our almost-free vacation part one

I felt that just a little blurb in my last entry was not enough to describe just how freakin' awesome our trip to Hawaii was. The other bonus is that I no longer feel obligated to email pictures to everyone. So here's some of the highlights:

Our room was great but who cares? I had no desire to spend any amount of time there, but the view was pretty okay. Not exactly an "ocean view" but I spent some time spying on one of our vice presidents playing golf one morning. And a little tipsy, too.

We spent our first day there just hanging around the resort. Jonathan spent most of the day snorkeling and had a blast. It came at a heavy price however...he sunburned his back horribly. Meanwhile, I entertained myself at the beach and the pool and visited with some honu turtles that come to the beach every day.

We also went to the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park a couple of times. The first time it was during the day and all you could see was steam coming up out of the crater of Mount Kilauea. We went again on our last night (this time to Pu'u O'o, the heart of the current eruption) and got to see the lava flowing into the ocean. We were pretty far away, but the park had set up a telescope for people to get a better look. It looked like 2 or 3 waterfalls of red molten lava pouring into the ocean creating big billows of steam when the tide came in. I'm posting some video we took, but it doesn't to it justice. Truly a moving experience I will carry with me the rest of my life.

I'm not sure if you can hear the audio, but on the video I had just asked one of the park rangers the age of the ground we were standing on. He said it was about 18 years old...ten years younger than me. Crazy. There were tons of people there that night and most of them were standing there silently, watching new earth being created before their eyes.

Fishing was second on Jonathan's Must Do list, after the volcano. We went one day with a shop manager buddy of mine. No sooner had I gotten up out of the chair, Doug sat down and reeled in a 70" spearfish. Whatever that is. Anyway. Jonathan and I were only slightly jealous but got a big kick out of seeing him get so excited about it, smoking cigarettes and calling his dad. I took some video when they pulled it from the water and didn't expect to see it get beaten to death. I would post it, but I'm sure I would hear about it from my mother so I'll spare her the lecture.

Okay, that's enough for now. The laptop is getting too warm on my lap. More later!

better than Indiana Jones' comeback

You know, it took me a really long time to figure out what my blogger username/password combination was. That's what I get for going well over a year without writing in this thing. It was entertaining reading some of my old posts (and deleting some of the ones that should have never been brought into existence).

I think I should thank my old friend Stephanie from high school for inspiring me to try to write again. This afternoon was one of those days when I tooled around on YouTube, read the newspaper from my hometown, and checked out who died recently on Wikipedia. I found her blogger page and figured I should try once again to login myself.

Yes, I have attempted to break into my page on several occasions, to no avail.

I can't believe that I haven't written anything in here since February of last year. The real tragedy here is that my profile and whatnot has changed little. I added a couple of books as my favorites and deleted "exercising" from my long list of supercool hobbies (which was a lie, anyway).

Things aren't all that much different from the last time I wrote, though. Fasten your seatbelts and stow your traytables, here comes a few highlights from the last 16 months:

1. Most of that funky green carpet is gone. Jonathan did an incredible job of laying hardwood floor in the living room, dining room, and hall. I like it when the cat gets scared and starts to spin out on it when he's running.

2. Speaking of mangy creatures in my house (no, not my husband...oh you saw that one coming did ya? My many fans are so smart...) yes, we still have the cat despite the many homocidal temptations we've had. His favorite pastimes still include chewing shoelaces and plastic bags and quickly puking them up. His new thing is sharpening his claws on our mattress while we sleep. Not cool. But we still love that stupid thing.

3. I probably wrecked my car at least twice since I last wrote. So now I have a new one. Love it. Not the payments. My employees make fun of me because I am not entirely sure how many collisions I have been in. Eight or nine? Maybe?

4. Went to Cancun last year for vacation. Went to Hawaii this year. Now before you start thinking we are big high rollers, know that we went to Hawaii on my company's dime. Sweet. Turns out I'm a pretty decent manager and I won a spot on my company's yearly incentive trip. Seeing Kilouea erupting into the ocean at night was truly indescribable. The big island is half volcano, half lush green jungle sprinkled with gorgeous waterfalls.

Everything else is pretty much the same. I've gotten hooked on The Sopranos, so I watch a little less Star Trek (see? I can be cool.) I still love Vietnamese food, but I also eat at the Waffle House twice a week. Work is still work, but I'm better and a little more confident/competent at my job so my stress levels are noticably lower. So now perhaps I can stop in every once in awhile and keep my family and friends updated. And hopefully not ramble on and on about work.

Ooooo...forgot to mention I cut my finger in half right after Christmas. Oh yeah. Combine holiday stress with a dull exacto blade and you will spend half a day in the emergency room. Good times.

extreme makeover: blogger edition

Unless you are one of my die-hard fans that has been around since I got fired from myspace and stumbled into the blogger community, you may not know that I have changed the look of my page...once again. I succumbed to the mounting peer pressure from blogger.com and updated my account to have all the new crap on it. Personally, I was happy with the way the site was set up (aside from being suddenly unable to post pictures) but quite frankly, I was getting tired of being bothered about it. So I switched. I was really hoping for some new templates so I could alter the layout of my page whenever the mood struck me, but no dice.

It's kinda like going from BETA to VHS...not as thrilling as one might think.

Now that I think about it, I've enjoyed shaking up the fung shui since I was a kid. Just about the only time I'd really give my bedroom a good cleaning was whenever I'd rearrange the furniture. This semi-annual event usually took up the better part of a Saturday and gave me a strange sort of high that lasted for a couple of days. I would wake up the morning after and be mildly confused for a few moments as I processed my new environment. Some kids did weed, others chugged beer, I got my jollies from moving furniture and scratching the crap out of the hardwood floors.

These days my furniture is much heavier, much more plentiful, and somewhat more color-coordinated (the olive green couches on the putt-putt green carpet being the exception). The day I moved the hide-a-bed-piece-a-junk into the next room is not one I wish to relive anytime soon.

Pushing my mouse around isn't quite as cumbersome as hauling around a heavy sofa, but I'll probably be just as frustrated once I start trying to tinker with the HTML codes while still using dialup. So expect to see this page change along with my mood.

Ha, good luck to ya.

tell me a story...

I remember my good friend Danielle in high school asking somebody that once in that cute little nasaly voice of hers. I don't recall who she asked or why, but it's one of those random memory flashes that makes me smile whenever it pops up. Once in awhile I ask someone to tell me a story and I am usually able to coerce a pretty good one out of them.

I have quite the vault of stories in my memory. There's one from my husband involving an iguana running through the gravy bowl one Thanksgiving, another involves a friend of mine's gross misuse of a nebulizer. A personal favorite from my father's unruly youth involves his execution of an entire chicken coop with his BB gun. Most recently, I acquired a humdinger of a story over a bowl of nachos, but I think I'll keep that one filed way in the back so I don't run across it too often. Too bloody. However, all these stories and the dozens of others I have heard have one thing in common.

None of them are my own.

Yes, I suppose I could go off and kill some innocent farm animals if I so desired. I could do some tequila shots and cause some trouble that I may or may not be able to remember after the fact. I'm in my twenties, pretty good looking when I put my mind to it, so I shouldn't have any problem going out into the world and doing something worthy of the ten o' clock news or dinner conversation, at the very least.

So why am I always the one asking for good life stories instead of sharing my own? Frankly, I have none. Or not many that will hold anyone's attention for very long. This has been one of those small and stupid problems I've been grappling with since childhood. Specifically, it reared it's ugly head sometime in my fifth or sixth grade English class.

Those damned personal narratives. Worse than the annual compare and contrast papers or the ever-popular report on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Never has an eleven-year-old stared so blankly at a sheet of wide-ruled paper, never has writer's block struck someone so young. Don't worry, I am keeping all this in perspective. Most kids wrote about their family trip to Orlando, minor bodily injury, or catching a big fish at Lake Malone. Man, I couldn't even come up with anything to compete with that. So I decided to put my creativity to work and just conjure up something believable. The one I recall most vividly is about how five-year-old Amanda used the process of elimination to figure out what crayons were. Over the years, I've discovered a few flaws in this fake autobiographical account:

1. I showed a great deal of promise as an artist from a very early age, a talent I most certainly inherited from my mother, who was an artist herself. No self-respecting parent in the 1980s would have denied their child a cheap box of Crayolas. It wasn't my purpose to make my mother look like an idiot in the story, I just wanted to get a passing grade and move on to the next form of literary torture.

2. The story took place on the school bus, on my way to my first day as a bona fide kindergartener. I don't really recall the events of that day, but I'm pretty sure my mom would have driven me to school that day (both of us probably emotional wrecks) instead of dumping me off on the bus. For the reason I would have been an emotional wreck, see #3.

3. I'm told that I was a rather "stress-prone" child (well I'll be danged) and "acted out" by refusing to eat, among other things. I would imagine little bitty Amanda, after being shoved onto that clunky bus bound for Olmstead School, might have undergone mild to moderate stress. It is unlikely that I would have tried to eat my crayons in a crude attempt to figure out what they were.

I wonder what grade I got on that. I hope that Mrs. Whatsherface at least gave me a little credit for creativity.

The point here is, I guess, is that I feel sort of dull. I know I can be entertaining when I want to, and have even been called "hysterical" by a handful of people I consider to be highly intelligent. Life, I am learning, is not all about just talking about your life, it's about living it. I'm just concerned that I'm doing too much working and whining and philosophizing and not enough living.

Oh, and blogging. I need to do more living and blogging. I'll make a note in my daily planner about that.

Bah humbug season is FINALLY over so I hope that I will be able to stop in here a bit more frequently than I have lately. But if it's still a bit more sporatic that you'd like, just know that I'm out there somewhere trying to live the life I've been given so I can assemble some jolly good stories for you to read. And they'll definitely be my own.

i'm not catholic, but whatever

Ah, 2007 is approaching. Time to watch all the Best of 2006 junk on TV and force down at least one black eyed pea on Monday for good luck (which is one pea too many in my opinion). Before one can start generating a list of to-dos that will probably not get to-done, I feel I should confess some things that weigh heavily on my soul. You know, start 2007 off fresh, free of guilt. So here goes:

Amanda's 2006 Top 5 Transgressions Against Mankind

So, yeah, Jonathan is out of town for a week or so. Doing recreational things back home like napping, refraining from bathing, and hunting that one giant buck he saw back around Thanksgiving. While I'm stuck here makin' the donuts as they say. My confession? I had mint doublestuff oreos marinated in milk for supper last night. That's stooping pretty low, even by my standards. Especially since we have that huge Christmas ham in the fridge in all its honeybaked goodness. Too lazy for the microwave, that's me.

You better be sitting down for this one, folks. Way worse than the confectionary sin. I seriously just watched High School Musical on the Disney Channel. And I...(gulp)...liked it. Yes it was all unrealistic and politically correct and had the overly happy song and dance at the end, but I just couldn't resist. I succumbed to the temptation of the cheese. And it was glorious. First it was The Sound of Music on Christmas night. Then the movie version of Annie. And now this. The shame is almost too much to bear.

My bedtime is about 10:30 these days. I'm really in no position to make fun of my mom and sister anymore. I crave sleep like my tragically-seasonal mint oreos. Mmmmm. Oreos. I feel another pang coming on...

I am now the proud owner of a bluetooth. No, no, not a blue tooth, a bluetooth. You know, one of those things people stick in their ear and proceed to walk through life like mindless zombies? I hate it when one of the living dead comes up to the repair window and I try to talk to them. Of course I get embarassed and feel like a dope when I notice their earpiece but hey, that guy has ABSOLUTELY NO FRIGGIN' CLUE that I exist. Quite frankly, he's probably shocked when he ends his call and realizes he's standing in a jewelry store and not the Starbucks next door. I vow to not be like them. I refuse to join the Borg collective. It's good for driving, but that's it. I won't walk around in public as if to say, "Look at me! I am wealthy enough to spend thirty bucks Best Buy!"

Well, I guess I thought that this day would never really come, but it did. The nonoffensive mounted black duck atop my mantel has been replaced by the buck Jonathan shot last fall. If I sit in my favorite chair to watch TV, the stupid thing is staring at me. It was supposed to be looking toward the front door (I assume to scare off religious kooks and the occassional girl scout) but no, it stares at me. So the other day I stuck a santa hat on him and proceeded to dramatically eat the deer jerky he so generously provided. Mmmmm...num num...want some? No? Okay, more for me. As if being shot and put permanently on display in our home wasn't humilation enough.

So that's pretty much the extent of my Transgressions Against Mankind for 2006. I'll just omit all the actual horrible things I did and said and participated in. All of the other miscellaneous sins I'll just have to take to the guy upstairs. And I won't need my bluetooth to get him to listen. ;)

Happy New Year!