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!   

1 Year, 2555 Oreos

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.

The Chocolate Milk Curse Continues

During the end of my first year teaching 6^th grade, my principal asked me to teach 5^th grade the coming year. This seemed stressful to me because everything was going to be different: the curriculum, my teammates, everything. However, once the school year started, I realized teaching wouldn’t really be that different. I still accidentally forgot to select the double-sided option on our copier and frantically pushed all the buttons to make it stop, I still sarcastically told my students that if they lost an important worksheet they would have to repeat the grade and they believed me, we still dressed up in group costumes for Halloween and spirit days, and my classroom still reeked of chocolate milk.  Here are some of the best moments of 5^th grade:

We learned how to use prefixes: As I was reading a book with a group of my students, we came across the word ‘Antifederalists’. I asked them if anyone knew what an antifederalist is, and while everyone else shrugged their shoulders or avoided eye contact with me, one boy reasoned, “Antifederalist is like AntiChrist. So they don’t believe in Christ.” In case you’re wondering, this is also the student who, during dodgeball, would stand in the center of the court claiming to be Samuel the Lamanite.

We played hard, and we worked hard (but somedays, not so much):

I introduced them to new music: Each year, our school has a dance festival where each grade performs a dance. My friend found a CLEAN version of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It”, and I taught the students a dance to perform for the school and their parents. After several practices, one of my students came to me during lunch and said, “That song has some kind of…weird…words. It’s just not really school appropriate.” I asked her to tell me what exact lyrics the song was saying, but she refused to say them out loud. Instead, she grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. The rest of my lunch was spent with me trying to convince her that NO, I was not playing a song at school that had the words “Weiner town” in it, and instead said “We in town”. I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t believe me. 

Children are still as honest and thoughtful as ever: One thing I love thinking about is what my students are going to do with their lives. Will the knowledge of fractions that I gave them inspire them to become incredible engineers, designing life changing technology? Will my love of US history inspire them to become the next president? One morning, the journal prompt for the day was, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” My favorite answer came  from a student who said, “I would like to get a waterproof phone and not get married. That’s because it would be too loud to have kids and an annoying wife.” I may not be the teacher of the future commander in chief, but at least my students will be able to have their phone survive if they drop it in the toilet.

Sometimes my students were honest, and sometimes they were TOO honest: Honesty is a great policy, but I don't think it really is the best policy when you make a thank you note for a volunteer who has been coming to teach your class and a student writes, “Thank you! But I never really paid attention to you.”

One student was VERY realistic about his homework: 

The chocolate milk curse continued: During my first year of teaching, one of my students left a carton of chocolate milk in their desk for WEEKS. Once I finally found the stink bomb, I vowed to myself I would never let that happen again. This year was going gloriously: our classroom was more than 365 days without the stench of rotting dairy until disaster struck. The last Monday morning of school, I unlocked my door and I could smell it. No, it wasn’t just a bad smell. It wasn’t an old apple or sweaty kids. It was chocolate milk, and it was rotting. I spent the thirty minutes before my students arrived tearing through my classroom. I looked in the trash cans, their desks, the bookshelves: NOTHING. Even the janitor came down because it smelled so bad. When my students arrived, I enlisted them in the search. (It’s really too bad the district people always choose to drop by the school when I’m teaching an actual lesson, instead of when I have all my students with their shirts covering their noses in the middle of a search party) There was only a few minutes of this until one student said, “Oh yeah….I forgot!! There’s chocolate milk on the ledge!!” In my classroom, there’s a ledge that’s too high for anyone to reach that goes all the way around the classroom. I’ve only ever used it to hang art projects from, but is also apparently a great hiding spot for fermented chocolate milk. My student was bottle flipping his chocolate milk and it “accidentally” ended up there. And then he conveniently forgot about it. It was that exact moment that my summer plans changed from “sitting by the pool” to “interviewing and hiring TSA officers to stand outside my classroom.”  

HAGS never stopped being cool: After our yearbook signing, I had one student who looked particularly unhappy. When I asked him what was wrong he said, “It’s just not fair. People are writing mean things in my yearbook. I don’t even know what it means!!” I opened his yearbook to see many scribbled “HAGS” all over the pages from his classmates. He was very relieved to find out that his peers were just hoping he would have a great summer instead of calling him an ugly, old woman. Of course there were also girls celebrating in the corner that a boy in their class wrote HAGS in their yearbook with a SMILEY FACE. Bring out the hidden chocolate milk and let’s celebrate!!

Was my definition of HAGS the only thing that my student will remember from this year? Hopefully not. HAGS!!

Marriage is (kind of) an Adjustment: Relationship Advice from an Expert

My friend Alice Cannon took all our pictures for
our wedding. She is incredible!

As my friends have gotten married throughout the years, I’ve noticed that once people get married, they start spouting off all their wisdom. We all know that couple that met on Tinder that will practically force you to download the app, the couple who met on a blind date who insists on setting you up, and the couple who simultaneously bursts into the “You don’t have to be lonely, at Farmer’sOnly.com” jingle. (Actually, I don’t know that last kind of couple, but if you do, I have a few questions. For starters, why is there a talking cow in the commercial? Does the cow come up later in the website? For example, if a guy messages a wedding proposal to a girl he just met, does an animated cow come across the computer screen saying, “You’re MOOOOving too fast?” Just curious.)   Since I’ve been married, lots of people have been begging me to share my incredibly insightful relationship advice. (Okay, actually no one has done this. However, my grandpa did email me and ask me if I was ever going to blog again. So, yeah, the public needs me.) It's been said that if you spend 10,000 hours working on something, you're an expert in that certain field. I have been in a relationship with my husband for over 10,000 hours, so now I'm an expert, right? Luckily I have ignored everyone saying no and compiled a list of advice anyway. 

 Don’t be yourself: When I was young, my mom was always good at reminding me to be myself. “Your hair looks great just the way it is,” she would say. “Don’t do what all your friends are doing if you don’t want to do it.” Apparently that phrase doesn’t really cut it when you’re in a Young Single Adults ward. If I were to “be myself”, instead of attending millions of those “mingling” activities, I would be creating a personal igloo from my pillows and blankets and rewatching a season of Parks and Rec. Regardless, at the beginning of a new semester my roommate, Emmie, and I would usually go to at least one or two ward activities to meet the new guys in the ward. (The word “meet” here means we would stand next to them in the buffet line and actually not speak with them at all.) Miraculously, a ward activity is where I met my husband, Tyler.

Show interest: This is one of the basics as you’re starting to date someone. I showed interest in Tyler by not texting him back for 4 hours at a time. This obviously worked like a charm, because we’re married. (Is anyone else reading this and wondering how I got married? Me, too.)

Have 12 year olds bring up topics that you’re too afraid to: After dating Tyler for awhile, I started seriously thinking about marrying him. Of course I didn’t bring this up, because it was completely terrifying. I’m not sure how long I would’ve waited to bring it up, but due to my incredible awkwardness a fair estimate is approximately 60 years. Anyway, I started dating Tyler during my first year of teaching. My students were incredibly excited of the idea that I wasn’t going to turn into an old cat lady (one of my students said she was actually really surprised) and really wanted to meet him. I promised that he would come visit them on the last day of school and they could ask him questions. After some of the generic, “What’s your favorite sports team?” or “Do you like Donald Trump?” questions were asked, one boy raised his hand and asked, “Have you ever thought about marrying Miss Hardy and having a family with her?” During this moment my emotions ranged from passing out, to failing this student from 6th grade, to turning to Tyler and saying, “Actually, that’s a pretty good question.” But I interrupted before he could even speak, calling the nice little Q&A session to a close.

If you’re taking your boyfriend to meet your parents, help him be less nervous by doing something stupid yourself: For example, I got pulled over for speeding on my way to taking Tyler home to Rexburg over the 4th of July. My wails of, “I can’t be pulled over! I vote EVERY YEAR! EVEN IN THE MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS!” was somehow drowned out by the wails of the police siren.

Don’t actually plan your wedding: This is a good task to pawn on someone else. Why figure out how many invitations you need to order when you can turn it into a math problem for your 5th grade class instead?

Rent an apartment that’s smarter than you: After we got married, Tyler and I moved into an apartment where you can control parts of the apartment through your phone. I can only assume this invention was made for one reason, and one reason only: pure amusement. Upon moving in, my new favorite past time became turning on and off the kitchen lights when Tyler was there, and I was in the other room.

Communication is key: Some people emphasize communication to prevent disagreements, but I say this because during our first week of marriage we both went to the grocery store on the same day without telling each other and ended up with 6 jugs of milk in the fridge.

Marriage is (kind of) an adjustment: Before getting married, I had people tell me over and over that I was going to have to make a huge adjustment in my life. After 6 months, I’ve noted that the largest adjustment I’ve had to make is that I no longer eat popcorn for 70% of my dinners. (But really we have dinner, and I still save room for popcorn later in the evening. So essentially the actual dinner is an appetizer, and the popcorn is my main course. Life continues as planned.)

Be prepared to answer a lot of questions: After we got engaged, people had a lot of questions. Did you get your wedding dress? What are your colors? Do you actually teach school anymore, or do you make your students listen to your engagement story on repeat all day? Once I got married, the question was mainly the same: “How’s married life?” My usual answer is “great!” but that is a serious understatement. Being married to Tyler is like walking outside and realizing it’s raining Cafe Rio burritos, and then finding out that’s the worst thing that’s going to happen during the day.

Looks like the 4 hour wait period while texting truly did the trick.

Chocolate Milk Rots: 10 things I learned in my first year of teaching

This past week, I finished up my first official year of teaching elementary school. The end was full of talent shows, dancing, tests, slideshows reminiscing old Halloween costumes and field trips, bribery in the form of doughnuts, and tearful goodbyes. During my first week of teaching I remember standing in front of the class, looking at my students, and thinking how hilarious it was that they thought I knew what I was doing. The last day of school as I watched my students leave, I was thinking THE SAME THING. There’s still so much to learn about teaching, but luckily I was able to come up with a list of 10 things that my first year of teaching taught me.

1. I now know the exact stench of chocolate milk if it is left unrefrigerated and stuck in someone’s desk for three weeks. Do I get worker’s compensation for having to smell that every day? Luckily I simply adore the student that was harboring away the stink bomb in the back crevice of their cubby.

2. Life is easier with personal servants. You would think that teaching would be hard because it’s like taking care of 24 twelve-year-olds all day, right? Life is actually way better when you have 24 twelve-year-olds taking care of YOU. Whenever I was teaching and my voice started to grow hoarse, a student would jump out of their chair and bring me my water bottle without me even asking. Anytime I needed a box moved to somewhere else in the school I never had to bother lifting it because most of the students were begging for the chance to carry it, and whenever I wanted a student to push me around in my rolling chair, they did.

3. Some students appreciate the classics, as shown when I asked for song requests for our class party. 

4. Being the adult is sometimes hard. Whenever I saw kids playing soccer in the classroom I would think, “Man, whoever’s in charge of them better stop that before something goes wrong.” Then I would realize: I AM THE PERSON IN CHARGE. If I didn’t know the answer to a question a student asked, I looked frantically around my class, looking for someone more educated than I. It was very early on in the school year that my students accepted that Google was their true teacher.

5. Creativity is not wasted on the young. Upon telling them my heater wasn’t working, one student told me I should simply ask my roommate to flirt with the repair man so we could get the heater fixed for free. At least one student realizes how little the teacher salary is.

6. My students are going to make great politicians. While teaching the French Revolution, I made one student the king, two students nobility, and the rest were peasants. As we role played, the comments ranged from things like,  “Too bad, you’re poor ” to students screaming at the top of their lungs, “IT IS TOTALLY NOT FAIR THAT WE HAVE TO PAY TAXES! IF WE HAVE TO THEN YOU HAVE TO AS WELL!!” I was so proud.   

7. Students are able to learn the most life applicable lessons from books. 

8. Being sick is not all bad. During February I got sick and had a substitute for a few days. I felt completely miserable, but when Emmie returned home from school she brought me a ginormous get well card made by my students, complete with notes like, “No more subs!!” and “My cat and I hope you feel better soon!!” As sick as I was feeling, it made me feel a lot better. This is probably what the sub had them work on instead of math, but whatever.

9. Students leave the best notes. My wall is covered with quips like “Miss Hardy, you’re cool because you stay up on the trends.” (Unsure how many times I did the Whip Nae Nae in class, but once was enough for one student to remark, “My eyes are burning.”) Another personal favorite was a student who thoughtfully penned, “Miss Hardy, you are like ohana to me. You are like my 23 year old daughter.” Oh, to be young. 

10. Having 24 students means you have 24 best friends. They always asked me what I did on my weekend (usually during a science lesson in an attempt to get me off topic) and they’re painfully honest (like the time my student asked, “Why does your face look like that?!”) They’re people who I could always count on to play wall ball and do art projects with me. They're the kids who all made brackets to participate in the March Madness bracket competition and howled with laughter when the team I picked to win lost during the first round. They’re kids I will love for the rest of the life, and I can’t wait to see who they become. 

And now, to end my blog the same way a student loved to end his essays:

Ta-Da, indeed.