Is this on? I mean, I can break through walls, I just can't... can't get this on. *

I absolutely love my brother-in-law.

Of course, it's easy to love someone who loves you back. So if you will indulge me, I'm going to just go off on him. Please understand that while I love writing, I'm horrible with writing about my life and about people in my life. Reality has never been my best subject. If I can't exaggerate or insert half truths or all out lies I lack in my ability to express myself. I don't know what it is, but it is. So this may not be well written, I may not be able to describe how I really feel, but just know that I have an overwhelming gratitude for him.

My brother-in-law is one of the few people who can bring me to tears, not in a bad way, but more because of my appreciation for him, because he never ceases to amaze me with how much he cares about me. Sometimes I think it's easy for me to forget that people care about me, even my family, and they have to care about me (not really, but I'm super glad that they do).

He gets angry when someone hurts me, he'll go through and edit a book he wants me to read, he calls me up to invite me to dinner, he'll mow my lawn without me asking, or risk life and limb to spray wasp killer into a hole in the ground. He's thrown in compliments here and there and helps to build me up, especially when I am having a hard time. He bought me a book on writing and a penguin (I love penguins) pillow pet (both gifts made me almost cry...okay, one of them really did, but in my defense I had had a really stressful day*). He loves my family - but of course, who couldn't love my family? And seems to go above and beyond (see below). He's just plain thoughtful folks...there, I said it, the cat's out of the bag, my BIL is thoughtful.

And that doesn't make him any less of a man.

All of that makes it okay that his life's goal seems to be to make me uncomfortable with winks and the kissy faces, but then I see him do the same thing to his brother and I know that I am really family and that makes me feel really special*. Besides, it makes it really difficult for anyone or anything to really make me uncomfortable.

It's like he has prepared me for the real world in some strange and twisted way.

I'm so grateful for him and I'm glad he knew what was best for him and married my beautiful sister and joined our family. I don't know what my life would be like without him and his little clan.

Run home, Jack!*

This week at kickball I actually made it around all the bases...twice!

It makes up for the fact that my very first kick was my worst ever. I wanted to kick it in a straight line, right down the middle, but what I got was the ball hitting the top right of my foot and going to the beefcake who was on first. (Who's on first?)*

So I started the game not too sure of myself. Then everyone on my team started to get really good kicks and I was thinking, "Yeah, um, no pressure or anything." So I went up to kick, the ball came rolling towards me. Now, there are orange lines on the ground indicating the kick zone, you can kick if the ball doesn't come between those lines, but if you don't it's a ball. So the first one comes to the right and it is not between the orange lines, it's close though, it's kissing the orange line, but not in the orange line. I look at the ref, the ref looks at me and he calls a strike and I smiled and was like, "From where you're standing, come over here and you would have seen it was out." He just smiled and I determined that no matter what, I would kick the next one.

And I did. I made it to first, then the person kicking after me got it so I ran to 2nd, then with my team yelling to keep going, I went for 3rd, where I stayed for a little while but then I got to go for the orange home plate. I can't say I had gotten to do that before so I was pretty excited.

After kickball I went to Byrd park to play some frisbee. I was kind of tired and while it had cooled off greatly, it was still humid. I ran down the field once and my arms were covered in sweat, no bueno.

Around 9:30 or so three dudes on motorcycles show up and start parking their bikes. I started to joke around that the motorcycle gang wanted to join our game, but they didn't, rather they seemed to multiply and before we knew it there were about 20-25 people headed towards the little baseball diamond next to the field where we play. Guess what they were playing??

Kickball.

Apparently kickball is more popular than I realized, even motorcycle gangs play...they should put that on the shirts. Anyway, so we keep playing, not really paying attention to the giant kickball game taking place next door. When we stopped playing we were all hanging around the bench drinking water and talking and I couldn't help but look at the kickballers, there was no light on that field (cause only authorized Little league baseball teams are supposed to play there) so they were borrowing the tennis court lights, like we do. This gave them a faraway look, made it easier to forget that they were there. I say something about it to one of the guys, Ryan, and he was confused for a bit and I said, "You see them don't you?" and suddenly I felt like I was in Field of Dreams. Ryan picks up on this right away and we start making Field of Dreams references. I called out (but not really cause I didn't want them to hear me) if there was a doctor, and then I pointed to one of the girls, "she's choking on a hot dog". It was fun, I love pretending I'm in a movie.

Then I looked out at the kickballers, cupped my hand to my mouth and said, "Run home, Jack!" and Ryan said, "No, no, no! They've got it backwards!"

"He's stealing second!" *bang*

Oops, short circuited on the movie madness.

Out! Back to the sixties! Back! There's no place for you here in the future! Get back while you still can! *

When I see something I like, I steal it. This comes from Meggan over at Roughin' It In Alaska. You should check her out, she's pretty cool.

So let's check out my booty (and by 'booty' I mean as in 'argh!' not junk in the trunk)

Things I am

...funny (I hope, I hope, I hope)

...procrastinator

...creative (aka pathological liar)

...hard on myself

Things I am not

...musically gifted

...confrontational

...motivated (at least not this week)

...sure

Things I love

...my family!

...writing

...my religion

...frisbee

Things I do not love

...sweating

...hitting a pothole

...when something at the house breaks

...cleaning my bathroom

Things I like to eat

...peanut butter ripple ice cream

...chicken strips

...buttermilk biscuits

...turkey sandwiches

Things I do not like to eat

...everything else...

...seafood

...veggies

...anything with a funky texture

Things I have

...a job

...good friends

...a house

...a blog

Things I still want

...to be debt free

...to be a published writer

...a boyfriend

...a more engaging job

Things I want to do tomorrow

...get to 5 o'clock

...fix my oven handle

...be productive

...I don't know, something amazing I guess*

Things I want to do in a year

...lose 20 lbs

...get some courage and send in my writing

...take steps towards a "career"

...continue to grow and be a better person

Things I wished for and received

...peace of mind (it will be a constant battle though)

...For things to work out for the best (sorry I'm being vague)

...To not have a lot to do this week (at work)

...to know the right thing to do

Things I keep wishing for

...a magical source of money

...a boyfriend (a rich one?)

...courage

...the perfect job to just show itself to me

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last*

I'm done, I'm done, I'm done!

I have to be honest here, I had a hundred pages left when I stopped reading on Thursday. I thought I could read and watch Harry Potter 7.1 at the same time, but I couldn't, I realized I wasn't actually paying attention to either. So I watched the movie and then we went to the theater. I have since finished it completely though, I went back further than 100 pages too because I felt like I had rushed it. But the point is, I'm done. I feel okay not finishing the last 100 pages beforehand because that's a lot of Potter in a short amount of time.

Because I went to the midnight showing, I took Friday off. I had an eye doctor appointment for 11:15 because I figured that would be late enough in the day that I could get some stuff done and then get over there...I slept in until 11:30, no beuno. So I called the eye doctor and told them I got held up (no way was I admitting that I just woke up). So they rescheduled me for 1 p.m.

I get to the doctor, update some info and then...I wait. Finally around 1:30 or 1:45 they have me take my eyes out and take me to do all the little test; the green field with the white house that auto adjusts, the puff of air, and the peripheral vision test. For the last one (for people who don't get their eyes checked often and do not know) they put a patch over one eye, have you put your chin on the little chin thingy, and then you stare at an orange light and click a mouse every time you see a white light blink in your peripheral. I knew it wasn't going well because I barely clicked the mouse and I remembered clicking it a lot more last time I took the test. We switch eyes and the same thing. All I could think was, "There's something seriously wrong with my eyes." Okay, so really I thought, "I'm dying....I'm dying." Because eyes and life force are so deeply connected, it's why there are no blind people...

So we finish and the lady is quiet for a moment and then she says, "Did you know that the lights will pop up all over?" I, not liking the idea of having failed a test just shrugged my shoulders and tried to act as though I didn't, but part of me didn't really understand what she was saying then. Give it to me straight, Doc, if I failed, I failed, let's not make excuses. Then she tells me that this test tests for 12 different things, one of which is glaucoma. Apparently 40 lights will appear and I hit the mouse 13 or 14 times...

Then she looks at the results from last time and says that I got 100%, so we'll do the test again after I see the doctor. Then she holds out the test results for me to see...which I can't because I took my eyes out and am legally blind. So I lean in close to try to make something of the results and though I don't see anything (even inches from my nose) I say, "Oh, okay." This must have given me away and she checked my prescription and it was her turn to say, "oh, okay." So I go to sit in the waiting room, blind as a bat, and she talks to the other woman in the office who reminds her that she needs to use a lens. So it's back to the test and there's a little device that pops up this time where she places a lens with my prescription. The patch is put back on my eye and I lean in for the test again, one eye, the next, all done. 100%. I went back to my seat in the waiting area with the feeling that I narrowly escaped glaucoma.

The eye doctor in total took about 1.5 hours...seriously? Once I got my new eyes I went into the Wal-Mart to pick up a few items. As I was walking down an aisle I overheard a man talking to his wife on the phone and he said, "This is Wal-mart honey, there is no one to ask."

...and that pretty much summed up my Friday afternoon.

Conversation in the Park

Last night we played some Frisbee at Byrd part. There is this homeless guy who rides his bike up sometimes and watches us play. Last night he showed up and we were finishing and some of us were just throwing the Frisbee back and forth. He called out to one of the guys to throw the Frisbee to him, so the guy did. Then the homeless guy threw the Frisbee back and I have to admit, I was very surprised by how well he threw! It was perfect! Now I get why he comes to watch us, this guy must have played before. Anyway, more and more people started to leave so we stopped throwing the Frisbee. I walked over to the bench to get my stuff and say goodbye to the few remaining people and then the homeless guy calls out and this conversation followed:

Homeless Guy: Cheat-toes and milk!
No one says anything
Homeless Guy: Cheat-toes and milk, some people say that's a funny combination.
Me: Well...they're both dairy, kinda, right?
Homeless Guy: That's right. (something-something) Scary and mean, (something-something) God and Jesus.
Me: What was that?
Homeless Guy: Sometimes God and Jesus can be that way, scary and mean.
Me: Oh, like Cheetos and Milk?
Homeless Guy: Exactly.

...I'm still not really sure what that was about, but I feel like he understood.

This is death con 5!*

They say you can't...

They say you can't drink a gallon of milk all at once.

They say you can't swallow a teaspoon of cinnamon.

They say you can't move your leg in a counter clockwise circle and draw a '6' with you hand at the same time

They say you can't read the last three Harry Potter Books in 8 days...

...

...
...

They may be right.


I have completed the fourth and am into the fifth. I'm trying to read at lightening speeds but I am just not a speed reader, I find that I want to ensure I am picturing the descriptions just right and I keep thinking, "Blast it J.K.! Don't you know I'm up against the clock!?"

Meanwhile, I am having really weird wizardry dreams, like finding bogarts in the shadowy places of my house...

In other related news, I have the seventh (the first part one) movie at my house via Netflix so that I have it ready to watch before I see the movie on Thursday at midnight (which means, I will probably watch it after work on Thursday afternoon).

Looky, Looky, I got Hooky.*

January - 4

February -3

March - 4

April -5

May - 4

June - 3

Just three this month...it was rough.

Everlost by Neal Shusterman - I bought Everlost for a couple of reasons. The first being, the literary agent that I am going to send my stuff to had this author listed on their website as books that they helped to get published. I liked his first book, Unwind so I thought I would give it a shot. Also, one day I forgot Harry Potter, when you are trying to read 50 books in a year you can't waste a perfectly good lunch hour not reading, so I went and bought this.

Neal Shusterman has a thing for car crashes on the highway (Unwind had a pretty nasty one too). I really liked this book, the premise is kind of, "what happens to people who are heading towards the light at the end of the tunnel but get knocked off course?" They end up in Everlost, living in a world that is kind of an overlap of the living world. Not that Unwind was poorly written, because it wasn't, but you can see a major improvement in Shusterman's writing from that book to this one. I really enjoyed it, so much that...

Everwild by Neil Shusterman - I went and bought the second book. Did I forget to mention that Everlost is the first book of a trilogy? Not only did I buy the second one (and read through it in record time) but I went ahead and bought the third too because I knew that I would want to read it right away...however, I ran into my Harry Potter debacle so Everfound is on hold.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
I have finished the fourth! Only three more books in 13 days!