Memories of Vanessa

This is a ridiculously long post, and I get that. This is for me to reminisce and remember Vanessa. I hope that if you didn't know her you will get more of a feeling for who she was.

• Saying, “you know that’s right” while fist bumping like on the show Psych
• Her always thinking her hair was too wavy. It never could get straight enough.
• She would make me practice her elementary education dances so that she could practice calling them out. One of which was to the song, “Big Girl You are Beautiful”, and yes, she knew all of the lyrics.
• · Her obsession with my Mitt Romney bobblehead. She loved that thing.
• Her lazy eye in so many picture takes. Her eye and camera flashes did not get along. We would sometimes have to take 10 shots to get one that didn't have the lazy eye. Or the drugged eye as we called it.
• The fact that her teeth did not close all the way, she had a permanent hole no matter how hard she pushed her teeth down together.
• She could eat a bag of chips like nobody’s business. In one sitting it would be gone. Especially the Kettle Salt and Pepper chips. Or any chips with salsa.
• We watched the movie “Yes, man” and in that show, there is a girl who takes a jogging group where they take pictures as they run. Vans and I decided this would be a good idea and tried it. Needless to say, the pictures were absolutely terrible, but it was hilarious.
• The turtles in her backyard
• How much she loved Sean Kingston, I can’t listen to him without thinking of her
• She was always such a clean fanatic, it was never clean enough for Vanessa
• She never wasted food. She could not throw away food even if it was rotten, so that was always my job in the apartment.
• Elementary Education was her calling. She loved all of her classes and she would get so into them. She would have made an amazing teacher.
• Her black converse shoes – she wore those almost every day, even in the winter
• Her puffy brown winter coat. She was from Arizona and so she always would freeze in the winter. She bought that coat but hated wearing it. She refused to invest in any other coat though
• One morning, we had a jazz dance class at 7 am, we both drove our own cars. I went and didn’t realize she wasn’t following. She called and her door had gotten frozen shut. I had to go back and help her. It was hilarious having both of us trying to get that car door open
• Her deciding to go on a mission was one of the hardest decisions of her life. Vanessa wanted the joy of being married, and she was afraid that if she went on a mission it would limit that possibility. I know that she knew it was right though. She thought long and prayed hard about it.
• Vanessa was the worst with directions. You could always count on her to get lost if she had never been there or was unfamiliar with the area.
• She was obsessed with David Archuleta.
• She loved her family more than anything in the world.
• We would figure out ways to have fun without too much money because she was always on a budget. She paid for all of her schooling.
• Her Santa Rita High gray cross country t-shirt
• Without eyeliner and mascara, Vanessa didn’t feel ready for the day
• She had flawless skin
• We painted a big fan that we bought from DI blue, and Vanessa loved it. It was always on the wall of our apartment
• Vanessa loved pictures and taking pictures
• She worked as a camera girl for BYU
• She was in love with Jimmer and would be devastated that he is now engaged
• She was also in love with Brian Kehl who recognized her at Conference one year
• We had a whole lot of awesome dance parties, even if it was just the two of us
• She was the queen of boxed noodle dinners aka Pasta Roni
• Her little green car was a trooper, and she got so mad when Scott and I filled it all with newspapers
• We went to Conference together 5 times, we did Free Hugs twice, and we saw David Archuleta once
• She met the King Singers with me and we got to pretend that we were singing on the stage of the Conference Center
• Before Vanessa came to Utah, her only experience with snow was once it dusted snow in Arizona, so she was shocked by all the snow here
• Vanessa was an amazing listener and I always knew that I could talk to her about anything
• She was feisty and was not ok when she felt wronged, she would get all riled up, but she would still handle it in a mature manner. I was always impressed with her insight.
• Vanessa wanted more than anything to serve the Lord and become the person he wanted her to be.
• Vanessa had a laugh that was so contagious
• She loved dressing up for things. For example: Black and White charity event that was a paint war we wore awesome zebra print outfits. For that event, it was so sketchy. We showed up at the address and it was some random warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be the best event ever J
• Loved doing Free Hugs so much. One of her favorite things.
• If I was ever curious about how a boy felt or something that had happened with a friend, Vanessa was on it. She would investigate and dig until she knew what was going on. She did that in regard to herself as well. She was no shrinking violet. I loved it!
• Vanessa before she left on her mission told me, “When I get back, I am gonna have such a hot body. They have set aside time every day for exercise! No way boys are going to be able to resist me when I get back”
• When we were in Montana, we were doing skits. For some reason we decided to stuff our shirts so we looked fat. Vanessa put on a hat, and her only line that she said over and over during the skit was, “I’m Buck” in a very strong hick accent.
• Vanessa was 5’9”, so it was hard to get pants that she felt were long enough. She always got so frustrated with her high water pants.
• Freshman year her sister Jenn convinced her to dye her hair more blonde, it turned out more yellowy-orange blonde and Vans hated it. So we curled it that night and styled it super cute so that she could put up pictures that she liked of her new hair.
• Her Bentley car logo t-shirt
• Her vans shoes that she loved.
• When Vanessa would get embarrassed, she would get soooo red.
• She loved taking pictures of herself with my camera. She would sit down and take 10 or so of her with all different faces.
• She had so many free t-shirts. Any time that they were giving them out on campus, she somehow got one. She also always got free shirts from her job.
• Vanessa was extremely passionate about which pictures she liked of herself, and those that she didn’t. It was always funny seeing her complain about pictures that were great pictures of her.
• She loved to chat with friends online, and she always added “haha” after everything she said, especially if she didn’t know what to say. She would add in just a bunch of “hahas”
• She had an Edward poster that freaked me out every time I would walk into our room.
• She definitely cut her hair after more than one break up
• Vanessa thought the average height of boys was 6’4”. When we disagreed with this, she then stated, “well, it may not be true, but it should be true”
• She had a pet peeve that she hated when cupboards were left open
• If you had an inside joke with Vanessa, it would live forever. It was the best.
• We had an FHE dad, Tim Ruggles, who would make us origami FHE reminders. Those were her favorite things in the whole world. She would request animals and things, and I’m pretty sure that she kept one of the pigs for a very long time.
• Vanessa loved laughing, and did it often
• At FHE one night, we were playing the faces game. You call out an emotion or a situation and then you say go and the 2 people have to do the faces they would make. Vanessa was queen. She dominated everyone.
• Vanessa was also queen at getting free food. We started calling it “getting animal crackers” because of a ‘My Life is Average’ post about a little girl using a boy for animal crackers. Vanessa would be at work and boys would always bring her food, for no reason. All she had to do was flirt and they would get her food in a heartbeat.
• When Vanessa found a new song that she liked, we would listen to it at least 20 times in a row. Examples: Any Sean Kingston song, ‘I just haven’t met you yet’ by Michael Buble, ‘Hey Soul Sister’ by Train
• Vanessa more than anything did not want to be a frumpy missionary. So when we went clothes shopping, she made sure to buy clothes that were still cute, because she wanted to change the sister missionary stereotype.
• Vanessa and I had a miscommunication when she went into the MTC, and so I was waiting for her at the corner of the entrance and she and Jenn had gotten in their car at the church or something. I was devastated. I couldn’t get ahold of her. Then I saw them drive into the MTC and I thought that was the end. She found people to escort her out and she came just to say goodbye. We were both emotional wrecks, but I am so grateful I was able to see her one last time.
• I went to Gilbert for a family reunion, and I wanted to visit Vanessa in Tucson afterward. The only problem was that I didn’t have a car of my own and Tucson is 2 hours away from Gilbert. Vanessa drove 2 hours to come and pick me up and then we drove 2 hours to Tucson.
  
• One memory I have of Vanessa, is we went water sliding in the park for a ward activity. It was seriously one of the most fun activities we had been to, and we were the only 2 girls participating, out of 2 wards! Vanessa always dove in full force.
• All of the boys at her work were in love with her, but Vanessa would never admit it
• We took a 5 am exercise class 3 days a week 1^st semester jr year, it was Vanessa that kept us going. I hated getting up, and she would always make sure that I got up and went because she knew that we would regreat not going
• She loved reading and always had a book she was working on
• Vanessa’s correct way to paint nails: bottom coat, 2 layers of color, and top coat. If you didn’t do it this way, it wasn’t worth doing in her book. She also asked me to take care of her nail polish while she was on her mission.
• She loved making prank calls. She didn’t do it often, but she got a real kick out of it when we did.
• There was an SNL video called Surprise, and that was Vanessa’s favorite. She would always quote it, “I’m so FRIKIN EXCITED!” and “SURPRISE!” with the creepy hand motions and everything.
• She started playing the impossible quiz once, and spent the next 3 days focusing on that quiz. Needless to say when we found it again a few months later, she refused to start it because it was so addicting.
• She loved the shows V, Monk, and Psych so much
• Vanessa loved getting massages from people
• While growing up, she would give her parents foot massages in exchange for gas money or different things
• She never kissed a boy in high school and got $50 for it. She was quite proud of that.
• Vans enjoyed making people do jigs. Don’t know why, but she did. Her favorite was making Tim Ruggles do a jig for us and sing that we were his favorite in Hungarian. That happened more often than you would think
• While I was abroad, I snuck in and changed her status so that it said that she was the hot one. She then retaliated by calling me beautiful eyebrows. The nicknames both stuck.
• Vans and I would sometimes trash talk Satan. Example: “What up Satan? I’m reading my scriptures. Suck it!”
• Vanessa had a green Nalgene water bottle that she carried with her every day.
• She always had the worst phones. I think her pink razor broke like 5 times.
• We had a pumpkin contest in our ward, each apartment got a pumpkin and then you tried to steal as many from different apartments as you could. Vanessa got very into the competition and was extremely upset when our pumpkin was stolen. She tried every trick in the book to steal it back…but it was in an apartment full of strong, tall boys. Needless to say we never got the pumpkin back.
• We had a terrible smell in our apartment and we had no idea where it was coming from. Surprise when Vanessa found rotting potatoes in a cupboard we never used. But because she couldn’t throw away food, we had a friend throw them away for us.
• Vanessa had the hardest nose. You know how most noses bend and feel soft and like cartilage? Vanessa’s felt totally hard. It wouldn’t bend even you tried to bend it.
  
• Vanessa bruised so easily. She always had the biggest mystery bruises. You would try to figure out where it came from, but she never had any idea.
• Vanessa did not want a facebook when we first became roommates freshman year. I forced her getting one by just making her one. She was glad I made her one by a day after she started using it. Also, that’s why her city was Zurich, Switzerland for so long. She didn’t want creepers knowing where she was.
• When we lived at Applewood, we had a swamp cooler. Vanessa and I would be trying to watch TV and it would be so hot that we would want the air on, but then the air was so loud that we couldn’t hear the TV. Vans would always get frustrated by that.
• Vanessa started with only 50 texts a month, but when she would date a boy she would always go WAY over. So eventually she got more texts just in case.
• We made 2 music videos. The first one, we did late at night so Vans was super into it. It was a ‘hardcore rocker’ type music video. Really though, we did not even remotely look hardcore, but we sure tried! The 2^nd one we did in the middle of the day. It was to the Carrie Underwood song, “Ever After”. She was so selfconscious, so we did it at castle theater. She had a wand, and she became a fairy. It was the funniest thing. She loved that wand so much. At one point she was chasing a butterfly and we caught it on film. She was all nervous that when people would see that, they would have no idea that’s what she was doing and would think she was just plain crazy.
• Vanessa had to grow a plant for her marriage prep class. She called it her love plant and she really did love that plant so much. She took great care of it and it even grew a purple flower. She was always so careful with that plant.
• Vanessa understood how awesome Saturday’s Warriors really was. She appreciated it for the classic it was.
• Vanessa loved writing poems about people. If it was your birthday and you were your friend, you would usually receive an awesome poem.
• Vanessa loved when I would tell her bedtime stories. She would give me a theme and I would have to come up with a story for her and sit on the side of her bed and stroke her hair. We came up with some great stories.
• I was dating a boy named Scott, and he was 5’6”. They would always fake flirt with each other, and she would always joke about how they would run off together. We even threatened to cut him in half and share him once, like Solomon and the baby.
• She learned how to have a seductive look and she tried to teach me how. It was basically biting part of your lip. Haha.
• Vanessa loved Disney Princesses. She had pictures of them all over her wall. Also she had lots of pictures of Zac Efron all over her walls. I bought her a Zac Efron calendar and she loved Zac Efron.
• She loved Ritz sour cream and onion chips
• Vanessa had 3 favorite dream boat artists: David Archuleta, Michael Buble, and Josh Groban
• Vanessa was ready to be married. She would have made a fantastic wife and mother and she still will.
• Vanessa LOVED scary movies. She was totally a movie screamer. The bad part was, that sometimes it was dangerous sitting next to her in those movies. She would hit you, or grab your arm super tight. One time, she was watching the new King Kong on TV and I was across the room on another chair. She kept squealing and screaming and telling me to come sit by her and watch it. I refused because I knew she would attack me out of fear. She even almost bit my arm once while watching ‘I Am Legend’
• Vanessa may have been 9 inches taller, but we wore the same size tops. She always borrowed my tops. She usually looked even better in them than I did.
• Vanessa had the skinniest waist, she always did. No matter what she ate.
• Vanessa loved knowing the latest scandals.
• One night, after watching American Idol, Vanessa Kasse and I started drawing on each others legs. All sorts of random phrases, pictures, it got out of control and was hilarious.
• When Michael Jackson died, we bought all of his music and had a Michael Jackson tribute party.
• Vanessa hated swimming. She could swim, but she didn’t see the point in swimming just to swim. She would play in the water, but she didn’t like pools too much.
• She always made wishes at 11:11
• Vanessa loved Kirby Heybourne, the actor. She even has a picture with him.
• When I visited her in Tucson, she always spoke about Egees, and their delicious slushies. I can say firsthand, they are delicious.
• Freshman year, we were talking about sexy faces. Kasse looks over and says, “this is my sex face” and she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth. Vanessa and I looked at her, and Vans says, “…did you mean sexy face or sex face?” We all started laughing and Kasse says, I totally meant sexy face! From then on we all would make our “sex face” in a lot of pictures. Vanessa loved it. She thought it was so funny.
• Vanessa took a class and one of the lessons was about mediation. After that class, she would always try to mediate tense or uncomfortable situations. She was hilarious when she would do it.
• Singing a remix of ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ at Ward Prayer freshman year. Vanessa would sing, “boat boat!” up high at the end. It was a show stopper.
• One year for her birthday we got Vanessa a happy Birthday balloon. It would play happy birthday every time you hit it. She would hit that thing over and over listening to it
• Freshman year, Kasse and I attacked Vanessa with Febreeze. She was not all too happy about it, except in retrospect
• For one of her projects for an El Ed class, she had to go see this kids play. It was terrible and one of the funniest things I had ever seen. We always said, ‘honey child’ and ‘tha’s mah crawdad’ after that in honor of the southern swamp thing monster from that show.
• Sometimes we would just sing all of our conversations. It was the best.
• Vanessa laughed easily. Sometimes the lamest jokes were the ones that she laughed the hardest at. She honestly could raise your self esteem so fast because she would think you were funny, even if no one else would.
• Vanessa named my face Kevin…weird but totally true
• One song that will always remind me of Vanessa: Miley Cyrus’ “I can’t wait to see you again” played backwards. Look it up online. It’s hilarious. Vans found it. Some of the gem quotes: Why is your fam a salad? Yeah super fun. Night police. Conan NCMO bases.
• Vanessa, when she was extremely upset or venting, would sometimes collapse on the floor out of frustration. It was the best thing ever.
• Vanessa and I would go on random adventures when we were bored, for no other reason than to take a million pictures of things we were doing. So we would just find places to take cool/funny/lame pictures of us.
• Vanessa had a crush on Chuck Bartowski. We watched the whole season of Chuck in like…one week.
• Our study break dance party in the parking lot of Dans during finals week was so epic
• Vanessa would try to make a hardcore face sometimes….it never worked all that well
• She had intuition. She could tell things about people’s feelings so well. She just read people very well. There wasn’t much that got past her.
• · She loved Costa Vida pork burritos. Especially because her work gave them to her for free all the time.
• One night at FHE, we were playing a card game and if you lost you had to complete a dare. There was a boy in our group named Tyler and he was no taller than 5’4”. The dare was that he and Vans would run across the front of the apartment building holding hands and yelling, “We’re getting married!!”. I must say that watching them run across the lawn in front of the Brittany was hilarious, with her being so much taller than him. -Tyler Thompson's Memory
• Sliding around in the blue foam – we were both so excited because we were juniors and had never done it. We looked like smurfs
• Halloween 2009 – We were Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Seuss for Halloween
• We put on a Fiesta every year. It was awesome.
• Vanessa gave the best hugs. I loved getting hugs from her because she was so much taller that her arms would basically go around my neck.
• When Vanessa loved a boy, she loved hard, but she didn’t love often.
• We would stay up late every night talking about everything, boys, the gospel, life in general. Vanessa knew everything about me and I know she shared a lot with me as well.
• She had read the Twilight series multiple times
• She loved all things Disney Channel
• She would never wear high heels even though she looked great in them because she didn’t want to feel like a giant.
• Vanessa loved when guys were super athletic. That was definitely her type.
• Vanessa was always good for a laugh. Almost every time I went to a basketball game I would text her where we were and she would find our group and put us on the big monitor, sometimes multiple times in a game. That was always fun. Some mornings we would walk to class together and she was always real excited to show off her new color she had for her nails. She had some wacky colors haha. -Jacob Blood's memory
• Vanessa loved being people's favorite. She would do everything in her power to convince you to say she was your favorite.
• Vanessa learned about a game called ‘The Boy Game’ from her roommate Christine. She decided we needed to make our own version. What the boy game consisted of: pictures of random guys we found on the internet, some good looking, others not so much, and then we wrote down a million characteristics both good and bad. You would have 3 pictures of guys and first choose who you would want based solely on looks. Then you would guess who everyone chose. Then you would add a personality trait to each person and see if that changed who you would pick. You would keep adding traits until you were sick of it and do it over and over. She loved the boy game. We spent a whole day finding pictures, making up names for the guys, and coming up with traits or characteristics. One guy we found, I thought looked Asian and she thought looked Hispanic. We argued over that for a while and came up with a name that included both. I can’t remember what it was, but it was hilarious.
• Vanessa thought she had a feminine and a masculine side of her face. They looked the same to me, but she thought one side was more flattering. If you looked at her from her left, she thought she looked good, from the right, not so much.
• She loved wearing glasses for style purposes. They had no prescription and she didn’t need glasses one bit. She just thought she looked good in them.
• She didn’t like wearing big earrings, but she had studs in almost every color.
• She had a lot of giant rings that she loved wearing. The bigger the better.
• We would take pictures and she would immediately want to load them up on facebook and come up with awesome captions
• We went to a concert by Train downtown and Vans loved it. She loved that band.
• She was very thorough while brushing her teeth. She would always brush for a long time and flossed daily. It was very important to her. She also bleached her teeth and loved how much whiter her smile had gotten.
• She loved trying to pop my toes. I hated it, so she would sneakily try to do it and laugh sooo hard when I got mad about it.
• One night, I think she was trying to tickle me, so I started tickling her, we ended up on the floor wrestling, all 5'2" or me and all 5'9" of her, and went for quite a while. Surprisingly a better match up than you would think, I have no idea who won, but my best guess is that we just gave up out of exhaustion. At one point I remember having her in a scissor hold though...
• She would always sing a brushing teeth song, "bruuussshh yooour teeth each morning, brush them every night, brush them well and often til they're clean and (she would either say bright or white)". She loved switching it up at the end.
• Vanessa would not go to ward choir. She detested going to ward choir. Even when I was the choir accompanist, and I would try to guilt her into coming so that she could support me in my calling, she would not go. She refused.
• She had these blue faded sweat material shorts - I remember her working out in those.
• I had a couple P90X videos on my computer, so we would try to do them every now and then when we felt motivated to actually work out. There was one problem, we did not have very much room in our little Presidio family room. We didn't care. We were leaping, jumping, using random objects because we didn't have the real ones. I remember us both leaping and passing each other and just laughing because if someone were to walk in or see us through the window, it would be quite the sight to see.
• Vanessa was FHE mom more times than should ever be allowed in college. She was so tired of it by the end.
• One night, Vanessa was going to a murder mystery dinner date and it was set in the 20's. I got all excited and helped her pick out a great 20's-ish outfit and do her hair and makeup. We looked up on youtube how to do 20's hair, and it turned out alright. She was kind of embarrassed when she got there because she was the only girl that dressed up. She said after a minute, she realized she was the coolest one there and just went with it.
• We had a snuggy party at John Lenahan's apartment one night.
• Our junior year, Vanessa felt kind of bad because we had pictures of the 2 of us all over the main front room of our apartment and even though Amy lived there too, there was nothing of her.
• Vanessa and I would get so mad when our roommate's boyfriend would come over and watch sports when she was doing homework and they weren't even together! We never could figure out the logic behind it.
• After Pat broke up with her, we asked her what she thought of Pat one night, and for some reason she said, "punk head". It stuck. Any time we had a boy that we were mad at or thought was dumb, we would call them, "punk head"
• She had an extremely pointy chin, and she used it as a weapon! Same with her elbows. She was just an angular person. She would laugh and laugh after attacking you with her chin.
  

• We almost made a calendar of all BYU stereotypes after taking a picture of me, Vans, Hailey, and Jalena on campus on a bench all reading Bridal Guide magazines. It is an epic picture that still hangs on my wall today, 2 years later.
• When she would read her children’s stories to us, her face would get so animated, and she would almost sort of pucker her lips, and her eyes would get really big. So cute.
• She would sing the tune of “Bad to the Bone” while I was undressing and I would dance, it was hilarious.
• She had named her laptop Skipper. It was red and she had a polka dot case for it.
• She loved making Jello cake. We learned about Jello cake my freshman year when my friends Abe and Brian brought over a Jello cake for my birthday.
• Freshman year, she and Kasse put a sign on the door in February that said, “All the cool people in this apartment have birthdays in February”. I was the only one with an April birthday. They thought they were so funny and clever.
• She would never ever unclog the toilet. She always made me do it. Usually we had no idea when it had been clogged or who had clogged it, but she would not touch it. She said she would do it if she did it, but she would not touch it if it wasn’t her doing. Note, that our toilet had the absolute worst water pressure ever, so this happened more often than you would think normal.
• Anytime that we would hear the Kelly Clarkson song, “Already Gone” while driving, we would try to sing it as loud and as terribly as possible. This could and usually did include many large arm motions and most of the notes off pitch.
• Vanessa and I were stellar interpretive dancers. Be jealous.
• Once, Vanessa Kasse and I tried a pilates class. Worst idea ever. Everyone else in the class was very experienced and very serious. We kept trying to do what they were doing, but failed miserably, and then we would bust out laughing. Needless to say, everyone kept looking at us and we never went back.
• When we took our Jazz dance class freshman year, Vanessa would always practice our little warm up routine. It was one where you pointed your toes and it was all about form and precision with your legs and arms. It was done to the song, “Realize” by Colbie Callait
• We saw a commercial for perfume or something and it was called “Tresur” which was pronounced, ‘Tray-jzuuure’. Vanessa and I from then on out called each other our “Tra-juuures”.
• One morning, I had bought my favorite cereal (Crispix) and I was so excited to eat it. It was the end of the box, and I poured it into my bowl and grabbed my milk out of the fridge. Now to preface, Vanessa and I labeled our milk by her putting a “V” on hers and me putting an “A” on mine. So I grabbed the milk out and poured it onto my cereal. It was totally chunky milk. It was Vanessa’s old milk that we had discovered the day before but she had not yet thrown it out. I was so mad that the last of my delicious cereal was destroyed. She kept saying, “it’s kind of funny, right?” or “you’ll look back and find this funny one day Ang”. Still not sure if I find it funny…gross? Most definitely.
• We had a clock on our wall in the Presidio that did not have batteries that worked in it for a good semester or longer. It was always 5:00 in our apartment. We had boys that would always comment on it and we told them that if it bothered them to help us fix it. Finally, our home teachers did.
• We loved watching “Everybody loves Raymond”
• When Vanessa’s feet were cold, she loved putting them under my legs for warmth. The only problem was that it was really cold on my legs! I banned her from doing so, but she would still try, and when I said no, she would give me her puppy dog face. It was a constant battle.
• Vanessa’s driver’s license was good until she was about 85. She would never have had to get a new drivers license if she lived in Arizona forever. We used to always laugh about how funny it would be to get pulled over at age 70 or so and show them your driver’s license with your 16 year old picture/weight.