Tuesday, November 14, 2006

I am not a city girl

Okay, obviously I failed at NaBloPoMo. Oh well. I kinda figured it wouldn't last, but I was going to try anyway. But, that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is to state how much I truly dislike cities.

Tonight I took the train down into Philly (because driving on the Schuylkill Expressway would have made me want to jump off one of the buildings downtown). I went into the city on a mission that I can't get into because it's a surprise. But, suffice it to say I had to go to a store that only exists (locally anyway) in center city Philadelphia. The train ride wasn't too bad, except there were more people than I'd like, meaning I had to share a bench seat with a total stranger. I'm not comfortable with that, because I feel like I'm imposing greatly on this other person. But, I survived and got down to the city. I made my way up to street level and then had to figure out which way to go. The one thing I REALLY loved about Salt Lake City was that there were reference points for directions. The really big really close mountains were to the East, which gave me a reference point for every other direction and made getting around really easy. There are no reference points for me in Philly. I get up to street level and generally head the wrong direction first and get to the first corner and have to turn around and head the right direction. Tonight I got lucky though and headed the right direction first. But, the streets are too crowded, I don't like all the noise (honking, shouting, more honking), I am very uncomfortable with all the people begging for handouts and the whole experience just stresses me out and makes me neurotic. But, obviously I survived. I also had a very successful shopping trip. Well, actually, the success of the shopping trip will be proven or disproven later this week. I'll try and update then.

For now a song quote... "oh give me land, lots of land and the starry skies above"

Thursday, November 09, 2006

PSA-for-the-day, etc....

I just have to rant momentarily. The problem I was having yesterday with the travel booking site at work turned out not to be a problem with the program, but a problem with my computer. ARGH! My computer is old and defective and has an old and defective operating system on it. I have troubles with creating FedEx labels and troubles with the travel site and it's stupid. Stupid company and their stupid lousy cheapness. BAH!

Someone posted a comment to my request for ideas with a couple suggestions and a couple of things one should never blog about. I would just like to tell the internets that I promise you I will never blog about bodily functions of any sort, particularly not anything specifically feminine. I will also never blog about laundry, because I don't mind doing it and therefor it is not something that I would ever feel the need to write, or complain, about.

As for the suggestions, I would like to take the one regarding a funny story from my childhood and use this moment as a PSA. With winter coming in most parts of the country I would like to warn everyone against the dangers of kerosene heaters. Okay, honestly, I'm not so sure how many people even use them anymore, but personally they scare the daylights out of me. The reason for that is, that when I was 4 or 5 I had an incident with a kerosene heater. At that time I was being babysat quite frequently by a really awesome woman named Marilyn who had two kids. One was several years older than me and the other was my brother's age, two years younger than me. We all had a lot of fun playing together, her kids, my brother and I. One chilly afternoon we were playing and, I don't remember why, but I was in the living room backing away from one or all of them. I distinctly remember the backing away part because of what happened next. So, of course, to protect myself in case of a fall, I had my hands behind me as I was backing up. Well, I managed to slowly back my hands right onto the top of a kerosene heater. Those suckers are HOT. I don't remember anything about what happened next, or the obvious trip to the hospital, but I most definately remember the thick white bandages wrapped around my hands for quite a while afterwards. My hands are fine now, no long-term damage. My recollection of it is entirely amusing, because it was a pretty stupid thing to do. But, it's also made me very wary of kerosene heaters. I won't go anywhere near the things. So, there's my PSA for the day, don't get kerosene heaters when you have kids that might, for some completely unknown reason, back into it with their hands. :)

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Funky Lil Kitchen

I went to Funky Lil Kitchen for dinner tonight. It was incredibly yummy and I was reminded of how I love that restaurant so. I had incredibly yummy scallops that came with a spinach goat cheese oatmeal. I know it sounds wierd, the oatmeal, but it was amazing. I love that place.

Anyway, other than that, still not much exciting. The travel purchasing program at work today was being hateful. I tried 8 times or more to book travel for my boss, but it refused to cooperate. Then the one time I almost had it cooperating, it died on me when I was ALMOST DONE! Evil hateful internet based bastard program. I really hope it cooperates with me in the morning.

Today I had Trader Joe's organic vegetarian chili for lunch. It was good, but I really don't like how Trader Joe's frequently insists on using tofu to substitute for meat in lots of things. There was tofu in this chili substituting for meat. There are much better ways to make vegetarian chili than using tofu as a meat substitute. If I'm going to be vegetarian, I don't want meat substitutes, because I've obviously chosen NOT TO EAT MEAT! I don't need fake meat. It's not good. Creative vegetarian chili is much better than tofu vegetarian chili.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Rachel's suggestion...

So, I have no idea what to write and no one left me any comments (BOOOO on you all!!), so I'm taking the suggestions of the 10-year-old who's camped out next to me working on homework, sort of. Sort of homework, not that she's sort of working on it.

Anyway, her suggestion was to write about where I'm staying. I'm staying with her in a really cool old house. The oldest part of the house is over 250 years old, which I think is awesome. I love old houses. I grew up in one that is currently about 170 years old. I lived mostly on the third floor, which was awesome because it was quiet and had a tilted ceiling. Our house, along with the house I'm staying in now, has streaky glass windows because the glass is so old and glass is really a liquid so it moves over time. I love that the house has wood floors and old deep window sills and a huge bathroom (cause there wasn't a bathroom inside when it was first built, so some other room became the bathroom). I also love that the house has water-filled radiators instead of forced air heat or clicky electric baseboard radiators. My room on the third floor had clicky electric baseboard heat, so I never turned it on because the noise always woke me up, so my room would get to 40 degrees in the winter. I'm not kidding, you could see your breath in my room on really cold mornings.

The house I'm staying in now is really neat and bigger than the house I grew up in. It's also in the midst of some reconstruction. They just recently redid the kitchen to be more in line with a late 1700s style. It's beautiful and as Rachel told her mom "it looks like a country store". It's also got an amazing stove, which I'm greatly enjoying cooking on. There's going to be a dining room with a really old really huge walk in fireplace, but that's still very much "under construction". But, even under construction I still think the house is amazing. It's fun living here for a little while.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Okay, maybe I need some suggestions...

If I still have any readers out there I think I may need some suggestions on what to write about for the next month. Is there anything you'd like to know about me? Any story you'd like to see posted on the internet? Any burning questions you'd like answered? Otherwise I'm just going to start rambling and that could turn bad.

Today was really uneventful. The biggest thing that happened today was that I went to Tower Records (which is closing, which is awful) and got the latest Duhks album. I love the Duhks. They are completely adorable and great musicians to boot. And they're Canadian, which is a bonus in my book. Really, that's all I have to write about, getting a new cd. I know, it's sad, but I can't think of anything else. I'm sorry. I'm going to sleep now and hope that I can come up with something better tomorrow.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Photo albuming!

This weekend was photo albuming weekend. Friday night I gathered up some photos and some of the miscellaneous stuff from my trip (tickets, pamphlets, etc.). Saturday I went to my storage space in West Bumblef&*%, PA in search of my scrapbooking supplies (no, I do not scrapbook as a hobby, I made one for my mom and that's it). Sadly, it was a fruitless trip, as I couldn't find the box with the supplies. The thing I really wanted was my Creative Memories tape roller. Seriously, the thing is fantastic for sticking down pictures and whatever. My plan was to mostly just put pictures into a regular album, but to include some of the tickets, etc. from the trip by sticking them to a 4 x 6 piece of paper and sliding them into a picture slot. So, no luck on finding the tape roller meant having to use glue. Saturday night I sorted through all my digital pictures and came up with 169 photos to print. I went over to the mall, dropped off my files at Ritz and then wandered the mall for an hour.

Okay, sidebar here: Who authorized this change to have Christmas season start after Halloween instead of after Thanksgiving? The mall was FREAKIN CRAZY!! People everywhere. I was ducking and diving to get around all the people. This is why I cannot live in a city, I hate crowds. I hate being slowed down by slow people and I end up having to duck and dive to get around them. It's awful.

Back to the story. I picked up the photos, flipped through to make sure they were mine and that there was nothing terribly wrong with any of them and headed home. On the way I calculated how big of a photo album I would need for all the pictures I had printed (which including previously printed ones that I wanted in the same album totaled more than 225 photos) and picked up an album at Target.

This morning I woke up, got some coffee and some breakfast and headed back upstairs to start my project. The glue I ended up choosing to use has a very strong smell, so it was a bit like huffing, but thankfully not too bad a high. I put together all my little "stuff" pages and then put all the pictures and all the "stuff" pages in the book. I now have a pretty good size album that basically covers the last year.

Next project, to get some more of these pictures up on the internet.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

I think I'm flunking NaBloPoMo

I keep doing these last minute posts. Oops.

This weekend is trying to put together a photo album madness, thus the forgetting about the posting. I'm sorry.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Quick post

Ooops. So, I ended up going out tonight and didn't post before I went out. So this is a quick post to get one in before midnight. :) Brief summary of randomness of the day:

Frustration: Stupid Arnold's Go Karting closed their track today from 1-2:30pm, right at lunch time when we tried to go go-karting. BAH!

Frustration: Stupid work vacation time madness. I logged on to our etime-sheet system and it suddenly told me I only had 2.5 vacation days total, which is the alottment I'd have for starting in October if I was only supposed to get 10 days in a year, but I'm supposed to get 15. So, much researching and nothing found and then I figured out tonight that I am still right and someone who entered my data in the system is stupid. BAH!

Frustration: I can't post to my blog from work because Big Brother is watching. BAH!

Yeah: My good friend Carolyn invited me out to fun First Friday in Ardmore at the last minute. YAY!!!

Thursday, November 02, 2006

My Freshman Experience

Something today at work, I can't remember what, made me think of my freshman college semester. Note, I didn't say year...

I went straight from high school to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I went there to study theatre design. I had a dream of becoming a set and lighting designer. That dream quickly ended when I realized that at the end of 4 years I would have more than $100,000 in debt and a degree with little likeliehood of being able to pay that off in my lifetime. My parents also raised me to be very conscious of going into debt, so that much debt scared me.

But, anyway, in that semester I had a very interesting freshman experience. CMU was a GREAT school. It has such an amazingly diverse student body. With exceptional programs in both the sciences and the arts, including acting and musical theatre, you get this crazy variety of students. It's a lot of fun to walk around and see such diversity of not only races, but student types (geeks, MTs (musical theatre, a whole other type of crazy), actors, artists). I had friends in the theatre department and in the computer science program. One of my very closest friends from high school, who I happened to be dating at the time, also went to CMU for computer science, so I made a lot of friends in his crew. It was great. That was one part of my freshman experience.

The other thing that sticks out the most in my memory from that semester was the last two/three weeks of school. I got so ridiculously sick one of my friends asked me if I was going to die. And my honest answer at that point was "I'm not sure". It started as we were getting ready for finals. I was part of a set building crew, so a lot of my time was being spent in the wood shop. One day in wood shop my ears started feeling funny. Then they started hurting. By the end of our session in the shop the only way I was comfortable was if I was bending over with my head hanging upside down. I got back to my dorm room and asked my friends what they thought I should do. They suggested I ask the Resident Advisor. So, I went over to the RAs room. She thought we should call Campus EMS since it was too late for any normal doctor's office to be open. Campus EMS guy had no idea what was going on, so he had one of the Campus cops take me down to the UPitt ER. I sat around at the ER for almost two hours to find out I had an ear infection. WHAT?! Who gets ear infections as an adult? I used to get ear infections all the time as a kid, but I thought this was crazy. Well, I got medicine and went on my way. Boy, did I realize why kids scream so much when they have an ear infection, they hurt.

I think it was within a day or two of the ear infection being diagnosed that I started getting sick. It was just a general sick feeling at first. Then I just felt awful. Then I couldn't keep any food down for almost two weeks straight. Seriously, I would wake up, try to eat, then within an hour it was back up. Same with anything else I tried to eat all day. I was so sick that my drafting professor sent me back to my room during class one day. I LOVED my theatre design classes, particularly drafting, so I didn't want to miss any of them being sick. But, I left the class for a few minutes to go to the bathroom and got sick. When I got back he was all "are you okay" and I told him I'd be fine, but he knew I was lying and sent me away. That got me a little concerned about how sick I was, I kinda figured college professors would never do something like that.

So yeah, I spent a lot of my freshman semester throwing up, but sadly it had nothing to do with any partying or anything at all fun like that.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

NaBloPoMo, or let's make myself crazy month

Okay, I have decided to TRY and participate in National Blog Posting Month, which is November. It's sort of along the lines of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in which you write a 50,000 word novel in one month, except I have to post on my blog every day for the entire month. I got to this through Guinness Girl, whose site I checked out after she posted a fabulous music list on Lawyerish's site.

When I first read about this I was thinking, there is NO WAY I can post something every day. But, then I started realizing that Lawyerish has given me quite a bit of inspiration on the posting front. She posts quite frequently with stories from her youth and college days and stuff. So, I can do stuff along those lines. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully I have 30 days of interesting stories to post. The only thing is that I think since I haven't posted in more than 3 weeks, I've probably lost all my readership. Sorry folks.

On to a real post now. Since getting back I haven't really had any time to sit around and work with all my pictures to put them into a reasonable size to make them uploadable to the internet land and viewable by all you nice people. Part of my NaBloPoMo vow will be to get pictures up here, or at least on Flickr.

Being back at the old job has been interesting. It's going pretty well all in all and I'm optimistic that it will get better. I like the work and I really like the people I work with, so that's really good.

It's wonderful to be back with the Girl Scouts. All the girls were very excited that I was back, and a lot of the parents too since I babysit. We've now had two meetings since I've returned and it's been so much fun. It's really cool to see them grow up like this. They have all gotten really tall in the last year.

Being back otherwise has been pretty eh. I've really got to work on finding things to get into outside of work. But, right now my living situation is a little chaotic, so it may have to wait until I get a bit more settled. The one thing I really want to do is find out if there is any indoor tennis locally that I could play. I was really enjoying playing tennis a lot more in SLC. Note, however, that I didn't say I was getting any better. I don't think I was playing enough to really improve much. But, I'm okay with that. One other thing I really want to do here is more walking/running. Where I'm living now there is a little dog in the family who is very full of energy. I think he is going to be my motivation to walk/run. I need to just think about going for a walk with him when I get home and see him going crazy. For such a little dog he's very good on walk/runs. He really pulls me and that's good motivation to try and run more. I think I've made enough resolutions for myself for the next month, I'm going to go think about how to work through those.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Back in Philly

Well, we survived, the truck survived and all my stuff seems to have survived. I don't entirely know, since it's not all out of the truck yet. :) I haven't quite figured out where I'm going to put it all.

So, the trip ended quite hectically. We drove from Nashville to Winchester, VA which is just on the VA side of the West Virginia border. We were hoping to push on all the way through to Philly, but it wasn't going to happen. It was raining so obnoxiously for hours. I just couldn't keep driving. I was so tense from not being able to see and fighting with the wind off the trucks. We stopped at a nice little Holiday Inn Express. Then Friday morning we finished the 3.5 hours left in the trip. We got back to my grandmother's house around 1pm.

So, there are several highlights from the trip that I haven't mentioned yet. I'll have to get most of them from my mom, since I can't remember them at the moment, but here's a funny one:

As we were headed through Arizona towards the Grand Canyon my mom was driving. She started telling me that she couldn't get the truck to go into overdrive. It's got a fourth gear that it throws itself into when it needs to get up a hill or go faster quickly, called overdrive. She said she had the pedal to the floor and it wouldn't go faster or go up into overdrive. I started getting kinda worried that something was wrong with the transmission or the radiator or something. I started thinking of all the possible things to check that I might know of. Mom looked to see if she had left the parking brake on, but that didn't seem to be the case. Just before the turnoff to Grand Canyon there was a rest stop, so we pulled over. I went over to the driver's side and looked around. I pulled the floor mat back and looked around. I popped the hood, looked around and didn't see any obvious problems. I wanted to drive to see what was going on. I got in the truck and it was fine, I had no problems and it was going right into overdrive.

So, yeah, remember the part where I said "I pulled the floor mat back...". Yep, the floor mat was stuck under the gas pedal and it wouldn't go all the way down. hehehe, oops

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

nearly Nashville, TN

This is going to be a quick update because I am very tired after almost 12 hours on the road. We are about 20 miles outside of Nashville, TN. We traveled about 650 miles today. We got started this morning around 9:15am. We got going a little late because I realized that the truck was a teensy bit overdue for an oil change. We happened to stop at a hotel right next to a MEGA Wal Mart. So, first thing in the morning I ran the truck over to their Lube Express and got the oil changed. While they were taking care of the truck I went back to the hotel and got ready and mom and I went to breakfast at Waffle House. It's a very good thing that there are not any Waffle Houses close to Collegeville, because I love Waffle House. I don't like waffles, but their hashbrowns are great.

We stopped at an Oklahoma winery on our way across 40, but it turned out that none of the wine had been produced from the grapes grown in Oklahoma yet. That wine was all still in the process of fermenting. So, that was a little lame. The wine wasn't particulary good either.

Lunch today was kinda fun. We were in Arkansas and found a cute little place called Feltner's Whattaburger. It was right across the street from Arkansas Tech University. The burger was good, but the best part was the sweet tea and the chocolate milkshake. mmmmmm........

We just ate dinner a little bit ago, because lunch was late. We found a place to sleep and then looked around for food. We didn't get close enough to Nashville for there to be much for options, so we ended up at McDonald's, YUCK! I had chicken nuggets (which are good, but leave that bad McD's grease aftertaste) and one of those new fruit and walnut mixes. The fruit and walnut thing was really pretty bad. The yogurt was not very good and the fruit tasted chemical-ly. The walnuts also seemed sugar coated or something, which was gross. Oh well, that's what you get at McDonald's.

According to the sign at the Best Western there's a continental breakfast, but I don't have much faith in it being anything more than coffee and maybe donuts, which will probably be stale. So, maybe we'll get on the road and find something. We have about 800+ miles to cover before Philly, so we may or may not get that done tomorrow. Probably not, but we'll see how ambitious we feel. On our last journey cross country my mom and I had a 900 mile day, but that was also the one day on our last trip that we got into an argument. So, yeah, not really looking forward to trying to do a full 800+ miles tomorrow.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Oklahoma City, OK

OOOOOOklahoma, where the waving wheat... etc.

We drove from Moriarty, NM to Oklahoma City, OK today. Yesterday was Tusayan, AZ to Moriarty, NM. We stopped and saw the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert in Arizona. It was my third time there, but mom's first. She was glad that I convinced her to go check it out. It's really neat. We got to Albuquerque around dinner time and went into Old Town Albuquerque to look for something. We really couldn't figure out where to go. Then, as we were walking around, we saw a nice looking guy standing outside a gallery. We asked him for a recommendation and he gave us a couple suggestions. We ended up at Church Street Cafe, which was very good. It was a mexican style place. Mom had some really awesome fajitas. I had a burrito that was okay. We left there to try and find a hotel and ended up driving all the way out to Moriarty to a Holiday Inn Express.

Today we just drove. We saw some interesting things on the road, including a motorcyle towing a trailer that was a child size coffin trailer. Very strange. We also saw several trailers with racing companies on them. Tonight we got to Oklahoma City around dusk. We found a fun little downtown area called Bricktown and tried to find a hotel near there, but no gots. They were all totally full with conventioners. So, we went over to the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It was really amazing at dusk. The lights came on underneath the chairs. It was really pretty. I will try to put some pictures up when I have more time. I'm not sure where we'll get to tomorrow, but hopefully I'll be able to update.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Tusayan, AZ

The subject of this post is the town we are spending the night in this evening. Tusayan is about 2 miles south of the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. My mom has now seen the Grand Canyon and I've seen it a second time. :)

Mom got into town on Saturday morning and we took care of a couple of things as far as running around town. We also went to Tony Caputo's for lunch. Awesome Italian sandwich place if you ever end up in Salt Lake City. Then we packed up the truck, which was a fiasco, to say the least. We couldn't quite fit everything, so some things ended up in the car. All things I don't entirely care much about, because the car shippers don't take responsibility for any items left in the car. The poor truck is STUFFED to the gills. There is NO room for anything else, but it's okay.

After we got the truck packed up we both wanted to collapse, but we still had to run some books back to the library. So we did that and then went to dinner at an awesome Indian restaurant that I just finally tried in the last 3 weeks in SLC. Dinner was yummy and afterwards I called the trucker who was supposed to pick up my car. He had called earlier, so I had his cell number. I found out he was downtown and after that was headed to Sandy to drop off several cars at the big mall down there. Since that was on our way south out of town and since there are about 15 hotels across the street from the mall (seriously, not kidding), we headed down there and got a hotel room. We dropped the car off, walked back to the hotel and then zoned out on a movie for a little while before trying to go to sleep. Even though I was super tired from all the packing I couldn't fall asleep because my mind was racing with a million things. BAH!

This morning we got up, got breakfast at the hotel and headed out of town. The drive was pretty much a straight shot, headed as quickly as possible to the Grand Canyon. Since Arizona is goofy and doesn't agree with the rest of the country on the whole daylight savings time thing, we gained an hour when we passed into AZ. We got to the Grand Canyon around 5pm and began sightseeing. The first section that we saw was very smoggy with smoke from a prescribed fire that they were doing. We actually ended up driving through the smoke, which was interesting and good, because it put us on the upwind side of the fire, so the canyon was then clear. I have a bunch of pictures, but I don't have time or patience to upload them at the moment. I'm also typing this from the lobby of the hotel, cause that's the only place the wireless works, so yeah, no pics today.

We got to the Grand Hotel in Tusayan and didn't feel like driving all the way down to Flagstaff tonight. We decided that it would be nicer to get dinner and be able to have some wine with dinner. Dinner ended up being kinda lame, so note to everyone, the Grand Hotel's restaurant isn't very good. Very slim selection, the chili was totally bland and the kalamari cost more than $1.00 per ring, which was totally not worth it. That's all for now, hopefully tomorrow night's hotel will also have wireless and I can update again. For now, goodnite!

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Music History

Yesterday I saw this post on a blog I have begun reading (one of many) that I got linked to from dooce.com. The whole thing made me laugh thinking about my own history with music and how our music histories differ because of our ever so slight age difference. The main thing that her post got me thinking about was what is the first song I can remember listening to. It's "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads, which EVERY time I hear it instantly takes me back to sitting in my dad's beat up, giant hole in the floor boards, POS, tiny Datsun pickup truck. My dad had the LP of Stop Making Sense and had copied it onto a tape. Every song from that album makes me thing of my dad and that Datsun.

I remember having a couple of LPs of my own when I was young. I had a Sesame Street album. I can't figure out or remember which one, but I seem to remember something like Sesame Street characters doing Sesame Street style versions of pop songs. I also remember getting the soundtrack to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on LP. I have no idea why I got that, I don't even remember listening to it.

My music listening until late elementary school was definately my parents style. Jethro Tull, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band and the like filled our house quite frequently. My parents are fun people and liked to play their music loud and often. Luckily we had a house that was surrounded by woods, so there were no neighbors to be concerned with the noise. The first time I remember finding my own taste in music was 5th grade. For me that was the time of New Kids on the Block. I was totally obsessed with Donnie, Jordon, Jon, Danny & Joe. I had cassettes and video tapes and posters and I was always begging my mom to get me the teen magazines that updated me on each New Kids' specific likes and dislikes. I also am pretty sure that 5th grade is when I asked for both the Metallica Black album and Billy Joels' River of Dreams for Christmas. That was also the time of Kris Kross ("Jump Jump") and Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody (thanks to Wayne's World).

I think my taste in music through junior high was just a terrible continuation of 5th grade. High school started out pretty bland music wise, I think I listened to one cd during 10th grade (Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes), but then I met Gil. Gil put the spark into my eclectic taste in music. He introduced me to Soul Coughing, Portishead, Dream Warriors, A Tribe Called Quest and many others. I have enjoyed every artist he has introduced me to. He continued to affect my listening habits and tastes through high school and into college. Sidenote: I have also put a lot of energy into constantly trying to "beat" him in music, by finding out about a cool artist before he does. I have failed several times, with Herbalizer and Roisin Murphy. However, my greatest success in this arena was Matisyahu. I heard one of his songs off the live album on XPN at random one morning. I loved it and when they said it was a hasidic jewish reggae rapper, I had to run right out and buy it. Gil was home one weekend shortly after this and I played the cd. He had never heard of it and loved it just as much as I had. Sweet Victory!

Back on track, we went off to college at the beginning of the internet music sharing craze, before you had to pay and before all the lawsuits. We shared all our music on the college's network. I got so much music then, all of which I still have (shhh!). That's when I discovered Radiohead. I loved the music of my freshman semester at college. Since then all my new music has come from one source, XPN.

All this music talk is also relative to my moving back to PA. Being out here in Utah I feel like I've completely lost my sense of new music. The only new music I've discovered in the last 6 months has been Roisin Murphy, whom I discovered not thanks to a radio station or a friend, but thanks to my obsession with a little tv show called "So You Think You Can Dance". It's sad and I feel lost without access to new music, but there are NO decent radio stations out here. They all suck. However, back in PA I will be back in the land of the radio station I LOVE!!! 88.5 WXPN is wonderful. I can basically describe my current music tastes as "anything they'll play on XPN", with the exception of Echoes and Sleepy Hollow (radio shows, not songs or artists). I am OH SO VERY EXCITED to be able to listen to XPN once again.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Crazy weather out west!

Hi all. I know I've been a little quiet. I've been trying to keep some info on the down low until it seemed a little more definate. Well, it seems pretty definate now, so attention, attention: I am moving back to the Philadelphia area. I got a good job offer from the company I used to work for in PA and I am heading back. I'm pretty excited about the job and about heading back east.

But, obviously that's off topic. This picture was taken yesterday, that's September 20, 2006, up at Snowbird resort here in Salt Lake City. The store manager's conference for the company I work for was being held up there and we had to go up to make some presentations. I really loved the snow, except for the fact that I was wearing open toed shoes. Honestly, it was warm enough in the valley for open toed shoes, I just hadn't thought about how much colder it would be up at Snowbird. Yikes.

Then tonight, after the insanity of showing all the very interested parties my apartment, it hailed. I'm sitting her watching tv and checking email and I hear this very strange noise and look outside and it's hail. Thankfully little tiny balls of hail and not golf ball or baseball sized hail. So yeah, talk about crazy weather.

I'm going to post some more pics up on Flickr of this various weather. Other than that not much else going on. Just wanted to say hi.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Oh, how I love the East!

See the green, it's everywhere. It's beautiful. This is the woods surrounding a good friend of mine's home in Palm, PA. It's a little out in the middle of nowhere, but that's the way I like it. It was so wonderful to be back in the land of green. It's very dry in Utah, pale tan is a popular color, sand, grass, dirt, it's all dry. I really missed the trees and the green everywhere. I stayed at my old neighbor's house in Collegeville all weekend. Their house is also surrounded by woods. They have a beautiful stone back patio with a fish pond and amazing plants. Everything was even more green than usual because it had been raining for about a week and a half.

Friday night my flight was delayed 3 hours because of the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto. Stupid hurricane. Even when we did land it was really bumpy and windy. Everyone clapped when we hit the ground. I didn't get out to my friend's house until 2:30am and to bed at 3:30am. Saturday morning I couldn't stay asleep for some odd reason, hmmm..... excitement maybe. :)


It was still raining Saturday. It ended up raining all day. It had also been raining most, if not all, of Friday, so everything was really wet. I went out to my grandmother's house and this is what I saw. A river in coming through her yard, over her wall and down her driveway. It always gets like this when it rains like crazy.

Saturday during the day I had an adventure driving around the city trying to find bikes for my mom and her fiance. They wanted to ride the trail from Valley Forge to Philly on Monday. I finally found a place with bikes and then it turned out that they would be open Sunday, so I just decided to drag my mom and her fiance down the next day to get their own bikes. They are a little bit picky when it comes to bikes. Saturday night I ended up going out to dinner with Carolyn and her girlfriend. We had a great evening. They took me to an awesome Italian restaurant in West Philly. It was in a part of the city I'd never seen before. We had a great time and they tried to talk me into coming back to Philly. I went straight from their place to the airport to pick up mom and her fiance.

Sunday I took mom and Steve (okay, got tired of writing "her fiance", if he doesn't want his name in here, he'll have to let me know, but it's not like his last name is here, cause I can hardly ever remember what it is, which is bad, since it may be my mom's last name someday soon) down to the bike shop to get their road bikes. Then I had lunch with my friend Penny and her family. It was a lot of fun. After that I headed up to Pottstown to see my old house and my old neighbor up there in Pottstown. I also stopped by my uncle's place for a bit. Then Sarah and I went out to Trader Joe's and picked up a basket full of joy. The checkout girl asked if we were roommates and Sarah explained that we were high school friends. I corrected her that we were actually junior high school friends. :) Then as Sarah went to pay I noticed that we have the same wallet. It was pretty funny. We went back to Sarah's and made chicken with TJ's masala simmer sauce. It was an awesome dinner. We watched some episodes of Coupling, a Britcom that I had never seen much of. It's funny if you like British humor, which I do, but I know people who aren't amused by it.

Monday I spent most of the day with Rachel, my sweet, wonderful, adorable little "sister". I say "sister" because I lived next to her parents for 14 years and was always very close with them, so when they adopted her she became like my little sister. I babysat her a lot and we hang out a lot. She taught me some moves on the trampoline, we went for a bike ride on the trail, and then we went to the mall for a bit. After that my mom and Steve came over to Rachel's parents' house for dinner. We had a good time, I dropped mom and Steve off back at gram's and then went to hang out with another friend. It was a very full weekend of friends, fun and food. The best food part was Tuesday. I went to lunch at Q'doba with someone from my old job in King of Prussia and then for dinner Sarah, mom, Steve, gram and Jake (my brother) went to August Moon in Norristown. 4 of us had sushi bimbimbap, which is rice, fresh veggies and sashimi in a bowl of goodness. mmmmmmmmmmmmm.......

Wednesday was sad because I had to head back to Utah. It was really nice to be back in Philly and it was really hard to leave. But, it's interesting to be back in Utah as well.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Trying hard not to spend money

I made a commitment to myself last weekend, starting Sunday, that I would not spend any more money at restaurants or the cafe at work or anything similar until I got to Philly. I know I'm going to end up eating out A LOT there, so I'm trying to save up. Sadly, my last meal at a restaurant was pretty terrible, so it's been hard to hold out, but I keep thinking of how great it will be in Philly. Last Saturday night I ended up in Park City and we went to a restaurant that was out of most of their more popular food items, including the only things that looked interesting to me on the menu. I ended up with a salad that was boring and not very tasty. Oh well. At least the beer was good. :) I just keep thinking... sushi bib bim bap, Qdoba naked burrito, Paradise taco pizza, mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I am sooooo looking forward to going back to Philly. For so many reasons, I miss it terribly. I miss people and places and the comfort of knowing your surroundings. Here I don't know the good restaurants yet, I don't know the best places to just casually hang out. The closest Target is 20 minutes away and really inconvenient to get to. I don't have anyone I can call to hang out with at random. It's going to be very hard to be back in Philly for 4.5 days and then come back here to Utah.

It's been 4 months since I've been in Philly, and that was only a short visit. I've "lived" here in Utah for almost 6 months. I've just realized that this is the longest I've ever spent away from the area that I was born in. Prior to this I'd spent two seperate 3 month stints in CA, but that was also living with my mom, so there was a huge comfort level in that. There is no comfort level out here.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

OMG I <3 BENJI!!!

I am going to be a big dance dork here and blog about So You Think You Can Dance. I was figuring it was going to be either Heidi or Benji as the winner on So You Think You Can Dance. When they told Heidi that it wasn't her, I was bummed for her, but excited for Benji. He is awesome. He has such an amazing personality. The whole finale of SYTYCD was great. All the top 20 came back and the judges and the top 4 got to pick their favorite dances. They even did the dance to Roisin Murphy's Ramalama (Bang bang) again, which was awesome. I love SYTYCD and am very much looking forward to next summer.

Other than that, all I have to say is WHY? why? relative to neighbors... why? relative to boys... why? relative to work. I can't explain it, I'm just wondering about a lot of whys. But, I don't think there is really an answer, which is why I'm not going to explain any of it.

P.S. Afterthought, this is a repost. Snakes on a Plane, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!! Who's freakin' idea for a movie was this? It's going to be the highest grossing completely terrible movie ever. No one is expecting it to be good, but everyone is going to go see it (except me, I'm too broke to have any interest) because of all the ridiculous hype. I just watched Samuel L. Jackson on The Daily Show repeat from last night and he and Jon were like 10 year old boys about to blow something up with a firecracker. It's completely crazy. Honestly, when Mark first mentioned this on his livejournal I thought it was a joke. I've been waiting for the past 6 months for someone to tell me that it's a joke, that no one would really make a movie that terrible, with that awful a title and that awful a logo. That's all I have to say on this subject.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Oh how I love living out west!


This picture was taken while hiking this past Sunday. This is Lake Mary, which is on the Brighton Ski resort property. This lake was maybe halfway into our hike. Yes, folks, that's right, I said "our". I finally had a hiking partner. Rich, who I've been emailing with from craigslist, emailed last week and we got together on Sunday. It was really great to have someone to hike with. Great conversation, pictures of myself hiking and someone to push me that extra mile.

We made it to the top of this peak. The only reason I went to the top of this peak is because Rich said "you can do it". I would have turned around long before this point. But, I am SO GLAD that I went. The view from the top of that peak was amazing. There will be a picture or two up on Flickr. I had such a great time on Sunday. At the top of the peak we met this really nice couple. The husband starts talking about this great way to get down without going back the way you came. It involved going down and then up and then down and then up another couple of ridges. Rich was all "let's go" and I'm of course "I'm going to die if I have to go up one more peak". So, I forget who came up with this idea, but it worked out well. Rich and the husband went his way and the wife and I went back the way we came. It made everyone happy. I had a nice time walking back with the wife. She gave me a great Utah native flower lesson. We reconnected with the guys about 80% of the way down the mountain.

After the hike we went over to Liberty Park and checked out the Sunday evening drum circle, I introduced Rich to bubble (boba) tea (he had never heard of it, totally shocking, I threw together some dinner at my place and Rich showed me some great line dancing websites (not country, pop). All in all it was a very fun day.

That's really all that's worth talking about lately. :) Work organized a big trip to Lagoon (a local amusement park, kinda like Dorney Park, only a lot smaller) last week. I went on my own and group hopped all afternoon. It was fun. They had a couple cool rides. Mostly I had a lot of fun seeing a lot of my coworkers families. It seems that 5 is the average number of kids for families out here. That's a lot more than I'm prepared to have. I'm impressed at the people who can coordinate that many.

Other than that, I am REALLY looking forward to August being over, because that means I get to go to back to Philly. Labor Day weekend folks. If anyone from Philly that doesn't already know about this reads this, let me know if you want to meet up. I am going to try my best to hang out with everyone who wants to hang out. I'm just really looking forward to seeing people and eating. There are a lot of food places that I miss a lot. Q'doba, August Moon, Fuji San (a.k.a. Royersford sushi), Paradise Pizza. I have not found replacements for these places here in Utah. The pizza is the worst out here. I have not found a single decent slice of pizza yet.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Nothing specific

I don't have anything specific to post about today, but I've been reading a lot of other blogs, so I felt like I should post. I've been blog hopping of late with my down time. Generally it happens like this... I start at one blog, then go to the blog of someone who commented on that blog, then on to someone who commented on the second blog and so on and so forth. Most of them have all spawned off dooce.com which Sarah introduced me too. I have found the blog of a woman living on a ranch in Oklahoma with her adorable husband and four beautiful children, a newly ordained minister in Canada, a New York lawyer and a woman and her husband going through the process of adopting from China. All these people's lives are completely normal and completely wonderful to read about. It certainly makes my day more interesting.

Outside of blog hopping, work is good. I've been playing more tennis and even finding some people to play tennis with. I love playing tennis, even when I get soundly beaten. I'm trying to figure out ways to get out and meet more people. I'm just not very good at meeting people when I'm not traveling. When I'm traveling I can meet lots of people. Maybe I just need to figure out a way to travel for a living. That would be wonderful. Well, that's it, this is a very brief update. If I keep typing I'll end up talking about So You Think You Can Dance. I feel like a big enough nerd watching it, blogging about it would just be awful. :)

Friday, July 28, 2006

RAZR Pictures

I finally invested in a program that allows me to get the pics off my RAZR and onto my computer. Thus, there are now finally pictures from the Yard Dogs Road Show up on my Flickr account. Warning, there is one picture not recommended for childrens eyes. Nothing awful, just some girls covered in basically a bikini. There are also to car pictures that I took for Turk. One is a Fiat convertible. Turk owned a couple Fiats in his younger days. The other is a Range Rover that's been repainted and pimped out with some really ugly rims.

You can see it the most in the car pictures, but the phone pics have some very odd focus effects going on. The focus area is very round and small. The edges of the pictures are pretty fuzzy. It's interesting.

Not much else going on. I keep seeing ads for V for Vendetta on dvd on Tuesday. I am SUPER EXCITED about that. I'm definately heading straight over to Best Buy after work on Tuesday to pick that up. I loved that movie.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Pioneer Day and more

Hello there everyone. I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. This time there's been some fun stuff that's happened since I last posted.

The weekend after 4th of July I went down to Lake Powell. This picture is from my first night there. This crazy storm was heading straight for the lake, but then all of a sudden, it parted over the lake and moved around us. A guy working at the campground store said that it always does that. Very strange. Maybe it has something to do with how big the lake is. I don't know.

The weekend at Lake Powell was awesome. My mom and her fiance came up on Sunday to spend the week there. Several of my mom's fiance's friends were there too. They were all cool people. One guy brought jet skis and became my new best friend. hehehe I LOVE jet skis. Monday 4 of the people in our group (of 9) and I spent most of the day on the lake playing with the jet skis. We had a lot of fun. There was a brief hour or so of craziness when a quick but scary storm moved across us, but all in all it was a great day. Tuesday was supposed to be my last day there..... however... more craziness ensued and my glasses are now at the bottom of Lake Powell. My mom had to drive me to the only eye doctor in Page, AZ (the closest town to Lake Powell) to get an emergency contact exam and a pair of trial contacts that were good enough. They didn't fix my astigmatism, but they worked well enough that I could drive home the next morning. Tuesday night we sat around and had some margaritas and talked and listened to some Dane Cook. I'd never heard of him, but it was interesting. I drove home Wednesday and found my old glasses as quickly as possible. It felt really good to get the contacts out of my eyes. I could never wear them. My new goal is Lasik.

So, all that excitement was two weekends ago. Not much went on last weekend, thankfully. After the Lake Powell weekend I was ready for a very quiet weekend at home. I cleaned and went to tennis and not much else. It was lovely. The week was fairly calm as well. We had a group "party" of sorts at work on Thursday. We went to Liberty Park, which I live very close to, and had lunch and played some volleyball. It was a bit chaotic for me (too complicated to explain), but everyone had a great time, so that was nice. Friday was my daddy's birthday!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TURK!!!! I am a totally terrible daughter and didn't plan a present in advance. My excuse is that my father is ridiculously difficult to buy for. He's totally the type who doesn't want much and if he wants something he gets it for himself. Thankfully Bass Pro Shops has e-gift cards that get delivered immediately. They saved my butt. I was able to get him a present on his birthday.

This weekend is funny. It's a HUGE holiday weekend here in Utah. Monday is Pioneer Day. It's bigger than 4th of July here. At the last minute the other week they told us we had the day off on Monday, since probably 80% of the company was taking the day off anyway. There's a huge parade tomorrow and there have been fireworks all weekend. Last night I went to the Gallivan Center to check out a cultural festival and band and fireworks. It was an interesting and fun night. Today I had no idea what to do, so I ended up going on a hike. This picture is of the trail and a patch of wildflowers along the trail. There were wildflowers everywhere. This hike was on a trail that is part of Alta ski area. I hiked the Lake Catherine trail that leads up to Catherine Pass where you can see Lake Catherine. The hike was at an elevation of approximately 10,000 feet. That was a bit difficult. It was a beautiful hike though. There will be more pictures from the hike and other pics on Flickr.

No plans yet for tomorrow, except probably a lot of cooking. I have a TON of vegetables from the CSA farm I signed up with that I need to do something with before they go bad. Tomorrow morning is the parade and a free breakfast at the local LDS church. I might go check those out just out of curiousity. We'll see if I'm motivated enough to get out of bed. Tomorrow night there will be fireworks set off from Liberty Park down the street. Supposedly I can see them from right outside my house, so I might just chill out outside and try and take some fireworks pictures. There's a fireworks setting on my awesome digital camera, so I might try and play with that.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Happy Silly mid-week Holiday

Happy 4th of July everyone. Yay for odd days off in the middle of the week. Actually, they bug me. It was such a waste of time to have to work on Monday and then not work today. And now it's like having a three day work week. Not that I mind a short work week. Those are always nice.

Anyway, sorry for the lapse in posting. Life has gotten back into a quasi-normal routine and I'm very bad at posting about my quasi-normal routine. I am however continuing to discover new and wonderful things about Salt Lake City. There's Red Butte Gardens for instance. It's a lovely gardens, much along the lines of Longwood, only smaller, for those of you in PA. They have a summer concert series with a great list of artists. I went to my first concert there the other week, John Hiatt. He was awesome. It was I think my 3rd or 4th time seeing him in concert. It was so much fun. The opening band, North Mississippi All Stars, were great, very high energy. The lead singer looked about 14, but sang like an old black blues singer. So cool. They also served as John's back up band.

Tennis is continuing to go well. This past Saturday was fun since we got to actually play doubles. I got in a group with 3 people who weren't totally clear on scoring, or most of the rules, so I was the official score keeper/rules officianado. That was interesting, since I wasn't 100% sure on all the rules either. I haven't played formal doubles in 9 years. But, none of us really cared, so it was all good. I went and practiced a bit on Sunday and then screwed up my right arm at the shoulder. I think something with the rotator cuff muscles went awry in trying to practice my serves. That hurt a lot on Monday, so I skipped the Monday night workout. I need to get some weights to lift and build up the muscles around my shoulder.

Saturday after tennis I went to see "An Inconvenient Truth" with Mason, a very cool guy that I've been hanging out with. The movie was great, scary, but great. Al Gore is exceptionally well spoken, particularly when you think in comparison with our current president. I've realized that Bush just sounds so uneducated, it's painful to listen to him.

After the movie I ended up waiting around for someone who had asked me earlier in the week to hang out on the weekend, but then ended up bailing. So, I looked at my map of the valley and picked a loop road that looked like it went through a forest area. It ended up being this amazing drive through the mountains south of SLC. It was so beautiful. I want to go camping and hiking and stay there forever. It was so green and cool and smelled wonderful. Then I came home and made potato pancakes, yummmmmmmmm. Sunday I went to see a very strange movie called "Hard Candy" with Jen from work and her husband. Totally strange movie, but good. After the movie we went over to the Gilgal Garden, which is this odd little sculpture garden in the middle of a block in SLC. The guy who did all the sculptures was a really religious LDS bishop (not like a bishop in Catholicism, more like a community leader) and a mason. One of the sculptures is a Joseph Smith sphinx. The guy's idea behind it was that Joseph Smith had all the answers, like the sphinx. There are a lot of LDS scriptures and song quotes carved in stone. It was interesting and led to a fascinating discussion on religion. I'm really enjoying learning so much about a completely new religion and culture here in SLC. I have no desire to become a part of it, but I definately respect it and want to learn more about it.

Today I finally did some more unpacking at the apartment. I'm going camping next weekend at Lake Powell in southern Utah/northern Arizona and I needed to sort out all my camping gear. And now I'm going to go kill my neighbors. They are shooting off some sort of fireworks that I'm sure are completely illegal. Add that to all the other eight million things they do that make me completely bonkers and..... well..... I can't be held responsible for my actions. :) Actually, really I'm going to go watch The Count of Monte Cristo. It's a great movie, I own it on dvd, but it's in Philly. But, it's on tv tonight, yay!!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Yard Dogs Road Show

Last night I went to one of the most fun and different shows I've ever seen. The Yard Dogs Road Show is a combination circus act, vaudeville and burlesque. There were dancing girls, singing girls, a belly dancing girl, a sword swallower (who also swallowed a neon light stick that glowed light through his chest), a fire eater and some great music. This very cool guy that I've met named Mike told me about it and invited me. It was a totally awesome evening. I have never seen sword swallowing or fire eating in person. It was crazy to see someone standing up there doing that. The dancing girls were cool too. They had these amazing Moulin Rouge-esque outfits on. Their finale outfits were really skimpy little sparkly white underwear with fringes and little sparkly 1.5" diameter circles covering their nipples. They were very good at the classic vaudeville/burlesque style dancing with the teasing and such to make the men folk go wild. I took some pictures with my RAZR, which if I can ever figure out how to get off my phone I'll post here or on Flickr.

Besides the show being great, the crowd was very interesting as well. Some great people watching. There were a lot of goth types in the crowd. One guy had this great suit on. There was a guy with a 6" thin stick going through the little piece of his nose between the two nostrils. My concern with that would be it getting caught on something and getting yanked out. There were also a bunch of very artsy/funky/hippy types there. It was a very diverse and very cool crowd.

Other than that not much going on. Tonight I get to pick up another box from the farm that I bought a half share in (it's a Community Supported Agriculture farm, very cool). Hopefully it will have more than a giant salad in it this time. Last week I got about 20 ounces of spring mix salad. I haven't even been able to eat half of it. Tennis starts Saturday morning. Thankfully the weather this weekend is looking to be nice and not too hot. It's going to be rough out there playing tennis in July when it's 100 degrees outside.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Tennis anyone?

I signed up for tennis lessons. They start Saturday the 17th and run (I think) 10 weeks. Super excited about that. I haven't played tennis seriously since junior year of high school. I miss playing. I signed up for the intermediate lessons, which should be good. But, since I haven't touched a racket in probably 3-5 years at least, I figured I ought to get some practice in before next weekend. So I stopped at Wal-mart on my way home on Friday and picked up a racket and some balls. This morning I went out and hit against the practice wall at Liberty park for about an hour and a half. It was fun. I actually got a couple good volleys going where I didn't screw up for several hits. However, I really need to work on my backhand and it's also really hard to practice your serve against a practice wall. I'd love to find someone to play tennis with sometime this week after work one day to get in some real live practice. I left my name and number at the desk at the Liberty Park tennis center, so maybe someone else will come in looking for a partner and we can connect. But, whether I find a partner or not, I hope to go back to the practice wall tomorrow and a couple of nights this week after work.

Other than that, I've moved into my new apartment. It's really cute. My mom also flew up last weekend to help me move in, which was awesome. We had a really great weekend. I love hanging out with my mom. I'm sure so few people my age can say that, so I know I'm very lucky. I love hanging out with both my parents, they are both really fun, cool people. I also like both their significant others a lot, which is also really lucky. But, anyway, my mom ended up paying for some stuff we picked up at Wal-mart and Target, which was super super nice of her. My bathroom looks very stylish thanks to my mom. :) The apartment is great, other than my neighbors. Not the people I share a wall with this time, thankfully, they are decent. The people that I don't share a wall with, but whose house and main door they use is 10-15 feet away from my bedroom window, are totally crazy. They fight all the time, they have people coming to the house at ridiculous hours and the woman screams out "WHO'S THERE?" instead of coming to the door to check. The other night I got home and the cops were walking up to their house because the woman had thrown half the furniture THROUGH the front windows. Not OUT, THROUGH! Both front windows completely shattered. Totally CRAZY! Hopefully they will move out or get evicted or something soon. If not, I'll have to start doing my civic duty and calling the cops everytime they are being obnoxious at ridiculous hours of the evening.

Not really much other news. Hopefully life will get more interesting once I start the tennis lessons. I'm hoping it will be a great way to meet friends and tennis partners. I would love to meet people to play tennis with 2-4 times a week. It'd be fun to get halfway decent at tennis.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The First Visitors

Two of my very good friends have officially won the title of "First Person to Visit Danielle in SLC". If you can't figure out who those two people are, or wouldn't know anyway, it's Gil and Balaji. Okay, so they didn't entirely come up here just to visit me, but they wouldn't have come if I didn't live here. :)

This past weekend (yes, I know the weekend was over several days ago, I'm sorry) the band Live played in Park City, about 30 minutes from here. Gil and Balaji had tried to get tickets to their show in San Francisco, but they sold out very quickly. Gil mentioned this on the phone to me one night and I said "oh, I think they might be playing around here sometime, you should come up here". I was half joking, but this weekend they showed up. It was a great weekend, even though Gil and I were both fighting off colds.

They got in Friday night and we went to see a midnight showing of The Big Lebowski at the Tower Theater a couple blocks away from here. Yes, Philly people, it really is called the Tower Theater, and yes, I know Philly continues to haunt me here in SLC. :) Then we crashed for the night, hoping to get a lot of sleep to prepare for the concert. We entirely failed in that regard and managed to sleep in all the way to 8:30am. Completely terrible. I blame it entirely on the Canadian goose that crashed into the plastic fence belonging to the townhouse development next door at some ungodly hour. Well, Gil and I woke up first and I dragged him straight outside to see the mountains that you can see from our porch. It had been dark when they landed, so no mountain views the night before. He was quite amazed. He quickly realized why I like it so much here. We also dragged Balaji out there and he was also amazed.

Once we were all ready to face the day we headed to the Living Traditions Festival downtown, got lunch, wandered around the festival a bit and then headed to Temple Square. Temple Square was interesting. We met one very nice missionary girl who was VERY jealous of us going to the concert that night. Then in the visitor center we met another missionary girl with WILD eyes. Seriously folks, she looked possessed. And she was, by the spirit of Christ through the words of Joseph Smith and the other prophets. She was frighteningly committed to her religion and to spreading her religion. We got away as quickly as we could. Then we headed back to the car to go up to This is The Place monument. That's where Brigham Young was leading the Mormon settlers into the valley and saw the valley and said "This is the right place" and that's how the Mormons ended up here.

Saturday night was the concert. I have to say, that is the second best concert I have ever been too. The first being a completely amazing Barenaked Ladies concert that Sarah and I went too. But, Live was amazing. Ed, the lead singer, really knows how to play the crowd. He was really enjoying himself and did a great job. We were singing and screaming and jumping up and down. It was so much fun. After the concert we went to a place called Dee's, which is basically a Denny's. It was awful. Gil, Balaji and I felt so old. But, it was amusing.


Sunday we did manage to sleep in and then sorta wasted time at the house. This left us with about an hour to spend up at Antelope Island in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. But, we had fun. The above picture was taken there, as well as the next one. We walked in the lake, which is indeed very salty. When my legs dried they were covered in salt dust crystals, even after showering them off. Then I rushed the guys off to the airport to catch their plane. As soon as they left my cold caught up with me and I spent the rest of the day lounging around feeling rotten.

That's about the most exciting thing that's been going on with me lately. There are other possibly exciting things, but I can't talk about them yet. I don't have any plans for the holiday weekend, except probably some packing and organizing to get ready to move into the new place on June 1. I'm really looking forward to the new place and the new mattress set I'm going to invest in.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

City of Rocks, Idaho


This picture will make my good friend Carolyn very jealous if she sees it. It made me jealous watching these guys. It definately made me want to get more into rock climbing so I can go out there and do that. This picture was taken at City of Rocks National Reserve in south eastern Idaho. It's in the middle of nowhere. I had to drive 28 miles on a dirt road to get there. Dust from this dirt road made it's way into every crack in my car and I spent almost an hour on Sunday cleaning it. However, it was well worth it. The place is amazing and I definately want to go back and do some climbing and maybe camping and hiking and such.


This is a larger picture of the rock that these guys were climbing. There are amazing rocks and climbing spots all over this park. It's an internationally known place to rock climb. There is everything from intermediate to extremely difficult climbing in this park. It's so cool. And the best part is that it's only 3 hours from where I live now. This is also amazing. I love being out west and being close to all this amazing stuff. I just find the west so much more varied and wonderful. I love it.

Work is going very well. I really like my job. Other than that, BIG NEWS!!! I got the apartment of my dreams. I found this perfect beautiful little apartment that has 1 bedroom and a loft (I've always wanted a loft). It's got hardwood floors and a gas stove and a washer and dryer and I'm in heaven. It's in a great neighborhood, very close to where I am now and close to a great park. I will move in June 1st. I signed the lease tonight, so it's official. Woohoo!!

Oh, also, I don't think I mentioned that I leased a car. It's a cute little Toyota Corolla. I really like it. I will post a picture up here as soon as I get a chance to take one. It's very fun to drive and much better on gas mileage than the truck. It will also be nice to have a four door vehicle when Balaji and Gil come to visit. That way no one has to squish into the little back seat of the truck. I'm so excited to have visitors. I got an air mattress at Target last week since they were on sale. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the visitors, other than the Live concert which is the main reason they are coming.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Spring in Utah, a.k.a Crazy Weather


So, the picture here was taken TODAY! Yes, that's right folks, April 18 and we have snow in Utah. This weather is really going to take some getting used to. It's nice, really. I love snow. I didn't get nearly enough of it this winter, but this is a little wierd. Especially since by Thursday it should be in the 70s. Oh well, I'll get used to it eventually. There are more pictures available for viewing at my Flickr site.

Sorry I haven't written in so long. I kept meaning to and then not making the time. Things are going well. Work is good, stuff in general is good. I've been out riding the lovely wonderful Felt bicycle I got. It's a lovely road bike that is so easy to ride and smooth. I see why my mother enjoys biking so much. OH, I went to the ballet. I went to see Swan Lake at Ballet West. It was amazing. It was so beautiful. I've never been to the ballet before, so this was quite the experience. I will definately go again. I'm trying to get more into cultural things here in Utah. I keep looking at the schedule at the University of Utah to look for events and on the local public radio station websites and whatever else I can find.

I can't really think of much else to say. I'll try and post more often.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Not much air up here in the clouds...

Today I experienced the shock of having moved high up in the world. I'm not talking about job status, I'm talking about elevation. My friend Dan was right, it's going to take some getting used to to be able to work out up here. At least aerobic exercise is going to take a little warming up. I went rollerblading today and barely made it 3.5 miles, while back in Valley Forge, PA I could do 6 miles no problem. My lungs felt like they were going to explode. They were screaming "we need air and you just aren't giving it to us"! It was frustrating. So, now my plan is to work out in the gym, where I can find a balance between aerobic exercise and weight training and slowly work up the aerobic stuff to longer and longer times. If anyone has any suggestions (beyond Penny's extremely helpful hydrating suggestion) on coping with this change in elevation on an exercise front, they would be greatly appreciated.

Other than that, work was good today. I got the chance to say "Please give me more to do, I'm bored" (although not quite in those words) and they listened and were able to give me more to do. My boss also praised the fact that I work so quickly. I don't know why I get things done fast, I just do. But, it was nice of him to say in front of a group of managers. I'm really enjoying the job so far.

I also dealt with a minor credit fiasco today and had two completely different experiences with the same company. So, back in October I paid off my Best Buy credit card. However, it seems that the payment got processed ONE DAY late because their payment processing system is pathetic. This ended me up with a $29 late fee, which over the past 5 months has turned into $59 and an over 90 days past due blight on my otherwise fabulous credit report. It lowered my credit score significantly and generally ticked me off. So I decided to call Best Buy about it. I explained to the first woman I talked to that I had assumed it was fully paid off and that I had been traveling and hadn't checked the account. She was a witch and that's being kind. She was evil. She was yelling at me that I was an idiot and that one day late is one day late and so on. She told me I could call customer service but they weren't likely to do anything either. So, I called customer service and got this very friendly man with a very thick accent. He politely listened to my explanation, checked the account and came back on the line and said "we will clear the balance on this and then we will make sure that the credit agencies are told that this was our error and the entire blight will be cleared from your credit report". I'm glad it's cleared up, but I wanted to call the first woman back and say "HA, YOU WERE WRONG!". However, I had not gotten her name, so no calling back. Oh well, probably better anyway.

Also at lunch time today I called and put my name on a list for an apartment here in SLC. Not that there's some kind of waiting list or anything to get apartments here, but I just want a very specific apartment (2 bdrm, fireplace, top floor, east facing windows). I also managed to find the one complex in all of SLC that has gas stoves, so they win my business. I'm planning/hoping on moving into an apartment sometime in late May or June. I'm happy with where I'm living, but it would also be nice to have a place to myself.

Oh, and I think I'm going to try for a little cultural overload. There's a lecture tomorrow night at the University of Utah that I'm interested in going to, they also have a film screening later this week that I want to check out. I'm also going to start going to the library more, cause the downtown library is not only gorgeous, but filled with thousands, possibly millions of books. I walked through tonight telling myself "just keep walking, just keep walking". I am a tad OCD when it comes to books. I LOVE books. I love learning and finding interesting books and such. I'm getting a Utah driver's license purely so I can keep my library card. Going to the library will be so much better than spending money on books. Although I read so slowly I'm going to have to renew them online several times to be able to finish. The nice thing about the library though is that it should force me to try and spend more time reading, so that I can finish it and return it.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

First week over, so many more to go!!

Well, one week of work and one weekend since being employed over. The first week of work was good. I really think I'm going to enjoy my job a lot. I'm very happy about it.

I'm also very happy about the location of my workplace. It seems to be situation in an incredibly cultural little corner of SLC. I know, so many of you out there are probably thinking "culture in SLC, what's she talking about? there's no culture there, it's totally white bread". HA!! I thought that once too, I thought that the best culture I was going to find out here was the still very white but slightly open minded bicyclist outdoorsy type. WRONG!!! On my way to and from work there are more than three Asian markets, one of which I think is just Vietnamese, a Halal Middle Eastern market, at least two places to eat Pho (vietnamese noodle soup), at least two places to get Boba (or Bubble) Tea (YUMMY!) and probably much more that I haven't even discovered yet. I am currently very happy with the little city that I've decided to call home. I'm finding it easier to find culturally diverse food here than I ever did in Philly. I know, I know, I'm sure there's just as much, if not more, cultural food options in Philly, but at least here I don't have to worry about getting shot in the sections of town I have to go to to get the cultural food variety.

Anyway, sadly I haven't had much opportunity to check much of these places out seriously yet because on my second day of work a coworkers germs started attacking me. The woman that is training me was sick the week before I started and just kept it all week long. She spread it to me of course, because we spent a lot of time on Monday and Tuesday sitting in her office. So, I spent all week fighting the good fight against whatever evil virus she coughed my way. I successfully managed to not actually get very noticably sick, but I sure felt crummy. But, lots of vitamin C, chicken Pho and hot toddies and I'm much better now. However, this also meant that, just so as not to push my luck, I pretty much did nothing this weekend. Saturday I truly did nothing. I slept in late and then watched DVDs all afternoon/evening. Today I got out of the house, all the way to WalMart, where a bunch of crazy Utahns managed to tick me off. Utahns drive very poorly. Really, they are starting to approach Florida bad. It's awful. I heard an explanation that is really amusing. They are all brought up (as Mormons) to be so nice to people all the time that when they are in their cars and no one knows who they are all their pent up anger and frustration comes out. Seriously, they are mean and terrible drivers. But, I can deal with it, people everywhere are terrible drivers.

Since I was sick all week I really didn't do anything, so there's really nothing exciting to report on other than my first week at work. Maybe next week will be more exciting. We'll see.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I am gainfully employed!!!!!!!

I got a job. The job that I really wanted too!!! I am oh so very excited. I will be working for Franklin Covey, the day planner and organizational tool company. How completely appropriate since I'm such a great organizer. :) The past two and a half weeks have been so slow and long because it's just been the waiting game. Waiting to hear after I send out resumes, waiting to hear if I got a second interview, waiting for the interview times, waiting to hear back after the second interview. I was going a little crazy with all the waiting. Today I decided to walk down to the grocery store and on the way back my phone rang and it was the wonderful woman from Franklin Covey offering me a job. It was funny too, cause she sounded all nervous when she told me the salary, like it wasn't going to be enough, but it was more than I had been expecting to make in this area (since the cost of living is so much lower than in the philly area). So, I'm very excited and very happy to be employed.

Other than that SLC continues to be a lovely city to live in. I'll try to post more now. I've been avoiding post because the only thing I had to talk about was job search stress and I didn't want to jinx it.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Skiing "out west", aka "trying to kill myself"

Okay folks, coulda warned me just a bit that skiing out west not only is totally different, but that the concept of green circle out here is TOTALLY different from the concept of green circle back east. I accidentally went down a green circle/blue square and fell for the first time skiing in probably 12-13 years. The last time I remember falling skiing was when Sarah's dad dragged me down a blue square that I was SO not ready for and I ended up falling and sliding backwards down the mountain about 20 feet. I think I was about 13 then, maybe 14. I did about 5 runs down the green circles and called it quits. Not only had I had quite enough of the scary green circles, but it was also blizzarding out, so that was a little new for me too. I think it's been a REALLY long time since I've been skiing while it's snowing. It let up very briefly while I was up there today, but then it was windy and snowing like crazy again. It made for lovely ski conditions, but not so lovely visability. Luckily I had my motorcycle goggles with the prescription glasses insert in them with me, so those were great. But, all in all it was fun. I will definately go back, hopefully one day when it's not blizzard conditions out there.

Other than that, not much going on. Hoping to hear from some people about jobs tomorrow, we shall see. Think happy thoughts for me. I think I picked up a little good karma today when I gave some people a ride up the mountain near the ski resorts. They were going to do some crazy hiking and backcountry skiing. I'm not entirely sure I understood what they were doing, something with telemark skis. But, they were grateful for the ride. Although I may have used up all that good karma when I got my rental skis for free because I asked if the guy had seen my roommate around.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

I may never leave....

Okay, other than the whole not having a job thing, which will hopefully be shortly remedied, I may never leave SLC. I have found a city with good fish tacos, excellent sushi and four real seasons. I may be in heaven. Except for all the mormons. Not that I've had a problem with a single mormon yet. They've all been really nice and polite and helpful. So have some non-mormons. My roommates are great people. So far things are going pretty well. Like I said, just need to get the whole job thing worked out. Anyone got any suggestions on lighting a fire under these hr people?

Monday, March 06, 2006

I live in Salt Lake City!!

I found a place to live yesterday and I slept there last night. Actually I'm typing from my room, so I guess it's here, not there. :) I found a room in a cute house in a nice neighborhood called Sugar House. It seems to be the liberal eclectic part of town. There's a Wild Oats grocery store close by, a $1.50 movie theater that shows second run movies, an amazing sushi place and lots of other fun stuff. It's very exciting. Now all I have to do is find a job. I've applied to six jobs already and hopefully I'll hear back from them soon. A few of them sound really good, a few just sound good enough. So, cross your fingers for me.

Okay, so beyond that, I'll finish up a bit about my trip. When last we spoke I was in Santa Rosa, NM. From there I did pretty much just drive and drive to Arizona. With one little detour through the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park. That's pretty cool, really beautiful desert and trees that turned to stone. I think I got a lot of good pictures there. Now I just have to find the nearest Ritz Camera to get them developed. Or some other decent film developing place. Okay, just checked, there are Ritz Cameras here in SLC, YAY!!!!!

I got to the Grand Canyon area round 8:30 Thursday night, so I just found a place to sleep. The Best Western outside the park was very reasonable, since it was off season. They also had a very nice jacuzzi which I took advantage of. The room was decent too. In the morning I got up, got some breakfast (free continental of course) and headed to the canyon. It's pretty cool looking. Definately something everyone should see at least once. I drove around and took some pictures. I didn't really do much hiking or anything, since I was alone and I'm sure that someday I'll drag someone back there, hopefully a future husband and children.

Sidebar: Our washer seriously sounds like it's going to take off for interstellar travel any minute now. Definately can't do laundry at night.

Anyway, left Grand Canyon for the long and GORGEOUS drive to Bryce Canyon area. This country just has some of the most amazing and varied beautiful landscape. I just love driving around the country. I had never seen this part, so it was just an all new awe inspiring journey. Absolutely amazing. Most of what I was driving through was a huge Navajo Indian Reservation in north eastern Arizona. It was amazing country scattered with these little Indian shacks and towns and such. Not very useful land in terms of farming, but ranching seemed good. Although it seemed like mostly the Indians made their money selling crap to the tourists in the summer. There were A LOT of roadside stands set up.

Got to Bryce area around 5:30pm, got a room at Ruby's Inn Best Western, then went and took some more pictures at Bryce. There was a dusting of snow laying around the area, which looked very pretty. The sun was also beginning to set, so that added some nice lighting effects. However, it was REALLY windy and VERY cold, so I didn't stick around for actual sunset. I went back to the hotel, had dinner, went to the indoor pool and jacuzzi and then went back to watch several episodes of CSI before falling asleep. Saturday was just a lot of driving to SLC and then getting to SLC and trying to get a hold of someone with a room and then finding a hotel room when I didn't find a room in a house. Sunday I found my room, moved all my stuff into it and built a futon bed from Wal-Mart. That and watched bits and pieces of the Oscars and then applied to several jobs. I felt very accomplished when I went to bed.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

People are leaving North Carolina in droves...

Seriously folks, something wierd is going on with North Carolina. People are leaving the state in what must be record numbers. In terms of out of state plates in every state that I've been through on I-40 so far, I've seen significantly more North Carolina tags than any other. Most of these tags have been on cars being towed behind UHaul trucks. Many others have been cars or trucks so loaded with stuff one can only assume they have left North Carolina for good. Anyone have any thoughts on this subject?

Besides the strangeness of the quantity of NC tags I've seen, nothing particularly odd has happened yet. This morning I went to the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It's the memorial to the Oklahoma City federal building bombing that happened on April 19, 1995. It's a really beautiful memorial and a very interesting and sad museum. I stopped reading all the info about 2/3 of the way through the museum because it was just too depressing. And that was also the point where they started talking a lot about finding McVeigh and Nichols and their trials and such. I remember a lot about that part, so I didn't need to know any more. I was there more for the facts about the bombing. Anyway, from there I just drove and drove through the rest of Oklahoma, the panhandle of Texas and into New Mexico. Now I'm staying at a campground in Santa Rosa, New Mexico which happens to have wireless. So, I'm sitting in the truck typing this. Very nice.

Tomorrow I plan to just drive and drive again and hopefully make it to the Grand Canyon area. I'll either stay in Flagstaff or drive up to the Grand Canyon where there is a hotel just outside the park entrance that is fairly reasonably priced.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Hello from Oklahoma...

OKLAHOMA, where the waving wheat, it sure smells sweet...... and so on...

That song gets stuck in my head whenever I drive through Oklahoma. Which, okay, honestly this is only the third time I've ever driven through Oklahoma, but still, it's stuck there.

Yes folks, I'm in Oklahoma. Oklahoma City, OK to be exact. So, last time I updated was just before Nashville. Nashville turned out to be not particularly exciting, which may have had something to do with the fact that it was a Sunday in February. But, anyway, I got to Memphis Sunday night, stayed at a hotel there, then explored Memphis in the morning and early afternoon. I went to the National Civil Rights Museum, which was really interesting. Then I walked around on Beale Street listening to the song Walking in Memphis sung by Lonestar (also a famous country band). Yes, I'm a big giant dork. :) Then I went to Graceland. Continuing the dorkiness, I listened to Paul Simon's Graceland on my way out there. Graceland was fascinating. Very 70's and gaudy, but interesting.

From there I made my way to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I stayed at a campground, spending my first night in the back of the truck. It wasn't too bad. Slept comfortably and very safe. Today I checked out Hot Spring, AR. It's a very cute little town with a lot of history. Definately worth the trip if you ever have the chance. I got a hot springs bath at the one bathhouse that's still open on Bathhouse Row. There are others being renovated to be reopened, but none are completed yet. There are also other places to get hot springs baths, but there's only one that's on the original Bathhouse Row. It was interesting too. I explored more of the town until about 1:30pm and then I headed off to Oklahoma. That's all very summarized. I hope to expand on these past few days and the days to come later.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Quick update to be expanded later....

Okay, very quickly I'm going to update. I am in Tennessee, just east of Knoxville. I'm about 3 hours from Nashville. Tomorrow morning I will be heading to Nashville to explore the city and then hopefully finding a place to sleep somewhere between Nashville and Memphis, unless some hotel in Nashville draws me in, or I end up staying there very late. However, since everything I want to see closes at 5pm, I doubt I'll get stuck there late. Thankfully time zones are on my side and I will gain an hour sometime between here and Nashville. Going east to west ROCKS!!! It's fun going back in time. :)

Anyway, let me sum up the past few days. Wednesday Jake, his former roommate Matt and I went to Bear Creek Mountain ski area. Jake snowboarded all day, Matt skiied (sp?) all day and I mixed the two. I finally tried snowboarding. It was fun for about 4 hours, then I got tired of falling on my butt, knees and chest and I was starting to get a headache, so I switched to skis for the remaining 2-3 hours that we were there. It was a really great day. I got a good feel for snowboarding and I will definately try it again.

Thursday I tried to pack up the truck, but didn't get all the way done. Friday I tried to finish up and get Jake's taxes done. Accomplished the taxes and most of the packing up, but didn't get it all accomplished fast enough to leave town on Friday. So, I left first thing this morning. That's all for now. Actually, I don't know if any of that needs elaboration. We'll see if I find something more to write about. The only interesting thing that really happened today was seeing a doppelganger of a friend of mine's son. I'm going to go try and sleep now.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Roundtrip roadtrip, country stars and more

So, last week was a very exciting week. Tuesday morning I left early and drove to Lexington, KY. The point of the trip was to go to Paducah, KY (extreme western KY) to pick up a pie safe (large antique cabinet) for friends of mine that they had bought on eBay. I have a friend in Lexington from CMU, so it was a great opportunity to catch up with him. We hadn't seen each other in five years. We went out to dinner together, which proved more difficult than one would generally imagine. I happened to end up in Lexington on Valentine's Day, so every restaurant was totally packed. It was completely crazy. We drove around for a half hour trying to find a place to eat. We eventually found a place and sat down to catch up. It was fun. Then he let me crash at his place which was great. The next morning I got up very early and headed to Paducah. I got there around noon Paducah time (it is in Central time) and picked up the pie safe. Then I headed back to Lexington. I got there fairly late in the evening so I just went to a hotel.

It was a very nice hotel and not too terribly expensive. But, the amusing thing was that the first room they sent me to had someone's luggage in it and smelled really strongly of men's cologne, like he'd just left. That was a little freaky. So, they got me a new room and gave me a card for a free breakfast. That was pretty nice. I slept really well and headed out of Lexington around 9am the next morning. The drive was pretty boring for the most part. However, the one exciting part that I just determined the facts of was that I saw Brad Paisley's tour bus. Okay, so Adam is probably the only person who knows who he is, but honest, he's a REALLY big country star. I was driving along and saw this really huge dark fancy looking bus ahead of me. Eventually I caught up to it and it said "Corvette" on the back. I don't know what that was about, but it was fancy. It had a WVU license plate in a spare license plate holder and then the rim around the real license plate said Brad Paisley. I was all "that's so freakin' cool if that's Brad Paisley's bus". But, I wasn't sure. Then I went to his website and it seems he's from West Virginia and was in the area where I was at the right time. So, I'm pretty much positive it was Brad Paisley's bus. SO AWESOME!!!

Anyway, got back from KY and unloaded the pie safe at my friend's house. Then Friday I got to babysit the youngest baby I've ever babysat. That was a whole new world. I've never heated up a bottle or watched a baby who is not very easily distracted. It was fun though. I had a great time watching him and learning more about what babies that age are like. Friday night I met up with some people at The Drafting Room in Exton and also managed to randomly run into another friend. It's so funny to run into people like that. It was great. I know, lots of things were great this week. I'm terrible at coming up with new adjectives.

Saturday I drove all over creation looking for rollerblade wheels and a cot. That was really frustrating and I don't really want to talk about it. I found a cot, but haven't gotten rollerblade wheels yet.

Anyway, Sunday I did some running around helping people move things with my truck. In the afternoon I rented a Rug Doctor from Genaurdi's and cleaned my grandmother's carpet in her downstairs living room. My brother had spilled a bunch of coke on the carpet and it was bothering my grandmother. The Rug Doctor worked wonderfully. The carpet looks great now.

That's the end of the week really. Yesterday was a holiday though, so the Girl Scouts all had the day off. They had a bowling trip planned and that sounded like fun, so I went along. I didn't think I'd actually be bowling, I thought I'd just be watching the kids bowl and talking to the parents. But, a few kids hadn't shown up, so the girls asked me to take someone's place. I had a lot of fun. I really enjoy bowling. I did pretty well too. It was fun.

So, after all that fun, I can't wait to get the flip out of town. I'm packing up the truck today and hopefully doing a whole pile of other things so that I can get on my way tomorrow.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Snow and MHS amusement

Okay, first off, all MHSers out there, you HAVE to check this out. It's too funny. There are reviews of a lot of the teachers we had and the teachers that were students with us.

Off that topic now, it SNOWED this weekend. I LOVE IT!!!! 18 inches of snow in King of Prussia and the world is lovely and white and pure. I love snow!! It started Saturday afternoon and went through Sunday midday. Saturday I went out in the snow and picked up some stuff from Trader Joe's. It was so packed, totally crazy. It was just as bad as Genaurdi's had been the day before. But, I got what I wanted and got out relatively smoothly. There were way more people out in the snow than I had expected. But, the roads weren't too bad. I spent the rest of the day and evening at home watching movies and Olympics and Law & Order with my grandmother. At one point Sarah and I were IMing each other and commenting on the pairs skating event that we were watchin and the commercials. That was fun. I've never done remote tv commentating.

This morning Jake kept waking me up. Around 7am he woke me up trying to dig his very lousy vehicle out of the snow. It's a decent enough vehicle when it's not snowing, but it is just not meant for the snow. He and Brandon couldn't get it unstuck so they managed to get it into a sorta parking space on the street. Then they came back inside and made random noises that kept waking me up. The final straw was about 10am he was SCREAMING over his Nextel phone to his boss giving him directions to get to the house. That was the end of all sleeping for me. I got up and made coffee and played on the computer for a while. Then I was really bored so I went outside and cleaned off the truck. There was A LOT of snow on top of it. Seeing as I wasn't cleaning it off for any particular reason I was having a lot of fun. I think if I'd been cleaning it off cause I was trying to get somewhere I'd have been annoyed about it. While I was cleaning off the truck the snow shoveling guy that Gram contracted with showed up. He was very hippy like and we talked about traveling and such. However, he was also very tired and ended up doing a rather pathetic job on the shoveling. When Brandon moved his SUV later I had to do a lot of shoveling around where it had been and then I had to move the truck to do the same. I had offered to move the vehicles for the shoveling guy, but he wasn't interested. But, it's okay, cause I got a great workout. :)