My BFF

This is my BFF Peeved Michelle. Well, I don't call her that. I call her just plain Michelle. Or the boss of me. I've been friends with her since college. Apparently I don't have a lot of photos of her, but she'll probably be happy about that.

We have lived together off and on since college. Well mostly off, especially now that I live in Texas and she is still in California. I may move back there eventually. We'll see. I weep at the thought of paying twice my current rent for some scary ass shitty apartment that's half the size of mine. I try to visit several times a year or we get together other places. For the past few years we've gone to BlogHer and I've seen her there. This is her in her fabulous cheeseburgher hat. I'm not going to explain. It is too difficult and involves alcohol.

I've managed to convince her to go to Disneyland with me... more than once. That's pretty impressive if you ask me since she mostly hates crowds and Disneyland. Although she is taking her older kid there for her birthday (well probably the younger one too since it would be just mean to leave her in the car).

This is K around her 2nd, I think, birthday. M's a good mom. Very consistent. Very loving. I envy her this and hope when I acquire my kiddos I can be half as good as she is.

Every year for the past many years (except the year I had to go to AZ to be with my family and the year she went to Florida to be with her husband's family... never again) we get together for Thanksgiving. I've already asked for the time off from my job. Thanksgiving isn't really the important part of the trip. The important part is Black Friday. One year (and only one and never again) we camped out at Best Buy. It was miserable and in the afternoon we (well at least me) were exhausted. But we always get our shopping done and wrapped and ready for me to ship where they need to go by Friday afternoon and then we can enjoy the "holidays" without having to go to the mall. The mall is evil around Christmas. It is best to avoid it at all costs.

I think the night we camped out at Best Buy we had about 4 layers of blankets each. Hard to believe it was THAT cold in CA.

As part of our Thanksgiving tradition, we do some sort of arts & crap project. One year she introduced me to cake pops. That was both the best and worst year ever. Best because well... cake pops and worst because well... cake pops.

She's had some rough few years lately and I'm amazed by her strength and ability to continue moving forward. I should be so lucky to be even partly as awesome as she is. Maybe someday.

Free Weekends

In January I started my internship wherein I worked 8 hours a weekend at a library and given that it takes me about 1/2 hour to get there and back 5 hours of each of my weekend days were spoken for. Five hours in the MIDDLE of the weekend days (1 - 5) were spoken for. Since the first weekend in January I have had Easter Sunday, one weekend in February when my sister and I went to DC and last weekend off from the library.  Until today. I'm done with my internship. I have no house guests. Just me and a glorious weekend of doing what I want. Apparently what I wanted was to do boring errands that I haven't run in months, like taking the recycling to the recycling place. I need my apartment to get recycling. I lugged 5 bags (which became 6 as the "forceflex tough" trashbag broke when I got to the bottom of my stairs that was fun) of newspapers, 3 bags of cans, 3 bags of plastic bags and a shitton of cardboard out to my car to take to the recycling place. I also took a bag of clothes out to the car so I could take them to charity. I discovered I have little to no endurance.  I seem to have decided to do this at the hottest time possible (really 10:00 - 12:00 what was I high?) and it wiped me out.

But I feel accomplished and that's what is important, right? :) I also picked up a shoe organizer for the closet where I keep the shoes. Sadly it was apparently designed for children's flip flops and so I cannot fit a pair of shoes into each little compartment, but that's okay. I think now that I have free time again I'm going to get back to work on my scrapbook project for my scouts scrapbook and Lyday's (gag) orange and blue and cat hair afghan. My niece now wants one too (but it doesn't have to be gator colors thank goodness) so that's another project for me to start and actually complete.

It will be a good summer. I'm looking forward to not having homework to do or anything else really that HAS to be done on the weekend. I think tomorrow I'm going to try to go someplace I can take photos of flowers. I want to create my own flower calendar at Snapfish. At this rate it'll be an 18 monther. :)

Old Skool Music

Usually when listening to my iPod I listen to a play list of about 170ish songs. It gets changed up everyonce in a while as songs start to annoy me or as I buy new ones but there are probably certain songs at the core that are always the same. This week, in a surprising change of pace, I've been listening to my entire iPod at work. I have a little over 1800 songs on it. I'm only on about song 250 so far. It has been fun listening to all my old music. Some of it reminds me of Vlad since I got the songs from him.

I was reminded me of some of my favorite music. They Might Be Giants' Anna Ng came up. One of my favorite lines from that song is "I don't want the world; I only want your half." I have far more Britney Spears than I ever thought I did. I also seem to have way more Christmas music than I thought, yet I'm pretty sure I actually have more Pearl Jam but the Christmas music has come up more frequently.

The strangest thing to come up has been a recording of the audio tour of Millenium Park in Chicago.

blogger's block

I keep starting posts and then deleting them. I think it is because I'm bored with my life so I can't imagine how anyone else wouldn't be bored with my life too. BUT in non-boring thoughts:

1. I'm thinking of trying eharmony again. OKcupid has provided me with a couple of dates so why not. (Oh why not? try abazillion dollars a month that's why not... but you never know.)

2. I was just thinking about cutting off my hair. It gets too hot on my neck. I have a lot of hair. (I don't actually think that is a non-boring thought. It seems pretty boring to me)

3. Oh I did have fun at water aerobics tonight.  We were doing these things called roly polies (well that's what the instructor calls them).  Basically you float on your back and then using your abs flip yourself to the front like superman and then flip back to your back. Over and over and over again. Now in class most use either the pool noodle or the 'weights.'  I do neither. I don't need either. Apparently the instructor can't do them without the noodle or the weights. Haha! Take that! (Really I don't know why this pleased me but it did.  Sometimes it is the simple things, you know)

4. I've been reading a lot of YA books lately. I seem to feel too restless to read an entire book so I've been reading a few beginning chapters. Skipping to the end chapters and then jumping back to a few of the middle chapters. That counts as reading a book, right?