congratulations!

I just found out that Alicia is already pregnant! WOW! That's what I call a honeymoon baby!
Congratulations!!!

crazy Isla Vista

(I had to split the previous post up into 2 smaller ones so it would load without hiding pictures.)


The place gets so crazy that they actually let all the actual residents move their cars into parking terraces at the university because so many cars are vandalized. A favorite thing to do of every drunk is to pedal their bikes down the road and kick off the side view mirror of any car foolish enough to not turn them in. Unfortunately this happens all year round and not just on Halloween. At any given time you can drive through I.V. and see about one third of the cars with their side-view mirrors turned in to avoid the vandalism. Jodi and I took these pictures when we drove around the other day, notice the broken bottom two. On lots of cars you'll see the mirror duct-taped back on.

I guess it comes with the territory though. I mean when you go to a school that Playboy ranks 2nd in the nation when it comes to party schools that what you get. The Princeton review actually ranked us 8th or something this year and people were infuriated! I mean last year when the UCSB Men's Soccer team won their last game to take 1st in the Nation they ripped out the goalposts, paraded them through I.V. and then threw them into the ocean. That's right. They threw the goalposts off the 30 or 40 foot cliff into the ocean. If that doesn't get you number 1 party school then what will? watch the video here.

We also carved some pumpkins and watched Arsenic and Old Lace with friends. Jodi's masterpiece was phenomenal and totally creative as usual. Mine turned out ok as well (it's the batman one above)







Here's a picture of Jodi's from last year. She's amazing.

Did I mention how much I love Jodi's camera? It takes the most phenomenal pictures even at night! All the ash and smoke in the air from the fires have made for spooky-scary skies lately.

All Hallows Eve!!

Some holidays just have a city and a street name inseperably attached to them. New Year's and New York City's Time's Square... Mardi Gras and New Orleans' Bourbon Street... St. Patrick's Day and Chicago's dyed green river....

I've always wondered where the notoriously craziest place for Halloween was. Until now that is. I've found it. Santa Barbara, or rather, Isla Vista, owns Halloween!! This cozy 1 mile X 1 mile area next to campus and the beach is where almost all the 20,000+ students live.
Which alone would be insane but add onto that the 30,000 out of town visitors which come to I.V. like pilgrims towards some holy city. I can assure you that I.V. was no holy city. In fact we undertook it upon ourselves to discover just how crazy Del Playa Drive of Isla Vista is during Halloween.




Armed with our extremely conservative costumes and a few friends we headed into the madness. To my surprise a whole lot of people yelled things when they saw the Argentine jersey, mostly good, with a few very bad. One passerby looked at Jodi and said, "Ooh, not only a pirate, but a naughty pirate!" um...okay. At one point Jodi realized "We're one of them! I thought it so insane that all these people would flock here, and now we're following the crowd." We had no idea what awaited us.

There were people EVERYWHERE! You couldn't even walk in lots of places. It was literally shoulder to shoulder for block after block. There was puke everywhere, riot cops on horseback, huge halogen lights illuminating the chaos... the wildest costumes you could imagine like the giant blow-up penis, the naked dude except for a very poor underwear choice, huge throngs of spartans from the movie 300, tons of girls not even in costume but just walking around in a bra and panties, mario, smurfs, angels, hooters girls and much more. I even saw the Cingular bars go walking by. It was amazing. We walked through puke, got cat-called, saw many fights and arrests, and some girl dressed as wonder woman even grabbed my you-know-what as she walked past. Nothing quite as funny as seeing students who are normally so well behaved in class passed out on some random lawn. I don't dare embed a video because it's too crazy. But if you dare, you can check it out here.

exploring!

We have been exploring Santa Barbara a little bit! look what we've found...
Rocky Nook park, complete with barbeque pits for tin foil dinners, lots of trees and boulders, gigantic mosaic lizards, quaint graffiti covered bridges and rope swings over a boiling cesspool of filth.

stop motion movie

this is the sweetest stop motion movie I've ever seen in my entire life.

bring on halloween!

Last night in I.V. we saw a thousands of girls wandering drunk through the streets, playing beer-pong or dressed as Angels, Devils or hookers (at least I think that's what they were going for).
Note:It's still two weeks from Halloween.
It should get crazy. We're ready for it.

home teaching, UCSB style

I just got back from doing my part in the "annual elder's quorum visits" where we go out and visit EVERYBODY that's on the church record at least once a year. This certainly didn't seem like it would be a very exciting evening but boy was I wrong...

You see, Santa Barbara, or rather, the Goleta Valley ward has some colorful members, and some even more colorful inactive members. Last year when they did this some old codger, who ironically enough lives on "Winchester Drive," got out his shotgun and started blasting away telling them to never come back!!

So we split up and took 6 or 7 names each. I set out with the Elder's Quorum President, Jason Earl, we went and did some visits. Some people would come to the door and tell us we don't want anything to do with your church anymore... blah blah blah. Others went for the more sly approach confirming that they were the same person on our list, but that they've never been baptized in our church, or at least they don't remember anyway. Others said they could offer money to the church yes, but time; no. A few peaked through the blinds at us, turned off the lights really fast and pretended they weren't home.

But my favorite was when we were looking for a guy named Felipe Radalto or something like that. We couldn't find his house so we tried the closest one next door. It went something like this...
*knock knock*
"Who's there?
*awkward silence as we decide what to say so as to not blow our cover* "Ummm... the Elders"
"WHO?"
"Ummm... Jason and Taylor"
"Oh, ok.... come on in"
"What?"
"Ya, just come on in!"
So what were we supposed to do? They must have thought we were some of their friends. I grabbed the doorknob and let myself in and immediately was overwhelmed with the smell of marijuana. I walked a few steps in the door and right next to me on a couch were two guys my age, each one had a GIGANTIC PURPLE BONG in his hands. We noticed what they had and we were rather surprised. As the awkwardness of the situation set in I realized I didn't quite know how to introduce ourselves... I finally clumsily asked if they knew the guy and they giggled something nonsensical and kept smoking their bongs.


Now there's an entertaining home teaching visit!! I'll never complain about boring visits again!

A New Job

After much searching, I was able to find a job to keep myself busy while Taylor is at school. It is with an After School Program for girls called Girls Inc. Their theme is "Inspiring All Girls to be Strong, Smart, and Bold"...I've never been the ultra feminist type, but I think it will be super fun and a good opportunity to be an example to young girls. I will be teaching 4 classes: Media Literacy (one for ages 9-11 and another for 6-8) learning about the media and ways that it often distorts our perception of reality, Character Quest for the wee little ones learning about being respectful, trustworthy, fair, etc., and a Creative Writing class. We are pretty sad that it's only 20 hours a week (for now anyway) and I don't get any benefits, but it should be a good job.

where's andy????

this is important. a bunch of people who usually see andy at least once a year have not seen him in approximately 6 days. rumor is he's on the run from the law, dating a scandinavian supermodel, dead or perfectly fine living right where he always has!

stupid rain...

Some days I'm happier than others that my only means of transportation is the mighty rebel...
If you look close you may see why.That's right, my very own Splash Mountain ride I get to look forward to each time it rains.

The rain does give us a chance to catch up on 30 Rock and The Office though. Also I discovered a new youtube video I think you'll enjoy. this is episode 1 of 4

time to slaughter the fattened calf...

because my books finally came!!!


That's right, after months and months of waiting and getting photocopies my books finally came. I never have had problems with them coming but this time everything seemed to go wrong. Thank heavens they're here now. Whether or not I'll still be praising their arrival as they make my life hell in the weeks to come is still to be determined.

I plead Not Guilty

okay listen, Taylor (aka King of exaggeration) has made me out to be a frog killer. I did not kill any frogs. I was chasing him and he jumped off of the balcony, but he was still moving and was saved by the little girl below us. Thank you very much- cleared of all charges.

"blog the frog"

Our cool little apartment is surrounded by beautiful trees!

We discovered that Santa Barbara, with all of it's lush greenery, has it's share of critters. We had to get ants sprayed because apparently this place was built on an ancient indian anthill burial ground. They're everywhere! Also we found to our surprise that FROGS are all over the place! We found one the other day and it leaped into our house and provided quite the chase. (Who knew a little frog could be so hard to catch?) After he had peed all over my hands, refused to sit still for a picture and jumped and stuck to most of our furniture we caught him and let him go.









Let him go for a while that is. Just tonight he made a reappearance and Jodi KILLED the frog. Out of pure spite no less.