"There's a monster outside my window."

"A story about a time you were afraid."

Folks. Never have I been more scared of anything than I was when I watched this movie:

image via here.

Which I actually happened to watch for the first time yesterday with a friend of mine.

Now, let me lead up to where I was actually somewhat afraid, because it certainly wasn't while watching the majority of this movie.

I understand that the '60s were a different time, and they didn't have the special effects we have now, or the ability for convincing storytelling, apparently, and they had the inability to edit information that was superfluous to the plot. I mean, who shows a full shot for 2 minutes of a woman driving away in a turquoise Chevy right after she'd seen this?

image via here.

I'll admit, that part was a little disturbing, but was quickly watered-down by the very calming/ordinary scene of a woman driving down a dirt road. Come on.

What my friend and I failed to understand was how in the world could a bird do enough damage to kill someone? I mean, sure, that guy above has probably seen better days (ha, pun not intended), but if you got your eyes gouged out you would still be alive, albeit in a little bit of shock. And the rest of him? Unless this guy was sitting in a pool of his own blood, I doubt that those little scratches that the birds gave him would kill him.

We concluded that the real killer in this movie was probably bacteria. Or some kind of bird disease.

Now, to where I did get somewhat afraid.

In the end of the movie, they decide that instead of fleeing a town overrun by an ornithological anomaly, the most sensical thing they could do would be to stay in their house. I mean, as long as the windows are boarded up, things, should be fine, right?

Wrong. 

This was survival of the fittest at its finest hour. Horror movies are just showing the people at the bottom of the societal totem pole. You know, the ones that shouldn't further the species because they're just so.....stupid.

Anyway, them boarding up the house reminded me of a movie that I still find truly terrifying/awesome.

image via here.

image via here.

Why do I do this to myself.

I'm at my house alone, and although it's 10:35 in the morning, my heart rate has gone up significantly upon Googling that top image. This is why I have anxiety, folks. 

When we first moved into our condo we didn't have curtains, and from my spot on the bed I am just below eye level with the roof of the building next door. Naturally, when I woke up in the middle of the night, somewhere in the recesses of my mind I thought of, "Daddy, there's a monster outside my window, can I have a glass of water?"

image via here.

And to this day I have to have a pillow in front of my curtains so our fan doesn't blow them open in the middle of the night, leaving me to look at the roof and imagine an alien.

So, moral of the story.

Watch The Birds if you want a laugh (and there was a point where we had to rewind the movie three times because a scene was so funny) and don't Google pictures of aliens. You will be sorry.

(P.S. If you want a really lovely analysis of this movie, go to the link for that last picture. It basically sums up why this movie is so terrifyingly awesome.)

On [im]perfection

"Pass on some useful advice or information you learned and always remembered."

I tend to be incredibly hard on myself. I blame my constant need for perfection which developed in elementary school (and possibly before). Perfection in elementary school wasn't too hard to come by. But then you enter the real world of junior high and high school (and let's be honest, I think junior high was more real world than college....junior high was brutal) and perfection becomes harder and harder.

My best friend's dad had given me a small side job during high school. He is the kind of person you would want as your grandpa. He's very soft-spoken, kind, and the type of person that wouldn't yell but would say how disappointed he was (which is worse). He was kind of like Dumbledore. Always giving one liners that were incredibly profound. (I'm rereading Harry Potter, it's the best comparison I could come up with.) I was talking to him one day at work, fairly upset for one reason or another about not being perfect at school or whatever, when he looked at me and said, "Kayleigh, if you were perfect, you wouldn't be working here."

And that phrase has never failed to haunt the recesses of my mind in all the best ways.
Mostly because I feel like it can be carried over to all aspects of life.
If you or I were perfect, we wouldn't be working here. On earth. Just trying to make it day-by-day. It was never intended for us to be perfect at anything.

That's not to say you shouldn't try, but if your best effort leads to failure, at least you tried.

Back to Britain, ladies and gents.

If you could take three months off from your current life and do anything in the world, what would you do?

If you read my previous post, you'd understand how I have a little bit of a love affair with England, mostly because that's where my kin is from. (Does anyone else think of O Brother Where Art Thou when you hear the word kin?) Alas, I've never been over there for more than a few weeks at a time. (I know, I know, my legitimacy as a half-Brit has gone down substantially.)

That is where I would go for three months. I don't know if I'd bum around at my grandparents' house (they're in their 70s, and I can pretty much fend for myself) or if I'd try and rent out a place, but I would go out to the green countryside where there is actual oxygen in the air (thank you high altitude of Utah). I'd probably eat lots of fish 'n chips with salt 'n vinega please (because if you don't have salt 'n vinega you shouldn't even be in England). I'd probably eat lots of doughnuts and traditional English breakfasts and beans on toast (don't knock it...it's a thing). I'd also visit all the places I've never visited in the number of times I've been there. Like the Beatles museum. (I know, considering I am the fifth member of their band, this is kind of a shame.)

Beautiful, isn't it.

You should see the view from my grandparents' garden.

Heck, you should see my grandparents' garden. Bless those red coats and their green thumbs.

Also, I only include this picture because it describes what a lot of my pictures look like from my last trip there. As I have been going through pictures for this blog the past couple of days, I keep running across pictures like this, where there is a random guy in the picture. Why? Because I was a creepy 17-year-old girl who decided to take pictures of all of the "cute boys" I saw. (Also take note of the massive amount of sweets on the conveyor belt....viva la Cadbury.) Let the record show, though, that in my three month sabbatical I would bring my husband, and would definitely not take creepy pictures of European men.

I believe I was inspired by Whitney's pictures from Italy, where there were lots of Italian men. And a video of her creeping on some old lady's mink fur coat.

The redcoats are a-comin'.

So, what kind of got me on the blogging bandwagon again was a month-long blogging "challenge" (if you want to call it that) that looked interesting and creatively stimulating (who says things like that?).

"Describe where or what you come from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are."

I come from a train-loving, endlessly teasing, swearin' in church father. Shown here.

What is particularly interesting about this photo is that I remember when this happened. I legitimately thought I was going to be eaten by an elephant. I didn't know at the time that the elephant trunk can't actually eat you. I also remember looking behind my dad and seeing this crowd of people and not really caring that there were these people staring at me, because I was going to be eaten by an elephant, for heaven's sake!

Lesson learned.

My first concert ever was with my dad when I was sixteen. And we went and saw Journey and Def Leppard. That was pretty cool. Especially since the new lead singer of Journey (not Steve Perry, unfortunately) signed my ticket stub.

He taught me how to fix stuff until it's actually fixed or until it's so hopelessly broken that you have to call someone. Usually for me, I'd call him. Like when I was changing the outlets in our condo from cream to white. There were times when we didn't have electricity in parts of our house because I'd messed something up. But he would fix it.

Or when I'd call him from school down in Provo because Stella was acting up. Or if I needed help with physics or other terrible subjects in school. Or if I needed the recipe to his super secret spaghetti sauce.

He's pretty cool.
There was a time my junior year of high school where I was leaving with my guy friends, and he said, "Be good. And if you're not gonna be good...be safe."

Sound advice.

I also come from a British, tell-it-like-it-is, handy-woman mother. Shown here.

Unlike the other photo, I do not recall learning to walk in the English countryside. Although that would have been a cool memory.

My mom is pretty friggin' rad. She isn't afraid of anything. Except maybe spiders, but even those she had to buck up and kill anyways, because my dad wouldn't. [Secretly I think he was scared of them, but I don't think he wanted to admit it. Except for the spider that locked me in my bathroom really late at night when I was 13 and when it moved I screamed. My dad thought I was being kidnapped because that whole Elizabeth Smart thing was going down and he came down and was not pleased that I was scared of a "little spider." He killed that spider with an empty toilet paper roll (a pretty amazing feat, considering it was as big as a car). I think the adrenaline of thinking his child was being kidnapped/being irate with said child for the false alarm probably aided in the murder of that arachnid.]

Back to my mother...
She tells it like it is. You can thank the Brits for that one. She is not afraid of offending people and rarely gets offended herself. But the beauty of that is, she's probably one of the nicest women you'll ever meet. She will just tell you the honest truth about something, which means you can genuinely trust her opinion. Basically she's the right balance of being the nicest lady ever without getting walked all over by people.

That's what I'd like to be when I grow up.
She also taught me to cook. And made me persist with the piano, which I'm grateful for. And always believed in me and told me I could do great things. And because of the whole English-tell-it-like-it-is trait, I knew she meant it.

And she and I tiled a backsplash this past summer. We used a tile saw and everything. We don't need men to get a job done.

Half-British. That is my claim to an ethnicity (which isn't an ethnicity at all, really, unless you count our proper pronunciation of "worcestershire" and our habit of eating pork and beans on toast [it's a thing!]). Here's a secret. I always feel this sense of pride when people are anglophiles and I can say, "Yeah, my mom is British. I've got British family. Basically I'm the 5th member of The Beatles."

And if I'm ever not in the mood to be an American, I can switch my loyalties to the red coats. Because, you know, I have that right. Never mind the fact that legally speaking, my mom has American citizenship. Once a red coat, always a red coat.

Except for when I'm talking to my granddad. I like to harass him about how we kicked his trash in the Revolutionary War. Go America.

Nostalgia

I am a nostalgic person. I believe it's one of my worst vices, because it leads to a small hoarding issue as well as unnecessary sad feelings at times.

But sometimes I have these wonderfully sweet moments with Nostalgia. She was sitting in the front seat of my car yesterday as I drove to the wedding of two people I have known for over a decade. As I was reminiscing with Nostalgia, she took me past a place where, years ago, I met a boy. A boy that for a long time I thought was THE boy. He had a torch in my proverbial Survivor tribal council that held out through all the tribal councils of a lot of other boys. There were many beautiful elements to the story of this boy, but the most beautiful element of it was when he was finally and forever voted off the island. Because as soon as that torch was out, I met the the reason for all of the madness.

Parker.

And then the planets aligned and all those shards of girly, Taylor Swift-y moments came together to form a happy ending/beginning.

The end/beginning of life as I knew it.

From the Beginning.

I've done an overhaul on the look of the blog. It just needed a change.

It's simple now. And when I get the time, I'll probably redo it again so that there's more to it. But for now, I'm happy with it.

Hello again, world!

some thoughts.

a few thoughts for this monday morning:

i can't work on a paper while listening to the beach boys. in fact, what can you do while listening to the beach boys? i mean, other than dance or go to a sock hop or something. no seriousness comes from the beach boys.

i used to have recurrent nightmares about e.t. and other aliens.
my dreams in the past six months have increasingly included zombies. thank you walking dead.

and, speaking of seriousness and the beach boys,
if you ever want a good laugh (and this is going to get real morbid real fast...just move past it), think about the most inappropriate song played as they walk your casket down the aisle at your funeral (à la gerard butler's character in p.s. i love you).
like, if barbara ann was playing? totally not appropriate. but hilarious.

well, off to work on a paper i am
(that was kind of yoda-ish. unintentional. though i will not be changing it.)

technology

you know how when you walk into a house, the woman's first statement is, "sorry it's so messy!" even if it's not?

i experienced that today. in a way.
i've been trying to install microsoft office onto our mac desktop. it has not been an easy feat, and after troubleshooting [i know how to troubleshoot but don't understand escrow?] the only option they gave me was to call microsoft and beg for another product key.

so i did. and a very nice (not foreign) gentleman helped me out. by hacking into my computer and taking over the mouse.

i subsequently apologized for how messy the computer was because i've been working on a paper.
that and i'm a tab whore.

after a little bit of tweaking he tried to open word. which wasn't working because my memory was so clogged with open tabs and documents and pandora and other things. he told me to close them. i was embarrassed.

but now it works. so huzzah for tech support that hacks into your computer and judges your desktop icons (i assume).

being a grown-up is stupid.

parker and i are in the process of buying a house (well, condo, but it's something that we'll own, so house is good enough for me). we met with our realtor and this really intimidating lady yesterday and they bombarded us with all this information about titles and house insurance and a warranty and HOA and escrow and blah and blah.

man. what the heck is escrow? honestly. i had to google just now what escrow is, and i still don't get it.

and parker and i got in a spat last night about the title and how confused i was about it and how i was having anxiety attacks thinking about calling all these people (the phone and i have a hateful relationship) and parker was asking me "are you serious?" when i asked if we had to buy the title.

yes. i was serious.
and no. i don't have to buy it.

luckily, the title and title company makes more sense now. escrow will probably always remain a mystery.

it reminds of this scene in gilmore girls.
in fact, that's the first time i heard the word escrow.

it also reminds me of escargot, which i think i'd rather be dealing with than actual escrow.
at least escargot doesn't make me call it.

it's time for me to get outside.

today is dr. seuss's birthday. it is still a mystery as to how i remember this without having to look it up on the interwebs, but there it is.

i live in a basement apartment, which means a couple of different things. the first being that there are (were) lots of spiders. there was even one on the side of our house that i'd pass everyday in his web. i came close to naming him, but you don't ultimately name things you're going to (for lack of better words) obliterate. after doing some research as to how to get rid of them and after a few close encounters our first month of marriage, parker made the call to the exterminator. (it was either an exterminator or get a cat, and we can barely take care of ourselves let alone another animal. we will be great parents).

$50 later (the BEST $50 i have ever spent. no joke.) we were spider free. well, kind of. there were spider carcasses that we'd occasionally find on the middle of the floor because they had hit the poison and staggered out there to die.

i have no sympathy for them.

anyway, the second thing that it means is that i rarely, if ever, see sunlight. we have a total of five windows in our 600 square feet of luxury and they're all at the top two feet of the wall. i never open these windows, because not much sun comes in them anyway, and i had seen more than my fair share of spider webs by the windows, so i wasn't risking my piece of mind for some vitamin d.

i recently quit my job to finish up my last online class, so i pretty much sit at this computer for 8 hours every day in my sunless apartment. i never get human contact. unless i venture out to the store to get groceries and whatnot (or, in yesterday's case, ringworm cream. yes, i have RINGWORM on my arm from my cast and brace...sick. only dogs and wrestlers get ringworm. how embarrassing.)

this is my long way of saying i need to get outside and away from my computer, so i'm off to take a walk. au revoir.

happy new year.

[as a precursor to the real post, i will just acknowledge the fact that not posting after that last post really did make it look like i was attacked by gremlins. i wasn't.]


spring is around the corner. i can feel it.

thank goodness, too, because this winter in northern utah has been abysmal.
today is the last day of the second most abysmal month (january, of course, being the first.)

so, tomorrow is my official new year.
(a statement i made about march a couple years back, right before my life changed forever.)
(which sounds like the tag line to a really terrible romantic comedy.)





(my life really did change. i married that boy who made me a mix cd.)





not this boy. this is whitney (not a boy). and me. circa 2007. mostly placed in here because i felt it was appropriate for unknown reasons.

today

you remember that movie the gremlins?

and the whole day/night that happened as a direct result of that idiot teenager giving into a "cute" animal just because it batted its eyelashes and promised him wealth beyond his imagination? (okay, that last part was made up.)

exhibit a:

yeah.

the chaos and terror of that day doesn't even begin to describe my day.

as i was driving home after this day from hell, i got stopped in one lane traffic on one of the main roads in ogden. the other lane was blocked off by a bunch of orange cones with seemingly no actual construction going on. (utah...)

i then began deciding how much damage would happen to my car if i decided that there really was no construction and ran over every one of those cones.

you know, one probably wouldn't do damage. two, even. but i don't think a whole flock of these cones is going to be nice to my car.

this then led to an image of my car being jammed with those orange cones and some major wreckage happening.

by that point in the thought process, the traffic was gone.

needless to say, stella was spared and the flock of cones (that should be a cover band name for flock of seagulls) won this battle.

but it won't win the war....

(p.s. don't google movie stills from gremlins. especially when you're home by yourself. just don't do it. and then don't feed those stills after midnight. you'll regret it later.)

(p.p.s. bad movie "joke" in that last sentence. it's been a long day.)

a few realizations:

curtain calls make me feel really uncomfortable.
andrew lloyd webber is a talented, but terrifying man.
thoreau's "civil disobedience" has taught me more about
how to deal with people than i thought.

props, thoreau.

props.



[i only add civil disobedience because i'm analyzing it
for my online class. i'm not that intellectually advanced that i 
read it just because.

maybe one day.]

shopping carts.

i hate carts. always have. i'm strictly a basket gal,
or a just-carry-it-in-your-hands gal.
which isn't exactly  conducive to large shopping trips.


(i'm not a good grocery shopper, illustrated by the following paragraph. sorry parker.)


i probably looked really stupid today in sam's club, then.
i had two big tubs of strawberry yogurt in one arm while that hand held pre-cooked bacon.
the other arm was carrying cinnamon toasters ($3.24 people!)
like it would probably carry a wiggly 6-month-old.


i should really look into using carts.

(that neon green grass can't be faked, ladies and gentlemen.)

this is why i can't have things like this in my house.

while perusing pinterest, i came across this gem.

i only mean gem because i read this in a very, very different way than what the creator intended.

see, i never called my grandfather figures "papa." my granddad was always granddad and the general was never really my grandpa to begin with since we really aren't related. and then there's sheridon, my grandma's new husband, who is great, but is the-grandpa-currently-known-as-sheridon.

so, papa, in my eyes, is just another word for dad.

therefore, this little plaque became very disturbing, very quickly.

(it wasn't until about a minute afterward that i realized, "ahhh. papa. like what my niece and nephews call my father-in-law. oops.")

at least i tried.

yesterday in the general relief society meeting, they mentioned briefly about how relief society is the type of place where women will invite another woman sitting by herself to come and sit with them. (essentially, that the relief society is a society of women striving to be the type of person who cares about individuals and strives to make their lives better through charity.)

anyway.

i kept thinking to myself about how i'm often that lone woman. and how (often) i like it that way. how sometimes i think to myself when i see the relief society get up "please don't talk to me. please don't talk to me."

i realized that's probably not always a bad thing (independence, solitude, yada yada), but it's not always a good thing either. and in my case, i don't think it's a good thing.

i thought that maybe my speed bump in life will be to not be so unapproachable (or at least not be so unapproachable mentally, because people don't seem to have a problem coming up to chit chat).

so, i decided today to say hello to a woman next to me right after relief society.

she told me her name, and her last name just happened to be jolley.

"what!!! that's my last name too! no way."
i then kept chit-chatting with her (i'm sorry, but sometimes i hate chit-chat) about where she was from, why she was in utah, etc. i even introduced her to pj as "another jolley!"

well, after all of that business, i decided i was thirsty and got up to get a drink. when i came back from my agua break,

the lady had left.

[crickets]

must have scared her off. (i was getting a bit too excited about the last name jolley.)
but! a for effort, right?


happy sabbath, everyone.

today's menu.

when i first started dating parker, i was convinced he was a picky eater.

"i don't like broccoli."

"i don't like chicken noodle soup."

"i don't like carrots."

"i don't like cauliflower."

if my mom was cooking something, i'd tell her, "parker doesn't like that." (which parker hated, by the way. "don't tell your mom i don't like what she's cooking!")

it wasn't until later that i realized i was wrong.

horribly, horribly wrong.

i'm the picky eater.

i hate cooked tomatoes. in anything. they freak me out beyond all reason.

i hate most kinds of cheeses other than maybe mozzarella and cheddar. and i've tasted a lot of other cheeses, especially of the french variety. mostly at an actual cheese party that the french club had while i was at byu. where i met one of the five browns and creeped on him by taking a picture. then i talked to him. 

but i digress.

i hate really thick pieces of deli meat. i'm not a huge cooked ham fan, unless it's a spiral cut honey ham, but even then the slices have to be really thin.

random, right?

then there's all this random food that i love that most people hate.

salt and vinegar chips? love.

pickled onions? yes please. and yes, i can hear you judging me through the internet and through time.

noodles with just butter and salt. what is that about?

so, i'm a picky eater. 

there you go parker.

this is actually somewhat unrelated.

it was just a pretty picture from our wedding.

(i need to upload more photos other than

wedding ones to my computer.)

i do love thursdays. but this one was humiliating.

let's talk about the awesome night that i've had.



i decided while walking into my apartment, dodging the awkward stares from my freeloader, 30-something male neighbors smoking on their porch (who, i'm pretty sure, are that 47% that mitt romney was talking about. judge me all you want.):

i'd pretty much had it with people today, for a few reasons.

first, creepers that go to winco and shop and look at me while i'm trying to buy deodorant.
and then when i leave the store i look like i'm following them because i'm trying to dodge a truck that's backing out. i got really close to that truck so i wasn't as close as i could've been to the creepers who were hocking (is that the word?) loogies right in front of me.

ogden is full of classy people.

second, my aforementioned neighbors.

.......

third, the fact that aunt flo is coming for a visit

(story behind that: basically i just looked up euphemisms for period, and that one was just about as golden as it got.)

huzzah!

because i was in this mood, i decided to blame aunt flo and decided that i needed, no...deserved a night where i didn't work on my online class and watched hours of how i met your mother while eating some of the mini twixes (how do you pluralize that? twixi? twixen?) i bought for pj. then i painted my nails.

yeah. they're pink. and sparkly.

i'm kind of a no-pink gal. not for any moral reason, i just don't think pink really goes with my personality. 

(yes. my bouquet at the temple was pink. this was not my decision.

the florist didn't know the difference between "red" and "pink."

i don't want to talk about it.)

when people think of kayleigh, they do not think, "PINK!" they usually think about how sorry they am that i am my father's daughter. or how i'm that mormon chick at work who sometimes says bad words. (emphasis on sometimes, in case an in-law of mine reads this.)

so, my night was pretty....well......

read the post i just wrote and decide for yourself.

i won't place judgments in your head.

here's to you moon unit.

and to the fact that i will post. even if it's just you who reads it.

love, delete

that time i needed to share an opinion on hollywood. and kanye west.

while i was in fresno i found a couple of people magazines on my mother-in-law's desk. which was pretty shocking, since my mother-in-law doesn't seem like the people magazine type of person. (which is a good thing.)

well, people magazine is my guilty pleasure. i read it. i mock it. i look at the pretty colors and then take a step back to realize the writing is ridiculous and who the heck cares about what hilary duff named her baby? 

(although, in the case of gwyneth paltrow, everyone should care. apple? seriously?)

anyways, i was glancing at it today and i came across a small blurb about kim kardashian and kanye west and their lovely relationship. here was the caption underneath a picture of them at a french ice cream parlor.

"during a break from the cannes film festival may 23, the pair slipped out for a sweet treat. on their french ice cream date, they held hands and tried several samples before deciding on a flavor."

.....

i'm speechless. mostly because i'm laughing so hard.

"when waking up one morning, kimanye stared longingly into each others' eyes while debating on whether to eat trix or honey bunches of oats."

see. i can do it too.

that there caption in people magazine is going to win a pulitzer.

nutella isn't allowed through airline security.

the title has fairly little to do with this post. other than the fact that we bought our first jar of nutella in fresno over the weekend, only to have the half-eaten jar confiscated at airline security after we thought i lost my phone.

i went to fresno this weekend. that's where pj's family is from.

i always enjoy going to fresno, and it always amazes me that two years ago, i didn't even know that my in-laws let alone parker existed.

i come from a small family of three, where i am the oldest and always wanted an older sibling.
parker comes from a LARGE family of five (large in comparison to what i'm used to) and he is the youngest. meaning his family is that much bigger because all of his older siblings are married and have children.

now he's the oldest in my family (something he always wanted) and i'm the youngest in his (something i always wanted).

it's pretty great. and somewhat intimidating. i'm so used to being the older one, the one that kind of bosses people around (let's face it: i'm bossy). i'm used to being the one that has more life experience; the one who gives the college advice or the high school advice to the siblings behind me who didn't know what they were doing.

now i'm the youngest. i don't know how to raise kids. i don't know how to be married. i don't really know how to be in their family (although it's not that hard....they've all just been there much longer than i have).

BUT. despite the fact that sometimes i feel intimidated, i also feel very much at home with all of them. from their somewhat sarcastic sense of humor, to their loudness (believe you me...in a family that big, you have to be loud).

and the real clincher was the fact that his house has about 15 norman rockwell prints scattered throughout the house. basically an illustration idol.

i'm proud to be one of 'em.
(although i am of the firm belief that once a skinner, always a skinner.)

look at me. i'm an aunt.