And The Cradle Will Rock...

Wooo HOOOOO... it's been a LONG day!



I'm here in Centralia, Washington visiting my relatives for the next few days :)



My day started at 2:30 this morning... and man, what a day it's been! Eric drove me to San Luis Obispo (it's about an hour from where we live) since that's where my flight was departing from. I hit the flightline at 6am on the dot and caught my connecting flight by literally 3 minutes in San Francisco. I managed to entertain myself throughout the flight by rockin' out to my Zune in addition to playing some Tetris on my Nintendo DS. I think the guy that was sitting next to me was staring at my game the whole time.... ya know that feeling you get when someone's watching you? Yeah, that's the feeling I had... wasn't really a fan of it. I mean, I'm not really a fan of people being in my personal space...and airlines are definetely anti-personal space.



Once I landed in Portland, Oregon.. I gave my Aunty a heads up that I landed and was expecting to wait around a little while considering my Dad was also going to be landing within the hour ( he ewas also flying in but from San Jose airport). Well, Aunty informed me that my Dad had missed his flight. I thought she was joking since this whole week up till the day we were gonna fly out, I had kept telling Dad "Remember: San Jose. not Monterey"...last year he misunderstood and thought we were flying out of Monterey rather than San Jose...so at that time, we missed our flight. Turns out he left early in the morning to get to San Jose airport and traffic was a total nightmare, not to mention, the parking shuttle was running extremely slow so he wasn't able to make his flight...he literally missed it by 20 minutes between the shitty traffic and lack of shuttles for the parking structure. So in the mean time, I had to wait in Portland Airport for my ride since Aunty was running a lil' late and Dad wasn't going to be landing until 2pm...several hours way after I landed.

In the mean time, Aunty and I did some retail damage considering we were waiting for my Dad in a state without sales tax. WOO HOO!! I ended up getting Alexandra's birthday present in addition to a massive birthday card that sings silly stuff, picked up Johns birthday present since his is coming up on November 11th. After all that, we ventured over to the Burlington Coat Factory and I scored on a really nice wool peacoat... we really don't have those available in California considering it's really never cold enough to offer those types of jackets. Plus, I was wanting something that'd work fairly well for me in Belgium. I have one other nice winter coat, but it's white so I'm afraid I'd get it dirty. So, I got the peacoat! It's a graphite gray color, has a hoody and it's a double breasted front...LOVE it! Definetely kept me warm :)

When Dad finally arrived, we swooped back by the airport, picked him up and headed out to pick up Alexandra's birthday "cake". It was actually really cool...a ton of cupcakes formed together to look like "16" in green with black dots (her favorite colors). Once that was picked up, we gathered up Uncle Sonny and Uncle Tim & rolled off to Alexandra's volleyball game which was a little over an hour away. I gotta say... FALL / WINTER here is GORGEOUS! The leaves look so beautiful especially when it's altering every other tree (yelloweee/red/green). Then you see the colors near the lakes we passed and man... I wish we had that in California! Where we live on base, there's NOTHING like that. Just dry brush and fire hazards everywhere...really sucks :(

We ended up catching the end of Alexandra's volleyball match & surprised her with the cake. Got some pictures of that and hung out for a little while. Rolled out to some Pizza Hut in Aberdine (I think that's the town). The houses there cracked me up since you'd see some really beatiful little homes, then right next door you see one that's all run down and cracked out. Didn't make any sense to me!

After dinner, we rolled back to the house...all the while I'm hearing all these incriminating stories about the things my Aunt and Dad would do when they're kids. Half the stuff they were talking about would be highly illegal now a days, but then again, times are definetely different than how they used to be back then. After about a good hour of just constant stories, it totally gives me a different view on my Dad, Aunt Vickie and Uncle Tim, lmao.

Alexandra ended up scoring a 120g iPod Classic, $125 worth of iTune gift cards as well as some movies she was wanting. During the course of her opening her presents, I was getting blinded by the onslaught of pictures everyone was taking of her. I still see spots in my vision!!

There's more to come within the next few days... I just figured I needed to blog what's happened thus far considering I have the memory of a gold fish and won't remember half of this stuff by the time I get back to California on Sunday afternoon.

Much love!