the way to a man's heart is through patriotic pastries.

last week i went to dinner club.  it's actually called dinner group, but "dinner club" makes me feel like i have lots of friends.  sometimes, if i want to feel fancy, i call it "dinner party," but it's really just 8 strangers eating potluck together.  you can imagine that the potential for uncomfortable silences is astounding.

dani, our host, told us the theme was american food.  what's that?  navajo tacos?  pemmican?  maize? she made roast.  we were all supposed to bring something american and i was in charge of dessert.  i considered twinkies, but i know how uncool it is to like twinkies, so probably i'd end up eating the whole box myself.  i wanted to make a pie, but how do i make pie seem american?  this is how:

american pie

i giggled so much while i made the letter snakes.  i'm sure you won't be shocked to know that i was the only one at dinner party to think this was funny.

it was a fun dinner club.  aside from the moment when i tripped over the fireplace and spilled my water all over myself, only the first 5 minutes were awkward.  but that's because i did what i always do in these situations: force conversation.  also, i was feeling a little silly (giddy) because the guy that i have had a crush on for weeks (i found out that his name is not actually "guy at the end of the row."  it's dave.) ended up being in my dinner club and i wanted to make a good impression.  i am incapable of making good impressions, so i just wore my best t-shirt and made sure my hair was extra curly.  

my t-shirt became the topic of conversation when steve asked me the significance of the words "st. matthew" and i told him i didn't know because i bought the t for 50 cents at a thrift store ten years ago.  everyone laughed like i was joking, but it was the truth so i wasn't quite sure what to say after that.  that bit, however, did cement my position as female joker of the group. 

my crush, dave, was a dull dud who did no more than laugh at my jokes.  i engaged him in stimulating conversation, but he did not ask me out. i even tried to send him messages with my brain.  my last chance to win him over was to send him home with some of the leftover american pie.  unless he's a communist, i think it will do the trick. 

the day i met jim halpert or a post in which i do not discuss shemar moore.

it's sundance season, a season that always sparks the flame of nostalgia in my memory. (i just made that up.)   you see, it was at the sundance film festival that i met jim halpert.

it was pretty much the best thing that could ever happen to me.  but it wasn't by chance.  i had been honing my stalking skills for about 15 years, starting with my high school crush and continuing with the byu men's volleyball team and everything i had learned culminated on january 19, 2009.

miss j and i went for the sole purpose of spotting jim (alias: john krasinski.)  we were armed with cameras, sharpies, paper and lip gloss (just in case...a girl has to be prepared.)  we had done our homework and knew that his movie would be playing at park city high so we hung out there for hours.  and hours.  and it was cold.  finally, i spotted him with his entourage walking to the front doors.  i was the first nerd fan to see him and i called out, "there he is!"  miss j and i speed-walked up to him and started snapping pictures like paparazzi:

we made it to him before all the other nerds and walked alongside him and gushed. (we really should have had some general idea of what we wanted to say beforehand because everything we said made us sound like 13-year-old girls.) out of excitement, miss j grabbed his arm a bit too tightly (i wonder if he was a little scared) i gave him a carefully chosen sheet from my desk calendar to sign:

i always imagined less manure.  i mean,
some manure.  just less.
--jim, about his first night
away together with pam-
on dwight's beet farm.

miss j snapped a picture of her and jim and then one of me and jim and then, finally, we let him go. (literally, we let go of him.)  it was so great.

we went back to the line of movie ticket hopefuls, so content and fulfilled and excited to look at our pictures with jim.  we turned on the camera and this is what we saw:

this is what despair looks like.

and all our hopes and dreams were shattered.  apparently, sometime during our brief, yet enlightening conversation with jim, miss j's camera shut off and she didn't know it. we were so, so sad.  no.  we were dejected.  plus, we didn't get tickets to his movie, after which he would be doing a q&a and i was planning to ask him the following q: can i be your girlfriend?  so that was that for us.

BUT.

miss j and i do not give up easily.  we bought some miss vickie's jalapeno flavored kettle chips and plotted our next move.  we struck up a friendly conversation with a security guard, who told us we were quite lucky to see jim in the first place, because usually the celebrities sneak in the back entrance.  not jim, though, he marched right up to the front doors.  (that jim, such an attention hog)  he also told us that our best bet would be to wait outside the back doors, because that was for sure where jim would exit.  we did just that.

we were there at first with about 5 creepy guys who had tons of glossy photos of different stars.  they were there to get as many autographs as possible to sell later.  of course, their intentions weren't as pure as ours, so we felt completely justified standing in front of them.  we waited.  and froze.  and then this guy came out:

he did not make any jokes.

miss j and i were very unimpressed.  nbd, he wasn't jim.  and then we realized, well, it's not every day that robin williams is standing 2 feet in front of you.  so we took a picture.  we waited some more.

then, finally, HERE COMES JIM!!!

LOOK!!

what is wrong with her?  i want her job. 

and although the tongue girl kept trying to pull him away (man, i hate that girl.) jim came over and signed autographs and took pictures.

and he was so sweet, too.  he thanked us all for coming and waiting in the cold and said how nice it was to see us and "golly gee willikers, i had no idea i was so famous and cute."  he didn't really say that, but that's how he seemed.  and then, determined to make up for our earlier mishap, i used my elbowing skills to cut through the crowd.  (miss j was too shy...apparently, she hasn't been to many concerts.)  although there was a fence separating us from jim, we got this glorious picture:

look how close our faces are!
look at the death grip i have on his skinny waist!
(oh, actually, you can't see that, but trust me, it was there.)

and then, because i could, i cut off all the unnecessary parts of the picture:

now we are a real couple.

and maybe i carried a 5x7 of this picture around with me for weeks.  and maybe i showed it to everyone i knew for weeks.  and maybe it graced the bulletin board above my desk at school for the rest of the school year (right next to the photoshopped pictures of me and jim made for me by cute 3rd graders.)  and maybe even now when i watch the office, i still get all giddy and remind myself, "I MET THAT GUY!!"

in england it's called welsh rarebit.

last night while i was watching a show about wedding dresses, (i don't know why i was watching this, but for some inexplicable reason it seemed better than my other option, which was sleep.) i decided i wanted some cheese toast.

i sprinkled some mozzarella on a slice of bread, popped it in my toaster oven, and hurried back to the tv to watch alabama megan search for her "southern chic" wedding dress.  then my cheese toast apparently started to burn.  i opened the oven and smoke came pouring out, which was very weird because the cheese was still frozen on the bread.  then the smoke alarms went off.  all of them.  there is a surprisingly large number of smoke alarms in my little apartment.

it was 2:24 am, so i panicked, imagining my angry neighbors storming up to my apartment and pounding on my door (they are not the friendliest folks around, no matter how often i try to bribe them with cookies.)  i ran around like a headless chicken.  i ran to the windows, but then thought opening them would spread the sound better and i'd wake up all the other buildings.  i ran to the toaster, unplugged it, and blew on the smoke.  i ran to the bedrooms and looked at all the fire alarms, wondering if i could somehow disarm them.  i ran back to the windows, opened them and had a brilliant idea to get my giant fan and put it in front of a window to blow in a refreshing breeze.  while i was scurrying to the bedroom, the alarms stopped.

after turning off my lights to conceal my identity as the moron burning cheese toast at 2:30 am, i retrieved my cheese toast to enjoy while watching the brides.  (seriously, i was riveted.)  it was mostly uncooked, but i didn't want to risk putting it in my demon toaster again.   it was the most concerning and disappointing cheese toast i've ever had.  the good news is that megan finally found her southern chic dress and she looked lovely.  her mother and i cried happy tears.