Funky Lil Kitchen

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

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

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

Rachel's suggestion...

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

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

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

Okay, maybe I need some suggestions...

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

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

Photo albuming!

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

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

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

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

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

I think I'm flunking NaBloPoMo

I keep doing these last minute posts. Oops.

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

Quick post

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

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

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

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

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

My Freshman Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

NaBloPoMo, or let's make myself crazy month

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in Philly

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

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

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

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

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

nearly Nashville, TN

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

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

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

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

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

Oklahoma City, OK

OOOOOOklahoma, where the waving wheat... etc.

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

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

Tusayan, AZ

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

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

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

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

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

Music History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy weather out west!

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

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

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

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

Oh, how I love the East!

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Trying hard not to spend money

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

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

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

OMG I <3 BENJI!!!

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

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

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

Oh how I love living out west!

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing specific

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

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

RAZR Pictures

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

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

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