It's Always Better on Holiday III, Pt.1

Well, summer came and went and although I visited Chicago twice and California once as August ended I just didn't feel that I had properly vacationed this summer so I decided to go to Utah over Labor Day weekend to take one last shot at having a good summer vacation. Funny that I was taking my "official" summer vacation after classes had started and funny how I always think of Utah when I want to take an awesome vacation.

I won't keep you in suspense. It was the best Labor Day Weekend ever.

Thursday evening I took the A train down to JFK. While I've been known to complain about the breakdancers here in New York, I'll never complain when breakdancers try to do their thing on a moving subway car.



Want to see videos of breakdancers breakdancing on the subway? Click here or here, but be quick about it, because these are YouSendIt links and won't last forever.

Thanks to a funny bit of fortune I wound up riding the subway (and AirTrain, as pictured here) to the airport with Brook and Ty, who were headed to Salt Lake on the same JetBlue flight as me . . . along with a decent handful of other NYC Mormons that I knew. The JFK-->SLC JetBlue flights are among the best places to run into NYC Mormons these days.



Here I am, riding the AirTrain, thinking of my impending Utah adventures.



My flight was an hour late taking off, meaning it was sufficiently late landing in Salt Lake, meaning that after Matt picked me up we decided there was no need to late night adventure. I spent the next day with Grandma, we went to the Salt Lake City Temple and then ate at the Blue Iguana because, as Grandma said, "You can't eat Mexican and then go to the Temple."



Nachos rule!



Now, when night came Matt and I headed down to Provo for Rebekah Tayebi's birthday party. Rebekah used to be a New York friend, but she moved out west in the middle of the beginning of the summer. A good number of New York residents, former residents, and residents-to-be were at her party. (Here we've got Visitor-of-New-York-Matt, Former-New-Yorker-But-Frequent-Returner-Mitch, Soon-to-Be-New-Yorker-Di, Current-Resident-Me, Former-Resident-Rebekah, and Ex-Resident-Christian)



On Monday night Mitch would ask Matt, "How many pink shirts do you own?"



It turns out that if you accidentally have your finger over your flash your photos will turn out kind of crazy looking.



Things were going pretty well at the party and then Scott Lemmon showed up and all the girls lost their minds.



Here's Mother Di, losing her mind over Scott Lemmon.



The party was good and all, but if you wanted the birthday girl's attention, the best thing for you to have done would be to have called her phone because while we were all in the house she was just pacing outside the window on the phone with people in China or Hawaii. Just playin', Beks, it was your birthday, so you could do whatever you wanted to.



Birthday Cake! Birthday Cheesecake!



Matt made buddies with a dude who had the same jeans and shoes as him.



After the party we headed out to seek Provo Adventure and wound up finding it in the basement where Marsha lives now.



Marsha paints dogs better than you do.



When I say "Provo Adventure" I mean the adventure of a bunch of people sitting around sharing stories, telling jokes, planning to host television shows, and that sort of stuff. Here's Rob and Marsha, and due to an incredible lack of attention to detail on my part, I have no photos of Emily Asplund from Friday night, and she was one of the most important people there.



When Matt realized that Di was the Glamor Shots girl in Napoleon Dynamite he started sending her photo to all his friends with his phone along with sensible text messages.



When that Adventure wound down Matt, Scott, and I went to get food at Beto's, but the scene was a bit too nuts so we didn't stick around . . .



. . . instead, we went over to Del Taco.



While enjoying Del Taco, Matt tried to show us what this one guy's face looked like, and Scott sort of thought he knew what Matt was talking about, but wasn't sure. So these are photos of the Lemmons trying to make this one face, or laughing about the one face, or whatever.















Here's a video of them trying to make "The Face."

Me, I drank lots of pop.



And that's what's happened Thursday night to Friday night. Soon I'll tell you all about Saturday.