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.

Weekend Trip to Philly

One of my PC Helps friends from Philly was having a surprise birthday party.  Mitch convinced everyone to go and KW did all of our trip planning with plenty of events to keep us busy.

The trip started at 4am on Saturday morning.  Dom drove his wifey and KW over to my condo to pick me up.  After 4 hours of driving we stopped and switched drivers (each of us taking 4 hour shifts).  KW drove the rest of the way.  We arrived at the location of the surprise party early so we took an hour to get lunch at a near by Italian place

We arrived at 1pm  and shortly there after found ourselves yelling "SURPRISE!"  as he walked throught his door:

I don't know if our friend, Eric, was more surprised at the party or the fact that 4 of his friends from Ohio drove in to see him.

Eric was given the royal treatment, including a throne and goblet fit for a king!

He was then served a birthday cake by his loyal subjects:

After which he mingled with the commoners,

Hit a pinata:

Thank goodness he had his walker to help him get around!

We all had a lot of fun.  I even convinced Mitch to take a picture with Eric and I (she definitely took the spotlight!)

After the surprise party we dragged ourselves over to the hotel KW had booked for us, the Hyatt Place, to check in:

We had a fancy room with 2 beds, and a fold out sofa bed.  While everyone laid down for a nap (which I was literally desperate for since I had only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before), I went to the Hyatt gym and worked out for 1/2 an hour and then came back to the room to shower and change for the evening.  After my shower, I laid down for my nap.  I had crawled into bed for all of 30 seconds when KW's phone rang to tell us our friend Edwin was downstairs and we should come hang out!

I nearly cried.  I was so tired!  Everyone else got up, though, and I would NOT be the party pooper, so I said a longing good bye to the bed, slapped on some makeup and joined the group.    I didn't take any pics with Edwin, so here's a random picture stolen from Facebook:

Edwin picked us up and drove us to Phoenixville for dinner.  We went to the Ironhouse Brewery for dinner.  I had their blue cheese burger, which was delish!

We had some time before we needed to meet up with our other friends in philadelphia, so we went back to edwins to play cards against humanity.  By this point I was so sleepy I was starting to feel "sleepy-drunk".  You know, that point in exhaustion where you start slurring words and reaction time decreases and everything seems just a little off.  While Edwin, Mitch, Dom and KW played cards against humanity, I laid on the couch to sleep.  I think I had too much soda at dinner because I couldn't sleep, but, luckily after a half hour of laying quietly and relaxing I felt energized and ready to go.

After Edwins, KW drove us into the city to Mc Ginty's to meetup with Geoff and Kristen.

I was designated driver, but, I got a bunch of free soda's and water, so that was nice.  There was a lot of laughter and everyone had fun!  Dom KILLED it at pool.  He was unstoppable.  Also, I really liked the bathroom wall there.  I really enjoy some positive graffiti!

We closed down the bar, and then the majority of the group wanted to go back to Geoff's house for some wii bowling.  As designated driver, I do what the majority wants.  It was fun!  While KW snoozed on the couch (he was sound asleep), Mitch and Dom played Geoff and Kristen.  Geoff won the first game, Kristen won the second game.  As a nerd, the thing that most interested me about Geoff's house was the charging station.  How cool is that?!!

By the time we got back to the hotel it was 4 in the morning.  Everyone quickly got ready for bed and promptly passed out.  We were up again by 8 or 8:30 the next morning.  While Dom slept a little longer and I showered, Mitch and KW went to get breakfast.  We were on the road by 10:30am and home by 5:10pm.

I drove the whole way home.  I picked up Mitch's shift as a HUGE thank you for helping me edit papers written for my classes.  It also worked out well because I love driving and she does not.

When I got home, after having been awake for 42 of the past 48 hours, I kept thinking "I am UNSTOPPABLE".   I laid down on the couch for a few minutes and passed out promptly.  I slept for a couple of hours, then got up because I had to eat something (I hadn't eaten much all day, so I needed something!)  I went to bed around my regular time (11/12) and woke up at 7 this morning.  I'm still kinda sleepy today, but nothing I can't handle.

All around it was a great trip!  I hope we do it again soon!!!

Back Pain, Hungry Knives and Dinner with Friends

This past week was thankfully slow!  I'm down to 2 courses for school (yay and yippee!) and last week was an easy "post on the message boards and watch lectures week" No major papers or major assignments.  This is great because my back is in SO much pain still!

Monday, after a day of sitting at the library I stopped off at walmart to pick up this omron elector therapy device:

It reminds me of the thing they use at the chiropractors office after a session to relax the muscles.  It worked surprisingly well.  I use it once in the morning before going to the library (a great excuse to veg and watch the morning show on NBC) and once before going to bed.  It does a surprising job and easing the pain, if only for an hour or 2.

I called dad for recommendations.  Dad has had back pains on and off for his whole life, so he know's some tips and tricks.  He recommended drinking a sip of diet tonic water (with quinine) a couple of times a day.

This has to be the grosses drink ever.  The first sip tastes like carbonated water, but then the bitter aftertaste hits and BLECH!  Yuck, eww, etc.  So gross.  I tried mixing it with crystal light, but all it did was make my crystal light bitter, so, I'm going with the "a couple of swigs here and there" way of getting it down.

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I cut my baby pinky fingernail?  Well, that same knife obviously has a taste for blood because it some how cut me on my index finger.  I'm not even sure how it happened.  I was cutting onions then an avocado when I noticed I was bleeding rather profusely.  I ran to the bathroom and baindaided it.  Still.  Beware of that knife, it knows and loves the taste of human flesh. (sorry about the poor quality.)

It's a new month and you know what that means?!!  NEW CALENDAR PIC!

On Fiday I got stood up for a date :( so I messaged my friends desperately asking them to go out with me.  KW, Dom, Mitch and I all met up at the Harry Buffalo...eventually.  I originally recommended we go to Quaker Steak and Lube because I saw they had a bucket of wings and I just wanted wings so bad!  Anyway, turns out the location I got was for a quaker steak  in the airport, so, we changed course and all met up at the Harry Buffalo by the mall.  My food was great, but poor dom got the weirdest pale orange sauce on his ribs witch made them almost inedible.  

I'm very lucky to have great friends who will meetup with me on a moments notice when I'm feeling sad.  I was all smiles after hanging out with such a great group of people!