First Post, Last Post

Note: I told you guys I was going to make a new blog. I did it! I'm at hollypolly.wordpress.com, and I'm pretty proud of my banner picture, so you should probably go over there to read this, eh? This is the first post in my new blog, but the last post in my old blog. This makes me feel clever, but that might be the sleep deprivation talking.

Right now I'm writing this from the lobby of my swanky new apartment building. I get little spots of internet up in my room (the left corner of the couch is almost always the winner), but the lobby's not bad. I'm pretty sure I can get wireless from the roof, too, but it's so cold up there, even though it's August! What the heck, it's not supposed to be cold until like, October.

Or November.

The move is over! I left Las Cruces on Saturday evening and finally turned in the truck on Thursday morning. Thank God. I was so sick of the truck and all the stuff, and I'm so glad moving is over. I kept telling people that it's such a huge hassle to move that I really can't see myself moving back across the country, even though I'm pretty sure I don't want to live here forever.

Anyway...

Saturday night Nick and I stayed at Richie's house in Tucson, where my Uncle, Aunt and Cousin were also. That was nice, because the first leg of our trip was the shortest (which was good, because we needed a warm-up for the lack of cruise control) and I didn't have to say goodbye to my whole family all at once.

Sunday pretty much sucked. We left very late, which was bad because I was in a hurry to meet a friend in Phoenix. After an hour of driving I realized I left my phone at Richie's house. We stopped to call, making us even later. Getting back on the highway, we got into a fender-bender and had to wait around for the police and fill out a report. By this time, we were way too late to meet my friend, and I couldn't even call him and tell him so. All the stuff in the back kept falling over, and when I crawled in the truck to fix it, I hit my head really hard on this bar that I'm pretty sure is only there for people to hit their heads on. I got a big puffy bump and a cut on my head. Lame.

The next day we drove from Los Angeles to Petaluma. We decided to ignore everyone's advice and drive right through downtown San Francisco and across the Golden Gate bridge, which was so awesome. We were there right at sunset, the the buildings were all gold and white, and the bridge was half covered in this really thick fog, so it looked like it just drove off into nothing. It was beautiful. Alicia's grandparents put us up for the night, and their house must be worth millions. Seriously.

On Tuesday we drove up into Oregon on the main highway (which is called a freeway here... highway means something else. It's like sneakers and tennis shoes, or coke and pop, or dinner and supper. I guess it's a state thing) and then drove over to the coast and stayed in Newport. Pretty. And freezing. We asked the guy checking us into the hotel if it was unusually cold that day, and he looked at us like we were crazy.

Wednesday we stayed on the coast for as long as possible. The trees parted often to show us the ocean and the beach and the ports. At one point, we drove around a windy road several hundred feet over a beach, but only a little bit of water was visible because of the fog that had rolled in close to the shore. We were high enough to see over the fog, and it looked like we were over an ocean of clouds instead of water. Very cool.

We got to Seattle Wednesday afternoon, checked into the apartment building, and started heaving the boxes and furniture up to the room. I'll tell you something; that enormous couch is a fat cranky biotch and I think I'd rather chop it into firewood and throw it out the window than try to get it back through the apartment hallway, into the elevator, OR down any stairs. I'm just not that attached. Now that it's up there, it's nice, but... never again.

My apartment is huge. I don't have enough stuff to fill the cupboards. I have like four really big closets, tons of wall space, but no counter space in the bathroom. My new big bed is fabulous. The trash truck wakes me up at like five every morning, but that's okay because I like waking up super early. I live right across the street from a (very expensive) grocery store. First thing I did Thursday morning was walk down to the market and buy vegetables and flowers. The flowers are starting to die, so... new trip soon! Hooray!

I'm moved. So far I'm not homesick at all because I've been so busy setting things up and doing wedding things across the sound (more about that later), but it'll hit me. My voice message from Andy the other night was a little sad. So far I've had all kinds of friends in town for the wedding (I had three people sleeping in my living room last night!), but now all of them are gone except for Adam. He'll be here till Friday. I'm glad.

This is definitely a change. It's why I changed my blog.

"busy" doesn't cover it...

i'm not a very responsible blogger.

here's what's been going on with me since my last post:

1. spring break trip was awesome fun, even though we didn't really find any ghosts. the creepiest places were right here in las cruces. what surprised me was how much fun it was to check out all the new mexico history in the graveyards and old forts.

also, we think that the st. james hotel in cimmeron officially hypes up their "haunted" status.

2. i graduated. woo hoo! i painted my face like ziggy stardust and just about died of heat stroke. it was fun. yay for the end of school!

3. i went to seattle and found an apartment. it wasn't my first choice, but it's not bad. it's within a mile of the ferry terminal, it's under $1300/month, and i can move in august 1st, so it's okay. i also found a place to go swing dancing. hooray!

4. i went to vegas with scott. he went for the poker, i went for the beatles. i saw the beatles show! i also bought a whole bunch of beatles loot.

5. i organized and played in a 130-hour hockey game (all-night, all-day, all-week), which ended yesterday. i am bruised and sore and i seriously jacked my knee yesterday afternoon, but it was fun. it was worth it. now i'm going to suffer from postmortem depression because i don't know what to do with myself after hanging out with all my hockey buddies all week. staying up all night to play hockey is just one of those things... now i'm going to miss them more than ever when i move to seattle...

6. next week! i'm leaving saturday. wow, less than a week. i really haven't started packing up my stuff at all. i've got my work cut out for me. nick and i are driving to seattle in a rental truck, so we'll get there just in time for

7. josh and kat's wedding. i'm totally excited about being the best man. i got my dress in the mail the other day, and it's beautiful. i still think i should be allowed to wear a tux, but since kat has a guy as one of her bridesmaids that definitely doesn't want to wear a dress, i'm sort of stuck. oh well.

8. i think it's time for a new blog. i've had this one for several years, several college years. now i'm taking off and doing something new, so it seems appropriate. i think that will probably motivate me to update more often, anyway.

i need to figure out the details of that. in the meantime, i've got plenty of packing and moving work to do.

smile

the sky is blue, the sun is out, the birds are singing, the spring break trip is ON (for this week! YAY!), and my school awarded me one of ten special fifth-year scholarships for losers like me who are stuck in this town, but it's good because it means i'm not poor anymore! that rocks!

i'm completely excited about both my bellydancing and oil painting classes. i'm planning on doing four dances in the upcoming spring fling show (one with a sword on my head, it's so awesome), and i finshed my painting of the graveyard last night. i like it.

oh, and i turned in my intent to graduate form today. i'm going to graduate! hooray! party!

so! now that i'm out of my meeting and i've turned in my last midterm project, spring break has officially started. i completely breezed through the midterms, too. i didn't prepare for anything, i've been wingin' it all week. course, that might end up biting me in the butt when it comes to the media studies test i took yesterday, but i'm hopeful. now it's time to hit the road and find some ghosts!

oh please, please, please...

i'm watching the superbowl this afternoon, not for the football, and not really for the commercials either.

i watch because i'm praying that the media fest that engulfs the event will be the perfect time to announce that apple and apple are finally going to be friends, that the beatle's music will finally be available on itunes, and that i'll finally be able to pre-order my brand new beatles-themed ipod tomorrow.

oh, sweet merciful lucky stars, let that day be today.

work SUCKS

i've talked a lot about work, right? i work for a very nice (but a little crazy) professor named dr. ghosh with two other students, elliot and dan. we're working on a mobile-reverse-osmosis-produced-water-recycler-unit thing. that basically means we have this enclosed trailer that we converted into a "water filtration lab" (ha), with pumps and pipes and magic membranes that filter out the bad stuff.

well, our design isn't working. it's not doing what we want it to do. and even if it did, it won't work with the contamination level of the water we're supposed to be cleaning. it's physically impossible. and even if it wasn't (by some serious miracle), it's not economically feasible. it costs less just to use some other water source than to filter it with out fancy (impossible, not working) technology. it's kind of fun to pretend that we're impacting the water shortage problem in new mexico, but the truth of the matter is this project is going nowhere. we just have to keep up pretenses for funding purposes.

despite all that, it's not altogether un-enjoyable to work with the system, run tests, take it apart, and try to fix the problems. we're running into issues we never thought of (some of which really should have been pretty obvious), but instead of being frustrating, it's kind of... fun. right now the thing isn't working, and we're isolating certain parts of the system to find the problem. it's kind of like a puzzle. it's cool.

i even like hanging out with my co-workers, which is especially nice after working with the likes of nat and ryan (especially ryan). but elliot and dan are funny and i like them, even if they do make fun of me for going home on the weekends and being a bellydancer.

but that all changed today. SIGH.

the other part of our job is trying to look good for the big-wigs that are giving us all our money. last week we spent a lot of time putting together this monster presentation for dr. ghosh to take to his reverse osmosis conference in california. he got back last night, and today we had a meeting about all the things the california people think we should do. dr. ghosh likes lists and outlines, so gave each of us a personalized to-do list for the next two and a half months.

dan's going to keep working on the system, troubleshooting the problems and basically doing the fun stuff. elliot is going to be taking trips to hobbs and albuquerque to take water samples and buy parts and check out equipment. also, pretty cool.

i, in my firmly-established role of "report and presentation girl," am going to read about seven books and four papers, summarize each of them, and write a report about the history of produced water processing. yeah. and if that's not enough, i am also supposed to become an expert about the potash mining universe in order to write an extensive summary for eveybody else.

this is so lame! i'm partially regretting being a TC minor now that dan and elliot get to keep doing the fun stuff and i have to go read a big ol book. potash mining is totally boring. it also has little or nothing to do with our project, even if it was going to work. and the history of produced water processing? give me a break.

the worst part of this is that i have to motivate myself to get it done and i can work on it whenever and wherever i want. i could conceivably put this off for several weeks and then try to bust it out in a few days. i'm already undisciplined enough about my homework, and it's fairly interesting.

not only that, but my homework actually makes a difference to my life! i get grades and knowledge that i'm actually going to use, whereas this stuff may or may not pertain to a project that is doomed three times over.

why did i have to be all snooty and get my TC minor and become report girl? report girl has no fun.

best idea ever!!!!

last night jen and i were watching Some Retarded Movie that was completely boring, but tried so hard to be scary (you know, with the intense soundtrack and the creepy "supernatural" images of normal stuff with the colors all distorted, which i think is all kind of cheap, really, why not just hire some little kids that stare soullessly into space and never smile? those always freak me out), which got us started on stuff that's happened to us that's actually scary (i used to work in a haunted restaurant, for example), which led us to the best idea ever.

okay... spring break is coming up and both of us are graduating, and we don't want to spend too much cash before we hit "the real world," but at the same time we don't want to waste our last spring break ever on like, working overtime. plus, i'm moving to seattle and she's moving to hawaii, so we're both kind of worried about leaving the southwest. we're really going to miss the desert.

so we thought... get this... that we'll take a road trip to as many haunted places as we can find in new mexico.

that would be SO much FUN! both of us are completely stoked. so, even though it was two in the morning and a school night, we started researching haunted new mexico places. of course there's the st. james hotel in cimmeron, the val verde restaurant in socorro (where I used to work), the double eagle in mesilla, mansions in los lunas and albuquerque, and not to mention the ghost towns and "condemned insane assylums" that are all over the place. there's even some old civil ware forts that claim general grant often appears on the grounds. sweet. every place we wrote down made us more and more ready to go on this trip.

of course, we might have to pretend to be ghost hunters or something, and take video and pictures. and we'll also need some big strong boys who don't admit when they're scared to go with us so we don't freak out. my brother, being the video/documentary enthusiast that he is, would be perfect. he's also something of a boy scout, so if we decide to camp at a ghost town (awesome), he'd be very handy. AND he doesn't startle easily. hopefully NMSU's srping break is the same as tech's.

on the other hand, there are some ghost stories that you couldn't pay me enough to investigate. i'm going to stay as far away from any indian reservations as possible. i'm not sure that the creepy stuff that goes on there can be classified as "ghost stories." ask anyone from farmington. i'm not making this up.

the other thing that scares the pants off of me is la lyarona. i've heard this ghost story since i was a little, little kid. the story goes that this lady found out that her husband was married to another woman in another village and had another family, and that he liked the other one better. so to punish him, she drowned her children in the rio grande. when she realized what she was doing, she tried to save them, and also drowned. now she walks up and down the rio grande crying for her children. the version i heard (when i was like six, good grief), said that she'd try to drown children that walked by the river by themselves, and that if you heard her crying, no matter how far away you ran, she'd come and kill you when you fell asleep.

CREEPY, right?

anyway, i didn't mean to turn this into spooky story night (although i could tell you some really good ones from the restaurant where i worked). the point is that i'm completely excited about this spring break. it's going to rock. ROCK.

catching up -- part two

i got a call from kat last night. she saw my name on a list of people that's going to start working at the naval base next year, and she called me to tell me about it. YAY! i'm excited. but... remember that girl from my interview that i told you about? the really negative one? not only is she taking the job, but kat tells me that she's starting the same DAY as i am, and there are only like five of us starting that day and we'll sort of be in a club for like a year, going to all the same classes and everything. that's lame. :(

so i guess i should keep up with my catching up. i'm still in las cruces, being nice and lazy all day. i'm not really looking forward to going back to school next week, even though this semester is going to be even easier than last semester. i'm pretty sure i'll be right at twelve hours, which has never ever happened before. should i take oil painting or glass bead making? right now i'm leaning toward whichever has the cheaper lab fees.

christmas-- it was fun. i was most excited about the gifts i got my sister... three t-shirts, one that says "i heart jake ryan" with a picture of the hottie from sixteen candles, another that says "i heart badboys" with a picture of the bad boy from the breakfast club, and a third that says, "i heart ducky" with, you guessed it, ducky from pretty in pink. she's one step closer to becoming molly ringwald. i also got one for my dad with john cleese that says "minister of silly walks." i got carmen some really beautiful sushi dishes with fish and flowers and stuff on them, which i still haven't actually given her yet. hmmm, i hope she doesn't read this. i love giving people presents.

as for me (look, i'm not that materialistic, okay, i'm not just going to talk about the STUFF i got, but you guys know how i AM about presents, okay?), what probably surprised me the most was what my aunt and uncle gave me-- a coin hip scarf and zils for bellydancing! dude, i'm stoked. i completely didn't expect it but totally wanted it. i'm so going to be the coolest kid at bellydancing from now on. it's gonna rock, man.

in the way of beatles loot, my grandma got me four pencil drawings of the early boy wonders, and apparently my grandad is going to make me some frames. they are beautiful. ringo is especially adorable. my dad gave me the complete beatles recording sessions, released by abbey road, which are going to make me the best beatles geek ever. and... speaking of "i heart" t-shirts...

alicia got me the dvd of paul mccartney's last tour "the space within US." woo hoo! i watched it the other night... and i'm on it. I'M ON PAUL MCCARTNEY'S CONCERT DVD!!!!! that's so huge. the camera zooms in on my homemade "i heart paul" t-shirt, which was on my back, so you can't tell that it's me at all, but i know. and i still have the shirt, so i suppose that proves a thing or two. YAY! i'm so excited about this.

after chrsitmas my dad took me shopping for kitchen stuff, since i don't have any and i'm moving this year. we bought a ton of red kitchen gadgets. i'm really excited about them, and kind of bummed that i won't be unpacking them until august.

new years was fun also, even if my sister DID fly all the way to kentucky and leave me alone to dress up in weird clothes by myself. my mom said i looked like the wicked witch of the west, but what does she even know about the wicked witch of the west, except what she's learned from me? honestly, she's crazy.

anyway, i went to lance and liz's house and watched part of the original saw and ate all their spring peas. then i beat my brother at guitar hero 2. uh. then i went home and started to watch a movie with scott and calm down my poor dog, who was freaking out because of the fireworks. poor thing. then we went to my aunt and uncle's house and played the longest game of arkham horror. ever. well, maybe there was a longer one, but it was like six hours, including our intermission to watch the ball drop and talk about resolutions.

i don't really like resolutions at all, but i am going to try to do one thing this year: finish a novel in november for nanowrimo. and, maybe not this year, but i totally want to see tom petty live before i die, so that too. :)

catching up, part one

you guys know how it is when you have a lot to write about.... no time to write. that's my excuse for being such a slacker lately. oh, but trust me, this christmas break, when i'm home all the time and the most exciting part of my life will be finding secret presents for other people that i will not discuss in detail, i will right all the time. about being at home. and finding secret presents for other people.

anyway... despite my lack of posts, this has been an incredibly eventful few weeks, or perhaps even months. it is now my lofty goal to quit slacking and catch up.

several weeks ago: the tau beta pi initiation
for those who don't know, tau beta pi is an engineering fraternity that is very old and exclusive and secretive. you join by invitation only, and only the top fifth or eighth of each engineering class is invited. you need an extremely good GPA and something they call a "character of integrity," which they decide for themselve and actually vote on. snobby, right?

well, congratulate me, because apparently i have a very high GPA and integrity to spare, because they finally wanted me this semester. i was pretty excited that i qualified, but a little bit hesitant. did i really want to be such a snob? i figured, what the heck, and found myself at a very cerimonial, um.... cerimony to like swear me in or whatever.

it was weird. it really felt like i was selling my soul to my alma mater or joining an academics cult. i thought that tau beta pi was about good grades and service projects, but really there's a lot more to it. they basically want you to promise that you're going to work your absolute hardest for the rest of your life-- which apparently includes looking attractive and being great friends with everyone else in tau beta pi-- not for the advancement of your own career, but to bring honor to your school and the fraternity. call me crazy, but i do a lot of things for the sole purpose of advancing my career.

there was so much emphasis on being selfless, they sort of beat you over the head with that point, when really the only reason i wanted to join was because it would make an extra-impressive line on my resume and i might get a higher-paying job because of it one day. and also, to be perfectly candid, because they give you these wicked awesome ribbons to wear over your gown at graduation that just proclaim to everyone that you're better because you're smarter, and i really, really wanted those ribbons, even if only to make a certain stupid ex-boyfriend feel inferior because of his lack of exclusive honor badges.

see? hardly selfless.

well, anyway, i take promises very seriously. i didn't want to make a promise that i didn't intend to keep. i didn't want to make a promise that i hadn't thought through very carefully. I didn't want to make a promise when there was even a shadow of a doubt in my mind that it was really what I want to do.

i fully intend on working hard and being an honest engineer for the rest of my life, and i already take part in service projects and i'm all for making friends and dressing nice, okay, but i'm not sure it's something i want to bind to myself with a promise, and i really didn't have time to think about it while they were reading off the attributes of a good TBPer. plus the whole thing was so bizarre and other-worldy that i was a little freaked out, and my thinking was not at top clarity, and i was not about to make a promise under those conditions. so, when the time came, and i was supposed to step forward and say, "i do," like i was supposed to, like everybody wanted and expected me to, i said instead, "i'm sorry, i don't," and was like, dishonorably discharged and escorted from the room.

i was completely distraught while i was walking back to my car, hours earlier than i'd planned, with the fat salary and awesome ribbons permanently out of reach, but i kept telling myself, however unconvincingly, "good girl! way to say no to weird peer pressure! you did the right thing!" i knew i was right, but i could still feel the disdain, real or imagined, from the people in the room i had just left. i'm sure someone in there thought the initiation was a failure because of me.

i called my dad and cried for a while, and he told me he was glad I didn't just give in and do something i didn't want to do. i love my dad. i know i made the right decision... i'm just sorry i had to back out at the VERY LAST SECOND and make a spectacle of myself. from what i can tell, i'm the only person that's done that in this chapter.

the worst part is when people don't understand. they say, "but everyone joins because of their resume, " "but they all know you don't really have to be great friends," "but they all just do it for the ribbons." (i made that last one up. i don't actually tell many people about the ribbons part. you have no idea how much i wanted those stupid ribbons!) then when i told my grandad what happened, he said he was dissappionted in me. that sucked.

but my mind is made up-- i'm glad i did what i did.

two weeks ago: seaaaaaaaaaaaattle, baby!
puget sound flew me to seattle for a site visit, put me up in this swanky hotel, gave me "food money" every day (like fifty bucks a day, which is like a week of food for a college student, which they may or may not know), and rented me a fancy car. it totally rocked. i keep hearing about how traffic in washington in general and seattle in specific is supposed to be horrible, worst traffic ever, but driving from the airport around part of the bay and over the tacoma-narrows bridge to bremerton was such a nice drive! i mean sure, it's busier than las cruces, or albuquerque, but it's no worse than virginia beach, and i think it's way better than new orleans and san antonio (worst highway design ever). maybe i got lucky and missed the bad traffic. or maybe i just love driving.

i met up with my friends josh and kat, who just got engaged (HOORAY!) and hung out. on sunday, josh and i took the ferry to seattle to go apartment hunting.

dude, guys, i LOVE seattle. i love it there. the weather was horrible and we were outside almost the whole day and it was miserable, but i was still all smiley because i was in seattle and i love it there and i really want to live there even if everyone who works in bremerton and half my family thinks i'm crazy. and they do. poor josh went with me because, as he says, he was "being supportive" and on the way back to bremerton he told me that he thinks it's a bad idea. i think he really expected me to get off the ferry and look around and say, "oh... so this is seattle. maybe i don't want to live here after all." well, that didn't happen. i was stoked.

and he also thought i was going to get lost without him, which is so not true. i actually know my way around much better than he does, except he has this mutant power that tells him which direction the sound is. this was usful when we got disoriented inside buildings.

"which direction are we facing?"

"north."

"okay, how do you know that?"

"because the sound is over there." i look "over there" and see absolutly nothing that tells me the sound is that direction.

"josh... how do you know the sound is over there?"

"it's like the mountains in albuquerque... you always know where you are because of the mountains."

"yeah, but in albuquerque you can see the mountains. how do you know where the sound is?"

"because... that's where it is. just trust me."

see what i mean? weird. anyway, we used josh's homing beacon for large bodies of water to find our way around belltown, where we looked at apartment buildings. i was expecting them to be sort of ghetto, like all the places i've ever lived, but they were so nice! all the rooms we saw looked brand new. of course i couldn't actually choose a place so far in advance (i won't be moving out there until august), but i felt better knowing that i will be able to find an apartment when i need to.

the next day was the site visit. i went on an aircraft carrier. they are huge. i never felt like i was not on solid ground. the weather was even worse than the day before, it was so freezing and so windy and occasionally raining. even the people that lived there thought the weather was unusually crappy.

i was in the "nuc" group with one other girl. she was so negative and selfish about everything! i hope she doesn't take the job, because i don't want to work with her. every question she asked had a theme of, "how much money can i get out of you people?" meh.

aside from her, the base seems like a great place to work. it's true, i probably wouldn't have even considered it unless it was both a) close to seattle and b) already employing two of my close friends, but being a shift test engineer for the navy seems to be an enviable first job. and the people there were very honest. they understand that happy people work better than frustrated people, so they don't only show you the cool stuff to trick you into accepting the job. if you're not going to like it, they don't want you to come. in fact, it's so much trouble to hire someone and get a security clearence that, if you do become unhappy where you're working, they encourage you to move within the base to another job. and (this sounds VERY cool to me) a lot of the shift test engineers get to spend months at a time in san diego, hawaii, and japan, and you get paid even more for that. sweet.

in fact, josh and kat are going to san diego for about three months early next year. and speaking of them... josh asked me to be his best man at the wedding! WOO HOO! i'm so jazzed. of course, he's all weird about calling me the best man and he says that i'm the "best person" and that i still have to wear a dress, but whatever. i'm the best man, and i am extremely honored.

i'm not a good man, i'm the best man. uh.

quickly...

okay, i've got two more tracks left on my new cd, the beatles love, and after that i officially have to get up and do something productive. says andy. the kid with the perpetually messy room. but whatever, i need motivation and i'll take it from anyone, so i'll have to be quick. that means it's time for a list! i'll try to come back later and fill in the holes.

in honor of the... ahem, holiday, a list of things for which i am thankful, in no particular order:

1. this cd totally rocks. my dad gave it to me for my birthday, and i love it. andy gave me rubber soul, which is my favorite beatles album ever, and i bought best of bowie and best of aretha at best buy (how appropriate) yesterday for like seven dollars each, so it's a good week, musically speaking.

2. green chile. do i really need to explain this one?

3. my dog jack is the cutest. i totally love him. i love him even more now that i've been spending a lot of time with slightly, my sister's cocker-retriever, who is a snotty little poop machine with a chewing problem.

4. my family totally rocks. i think thanksgiving is pretty lame, for personal reasons, but hanging out with the family is SO fun. we had an iron chef competition for my birthday last night that was the most fun thing i have done in a very, very long time, and for thanksgiving we ate enchiladas and played guitar hero and tried some funny games on the wii and had fffunn!

5. i am thankful for hockey. even though i have this gigantic bruise, hockey is still the bomb.

6. two more weeks till school is over! then it's time for christmas! time to buy presents for everybody! yay! :)

7. i only have one final this semester!

8. I GOT A JOB IN SEATTLE and I'M MOVING THERE!

9. i'm drinking cola tea, which doesn't really taste like pepsi (or coke, or sprite, for that matter), but that's good because i think it's yummier (more yummy?) than pepsi, and i like it a lot more than pepsi, and it makes me happy. thanks cc and barb!

10. and, finally, one year and two days ago, i was in phoenix and sir paul mccartney blew me a birthday kiss. what more can a girl ask for? i'm happy.

okay, that last track might have been my favorite, but lady madonna was really good too... anyway, andy says it's time to go. i'll come back.