Neither of us drinks coffee, either

As I get ready to leave after a longish shift at work, my Mexican coworker (who is also a male model, I found out this morning) walks up to me all eager-looking.

Him: "You're not leaving, are you Violasaint?"
Me: "Yes, I'm tired and want to go home and relax."
Him: "You're sure you want to go? You could stay and we could sip coffee and talk about white brotherhood!"
Me: "I'm not sure that would work on any kind of level..."
Him: "Why? Just because you're a girl and I'm Mexican?"
Me: "Pretty much."

Ah, but do you care what I refrained from getting for dessert?

After spending the past few days at the Grand Canyon, I feel the need to share some of my observations with you, the internet.

-It may not occur to you, but the Grand Canyon is in fact, a big hole in the ground in the middle of the desert. If you stand on the edge and take pictures of it all day, you will end up sunburnt. If you wear pigtails while taking pictures all day, you will end up with a sunburnt scalp which will flake off over the next few days in a painful and ugly way.

-It is nearly impossible to take an interesting picture of the canyon, because every angle you can get of it has already been gotten a million times before by Japanese people in tour buses. Your only hope is to get a really great sunset or lightning shot, because the sunset and lightning are the only things about the canyon that actually change.

-When the hotel boasts "modern rooms with vaulted ceilings," it means the roof does come to a very obtuse point, and you get a TV, two lamps and a bathroom. Modern!

-The fact that there are exactly three restaurants in the actual park leads the Bright Angel Lodge to believe it is safe in naming a dessert "Warm Apple Grunt." I know that my favorite dessert is the Tepid Blueberry Howl, not to mention the delights of the Cool Watermelon Snort.

Mourning a Great Loss

I got my oil changed today. Back here, in the land of crappy service and aggressive oil change guys who try to get you to buy fifteen extra services beyond a simple oil change. This is one more reason why I miss Parts Unknown- they have a wonderful little chain that gives you an oil change (and ONLY an oil change) in ten minutes. Cheer and lemonade are distributed freely, and you don't even have to get out of your car. Ten minutes!

I feel so patriotic

What better way to celebrate your country's independance than by eating hot dogs and getting rained on as you listen to an overture by Shostakovich? While wearing your Communist Party shirt?

It was actually slightly more interesting this year because not only did we have fireworks to watch, but in between we could watch lightning, nature's original fireworks. As always, the Sousa marches were excellent and crowd-pleasing. The Fourth of July is the only redeeming feature of that stupid park with no swings.

Great Dalmuti!

Seems like I must have loserly genes. Or something.

No matter what game I'm playing, no matter who I'm playing with, I generally lose. Dominoes, cards, Settlers of Catan. The game of Life, even.

When I was younger, the Losing usually preceded the Crying in Frustration and Anger, which made my family think twice before starting a game with me. By now, however, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to ever win a game. This resignation has made losing slightly more bearable, and for some reason, I still love to play games. They're fun and exciting, and once in a while I even let myself think I have a chance of winning. I don't get as disappointed when I end up losing again, which is a good thing. I suppose.

How to Depress Yourself

1. Go take the Personality Disorder Test. Although I suppose if you don't have any personality disorders, it won't depress you as much....

2. Go get a copy of I Hate Myself and Want to Die. It's a book describing like fifty depressing songs. Except from the few chapters I read of it, it's more funny and chuckle-inducing than it is depressing.

The Stars are Masses of Incandescent Gas

You know, you really forget just how many stars there are until you go out into the middle of the desert late at night. There was such a Milky Way to be seen last night, and about a gazillion other stars elsewheres in the sky. One of them even came down to earth and burned up in the atmosphere not too far from where we were. I've decided that it must be an extra-special shooting star, and will therefore be extra-powerful in granting the wish I made on it.

Total Soreness

I went and did something fun the other day. I know, go ahead and gasp in a shocked manner.

A friend invited me to an evening of swing dancing that apparently happens every week at another friend's house, and I went with high expectations and my newfound love of dance. I'd just like to say, that was the most fun I'd had for a long time. So excellently fun. So magnificently a good time.

I learned several new and fun moves, including two dips, one nifty jumpy thing, and two aerial moves. That's right, I did aerials. Me, one of the boringest and most landbound people on earth, went flying through the air, and I loved it! I intend to attend these events for as long as they hold them, I like it that much.

However. Many of these cool new moves involve the use of cool new muscles. Muscles that I previously didn't know existed in my body. It's been a few days now, and I'm still incredibly sore in my right upper thigh, as well as somewhat sore in my neck and back, and my abdominal muscles are also making themselves known. This will not stop me from dancing in the future, but it will make me think about stretching afterwards.

Nothing New

Not much is going on in my life right now. Working, yes. Today I made a whopping $18, because business has slowed down so they can't afford to give anyone very many long shifts. On the other hand, working for three hours a day is kind of nice. Except that I don't have any other pressing activities to attend to during the other 21 hours of the day.

I met up with some friends tonight, though, and I looked very cute in this great skirt that I got for maybe $8 and pigtail braids that made me look either like Pippi Longstocking or like Anne of Green Gables or like Snoop Dogg. But Snoop Dogg wouldn't wear such a cute skirt. Anyway, through talking with various people, I learned of fun activities that go on around town, such as swing dancing at somebody's house every once in a while, and weekly indoor soccer at the church. Perhaps I'll become less hermit-like and check out those events. My plan, as you may have divined, is to make myself busy so I don't realize that I have nothing to do.

My plans for tomorrow? Finally tackle the pile of stuff that I had use for during the past year, but not anymore since I'm living in my parents' already-furnished house. Stuff like mixing bowls, and blankets, and twin sheets, a non-functional printer, and oh yeah, all of my favorite books that I brought up there with me that I now have no room for on my bookshelves because they're all filled up with the books that aren't my favorite favorites.

Between living a suddenly very sedentary lifestyle and eating not the best for me foods (and large quantities of them, since I don't have to pay for groceries anymore), I believe I'm ballooning up like, well, a balloon. Tonight I ate a cod filet and several mini mushroom quiches, a root beer float, and then some Pecan Pandoutie (panned-outie?) with ice cream, and the mix of it all is making me want desperately to vomit. Sugary pecan mash does not go well with mushroom quiche, I'd like you all to know. Beware the admixture of nuts and fungus!

Hopefully the effect will wear off before I wake up tomorrow and try to sort through boxes of stuff.

Prepare for Severe Cuteness

Tomorrow will mark the one-week anniversary of my owning two almost unbearably cute animals. Wanna see? Yeah, I thought you would. Here you go. You might want to brush your teeth after looking at them, because they may give you cavities. They're that sweet.



I like to call this first picture "Chinchillas in Da Big House."


And this one? Well, it doesn't have a funny name. It's just a cute Chinchilla on my shoulder.

Happy Holidays

Today was Thanksgiving, and tomorrow will be Memorial Day, Easter, and Christmas all rolled into one. Since I was gone for a few major holidays this year, my family is having them in May. Not full-blown holidays, mind you, just little pseudo-celebrations. We had a turkey roll tonight with mashed potatoes and green beans, and mom made a pumpkin pudding for dessert. Tomorrow we'll be having hot dogs for dinner (Memorial Day) and jelly beans and devilled eggs and chocolate on the side (Easter).

Where does Christmas come in, you ask? Well, tomorrow is the day that I get my new pets, which I am very excited about. Even more anticipation in getting these than in getting Christmas presents this year.

Wherever life finds you during this holiday season, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and a Happy Easter, and may your Memorial Day be memorable.

Un-unemployed

Hooray, tomorrow I begin working again. I'm looking forward to my new job- it's a place that I like, it's really close to home (we're talking a 30 second commute here), and the people so far seem friendly and more clean-cut than my old coworkers. Let's all hope that I like working there, and that I like the people and stuff. Getting the job was the most painless thing in the world- I got an application, took it home, filled it out, brought it back a few days later (today), and the manager interviewed me and hired me after about 15 minutes of me walking in the door. No, it's not the most glamorous job out there, yes, I'm still working with food, but it's better than my old job and it's absolutely better than my recent state of no-job-at-all. I'm excited- I now will have a reason to wake up in the mornings. This is obviously a Good Thing, especially when you take into consideration that the thing that will keep me busy and not dying of boredom will also supply me with money. In return for what? In return for having something to do all summer, that's what! Having a job rawks.

Also, since I now have a job and will soon be earning money, I can now start seriously working on obtaining that pet that I want, which is now looking like those two pets that I want. I imagine that I'll have them sometime within the next month, if all goes well with the job and the pet-obtaining process. I'm very much looking forward to meeting with the breeder and checking out the various animals, choosing which ones will be right for me.

All in all, this summer is shaping out to be pretty good. A job to keep me busy, a pet (or two) to keep me company, and an income to keep me happy. The only drawback? When I talk about waking up in the mornings for my job, I mean the mornings. Like, up with the sun. It may even be up before the sun; I don't even know, because I've never woken up early enough to know when the sun rises. Early to bed and early to rise, as they say.

Don't get your hopes up

I don't really have anything to say, since I haven't done a whole lot of anything during the past few weeks. Well, other than getting a cute orange skirt a few days ago for seven dollars, and getting a black eye tonight for free. I'll give you internet people a picture of the cute orange skirt, since the picture of the black eye didn't turn out very well.

Mainly I just wanted to reassure you that I'm still alive, and the blog is not dead. It's just in a dormant phase while I have a boring life for a few weeks. I've got some tricks up my sleeve, though. I have plans to obtain a job really soon (I'll be applying at every place of business in a five mile radius of my house on friday), and I also have supersecret amazing plans of coolness that will make me less lonely. No, I'm not hiring a male escort, I'm thinking about buying a pet. But not just any pet! It's a supersecret amazing pet that if I actually get one, I'll tell you more about. Here's a hint as to the species: it has fur. Is it a hippo? Is it a stoat? Is it a yeti? Those of you not in the know, please leave a comment with your guess as to what would be my perfect pet. If you have a better idea than me, I might just change my mind!

Grammar Nazi

I used to be one, probably from grade 8-11. My senior year of high school, I relaxed a lot about it, realizing that people are going to talk the way they talk no matter what I thought about it, so I should just chill. Then I took a linguistics course during my freshman year of college, in which I learned about descriptive and proscriptive grammar. Now I essentially root for descriptive; if everyone in history was all grammar nazi-like, nothing would ever change, and we'd only speak one language, and talking would be boring. Innovation and evolution are part of language, so all you people who visibly cringe when someone uses a word "improperly," you can all just shut up. I hate you. Alright, I really don't hate you, but people who use their so-called superior knowledge to make normal people look up to them, they really annoy me and sometimes make me angry.

That all being said, I still have little bits of my past control-freak that surface now and again. One that really bugs me? When people try to type "Voila," but end up saying "viola." Those two words are not the same. It really shouldn't bother me, since spelling isn't terribly important in the grand scheme of things, and especially since neither of those words is used very frequently. But still. Every time I see "Viola!" in somebody's writing, I think to myself, "Cello! Bassoon! Marimba!," even though I know what they really meant to say.

Now What?

I'm back home. I spent the day with my parents, going to lunch with them and grocery shopping with them. Much as I love them and have missed them, I really hope that the rest of my days don't follow that pattern this summer. I guess I need to find a job, and I hope that the job will keep my busy enough to forget the fact that I don't have any friends in this country. Sigh. Eight months doesn't seem like a long time, but I feel so amazingly out of the loop here. I went back to my old workplace just now to visit, which was a mistake. It only depressed me, and the two people who I was hoping to see weren't working at the time. The few coworkers I did recognize were vaguely friendly, but not very interested to see me, as I was not very interested to see them. I've been back in town for about a whole 24 hours, and I'm already lonely and sad that I left Canadia. Also very bored. Perhaps I'll watch a movie tonight, to distract me from the fact that I have absolutely nothing to do: no school, no work, no friends to call, no shopping to do (because of the lack of money to spend), no jobfinding to do until monday morning. Not even parents to hang out with; they've got a previous engagement with friends and food. Thank you for reading my long paragraph of boringness. Sorry I'm not more exciting right now, but perhaps my life will pick up again when I see people at church tomorrow, and start looking for a job on monday. Cross your fingers for me.

A Quick Update on the Trip

I'm not going to detail the past three days. I'm far too tired. Suffice it to say that each day has been excellent beyond belief, and I'm loving the whole idea of hostels, especially the four most recent ones we've stayed at. Each one has been so absolutely cool and breathtaking, with great locations in cities and in the middles of nowheres, and wow. Just great. Tonight we're staying about 50 feet from the ocean, and I'll leave you with a picture of our explorations on the beach this afternoon.
(please don't mock my giant calves. They're genetic and I can't do anything about them)

Two Weeks of Homelessness: Day 4

Our day did not start well. In fact, it started pretty badly. Not only was it raining when we woke up, but it was raining on the bag of my clothes that was sitting on the roof of my car where my bike should have been. Apparently it's not a good idea to park your car overnight in the area of town where our hostel was located. Sigh. Not only was the bike stolen, but one of the side windows of the car was smashed in and all of our stuff rifled through. It seems that they got away with my bike (minus the front wheel) and my Gamecube. They left the car, with all of its confusing mess of stuff useless to thief-type people, for us to continue our trip with. Lucky!

Our day seemed doomed as we sucked up our loss and tried to find our way to the next place we were supposed to go, but became sadly lost and Very Grumpy in the rain. We magically found our way to the ferry, though, and our day became pretty dang good from there on out. The ferry ride was excellent, although rather cold and windy. We saw two (two!) bald eagles, and a group (herd?) of seals swimming about in the water, as well as other fun stuff like kayaks and sweet little cottages on islands. I will not show pictures of the car, since I didn't take any, but I'll show you some happy pictures of what we saw today and where we are now.

Our hostel tonight is way cool. It smells good, and has fun people, and fun artwork, and fun everything. We look forward to our stay here being happy and non-car-breaky-into. Cross your fingers.

Two Weeks of Homelessness: Day 3

I forgot to mention this earlier, but for the next little while (I believe till a week from today?), this site will be more of a travelogue than my normal blogginess. Just so you all know.

Today's drive was lovely. We went through the mountains for like forever, and we saw numberless lakes and trees and snow-capped peaks and all that great stuff. We also saw numberless signs warning of elk and deer and moose and elephants and what have you, but the only wildlife we saw was maybe like three deer and a couple of woodchuck things. The drive, though lovely, was very long, ending up being about 13 hours when you include the rush hour traffic in the city of our destination. We are both pretty tired, after each driving more than six hours through curvy mountainy rubber-neckingly beautiful terrain.

Our hostel tonight leaves something to be desired, and that "something" is managers with a proper grasp on the English language, and rooms that don't smell like old chinese food. I hate to be all ethnocentric, it's just that those two things have been trying for us. It took a long time for the guy to find our reservation when we were already tired and grumpy coming from 12 hours of mountain driving and one hour of rush hour traffic, and being that we were still kind of woozy from the drive and the vertigo of finally not being flying down the highway, the smell caught our grumpy selves off guard. Fortunately, we're only here for one night, and the place we're staying at tomorrow looks to be coolness surpassed only by Disneyland itself. Hopefully it lives up to the pictures and description on the website.

Tomorrow should be a good day, once we get out of the hostel and into the city to look around. We've got a relaxing, enjoyable day planned, which will be the first of several stops that we expect to be great.

Update: we seem to have found the source of the smell. It appears to be coming from the kitchen, where we found a bowl of clam shells in water, and what we believe to be the body of an ill-fated crustacean. These items were left on the table despite signs in the kitchen which direct you to wash and deal with your dishes when you're done with them.

Two Weeks of Homelessness: Day 2

Day one was alright. We drove up to Parts Moreknown, partially to give us a nice, easy start to the trip, and partially to regain a couple of books I had lent out last semester. The trip was fairly uneventful, and we spent some time walking around the cute river area before heading to the home of a friend where we stayed the night. It was a pretty laid-back night, just talking and letting my sister get to know my friends a little bit.

Day two was a little more strenuous. We snuck out the house around seven in the morning, and drove hard for a solid 7.5 hours, stopping only to purchase gas and to take pictures of us at the sign announcing the new province. Oh yeah, and that other stop, where there was this little town that had a whole bunch of dinosaurs. We took a lot of pictures there, too. We got to our destination for the night around 2 in the afternoon, a city bigger than I've been in for a long time. We got a little bit lost downtown (well, not lost, we just missed the street we wanted to turn on, and had to backtrack), and had a close call involving a commuter train (more like a blonde moment. Not dangerous, Mom). We're now in the hostel, after having napped for a couple of hours, and walked around downtown for an hour or so. We're going to try and get showered up and then find dinner at one of the many varied restaurants around here, and get to bed kind of early- tomorrow's drive is a good 11-12 hours. Ugh. Hope everyone is well, and so far we haven't killed each other. Fingers crossed.

No more greasy Denny's food for awhile, please

My sister is here! Her planes didn't crash or anything, and she didn't get barred from the country by the customs people, and she was even in a good enough mood after a day of travel to go to Denny's with some of my friends when she got here. We ate greasy food, chocolate milkshake, and pancakes as she and my friends unconciously tried to one-up each other by mentioning various inside jokes. All in all, I won, because I knew all of the inside jokes. Good times, and more fun will happen tomorrow!