2018 Christmas Card

Dear Friends and Family,

The annual argument continues in the Hardy household: who will get the most facetime in the family Christmas card? With my siblings having kids, applying for grad schools, baking mouth-watering treats for every family event, and my brother actually playing the clarinet that my parents bought for me after I abandoned it after only one year of use, it became clear to me that I would need to write my own card if I wanted to have my turn in the spotlight.

We began the year by moving into our new home. There are many perks of this wonderful apartment:  plenty of space, nice neighbors, homemade cinnamon rolls every Saturday morning, a seemingly never ending pantry, and a free trash service. I know what you’re thinking…. “Rachel, where did you find such a wonderful place? Can I put my name on a waiting list (because with a place that grand, how could there not be hundreds, if not thousands, of people wanting to live there) so I can live there, too? The simple answer would be no, because we live in my parents basement. (But a more complicated answer would be maybe, because technically there is a second bedroom we don’t use, and if my parents don’t read this letter then maybe we could lease out the bedroom for $3000 per month without them knowing, and I could quit my teaching job and become a retail tycoon) Anyway, we really did move into the basement, and whenever I mention it to my fifth grade class they all laugh because they imagine me as the stereotypical old person living in their parents basement, playing video games, and stealing their parents food. (I do go upstairs for random ingredients quite frequently, so they’re not too far off base) I know that living with your parents/in-laws gets a bad rap, but I was not joking about the cinnamon rolls. My dad makes them every Saturday and they are divine. Needless to say, things are going swimmingly.

The rest of the year brought some great things. In the beginning of February, my sister tried to get us tickets to see Hamilton, but was unsuccessful. Later that night I told Tyler that I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see Hamilton until I was very old. Little did I know that he and his family had tried getting tickets for us that morning and had actually gotten some! For the next three months, there was an unspoken agreement with me and everyone else in the world that Hamilton would be the only thing I would have conversations about unless there was a dire emergency. Being able to see it was a dream and the perfect surprise.

2018 included some fun trips for Tyler and me. We visited Denver in the spring, and Arizona in the fall. While in Arizona we went to the BYU game, which we expected them to lose but they did not, which gave us false hope for the rest of the season. We visited Washington D.C. in October, where I was dismayed to find that President Trump does not wander around the National Mall as he tweets. I had some things to chat with him about, and now my only hope is that the people with camp chairs and  sound systems outside the White House will yell my ideas to him with their microphones.

Fall also brought Thanksgiving, which Tyler and I have both agreed is truly the best holiday of the year. I spent the day before making pies, and when everyone was devouring them my mother-in-law told me they were so good that I could open my own bakery, so I was feeling pretty good about myself, to say the least. It was somewhere around the time I was debating what I should call my new bakery (I believe I was deciding between the names “Pies...because that’s the only thing I can bake” and “Mediocre Meals”) that my sweet nephew, who is allergic to eggs,  threw up all over the couch. He was having an allergic reaction. To the pies. An allergic reaction to the pies that had egg in them. An allergic reaction to the pies that when I was asked if they had egg in them, I said no. EVEN THOUGH THE FIRST STEP IN PUMPKIN PIE IS “BEAT EGGS LIGHTLY.” Yes, I had totally forgotten they had eggs in them, and if I had a time machine I would use it to go speak with past Rachel, who at 9 years old gave a church talk that discussed how President Gordon B. Hinkley once said that “Now is the time for revolution!!” instead of “revelation”, and inform 9 year old me that a moment a LOT more embarrassing than that would be coming. Actually, I guess I would probably just use the time machine to go back an hour and remind myself there certainly IS egg in the pie, but whatever. Luckily, I married into one of the greatest families of all time, and they were all very nice about the whole thing. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to when I was worried about my dating life and tell myself, “Don’t worry! Eventually you’ll find the greatest person ever and he has the kindest family ever!” I think the moral of this little tale is that we need to let whoever is in charge of inventing time machines know that I need one ASAP.

Merry Christmas! May you all get plenty of coverage in your family’s Christmas card.

Love,

The Neeleys

The New Karate Kid

When I was in college, at the beginning of each school year I would always joke with my friends that then would be the perfect time to “rebrand.” Most people moving into the apartment complex we had never met, so if we wanted to change something about our personality then would be the time. We would always joke about becoming the person in the complex who throws all the parties, or the person who has a very loud, controversial opinion on everything. The emphasis, of course, is on the word “joke” since every year of college my brand was almost always “only attend social gatherings that have plenty of food, leave early, and spend the rest of your time in sweats watching TV with your roommates and perfecting the lifelong quest of making a non-burnt quesadilla.” Now that another school year is almost upon us, I have been thinking about rebranding. There are a few different ways I’ve thought I could rebrand myself:

Karate Kid: Emmie’s awesome room mom had given her free passes for a karate class for teacher appreciation week, so this summer we went. This would be an excellent time to let you know that I know NOTHING about karate, except people break wooden boards and make loud “Hi-YA!” noises. I wondered on the drive over if anyone had every actually broken their hand trying to break the wooden board, or if I would be the first, and if they would put my picture up on their wall. (Hopefully the picture would be taken before the resident karate master got word of it and was jealous that somebody was finally getting their picture on the wall and challenged me to a karate duel) After one class I’m not quite sure if I can truly rebrand myself as “the karate kid,” and instead might be rebranded as the “please don’t make me stand in front of the class” person, but I do know some self-defense moves, and during meditation time while everyone had their eyes closed I made sure to peek around and check out who all the black belts were in case I ever find myself needing a sensei to aid me in an Ocean’s 11 scenario. I also learned that at the end of the class, everyone bows to each other and says, “Courtesy”, so sometimes I like to bow randomly to people and when they give me a confused look roll my eyes and say under my breath “Oh...must be a white belt.” (Hopefully the fact that I had to google the lowest karate belt while writing this doesn’t hurt my karate street cred)

The Movie Person: After this summer, it’s hard to imagine not rebranding myself as cinematic expert. Tyler and I love to go to the movies, and we always get popcorn. As we all know, concessions at the movie theater are astronomically priced. The popcorn is so expensive that I have often wondered if Cinemark is coating my popcorn with extra butter, or liquid gold. We found a new movie theater in Pleasant Grove called Water Gardens. We were first interested because the price of the tickets was cheaper, but as we got in line to get our popcorn I felt as excited as my 9 year old self when my dad told me he would show my how to use dial up internet if I cleaned my room. This movie theater lets you bring in any bowl you want from home and FILLS THE ENTIRE THING FOR ONE DOLLAR. I wasn’t quite sure if I was supposed to hug the manager or let him know that they could charge at least 6 dollars more for the purchase, but chose to instead say, “Thank you!”, but not the kind of “thank you!” that you say after getting your oil changed or your groceries bagged, but instead the kind of “thank you” which really means “This is the best day of my life and I will be returning every day to buy myself popcorn for dinner.” I was so excited about this theater that within the next 24 hours I had contacted almost all of my closest family and friends to share our exciting news. (Sure, when we said we had “exciting news” some people thought we had bought a house or were pregnant, but I keep insisting that this piece of news is just as life changing.)

A Tech Guru: I’ve never thought I’m really ahead of the curve with technology. I know how make spreadsheets and documents, and I know how to work my phone well enough to send my sister 30 different Snapchats of me singing “Talk less, floss more,” as I was creating a Hamilton parody while waiting for my dentist appointment. However, I always have to google how to take a screenshot on my computer, and whenever I see the rainbow wheel of death on my mac I usually take a nap or scroll through Instagram in the hopes that “it will figure this out on it’s own.” It was not until I was at the gym that I realized I might be a tech genius without even knowing it. I was biking on one of the stationary bikes with my earbuds in and my phone sitting on the handlebars. As an older woman sat down next to me, she looked at my earbuds and said, “Wow! I need to figure out how to connect those two.” She showed me her iPad and said, “I think headphones connect somehow.” She shrugged, and the conversation was over, but for the next little bit I kept thinking, “Am I a tech goddess?? Am I the only one who knows the hack of plugging the earbuds INTO the phone to hear the music? Am I about to become a BILLIONAIRE by sharing my skills with the world?!?!” But then I looked around the gym and saw that 99% of them were already listening to music through their headphones, so that pretty much ruined my plan to success.

While my knowledge seems to be subpar in each of these areas, luckily I’m pretty good at googling something and acting like it was something I knew all along, which will probably always be my true brand.

Courtesy.

2017's Best Google Searches

The end of the year is the perfect time to reflect on the previous 365 days: your favorite moments, times when you grew, and the buckets of movie theater popcorn you consumed. Some families look through pictures of the past year, others look through their journals, but I look through my Google searches. While pictures are usually posed for and filtered, Google searches show the true me: the me that knows Google can solve all of my problems.

When I was in 6th grade, my teacher put each student in a reading group. Mine read The Chessman of Doom. Another group read The Westing Game. 12 year old me was VERY miffed at this because I had a suspicion that my teacher had not placed me in the highest reading group. Now that I’m a teacher and put students in reading groups with different levels of text, I remembered back to that moment and decided to check if I was right. Although it turns out I was just a mediocre reader, at least I have an A+ in holding grudges.

Sometimes my Google searches are very lengthy and detailed, like this one:

What to do if you went to church for 3 hours and you accidentally put your roast on “low” in your crock pot instead of “high” but you want to eat as soon as you get home?

Often I forget that Google is not an actual person and you can’t ask incredibly specific questions. But in case you were wondering, the day I forgot to turn my crockpot on “high” was fast Sunday, and yes, there were tears.

Something I should have Googled, but I didn't:

This summer, Tyler and I attended a family reunion in Yellowstone. Although I love using Google to look up things, for unknown reasons I never look up the weather. Now this is not because I don’t believe the weather forecast or I’m taking some odd stance against global warming, but mainly I just forget that checking the weather is a thing people can do. Before our trip to Yellowstone, we didn’t look up the forecast. The first day we were there, the weather was nice, and we went on a long hike. During the last mile, it started to pour rain. No, it was not drizzling. It was not a trickle of rain. It was POURING. An ocean-worth of rain was being dumped from the sky and probably all the bison in the park could hear me yelling as we ran towards our car, “No one told me to bring a rain jacket! I am never doing this again!!” The next morning, it was sunny. We went on a few hikes, and in the afternoon we started walking around the boardwalk (people who are familiar with Yellowstone ask me which part of the park we went to see, and I am informed enough that I can tell you that this section of boardwalk is one of the parts of Yellowstone that does NOT have the lodge with the ice cream shop in it) and it started to HAIL. So just like the day before, we sprinted back to our car while everyone else with rain jackets walked around. Although we weren’t prepared for the rain, I am pleased to say I hardly noticed the puddles of water sloshing around in my shoes when we finally made it to the section of boardwalk in Yellowstone that DOES feature an ice cream shop.   

This year, Tyler and I were happy to have season tickets to BYU football. Unfortunately, they were absolutely terrible this year. At the beginning of the season they looked bad, but we would say, “At least they should be able to win some of those other games” and “Their schedule will get easier.” Then they played a few more games and we said, “They’re pretty bad, but at least they can win some of the easy ones.” Spoiler Alert: They did NOT win the easy ones. But we went to the games, and it was hilarious and fun in a kind of “this is the worst BYU football team that has existed in my lifetime” sort of way.  

This year for Halloween the staff at my school decided to dress up as food. Emmie and I went as bacon and eggs, but when my egg costume arrived in the mail it had been folded, so there were lots of deep creases in it. The next two weeks were spent trying to figure out how to unwrinkle my costume that specifically said “Do not iron” on it. (Solution: Iron it.) I don’t think Tyler knew when he agreed to marry me that he would come home one day and I’d jump out from around the corner wearing my egg costume yelling, “THE IRON WORKED!”, but I suppose marriage is full of surprises.

When Tyler and I were first dating, I introduced him to one of my many well thought out  theories: an athlete is better because of their name. Do we really think that Usain Bolt’s parents thought “Hmm...let’s name him Usain Bolt. The name has a nice ring to it...the “nice, average, never win any gold medals” kind of ring.” Of course not! His parents knew EXACTLY what they were doing. Coco Crisp. Metta World Peace. Tiger Woods. Andrew Luck. How could you possibly go wrong when you’re literally wearing the word ‘Luck’ on your jersey?! These names were no accident. Tyler didn’t believe me. Luckily this year a VERY scholarly article by Bill Simmons came out this year, suggesting that perhaps Blake Bortles, the quarterback for the Jaguars, doesn’t perform as well because of his name. This has been the first time one of my bizarre theories have ever been backed up, so it was definitely a highlight of 2017.   

May your Google searches of 2018 be even more bizarre than 2017’s. Happy New Year!