Adios, amigos

Tomorrow my family and I take off on another "vacation" to Mexico, which will as always be one big realtive-fest. My grandmother is throwing my parents a 25th wedding anniversary party, and it will be a Very Big Deal, so up until that is over, I think it will be a very stressful time for me. Because naturally, if my mom is stressed, she expects me to help her out while my brother watches Mexican TV and eats candy like he's eight years old.

Looks like from here on out, I'll be travelling around like crazy.

Mexico dates: June 23 - July 16 or so
Moving in (Austin): July 18-20th-ish
DC/New York: July 22(ish) - August 1(ish)

And sometime after that, I hope to have many visitors in Austin, as it is the setting of this years' Real World and overall the best place in Texas to visit.

Try not to miss me too much when I'm gone, and feel free to e-mail me, since they actually have that intra-net thing at my relatives' house.

Happy Birthday Phil, Father's Day and Juneteenth

This will be a long post, so all of you who read this while at work, rejoice! It has little to do with me having something incredibly interesting to say and much to do with the fact that more has happened to me in the past four days than the rest of the month combined.

First things first: Thursday night, Laurie and I go out to Dave and Busters for a little gaming action. And win about forty bajillion tickets in the Quarterback game. For those of you need a little refresher (I know you specifically don't, because everyone knows the game Quaterback!), Quarterback is one of those games where you drop the coin in and a little pusher pushes it down to the next level and those push off the coins on the edge. The more coins you push over, the more tickets you get. For some unknown reason, this one specific coin pushing game is Laurie and I's (is that grammatically correct??) obsession at Dave and Buster's, and as soon as we saw that it was open, we jumped at it. After a few rounds, we noticed a Lurker hanging around admiring the trim on the surrounding games. The jig was up - we realized he was stalking our game. I guess he came on the wrong night. After a few more exciting coin-dropping rounds, The Lurker comes up to us and says, "Have you girls won anything tonight?" Glancing down at our bucket full of tickets, we said "uh... no." To which the Lurker had no response and sulked away. Sucker.

The next day, we went to a matinee of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is awesomely awesome. Not only is it an uber-fun movie, Brad Pitt's character went to Notre Dame!

Saturday, Chapter 2

Phililip and I headed to Austin to celebrate his 21st birthday, Real World style. Apparantly, the thing to do is to go bar-hopping, take your one free shot and get out. Well, the "everyone going out to celebrate Phil's birthday" turned out to be me and Philip going into bars while his friend Patrick waited outside. It was pretty nuts - people everywhere, the streets blocked off from traffic. Lots of fun, but I definitely won't be going out alone, ever. Sixth street, for those of you unfamiliar with the Austin scene, is about 4 long blocks just packed with bars. The bars on Fifth and Fourth Street are actually becoming more and more popular too, so soon it will be one giant downtown full of bars. And this is where I'll be going to law school :-)

Anyway, I would go into bars with Phil while his friend pretty much waited outside (I don't blame him, most places were packed). Not wanting Philip to drink alone, I usually bought myself a shot to do with him. Little did I know that is a much more expensive "favor" than I realized at first. Anyway, about six bars in, we reach Coyote Ugly, a shamless copy of the movie. We get there, and the girls are really not that cute and doing some sort of karate-dance thing on the bar. It's really not that busy, mostly big groups of women and two old men who very blatantly and shamelessly tried to look down my shirt about 10 times. Patrick insisted on going in and getting the special birthday shot, which was 20 bucks. This consisted of two women on the bar, one laying down with a shot of tequila between her boobs which Philip had to shoot by putting his mouth around the shot glass and tipping it back, like a Blowjob. The second woman was straddling the one laying down and dropped lime from her mouth into Philip's. The second part of the shot consisted of one of the bartenders taking a belt and spanking Philip, then lifting his shirt and ripping off the elastic band from his boxers and hanging it up around the bar. I could say that I wish I had a camera to capture the moment, but honestly, I was too shocked to even take a picture had I had a camera on me. After that, we went to one more bar, and I was out of cash for the night. We headed back and Philip soon passed out, probably more from the fact that he didn't sleep much the night before than the alcohol.

After a short trip to Thundercloud Subs on Sunday, we headed back to celebrate Father's Day with our respective parents. And Juneteenth. Philip had to share his birthday with both a national and local holiday. Juneteenth is the June 19th, 1864, when Union soldiers landed in Galveston to announce to Texas that the Civil War had ended and all slaves were to be set free. Now, it's mostly an excuse to eat spiked watermelon.

Finally, Monday, I went and saw Batman Begins, and my head exploded. I heart Batman.

We're the sneakiest sneaks that ever sneaked

Today, my best friend Laurie and I embarked on a shopping adventure. After hitting up the Galleria for some out-of-our-price-range shopping, we went to dinner at a Chili's nearby where we got FREE dessert since they screwed up her order. Afterwards, being the hooligans we are, we went searching for a retail store that was still open after the hour of 9pm. Finding no luck at the Sketchers outlet, we went to Ikea for some decorative baskets Laurie needed. After pulling into a nearly-empty parking lot, we decided to forgo the traditional "entrance" and go in through the exit. Ooooh. The baskets she needed were right by the checkouts, so we got her things and checked out around 9:30, a full half-hour after the store had closed. Those fools didn't even know we snuck in after closing time. We should be international spies. Really.

And thus concluded another crazy night in Houston.

Tae Bo - more like Tae No

Exercising in the summer in Houston is a problem for me. Two summers ago I joined a gym, which was fine, but they kept charging me after my summer was up - not a happy experience, and I'm not even going to be home all this summer. (For those of you who may remember from my previous blog, it was also a breeding ground for old men to stare while I used the leg muscle machines that look inappropriate). A few summers ago, I tried to go running at 8 am, before it got too hot. Needless to say, it's physically impossible to go out "before it's too hot", because even at 8, 7, or 5 am, it's still over 80 degrees with miserable humidity, rendering it impossible to exercise without feeling like a sweaty gym sock and/or passing out. Also, who gets up at 8 am?! The treadmill we have at home is fine, but a little old and boring. So, for fun, I decided to try out one of those Tae-Bo tapes (well, DVDs) that everyone keeps raving about. After all, Kt R likes it and my old RA Liz swore by it. So I pick up a DVD with a very sweaty Billy Blanks on the cover promising an effective cardio workout and all the other magic things Tae Bo promises to give you, such as the ability to fly or kill an attacker with a paper clip. I tried it out the other day, and good lord. I lasted fifteen minutes before the light headedness and passing out started to kick in. I'm hoping to build up, but for now, I hurt too much to move.

In other news, I finally went and saw Star Wars on Saturday. Our friends picked the theatre, and it ended up being on IMAX which was pretty cool, but unnecessarily expensive, in my opinon. The movie itself - well, just as Alex and Stork put it when I asked them how it was, "It was... evil." A little depressing, I suppose, but pretty entertaining. All I know is I'm looking forward to Batman Begins beause I love me some Christian Bale.

Joyful News!

Oh yes, it's joyful news indeed. The first and most important (in my opinion) piece of joyful news is that my favorite TV show currently on the air, Arrested Development, has been renewed for a third full season. In my opinion, Arrested Development is the best show on TV and highly underappreciated. So it makes me do my happy dance to hear that it's being continued. Thanks to Dooz for filling me in on info that I already knew, but had yet to share with you all.

Secondly, and important in the sense that I won't be homeless, is that I found an apartment to live in next year! After a rigorous two-day search around pretty much the entire Austin metropolitan area, I found a super sweet apartment complex in the Far West area that I lurrrrved. It's really spacious and completely remodeled and right by a ton of stuff to do. Wahoo! So, if you ever want to come visit Austin, you'll have a place to stay! And it isn't a cardboard box! There may not be any "furniture" per se, but there will be plenty o' floorspace ;-) So, stage one of me moving to Austin has been finalized, and I get to move in on July 14.

One thing I noticed in my trip to Austin is that every waiter I had, including the IHOP waiters were super friendly and nice. And I mean, it must be a huge struggle for IHOP waiters to be nice because let's face it, they're not expecting any huge tippers. Perhaps everyone is Houston is just crabby. I guess you would be too if it were 100 degrees outside with 100% humidity. Or maybe we're just bad tippers.

Summertime and it feels all right

Well, chilluns, I feel obligated to apologize that I haven't updated my blog in so long. I know many of you, especially now in the summer months that you most of you are working jobs that require little or no work, depend on meaningless things to pass the time such as blogs. And to you, I say... I'm sorry I let you down.

So, just as a sign of how much I let ya down, here's a list of things that have happened since I last updated:
1) Kentucky Derby
2) Senior week
3) Graduation
4) Trip to Disney

All those were well and good. Kentucky Derby was a ridiculous mess of people staying at Stevo's house and getting ridiculously drunk the day of the Derby. I think I may have seen one horse for less than a minute in the entire 6 hours I was there. I did, however, see EVERYONE I KNOW from Notre Dame. It's true. Senior week was exactly like you wish college could be all the time, scheduled drinking and seeing all your friends minus the classes. Graduation was a super busy and anticlimactic weekend. I literally hugged some friends after the ceremony and said, "Well... see ya... never." Trust me, it's way weirder being the graduate than the younger friend of the graduate. After that, it was off to Florida for my first trip ever to Disney World!* Again, lots of fun but so anti-climactic at the end. College has no closure, I've decided.

The day after I got back from Florida was my dad's birthday. I had nothing better to do, so I, with my own BARE HANDS made a cake and even made the frosting from scratch! I am awesome. And no, it didn't kill anyone.

For now, I am trying to stretch out about a week's worth of work into the whole summer. Because let's face it folks, having the summer off is a great deal and all, but after a while... you kinda get bored. Especially since most of your friends don't live in the city. My latest project is Clean Sweeping my room, TLC style. Except they get a whole team of experts to go through their junk for them, and pay for the redecorating of their room. I have my mom and an unwilling brother. Sweet.

Side note: I am highly recommending the movie Crash, out in theatres right now.

And finally my friends, I leave you with this - The identity of Deep Throat (now that can start its own slew of jokes) recently has been revealed. To anyone other than CNN - is this really a shock? And what has changed now that we know his identity?

G. Gordon Liddy thinks his actions were wrong and "morally incorrect". Thanks, G. Gordon Liddy. Did you think of that when you were in prison, or just now that he revealed himself?

*OK so technically I went to Epcot with the band for the Gator Bowl. But Epcot is NOT Disney World!