Askew Adventures - Farm Edition

Majolica Birthday Extravaganza

2011-01-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

My 30th birthday is tomorrow! It's crazy, I can't believe I'm already 30. I feel like my 20s disappeared really fast. But, my 20s have been pretty awesome. When I look back on the things that I've done in the last 10 years, it's kind of a lot. Anyway, that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is the incredible birthday gathering my mom put together for me this past Wednesday night.

My mom organized a great group of people for a tasting menu dinner at my favorite restaurant, Majolica in Phoenixville. Andrew put together an amazing selection. We started off with mortadella puffs, which I forgot to take a picture of, but they were lovely little puff pastries filled with mortadella.

Next came a lovely chanterelle mushroom cappuccino soup with nutmeg foam and thyme.

I forgot to take the picture until after I'd already eaten a bit, so you can't see how lovely the foam looked and the little bit of fresh thyme that was on top, but you can imagine.

Then we got a very tasty citrus daikon salad. Slices of blood orange, grapefruit (I think), daikon and some wonderful blue cheese.

After that came this fantastic swordfish with israeli cous cous and saffron aioli.

Then we got sweet potato agnolotti (little ravioli-like pastas) with royal trumpet mushroom and piave cheese sauce, so yummy. It even prompted Rachel to remark that the tasting menu was mean cause it was teasing her with these yummy things, but not enough of them.

After this we got three flatbreads to share amongst ourselves, the escargot flatbread, scallop flatbread and a pear gorgonzola flatbread. I only got a picture of the one piece that I took of pear gorgonzola flatbread.

After the flatbread we got a tasty palate cleanser of cucumber sorbet. This is my absolute favorite of the various sorbets that Andrew makes.

Following this was the main course of duck confit with fazzoletti pasta. Fazzoletti pasta is handmade large squares of pasta. The pasta was amazing.

After all this finally came dessert, raspberry sorbet with basil, fresh raspberries and a chocolate sliver. Mine came with a candle, which was very nice.

And then Rochelle wondered why I was taking the picture instead of being in it, so she took this very nice photo of me.

So, that was my incredible birthday gathering at Majolica. I'm eating at Majolica again tomorrow on my actual birthday, which I am also really looking forward to. I will try and blog that one too.

Farmer perspective

2010-05-16T09:45:00.000-05:00

I'm not doing very well with this blog, but I'll work on getting better. Things continue to go really well at the farm. My brother did so well while he was working on the farm as a day laborer that they invited him to be an intern. It's working out surprisingly well. He's doing a really good job and he's got a very positive attitude about it, so it looks like being a farmer might stick. I think it's fantastic that he's found something that he enjoys so much and does well at. We're getting along well, which I hope continues.

The weather has been really wacky. It goes from extremely hot days, to more mild, typical spring-like days to cold, ugly, rainy days. As much as I can tolerate the crazy weather, I'm learning how much the various plants do not like the crazy weather. I came into this with very little prior knowledge of gardening even, so it's all been fascinating. There are veggies that the farm grows in the spring specifically because they like, or at least can handle, the cooler weather. Also apparently the cooler weather protects some of the plants from a variety of pests that strike as it gets warmer. But, with the unseasonably warm days we've had, those pests are striking early. The turnip and radish greens are getting attacked by beetles and other bugs as are the roots (which are the vegetables we hope to harvest). The greens which should have had more freedom to grow are being overrun by grasses and weeds that should be held back by cooler temperatures. I'm so curious about all this stuff and luckily our farm manager doesn't seem to mind my questions (or at least I hope he doesn't).

I've been officially appointed 'mistress of the wash' (although the title is my own), which means I coordinate and do most of the washing and sorting of the veggies and greens for the markets and stand. We have a huge salad spinner that we use as part of the process. We take tubs and tubs of spinach, spring mix, Asian greens, arugula and more and gently rinse them in a sink of water, spin them dry and then bag them up. During each step of the process we are sorting out any grass or weeds that may have snuck their way in during the harvest. Because of the weather I mentioned earlier, the sorting process is sometimes time-consuming since there is a lot of weeds that aren't supposed to be included in the spring mix that you want to buy at the farmers' markets. I actually really like this process and am quite happy to be coordinating the cleaning because I think I'm pretty meticulous and I like making sure things look good for our customers.

This Saturday Jake (my brother) and I worked the Phoenixville Farmers' Market with the farm owner. It went really well and was a lot of fun. We have to work very fast to get everything loaded into the van to get down to the market and get set up and we have to work very fast to get everything unloaded at the market. But, once we are all set up it's easy to get into the rhythm of helping customers and restocking. There was a good pace of market shoppers this weekend and I got to see a lot of people I know, which was a lot of fun. Some friends stopped by just to say hi and other people I know from around town just happened by as shoppers. It's been neat to see people I know from around town and be on the producer side of the market. The Phoenixville market has a great group of regular shoppers (I used to be one of them) and it's fun to see the other side of that from the farmer perspective.

Speaking of the farmer perspective, I still haven't worked on my writing assignment. I'm having trouble deciding on a thesis. What's my point? What do I want to tell people about all these different sides I've now seen to the local food market that will hopefully be interesting to them? Suggestions or thoughts on that are welcome.

On a non-farming note, last night I went to the wedding of one of my ex-coworkers. I didn't get to go to the ceremony, which was a bummer since I heard it was really beautiful. But, the reception was also beautiful and the food was great. The bride looked amazing and they did a great job putting together a really fun party. It was nice to see a bunch of my ex-coworkers again and catch up. My great friend Sarah was kind enough to loan me a dress, so my outfit for the evening cost me a whopping $20 in accessories from Target. They had a live band playing and they were really good at doing covers. It was a fun night to dress up and leave my hair out of a ponytail and curly for the first time in about a month and a half.

Let's begin again....

2010-04-19T21:55:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm already behind on blogging, haha. Better late than never, I guess.

I'm a farm intern!!! I love it so far. It's been two whole weeks and they've been really interesting weeks. I've already learned a lot and gotten really dirty, bruised, sore and cut myself. But, I end my day feeling like I really accomplished something, and there are physical, visible fruits of my labors...or vegetables really...haha.

I got a bad sunburn on my first day on my lower back, which was the only place I forgot to put sunscreen. My shirt kept riding up as I was working, kneeling on the ground transplanting swiss chard into the field. But, since then I've been really good about sunscreening all over and I'm not getting burnt. I am still getting a little tan though, which is nice. The weather has been great, all except for Tuesday of this past week. We had three people show up to work for the day to help, apparently from an ad on craigslist. It was chilly and drizzling off and on all day. One of the day laborers quit before noon, but the other two came back. My brother came up Wednesday through Friday then, which was cool for him and luckily worked out well. It's been great to have the extra help to plant potatoes and transplant onions. A couple of the guys actually came back this week to help out some more.

I'm kind of jumping all over the place, but this would be a ridiculously long post if I talked about all the cool stuff I've done. I've gotten to drive the tractors quite a bit, which is a lot of fun actually. Apparently I'm a natural at it. The tractors aren't really big, the back wheels are maybe 3 feet in diameter. One is really easy to drive, it's kind of like an automatic transmission, but the other one is much more complicated. We've been using the one easier tractor with a trailer on it to spread mushroom soil on the fields for fertilizer. The other tractor has been used to load the trailer with mushroom soil and till the soil after the mushroom soil has been spread. I didn't get to load the mushroom soil, but I did get to till the fields.

Last Saturday I worked at the next to last winter market of the Phoenixville Farmers Market. It was so much fun to work at the market. I got a writing assignment that I really need to work on about my perspective of shopping at the market, working at a restaurant and working on a farm now. The winter markets are short, only an hour, but the weather was great for this one, so it was really busy and the hour went by really quickly. I'm really looking forward to working at the farmers markets throughout the season. I like the social aspect of this job and telling people about the veggies and good ways to eat them and how they taste.

I'll try and keep posting, but it's hard to sit down and take the time to think about what to write in the evenings. Lame excuse, I know.

Wanna buy a house?

2007-04-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

Thankfully this is the neighbor's house, not the house I'm house-sitting at. Also thankfully, one of the people I'm house-sitting for is home this weekend to help handle the rising water. Obviously it got a little wet down here along the Schuylkill river this weekend. There are a lot more pictures up at my Flickr account. It's been an interesting day. There wasn't too much to move at the house, so it was mostly just watching, waiting and taking a lot of pictures. I got some fun pictures of various strange goings on. A couple people that live in two houses down the street a bit were out canoing and kayaking in their back yards. You're only supposed to be able to canoe in the front yards here (the front yards being the river).

Outside of all this, I know I haven't posted in forever, I'm sorry. I'm not good at posting when I'm just back in normal boring life mode. But, there is something exciting, I found an apartment I really like right on Bridge street in Phoenixville. It's the main street in town, even though there's also a Main street. I will get the keys May 1 hopefully. The landlord is planning on doing a couple things to the apartment. Not really much else to talk about. Enjoy the flood pictures.

I am not a city girl

2006-11-14T23:12:00.000-05:00

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"

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

2006-11-09T22:45:00.000-05:00

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. :)

Funky Lil Kitchen

2006-11-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

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.

Rachel's suggestion...

2006-11-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

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.

Okay, maybe I need some suggestions...

2006-11-06T22:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Photo albuming!

2006-11-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

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.

I think I'm flunking NaBloPoMo

2006-11-04T23:59:00.000-05:00

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.

Quick post

2006-11-03T23:56:00.000-05:00

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!!!

My Freshman Experience

2006-11-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

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.

NaBloPoMo, or let's make myself crazy month

2006-11-01T22:44:00.000-05:00

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.

Back in Philly

2006-10-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

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

nearly Nashville, TN

2006-10-04T22:39:00.000-05:00

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.

Oklahoma City, OK

2006-10-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Tusayan, AZ

2006-10-01T22:46:00.000-05:00

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!

Music History

2006-09-27T16:44:00.000-05:00

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.

Crazy weather out west!

2006-09-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

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.

Oh, how I love the East!

2006-09-08T21:39:00.000-05:00

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.

Trying hard not to spend money

2006-08-26T20:06:00.000-05:00

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.

OMG I <3 BENJI!!!

2006-08-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

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.

Oh how I love living out west!

2006-08-14T22:11:00.000-05:00

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.

Nothing specific

2006-08-02T23:21:00.000-05:00

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. :)

RAZR Pictures

2006-07-28T23:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Pioneer Day and more

2006-07-23T23:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Happy Silly mid-week Holiday

2006-07-04T21:37:00.000-05:00

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!!

Yard Dogs Road Show

2006-06-15T15:10:00.000-05:00

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.

Tennis anyone?

2006-06-10T15:37:00.000-05:00

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.

The First Visitors

2006-05-24T23:27:00.000-05:00

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.

City of Rocks, Idaho

2006-05-09T23:52:00.000-05:00

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.

Spring in Utah, a.k.a Crazy Weather

2006-04-18T22:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Not much air up here in the clouds...

2006-04-04T00:19:00.000-05:00

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.

First week over, so many more to go!!

2006-04-02T23:29:00.000-05:00

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.

I am gainfully employed!!!!!!!

2006-03-23T16:18:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-03-12T19:07:00.000-05:00

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.

I may never leave....

2006-03-07T23:34:00.000-05:00

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?

I live in Salt Lake City!!

2006-03-06T13:01:00.000-05:00

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.

People are leaving North Carolina in droves...

2006-03-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

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.

Hello from Oklahoma...

2006-02-28T23:40:00.000-05:00

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.

Quick update to be expanded later....

2006-02-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

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.

Roundtrip roadtrip, country stars and more

2006-02-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

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.

Snow and MHS amusement

2006-02-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

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. :)

Stealing from Sarah.... again

2006-02-03T11:20:00.000-05:00

Sarah finds all the best stuff. See following:

Total number of tracks: 2284

Sort by song title:
* First Song: --Untitled--, Autechre, Autechre
* Last Song: Zoot Suit Riot, Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Sort by time:
* Shortest Song: The End, Maceo Parker, Dial MACEO, 0:04
* Longest Song: drane2, Autechre, Autechre, 18:42

Sort by album:
* First Song: Send Me an Angel - Real Life, Various Artists, '80s Retro (Disc 1)
* Last Song: I have a lot of songs without album data at the end, but the last one with album data is: The Rockafeller Skank, Fatboy Slim, You've Come a Long Way Baby

Top 10 Most Played Songs:
1. 16 Military Wives, The Decemberists
2. All These Things That I've Done, The Killers
3. Narc, Interpol
4. Finding Out True Love Is Blind, Louis XIV
5. Blue Orchid, The White Stripes
6. Going Through the Motions, Aimee Mann
7. Sheep Go To Heaven, Cake
8. Son Et Lumiere, The Mars Volta
9. The Perfect Drug, Nine Inch Nails
10. Forever My Friend, Ray LaMontagne

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:
1. Give Me One Reason, Tracy Chapman
2. Mrs Robinson, Lemonheads
3. Pass In Time, Beth Orton
4. Such Great Heights, The Postal Service
5. Cross My Fingers, John Hiatt

Search for:
"sex", how many songs come up?: 3
"love", how many songs come up?: 77
"you", how many songs come up?: 222
"death", how many songs come up?: 7
"hate", how many songs come up?: 15
"wish" how many songs come up? 5

There we go. Anyway.... I'm in the Philly area, which leads to me not posting, cause I feel like nothing is going on. Saturday was the Robert Burns' Supper, which was a great party as always. I made Caledonian Oatmeal Ice Cream that was a huge hit. Not much other than that.

Cruising and Valuable Lessons Learned

2006-01-24T21:17:00.000-05:00

I'm back from my 3-night cruise on the Carnival Fascination from Miami, FL to Nassau, Bahamas.

Here are a few things I learned this weekend:

- I will not go on another Carnival cruise

- I will cruise again, only this time on one of the ships I originally wanted to go on, a Royal Caribbean Voyager class ship.

- Cruising alone is not much fun unless you are Pamela Anderson and really outgoing, neither of which describes me. I will take someone with me on any future cruises, even if I have to kidnap someone.

- Green Iguanas spit when it's mating season and you are trying to get a picture from too close up, but... it's not poison spit.

- I will not return to the Bahamas on a cruise.

- I will only return to the Bahamas if it's to stay at Atlantis. It looks very cool and very good for kids too.

So, as you can see the cruise was a valuable learning experience. It was good for the most part. Not particularly exciting though. There's not a lot to do on that ship besides eating and drinking. Neither of those really appeals to me. The food is not good enough to eat constantly. The drinks were also weak and too sweet. The bed was nice, very cozy sheets. The room was small, but not too bad. The biggest problem was that the public places smelled like urine. I'm serious. It was really gross. That's definately why I will not go on another Carnival cruise ship again. They are old and they obviously don't care much about keeping them up. The lack of things to do is also a big problem. They have a lot of cheesy games and activities planned. LOTS of bingo.

Saturday was the day in Nassau. It's not that great. Really not my style. Very geared towards shopping. The only thing I got was a present for Sarah which I can't talk about here yet cause she hasn't seen it yet. I'll tell everyone about it once she's seen it. I hope she likes it.

Saturday started out with my massage. It was decent. It was a massage and facial combo. The facial part was much nicer. She didn't seem to know what she was doing really with the massage. I will probably not get a massage on a ship again. There are much better ways to spend money on a good boat. Then I headed off to the island. It was around noon, so I didn't want to head to the beach yet and get burnt. I found lunch at Twin Brothers. It wasn't very good, it was expensive and the waitress forgot about me. After that I walked over to the Ardastra Gardens and Zoo. That was cool. They had some interesting animals. I was trying to get a picture of this huge iguana's head. I couldn't get the camera to focus right. The iguana got sick of me being that close and spit on me. Seriously, it was funny. He shook his head a couple times, geared up and spit at me.

After that adventure I walked back and tried to make my way to the beach on Paradise Island. FYI, if you want to get to PI quickly, don't take the ferry unless you get there just as they are about to leave. A taxi would be much quicker. They sit around until the boat is overloaded with people before they leave. Once I managed to get to PI it was a whole other thing trying to find the beach. I managed to end up on the Atlantis property. That was a big whoops! I don't think I was supposed to be there. But no one seemed to notice that I didn't have a bracelet on. It's a very cool looking hotel. They have great looking pools and water slides and seperate pools for different ages. It's great. I would really like to go back. It will definately be on the option list for a honeymoon, if one ever happens. :)

Anyway... I finally found the beach and most of it was private Atlantis beach. Once I walked really far down the uncomfortable-to-walk-on white sand beach I found the public beach. I also found a guy renting out jet skis. He coerced me into renting one for a half hour. Luckily I didn't have enough money on me so he rented it to me for $40 instead of the list price of $60. That was actually A LOT of fun. Jet skiing on the ocean is quite a bit different from jet skiing on the Schuylkill.

After that I was totally soaked, so I had to get back to the ship to change. I was going to walk all the way back but then I saw that they were loading up one last ferry. So I ran down to chatch it. The captain was a total jerk to me because I had some sand on my bag. He was whining about getting the ship dirty. Stupid ferry guys. Once I got back to the ship I got a shower and got changed to go find some dinner. That proved far more difficult than I had expected. The area near the docks shuts down in the evening. Nothing was open except Senor Frogs. But the food there turned out to be pretty good. It was Mexican. I had tortilla soup and veggie fajitas. It was good. I also got a completely non-alcoholic iced tea, which came in a big plastic souvenir cup. On the way back to the ship I emptied the melted ice down a rain water drain. From behind me some guy yells "Hey, that's alcohol abuse, I saw that!" I yelled back that it was just water abuse and ended up walking back to the boats with he and his friend. They were on the Carnival Celebration though, not my ship. The other problem was that the cute one was married. Oh well. So, I just went back to my boat and watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Sunday I slept in late, which was great. I went and got lunch and had a great conversation with a couple from Chicago about other cruises and vacations and such. The wife was telling me that there was definately a lot more to do on Royal Caribbean cruises than on the Carnival cruises. She thinks that I would enjoy a Royal Caribbean cruise a lot more. I think so too. Since it was my birthday I decided to do a little shopping after lunch. Everything on the ship is duty free and also discounted (supposedly) from US retail prices. Most of the stuff I agree on the discounted part, but I'm not so sure about the alcohol. It didn't seem that much cheaper to me. But, I also don't buy much alcohol, so maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, I looked around and found a very pretty Hot Diamonds necklace for myself. Hot Diamonds is a company that puts very very tiny little diamonds into sterling silver jewelry. I like it a lot and it's pretty inexpensive. My necklace was only $78. It was a lovely present purchased with the ship board credit that my mom gave me. I took a picture of it on me that I'll probably put up on Flickr.

Not much else happened on Sunday. The Steelers won the AFC Championship, so that's very exciting. GO STEELERS!!! Hey, at least they are still from PA. The Eagles aren't worth rooting for at this point. I watched Bewitched, which was eh. Dinner was also eh. They brought out Baked Alaska for dessert, which was terrible, and then they wouldn't take orders for dessert from the regular menu until they got done with this horrible cheesy dance number. I almost got up and walked away, but I had to get the taste of the Baked Alaska out of mouth. After that I walked around the deck, took some pictures and then went to bed. I had to get up really early so that I could get into the Early Bird line to get off the boat. If you could carry your own luggage you could get off the boat at 7:00am. Otherwise you had to wait until after 8:30am and after your tag color was called. Since I was in the basement of the ship basically, I figured it'd be a while till my number got called. My luggage wasn't that hard to handle, I hadn't taken much. So, I just got up at 6:00am and got off early. I was back at my dad's house by noon on Monday, so it worked out well.

Today I just relaxed around the house, did laundry, and now I'm going to go pack up. I'm heading back to Philly tomorrow for hopefully a week or two. When exactly tomorrow I leave is entirely dependent on the Adelphia cable guy. We've been having problems here at Turk's house with the cable going in and out. It'll go out for hours at a time, which is a big pain in the neck, especially if Turk is trying to work from home. We've tried several different things, including getting a new modem, none of which have helped. So, tomorrow comes the cable guy, hopefully he can figure something out. Hopefully he also comes really early in the morning so I can head out nice and early. Wish me luck!

On a Boat

2006-01-20T18:45:00.000-05:00

Yes indeed, I am on my cruise. Yes, it's only 6:45pm and I have already made my way to the internet cafe. So far not off to a thrilling start, but I'm looking forward to things getting better this evening, I hope. I also scheduled a massage for tomorrow morning, so that will be really nice. Then it's off to hang out on lovely Nassau, Bahamas for the day. I'll keep you posted. I bought a 30 minute internet cafe pack.

New Adventures all around!

2006-01-18T20:16:00.000-05:00

Well, I know I haven't updated in a bit. That's because things were pretty boring and frustrating and annoying for a while down here. The truck ended up needing parts that are taking a while to order and it's just making me nuts. I really appreciate that my dad is putting so much effort into making the truck ready to go for me. It's a really awesome birthday present. But, it delayed my travel back to Philly and changed my birthday plans again. But that turned out really well anyway, so it's pretty much all good in the end.

I'm going on a cruise after all. Three night cruise to the Bahamas on the Carnival Fascination. I'm really looking forward to it. It should be really nice. I will definately update either from the ship or as soon as I get back and let you all know how it goes.

On another completely FABULOUS note.... one of my absolute favorite people in the world called me today and told me that she asked her girlfriend to marry her. I am SO HAPPY for both of them. They are so happy together and so perfect. I am so so so happy for my friend (who's name I will mention if she gives me permission). She deserves this happiness so much!

So, that's the new adventure news for today. I'll try and keep you posted as my adventures progress.

Help!

2006-01-06T14:30:00.000-05:00

I need ideas! Or a cruise buddy. I'm trying to figure out what to do for my birthday, which for those of you that don't know or don't remember is January 22. It's my 25th birthday. I want to do something cool. I wanted to go on a cruise, but I can't find anyone to go with me. The cruise I want to do is January 29-February 5, Royal Caribbean Western Caribbean cruise on the Explorer of the Seas (one of the big ships with the ice skating and rock wall and mini-golf). It stops in Belize City, Belize; Costa Maya, Mexico; Cozumel, Mexico; and Georgetown, Grand Cayman, all starting and ending in Miami, FL. If anyone seriously wants to go with me, let me know. I'm sure there are many that would love to go, but can't.

But, that's besides the point. Seriously, I'm asking for suggestions. Any thoughts as to what I should do for my big quarter century? Did any of you out there reading that have already passed this number do anything big for your 25th? I was thinking about maybe learning how to snowboard. Any thoughts on that? Feel free to either leave me a comment, or just email me.

Other than stressing trying to figure out what to do for my birthday, there's nothing really going on here. I'm taking the truck to get fixed/looked at next week. After that, I have no clue.

The year in interesting questions... or stealing great ideas from Sarah

2006-01-03T00:58:00.000-05:00

I stole this off of Sarah, but it was interesting. I'm curious to see what my own answers will end up being to some of these questions.

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before? Quit my job without having another job to go to.

2. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don't really do resolutions, never have. I think I've always known I wouldn't be any good at sticking to them.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Stacey, one of my very cool quasi co-workers. I've also known Carin (Sarah's cousin) for practically as long as I've known Sarah, though not as well certainly, so that sorta counts too. Oh, and Jen just barely made it into 2005, giving birth on Dec. 29.

4. Did anyone close to you die? My father's half brother died, but the last time I'd seen him I think I was about 18 months old, so we weren't close emotionally and I didn't go to his funeral. Other than that I can't think of anyone. Definately didn't go to any funerals, thankfully. God willing, 2006 will be the same.

5. What countries did you visit? Canada, a beautiful and friendly country.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005? Sanity... :) I don't know, a quiet place to live.

7. What date from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory? October 21, my last day at my job.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Quitting my job, which took more thought and questioning and reasoning and guts than anything I've done in a really long time.

9. What was your biggest failure? The bus.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Thankfully no, at least nothing major.

11. What was the best thing you bought? ipod. laptop.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Sarah, she worked harder than I've ever seen her work and did it with grace. She has totally amazed me this year, from beginning to end.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed? George W. Bush

14. Where did most of your money go? into my house

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? buying the bus... and then going to Canada.

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2005? Garden State Soundtrack, particularly Blue Eyes

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? eh, the same
ii. thinner or fatter? sadly, I think a bit larger
iii. richer or poorer? ummm.... that depends on how you look at it, I have more money in the bank now, but I also have no income at the moment.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? Spent more time with Sarah. Spoken up for myself.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? Responding to ads on craigslist. :)

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Spent Christmas with Mom and Jake in CA.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with? Probably a toss up between my mom and my realtor's voicemail. Okay, not really, most likely my mom.

22. Did you fall in love in 2005? Nope

23. I had to delete this question for purposes of the possibility of young people reading this, and I wouldn't have answered it anyway.

24. What was your favorite TV program? Lost, CSI, House (discovered late in the year)

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? no

26. What was the best book you read? The Chronicles of Narnia (the first 6, I don't really like The Last Battle)

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Matisyahu, that guy is just amazing.

28. What did you want and get? a bus

29. What did you want and not get? a Bentley Continental GT

30. What was your favourite film of this year? oh, dear Lord, that's an awful question to ask me, there were so many awesome movies I saw this year: Unleashed, Sin City, Kung Fu Hustle, etc. etc. But, I guess my favourite would be Garden State, because it really made me realize something about myself. I know that sounds cheesy, but one of the lines in the movie just put into words exactly how I'd been feeling for months, but just hadn't been able to figure out what it was. I saw the movie and a lightbulb went off in my head.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? For my 24th birthday I finally made it to Maggianno's for dinner with a group of my favorite people, it was great.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? The bus not being screwed up, or having been able to get my old bus back.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005? I really don't have a personal fashion concept, I dress all over the place.

34. What kept you sane? I'm not sure anything did... I guess the hope that things would get better, or I'd find something better.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you like the most? uh, no one really impressed me this year.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? uh, I probably shouldn't talk about that here, it might anger some of my readers.

37. Who did you miss? Sarah, a lot.

38. Who was the best new person you met? Gilly.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005. I cannot ever buy a car for myself again, from now on Turk will be forced to make every car buying decision for me.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year? "everything in this world, everything in this life has an inner essence, and inner soul… it comes into this world for one reason, that it should transform the darkness into light, so make it light" -Matisyahu

Happy New Year!

2006-01-02T17:25:00.000-05:00

So, I've finally gotten around to posting the bus for sale on thesamba.com. It's a VW centered website mostly geared towards posting of vehicles and parts. It's how I bought the bus, so I figure it's a good way to sell it. Wish me luck.

Other than that things have been good and uneventful here in Florida. New Year's Eve was nice. Turk, Theresa and I went out for dinner to a very nice steakhouse in City Place. Then we went over to the Palm Beach Convention Center for the Dave Mason and Leon Russell concert. Dave Mason was great. I don't think I ever realized some of the songs he sang. I recognized several of his songs. It was very good. Leon Russell however was not so good. He's only 63, but he seems more like 83. I think I understood maybe 15 words out of the whole hour+ long concert. He got out there, played through the set as fast as he could without pausing and then left. It was pretty lame. But, Dave Mason was worth it anyway. After the concert the ride home was extremely foggy, so we were quite happy to go straight home and not be out in the fog with all the crazy bad drivers.

My assignment for this week is to take Turk's pickup truck to the nearest, or most highly recommended if Turk can find someone to recommend, Dodge dealership. It needs to be tuned up and it pulls very badly to the right, so that needs to be looked at as well. It will likely need a few things. This is all in preparation for the possibility of me driving off in it for a few months. So, let's hope that goes smoothly as well. Not much exciting going on here. I'm also going to go out hunting for a pair of boots now that the holiday shopping madness and the odd store hours should be over. Not that I need boots in the 80 degree Florida weather, but I'll need them eventually.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-26T13:40:00.000-05:00

It was 70 degrees outside on Christmas day where I am. This is still very strange to me. Christmas is supposed to be filled with snow, or at least be cold. I'm not supposed to be spending the entirety of Christmas day walking around in jeans and a tank top. But, it was a lovely Christmas nonetheless. My mom like the presents I got her in Berkeley and the books. I got some shirts from NY & Co., Millions (the movie), a very nice personalized travel alarm clock with a picture inside it of me and my mom when I was very tiny, a 1.0gb card for my camera (which I don't really need so it's going back to Costco today) and some money to buy some boots (which I really do need). We had to wait until almost 11am to open presents because Jake slept in and then decided that Christmas morning, while everyone is waiting to open presents, is the morning he's gonna get a shower. Whatever! He liked the present I got him in Seattle.

Other than that, my time in SoCal has been very nice and relaxing and uneventful. We spent a lot of time chilling out. I did some errands last week while my mom was still working. We ate some wonderful sushi and enjoyed the excellent company of Katie, one of my mom's friends from work. We picked up Jake very late at the airport and then discovered that Manny's El Loco taco shop is either 24/7 or open really late. We've had several wonderful dinners at home, including one which I got to cook. Last night we had a traditional Christmas dinner including a roasted chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, corn, stuffing (yuck), cranberry sauce (double yuck) and rolls.

I really enjoy spending time with my mom, but there's only so much SoCal I can stand. The traffic and all, there's just too many people for my liking. I'm looking forward to heading to Florida tomorrow.

Berkeley, berkeley berkeley

2005-12-20T20:45:00.000-05:00

I am on the train on the way down to Pasadena. It's really good when you become friends with the conductors on the trains and they tell you that the San Joaquins train is a much faster way to get down to LA area than the Coast Starlight. Then it's even better when the nice conductor finds you the schedule for that train and you find out that one of the busses that goes off from Bakersfield goes straight to Pasadena, which is about a million times better than getting into LA's Union Station. I should get right into downtown Pasadena at 6:30pm as opposed to LA at 9pm.

But, that's not what this post is about... This post is about my lovely weekend in Berkeley with my great friend Gil. After my train being 4 hours late on Friday, I got to Gil's place rather hungry, so we headed out to Naan n' Curry. It provided a very tasty Indian meal for my dinner. Gil only stole a little of my food because he had eaten earlier. I was eating my dinner around 10pm, so I didn't blame him. I would've eaten earlier if I could have, but there was nothing to eat on the train. They didn't have any dinner food to prepare because they weren't supposed to be running at dinner time. Well, the Indian food was very tasty, I had my favorite standard, Palak Paneer. For those of you that don't know about Indian food, that's spinach cooked with spices and a lovely Indian cheese called paneer. This particular dish wasn't very spicy, I think because they saw a white girl and told the kitchen to keep the spices down. I only say this because Balaji later told us that when he eats there the food is painfully spicy because he's Indian and they think he wants it crazy spicy.

After dinner we walked backed to Gil's place and looked at my pictures and played around on the internet and talked. It was really nice to just chill with Gil again. It's been so long since I've seen him. His house is very nice. There is a common type of house in Berkeley with wood siding and a very nice 50's feel to it, that's the type his is. His roommates all seem really great. The location is nice too, it's close to the college and nice places to hang out and eat and such without being too noisy. His little neighborhood is quiet. Because they are one roommate short at the moment I had a room to stay in all to myself. There was a bed in it because the house manager (the son of the owners) had had visitors stay in that room a few months ago. So, it was a pretty sweet deal for me.

Saturday morning we woke up early, around 8:30am, and headed downtown to meet Balaji at the Asian Art Museum. It's a very cool museum, full of amazing pieces and interesting bits of history. We ended up doing a 45 minute tour with a docent. She was this cute little tiny woman, but she was very knowledgable and easy to follow. She gave us little tidbits about certain items and gave us an overview of the museum and how things are connected. It was a lot of information that you really couldn't gather from walking around on your own. I've never gotten a guided tour of any museums, so it was interesting. So, now I've seen some kind of museum in just about every city I've been to.

It was a very rainy, gloomy day on Saturday, so after the museum we headed to North Beach to a find a cafe. We got to North Beach and I think Gil was looking for a specific cafe, but he couldn't quite remember where it was, so we were walking around in the rain getting cold and soaked. We thankfully gave up quickly on finding the specific cafe and just looked for the closest one. Well, I looked across the street and saw Caffe Greco. Well, as Sarah will know, we of course HAD TO go there. It turned out to be a great choice anyway. I had a pretty good cafe mocha and I think Gil and Balaji enjoyed their latte's, but the best part was the snacks we got. I got a slice of Brasiliana cake and Gil got Tiramisu. My cake was chocolate and espresso icing and then it must have been soaked in some kind of liquor, cause it definitely had that taste. It was excellent. Gil's tiramisu was also excellent. Balaji didn't get anything, but tried some of ours. Then we left there and made our way down to City Lights bookstore. That is a cool bookstore, however, I could've easily spent hundreds there. But, I restrained myself and didn't spend anything. I just wrote down every book that I saw that I wanted and later created a Barnes & Noble.com Wish List. Although, one book that I KNOW I saw there doesn't seem to exist outside of that bookstore. It's called The Founding of Language and it looked like a really interesting book on the study of how language developed in the first place. When I went to type it into Barnes & Noble.com it didn't come up. So, I tried Amazon.com, nothing, and then Google, still nothing. I tried the author's name, Guy Deutsche, and also failed. So, if anyone can find anything on this book, I'd be very curious to know about where you found it. I think I'm just going to have to ask Gil to go back to City Lights and pick it up for me if I can't find it anywhere else. It was just terribly strange not to be able to find it online. And the funniest part is that I had shown Gil the book, so he knew I wasn't imagining the book. He was perplexed by its inexistence on the net as well.

After bookfest we went back to Gil's place for dinner and then a party for one of Gil's housemates. Dinner ended up being at Filippo's just down the street from Gil's. It was a very tasty Italian dinner. The guys got port for dessert and I got tiramisu. The tiramisu was good, but not quite the same as the Caffe Greco tiramisu. I had never tried port before, so that was good. The party back at Gil's was funny. It ended up being the typical college party with a lot of drunk people and craziness. I think there were several people there that were friends of friends and were kind of strange. Then I went to go to bed around 3am and someone had pulled the door to my room shut, which locked it and Gil didn't have a key. So, it looked as if all my stuff was going to be locked in there until we could call a locksmith the next day. Then we realized that the roof of the downstairs addition would get us over to the window of the room where my stuff was and we could get in that way. I tried going out on the roof, but you had to climb over a steep pitch with a very small flat strip at the bottom and I'm terrified of heights, so that wasn't going to work well. I probably would have fallen from fear. So, Gil, being the brave hero he is, climbed out there and made his way over and got in and opened up the room. Then we figured out how to hold the bolt unlocked so this couldn't happen again. Well, after all that excitement we were awake again and went downstairs to clean up a bit so that it wasn't too terrible in the morning.

Sunday morning we slept in, of course, and then headed over to the Thai temple for brunch. On the way over there we ended up on a street that Gil had never been on before. Well, on this street was a house that had decorated the exterior with televisions. Yes, I am totally serious, there were probably 20-30 tvs sitting outside this home. They were very well organized, creating a very interesting look. Of course we got pictures and I will post them as soon as possible. So that was pretty cool, even for Gil, to discover this odd little house. We got over to the Thai temple and got our brunch/lunch/whatever you want to call it. OHMIGOSH that was awesome food. If you live anywhere near the bay area, or are ever visiting that area and even sort of like Thai food, you really should make your way to this temple for Sunday brunch. It was so very very yummy. We had yellow curry, pad thai and eggplant and tofu mix. We had all vegetarian, but they also have a non-vegetarian line. However, the non-veg line was mostly pork, so I was a big fan of the vegetarian line. Then we got sticky rice and mango for dessert, which was also very yummy. The next time I'm back in Berkeley I will definitely insist on going back there.

After lunch we went on a very long, but very enjoyable walking tour of downtown Berkeley. I ended up finding some presents for people, which was nice. I even found some cute unexpected presents for people. As we were walking around Gil ended up on the phone with Diane and I saw a Goodwill store, so I headed in there to let him talk for a while. I spent probably a good 20-30 minutes looking through the used books at Goodwill. I found three, two for myself and one for a friend. One for myself is about media and culture and the other is called God Stories and is a collection of short stories that have something to do with God, in one way or another. I've read two so far and they are interesting. I walked out of the Goodwill and Gil had disappeared. I walked around trying to find him in the Goodwill, thinking he'd finished on the phone. Then I walked back out of the store and he was walking down the street. He just wanders around when he's on the phone. We headed back to his place to drop off some things before heading back out to get dinner and then go see Brokeback Mountain. Dinner was burritos at this decent mexican place. They messed up my order though, so that was kind of annoying, but we were cutting it too close to bother with getting it fixed. The movie was amazing. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were incredible. Heath Ledger was particularly impressive with his accent. He is from Australia and did a great job of sounding like a Wyoming cowboy. Anne Hathaway was in the movie as Jake Gyllenhaal's character's wife. That was strange. I'm used to seeing her in princess movies geared towards kids age 2-14, not a very adult geared movie. Let's just say she was VERY far from Princess Mia in this movie. She was excellent, which is great. Hopefully this movie will show everyone in Hollywood that she's not just a kids movie princess and she can do more serious roles as well as the princess movies. Michelle Williams plays Heath Ledger's character's wife, who figures out what's going on with her husband very early on, and is also very far removed from her early days as Jen on Dawson's Creek. She and Heath Ledger are actually engaged now and just had a child together, which is pretty cool. Ang Lee said in an interview that the relationship developing was good for both of them during filming.

Monday Gil had to work, so I went wandering around looking for presents for people. I succeeded in my quest and then went back to the house and ordered some books online, for my mom, not for me. After Gil got home we went for dinner, which became a slightly chaotic venture because many places were closed because it was Monday. Stupid Monday restaurant closing thing. We ended up at Isobune, a sushi restaurant in the Rockridge area. The food was very good. On the way back we stopped and picked up some movies, House, M.D. Season 1, Disc 2 and Sense and Sensibility on VHS. Back at the house we didn't get right to watching movies, so we ended up only having time for one or the other, so we watched House. I've GOT to get that on DVD. Maybe I'll ask for that for Christmas from my parents too. We'll see. It's awesome though. Thank you Adam for telling me to watch that show.

So, to finally end this entry, I woke up this morning, got on the very late bus heading to Oakland and then walked through a really sketchy section of Oakland to get to the train station from where the bus dropped me off. I think I have too much stuff with me, cause on the bus my leg started going numb from the pressure of the weight on my legs. It's fine now, but it was very odd. And now I'm on the train, very much looking forward to getting to Pasadena. It'll be so nice to be somewhere where I don't feel obligated to be touristy and do stuff every day. I can just chill at the house with Booker and do nothing. Jake will get to Ontario airport on Thursday, pretty late at night. Then we both leave from Ontario on Tuesday after Xmas, Jake to Philly and me to Florida for New Year's. It looks like Turk, Theresa and I will be going to a Leon Russell and Dave Mason concert on New Year's Eve, which should be cool. We are also going to a King Tut exhibit at one of the local art museums, so Yay for more culture. :)

Late trains are no fun...

2005-12-16T22:43:00.000-05:00

AAAAAHHHH!!! Being stuck on the train sucks. We have either not been moving or moving exceptionally slowly for the past 3 hours. We are now on track to be exceptionally late into Sacramento, which may make me late getting into Berkeley, which will make me very sad. The worst part is they aren't even communicating why we are going so slowly and stopping for so long. I just want to get to Berkeley and hang out with Gil. This is terrible. Oh well, this is what I get for traveling by train. I'm going to look through my pictures some more.

We are running something like 4+ hours late. Normally it wouldn't bother me, but I REALLY want to get to Berkeley. BAH!!

Later Note: I am now in Berkeley posting these entries (today's and yesterday's) from Gil's house. I am so glad I'm here. We just went out for lovely Indian food and now we are planning the weekend. It sounds like we are meeting up with Balaji at the Asian Art Museum.

Chicago to Berkeley train travel

2005-12-15T13:41:00.000-05:00

We are now traveling along the Colorado River between Granby, CO on our way to Glenwood Springs. It is an awe inspiring view. I have seen several bald eagles and a small pack of elk. I'm hoping to see some more elk along the way and be able to get some pictures of them. I have once again upgraded to a sleeper car, this time for a mere $242 for two nights. So, I am enjoying the view from my very own room.

I slept incredibly well Tuesday night on the Heavenly bed at the W Hotel. It's an unbelievably comfortable mattress. The shower in the hotel room was also really nice. I packed up and left around 11:30am and made my way over to Union Station. I found a locker there (for a ridiculous $4 per hour) and went and got some lunch. Since the locker was so expensive I got my stuff out after the first hour was up and just went down to the gate to wait to board the train. They kept reminding us of Amtrak's baggage policy, but not enforcing it. It's pretty funny. I saw a woman get on at another station with 5 carry on bags. The policy is two pieces of luggage and then a briefcase/purse/backpack type bag. Technically I've managed to fall within the policy so far. No one has hassled me anyway. I figure they probably only hassle people if the train is really full. Our train is pretty empty. I had no problem upgrading and had my choice of rooms. The meal times are fairly empty. Last night for dinner they took reservations but ended up announcing “come as you please, there's plenty of space” when dinner time actually came. I had eaten a good size lunch, so I didn't want a full dinner. I just ended up having a cup-o-noodles from the snack car. I waited until after dinner time to upgrade, so the upgrade was about $30 cheaper than if I'd upgraded before dinner time.

The Superliner roomettes are not as nice, in my opinion, as the Viewliner roomettes. The Viewliner is a single level train car, like the one I rode in from Florida to DC. The Superliner is a two level train car. Most of the rooms are on the second floor and you walk between cars on the second floor. The Viewliner roomettes have a toilet and sink in the room, which is strange, but also more convenient. The Superliner roomettes don't have a toilet or a sink. Their upper bunks are also smaller and right underneath the air vent, which really stinks. I hate air blowing on me. So, as much as I like sleeping up high, I think I'm going to have to sleep on the lower bunk tonight.

Last night I watched Red Eye in the lounge car. Rachel McAdams was pretty good in that. The villain, who also played the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, is SUPER CREEPY. That guy just has the creepiest eyes. He is so good at playing this terribly strange frightening character. The actor's name is Cillian Murphy. I only know this because there is a one page article about him in the latest Vogue, which I picked up in Chicago because it's the thickest magazine that actually has moderately interesting articles in it. This one has an article about the recent surge in food, particularly peanut, allergies among children. After Red Eye I requested my upgrade and then waited until we go to Omaha, NE to move my stuff. It's a lot easier to move your luggage outside of the train than through the train. I thought about watching one of my own movies after that, but realized I was very tired and just went to bed. Didn't sleep very well because of the air blowing on me and the tracks being pretty rough through Nebraska and into Colorado, but it was better than sleeping in coach.

Now I'm just watching the beautiful landscape and taking lots of pictures. I've got probably 200+ pictures to sort through tonight so that I can try and do some uploading once I get to Berkeley. I'm sure you are all growing very impatient with the lack of new pictures. I'm sorry! It's just that there are so many good ones and it takes so long to upload them. The landscape out here is just so gorgeous.

Country music makes the perfect background music to traveling through western Colorado towards Utah. Okay, I'm sure if you really don't like country music it wouldn't quite work, but being as musically diverse as me, country music is lovely. I've got my computer going and I had it on shuffle through my whole library. November Rain is not the best background music, it's too depressing. Then a Lonestar song came on and it made more sense with the landscape. :) I now have a soundtrack to Colorado. It is getting towards sunset now and the mountains are getting bathed in the most beautiful orange glow. This continent is so amazing. The variety of landscape and homes and weather I've seen in the past three weeks is awesome.

Oh, also, earlier when I was eating lunch we saw the abandoned cars from a former train derailment on the side of the tracks on one side and down in the river on the other side. It gave me pause, but I feel pretty safe. It was a freight train, not an Amtrak train, so that's a plus. Also, I've heard that the freight trains will often have far too many cars and go too fast. We've kept a very reasonable pace so far on this trip.

For quite a way the train follows along Route 70 in Colorado. It's an interesting highway. Many parts of it through the steep valleys are two level because they couldn't fit it safely side by side. A guy on one of the other trains I was on told me it was the most expensive highway ever built.

The W Hotel... or my favorite hotel ever.

2005-12-13T21:45:00.000-05:00

Okay, so the train trip ended with two obnoxious little children (okay, really they were close to my age, but acting like children) getting on the train in Fargo, ND mostly drunk already, continuing to drink and talking loudly enough to manage to keep me awake from 2:30am until they finally decided to shut up at 6:00am. I know that's a terrible run on sentence, but they just were terrible run on North Dakotans. Seriously, every sentence out of their mouths made me desperate for Sarah sitting next to me to make snarky comments about them. They were terrible.

But, I managed to get off the train in Chicago without throwing either one of them out a window. Minnesota is a lovely state, as is Wisconsin, but there's not much really spectacular to talk about. I met some nice people, including a nice Amish or Mennonite couple from Hanover, PA. I didn't get a chance to ask them what religion or group they exactly were from, but they did say that they drove part of the way on their vacation, so obviously they are not strict Amish who can't drive cars. They were reading a book called "House Calls and Hitching Posts: Stories from Dr. Elton Lehman's Career Among the Amish". It looks like a very interesting book. It must be interesting to read someone else's perspective of your own culture.

Once I got to Chicago, I had decided to stay at a real hotel, since I had not slept much the night before and had managed to stay in coach the whole time on this train trip. Well, I had found the Holiday Inn on the internet, very close to Union Station and reasonably priced. Well, obviously from the title of this post I didn't end up there. The woman at the front desk was exceedingly rude and basically treated me with total disrespect and acted as if there was no possible way I could afford a room at their hotel. So, I grabbed a map that showed other hotels in the area and I walked out. The next closest hotel to the station was the W Hotel on Adams Street. I have always heard good things about the W Hotels, so I headed there. The woman at the front desk here at the W was very polite. She made no assumptions about my ability to pay for anything and politely quoted me a price for a room. My heart jumped out of my body for a moment, but I totally kept my cool and handed over my credit card. You really should splurge on yourself every once in a while. As she was putting all my information into the system I told her it was my first time at a W and that I'd heard good things about it and I told her how rude the Holiday Inn desk attendant had been. She put me in the nicest room she could find for what I was paying and reminded me that W Hotels have the Heavenly Bed. Then she sent me up to my room.

After a really wonderful bath I crashed briefly on the bed. Let me tell you, it really is quite heavenly. They aren't kidding. If I have the money some day I may invest in one of these. It's a beautiful thing. So I'm sitting in my room, talking to Sarah on the phone when there's a knock at the door. I'm very confused and remain on the phone with Sarah as I answer the door. It's a room service guy with a tray for me and a card. I'm VERY perplexed at this point. I'm trying to describe the scene to Sarah. The room service guy opens my bottle of wine and then leaves, with me feeling completely awful that I had no cash to tip him. I am seriously completely out of cash at the moment, I desperately need to hit the ATM at Union Station tomorrow before heading out. Anyway, the tray was a half bottle of Fetzer Merlot and a plate of cheese, crackers and fresh fruit. The card said, "To our favorite 'crazy backpacker'; We think you're classy. :) Have a safe trip and let us know if we can do anything else for you! Sincerely, Katrina at the Welcome Desk". HOW FREAKIN AWESOME IS THAT?!?!!!!!

Katrina at the W Hotel in Chicago is my current favorite person. She is awesome. I went downstairs to head out to dinner and thanked her a billion times over. She rocks. And cheese and crackers and fresh fruit are a very tasty combo. They will make a very nice snack as I watch my complimentarily borrowed copy of Jerry McGuire. Yes, I'm a dork, but I've never seen it before, at least not in it's entirety. So, that's what I'm going to go do now, lay in my Heavenly Bed, eat my cheese and crackers and drink my wine. Oh, what a terrible life I lead, I know.

Seattle and such...

2005-12-12T12:42:00.000-05:00

I had a great time in Seattle this weekend with Kayur and I am very much looking forward to an opportunity to go back to Seattle. Well, first I guess I should say a bit about Vancouver. The weather there was beautiful and so I walked around for a while. I went to the art museum, which was very nice. Then I met Chris and Angela from the train for lunch. When I went up to the restaurant Ryan the attendant in my sleeper car was sitting there waiting to have lunch with another woman who worked on the train. That was an amusing coincidence. They were spending the night in Vancouver and then VIA was flying them back to Winnipeg the next morning. Lunch with Chris and Angela was pretty good. It was an all-you-can-eat sushi and japanese restaurant, but there wasn't much sushi selection on the all-you-can-eat menu. Then Chris took us on a tour of Vancouver. I got some good pictures and Angela even took a picture of me. Vancouver is a beautiful city. There are all sorts of neat things to do and the mountains are right there. The city has an awesome view. Chris said there are ordinances controlling how high they can build new buildings so that the view is not blocked. Vancouver is building a lot of stuff right now for the Olympics in 2006 or 2008 or whenever. They also have recently built and are still in the process of building a lot of new high rise condos. They are beautiful buildings that probably have amenities I would never dream of, but they also cost A LOT of money. Many of them are right on the waterfront with a view of the mountains, ocean and your very own yacht.

I left Vancouver at 6pm and headed for Seattle. The Cascades train that goes between the two is really nice. I found out that Washington state owns 80% of that train, so they've invested a lot into making it nice. It's a very modern train compared to the other trains that Amtrak runs. There are motion sensor glass doors and outlets at every seat and a nice snack car too. There wasn't much of a view since it was dark the whole way down, but it was a nice trip. We got into Seattle about 45 minutes late, but Kayur was wonderful and came an picked me up. It's nice to know someone with a car. :)

Friday night we just went to a diner for some food and then went back and went to bed. We slept in on Saturday until about 11am, which was very nice given that I didn't get much sleep my last night on the train. Kayur had a lot of school work to do that day, so I headed out on my own. First I did some laundry, which was great to be able to do. Clean clothes are wonderful when you are on a trip like this. Then I headed out looking for food. I didn't end up finding anything exciting, since I wasn't exceptionally hungry. I just had a slice of pizza. I caught the bus downtown and headed to the library. Kayur had sent me there first and I am really glad he did. The Seattle Central Library is this architecturally stunning building and filled with probably hundreds of thousands of books. I could have easily just wandered around there for days, just picking books off the shelf and looking through them. The library had a copy of James Morrow's latest collection of short stories, which I now am desperate to pick up in somewhere along the way. He is my absolute favorite author of all time. He's an amazing writer. The cover of the short story book, which came out in 2004, said that there is another book he wrote that should be released in the US soon and that he's working on another novel. SO EXCITED!!!!!

After the library I headed to the Bank of America building. They have an observation deck that is supposed to have one of the most amazing views in all of Seattle. However, the stupid place is closed on weekends. How freakin dumb is that? Whatever. From there I went down to the waterfront area. I got some nice pictures from the ferry building. On the way back up into downtown I stopped at a Dr. Martens store, but didn't find anything. However, I did realize that I desperately need some new boots. That may be something I either ask my mom to get me for Christmas, or just get myself. I continued walking around downtown and found Pike Place Market. That is a great place to walk around in Seattle. There are all sorts of interesting stores and vendors. It's also where the famous fish market is. There are guys screaming fish orders and throwing fish around. It's very interesting. I found some presents for people in one of the stores on the lower floors and from an artist who has a booth set up outside. Very exciting. While I was there Kayur called me, so I started making my way back to his place via the bus. I met up with him at school and he showed me around the building where his office is. He has a nice office in a beautiful building that was, at least partially, funded by Paul Allen. From there we stopped back at the house so I could get my laundry out of the dryer. Then we ran over and picked up a ticket for me for Narnia later that night and then we went off to find some quick Thai food. We ate at a place called Thai-ger Room on University Way closed to the University of Washington. The food was EXCELLENT. I got yellow curry with chicken and Kayur got something with tofu and yummy peanut sauce. We also got Thai spring rolls for appetizer. It was all so very delicious. I love Thai food. There's a lot of it in that area and Kayur says a lot of it is very good. It's also very cheap. Our whole dinner, which was so large we got leftovers enough for two more meals, was only $20. Yay for cheap eats. Narnia was a great movie. I'd really like to go see it again on a much larger screen. It'd be great if it was in an IMAX theatre somewhere in Berkeley or LA. It stuck to the movie fairly well. There were some things that they changed that I wasn't real fond of. But, overall it was very well done. After that we went and hung out at a friend of Kayur's house and played Taboo.

Yesterday was good fun. We woke up and got ready and headed out to have brunch at the Seattle Space Needle restaurant. It was $50 each in the end, but the food was great and the view is really nice as well. I had Seared Ahi Tuna appetizer, King Salmon with roasted pear rice and tarragon-pomegranate dressing and Turtle Brownie a la mode. Yummy. From there we went up to the observation deck and took pictures. Then we went over to the Science Fiction museum. That was cool. Very dorky, of course, but I'll happily admit to being a dork. They had some neat bits of science fiction history, including lots of props from the Star Trek series and movies, as well as props from other popular movies. They had one of the aliens that they had used in the movie Aliens. Now I really will absolutely never ever watch that movie. That thing was huge and scary and that movie scares me already and now that I've seen the thing in person, I can't even imagine trying to watch the movie. I'd end up curled up under the couch with my eyes tightly closed and covered.

So, that was the SciFi museum, sponsored and nearly fully funded by Mr. Paul Allen and his wife. They also funded the Experience the Music Project, which is connected to the SciFi museum. That had pretty much used up all the time that Kayur and I had for the day, so we headed for the train station. The train station happens to be conveniently, or inconveniently in my opinion, located right next to Qwest Field where the Seattle Seahawks play football. Of course, unbeknownst to Kayur and I there was a game yesterday. So, we get down there and the streets are blocked off and cops are directing people around where we need to go and there are hundreds of crazy football fans wandering around. Kayur dropped me off and I just walked over to the station. That made more sense than us trying to wind our way back to the station.

That leads us to where I am now, on the train. I've managed to hold out and remain in coach. I'm rationalizing that if I can hold out and stay in coach, I'll stay at the Holiday Inn in Chicago as a treat. It's actually not too bad since it's pretty empty. Not a lot of people traveling through the middle of nowhere by train right now. I have to say though, my childhood dreams of moving to a ranch in Montana have been renewed. I woke up this morning in Whitefish, MT, which seems like a resort town centered probably around skiing and a lake. Since then it's been amazing moutain views and just beautiful landscapes. It's incredible out here. I really want to live somewhere this gorgeous. Just mountains and trees and your own little cabin in the middle of nowhere. We ran along the southern edge of Glacier National Park this morning. I will definitely head back there to do some hiking and camping and what not. So, today during the daylight we will be going through the rest of Montana and we may see a bit of North Dakota while it's still light out, but it looks like most of North Dakota will be in the dark. Then tomorrow daylight will be through Minnesota, Wisconsin and then into Chicago at around 4pm, as long as we stay close to on time. I hope we are on time so that I don't have to walk to the hotel in the dark. Anyway, now I'm hungry, so I'm going to grab some cheap lunch from the snack car.

Briefly...

2005-12-11T05:44:00.000-05:00

I will tell you that I am in Seattle and I am hanging out with my friend Kayur from CMU. I don't have time to write a full update at the moment. I will write something longer when I get on the train tomorrow night and post it later. Hopefully later will be sometime in Chicago, but I'm not sure.

Trans-Canada train trip

2005-12-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

I am in Vancouver. The plan was to get here and see what the weather was like and go from there. Well, the weather is gorgeous and I have lunch plans with one of the VIA guys and another passenger, so I'm hanging out in Vancouver until the 6pm Amtrak train to Seattle. Woohoo. So, here is the story of the last three days....

I woke up at 7am Tuesday morning to get ready and get out of the hostel by 8am so that I had plenty of time to catch my 9am train. When I went to check out I found out from the guy at the desk that the other two people staying at the hostel who were going on the same train had left quite a while ago. This worried me slightly so I scurried out to catch the streetcar. The guy at the hostel front desk told me it'd probably be faster to walk than take the streetcar. I figured he just didn't realize how slowly I'd be walking with all my gear. NO, he was right. Flippin' streetcar just dropped me off far from the station and then I had to get a bus and that went this really roundabout way. It would have been TOTALLY faster to walk. BAH!! Whatever, I made it to my train no problem. Got on the train, settled in a little bit and enjoyed the AMAZING view.

I highly recommend this trip to anyone and everyone. Get your butts up to Canada right now and get on the train from Toronto to Vancouver. The views are incredible. Wednesday during the day I saw a wolf out on a frozen lake and then a bit later I saw an otter or beaver hanging out on the ice and then he jumped in the water. It's just indescribably beautiful up there.

I ended up upgrading to what they call and Upper Berth. What that is is a bunk bed set up that folds down after they dismantle the seats. Well, the seats become the Lower Berth and then the Upper Berth folds down from the cieling. The upgrade was only $380, which for 3 nights including all food and a shower every day, it was totally worth it. I had a bunk mate named Gilly. She is so very cool. We first met up on Wednesday afternoon when she got back from lunch. We got talking and had a great time all afternoon and evening. She taught me that you get free champagne in the sleeping accomadations. We got a new crew at Winnepeg that day and our new attendant Ryan brought us a lot of champagne. We each got two full glasses of champagne and oj and then he ended up getting a hold of a whole bottle for us later in the day.

It was a great day. It went by really quickly. Gilly and I got off the train in Winnepeg for a while. We got there almost an hour early, so we had an hour and a half to explore a bit. There is a fun market very close to the train station. We went over there and explored and then Gilly bought me an empanada. It was very tasty. mmmmmm....empanada. We got back to the train and settled in for a night of hanging out and talking and listening to music. Gilly is from Yellowknife, which is REALLY FAR up north. It's close to the Arctic circle up north. She says there's practically 24 hour darkness in the deepest parts of winter and 24 hour sunshine in the best parts of summer. She lives in a cabin on a lake. It sounds amazing. I am hoping to get up there next summer. The Folk on the Rocks music festival will be taking place July 14-16, 2006 and Gilly said that it's a great festival. Hopefully I can get up there for that.

Anyway, Gilly was getting off in Edmonton the next morning. We had this grand plan to wake up at 7am and eat some breakfast before Edmonton. No deal. Just as a note, when you are on a train with LOTS and LOTS of old people, there is no time that is early enough to wake up to beat them to breakfast. We got there just after 7am (they only start serving breakfast at 6:30am) and it was packed full and they said there were 15-20 people waiting to get seats. So, no gots on the breakfast. We went down to the Park car and got juice which held us over. I got off the train for a while at Edmonton to hang out with Gilly while she waited for her friend to pick her up. She was spending some time with friends before she left on the bus ride to Yellowknife around midnight.

Back on the train we headed into and through the Canadian Rockies. They just provide even more incredible views. It's really nice to just sit up in the skydome lounge and look out in awe of mother nature. We had an hour or so stop in Jasper, which is a very touristy little ski and adventure trip town. I wandered around a bit and found a small bottle of ice wine at a liquor store. I've been wanting to try ice wine for a very long time, but a full size bottle is $60 or more. The little one was $8, which is much more reasonable. I think I'll try that tonight with Kayur maybe. After Jasper it was just through the mountains on to Vancouver. I got talking to Chris, one of the VIA guys and Angela, a tourist from New Zealand. Chris ended up taking Angela and I on a tour of the train back to the Park car for more champagne. Then Angela and I got dinner, which was lovely, and then headed back to the front lounge car to watch Beyond the Sea. It was a really good movie, but very long. It gave me a whole new perspective on Kevin Spacey. He's an incredible actor and this was a very important project for him. Once the movie was over it was time for bed, to get in as much sleep as I could before getting to Vancouver at 7:50 the next morning.

So, I set my alarm for 6:30am this morning, thinking it would give me almost and hour and a half to shower and get my stuff together before we got to Vancouver. However, the trend of earliness continued and we got to Vancouver an hour early, meaning I had a little over a half hour to get ready. I got out of the shower and ran around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to fit things into spaces and work everything out and go crazy. Ryan helped me off the train with my gear. I found a locker for my backpack and duffel bag at the train station, got my ticket to Seattle and headed out. Now I'm wasting time until the Vancouver Art Gallery opens at 10am. I'm hoping I can wander around there for a little while, take a break for lunch and then go back in without having to pay again. I'm also hoping they have a locker or bag check room for my laptop bag and that I can keep my laptop bag in there all day. We'll see.

So, that's the short version of my train trip. It's just too incredible to fully describe without taking forever. I've already hand written quite a bit in my journal and I'm hoping to do more, perhaps on the four hour trip from Vancouver to Seattle.

Casa Loma

2005-12-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

Today is Monday and I'm just basically hanging out at the hostel doing lots of things on the internet that I need to do before I have to go 3 full days without internet access on the train. I'm looking into where the train station in Seattle is relative to the University of Washington. I also had to look into where I might stay in Chicago for the night. It'll either be the youth hostel or the Holiday Inn. Both are close to the train station, it's just a matter of where I feel like staying once I get there. It looks like the youth hostel doesn't have private rooms, so if I feel like sleeping alone I'll go to the Holiday Inn. I'm also working on uploading more photos to Flickr.

Yesterday I went to Casa Loma. It was very easy to get to via the Spadina streetcar and then the University-Spadina subway line. It's an interesting place. This guy Sir Henry Pellatt built it over several many many years, making it ever more extravagant until he ran out of money and ended up basically forfeiting it to the city of Toronto for unpaid taxes. A lot of his possessions had been auctioned off when he started running out of money. However, some of them have made their way back to the castle thanks to generous donations and such. It's a very gaudy Victorian style castle. It's really not my style, but it was interesting. There was some very fun people watching though. The first funny thing that happened was this little boy trying to use one of the display bathrooms in the house. I was walking through taking pictures of Sir Henry's bathroom (the one in the pictures with the crazy shower). These two little boys were walking through with their mother and grandmother. The younger boy must have only been about 2 years old. He saw the bathroom and figured it was okay for him to use, so he just starts pulling his pants down right there. Luckily his mom caught him in time and was like "no, this is not a bathroom you can use". I was giggling a bit at the situation, as were mom and grandmom. Grandmom said I should've taken a picture. I'm not that fast with catching moments that I should be taking pictures of. But, it was very amusing.

More fun people watching came from the actors who were participating in the Alice in Wonderland play at the museum. The Mad Hatter in particular was very cute with the kids. There's a picture of him and some kids in my Flickr pile. The kids were totally enthralled with the fake mouse he had. I didn't exactly catch what he was pretending with the mouse, but it was funny to watch the kids faces when he pulled it out of his pocket.

Then there was another moment when I went to go check out the Swimming Pool. Sir Henry had this grand plan for an underground swimming pool that was going to be marble and columns and fancy. It never came through cause he ran out of money. But, the room is there with this shell of what could have become a pool. At the moment the museum has a display of a cave in there with knights and a dragon. I'll upload the picture. As you'll see it's very dark in there and there were dragon roaring noises coming from the room. So, I'm walking towards this and there is this little girl (maybe 5/6 years old) standing in the doorway of the room that leads into the room with the swimming pool. She is PETRIFIED to take another step. She is totally terrified to move one more inch. She is explaining to the woman who is already in the room trying to coax her through why she doesn't want to go through. The woman is trying to tell her that it's fake. Then she's trying to say that the knights (which were really just suits of armor) would protect them. A woman who I can only assume was this little girl's mother was sitting next to the doorway with a baby. She apologized to me and I reassured her that no apology was necessary. At that moment the little girl noticed someone was behind her. She asked if I would maybe go in with her and it might help. I said of course I would go in with her and reassured her that indeed her mother and the other woman were right, that it was pretend and nothing would hurt her. Once we were all in there she was completely fascinated with the display. It was so adorable. Then on the way out the other woman with them said "Thank you" to me. I'm not sure if it was thank you for going in with us or thank you for not being annoyed at the kid blocking the way for 5 minutes making up her mind about going in. But, whatever it was, I just said "no problem".

Oh, and I saw a group of Brownies. They have Girl Guides in Canada, which is obviously connected to the Girl Scouts in the States. They reminded me of the troop of Juniors back in PA. I think they would have enjoyed Casa Loma and particularly the Alice in Wonderland characters. Casa Loma also had a Big Comfy Couch show that happened on the hour. There was an actual big comfy couch and a woman playing Luna and someone under the couch working the Molly puppet. It was also cute, but that show is geared towards much younger kids. There was a large crowd though for the shows that happpened while I was in the museum.

I came back from the museum, did some things online that obviously did not include updating, cause I just wasn't feeling very loquacious. Then I went out and got some sushi for dinner and then came back and did laundry. I couldn't find a place to get single use laundry detergent or dryer sheets, so I had to buy full size ones and now I've just donated them to the other guests at the Backpackers. After laundry I just watched tv and went to bed.

Today so far I went and got breakfast and then came back here to work on the computer. There is nothing left in Toronto that I feel like I haven't done. I'm pretty happy just chilling out here today before I leave early tomorrow morning. I'm very very excited about the train trip to Vancouver.

Oh and also...

2005-12-03T21:14:00.000-05:00

some pictures. These are just from Detroit and Florida at the moment. I have to get a paid account to put up any more, which I don't feel like bothering with just at this moment.

Body Worlds and South Indian Food...

2005-12-03T20:27:00.000-05:00

And of course finally meeting some friends of mine in person. Today I finally met Todd, Sage and Paul in person. We met up at the Ontario Science Centre, which took longer to get to than I had expected. I had to to take the subway and then wait about 10 minutes for a bus and then the bus ride was about 15-20 minutes. But, the Science Centre is definately worth the trip. There's a lot of neat stuff going on and the Body Worlds 2 exhibit was particularly fascinating. Definately recommend that to anyone who has the opportunity to check it out in their city or any other city. The rest of the Science Centre was great too, especially because I had excellent guides. Paul and Sage visit there quite frequently. Sage hung out for a while with us, but headed home when we went into the Body Worlds exhibit. She had already seen it. Paul really wanted to see it a second time and Todd and I had not seen it. After that exchibit we got some lunch and then went around to more of the regular exhibits. I love going around places like that with kids. They just make it so much more fun. Paul had a great time leading Todd and I around and showing us his favorite exhibits.

We left the Science Centre at 5pm, when it closed, and headed out to catch a bus to get to the subway station to head to dinner. I'm not exactly sure where we went as far as streets and stops and what not, but that's okay. Dinner was wonderful. We went to a South Indian restaurant. It was just this tiny little place, but the food was fabulous. I had a Masala Uthapam, which is a pancake sorta thing with tomatoes, peas and chilis cooked into the pancake part and then it was folded around some potato stuff (similar to what's inside a vegetable samosa for those of you that know what a samosa is). My favorite part about South Indian food is the two side dishes of dipping sauce that come on the side. One seems to be a tomato/vegetable based sauce. The other one I haven't a clue what it is, but it's good. Sorry. Anyway, dinner was wonderful and then Todd gave me directions back to the hostel, which were very simple... get off at Spadina and then take the streetcar down the street.

So, to answer Sarah's question from my own perspective, the TTC (Toronto Transportation Commission) is a wonderful system with very clean stations, subway cars, busses and streetcars. It is very easy to navigate and from what I've seen can get you to a lot of places.

Oh and last night I was able to do exactly what I'd wanted. I just hung out at the hostel. I spent the night hanging out with Aussies. :) I met Bear, Erin and some guy who's name I don't remember. They were all Australian. Actually I had met Bear the night before and spent time playing pool and talking with him. It was fun hanging out with them, although sometimes they said things that went whoosh right over my head. But, I asked what they meant and now I know some Australian slang. Bear is really cool. He's got a pretty amazing life. He is a dive instructor in the Bahamas most of the time, spending a week at a time out on a large boat taking people on 4-5 dives a day. He also spends A LOT of time traveling. He was in Toronto for 3 days, then went to Toledo and New York for a few days and then came back to Toronto for another 3 days that turned into 4 when American cancelled his flight. In January he's going to Salt Lake City and Denver to go skiing. In the spring he's going to do a tour of Africa, from Egypt to South Africa. And at some point he'll go back and spend some time in Australia. That just sounds like such an amazing life. It actually sounds like something my friend Bob should be doing. That life would suit him well.

Maybe while I'm on this trip I'll find something I can do that could lead to a life like that. Stints of working and then traveling that alternate in month or two long bits.

Anyway, no I'm going to go figure out what I want to do tomorrow and then probably go upstairs and read some more. I'm a little worn out from walking around the Science Centre all day.

Oh it's so cold!

2005-12-02T20:23:00.000-05:00

Dear Toronto,

I am very sorry, but you have just been pulled from the list of places I would be willing to consider home. I loved you dearly until this morning. The cold front that came in and brought you snow also brought bitter cold and wind. I'm sorry, but I just can't take walking around in that.

Love,
Danielle

That is my note to Toronto after today. The weather was lovely until the cold front and snow last night brought in some awfully cold weather. The wind is the worst part. It just bites into you. It made for a somewhat unpleasant day of walking around. I again decided to walk all over Toronto. I went down to the CN Tower this morning to get my CityPass and as I was walking down I realized that Weather.com had lied to me and it was a relatively clear day. So, I just went up the tower while I was there. It's really cool up there. The view is amazing. I got some cool pictures, including two pictures of the Global Village Backpackers. After the CN Tower I walked back to the hostel to bundle up some more and grab my hat. Once I was all geared up I headed out to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Before I went in though I had to find some lunch. I found some excellent Tofu Noodle Soup at this place called Sakura. It looked like it might be a chain. Lunch was $5, which was a nice bonus. Then over to AGO. They are doing some construction at the moment, so it's not a very extensive collection. It was still neat. The Catherine the Great exhibition was amazing though. It cost an extra $10 above the admission price, but it was well worth it. I learned a lot that I didn't know about her, including that she was pretty short. But, I think everyone was shorter back in those days.

From the AGO I decided to walk down to the Royal Ontario Museum. This is also being renovated at the moment, but there was still an immense amount of stuff to see. I spent two hours there and didn't really do the place justice. I kind of sped up at the end cause I was starving. I made my way back to Spadina (the street that the hostel is on) and headed down looking for a restaurant along the way. I ended up at Fresh. Totally recommend this place highly. I had a Baby Buddha rice bowl and sweet potato fries for $12.50. Excellent dinner. The Baby Buddha rice bowl was basmati brown rice with mildly spicy thai peanut sauce and tofu and cucumbers and tomatoes. REALLY GOOD, as were the sweet potato fries. Now, after my day of walking around I am tired and want to do nothing but just chill out here at the hostel and drink and then sleep.

Oh, and to answer Sarah's question from the previous post.... I have not tried the public transportation yet. It seems to be fairly extensive and pretty easy to use, but I just haven't tried it yet. I will be using it tomorrow, so I'll let you know.

Oh Canada!!

2005-12-01T21:01:00.000-05:00

I am in Toronto. I have finally made it across the Canadian border for the first time in my life. So far, I like Canada a lot. The money takes a little getting used to. There's a lot more coins than in the US. They use $1 and $2 coins. It makes for quite the pocketful of change.

I'm staying at the Global Village Backpackers youth hostel in Toronto. It's a pretty nice place, although they keep the rooms at about 25 degrees Celsius, which is around 77 degrees fahrenheit. That is REALLY warm for me. I like rooms around 60 degrees or less. My bedroom growing up was always really cold in the winter cause I refused to turn on the heat cause it made a clicking sound. Yes, I know, I'm wierd, but the noise woke me up. My mom frequently said "You can see your breath in here, how do you stand it". I was perfectly happy. You can always bundle up more, you can only take off so much. I slept in shorts and a t-shirt last night and barely had a sheet over me and I was roasting.

But, enough complaining. Other than the heat issues it's a great place. They've got free wireless internet, which makes posting really easy. There's a bar inside the hostel and lots of interesting people. It seems that it's summer vacation in Australia, so there's a lot of Aussie's here. I'm actually sharing a room with 3 Aussie girls. They act something like 14, but they are probably late teens/early twenties. Last night I also met two girls from Ireland. It sounded like they were spending several months exploring Canada. But, I couldn't really understand everything they said between their accents and the loud music.

I got into Toronto last night around 6pm (caught that earlier train) and got together with my friend Mike and got sushi. It wasn't very good sushi, but it was more about meeting up with Mike. We actually had never met in person. I know him from working at The Validation Group. I was a junior accountant and he was one of the many field guys. So, we always talked on the phone and emailed, never met in person. Then I got back to the hostel and pretty much crashed.

Woke up this morning around 10:30 and then went wandering aimlessly around Toronto. It was wonderful. The weather was nice, not too cold. I walked all over the place. I got lunch at this great little crepe place. Then I went down to Eaton Centre, the local mall, to look for a phone charger (since I'm an idiot and forgot mine at Turk's place). I got the phone charger and also found a nice inexpensive cable lock for my luggage. It'll make me feel a little better when I'm on the train. I'll be able to lock my stuff to the bars in the luggage storage shelves. It'll just help with my paranoia. :)

Tonight I had the most amazing Italian dinner I've had in a very very long time. I found this restaurant called Piero's on Richmond near John St. (for those of you in or traveling to Toronto). I had Pollo Supremo (chicken parmesan). That was SO GOOD. The sauce was incredible. It was so perfect. Oh, and I got Prosciutto con melone (prosciutto ham on cantelope slices) for appetizer which was also most excellent. Then for desert there was coffee that's got me goin' and tiramisu. Both were tasty. There is a very good chance I will go back to that restaurant before I leave.

And now we have reached the point of the story where we are at the present moment. I'm back at the hostel and surfing the internet and updating and trying to plan the rest of my visit. I'm hoping to go to the Science Centre on Saturday with Todd and family. Todd clued me in to the Toronto CityPass which gets you entry into the CN Tower, Science Centre, Ontario Art Gallery, Art Museum, Zoo and I think a couple other things. It's $47CAD and it's worth something like $97CAD. With the weather, it looks like my best bet for the CN Tower might be Sunday. It's going to be snowing tonight and tomorrow and then mostly cloudy on Saturday. Only partly cloudy on Sunday, then back to snowing on Monday. I leave early Tuesday morning. That's all for now, good night.

I Love Starbucks

2005-11-30T09:21:00.000-05:00

As much as people complain that it's terrible that there is a Starbucks on every streetcorner in most urban centers of the United States, I LOVE IT. I love it because it is the only thing that is allowing me to update all of you lovely people out there on my status.

The status is... it's SNOWING in Detroit. I love snow. It's so pretty. It does make it a bit hard to find my way through a somewhat strange city, but it's still nice. Speaking of Detroit, I would like to send a shout out to my friend Matt, THANK YOU SO MUCH for showing me around Detroit Halloween weekend. If I had not spent that weekend in Detroit I would have been a crazy person on the city bus coming down Woodward from the Amtrak station at Grand. I would have been hovering over the driver, "Where do I go now? Do I get off yet? Here? Now? When?". However, having spent some time in the lovely metropolis of Detroit, I knew to relax and get off once we got to Jefferson. Then I walked into the Comerica building and asked the nice man at the desk for directions to the nearest Starbucks and here I am. Aren't you all lucky.

So, the train only got more interesting after I typed up that last post. I'm not exactly sure where he got on, but we got a really, and I mean REALLY, drunk Georgian (as in Russian Georgian) guy on the train. He was seated two rows in front of me and one row in front of a woman with two young children. The conductor kept telling him to go to sleep. But George (yes, that was his name) would have none of it. He was going off, it was so amusing. Here are some quotes (all spoken with a Russian accent):

- I'm a very rich man.
- My father's a king.
- I'm a lord.
- Bless you all, God bless you all, everyone on this train.
- I love children, I am the godfather of your children, no one can hurt them.
- I love you brother.
- Please get me to Pennsylbania safely. (not a typo, that's how he said it)
- I have to get to my father, 245 Pine Street (anyone have any thoughts as to what's at 245 Pine?)

Each of these was repeated at least 4-5 times while I stuck around in the car. It was at once amusing and troublesome. I was a little worried he'd vomit all over someone at any moment. He kept going on and on begging someone to get him a Heineken since the cafe car wouldn't serve him. Thankfully no one obliged. Eventually his begging and incessent talking got on the nerves of the guy that was across the aisle from me and he started very calmly and sternly saying "Sit down, be quiet". Then George proceded to call someone on his cell phone and speak a bunch of Russian. (Honestly, I'm not 100% sure he wasn't just having a conversation with himself but thinking he was on the phone) Then he called someone named Carlos and proceded to tell Carlos that "these people are strange" and "a man with a dark mustache just threatened me" and "no one can threaten me". He told Carlos that he'd called the Embassy and that he wasn't sure he was going to make it to Pennsybania safely and that Carlos should call his father. It was so vastly amusing. However, George's antics were not likely to be conducive to sleep and the train car was really crowded, so I decided to investigate upgrading to a sleeper car.

To anyone who ever has to (or just decides to) travel a long distance by train, I highly recommend getting a sleeper car. They are pretty expensive if you book them in advance, but because I bought mine on the train, it was only $166 to upgrade. Personally, it was well worth it. I had a quiet place to read, watch a movie and then sleep. Most importantly I was able to sleep lying flat. The coach seats recline pretty far, but not flat. The other nice thing about the sleeper car is that meals in the dining car are free. That's a nice bonus, cause the food is really good. I had dinner with three guys who ordered the steak and it smelled wonderful. They all said it was good. My ravioli was really good too. I slept in too late in the morning and missed breakfast, but I ended up getting lunch because we were so late.

So, we got into DC 3.5 hours late. That meant that my lovely 4 hour layover to check email and post got cut to a half hour of trying to find a place to put things down for a bit before piling on to the train. I got on the train and my car was fairly empty. I sat alone and read more of The Chronicles of Narnia and made a 7pm dinner reservation. I was really hungry, so I decided to eat a full meal. I'm glad I did too, because in the process of waiting for dinner I met Al Smith. Al is exactly like Turk's friend Russell. He was so funny and cool. We had a great time talking and hanging out. We ended up hanging out in the cafe car and watching Blues Brothers and playing You Don't Know Jack. He is really fascinating. He spent a month wandering around Pakistan. He had gone over there to climb K2, but there was some kind of problem with the guide or something, so he ended up just exploring Pakistan. He was in the Navy for 14 years, ran two different motels (one in San Diego and one in northern Michigan) with his wife and now he's retired and lives on 120 acres in southern Michigan. He said "It doesn't know when to quit snowing up north, so we moved south".

That train ride ended rather poorly though. Once Al and I parted ways to get some sleep I got back to my seat to find it had been hijacked by some woman watching a dvd and wearing excessive amounts of bad perfume. So, I knew I wasn't getting any sleep there, so I went and tried to sleep in the lounge car. Not much luck there either, so I'm currently running on a gross lack of sleep, just one more reason to love Starbucks. Between the snow and the lack of sleep I think I'm going to have to save the Detroit Institute of the Arts for another day. Right now I'm going to try and venture over to Canada and see if I can switch to an earlier train to Toronto. Wish me luck.

On my way

2005-11-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

On the train!!!! Turk gave me a ride to the West Palm Beach Amtrak station this morning. We got there about 45 minutes before my train left, so I had some time. I ended up just sitting on the platform. While I was sitting there a Haitian cab driver came over and “talked” to me. I say “talked” cause he didn't speak or understand much English and I don't know what the official language of Haiti is, but I can't speak it. He also spoke French very well, or at least that's what I gathered. However, as I explained in an earlier post, I also don't speak that. So, it wasn't really a conversation so much as him trying really hard to keep my attention, but failing miserably. I have a hard time staying focused on someone that I can't understand. He was also wierding me out a bit, but I think he was harmless.

The Silver Star train that I'm on is not the most hi-tech. There is one plug on the entire train that I've found so far. It's in the Lounge car, so obviously that's where I am now. My battery will only last so long, especially with Itunes running, so I'm going to hang out here for now. I think I might look into getting a sleeping car for the night. The train is relatively crowded and I got an assigned seat next to some old man from New York who seems to have some kind of foreign accent. Not that I have anything against him for any of that, but he's also one of those old people who will sit there for a while and then all of a sudden start talking to you while you are in the middle of a sentence of a perfectly good magazine article. Then whatever he's saying he invariably loses his train of thought halfway through and trails off, so you go back to your magazine article, and then five minutes later the train of thought comes back and he picks up right where he trailed off. It's very frustrating when you just want a peaceful train ride. Anyway, so yeah, that may lead to an investigation into the cost of upgrading to a sleeping car.

That's all I've got for now. I'll update more later.

Sunday in Florida - delayed a bit

2005-11-27T09:04:00.000-05:00

This entry is getting posted late because Turk's cable modem died a horrible death on Sunday and I couldn't get on to post anything. Saturday I went to the Morikami Museum and Gardens in Delray Beach. If you are ever in the Delray Beach area of Florida you should check this out. It's a very fascinating museum with changing exhibits and a beautiful garden. There's a path that goes around from the museum in a circle through the gardens and passes the original museum. The cool thing about the original museum is that you have to take your shoes off. It's a traditional Japanese house set up. It's got neat displays as well, including several rooms where you have an artifact with three possible descriptions below it of what it could be. You have to figure out which one is the right description. You can add up your score and then it tells you that if you get most of them right you could be the curator. It's cute. All in all, definitely worth the $10 entrance fee. Oh, and I got some pictures, which will go up eventually. I'm still working out a Flickr account.

This morning Jake left around 8am. Hopefully he'll be smart and stop somewhere for a hotel and not try and drive all the way through. Turk and I hung out at the house while I did laundry. Always good to start a trip with as much clean clothing as possible. Also good to do laundry when it's free. :) I'll be able to do laundry again in Toronto. The youth hostel I'm staying at has a laundry. Although I'm assuming I'm going to have to get a hold of some Canadian coins to take care of that. The currency thing is going to be very strange in Canada. With the value of the US dollar down the way it is, the exchange rate isn't as simple as it used to be. Not that I've ever been to Canada, but I remember it being $1 to $1.50CAD at some point, which is easy math. The math isn't so easy now.

This afternoon we met up with Theresa to go catch a movie and dinner. We saw Walk the Line. Awesome movie if you have any interest at all in Johnny Cash. Great movie just for it's pure value as a film, but really fascinating look at Johnny Cash's life. I never realized how long his realationship with June Carter took to develop. I also never realized he was married to his first wife for so long. I'd really like to read one or both of his autobiographies now. He had quite the life. Joaquin Phoenix was an impressive Johnny Cash. I'm amazed at his singing voice. I guess that's what months of special training will do. Reese Witherspoon really proved that she can handle any role, not just the ditzy cute blonds. Her voice was also pretty impressive, although not as similar to June Carter's voice as Joaquin's was to Johnny's.

After movie dinner was at a nice little Mexican joint in Boca Raton. The food was good. Their guacamole was great, nice and chunky the way I like it. After dinner we chilled at Theresa's for a bit before I had to head back and pack up all my stuff into as small a space as humanly possible. I think I did pretty well in the end. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to handle the bags I have on the train and wandering around for the next month.

Relaxing in the Florida Sun

2005-11-26T02:18:00.000-05:00

I am hanging out in Florida, enjoying what sun and warmth I can get before I venture north into the cold and snow. Not that I mind the cold, or the snow. Many people can tell you how excited I get at the thought of snow. It's so beautiful and white and makes the world seem quieter and calmer. Everything slows down a bit with the snow.

So, I am officially a dork... I went on to check out one of the sites I read quite frequently and found that my friend Todd had mentioned me on his site. I was thrilled. I'm a total geek about getting linked to on other people's websites. :)

Todd has been giving me great suggestions for places to visit and other modes of transportation once I get sick of Amtrak and ViaRail. This has led to some very interesting discoveries. He suggested Green Tortoise. Their 28-day Alaska tour sounds really cool. However I did find some websites with people complaining about them, particularly stories of women feeling pressured and harrassed about nudity and promiscuity. So, that's something I'll have to investigate more. There were a lot of stories of people really enjoying Green Tortoise trips too, so I'll have to find my own balance there. In looking around for Green Tortoise info, I found GoNomad, which has info on all sorts of traveling and alternative traveling. One thing they mentioned was traveling via freightliner. That sounds INCREDIBLY cool. There is a part of me that is definately thinking, "forget traveling the U.S. and get on a freightliner to India this INSTANT!" 84 days traveling from New York, through the Panama Canal, over to places like Japan, China, Singapore, India, Saudi Arabia (although you can't get off the boat there) and other amazing places just sounds so completely wonderful to me. But, that would also eat up most if not all of my money in one fell swoop, so that's probably not going to happen. And I'm still a firm believer that I need to spend some time exploring my own continent before I go off doing some extreme adventuring on other continents.

Thanksgiving was great. Fried turkey is very tasty. The frying went off without incident. There was an array of wonderful side dishes, including a tasty spinach dish that Theresa's sister made. It was a nice family event.

Today we went out for a ride on the motorcycles. Jake had a little trouble with shifting due to his damaged left foot/ankle. (For those of you that don't know, Jake is my younger brother and about 2 months ago was involved in a motorcycle accident where a woman just completely didn't see him and his left foot/ankle got smushed and severely dislocated between her car and the bike.) I rode on the back of the V-Rod with Turk. It wasn't a long ride, due to Jake's difficulties, but it was fun. The new seat on the V-Rod is much more comfortable than the one that was on there last Christmas. Tonight Turk and I went out for dinner and I got to try lobster for the first time ever. Yes, I'm serious, I've never had lobster before. It was decent. Not something I'd go out of my way to pay $30 for, but decent. Then we got home and Turk concocted me some sort of cappuccino/espresso thing, so now I'll be awake for the next 12-14 hours. hahaha

Finally Somewhere!!!

2005-11-24T02:35:00.000-05:00

I have finally managed to get somewhere.... and that somewhere is Florida. I am hanging out at Turk's house for Thanksgiving. For those of you that don't know, Turk is my father. His real name is Donald, if you ask nicely I'll explain how he came to be Turk. Actually, we aren't hanging out at his house for Thanksgiving, we are going to Theresa's house. Particularly exciting is the fact that I get to try fried turkey for the first time. It sounds interesting. I've heard good things about it.

The drive from PA to FL was just lovely (she says in a totally sarcastic and snarky tone). Jake insisted on going to South of the Border to get fireworks. I had to either pretend to sleep or read while he was driving so that I didn't panic and scream. He is not exactly a good driver, okay, really he's an awful driver. I would say something meaner, but there are possibly children reading this, so it's gotta stay PG.

Saw a lot of different license plates along the way. There seems to be a Canadian invasion going on. I guess there are a lot of Canadian snowbirds escaping to the southern US. Personally I'd much rather escape to Canada at the moment, but then again cold and snow doesn't bother me. At least not nearly as much as the current American regime bothers me. :)

Florida has been lovely so far. We went for sushi tonight at Sushi Yoshi. It's very much one of those places where everyone who walks in and sits at the sushi bar knows the chef well and he frequently knows them. I love those places, cause they are always really nice to you if you sit at the sushi bar and give you treats. Tonight we got some crab concoction sort of thing stuffed into a big clam shell. It was very tasty (sorry Sarah).

So, the adventure officially begins next Monday when I leave via Amtrak to head to Toronto. I am REALLY looking forward to this trip. Trains ROCK!! My tickets and my North American Rail Pass showed up in the mail here at Turk's on Tuesday. Yay for Amtrak.

In Limbo

2005-11-11T23:03:00.000-05:00

Okay, so now things are in limbo. I've decided that the bus and I are not going to be friends. It's just not going to work out. When I tried to get the bus inspected for PA state safety inspection the mechanic told me he's amazed I didn't die driving back from Chicago. The brakes have some serious problems. That combined with lots of other minor issues for inspection and my continued discomfort even thinking about driving it, means that I've put the bus in storage to wait for the PA title and then sell it. I'm fine with that. Now I'm moving on to a new plan, but it involves waiting in limbo for another week plus.

At this point, I'm going to drive to Florida with my brother on November 20 or 21. We will be spending Thanksgiving with Turk and his girlfriend and her family, which sounds really cool. From there I will head out and spend a month (perhaps two) traveling the USA and Canada via train. Amtrak and ViaRail Canada offer a lovely thing called the North America Rail Pass, which will allow me to travel all over the place for one low price for 30 days. I'm very excited. My train trip from LA to Philly 5 years ago was one of the coolest experiences I've had and led to the development of a great friendship with two really amazing people. And that was only 3 days. Imagine the things that could happen in 30 days. SO FREAKIN' COOL!!!!

From there... is not entirely worked out yet. But, it'll get worked out over the course of the next 6 weeks. So, that's how things stand now. I'm not going to lie, I'm frustrated that things have not worked out entirely as planned. But, I'm beginning to get to a point in my life where I'm getting a little bit better (note the little bit) at taking these changes and trying to make the best of them and adapt. I'll admit I'm still not always totally great at it, but trust me, there are people who can tell you that I used to be much worse. I'm working on changing. Anyway, that's about it at the moment.

Askew

2005-11-01T13:49:00.000-05:00

So, things went a little askew over the past several days, but in a good way. Friday I picked up the bus and was still pretty uncomfortable driving it. It has some issues with wanting to stall out when you are at a stop and go to move again. It's very frustrating. I don't like stalling out, I don't like the idea of people behind me being angry at me. I know, I'm wierd.

But, anyway, so I was freaked out driving the bus and came to the realization that there was no way I was getting it packed up and heading out the next morning very early to make it to Detroit that night for the Halloween party I'd been hoping to go to. So, I very sadly got back to my grandmother's house, stopping on the way to call my friend in Detroit and tell him I wouldn't make it there. Then I got home and decided to go back out to Starbucks and play on the internet. At Starbucks I got to hang out with my senior prom date who works there. He just graduated college and is chilling at Starbucks a bit longer before looking for a real job. Sounds great.

So, I'm chilling at Starbucks on the internet and decide to scope out flights to Detroit for giggles, mostly because of a suggestion my brilliant friend Hazel gave me. She told me I should take a train to Detroit and hang out for the weekend and think about the bus deal later. However, since a train would take a REALLY long time to get to Detroit, I looked for flights. I got lucky and found an E-saver and flew out to Detroit Saturday morning. I surprised my friend when I called him and told him I was driving down the street that leaves the airport and heads into his town. He expected me to be sad and moping in Philly. Not this girl, no way. As Sarah put it so well "Spontaneity is the theme of this year for you."

The weekend in Detroit was great. I had an awesome time at the Halloween party and an really awesome rest of the weekend hanging out with my friend and his family. He has a huge family, 12 brothers and sisters, something like 8 of which still live within 15 miles of each other. They are so much fun to hang out around. They are wild and fun and loud and great. The party on Halloween reminded me of the parties I used to go to with my parents, only this time everyone was related. On Monday my friend had to work, so I went and checked out Belle Isle. It was really beautiful and sad at the same time. I got some fabulous pictures, which I'll try and post somewhere.

Now I'm sitting at the Detroit airport waiting to head back to philly. I managed to get onto an earlier flight, which is good, cause I didn't like getting in all late. It looks like Jake's surgery has been scheduled for tomorrow, which is good too, cause that means I can take him down there. Then I am taking the bus to get looked at on Thursday, to see if the guys at Lehman's can figure out a way to make it happier without spending too much money. That's about all for now, I've got to go make sure I'm still sitting at the right gate for my flight.

Brief Intro

2005-10-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is going to be very brief, cause I still have a lot of errands to do, including putting the bus in my name and all that goes along with registering it in PA. Things are a little chaotic at the moment cause the bus has some issues. It's got some problems with the shifter. Problems is kinda putting it mildly. My friend Bob, who is always calm and collected and peaceful about things said, "That's f*&%ed up" when he tried to drive it around the block. He didn't get around the block, he wouldn't even consider driving it. This from a man who has had several VW's, including a couple busses in his lifetime. Whatever. He says it's a miracle I made it back from Chicago with it like that. Basically more proof that I'm crazy.

Anyway, I'll post more later, including pictures of the bus, or at least a link to pictures. Now I have to run and do errands.