Giant Killer Tumbleweed

I left for home yesterday morning. My dad and I left my brother's house around ten in the morning, expecting (or hoping) to get home around midnight. The stretch between Salt Lake City and Ontario, OR went smoothly, and we made excellent time with few mishaps or problems.

Unless you count the twenty or so deer carcasses we saw within a five mile stretch of road. Which really only makes you wonder if there are any deer left to hit, so not really a big worry.

As we got near LaGrande, OR we ran into a few icy patches on the road, which I dealt with calmly (due to the fact that I've only experienced driving on icy roads a few times and don't really know what I'm up against). The mountain passes went slower and we began loosing the time we had gained changing time zones. On the final downhill stretch before Pendleton and dry roads we got stuck in traffic that was backed up for 6 miles due to a couple of semis getting into a wreck at the bottom of the mountain. Shortly after we had stopped we were nearly rear ended by one of the crazies that didn't stop to consider how snow packed roads would affect his stopping time. Luckily we were able to pull up quite a bit and they were able to turn quite a bit otherwise the two hour delay would have been a little more exciting.

Yes that's right, two hours we were stuck on that mountain, and it took about an hour and a half to get off the mountains and to dry roads. At this point it was 10 o'clock and four hours from home.

I drove for a couple of hours and was attacked by giant tumbleweed. There was one as big as me! Or maybe it was two tumbleweeds that were hooked together. It was weird how it disintegrated as soon as I hit it.

We also had the adventure of stopping at a rest area to sleep for a few hours before making a break for home. We were easily the only passenger vehicle stopped there for more than a bathroom break.

All in all, we didn't get home until 5 am Pacific Time. I'm sleepy just thinking about it.

The Hair Affair

A week or so before Halloween I had the brilliant idea to be Alice Cullen (from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight) for Halloween. This involved getting my recently decided to grow out hair cut, and coloring it black. This was kind of cool in my mind, on many levels. Firstly, I have often jokingly said I was going to color my hair black. Secondly, the costume itself was very subtle and I doubt that many people would notice my amazing fangs if it weren't for the black hair being such a tie-in to my character.

I had initially thought to get a temporary color, but I have a friend that did that and instead of just washing out it turned her hair purple (Anne of Green Gables anyone?) and I didn't really think that purple would be a good idea. Then the idea was that since my hair grows fast I would just color it, and then let it grow out. So I colored my hair, which was rather uneventful in and of itself, but then liked it enough (and got enough positive feedback) that I decided to recolor my roots when they had grown to the point that I couldn't ignore them anymore. That said, I have never noticed how fast my hair grows until I did this. So when school got out for Christmas I went home as a black-haired red-head. Needless to say, my parents and my grandma weren't very enthused about it and as it is only hair and not a lifestyle decision, or a pressing need to have black hair, I eventually gave in to my mom's pressuring to change it.

We juggled around some various options. Ranging from getting it stripped, to getting a weave, to doing something to it ourselves and eventually settled with the latter. Being the ever observant mother that she is, my mom suggested that we try a product she had seen called Color Oops, or something of that sort. We did that and my hair became an odd sort of weird orange-y brown mixed with black and my natural reddish roots. So we went to Walgreen's (on a very icy day, in which I did some parking lot acrobatics ending on my hands and knees), and got some more and did it again. This time it ended with a reddish something that didn't really look all that bad except for the stubborn black that remained on the top of my head. We then intended to color it a cinnamon brown and leave it at that, perhaps getting a weave later on. It turned a nearly black brown, except for the top of my head which remained black.

So we went to the beauty college. They wouldn't touch it, convinced that with all the stuff I'd done to it so recently it would melt or fall out. Great. Giving up and moving on and resolving never to color my hair black again (unless a large sum of money was involved), I went home.

Then today my mom was telling her hair stylist about the whole fiasco, and she wanted me to come in. So I went in and we discussed several options. She bleached my hair to a lovely chestnut brown.

So over the course of the week my hair has been stripped, dyed, bleached, and washed about thirty times. It's cleaner than it's ever been. The odd thing is that through all this my hair hasn't decided it's had enough and fallen out.

How many colors can my hair be in a week?

Summer

Gentle breezes.
No strings, no ties,
Only beaches and carnivals.
Drifting in an aimless canoe,
Tip of a fishing rod.
Green shoots of Spring
Darken slowly into amber.
Sun glowing cheeks and rainbows;
Clouds never gray the sky.
Smiles and laughter,
Mere echoes of the past,
And visions lull the dreamers
Back to sleep.
Here in Winter's cold embrace,
Though Autumn still and silent,
A sweet recollection smooths a face
And the last kiss of Summer lingers.

New Year

So it's a new year. A whole year has come and gone. I see a lot of people making New Year's Resolutions and posting them on their blogs, and it kind of makes me feel like I should too, but I feel kind of dumb. There are so many things I would like to do, or that I would like to do differently, but I'm one of those people that has a hard time if I make a huge list. It makes me feel overwhelmed, and then none of it happens. (I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but is anyone ever just whelmed?*)

But then again, I also know that writing things down makes them more likely to happen, and that having it visible to others has the added benefit of people knowing what you are supposed to be doing so they can hold it over your head. So here's a few things I would like to accomplish this year:

1. I resolve to have an opinion. So many times I feel like my response when asked if I prefer one thing or the other is "I don't care" or "whichever." I feel so often like I say that more to eliminate the analytic process that then has to take place in my head, about which option I really prefer. Even after this process when I can clearly define that there is one option that is better than another I then have the tendency to feel that if I take the "better" option I am then ripping someone off. Silly, because more often than not the other person involved either doesn't have a preference or is giving me the courtesy to express my opinion in the matter. So I resolved to have an opinion (and share it).

2. I resolve to not be a pushover. This kind of goes along with the first one. I'm not going to let my feelings and wishes always be pushed aside. Not that this ever really happens, mostly because I don't usually express what I feel about various matters.

3. This is one that I've been trying to be better at all along, but now it's going to happen. I'm going to keep curfew better. And enforce it better. 'Nuff said.

4. I hesitate to add another one because I know that I'll have to add a fifth (odd number thing). I'm going to talk to people more. Like people I don't know very well. I'm going to go up to people and say hi, and ask how things are going. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't notice people and hope that they don't notice me. It's dumb, what's the worst that's going to happen from saying hi to someone?

5. I'm going to get organized. *cringe* Yeah, I know it sounds terrible. But I need to. Badly. This is the last one because I know it's going to be the hardest (which is saying a lot for an anti-social{not really}, easy-going, conflict-avoiding, night-owl). But I have it written down where the world can see it, and now I'll have to try to follow through, because everyone knows I'm supposed to.

So that's my New Year's Resolutions a few days late.

Max wants everyone to know that his New Year's Resolutions are to eat everything in sight, stay dry, and kick me out of his room.

*I think you can in Europe. :P Actually, whelmed means the same thing as overwhelmed, which seems like a waste of letters to always be saying overwhelmed when whelmed would work just as well. I'm pretty sure there are other crazy words similar in that regard. This further cements my belief that the English language is terribly ridiculous. Ten points to anyone that can name the movie that I was referencing.