Tag, Schmag

I've been "tagged" by Jaime, aka DOB, aka Jason's wife. Now, usually, I would be WAY too cool for a tag, but who can resist an opportunity to talk about me? I know I can't.

One of the lamer "rules" of the tag is that you have to tag 5 other people, and if they tag 5 people, and if they tag 5 people then you would have a nice little tag pyramid scheme. So I will choose to tag myself 5 different times, so that I can talk about myself even more.

In each tag you need to mention 5 random things about yourself. Those are the rules that I know of, and here are the 5:

1. My music

I love music, I always dreamt of being a DJ ever since I got my first radio when I was 10 at Christmas. I also got the Ty Detmer Heisman Trophy poster (with autograph!) that hung above my bed until my mission, right next to the boogers I wiped on the wall. Ugh, that makes me nauseous just thinking about it. If my kids do that, I will have them fed to the wolves.

Anyway, I spent many an hour listening to KJQ with my fingers perched on the "Record" button so I could record my favorite songs on the blank tapes I purchased with every cent I got. My first favorite song was "Message in a Bottle" by the Police because I liked the "SOS" part at the end.

Good memory about blank tapes, which I hope Baldwin will forgive me for mentioning:

When I was 13-ish, Baldwin was in love with this girl Linda Rowberry (yes, THAT Linda Rowberry) and talked about her non-stop. She lived in the hated 5th ward, our rival basketball ward in the next neighborhood over. We always would walk by her house when we weren't walking by my crush's house (Katie Howard).

Baldwin is in the middle of this picture, with the red hair.

Anyway, I asked Baldwin if he had any old blank tapes he wasn't using, and he gave me a couple. One day I was listening to aforementioned blank tape, which was only about halfway full, while I was doing something on the other side of the room. After the last song played, I let the tape run because I was too busy doing whatever I was doing (probably creating some make-believe football league).


After about 10 minutes, a song came on, but not directly recorded from the radio, it was being played externally, because you could hear the ambient noise. The song was "She's Like the Wind" from Dirty Dancing, and Baldwin was singing along to it. At the time, Baldwin was in an extremely gay singing group called "Footnotes" that frequently sang lame songs at our junior high assemblies that were probably titled "We're Bestest Friends" and "I Love You Like I Love My Other Handicapped Friends". His love Linda was also in Footnotes with him. Anyway, I immediately stopped working on my composite schedule for my fake league and ran over to the radio and turned it up so I could hear every possible sound. Baldwin was doing a pretty good job keeping up with Patrick Swayze, but it was still very amusing. Once the song ended, there was a pause, and then....

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda...

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda...

"Oh Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda..."

And on and on like this for a minute or so. Highly amusing.

At this point, I will say that Baldwin is one of my all-time best friends and I should say that he is one of these characters that is always madly in love with a girl. He is happily married and has a beautiful daughter, and his wife is lot more of a catch than stinkin' Linda Rowberry.

Back to music. I have a list of my all-time fave bands and songs, but this deserves its own blog. I will get to it later.

2. My stuffed animals

Just like my radio, I received my first quality stuffed animal (from here on out referred to as "Stuffedee"--Mom's word for it) for Christmas, in 1986. I remember it being 1986 because I brought him in for Show & Tell in 1st grade. He was a lion, and I named him Gibby. My brother Brian (from here on out referred to as Bohnzee) got a hippo, and Kurt (JoEllen calls him Kurtis-woo, but that's just lame) got some sort of lame stuffedee, I think a dog. Well, when Mom saw how much fun we had with them, we kept getting more and more of them. I collected Lions and named them starting with G: Gary, Gary Jr., Griffith, and Harry. There's only so many Lionesque names that start with G. Brian collected hippos and rhinos and named them Blab I, Blab II, Blab III, Blab III Jr, Tlab, Mlab, Tlab Jr, etc. Kurt started getting cooler animals, like tigers, but he named them lame names like "Fred" and "Mikey", so his animals weren't as cool.

I was mad that Heidi was in this picture above because her stuffedee was so lame. Brian looks like such a nerdbag! Almost Dustin Ormond-esque.

Anyway, we played all sorts of games with them, most common were football and basketball, and each had their own qualities: some were fast, some were strong, some were slow (those were usually the stuffedees that we inherited, a few of them were the extremely low-budget pillows with faces drawn on them: "Hug Me" and "Snowman", the slowest and most uncoordinated of the bunch). We also had extensive wars. The stuffedees had their own language, and the most original phrase was "Eh!" (pronounced "Enngghhh") that showed approval, excitement, or general happiness. Hours of entertainment. Gibby and Gary moved to Boston with me.
In my arms is Gary, on the table is Gary Jr. and Griffith. Liesl is holding a worthless walrus, so worthless I don't recall his name.


3. My TV

When we were little, TV was FORBIDDEN AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE YE SHALL WATCH. Except the following:

1. Mom and Dad gone
2. While Mom was teaching piano lessons (M, Tu, Th from 3-5, right during Disney afternoon. The WORST part about the M, Tu, Th schedule is the Duck Tales that had the "To Be Continued..." because we NEVER got to watch how it ended on Friday.)





3. Any sports--I'd even watch the lame sports on Saturdays so I could get much more TV in.
4. Saturday morning until 9 AM. "Captain N" was my favorite cartoon, albeit short-lived.





















5. Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and whatever filled the 1:30 pm spot. "Today's Special" (featuring Jeff the Extremely Creepy Mannequin and "Hurry, Jody, Hurry!") was allowed for about a year and that was on at 10 AM, although whenever Jeff turned into a mannequin and vice versa (via the Plaid and Embarrassingly Ugly Magic Hat), I could never watch.
















6. Any "Anne of Green Goblins" episode on KBYU.

7. General Conference. More tolerable because it meant we were watching TV. Listening to it on the radio? Death.

We had this old, tiny TV we had in the dining room and you had to play with all the knobs and antenna to get a good reception. After a while the power button broke so we had to unplug it every time we wanted it off. When Mom and Dad were upstairs, Neil would turn on "Magnum, PI" sneakily and keep the volume super low and we would all crowd around, while Neil would holding onto the cord to turn it off in the event of Mom. When we heard stirring upstairs (right above the TV), we would all tense up until it stopped. If the stirring turned into steps across the floor to the stairs, we would yank the cord and goosestep around the house, whistling innocently. I usually fled downstairs to the basement.

We used to have to rent a VCR every time we wanted to rent a movie. Everything we rented was in black and white because Dad loves the classics. I remember we rented "Shane" for Craig's birthday and I was super excited cause it was in color. Of course, this was 1990-something and color and been long since invented.

Eventually we got a new TV and a VCR, and TV became a more regular part of my life. My parents have their shows that they watch ("Jeeves and Wooster", "P&P", "Everybody Loves Raymond"), so even they caved in to the mindless entertainment of TV.

Now, I can watch TV whenever I want. Well, not at work. But you get my drift. I do think watching TV is a huge waste of time, but I think I deserve after slaving away at work all day. I wish I could read more books without getting extremely sleepy, so that is why I don't read much.

4. My plans

I love to make plans. I make plans years and years in advance, calculate how much money is necessary for these plans, and then budget accordingly. Even if a plan is just a dream, it's fun to me to figure out the logistics and see how and if it would work. A lot of people would say that this makes me fairly unspontaneous, but I would say that this makes me MORE spontaneous. Because I always know where I stand with future plans, I know whether a spontaneous plan to go to NYC for the weekend is a good idea or not. It also enables me to take my excursions around the world.

Not to sound like I'm old and experienced, but I am older and more experienced every day and I realize that past planning has led to future and present benefits. And poor planning has led to painful prices to pay. If I would give anybody advice, I would say to make a reasonable budget and stick to it. The key words there are: reasonable--give yourself allowances for wants, not just needs; and stick--you need to stick to it and make sacrifices, or you'll never reach that goal of going on a safari in Kenya!

That was my soapbox.

5. My maps

I have always loved maps. We had a large world atlas at home, and I used to plan trips around the world, which probably has something to do with my love of seeing new places. That's all I have to say about that.

Getting (it) Together

I'm sorry to those of you closely monitoring the countdown of our unborn child, but that thing was starting to creep me out! It just looked like a curled up worm or something, and when no real growth is happening, what's the point?

So we've been totally slacking on our blogging lately. I would blame it on our super busy, super important lives, but let's be honest, blogging just doesn't take that long and we're just not that important (Don't tell Kent). Anyway, after much suspense, here is the Hansen Fall Holiday Recap...

As much as I absolutely LOVE our new apartment, it doesn't offer a very trick-or-treat friendly environment. Trick-or-treating is one of the best parts about Halloween, whether you're the one in costume trolling for candy or answering the door to over-excited and over-sugared children. However, one of our neighbors promised me that she would bring her daughters to our back door to trick-or-treat. She kept her promise and brought the other small children in our building with her. I wish I had been quick enough with the camera, but it was a group of girls, under 5 and it looked something like this:


Okay, so maybe Andrei Kirilenko from the Utah Jazz wasn't with them, but there were plenty of fairies and princesses to go around. Besides, putting in a picture of an NBA player is the only way to get guys to read this blog.





I did try to get Kent into the holiday spirit by carving the pumpkins we picked up at the Apple Orchard a few weeks before. Kent refused to use the fantabulous pumpkin carving kit I bought because he was too good for that commercial ridiculousness. Although he was jealous of the pumpkin scraper it came with and I had to keep waiting for him to "finish his turn..." Another win for commercialism...Here is what we ended up with. And I will admit that Kent's freehand jack-o-lantern is much more entertaining than my pattern.



My impression of Kent's pumpkin...yes, I do know how brave I am for posting that on the world wide web.










If you're unsure, mine is the awesome skeleton face on the right. Kent's is the crossed-eyed, buck tooth crazy lookin' one on the left.









Following the barrage of fairy princesses, we spent the rest of All Hallow's Eve playing a basketball game for Kent's city league. Oh, it was scary all right.

Then this past Monday my parents arrived from England to spend Thanksgiving with us. They are in the process of moving to Thailand, so their first stop was here in Boston as they make the trip to the other side of the world. I tried to keep them entertained and I think we did an okay job. I haven't seen my sister Amber that often since I lived with her, but it was nice to have everyone together, no matter what Kent thinks. Actually, I'll give Kent credit, the McKinnons can be quite a clan to handle (think battle scene in Braveheart), but he handled it with grace and charm.












This was my first time being responsible for the main part of the feast, but I felt pretty confident having my parents there to help. Early on Thursday morning I put my mother to work...











All-in-all it worked out pretty well. The turkey took an extra hour to cook, but it was delicious and well worth the wait. Although I must say, a 20lb turkey is a tough bird to handle. Around the table we had my dad, one set of elders from our ward (Payne & Soeun), Kent, myself, Amber and my mom. Sadly, we were again slacking on camera duty and this is the only picture we have from Thanksgiving. Everyone looks regal in their paper crowns from the Holiday Crackers my parents sent Amber and I for Christmas last year.



If you don't know what Holiday Crackers are, they are a mostly-English tradition. You hold one end and have the person next to you grab the other and on 3, pull to pop them. Inside you'll find an awesome and stylish paper crown, an equally awesome and corny joke, and a sweet toy. We have had them at almost every holiday feast since we first moved to England when I was 3 years old and if I could buy them in the US I would make sure they were always part of the family dinners.

Model Child

The problem with posting a life-altering post like "The Goodwins" is that I have to follow it up with an equally entertaining post. Well, I shall disappoint the Faithful by posting a rather "newsy" post instead of a "observational" post. Booooooooring!

One of the perks about having a job and not being a student, is that once you're home, you got nothin to do but watch the boob-tube-aroo and fool, fool, fool. So I used to just relax by watching the tube or play Civ IV. I can only take a couple of hours of staring at the picture box and Civ has been losing its allure, so I decided to take up a new hobby. But, alas, what was I to take up?

I narrowed it down to 5 hobbies:

1. Annoying my wife



















2. Annoying my neighbors


















3. Scrapbooking


















4. Sports and junk












5. Growing out my toenails to beat the Guinness world record








As appealing as the first 2 sounded, it would lead to a cranky wife and/or neighbors, so that was ruled out. Scrapbooking is awesome in every way, so I knew that wasn't for me. Sports is so last week. So growing out my toenails was the hobby!

The first week was going great, until I realized that I STILL had all sorts of time, no matter how much I spent focusing on toenail-growing. One day, while simultaneously growing the toenails and watching "Beetlejuice", I saw the impressive model city they had in their basement, and I decided to go into modeling.

No, not male modeling, although I would be the Most Smartest Model if I got into it. Instead, I went down to Ye Olde Train Modeling Shoppe, which is also Ye Biggest Train Modeling Shoppe Inne Ye USA, and starting perusing. I didn't want to waste a bunch of dough on a model train, because I didn't even know if I would like it, so I spent 10 bucks on a "Homestead" set (water tower included!), bought some Super Duper Awesome Ridiculously Sticky Glue and a Precise-O Knife. I took it home and started gluing away, and lo, I finished my first model. I had a few screwups, probably used way too much glue, and even bent the antenna on the house, but I think it looks FETCHIN good.











"Oh, Ima doin' the warsh out here on the range..."











"Oh shewt! George done did sit in a cow pie again!"














"The unshaven giant is back again!!! Aieeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!"

Goodwins

Last night I had a dream about the Goodwins. For those of you unfamiliar with the Goodwins, they are my parent's long-time neighbors in our cul-de-sac in Orem. They had 2 natural born kids, Hillary and Chris, and then adopted 2 kids from El Salvador, Dave and Timmy.

Since I definitely don't have pictures of them, I did a Google search for their names and found their counterparts:

Bob




















Anne















Hillary



















Chris



















Dave









Tim


















All of the above people actually share the name of our infamous neighbors except for Hillary's picture, because there was no Google Image found for "Hillary Goodwin", and Dave, because the Dave Goodwins I found were insufficiently funny.

The Goodwins are famous for:
1. Borrowing our ladder and not returning it.
2. Playing basketball on our court while we are eating Sunday dinner.
3. Weirdo Chris practicing his wicked awesome mountain bike moves on their front lawn for about 17 hours every day, and then mocking me for playing "in mine" basketball, complete with crowd noise and announcers. This deserves its own blog post.
4. Hillary, a fairly normal girl, who Mom dubbed "Hillstance". This nickname is probably the longest lasting Mom nickname.
5. Timmy getting jailed multiple times in his life and driving hideous Mexi-mobiles.
6. Dave thinking he is an athlete because he made one of the dozens of double-A soccer teams, in an era where EVERYBODY made the team. I reffed quite a few games in which he thought I was the "worst ref ever". In a related story, I thought he was the worst player ever.
7. Staying up late (past 8 pm!) and playing in their yard in the summer months when it was still light outside while me, Brian, and Kurt (the 3 terrible twerps) looked on in insane jealousy. (Similar to the Simpsons Episode where Bart and Lisa go live at the Flanders and they have to go to bed at like 5 pm).
8. Having the poopiest backyard of all time, what with their 3 Austin Collies and all. I hated mowing that lawn, but I needed the dough.
9. Being "rich", according to us twerps, because the Schwann's frozen food truck pulled up to their house at least once a week. We equated frozen food with wealth because we rarely got it, and we loved it. We also equated delivery service with wealth because we also never got it and we never got to buy ice cream from the ice cream truck. Turns out that they were just lazy.
10. Bob breaking every LDS record for talk length (53 minutes), testimony length (25 minutes-also when sacrament meeting was the LAST meeting, making us endure 3 hours and 20 minutes of church that day), prayer length (16 minutes), baby blessing length (23 minutes), and home teaching lesson length (3 weeks, 2 days, 19 hours, 32 minutes, 14 seconds--according to Kurt).

Anyway, in the dream I had to go over to the Goodwin's for some reason and it was just Anne and Bob, and they had done all sorts of remodeling, and Chris still lived downstairs, which is really funny if you think about it. That is all.

I pray the Goodwins never see this.