March Madness

As I contemplate filling out my bracket this year, I like to think back to March 2002. Picture Joe, in a suit, lying on the floor of church, filling out his March Madness picks while waiting for a meeting. I had a SUPER huge crush on him, and could never think of anything to say, so I think I commented on his white socks. Smooth. 

The picture above is from a lesson Joe taught in Church during March Madness 2005. He created a bracket for "Good vs. Evil," and UNITY won. I wish real-life brackets were that easy to fill out. Gooooo Unity!

 

Hair

As some of you may or may not know, i've grown my hair for the last five months. probably the longest it's ever been. anyway, tonight i had it all cut off. it just didnt look that good. this would probably be a better post if i was a girl. everyone would be like "love your new look! you're great!"

Steve Holt!

I didn't follow student body elections at BYU at all. They seemed dumb. Every time someone won, the other side would accuse them of rule violations, and they'd have all the votes thrown out. Elections at GW are no different. GW's newspaper actually ran a campaign of their own declaring that "all the candidates are tools" and there is no difference between any of them. But then, something awesome happened. For those of you that watch Arrested Development, you know about Steve Holt's adventures in student elections. Some of the GW students decided to run a campaign for Steve Holt and... he won. a bunch of positions.

I also had to admire the creativity of one sign that said "SEX!!!!! Okay, now that i have your attention, vote John for president."

Can the Sandcastle make it to #1?

For those of you who don't know, my awesome parents own the awesome Sandcastle Motel in Lincoln City, Oregon. My mom told me they were getting some extra business from positive reviews on tripadvisor.com. Currently, they are #3 of 33 motels in Lincoln City, (though there are two motels tied for #1, so who knows). With reviews like the one below, I'm sure they'll be getting even more traffic soon.

The Giggles

Yesterday at Church, we were without our "overflow" gym seating, so the Bishop asked some of us to sit on the stand in the choir seats. Right before the Sacrament hymn started, Joe grabbed the hymnal and started flipping through the pages really fast to get to the right page in time. Except when he got to the right spot, THE PAGE WAS MISSING!

That's all it took...for two whole verses we were bent over in our seats, giggling uncontrollably. My face was bright red, and we just kept whisper-laughing "STOP LAUGHING!" to each other. Had we not been on the stand, where the rest of the ward could see us laughing at a really inappropriate time, I don't know how funny this would have been. As I write this, it doesn't even seem that funny anymore. But trust me, it was.

I love so much that Joe and I both have families and great friends that love to laugh...and giggle...and stop breathing...and then burst into giggles again on occasion due to over-laughter/inappropriateness of said laughter.

Like one time we were in Park City, and Marcus's fake leg fell off and we all yelled "OH NO!" and some people who didn't know him thought his actual leg had just fallen off.

Sometimes I will think about that and just start laughing and can't tell Joe what I'm laughing about for a few minutes, so he has to guess. Then as he's guessing, he's telling me other funny things and I start laughing about those, too.

My name is Brittney, and I'm a giggleholic.

Thanks, Dad.

So even worse than the actual Snowpocalypse has been the aftermath: The roads and parking lots we frequent are now icy death traps. Potholes, abruptly-ending lanes, 12-foot snowbanks obstructing any idea of how safe it is to pull out/merge, and crazy drivers have made for a super stressful week of driving.

Luckily, I have an awesome dad who let me do totally illegal things like start driving 4-wheelers when I was eight years old. I'm a very confident, defensive, cautious (and Joe would add impatient...but only because I am the ONLY person on the road who knows how to drive, duh) driver now, and I think my extra years behind the wheel (or throttle) have taught me well. THANKS DAD!

 

We Survivied Snopocalypse 2010.

I have no idea how to make this post sound cute or funny. My brain is not functioning at full capacity due to lack of use. Let's just get down to business, shall we?

Friday, then Saturday:

We were without power for about 8 hours...so we took pictures of the cats and listened to our emergency radio.

Our first big outing was to see our neighbors on Saturday. These are cars.

This is the major road near us (4+ lanes).

And a tree.

Church was canceled for two weeks. This was Super Bowl Sunday:

 

Lucky expressed a sincere interest in walking in the snow on the balcony,

so we decided to take him outside. This is what happened when we put a leash on him:

 

He was not a fan of the snow.

We left the house another time, just to walk around the complex.

Then one time we braved the barely-plowed roads to get some Elevation Burger goodness.

 

Then we painted the bedroom (pics to come later).

I did get to tutor on Tues. and Fri. in between storms, but had 7 school snow days in the last two weeks. Joe had 4. Our metro station was closed all of last week.

I went back to school today (sans students,) and have no idea how the buses and parents will make it tomorrow. There is barely a lane and a half leading to the school, with 8+ foot snowbanks in the parking lot. 

That's all. No more snow please.

Lisa, YOU'RE TEARING ME APART

Joe and I went to see a movie @ midnight last weekend in DC. It's been out for over 6 years, and still gets played at independent theaters around the world because its that. unintentionally. funny.

People go to watch the movie just to yell at the screen. We read up on all the things you're supposed to do during the movie, which included:

-Yelling "FOCUS" every time the camera goes out of focus.

-Singing the "Full House" theme song during shots of San Francisco townhomes.

-Throwing plastic spoons when you see the framed photo of a spoon on the foyer table.

-Tossing a football between friends during totally unexplained, pathetic football-throwing sessions on screen.

It was an awesome cinematic experience.  
Joe: "I thought I was going to suffocate from laughter."

Joe's Birthday in Orlando

A few weeks ago we celebrated Joe's birthday at the Gaylord Resort in Orlando. It was a quick weekend away, just enough time to enjoy the (only very slightly) warmer weather and watch some of the MLG National Championship games being played in the Conference Center.

The Gaylord hotel rooms surround an atrium covering 4.5 acres of gardens and waterways. Our room was in "The Everglades". 

We got some great seats for the All-Star game. I never know who to root for when there's an "East vs. West" competition...

There was MAJOR drama when the xbox for one of the teams had to be re-started. They were favored to win it all, but couldn't recover after this setback.

We had tons of fun being silly

and eating at the hotel's restaurants.

Before heading home, we stopped by Downtown Disney. It was freezing! We opted to just go to the airport early and watch some playoff football :)

Happy birthday Joe!

My Job

I tell people that I deal with crazy people every day, and I think people think I am exaggerating. I am not. Here are two students I saw today rocking the twin Mario & Luigi costumes.

JoeAndBritt goes corporate

Everyone sells out eventually, so I thought I'd plug my friend's company real quick.

Justeyewear.com is a sweet places to get glasses online. It's like 1-800 Contacts, for glasses. My buddy Marc has been able to set it all up while going to law school full time. Anyway, pretty much every product is overpriced until someone learns how to sell it cheap on the internet, and I have been spending way too much on glasses for years.

For more info, check go here:

http://www.justeyewear.com/

http://themormonsarecoming.blogspot.com/2009/12/glasses-for-masses-plus-avatar.html

http://ellament.blogspot.com/2009/12/glasses-for-masses.html

December stuff we failed to blog about

Dave came to visit! He was just here Friday night-EARLY Monday morning, but he got to see his friends, host a Halo party, and enjoy a family dinner with us (without cutting his finger off).


It snowed. A lot. You might have heard about it. We couldn't leave our condo for about 36 hours, church was canceled, and then Britt enjoyed three snow days while Joe only got one.


Christmas happened. There was eating, present-giving, and relaxing.

My parents came to visit. They win for most visits in 2009. We played lots of Yahtzee and Hand & Foot, taught dad how to use the XBox to stream Netflix movies, and did one (freezing) day of sightseeing. We only made it to the Library of Congress and the Ford Theater/bed where Lincoln died across the street...with a trip in between to watch Sherlock Holmes just to warm up :)

We caught up with good friends. Jacob came to town and brought his girlfriend Ashley. She's pretty awesome, so we saw them a few times. Once we met up with even more friends and ate at Ray's Hell Burgers...WHICH IS NOW SERVING FRENCH AND SWEET POTATO FRIES. Just saying.


We rocked New Year's Eve. Just kidding. We kind of treated it like the rest of our break and stayed lazy. But it was wonderful. We joined about 20 other people in downtown Falls Church for a bit, then celebrated at home where it was not freezing cold.