Thanksgivings That Pretend to be American

I went out to my sisters house in Colorado this American Thanksgiving, in order to bond with her and her hooligans.
I guess that includes her husband Scott.

Here's some gems I left out of the facebook album because I figured my fbook friends just don't have as high an interest in the Gundersons being awesome.

santa hats, decemberweengiving meal AND painted nails??

so we went on a hike and landon and parker got sticks. parker kept biting his.

parker kept wanting me to take him up to the top of the waterfall.
this is how close to the top we were (on an outcropping of ice directly over top of the water no less), and he still wanted to go higher.
we probably would have gone higher, but cindy arrived with landon and made us come down.
so we slid on the boulders the whole way down.

landon was jealous of my swimsuit.

parker being 'NAKE!'

the gunderboys decorating for christmas.

we went to the zoo, and as we approached each different primate enclosure, landon and parker would call out the names of the specific monkeys.

you know the beginning to the circle of life (the african part - haaaaaaaaaaai, sevenya.... that's horrible phonetic spelling, but you get it)? This is Parkers rendition (sing it to the tune and it's better): "uh. suh. buh [unhale] yuh. eeets see bobo!"
sung perfectly on cue as we walked up to the lion enclosure.

And finally, I had the great pleasure of coming with Cindy and the kids to have Parker's hair cut. He throws a fit each time Cindy tries to do it (resulting in random chunks missing and long hair everywhere else), so the idea was to scare him enough to make him want Cindy to do it.

Prior to this video, the lady put a penguin hair cutting cape thing on him and he screamed and flapped his arms like a mad goose.

She switched to the fish one.

Then came the choruses of "ow! ow! ow! I don't want toooo!"
Then this -




Did I mention that I took Parker in to go to the washroom at church, and after I rushed to stop him from putting his face in the toilet water, he immediately licked the toilet seat?
I told him that was disgusting.
So he looked up at me and grinned, then bent down and licked the floor.


Thank you so much to Cindy and Scott for having me and feeding me and to my Northern mumsy and popsicle for the funding!

Geo Moves to Mexico

I'm happy to share that our grande apartment in Little Mexico now has 6 residents: myself, my 3 roommates, Dani(a roommate)'s fish Shakira (currently being trained) and...

GEO!



She is a mouse, she was a gift and she is adorable.
She's starting to let me hold her, which is like every childhood dream come true (ie the gophers, mice and gartner snakes we were never allowed to domesticate (i wonder why)).

Christmas is already jolly this year :]

Halloween like a Champ

I'm sure most of you are pretty familiar with the fact that I have a tendency to boycott holidays. It's not that I'm bothered by all the cheer, it just takes so much effort - especially for all those holidays that don't actually mean anything...like maybe Halloween.

After getting my 'tude all year last year, my roommates decided it was time to take revenge. Enter the month long Halloween celebrations.

I'm not sure how I agreed to all these, but we ended up having a pre-pre Halloween get together, a pre-Halloween shindig and then an actual Halloween party.

The results:

At the first party, I was a film star from the 20's - hence being in b&w. That's my roommate Lissa as a doodle bear on the left:



At the pre Halloween bash, I was Joanne McLeod from Body Break. I have no idea what's wrong with my face:



By the time real Halloween rolled around, I had a job, internship and 5 classes, so I was obviously exhausted. This led to me being one of the three little pigs - I just wore jeans and a flannel shirt, stuck some sticks in my shirt pocket and turned an egg carton into ears and a nose.

Well, the nose stopped sticking and fell off after taking about 5 steps into the party. Then I kept jabbing myself in the cheek with the sticks every time I turned my head. Plus the headband was giving me a headache. So I took it all off and just called myself a lumberjack. In this one, my friend Steph is a jedi:



Yep. That is just me in normal clothes.

Needless to say, after all this celebrating, I'll probably be holidayed out for a year. Happy Halloween everyone!

Brandon's New Favourite Film

The big update on my life is that I now have a job, internship and I'm taking 20 credits. I basically have no time.

A lot of you have been asking what I do for my internship - here's the trailer for the film the production company I'm interning at has in release:



It's actually really really inspiring, even though Brandon has deemed it hippie. You guys should definitely check it out.

Then I'm working at a rabbit shelter (ha) and going to school. Can't wait for Thanksgiving with Scondy!

Kiva

So back in January, Scott and Cindy gave me a really cool birthday gift - a gift certificate to a website called Kiva (www.kiva.org).

On Kiva, you lend an amount of money to entrepreneurs in 3rd world nations so they can build their business. Usually it's things like buying another cow for a dairy or selling fruit in markets and things like that. Well, after finally finding time and recovering my gift certificate code (ha), I was able to lend to a woman in Liberia! It's really cool, here's the entrepreneur I lent to (click to be able to read it):



So then after the person you lend to buys whatever they need to to help their business grow, they start paying the loan back to Kiva and you get your money back. You can either reinvest it in another entrepreneur, or withdraw the money. I hope everyone can take a few minutes and check out the site, it's really cool!

Welcome to October.

Ah, the simple things in life.
And by this, I mean we FINALLY have internet in our apartment. So here's a quick little update for all my baited breathed fam and friends.

I live off a street very much like this one:



I still don't have a camera (hi Santa!), so that's actually a googled image. That's pretty close though.

Here are my roommates, because I know you're all curious:


That was honestly the most normal one we had.
Off to homework!

PS, by roommate request:

Le Lovely Canada

All my friends are tired of it, but I must say, missing my homeland has slowly begun.

My mum and I are in the middle of a very lovely road trip. I may have stayed out all night the day we left, which resulted in a particularly loud rendition of God Save the Queen after crossing the border into the US. Mum loved it.

First we went to Colorado to visit my sister and her husband.

The highlight of the trip might be the first morning: after sleeping in the family room, Parker came in at 6:30 to wake me up.

"Deesha, wake up...."

Then I'd hear a 'buhbuhbuhbuhbuh' of Parker running back into his and Landons room.

Then:

Landon: "No, Parker, wake up Leesha."

Then, buhbuhbuhbuhbuh.

"Deesha, wake up...."

In and out, over and over for a good five minutes. Who knows how long it went on before then. It was so adorable. Of course I woke up and got them cereal.

The other highlight has to be the bite marks on my collarbone from Parker trying out his career as a cannibal.

Then it was on to Wyoming.

Not a highlight.

Although, after what seemed like driving for a few years, we stopped in a small town to eat. Mum and I walked into the one restaurant in town and five or so of who I have to assume were the 'regulars' turned around to size us up. It was like walking into Dog River, so at least it made me laugh. (American friends unfamiliar with Dog River: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_River,_Saskatchewan#Dog_River)

Now we're in Utah. It's been so fun to hang out with Brandon and Tamsin - I don't get to see them nearly enough.

It was especially fun getting to go to Porter's Place - a restaurant named after a gun slinging famous wild west cowboy. Imagine an old west hotel where they don't tell you what's in any of the drinks. It was awesome.

And virgil. He's cute. (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6JPvzEjBQ34/SdjK2vPo1GI/AAAAAAAAAwA/OR5jAc_Kdl8/s1600-h/IMG_3086.JPG)

Tomorrow morning it's off to California to find a place to live and start school. Crosslegged the whole way of course, because Stacey and I have enough stuff that the Scion's basically scraping the ground.

Haha this was easily the best idea ever.

Onward Mary Horowitz, onward!