Happy Birthday, Caley! [2]

I first met Caley in December 2015, when Levi hosted us and some other friends at his parents' house for a movie night. We watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier together, and to this day, I get a flood of happy endorphins every time I think about how fun that evening was. Levi and Caley had just started dating, and I'm glad that my first experience meeting her coincided with this memorable movie night.

When he introduced us, Levi told me that Caley had read my blog and really liked it. She shot a horrified look at him and said, "You shouldn't have said that! Now I sound creepy!" Levi and I laughed and assured her that it was fine, and he said, "If you put something out there online, you're not going to be like, 'Oh, no! Someone read it!'" It's true. I'm always pleased to hear it when people enjoy the random stuff I post, and the three of us would have been pleased to know how many times Caley would make her own appearances on my blog, with all of our future adventures. 

This past year, Sophie and I visited Caley and Levi in the mountains, and we saw them again around Christmas, when they were in town to be with family. The following quotes are from these two visits, and Caley gave me permission to share some of the stranger ones. We start out with an embarrassing story she told:

“I was walking down the street, and some guy yelled, ‘Looking good!’ I thought I just looked especially nice that day. But later, I found that the back of my dress was caught up under my backpack!”

About the same thing happening twice in one day: “People around me started laughing, and I didn’t know what was so funny. I thought, ‘Is it me?’ And I checked, and it WAS!’”

That moment when I accidentally became the authority on humor: “Levi, when we were on the mountain, you made some joke about Quasimodo, and you thought it was really funny, but we didn’t laugh that much. And then Dorothy didn’t write it down in the notebook, so I was like, ‘See, it wasn’t that funny.’”

About her cat’s horrific death when she was a child: “I was sobbing, and my parents were like, ‘Well, it’s a good thing you named her Angel!’ I was like, ‘No. No. Do not. You are not helping!”

“I chicken-sat once!”

“I had to go out in the dark to get to the sketchy barn. I would call Levi in the wee hours of the morning to tell him I was going to take care of the chickens, so that he would know if something happened to me.”

“I kid you not, I felt like the chickens were possessed by demons!”

“I thought that she had killed her husband! Argentina? Really? I thought that was just the story she told people so that they wouldn't know that he was buried on the farm.”

“I was like, ‘She’s trying to figure out how to kill me! And there’s no one for miles.’ It really was out in the middle of nowhere. The closest grocery store was forty-five minutes away.”

“You can’t even see her ramshackle farmhouse from the road because of all the vegetation that has grown up around it. In the nicest way possible, she was like a witch.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t have cereal for dessert. But the night is young!”

Caley makes an excellent tour guide: “That used to be the town jail, but now it’s a restaurant.”

“Let’s get a hundred doughnuts, like we did for our wedding!”

About her one experience accompanying someone to a college party: “And then… I think… Uh, I don’t remember that part of the story. But anyway, the police came!”

“Girls would talk about you, and then they would turn to me and ask, ‘When did you first have a crush on Levi?’ And I would say, ‘I’m not interested. I really don’t think he’s that attractive.’ I didn’t want to talk about my feelings for you, so I just pretended that I didn’t care.”

We also had a lot of dark conversations: “Their parents pick out their spouses from a website for the cult.”

“The ad breaks on that podcast are so weird. They talk about all these dark and depressing things, and then it’s like, ‘Sponsored by cozy socks!’”

“Give me hives! I mean high fives.”

About how hard it is to studying nursing: “Sometimes I think, ‘I should just get pregnant and drop out of school!’”

“Have you seen a salt lamp before? I licked it. It tastes like salt.”

About one of Levi’s sisters: “We’re very emotional people. She’s better at not expressing it than I am. I’m like, ‘I’m about to just cry right here!’”

              That is not the most cheerful place for the post to end, but I'm sure that many of us can identify with that. I hope that Caley has a wonderful birthday, and a year with as little cause for tears as possible!

Previous post: 2018