New Mexico Trip with the Family

This video quality is terrible. I'm working on it. Don't make it big; it just looks bad.

So way back at the end of June, some of the family and I went to see some heritage and other family in New Mexico. I decided to try a stop motion video of the trip. Here it is.

There are a few places where it doesn't quite work, and the credits roll a bit too quickly (only because I put so much stuff on them), but overall I'm rather proud of myself.

8/18 1985-2010

Top Reasons It Is Awesome My Sister is 25.

She’s still got a lot of time to live in fun places I can go visit.

Now she is the same age I “was” at a bar in Nice!

And are both finally closer to thirty than we are to twenty! Misery loves company!

If we ever have to rent a car, she can still do the driving and I can still do the drinking!

Catching a Laina-saurus is still just as funny as it was when she was 24.

In dog years, she’s still only 3 ½, and she sure was a cute 3 ½ year old.

25 won’t stop us from going to things like Finding Nemo and The Princess and The Frog in theatres!

She is still in school, which leads me to believe one day she’ll be able to repay me.

If she is 25, then Zak must be almost 21!

It’s unlikely that this will cause her to stop randomly translating what I say into French just for practice.

She’s still going to love the card and present I sent to Boston so it will be there waiting on her.

She’ll still be able to drink her weight in iced coffee.

We will all still hear the words “inappropriate” and “unfortunate” at the most opportune moments.

Ok, seriously. That list was fun and all, but there’s too much stuff on there that involves all of us, and really, it’s her birthday. My sister is the best. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be stuck between me and Zak, but Renée does it. And loves it. She does whatever she wants, or whatever other people want, and is happy. She can hang out with anyone, talk to anyone, and quickly become basic friends with anyone. A good example of this: she came up to Asheville a few weekends ago and was forced to hang out with me and a bunch of people I had just run through the water drainage system with for like 6 hours. She pulled it off just fine. She has so many friends. Beyond that, she has close friends everywhere. Renée has been in more weddings than anyone I know and probably will ever know. She handles horrid situations with grace and poise and is fantastic at making everyone else comfortable. She’s always got your back, even when you’re wrong, and even though she says I’m the smartest a lot, I’m pretty sure she is a lot smarter than I am.

My sister is one of the funniest people I know and I wish we weren’t both so damn busy so we could talk and text more often. Renée is also one of the most responsible and mature people I know. She is both respectful and respectable. She listens to great music, because she’ll take mine, Dad’s, and Zak’s advice on it, but also go off and find her own. She is open to any possibility.

It is shocking to me to know how much she has changed in the 25 years that I have known her. This is neither good nor bad, though I’m sure in some way, she’d say it’s only good. I simply mean that it is so interesting to see the progression that she has gone through to become the incredible woman that she is today. It’s hard to even remember sometimes that she’s had several unfortunate haircuts when now she is always gorgeous, or that she once punched a boy in the face for being a jerk when now…well I guess if he really deserved it, she’d probably still do that. It’s hard to recall what her voice used to sound like, which is why we call them Laina-sauruses and not Renée-osauruses, when now she is so well spoken and eloquent. I still giggle when I think of some of the nicknames she gave herself and the ones she grudgingly embraced, when now her beautiful name fits her so perfectly.

I am in so many ways jealous of my sister. She followed in a lot of my footsteps and then suddenly branched out. But it’s more a sense of pride than anything. I love knowing I have seen the entire life of this beautiful person.

I got back to myself there for a minute. Forgive me.

If you know my sister, count yourself among the lucky ones. I do.

Happy birthday, Renée Alaia. I love you.

I Got Crappy At This...

So lots of things have been happening and that's one of the reasons that I haven't updated. School ended, and normally that would have been something to excite me enough to blog about it, but around the same time, the rates for tv and internet went up by a whole bunch. I was not entirely prepared for this but could have handled it. My roommate could not. In hindsight, I just shouldn't have told her, let her continue paying what she had been, and eaten the extra just so that I wouldn't be so damn bored. I just didn't care that much since we would both be moving fairly soon anyway.

Thus, I've been getting my internet fixes by using the various wifi spots around town. Kind of fun and interesting actually...

Anyhow, lots of fun things have happened. My birthday was spent in Charleston. Friday was spent at the beach and Saturday was spent at a beer festival and baseball game. It was great.

Here's the whole group that went. And no, the beer festival was not a bud light festival. Tickets to the beer festival included a ticket to the baseball game immediately following, where their cheap beer was attractive to our drunken minds.

So you know, that is my friend Liz, the one who works for US Customs in Charleston and whom I had to do an interview for with the Department of Homeland Security. She got the job and is now way closer to me than Africa or Milwaukee, which is wear she was before.

The only major thing that I've done this summer so far is go to New Mexico with the family.

Here are some random pictures from that trip.

Mom and Lita and White Sands.

Mom eats a hot pepper; Dad laughs.

Dad finds a cowboy sombrero he likes; Mom refuses to let him buy it.

Other stuff that has happened:

I wrecked my beloved Honda Civic Hybrid. Again. I had to get a rental for a few days, then Mom, Dad, and Zak were kind enough to bring me the jeep. Since Renee is home for the summer, I couldn't keep the jeep indefinitely, and had to get another rental once we got back from NM. My car should be ready by the end of the week, just in time for some craziness to get started.

"Craziness" would be defined as moving. Again. I've lost count of how often I've moved in the last couple of years. They've all been for very good reasons, but it's getting old. On a positive, at this point, I think that I've consolidated my stuff pretty well and that it should be easy except for the big stuff that I accrued when I lived alone. Except for how hard it is to move stuff like that, I feel like I could move at the drop of a dime if I had to. The lease technically starts on Friday, and I will be taking a bunch of stuff on Friday, but will have to wait until next week to start getting the big stuff. Bonus on that: moving small stuff is easy for me because I have 4 of those huge tupperware/storage containers full of school shoes, blankets, etc., so I take them to the apartment, throw the stuff that's in there somewhere out of the way, take the empty storage bins back to the old place, fill them up with other stuff (movies, books, more blankets), and take them back.

On another positive, I have a pool again, and thank goodness! As it turns out, spending my summer reading and doing nothing isn't as much fun if I don't have a pool. At least the second half of my summer will be a little more enjoyable, and probably a little more tan.

Which brings me to an admission of seriously embarrassing proportions. At the end of each school year, or at least for the last 2-3, I have not had cable and have gotten by with my HD digital antenna, which actually works quite well despite only picking up about 6 channels. This of course forces me to watch some crap sometimes. One of those things has become a re-occurring end of year theme; I grade papers and watch the auditions for America's Got Talent. DON'T JUDGE ME. I've never made it through the entire season; I only like watching the auditions. Anyway, for some reason this season has really gotten to me and I think it's because they keep sending CRAP through. Seriously. I won't go into because then you probably will judge me, but the judges have sent through some ridiculous acts and left out some really good ones.

Alright, I think that's it.

It's Happening...

I am super excited about this weekend (Hey imagine that! I am excited about a weekend!). Why, you ask? Excellent question! Because there will be a lot of this:

Definitely some of this:

Probably a bit of this:

And more than likely a little of this:

HA! FUN!

May is 100% my Favorite Month

May really is my favorite month. There are lots of reasons for this, some of which are still applicable and some of which are not.

One of the major reasons that I like it so much has to do with school, obviously. This started in college when, for the first time, my birthday was in the summer. I loved that college was done at the beginning of May, and because it became a summer month, it was automatically added to my list of awesome things.

Now that I'm back in high school (haha kind of), May is back to being a spring month. I'm okay with this. In a way, it actually makes it better because the summer flies by so quickly and I like May to feel forever long, which it does when it's the last full month of the school year. I love the thought that summer is on its way, but there's always the fact that it is not here yet and that's just fantastic.

I also love May because of birthdays that occur in this month, particularly mine. I mean, obviously my birthday is important to me. My ex-boyfriend's birthday is in May as well, which was really only important when he was my boyfriend, but as we dated for 5 years or so and didn't break up forever ago, it's still kind of a lingering feeling.

Aside from the birthdays, for whatever reason, some awesome movies came out in May over the course of several years, which also has something to do with my ex-boyfriend and is still lingering.

I also love the weather. And baseball. And laying out and swimsuits. :)

Anyway, May 1st turned in to kind of a great way to start off the month. A couple of days ago I found out that an old friend of mine was getting married on Saturday. I had to change some prior plans around in order to make it work out, but it ended up being worth it. I went to the wedding where I was forced to hang out with that same ex-boyfriend, Jason. So I was forced to hang out with Jas, which could have gotten ugly (and actually kind of did later on, but that's neither here nor there), but I thought went surprisingly well. We drank plenty of beer and watched a really cute wedding which involved a maypole and had some really good food.

Then I went downtown to the baseball game to meet up with the people who were in town who I had originally planned to spend the weekend with. They were here because one of their old college roommates was the umpire at the game. Fun, right? So we hit the game, hung out downtown at Jack o' the Wood and The Yacht Club, and made general merriment.

I woke up entirely hungover and we ate at Sunny Point for breakfast. Sunny Point is one of the best breakfasts I have ever had ever. Then I had to play soccer, which I must admit was not a good idea as I thought I might puke the entire time, but we beat a really good team and I scored a super sweet goal. It was really satisfying.

All in all, another good weekend, and a great start to my favorite month.

Happy Spring!

I wish that I had some better pictures to show you as far as my spring goes thus far. I have one fun one, but mostly they're just me playing around outside with Jack.

This is a picture of me and some friends at the Vampire Weekend show at The Orange Peel over Spring Long Weekend. It was the last night of the break right after I got back from the beach and it was a super fun night. We went for drinks and to sit on the sweet patio at Hannah Flannagan's beforehand (and a shot at Mo Daddy's on the way) and just had a blast hanging out. The show itself was GREAT. If you ever get the chance to see them, do it.

One thing I do love about The Orange Peel (among the many things I really hate) is that they get all kinds of bands somewhat early on in their career, right before you'd expect to see them play in Charlotte rather than in Asheville. The issue is that people from Asheville will travel to Charlotte to see a show usually, but people from Charlotte suck too much to drive to Asheville. For example, I saw Wolfmother at the Peel a couple years ago, right before they blew up and they are now playing at the Fillmore in Charlotte. Same thing with O.A.R., though that was more than 4 or 5 years ago probably, and I also had the opportunity to see Queens of the Stone Age there, but I chose not to go.

They also get really fantastic, kind of huge bands every now and then, like the time the Smashing Pumpkins played 9 shows there. And the time the Beastie Boys sold out in like 45 seconds or something.

Here's Jack playing in the sun one of these really hot days. Actually, I guess he's technically not playing so much as panting, but you get the picture.

Where's Jack? This is one of those times that I was doing laundry and the washing machine was scaring the crap out of Jack. Instead of hiding under something this time, he went outside and refused to come in for like 2 hours. In fact, he hardly moved from that spot. This one also is a good picture of how long the grass in the backyard is...

Happy Spring!

BEACH

I LOVE THE BEACH.

We had a Spring Long Weekend and I went to the beach for four days and it was great. Unfortunately, I spent the vast majority of my time in the sand drinking and therefore did not trust myself with my new camera.

I literally did next to nothing except sit in the sun and drink. It was amazing.

I did, however, take a really silly video last week sometime when it was nice outside. This is my backyard and you can also kind of see the deck. Please excuse the quality of the video; I shot it with my cell phone. Also please excuse my extraordinarily loud talking, giggling, whistling, and the vibrating at the end of the video when someone sent me a text or something.

Other than that, my dog loves sticks. And running. :)