Scrapbooking... The never-ending battle

Throughout my life I have collected things...beenie babies, Happy Meal toys, Star Wars Episode One figures, baseball cards, report cards, papers, pictures, awards, and the list goes on and on.

I have this urge to keep it all, but I don't want to. So trying to be constructive and preserve some memories... Like the note card that came on the flowers my brothers sent me when I was elected to the homecoming court my senior year... I am trying to scrapbook everything.

It looks like a war zone in my room. Besides not being completely unpacked and having boxes everywhere, I now have piles of papers and pictures everywhere too. I decided to work on scrapbooking all of my soccer memories first. I can't even explain how much stuff I have for soccer alone. I then decided that I should theme that section of scrapbooking and do all sports. So this includes the year I played basketball when I was about 10 and all the dance classes and pictures of me dancing and who can forget random horseback riding lesson pictures. I'd say I'm looking at roughly 50 to 70 pages for this one section alone. That is just how much stuff I have.

Then there are pictures and momentous of me growing up, birthday parties, birthday cards, graduation (HS and college), Germany (YFU 6-week trip in HS and the semester abroad in college), family trips to PA, sorority stuff, newspaper clippings, and ahhhhhhhhhh!

Then there is the creation of one scrapbook page. I want them to look creative and fun, so that involves getting scrapbook stickers as well as looking through magazines and cutting out fun phrases and words as well as ads that can be used as backgrounds on certain pages. I found some funny soccer ads that worked really well when I arranged some soccer pictures on it. This just takes a lot of time. I had no idea when I began, what kind of project this would end up being.

This is turning in to the never-ending battle. Me against mounds and mounds of paper.

One of life's little Let-Downs

It's the alarm clock at 5:57 in the morning. It signals that I am still alive and well. That is not the let-down. The let-down comes shortly after the fog lifts and I recognize what my life has become. I wake up, go to a short-term job situation, come home, and get to do it all over again.

The let-down is that I am not moving away from this situation. It is like a ditch on the side of the road. I'm standing in it and instead of stepping out of it like a sane person I grab a shovel and I'm digging it deeper. You know, so that it's extra hard to get out of.

I was a fresh, ripe, impeccable peach sitting on the road-side stand waiting for someone to say, "That's the one I want!" I'm fermenting. Several months out of college, I'm beginning to get soft around the edges.

The dream is still out there, but I am starting to doubt myself. I hate doubt. It is an extra voice in my brain. I already have the voice of my mother, my father, my two older brothers, and my largest critic-- myself. I don't need to have a doubter in my head.

Needless to say, there are very few to no people to talk to about all this. Everyone just wants to tell me how great I am and how wonderful my resume looks and how anyone would be lucky to have me working for them. (pssst... *in the voice of wisdom* I'd have a job if all this were true... or at least some direction).

Golf

My brother flew in to Austin on Thursday evening for the UT vs OHIO football game on Saturday. It was great seeing him. Friday was such a good day! In the morning we went golfing with my dad and my mom came in-tow to take pictures. Tom and I are not the best golfers. I have only been playing or learning to hit the ball for a little over a month.

My brother and I began to switch hit. We both hit the ball each turn, but then we would hit the ball from the best ball. This way we had two chances to get the ball to a better place.

Pretty funny though, we lost about half a bag of golf balls in the long grass and the ruff. That is just how bad... or not good if you want a little more positive attitude in the sentence... we are. It was nice not feeling like I needed to beat anyone and even better I got to be on the same "team," so to say, as my brother. It is funny, even with eight years between us, life has started to even out. I'm not the kid sister as much as I am making my way to being an equal.

It begins with golf?

Too much of the Same

Variation. That doesn't happen in my life. At least not right now. I am used to going to school at different times every day and working different times every day with grocery shopping when I can fit it in and babysitting Friday or Saturday nights and soccer games on the weekend and rollarblading in the park when I'd get off of work at the preschool.

I can sum up what I do now: Work, lunch, exercise, sort through stuff in my room, and go to bed. That is normally the pattern of every day. It's getting harder to break that pattern, because I live so far away from the city and I don't really have any friends that live here. Then my cell phone doesn't work at my parents house. Everyone I normally call has Verizon... so no one ever calls anymore because they can't get through to me and it's not free to call my house phone.

I need to get a job. I miss having my own apartment. I love my parents and I love this time that I get to spend with them (though I really should have a job and my own apartment), but the distance and feeling cut off from everything is pretty hard.

No wonder they call college the best times you will have in your life.

Oh Deer

The front of my car started shaking when I stop after going at least 30 mph. Time to go in to the shop!

So how do I get to go to work? Ah, daddy's car! The nice, new, pretty car that beeps angrily if you switch lanes without using your turn signal. The car that comes with the unspoken label, "You had better drive safe!"

I am about to turn on the feeder road to get on to I-35 when I see something out of the corner of my right eye. I can't see anything when I turn my head and look so I step on the gas...

I hit something.

It gets up and tries to continue running across the street, but it is so startled, as am I, that it falls in the middle of the two lanes to my left.

Oh my... Deer! I hit a baby deer, hence why I could not see it in front of daddy's car. It somehow makes it across four lanes of traffic and in to the woods on the other side.

I had to sit in an hour and a half of traffic feeling like a baby deer killer. I don't like to hurt animals or see hurt animals, so I am still feeling guilty about this one.

Just that Creepy Feeling

Have you ever had an instant where you thought you might die? Where you see it coming and you're scared, but not really? As if you know what is going to happen, but it just doesn't register that you should be really afraid and saying a final prayer.

I was driving down 183. At a point in this road before Leander, TX it is four lanes of traffic with no middle divider. "Who cares?", you ask. The road is curving and it is also 65 mph. So then you get nut cases that drive 75 to 80 mph in the left lane. Add a little bit of wind and passing a car in the right lane and that nut case is all over the left lane of the on-coming traffic.

Insert me in to the on-coming traffic. It is almost as if the nut case forgot that he could ease off of the gas and maybe, just maybe, find the broad petal next to the gas called the "break." With someone next to me in the right lane I was trapped.

Closing my eyes didn't seem appropriate, seeing as to how I was driving something that weighs about as much as an elephant. I sucked in my breath, braced myself for the impact, kept my hands firmly on the steering wheel, and then nothing.

It is like the laws of nature decided to take a break at 7:20 this morning on 183 right about where my 4Runner was supposed to get hit by a white Dodge truck. Yes, I do remember the name and color of the truck, because everything moved in slow motion. Everything. The sound on the radio, the blur of the grass, the red vehicle next to me, the sound of my heart, and most of all the little pocket of air between my SUV and the truck.

So, not today.

What Nicole and I miss about New Orleans

So Nicole began to miss New Orleans and if you've ever moved away from a place that you really love, you'll understand. She wrote the first 15 things, though I will have to admit some of them I should have repeated to emphasize how much I miss them too. Numbers 16-31 are all mine.


1. Daiquiris - especially the Chocolate Banana one from daiquiris and Creams
2. The Fly
3. Crawfish every weekend in the Spring
4. Breakfast at the Bluebird Cafe
5. Taking the streetcar downtown and wandering the Market and enjoying just being outside.
6. Cowboy Mouth concerts every other weekend
7. Quarter martini lunch at Commander's
8. (I never thought I'd say this) The sound of the little kids "tap dancing" on the streets in the quarter
9. Beignets at midnight
10. The two story Target SO CLOSE to my house (and mine because we were neighbors for a short time)
11. Cheap movies and Movie Watcher clubs and free popcorn Wednesdays
12. The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival
13. The Oak Alley craft fair
14. Choosing which house I want to be "mine" on St. Charles (For me it was the white wedding cake house!)
15. Gelato at Angelo Broccatto's
16. Bacco's (oh so yummy food)
17. Port of Call burgers
18. Jiggers' burgers
19. Driving down River Road with my window down in late January
20. Biking on the levee
21. Rollerblading in Audubon Park
22. Babysitting my favorite little kids
23. Actually having friends that would go grocery shopping, watch movies, eat sushi, rollerblading, dance, give fashion advice, search for Taco Bells that don't exist in post Katrina land, and play soccer with me.
24. Playing co-ed soccer with Lazy by Nature
25. Going to the Soap Opera and getting all my clothes washed in 2 hours instead of taking all day
26. Hubig's Pies
27. Wine and pizza night with Heather
28. Free beer glasses at the Bulldog
29. WWOZ New Orleans heritage radio station
30. Being within 15 mins of three malls (even though they may not be the best malls)
31. Touchdown Jesus