This is how to ruin a panoramic photograph of your beautiful Hawaiian surroundings: insert yourself as many times as possible so you look like a creepy ghost girl from a J-horror film…but with sunglasses. Click here for a bigger (worse) look.
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Dreams really do come true, and not the nightmarish kind. Also, sometimes geeking out to the point of stalker-dom helps. Remember when I totally freaked out because an episode of Henry’s Kitchen was being filmed next door?
Well, instead of my neighbor issuing a restraining order against me, the opposite happened. A friend recognized a guy in the video who turned out to live next door, told him about me being obsessed with the series, then told me that she told him and that he told her that I could come on a shoot, and then he left me a note on my door about the shoot, and then I called him (before accidentally texting a complete stranger beforehand, which was totes embarrassing) and then he told me about the shoot and then I went to visit and got to be in the background of the very final episode of Henry’s Kitchen.
And that is how I finally met my neighbor. Yes, it took a mutual friend, a stalkerish blog post, a viral video series, one note, a wrong text message and a phone call. All the while, I could have just knocked on his front door but then I would have nothing to blog about.
I am supposed to be doing homework right now but instead I am looking for whales in our ocean view and wondering if I have to go pee. So here is a time-lapse video that B shot of the sun setting a couple nights ago. The island you see in the distance is Molokai and that bright thing on the left is called a “sun.”
Also, yesterday we drove down the famous Hana highway where we saw two mongooses (mongeese?), pretty scenery, lots of banana bread stands and an incredible number of ridiculously annoying drivers who decided that the speed limit was 10 MPH (not on the hairpin turns) and that slowing down to look at EVERY SINGLE waterfall was a must-do on their bucket list. I hate them.
I’m home! And I already forgot almost everything I learned and I am already behind on my homework. But this semester is going to be GREAT. I am going to do GREAT work and LOTS of it and MAKE PROGRESS and BE SMARTER with my time and STOP PROCRASTINATING and probably CRY A LOT in the meantime.
The most upsetting thing about leaving the world-as-I-know-it for 10 days is missing out on some really big things. Like, really big things. Like, things I wished the rest of the world-as-I-know-it would wait until I got home to enjoy it. So I made myself a list to feel better.
I may be somewhere along the Oregon coast in chilly, damp weather but there’s wireless Internet everywhere which means that in the middle of intellectual things like talking about writing….stuff….I can still enjoy YouTube.
Meet my new heroine, Alana, who I foresee will have a great career as she grows up with appearances on Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of Beauty Pageants and eventually, Intervention.
PS. I think her special “juice” is actually just Mountain Dew. Right?
And here’s the obligatory “happy new year” blog post. Yay for 2012! Actually, whatever 2012. Am I the only one not really that excited about this coming year? I’m excited about certain things that are planned to happen in the coming months but with all the other annual stuff, the thought of facing another 365 days is a little tiring. 2011 was good. 2010 was good, too. So was 2009. So I expected 2012 will be equally good.
(As my luck has it, my house will explode and/or all my limbs will fall off as soon as this post goes up.)
I’m also catching up from the previous year by finally uploading my photos from our trip to Mammoth Lakes this past summer. Yes, summer. I’m so lazy. Here we are at the top of Mammoth mountain, over 11,000 feet above sea level! This was a couple days after I got altitude sickness and puked in a flower patch after a not-so-rigorous hike. Check out what happened on top of the mountain below!
Okay, so I saw a picture of my butt recently and it made me really sad. I mean, I think I look fine sideways but when it comes to a full frontal (or full butt view), my heart fills with despair knowing how much food I’ve consumed over the past holiday (starting with right after Thanksgiving because on the actual Thanksgiving day, I was hanging out in the ER while NOT eating food). Things I’ve eaten in the past week for Christmas include: pasta, pumpkin bread, cinnamon buns, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, chocolate, licorice, cookies, cookies, cookies, pickles, hamburgers and way too many burritos.
So here’s my first New Year’s Resolution: climb the Prospect Walk stairs (or whatever they’re called) in our neighborhood at least once a week. There are at least 3 sets of them up and down Franklin Hills, which means the neighborhood has given me my very own (free) gym.
They remind me of those super steep and narrow stairs they have in almost every temple in Japan. Maybe that’s how monks stay in shape. Are there monks in temples? I don’t know.
I’ve been noticing a strange thing happening this past year: the tenuous relationship between memory and friendship.
I like to think I have a relatively good memory, both short term and long term. I can recall birthdays, conversations, stories and people. I always forget where I left my keys but I can tell you which rides we rode and in what order on our last trip to Disneyland. I remember who said what, not in the sense of being anal and tracking down everything that happened in my life so far, but just a distinct understanding of what happened when. It’s not that hard. I thought most people, including friends, were like this. But there’s been a recent occurrence–or perhaps I’ve only recently come across it–where what I thought (and knew) what happened is not what other people remember. And it drives me insane.
Sometimes when I watch my favorite reality TV shows, I try to imagine what it would be like to be on television, faced with the same situation, talking to the same people and dealing with all the cameras. And then I remember, hey! I did that already!
I think most of you know, but B and I were on an episode of Secrets from a Stylist on HGTV earlier this year where we totally lucked out and had our guest room made over by the one and only Emily Henderson. I was too lazy and busy (lasy? buzy?) to write about it but since the year is wrapping up, I decided to get it all down.
B was hesitant at first to appear on camera but everything fell into place and you’d have to be insane to turn down a free offer to change over what used to be an eyesore room in the house. All we had to do was have shoot for two days and hand over our house key while we went out our daily lives. It was a little nerve-wracking to leave our house behind but the whole crew was awesome and nice that it was like having a bunch of friends hang out there while we…weren’t allowed to come home. Or something like that?
I can’t believe we’re wrapping up 2011. It’s been an eventful year but just because stuff happened doesn’t mean I dropped the ball when it came to my annual reading goal. This year, though, I was [un]lucky to have my first semester reading list, which meant taking on 20 “serious” books for writing, which meant almost a book a week between June through November, which meant that the quality of books I read went way up and that I’m surprised my eyesight hasn’t gotten bad from all the page turning.
Somehow I managed to still read 40 books (and hopefully one more: Cold Comfort Farm which I’m reading right now) over the past year. I’m proud because I honestly thought I wouldn’t make it and that I’d have to disembowel myself for dishonoring the family. Or something like that.
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