Saturday, August 15, 2009

Confession Time

I'm feeling a bit dramatic, so I'd like to make a few confessions.

1) I've realized in the last few months that when I spend the night anywhere that's not my apartment (besides home) I still get homesick for home and my momma.  This is me and my momma during Christmas break 2007.  Neither of us look particularly good in this picture, but I love our matching pajamas.


2) I've now been to Arizona.  I still don't really like it.

3) When my friends make racist remarks, it makes me sick to my stomach and wonder if I really want to be friends with a person like that, even my friends who I love the most.  And then when I think that maybe I wouldn't want to be their friend, I feel like a bad person.  Racist remarks just make me so frustrated.

4) I missed Sarah this summer, a lot.  But, I think I was forced into finding and making other friends which was good for me.

5) I'm so ready for the "boys" to get back from their missions.  At the same time, it freaks me out because I know that it isn't very likely that things will be the same between us.  However, they'll be grown up men so hopefully we can be a new kind of friends.  

I feel like five is probably plenty of confessions and a little too much drama for one night, don't you think?  I know that I thought of a six, but I can't remember it for the life of me.  Enjoy.

Married

Well, Jaimie's married now.  It's a little weird.  Everything about the reception was absolutely lovely and Jaimie looked stunning.  Sarah and I were there early because Marci had to take pictures so we helped set up a little.  Then we got roped into serving gelato for the rest of the night, but avoided the lady at all costs so that we could enjoy the wedding. 

I stole this picture from Sarah as my camera is MIA.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

At Least We Didn't Get Eaten By Coyotes

Yesterday morning I got up at 6:30 am to get ready to leave for Arizona (to go to Jaimie's wedding).  I picked up Marci and Jenna and we were on the road by 7:30.  A little bit into the trip (hour and a half? two hours?) I started seeing white smoke coming from the back of my car so I texted my mom to see how big of an issue it was.  She said it was probably just because I had gotten my oil changed days before (wrong answer).  Awhile later (two and a half hours into the trip) the smoke increased and we stopped accelerating - in the middle of nowhere, Utah.  I freaked out a little, but pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.  I was leaking a lot of some sort of fluid so I checked the oil.  There was plenty.  So, I pulled out my phone to call my mom - no service.  The other girls woke up and we started doing a service hunt.  As soon as we stepped away from the car, we heard the pleasant sound of coyotes. Awesome.  Several people stopped and we waved them on. Finally we got enough service so that I could call my mom, my mechanic uncle (in Virginia) and we got ahold of AAA. 

Meanwhile, a lovely old couple stopped.  They had been planning to leave early for the temple that morning, but ended up not going.  The lady said we looked just like good Mormon girls (which we are) so she had to help us.  We were at that time fighting with AAA because Marci's parents were the cardholders, not her, so they didn't want to give us a free tow.  The couple (the Collettes) gave us their AAA card and promised to double check that we were getting a tow truck once they were in a better service area (because service was so spotty and we weren't sure the call had gone all the way through).  Once they left, a few more people stopped (including pretty much Marci's whole family) and we waited.  We finally decided someone needed to get to an area with better service so we could check on the tow truck.  The plan was not to go with a man, and to send two people.  Luckily, this lady and her sister and their vehicle full of kids stopped, refused to leave only one of us there alone, and drove Jenna to a service area.  On the way, they spotted the tow truck and came back.  That's when Rick came along.  

Rick was the tow truck driver and mechanic.  He said that he had towed many vehicles like mine that summer and they all ended up in the junkyard because they needed a new transmission and that's too expensive.  Not to mention that I was leaking transmission fluid.  This is what I drive (a picture from the internet, not my actual one).  
Mine is  the same except it's all blue, no white. I figured my car was dead for always and started freaking out minorly.  I got calls in to my parents to let them know we were no longer stranded on the side of the road.  We were taken to Beaver, Utah to Rick's shop to wait.  We sat in the DQ attached to the gas station attached to the shop and waited.  And we waited and waited.  And I freaked out a lot, and we waited.  We started trying to figure out plans for what we would do.  The general consensus involved staying in Beaver for the night and getting a ride to Arizona the next day with a friend of Marci's (though we didn't know how to get back to Provo afterwards).  Finally we heard from Rick.  My car would run, but it will never go fast again and likely not long distances.  We took it back to Provo.  

The plan then became to get Jenna's car (which would involve getting her oil changed, checking tire pressure, unloading her stuff because she's moving, and transferring all of our travel neccesities) and then drive to Arizona either through the night or stopping at Marci's grandparents on the way.  To our surprise and delight, Jenna's boyfriend had done all the things to get the car ready before we even got there and she just had to get gas.  Twelve hours after we had originally left, with no net gain, we were on the road again.

The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful.  We drove it in three shifts, no one got pulled over, Jenna saw a couple deer, there was construction, and Marci got stuck in the rain.  Finally, we got to Marci's house, I showered, and I went to sleep.  The day was certainly exhausted, but we made it.  We got here and we're ready(ish) for the wedding and we owe a lot of people for their time and kindness.

This is a Beaver.  I just found out they do have beavers in Utah.  Go figure.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Letters (of the Alphabet)

I have a genetic disorder that will not let my brain shut up when I want to go to sleep, especially when I really need to sleep (like last night when I was doing stuff until 3:30am).  So, I started thinking about letters, starting with J.  I won't try to follow my string of consciousness back to why I started with J, but that's what happened.

Then, because I'm nuts, I started figuring out how to spell out each letter (for example: jay, kay, and el).  Then I got frustrated.  How would you spell out H?  I figured all of them out except for stupid H, so I turn it over to you.