middle school cooking
class for burning those pancakes” recipes started showing up on my Pinterest
feed. So yes, I tried making it AGAIN. It actually turned out pretty good! (But
don’t think I didn’t warn Tyler beforehand to order a pizza so it would arrive
just minutes after the chicken destroyed our taste buds for the third time in a
row.)
1 Cubs/Braves game: Over Labor Day, Tyler and I were able to visit Chicago to see my
grandparents and go to a Cubs vs. Braves game, who are mine and Tyler’s
favorite teams, respectively. The trip also included touristy places, like the
Sears Tower, and the Art Institute, where half the time I stood in front of a
painting in awe wondering how it’s possible for one person to be so talented,
and the other half I stood thinking “That’s it? I could do that. I probably
have done that. Don’t I have a painting exactly like this in my kindergarten
portfolio? Did the artist copy me? Did the artist break into my home and
underneath piles of random papers and childhood artifacts my mom has been
asking me to sort through for the past 7 years that I’m too lazy to actually
sort through find my masterpiece and submit it to the Art Institute?” I assume
that’s what most people are wondering about when they’re looking thoughtfully
at paintings. The trip also included deep dish pizza (which I have spent every
day thinking about since, which is why I now know you can order deep dish pizza
through Amazon), my grandpa asking us frequently who won the World Series last
year in order to remind Tyler who the better team is, the Botanical Gardens, my
Grandpa making sure he used his Cubs World Series mug whenever he sat across
the table from Tyler at breakfast, and Millenium Park.
Definitely my favorite 2,555 Oreos ever.
