Christmas Eve

For Christmas Eve, Jon and I ordered a Credit-Card-Rewards-Points-Gift-Card to a fancy steakhouse and went out to dinner for cheap-as-free! It was absolutely incredible. I had scallops and Jon had a Wagyu ribeye steak. Also we shared a lobster mac-and-cheese. There was nothing that was not amazing. You know how for a lot of meals you have one main thing and then a bunch of filler? There was no filler here. Everything was seasoned in interesting and tasty ways, which made me want to be more creative with seasonings myself. AWESOME. 

Also, apparently this restaurant, which averages 250 people per day/night, had FOUR HUNDRED people for Christmas Eve. This was evidenced by the fact that our reservation time was 10pm.

  

surprise parties

When I was at BYU, I lived in an apartment with three other girls for more than half of my time in Provo. (I had other great roommates, too, but these three win for longevity.) Two of them, Becca and Danielle, are from CA and live here locally now again. They grew up together and their birthdays are only about five weeks apart, so they would always throw parties for each other.

In our group of four at BYU, everyone got to join in. For some reason, we made sure every party was a surprise. As you can imagine, we had to get pretty creative on that "surprise" part ... I mean, when you get a surprise party EVERY year, and most years it's on your actual birthday, you've got to be the most suspicious person in the world for that one day.

Well, now three of us live in the same area. We haven't done so much on the party front lately, but we decided to step it up a little this year. We had a surprise dinner/free massage for one of them, in October, and then planned a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure scrapbook night for the other's birthday, which was in November. We had planned to Skype in our fourth roommate, Val, but then she had the brilliant idea to fly in, instead :) I picked her up from the airport the day of the party and she answered the door when the other roommates arrived. It was a great moment. (And one of them announced a pregnancy at the party, which was even more fun.) We had pizza and High-in-the-Skies (from the Skyroom at BYU), scrapbooked, and watched "The Hunger Games." The girls' husbands took full responsibility for the kids, got subs for their church callings, and packed overnight bags for them so Becca and Danielle could stay the night, and then we all went to church the next morning.

Over the next couple of days, we had some great meals and took pictures and hung around and talked. We missed my cousin Charles (aka Val's husband), but it was fun to have everyone else there. It was a great reunion, and a pretty darn good surprise. :)