oh, the places you'll go (in utah)

Please dine at a delightful little restaurant in downtown Provo called Communal. Thank you, Jenny, for turning 25 on Saturday and for wanting to eat brunch.  The french toast was a treat.

You can tell that the Cocoa Bean Cafe in Provo knows their audience when their best-selling item is named the “better than whatever cupcake.”  Thanks for not letting that get too graphic, marketing.

No matter what the month, Sonic drinks equates to wanting to be at the pool. (Ahh, the good days.) If it’s freezing outside, though, the next best option is to sip ‘em while playing Phase 10 and watching Hitch with friends.

 

The Aveda Institute is the best-kept secret in Provo. Where else can you spend $16 and receive a head, neck, and shoulder massage, another head massage/shampoo-conditioning while reclining in a massage chair, a style, a hand massage, a full-sized bottle of Aveda volumizing tonic, and a $16 gift certificate to come back? (Be willing to invest two hours of your time.)

I have yet to see anyone famous at Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Maybe next year. No matter how many times I go to Park City and even though it’s in my current state of residence, I always feel like a tourist there. I love it. And I love fine dining.

Who knew these things existed in Utah? We took a detour on our way home from PC last night and stumbled upon the Midway Ice Castles. Kind of impressive.

 [PS, Please note that all of the pictures in this post were taken using Hipstamatic. Thank you, cool friends, for telling me about this app.]

baby got booth

Take a few minutes to watch this video my company recently made to promote our new conference booth. It's pretty fun. And as always, for more information about the fantastic company I work for, please visit the Imagine Learning website. You should also check out our blog!

there was a lot of shouting

Last night we went to my family's house for game night and played Last Word (my team won as I yelled out "hymen" for parts of the body starting with an h), Catch Phrase, and some other game that I don't know the name of-- Write to 100? 

Best.game.ever.

I will explain:

Roll 2 dice. Try to roll doubles.

When you roll doubles, start writing to 100 as fast as you can on your piece of paper. 

While you're writing, everyone else takes a turn rolling.

(They don't want you to win.)

 Once someone else rolls doubles, they steal the pen from you and start writing to 100 on their piece of paper as fast as they can.

(This is where the game gets intense.)

Play until someone makes it to 100. 

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

(There will be shouting, cheering, booing, blaming, stealing, and sweating.)

Play it. You'll be obsessed.

[Uncle Stuart, Syd, Amie, & Aunt Sandy: thank you for hosting game night. Note, this picture was definitely not taken during game night, but rather at my sister's October wedding reception.]

One game we didn't get to was the paper bag game. See an example below from this year's Thanksgiving. My 6'1" brother Aaron took second place. No idea how he did it.

paper bag flexibility from Amanda Johnson on Vimeo.

my new love

Heard this on the way to work this morning. I love it.

something i love about this place:

Leaving work today. Beautiful.

quite the juxtaposition

Of all days for there to be a White sale...

logan weekend

Have you ever played the game Last Word? It's turned in to be a tradition whenever I go visit the Jensens in Logan. You have a letter and then someone puts down one of their category cards (for example, T and titles of songs). Everyone starts saying words with that letter that fit in the category and the goal is to be the last person to say something before the buzzer goes off. I'm used to winning, but this weekend I was shown up by someone. He's better than me at every thing.


After my sister, L, made us a delicious homemade belgian waffle breakfast, Steve, Brad and I went to a few of the local gems in the area (thank you, Lauren, for ideas): 

• Pepperidge Farms Thrift Store (I spent $13 on 5 loaves of bread, 2 bags of goldfish crackers and 1 bag of milanos)
• The Sock Outlet (sadly, it was closed, but we tried)
• Gossner's Cheese Factory (delicious samples of both cheese and flavored U.H.T. milks)
• Hardware Ranch (lots of elk-- see pictures below)
• Aggie Ice Cream (we tried Aggie Bull Tracks and Aggie Blue Mint)
• The Beehive Grill

[We like each other. I just wanted to see the little elk behind us.]

Fun weekend!

utah bucket list: hill afb

So there are a lot of Utah things I haven't yet gotten around to doing in the five years I've lived here. I think everyone's seen the movie The Bucket List, right? Using it as my inspiration, I'm happy to say that as of December 2010, I have my own Utah Bucket List-- a list of all of the places, events, and things I should at some point do in this state. My deadline? The end of this coming summer.

Saturday we went up to Hill Air Force museum. Located near Ogden, this museum has about a million old, legitimate Air Force planes. It was really fun to see all of the planes. The most fun, though, was probably to hear Brad tell me any fact, description, or engineering piece of information about any single plane in that place. I don't know how he does it.

[I love these old planes. Please remember that Ohio is the birthplace of aviation. It says so on our license plates.]

[I'm sorry that I'm unable to tell you what any of these planes are.]

After the museum we were able to go somewhere I've never been before: an actual military base. Thanks to Brad's Department of Defense personnel status, we drove up to the entrance gate of Hill AFB, showed the armed guard B's military ID, and drove around for a bit. We went to the exchange, the commissary, and saw some real planes on the runway (F-16? F-18? F-14? Again, I apologize for being so ignorant.) I also asked lots of questions about military ranking systems and learned a lot about the Navy.

Other notables of the day: seeing one of my favorite mission friends and her husband who live just minutes away from the base, getting a rock chip in the windshield of a car that's not mine, eating lunch at Chipotle in Bountiful, spilling an entire cup of soda on the front seat of said car, stopping at Anthropologie in Salt Lake, learning that my boyfriend takes full advantage of his concealed firearm permit, and finishing off our day of military appreciation by watching Top Gun. Take my breath away.

Suggestions of things to add to my list?

this place is a dream

I've always wanted to go to the Tree Room, one of Robert Redford's restaurants at Sundance. Well, we came up with a few excuses to celebrate, so we went up there for dinner last night. Delightful.

The Native American decor, the gorgeous wintry landscape outdoors, and the exquisite menu has made this restaurant one of my new favorite places to visit in Utah, if only just once a year (please note, the fanciness of this Butch Cassidy lodge is strongly reflected in its pricing).