Movies, BBQ's, Video Games, Homework, Garage Sales, Flooding, Free Food, and Walnut Wednesdays

Oh brother.  I put off blogging for 2-3 weeks so you, dear readers, are in for another massive blog!

In the past few weeks I've seen some good movies.  One of my all time new favorite movies is fright night staring Colin Farrell.  I love me some vampire movies, and this was one of the best vamp movies I've seen in a while!

I also convinced KW to go see Neighbors with me.  It was pretty funny!  I could see myself watching it again when it comes out on DVD

Now that the weather has been warming up we've been BBQing at Mitch and Dom's almost every week.  Dom is a grill master!!!  It always turns out great.  Heck, he can even BBQ bacon!!!

As with most BBQ's I tried to get pics for my blog, While I take stunning pics,

Other's refuse to play along

Yesterday, since we where having a BBQ anyway, I begged Dom to grill up some chicken for me.  There's just something extra delicious about grilled chicken.  It turned out soooooooo good.  I'm surprised anything made it home with me.  It was mouthwateringly wonderful!

We've all been gaming off and on.  We tried playing Civ V 3 weeks ago, but it gets really laggy after turn 100.  Still a fun game!

Minecraft is another thing that KW, Mitch, Dom and I have been doing 2 or 3 times a week.  The great thing about Minecraft is that it does not seem to get laggy!  I had never really played it before a couple of weeks ago, so I had a steep learning curve.  The worst part of the game is the fact that KW and occasionally Dom see the need to kill me.  Granted, I (rarely) deserve it.  Even Mitch killed me once.  She had a puppy and I hit it once (and it just happened to die).  She was displeased and ended me.  Note to self, do not kill Mitch's dogs.

Back at the beginning of May I recieved an email from my June course explaining that we would need to read 22 YA books.  She sent us the email so we could get started on our reading early since a month was going to be pushing it to get all of the reading done!  I'm sure the North Olmsted library hates me after i put most of those books on hold

Since the email in early May I've read about 10 of the books.  This was the first one I read:

One of the reasons I've been so slow to blog was that my first summer course started on May 19th.  It is a 15 week course jammed into 3 weeks.  If I'm not listening to a lecture than I'm writing a paper or discussion post or taking a test.  It's been hectic and tough!!  So please forgive me this summer if my blogs are few and far between!!

One weekend (I don't remember which) we went garage saleing.  Mitch convinced KW to get some fancy cups and KW also bought a wok and a painting for his house.  Mitch and Dom bought buttons (like a bag of buttons), a picnic basket and some other things I can't remember.  Being the thrifty shopper, I only bought 1 book.

There was some horrible flooding in North Olmsted.  Luckily my condo was fine, but I spent part of one day helping Mitch and Dom clean mud out of their garage and basement.  So horrible for them, but I had a lot of fun hanging out and helping with the cleanup.

I've been lucky enough to babysit for my friends in lakewood, Jared and Chel.  Being the awesome people they are, they gave me BACON WRAPPED STEAKS!!!!  Right?!  So much awesomeness!  I guess they're fairly inexpensive (although not the cheapest) at Aldi.

While they don't look like something special they were super delish!!!!

Last up, Walnut Wednesday.  Cleveland runs something called "Walnut Wednesday" from May to November.  Every Wednesday, food trucks gather on walnut street in downtown cleveland.  Manders, KW and I went to it back in 2012 and decided to try it again this year.  It rained so much.  Trying to be positive I said "Welp, at least it won't be busy as it's so rainy".  False!  The lines were long and it poured the whole time (as evidenced by the sopping wet Jnet below who didn't bring an umbrella).  Once again, KW opted out of being in a picture, but manders looked amazing regardless of the inclement weather.

Phew!  All done!  Thanks for sticking with me faithful readers!!!

Getting Political

Tuesday, May 6th was a voting day in Cuyahoga county.  KW got me interested, so I signed up as a poll worker.  I went to a 3 hour training on Saturday, then on Monday, I metup with the other poll workers to setup.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:30 am (I didn't even think that time really existed!!!)

I got ready and headed over to the polling location.  I was there by 5:30 am.  I got a fancy name badge

And since I was lucky enough to be working in my polling location, I was the first one to vote and first to get an "I <3 Voting"

The other poll workers were SO much fun to hang out with and all around GREAT people.  After spending 15 hours with someone you are either friends or enemies.  We were all vast friends.

In the back from left to right is Me, Jnet, Marlene, Peggy (Ruth not pictured), then the boys in the front are Larry, our PLC (Like a team leader) and Brent.

Larry and Brent were pretty exhausted by the end of the day.

Sike!  They were pumped to be almost done:

Along with Larry and Brent, we also had Gary (Pictured top left), who was a Rover.  He would periodically drop by and help precints with any problems they were having.  He was a godsend on monday night when our PLC was running late.  Gary really helped us get everything set up.

One more pic of the lady poll workers.  I felt like a giant next to 5'3 Marlene (left) and 5'3 Peggy (right)!

We will hopefully be hanging out as a group sometime later, but if not, I'm hoping I see them all in November for primaries!

You would think after all of the politics from tuesday I would be all politiced out.  Nope!  Wed (yesterday) was our bi-monthly city council meeting.  I dragged KW along.  It was a blast, and, though not necessary, it gave me a reason to get dressed up!

Phew, that's it.  I'm all caught up on blogging.  I'm hoping to drag the friends out to the drive thru movies this weekend.  Also, one of my summer courses, the one that runs the month of June, emailed us and said we would be reading 22 young adult books.  I'm glad they sent this early, so, I'll be spending the next few weeks trying to knock out as many of those books as possible.

Thanks for reading!!

Last Weekend (Belated Blog 3)

Last weekend was SUCH a relief to finally be finished my first semester.  I dragged my friends out to the new North Olmsted Bar.

We got dinner and talked for an hour or 2 then all went home (we're getting too old to stay out past 10pm).

The next day, Mitch and I went out for a girls lunch.  We decided to be adventurous and go somewhere we had never been before.  We went to Canary's, across from the north olmsted library.  Their prices were pretty good and the food was delish!

Mitch does not like posing for pics, but is such a good friend she does it anyway!

Me trying to be as cool as Mitch!

During lunch I convinced Mitch that it would be fun to pick dandelions and put them on KW's porch.  Again, she's such a good friend she just goes along with my crazy schemes.

We went back to her house and had a lot of dandelions to pick from (luckily Dom wasn't going to mow for another day or two).

My fingers were stained yellow after we picked 1/2 a buckets worth of dandelions,

but it was worth it when KW messaged us:

Pure winning!

On sunday I metup with a different board game group in lakewood.  We played 2 games, one was a train board game with stocks.  I didn't take pics, so I can't remember what it was called.  The other game was a pirate board game called Cartagena, which was really simple, get your pirates to the ship.  Both really fun and I just LOVE meeting new people:

Pics from College (Belated Blog 2)

One thing I did to calm myself during the stress of the end of semester projects was to post old college pics on facebook.  I figured that since I had them, I might as well blog them.

This is from Halloween (2001?) from left to right Rachel, Shareen, Oklahoma (Andrea), Brooke and me, Jnet:

Here is a posed pic of myself and Rachel doing homework:

I'm not quite sure what's going on, but it must have been exciting if balloons were involved.  Brooke and Rachel are in the back, Shareen and I are in front:

A pic of all of us roomies at Brookes wedding:

According to Rachel on facebook, this pic was taking when I went home with her for thanksgiving.  I was really lucky to have roommates that would let me stay with their family for thanksgiving since it was too expensive to fly home to philly.  One year I stayed with Rachel, one year with Shareen!

Girls Night, Board Gaming and the End of First Semester (Belated blog 1)

Oh boy, I'm really behind on blogging!  This blog will cover the weekend of April 26th.  It was a really busy week as I was finishing up up a huge paper for one class and studying for a big test for a different class.  I took a few hours to go hang out with my friends.  Honestly, I can't remember what we did.  I do remember the boys went to play video games over at KW's house, so Mitch and I had a girls night!

We got to talk about boys, our lives, and of course watched the obligatory chick flick:

A few days later, I met up with a board game meetup, a group of people that get together and play board games.  It was beyond fun.  We played splendor (I won the 2 games we played):

And crows (I came in dead last...by a lot)

It was so much fun, and the guys were really patient with a board game noob.  They explained the games really well and were patent with all of the questions I asked.  Uber fun!

The rest of the week was spent studying and paper writing.  As I'm writing this, the semester has been over by about 1/2 a week.  I managed to eek out a 90% on the final test I took and got a 97% for that class.  The other class I'm waiting on the professor to grad the paper.  I'm currently at 98% for that class, but since this paper is 25% of the course grade, my final grade could change drastically.