8:30 PM

All right. Here I am again. I know it's been almost a month. And this is painful to write, so I'm gonna make it quick. I've been trying out LiveJournal for the past month or so, given my blogging purposes have changed in the past year or so from what they were before. Right now, it seems that LJ's set-up is filling (no, nothing like filling, but at least making a few drops in?) a gap in my life right now. So I've decided to go with that for a while.

This is just past the six year anniversary of this blog...six years of archives. Wow. That IS something. And those will stay there for me, and I haven't given up on this blog. I intend to come back to it, though I'm not sure in exactly what sense right now.

For now, though, if you want to hear what's up in my life, try this URL:

http://skygawker.livejournal.com

Thank you, Blogger...I'd highly recommend your service, and I'm not done with you yet!

9:35 PM

To see a friend so happy is just about the nicest feeling ever.

And when they're happy because of something you did for them, and hoped they'd like? Well then.

*glows so brightly* Less than...oh, I think we've made five by now. <5. *just smiles*

3:41 PM

I know you were all waiting anxiously for this. *grin* Presenting the conclusion of my St. Louis trip! As written partially while I was there, and then the rest when I got back because there just wasn't time (well, "there just wasn't energy" is more accurate) to write it while I was there, though I very much wanted to do so because being with the Hobbits seems to make me want to post silly things in my blog and/or write them on dry erase boards every few minutes. *laughs* (You see why this thing isn't updated as much as it used to be?)

So here we go.

September 3

So now Megan and I are waiting for Aileen to finish her shower, having already taken ours, and then I believe we are going to the zoo. :) They have a baby elephant, we hear!

Yesterday we went to the Arch, and it was quite cool indeed. It was overcast when we first got there so our pictures weren't as spectacular, but by the time we got to the top and then outside again a few hours later (after waiting in lots of lines), the sky was a perfect blue with wisps of clouds to look perfect in photographs! Of which I took like nine million, 'cause did I mention the Arch is pretty impressive? I think it works particularly well as an inspiring monument.

While we waited in long lines for security and tickets, we played the alphabet game, where everyone has to come up with something starting with each letter, on the theme of -- yay! -- Kalamazoo College. Hee. (Hey, MEGAN picked "Yzerman" for Y? I was so gonna do that but then thought that wouldn't count! *laughs* I'm glad someone ELSE picked Stevie Y for the alphabet! Megan explained that he's part of K because that's where she learned about him. That made me happy. *grin*)

You also get to watch this very cheesy movie before you go up, which clearly has not been updated since the Arch was finished in the mid 60's, as evidenced by that 60's-style scary narration and dark dramatic score. *lol* And then you go up on a tram, or as we called them, pods. Because they're these little cars that are white and glowing and 4 feet fall with five squished seats in each of them. They were very 2001. And by that we mean the 1960s movie, not the actual year. ;p Amusing.

(Aileen is out of the shower now and just noted that my typing still is "a centipede tap dancing." Hehehe!)

So now I have another observatory to put on my list, yay! It was pretty cool. You very much feel the slope beneath your feet in that little narrow crowded viewing area. Not ideal for viewing, and yet, very much its own unique experience.

After that we went to get Imo's Pizza, which is St. Louis style pizza (like...a pizza cracker with sweet sauce!) and played the Guess the Person game for quite a long time; we were the only people in the restaurant (which was mostly a takeout place) and we were laughing pretty hard and I suspect making the staff wonder about us. (We got into some pretty deep philosophical conversations about the nature of existence. "Like, Puffy the Cat, or Garfield the Cat, or like the five eyed Loch Ness Kitty?") After that we went to Dairy Queen because that is like the Good Ol' Days when we had a DQ right in our back yard, and there we got into another big conversation, this time about Harry Potter, and we have determined that in Book 7, Voldemort is going to die (duh), and then either Snape or Harry. We generally agree that Snape just CAN'T be evil because that would be boring and dumb, and therefore if Harry doesn't die, it will be because Snape will jump in to save him. But we know Harry can't come through unscathed because that would be dumb and unfulfilling. He has to be scarred (again) somehow. ;) And that Slytherin remains dumb (no redeeming qualities! Why aren't they all expelled?) as does Quidditch, though Aileen says maybe the snitch could be worth only 50 points. I say 0-20, beyond that it's silly. ;)

Random addition: Aileen says our next trips will go like this: Chicago, New York, Toronto (intermediate step: out of the country but not?), foreign country that is not Canada. Oh, we just determined -- NEW ZEALAND. Hobbit trip indeed!

--

Okay, there ends what I wrote during the trip. Picking up where I left off!

So then we watched Animaniacs, which I got on DVD on my birthday, which was fun. Better than the VHS tapes I had at K with me, though we did miss the 1994 commercials. *lol* We did that the next night too.

The next day, Sunday, we did indeed go to the zoo, where we did meet the baby elephant! Awwww! It was like a grown-up elephant but...little. Miniature elephant! So cute! I have pictures, but it's hard to see her because she was hiding under her mommy.

I also made friends with a polar bear! That polar bear rocked my socks. I don't know that I have one favorite animal specifically, but this particular bear certainly did its best to advocate for polar bears to have high ranking, so now they do on my list of awesome animals. She (he? I don't know, sorry, Mr. or Ms. Bear) kept peeking out of the water and playing with a ball and generally performing for the crowd, and I could definitely feel her pain at being a POLAR bear in Missouri, because it was hot. I would be some kind of cold weather animal if I were an animal, anyway. :p I also lately have been concerned about polar bears because of global warming; having your safe place MELT FROM UNDER YOU would be a really horrible thing to have happen.

And then the cats! Of course the cats. Clearly a forerunner on my list of favorites. "Oh, there's one more we didn't see!" I would say and drag Aileen and Megan over to see another pen where there might be some big cat hiding. The leopards were soooo pretty. One, the regular golden-orange one, was right out lying out and showing off her pretty spots; the snow leopards were hiding in their den (again -- empathy for cold weather animals! Missouri = too far south for this Michiganian!) but I still managed to get pictures. And the tiger? Have to have a soft spot in my heart for tigers; I'm quite sure they're all as wise as Hobbes. As someone who's got way too much of Calvin in her, I gotta respect that. ;)

Megan and I got Dippin' Dots, too. We tried to make Aileen accept some from us, but she refused. We determined she was nuts. Oh well, we already knew that...but this may be a dangerous kind of nuthood, not to want Dippin' Dots. :p

We went to the Herpetarium and hoped for some glass to disappear. Alas. It remained intact. Oh well, we've proven our magic in other ways. :p

So yeah. That was that day...and then we made awesome tacos for dinner and we were quite proud of ourselves. We rock so much. And then we watched more Animaniacs.

The next day, Monday and Labor Day, we went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens so that we could see the Japanese Festival which just happened to be going on that weekend. *laughs* I have been to SO many Japanese festivals, but I've never been to one with Aileen and Megan, so that made this extra fun. It's cool to be able to show them a bit of where I studied! I would certainly enjoy going to German and Mexican festivals with them, anyway.

One annoying thing was that I apparently put my wrist band on too tightly for the liking of the man who was checking them at the entrance, so I had to stand there while he held my wrist and picked it off and then put it on waaaay too loose for my liking. What the heck was that for? My wrist band was just fine, thanks. And I'm also just a little weird about strangers holding on to my limbs, so it was unnerving. And then Aileen in particular had fun analyzing the incident. Weird.

Aileen was set on seeing the sumo wrestling (they had two former real sumo wrestlers, Americans from Hawaii, there to demonstrate. Umm...I think I saw enough of very large guys knocking each other over at the Big Official Sumokai thingy in Nagoya last summer, but oh well, spread the excitement, right? *laughs*)

Slight digression: I noted at this festival that I sometimes may come across less nicely than I mean to. I don't mean at all to sound like I know a lot or to hold it against people for just trying to be nice and sharing their knowledge with me. But I think I may have sounded a bit snappy when one guy at St. Louis's sister city booth said to me (after I had asked where in Japan it was), that it was on "the big island, which is called Honshu" and I (knowing quite well what Honshu was, but not meaning to demonstrate that fact so much as to get my question answered more precisely because I really was curious) said, "Yes...which prefecture?" And another guy jumped in and said, "Nagano. That's where the Olympics were held a few years back!" quite enthusiastically, as though just happy to be sharing the knowledge. Which is great. Share that trivia! So I definitely didn't mean to sound as "Yeah. I know" as I did when I said, "Yeah, I know." *lol and sweatdrops a little* And of course, they may not have even thought this at all, but in any case, it just struck me that I may do this more than I mean to and maybe I should try to be aware of that and avoid doing so. (Or, you know, at least INTEND to be a know-it-all and not just do it accidentally. *lol* But hey, I AM both a Japanese student AND an Olympics otaku -- yes, I know the Olympics were in Nagano in 1998; I still have the Opening Ceremonies and the women's hockey gold medal game, in which we beat Canada, on tape. ;)

Boring self-reflection over. Continuing with story. :)

So yeah. The Japanese festival was fun. We didn't get there in time to get tickets to the tea ceremony, but we did get to go and sit on a little peninsula in the Japanese garden, which was pretty. During which I got the first of my collected quotes (written on the Botanical Gardens receipt):

On discussing Sesame Street: "Bert's not such a bad guy; he's just got...the same kind of problems I do." ~Megan

(Haha, and Megan has a bottle cap collection too. We were concerned because one of them had heard a rumor that they're going to kill off Bert to help kids deal with loss. We all agree this is most unnerving.)

After the gardens, we made pasta at Aileen's for dinner (two nights in a row of successfully feeding ourselves!) and then plotted the deaths of our husbands. Despite the fact that none of us even have boyfriends at this time. ;p We decided we have to do this so we can all live together in the future again. Aileen noted wisely that maybe it would be easier just not to GET married in the first place (she is currently thinking of becoming a nun, having more trouble with the scary/weird boys who are always tailing her), but Megan says this won't do because SOMEONE will probably want to get married someday, and then it just wouldn't be fair if only ONE person has to be guilty of murder, so she says we all have to get married and then kill the husbands. Oh bother. This has become messy. ;) But it's all right -- we've set it up so that we're going to make them walk the plank (as suggested by an Outburst card themed "Methods of Execution") and then, as quoted on my receipt that stood in for the whiteboard, "They'll think it was pirates!" "Because pirates are a major source of crime these days." (Well...Internet pirates, I guess!) Or Orlando Bloom, who clearly has motive to murder our husbands ove the Frodo vs. Legolas battle of 2002 on Megan's and my whiteboard. :p So we'll just have to steal his credit card to charge the pirate ship. Brilliant. We shall never be detected.

("Psst...Jessie. You just wrote it in your public blog."
"Ack! Foiled again! Oh well then....")

Also: "Excuse me, where could I procure some great white sharks?" Asked just like that.

So there was much laughter, but also kind of a sense of sadness because having a joke like that just goes to show that the college days are done. Which is sad. I do miss having awesome roommates. It makes me sad, not having someone to just...go up and talk to. (Um, my family doesn't count.) Why must all but one of my closest friends now live in other states? Siiiiigh. And I know, I know, there are all those people I'll meet one day whom I haven't yet met, but...well, I already know some pretty wonderful people. These people I'll be meeting in the future have some pretty high standards to meet. :p

Okay, I'm done now. I'm still pretty stressed and such with the job situation and such, but...I'll save that for another entry. This was enough for one day. Yay for the Hobbits!

10:32 PM

I'm home from St. Louis! I drove 567.0 miles today. Go me. Including scary traffic in Chicago.

I'm now sick at my stomach with stress over the current crazy situation that is my lifes, so...more later. Sleeping is good.

I do have quite the adventures to tell you about as soon as I get a chance.

12:12 PM

Muahaha! I'm leeching wireless Internet off of the person in the apartment below Aileen's! Hah! He woke us up with loud music this morning, so I think this is a fair trade. :p So here is the part of my journal that I wrote yesterday! ^_^

September 2, 2006

I am now in Aileen's apartment. :) I left home at 8:11 am EDT yesterday, reached Megan's in Chicago by about 1 pm, at which time she wasn't quite ready (because I got through Indiana fast, heh) so we had maybe 45 minutes there, and then we got to St. Louis by 6:40 by my watch, which is still set in Eastern time. What's up with this Central time silliness? *lol* Aileen and Megan are adjusted to their Chicago/St. Louis time, so perhaps it should not be surprising that I fell asleep while they were still talking. *lol* I tried to keep my eyes open but I just couldn't! But I think that was due more the nature of this past week than to the time zone. ;)

Oh, and I would just like to note that I drove ALL the way. That is the longest I have ever driven in my life. Go me! Megan was going to help out and drive, but it turned out I didn't need it. (I don't enjoy driving, but I didn't want to make her. She has driven me around quite a lot over the years. ;) And now I know I CAN drive a long trip in one day, if I have to! Part of it being by myself even, with me having to pay tolls (haha, I like pitching the money into the baskets because I can't reach, that's amusing). I also almost lost my voice from singing all the way across Michigan, so I took a break and listened to NPR, and then sang more. And then I picked up Megan, and we were going to listen to music, but it turned out that we instead talked the whole way down I-55 across the prairie grasses of Illinois. :-p About everything ranging from weird people (you know everyone wants a staff like mine =p [see current Skygawker.com layout]) to Pluto's demotion to Finding Neverland to spirituality to weddings to stupid rudeness and crudeness of people in the world. (And I must say, it's really really nice to have a friend who is sensitive to things similar to the way I am, and will rant about them with me. I feel soothed. ^__^)

But yeah. So I was driving, good for me. But I also know now that I definitely prefer being a navigator. I like being able to look out at a new place and absorb it and all the cool new sights! And let me tell you, St. Louis is a really cool city to drive into--the Arch appears first around a hill, and then you come around the hill and THERE it is! So cool! And when we were driving in, there were sunbeams falling down from the clouds above, and it just looked SO amazing. Major props to St. Louis for being a very impressive city to drive into.

Slightly less props for the weird road trick on I-55/I-64 where it says I-64 "All Lanes" and then the road splits into two weird up-and-down bridges, and we saw I-64 signs on the OTHER one and thought we were going the wrong way, only to see that the two bridges just twist apart and then come back together. Um...right. That was weird. Aileen had warned us that if we thought we were going the wrong way, we weren't. *lol*

And then over the Mississippi, and then--Missouri! My second new state in a week! How cool! ^__^

And we saw the Savvis Center, where the St. Louis Blues play (hee...we beat them a lot) and a big cool train station...and then a St. Louis Bread Company, which is what they call Panera here. Hahaha. I knew that from seeing a Panera application before. We made it to Aileen's cute and big apartment (well, big compared to Megan's Chicago-is-expensive studio apartment!) and then we went back to St. Louis Bread Company for dinner. Yay. They gave me free chips because I asked for bread and they got it wrong. So I got both.

And then Aileen and Megan had a little mini birthday party for me!!! *^__^*!! Megan got me an awesome Chicago World's Fair poster and a really cool skyline-with-clouds card, and Aileen made me a cake! Squeee! I love my friends! *^__^* I have missed them!

And we went over just about all the old jokes ("Cowboy Racoon Dog Foo'" "Does he give live birth?" "Is it Pierre?" et cetera, et cetera! =p) and all the old Kzoo characters and...and...we all miss being at K. Awww.

And now Aileen and Megan seem ready to go, so I think we're going to the Arch now! Aileen says you can go up in it, and it's nice weather today! Squeee! A new observatory for my list! I'm excited. So I should stop keeping them waiting now. More later! ^_^ (Well, for you, it'll all be at once, won't it? ;)

10:54 PM

I drive to St. Louis tomorrow! I've never driven a long distance by myself, so I hope things go well. Tomorrow between about 7:30 and 12:30 or so that's what I'll be doing. Then I pick Megan up in Chicago, and we continue to Aileen's in St. Louis. Wish me luck! I'll see you when I get back.

Oh, and the job stuff? Still very stressful and unresolved. I have my fingers crossed. Life in general is pretty stressful right now. That's all for now about that. I hope this trip will be a good distraction, though of course I'll be telling Megan and Aileen all about the situation. ;)

Back Tuesday! (Or maybe Monday night but I sure hope not, the plan was Tuesday and I don't want to have to change it....)

10:53 PM

Okay! Here I am with more! I didn't get a lot of sleep last night (heh, look at that timestamp on my last entry ^_~) nor the night before, but I want to write about this now. Who knows if I'll get a chance later, anyway? I mean, tomorrow is my last day at the antique mall, then I have to go over the packet for the ESL tutor job in the evening (when I'm always exhausted), and then orientation 9-4 on Wednesday and Thursday, and then Wednesday night I pack and Thursday night around 6 or 7 I have to DRIVE TO CHICAGO, scary. Gotta get in touch with Lara sometime in there too! And then continue on to St. Louis for the Hobbit reunion, yay! Some stressful stuff, some good stuff -- but overall, no time for blogging. Except now. So though I'm tired, this will have to do.

First, Myrtle Beach. Was cool. By cool I mean very warm, actually. South Carolina is a warm and humid state. The first day, Friday, after we flew in, we checked into our condos (3 for the boys, 3 for the girls, three bedrooms with two full beds per room, and only 4-6 people per condo! Score!) and then we went to the beach. YAY! The waves were pretty big, so I don't feel so bad about missing the big waves on Lake Superior. Though I must say, it is quite a shock for my Michiganian self to go to a big body of water and have it taste SALTY. Ewww! That was gross and very very weird. But not so gross as to do any more than make for an interesting surprise. Anyway. We also went to the beach on Saturday, during which time I hung out with Naomi (who missed her flight due to awful frustrating circumstances and had to come a day late! Our condo was lonely without her) and Tall Katie, who was my awesome roommate for the trip, and Steph and Josh and I swam so far out that the water had to be about eight feet deep and we got whistled in by the lifeguard. Hah! Saturday morning we went to the waterpark, which was not extremely impressive but was a bit of fun nonetheless. There were a few slides, a water playground, and a lazy river.

We had a very nice banquet on Saturday night. They had very good key lime pie. Mmm. I've only had that once before in my life. And there were US Pavilion coffee mugs left from the Expo for people to get -- someone at our table made the comment that we'd better get over there and grab 'em right away, and I'm glad we did, because they were gone pretty fast. Mine is sitting on my nightstand next to me right now. *grin*

Of course there was also a lot of alcohol consumed on this trip, and you know I'm not a big fan of such things. Saturday night got pretty crazy. I think Naomi and Kathy (who's a Mormon) and I were the only people who didn't drink. Most other people were somewhere between quite tipsy and passed out in pools of their own vomit. At about 1 am the drunk people all went swimming in the forceful waves in the dark dark ocean, and I admit to having been a bit concerned about that, but fortunately everyone made it home alive. Despite the jellyfish that attacked them. (They were just minor stings from what I hear, but still, many were reported.)

So yeah...umm...I had way more to say about that, but I'm tired. Oh well. I guess that's all we get then.

And now I'll briefly say that my birthday was quite nice. It WAS admittedly very boring in some ways; I didn't *see* any of my friends, being mostly out of state as they are, sigh. But I can't complain too much, because I saw lots of them in Myrtle Beach this past weekend and will see more of them in St. Louis next weekend. And then last night, sooooo nice, I had something of a virtual birthday party because my best friend is far away...but not far away in spirit. That was really something special. And today my mom took me to Borders and bought me the Detroit Red Wings DVD collection (5 complete historic hockey games and 4 Red Wings specials! *grin*) and a Detective Conan DVD and the Animaniacs collection (gee, I'm kind of embarrassed at how many DVDs I got; usually I'm not really a visual media person, but oh well...and I also got Ender's Shadow, the sequel to Ender's Game that starts the other string of sequels which I haven't yet read. And then I went with my mom and dad to Outback Steakhouse for the first time in *this* country anyway because there is one near our house now, and got a little tiny cake (which was quite enough, I was so stuffed) with a sparkler candle.

And I heard from Chanchan, Aunt Eliisa, Megan, AND Kristin all in one day by the phone. SO nice to be thought of! ^^ That made me really happy. And then there were all the nice Facebook wall postings and MB comments and other such happy messages. I felt very loved. I love you all.

Still think last night I got the nicest present ever. *grins and looks at it again*

And now I'm exhausted and so that's going to be all.

3:01 AM

I just got the most special, most wonderful birthday gift I've ever received.

Thank you.... I love you!