California part 1

Kaden playing his Leapster in his BATMAN costume

Kasey their new golden retriever...VERY sweet dog. laying beside me right now!

Kallum being a ham. pretending to sleep

making funny faces

Sweet boy who is just coming around to the idea of me...

crooked smile Kallum

Nick playing with a "hella-copper"

Not sure if he wants to have his picture taken

Cheese and rice smile

Kyler setting me up for bowling on the wii... SO MUCH FUN

Kyler was very upset. he thought just because I'm going to marry mark that I wouldn't come see him anymore...he's my boyfriend. he like when mark is working or away so he can have me to himself

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NOW WHAT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR...

the ring

the ring on my fat finger...look at the pooch. it fits perfectly though, thanks to analee!

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now i have to pick out the pattern and the cloth I want for the wedding quilt mark's mom is going to make for us... this should be interesting...i need analee's advice.

California

Well, it is 1135 and we leave for the airport in about 4.5 hours...
i'm wide awake. not close to going to bed. but i am all packed.
mark is sleeping on the couch with all the lights on.
mom and kendal slept right through me banging around in the closet
to put away shoes, etc. so the fairel girls won't get a hold of them.
Dad is sleeping (and snoring) in his bed...
i'm trying to think of things I forgot to pack.
I'd hate to get all the way to cali and realize i forgot something important...

my favorites from the email

these are 3 of my favorites. the cord and the power strip from analee's made me laugh out loud also!

for mom

note my indeciveness

Welcome to the new 2008 edition of getting to know your family and friends. Here is what you are supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun. Change all the answers so that they apply to you.

1. What is your occupation right now ?
Student... hopefully soon i'll have something else to put here!

2. What color are your socks right now?
white and gray thick hiking socks. 65 degrees in my apt


3. What are you listening to right now?
Old Man-Niel Young

4. What was the last thing that you ate?
Ihop pancakes and garden scrambler. drinking tea right now though


5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yes. hopefully the next car will be one!

6. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
mom. or Brandon's voicemail...


7. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
yes!

8. How old are you today?
22


9. What is your favorite sport to watch on TV?
hmm, if i HAVE to watch sports, i guess college basketball. i like sports much more in person!

10. What is your favorite drink?
coke with lime. i like earl gray too. both only in DECAF!


11. Have you ever dyed your hair
unfortunately

12. favorite food?
italian


13. What is the last movie you watched?
Wall-E. just came out today. it's cute. melissa, your kids would love it.

14. favorite day of the year?
Christmas

15. How do you vent anger?
cry, usually


16. What was your favorite toy as a child?
baldy, i don't think he was a toy though! haha.

17. What is your favorite season?
Spring


18. Cherries or Blueberries?
FRESH sweet blueberries

19. Do you want your friends respond?
Yes


20. Who is the most likely to respond?
probably no one...i seem to be the last

21. Who is least likely to respond?
--

22. Living arrangements?
depends. in greenville, it's just me in my small apt. in zebulon it's me, mom, dad, and maggie. in knightdale it's me, mark, eric, maston, and callihan.

23. When was the last time you cried?
yesterday maybe? i know, for sure, i did on friday.

24. What is on the floor of your closet?
shoes, plastic containers and my dirty clothes basket. oh i've got a suit case in there too.

25. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending to?
analee. i don't think melissa and i were friends until she moved out (true? you were in college?) analee was more of my other mom. i don't remember us fighting/arguing like mel and I did.

26. What did you do last night
last night i was asleep on the couch by 7, mark woke me up at 1015, back asleep in my bed by 11...woke up at 7am. i'm a hermit.

27. What are you most afraid of
dissapointing the family.

28. Plain, cheese, or spicy hamburgers?
what's a spicy burger? plain with lots of Ketchup...


29. favorite dog breed?
hmm... i think wienaramers are nice. so are retrievers. but i like spaniels. britneys, cockers, etc.

30. favorite day of the week?
Saturday


31. How many states have you lived in?
just NC. that might change soon too. i'll take any job at this point!

32. Diamonds or pearls?
pearls, only cause i don't have diamonds


33. What is your favorite flower?
daisies or lilies or tulips

for mom

He even took the gramophone on safari.
Three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart.

I'll bring it home next weekend so we can watch it, or at least listen to it.

and i'm still wearing your brown pearls. sorry i did mean to leave them with you...the owner!

analee

i found this today and immediately pinned it on analee... i don't think it will hurt your feelings because you know it's true... love you!


you know, now that i think about it, melissa is like this a little too. i guess we all are. with me it's, "ok i just have to brush my teeth!"

2 in one day... a record

this is really just for mom, since she's the only one I've told... (and no, the picture isn't for mom, but that is the finger.)

my finger is still bleeding. just a little though. i had to take off the bandaid so it could get some air, and i cleaned it. you can pull it open and see deep red inside, the meat of my finger i guess. it still isn't laying down flush with the rest of my finger so hopefully they'll be able to find some glass tomorrow and get it out. it currently has gauze with tape on it. just gauze over the cut and tape holding it snugly in place. i do have to do dishes tomorrow though. it won't be pleasant.

me and mark in mouse form...

Notice the beads of sweat running down mickey's forhead...

ants continued...

so i really hate ants. the guy came today and sprayed my bathroom. so now the floor is wet with poison and covered in dead ant bodies. the problem is... there are still some alive! there are some in the bathtub, some still crawling on the floor in the bathroom. some coming out of the molding in the living room (which shares a wall with the bathroom) and i killed 2 on my pants, 1 on the floor and 3 on the couch and chair in the living room. i'm trying to study but my eyes are on high alert for moving brown ants...


they make my skin crawl. they really look like this too. some of them have really big heads that look like they are carrying something and some are small and normal shaped. for the most part, their abdomen up instead of pointing downwards. very strange. strange and GROSS.

Where does snot come from?

just an update for everyone.

When I blow my nose, i feel the snot move in my throat.

I don't remember which of melissa's kids this happened to but she used the bugger puller on them and they gagged. I blew my nose, coughed and gagged from the snot movement and then threw up a little. GROSS! so i can blow my nose, and two minutes later, i have to blow it again. there can't be much snot left up in there, right?


also, if you'll remember from the yahoo days, i hate ants. they gross me out and they are hard to get rid of.

well a few weeks ago, i came back to greenville and there were lots of little dead ant bodies all over my bathroom floor. so i vacuumed them up. now i have ants coming out from under the bath tub. i put out some ant terror. they come to it, look like they are eating it, and then the next time i walk in there, it's a pile of dirt on top of the poison. I got online and looked up ant remedies- for lack of a better word. one thing i found said they hate peppermint so if you mix water and peppermint, and spray it, they will go away because they don't like it. BULL SHIT! They started coming out of the wood work. 38 ants came out and started eating it or something. went right to it! hopefully the poison man is coming tomorrow. i can't take it. there are random ones crawling on the walls. i just saw one above my bed, i had to get up and move my bed out from the wall. gross!

Fall Break 08---the last one

For fall break this year mark and I drove up to Gaithersburg MD to visit his sister Alisha and her family. We got there around 6pm friday night after being stuck in traffic for hours to get from the southern side to the NW side of DC. That was not planned well. When we got there we went to eat at a restuarant called Baja Fresh. it's like a mix of baja borrito and Moe's SW grill. pretty good. We played with Nick for a while then went to sleep... we were both exausted.

the next day, mark, alisha, nick, grace and i went to a train park outside of DC for nick to ride the train (he's really big into trains) that was of course not my cup of tea. the seats for the little train were HARD and small. my knees were pushing on the rough iron. after the train ride, nick played on the train playground while gracie ate.

Nick excited about the train

Grace thinking "ugh another train"

then we were off to a farm to pick pumpkins and apples from the orchard. There was a little petting zoo and tractor tires to play on with huge rectangular bales of hay. We took a hay ride over to the pumpkin patch (which was quite a ways away when you were trying not to touch the...HAY)

Climbing the tree to get to more apples.

Grace peeping out of the sling

reaching for the good apples

rolling pumpkins

tuckered out thumb sucker

mark has the pack mule sway that put her to sleep.

After that exausting day in the sun, we met Marion (the bro-in-law) for dinner at Cheeburger-Cheeburger. YUM YUM i got a turkey burger with sauted mushrooms, pickles, and tomato. YUM WAS IT GOOD! It was a weird combo of Andy's minus the greese and Fudruckers. a really good, hole in the wall, small burger joint. SO good. Exausted after the day we all went to sleep.

Sunday was the date day for me and mark. I got up around 8 while everyone else was asleep to start getting ready. then I woke mark up for him to get ready. Then, after he was done, he woke marion up to get ready. We all rode to and on the metro together. marion got off at the medical center and mark and I kept going into DC. We got there around 11. We finally found our way to the natural history museum! We saw some awesome rocks and stuff. Mark, of course, made fun of me quite a bit...

mmm rocks

look at that perfect garnet

can i have counter tops made of this???

mark and his dinosaurs...

after the smithsonian, we walked back into town (away from the mall) to find somewhere to eat for lunch (1:30pm). We walked past lots of places, and i was starving so I kept suggesting we eat at whatever resturant we passed. We finally found one we both agreed on. District Chophouse and Brewery. since it was sunday, they were serving brunch, which took us both by suprise. I ordered the 7th st combo (8-ounce top sirloin grilled and served with three eggs any style and ChopHouse Brunch potatoes.) and mark ordered a salmon plate (salmon steak with almond rice and fruit) I got the Brewer's Marker Oktoberfest beer and mark got some high content Dark HefeWeizen (atleast that is how it was described to us. it was gross)

After lunch we walked back to the mall for the art museum. after the first floor, we were both done. it all started looking the same. so we left. decided what our next plan of action would be (since it was already 4 and we were completely pooped) we made the choice to cut arlington since we have both been there and didn't feel like walking any more than we had to...

we walked up the mall saw the washington monument, the WWII memorial (mark had never seen it. it wasn't quite a nice as the first time i saw it. no old men dressed up in their WWII uniforms) from there walked up to the vietnam memorial (where I imeadately found Paul R. Martin's name) kept walking to the reflecting pool and the lincoln memorial, then around to the korean war memorial. from there we took off towards the potomac river to find the Jefferson memorial (which neither of us had ever seen) That was a LONG walk to the Jefferson memorial. we had to walk all the way around a tidal pool (which looked small on the map but was NOT small in person) on the way around, we stumbled across the FDR memorial. it was beautiful! Lots dark pink granite and weathered bronze, bigger than life statues. When we finally got over there, a school group had just arrived so it was super crowded. when we left, we had to walk all the way back up to the nearest metro station. we caught the orange line up to the connecting station to hop on to the red line which carried us back out to MD. we were so dog-tired when we got back to the house at 7, we didn't even see marion. Alisha and the kids left the house to go get him from school at 8 and i didn't hear them get back.

view laying in the shade

looking towards the pacific

Washintgon monument and reflecting pool in the background

favorite korean war statue

FDR memorial- one of many waterfalls

mark at a different one

washington and jefferson from one side of the tidal pool

Jefferson memorial

I slept for 12 hours that night. i got up around 830 on monday. Marion had taken the day off to spend with the family. we went hiking at Great Falls National Park My feet were so sore from sunday. it was like they were resisting going back into my tennis shoes... it was beautiful at the park. there were lots of families out with their dogs, the weather was nice (around 75) it felt wonderful in the shade. unfortunately the mosquitos thought so too. there were everywhere. we were swatting them off the baby and each other. it was rough.

riding in the pack

looking up at the falls

fearless.

another view of the falls

full belly makes for sleepy grace

mark and bell. she is my kind of dog!

if bell can do it, so can nick.

looking up towards the falls from the calm waters.

after we left there, we relaxed at home. played with the kids and eventually went to sleep around 9.

mark and grace had floor time.

my time with grace.

it's been a long tiring weekend...now for school to start. I've got a test on friday and a project due on friday!