To my best frenemy

Dear Graduate School,

I really wanted to be friends. I practically begged for your friendship in my application and you accepted my pleas and my pledge of sisterhood. Or so I thought. In recent months, I've started to feel like you don't really care about me anymore. Like you never cared about me. Like all you wanted from me was my money, my time, my health, and my sanity. And I gave them to you...all of them, and what have I gotten in return? Ulcers, migraines, 10 lbs of stress weight, and all for what? A piece of paper? A bit of prestige? Tell that to my student loan debt, bitch.

As of this moment, graduate school, you and me? We are not friends. Not. Friends. At. All. But I want you to know that you can stress me out, take my money, pile the pounds on me, pilfer my time, and suck out my soul but I will vanquish you in the end. You'd better start running because I will hunt you down and kick your ass from here to Thursday.

Love and kisses,

Kristen

Still alive...

So I am a terrible blogger. I think that's the theme of this year's blog adventure. I have so many good ideas of things I want to blog about and very little time to actually follow through. *sigh*

At some point I really do want to blog my Turkey trip both so I don't forget all the little fun things that happened and so that you all can see my amazing pictures. Unfortunately, my workload this quarter is insane and I don't know if/when I'll get the post finished. *sigh*

I just wanted to let people know that I'm still alive and hanging in here. Graduate school isn't quite what I thought it was going to be and I alternate between loving it and learning a lot and hating it and feeling like a total idiot. So that's been....interesting. Someday I'll tell you all about it. Today is not that day. *sigh*

Poor excuses

Dear Blog,

I apologize for having neglected you the last few weeks due to being swamped with margaritas, reading, and lounging on the beach/in the most awesome pool ever. It was a rough 2 weeks, waking up every day at 9, eating a breakfast prepared by someone else and then putting on my bathing suit and jumping in the water/lounging with a book all day. But the fun ended on Saturday and now I'm back in Chicago running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get packed and organized for my trip to Turkey which commences in a day and a half. I have yet to wash laundry or pack and for some reason have become fixated with scrubbing all the grout in my bathroom and dusting the all the crown moldings in my apartment.

Long story short: I will not be blogging for the next 3 weeks due to packing, organizing, scrubbing grout, dusting moldings, and being in Turkey. I shall return mid-September and will post a plethora of pictures of Istanbul etc.

Love,
Kristen

Why My Pseudo-Family Rocks

I have the best pseudo-family ever. Since I left their employ to go to college 6 years ago, we've kept in contact and I've been back to NJ to visit them regularly. I was back there in July for the first time since my wedding and they felt so bad that we weren't able to spend any time at their beach house that they offered to fly me out this weekend to spend 2 weeks with them at the Jersey Shore. Woot woot! Hooray for a free trip to the beach!

L.A. Theatre Works

Dear L.A. Theatre Works,

I love you and I am so happy to have found you on Saturday night NPR. I am even more excited that your fabulous work is available in podcast form so I can listen to it on iTunes. "La Bete" so far is fantastic and I can't wait to hear the end!

Love,
Kristen

How Not to Go Down a Waterslide

• Step 1: Fall off your floating chair in the deep end of the pool, getting water up your nose and turning you into a sputtering, flailing mess.

• Step 2: Give in to taunting by 9 year olds who find it hilarious that you are sputtering because of a little water up your nose and who start making chicken noises at you when you tell them there is no way in hell you are going down a waterslide.

• Step 3: Exit the pool but first trip on the step and skin your knee. Do not pay attention to the foreshadowing of said knee scrape.

• Step 4: Walk up the rock steps to the top of the waterslide, not paying a bit of attention to how high up it really is.

• Step 5: Prepare yourself to slide down the slide by sitting down at the lip of the slide, then slip on the wet rocks and begin careening down the tube slide, completely unprepared for what is to come.

• Step 6: Spend the entire time in the slide getting plastic-burn on the back of your legs because the slide is completely dry, swearing because of said plastic-burn, and trying to figure out how best to enter the water to avoid a) losing the top to your swim suit which has somehow come loose b) smashing yourself on the rocks on either side of the slide exit c) drowning in the deep end of the pool.

• Step 7: Fail at the first two of the goals listed in step 6.

• Step 8: Make the 9 year olds promise not to mock you for eternity for failing spectacularly at something as simple as going down a water slide.

• Step 9: Swim over to the swim-up-bar and pour yourself a drink.

• Step 10: Repeat starting with Step 1 if you did not learn your lesson the first time.

Extreme Gym Class for Kids, or How My Vacation Made Me Feel Out of Shape

So the family I was visiting in NJ is the family that once upon a time I worked for as a nanny. The family is comprised of 2 awesome parents (more on them in a future post) 4 fabulously fun girls, and 3 dogs of various yappy-ness. The girls range in ages from 9 to 18 and all are tremendously talented athletes. All 4 girls are training hard this summer for their respective fall sports (college, high school, middle school, & elementary school) at a local gym whose mission statement is something to the effect of "making your children into professional athletes in just 3 easy steps"*

I drove the carpool to the gym bright and early one morning and let me tell you, I got a workout just watching these kids. I was amazed to see the sprint trials the 9 year old's group was doing that day: ladders back and forth across the gym with almost alarming speed. And let me tell you, those 9 year olds were FAST! The 13 and 15 year old's classes overlapped a bit and watching them do squats and chest presses with not much less weight than I lift was definitely a reality check. I am in better shape now than I was in high school, which I am tremendously proud of, but I felt like such an out of shape soccer mom watching these kids pump iron, hard, for 90 minutes.

So after gym class, I went home, had half a donut in consolation, and swam in the pool the rest of the day. Swimming counts as exercise, right??

*ok I made up the 3 easy steps part, but the mission statement does involve making children into "professional athletes."

More to come

So I'm back from my week long vacation to the always lovely New Jersey (no really, it's beautiful there) and I have lots of things to blog about. Unfortunately, I have to work the next 5 days in a row so I'm not sure when said blogging will occur. I'll try to throw something up when I get home tonight or first thing tomorrow so be sure to check back to read all about the following:

1- extreme gym class for kids
2- how not to go down a water slide
3- why my pseudo family in New Jersey rocks
4- a brief outline of my next adventure

Ew

Dear brown, smelly sewage water leaking down my bathroom wall and through to the common room floor below me,

Why, oh why, did you have to grace me with your presence at midnight on a Saturday instead of noon on a Thursday, when the maintenance guy is in the building? I mean, could you have at least given me a few hours notice so I could move my toiletries out of the impending flood? I know I can just boil them all to remove the traces of feces but think about it...would YOU want to wear a retainer to bed that you knew was previously dripped upon with poo water? I thought not. Ew. For real. Just...ew.

unhappily yours,
Kristen

Re:

Recently a friend of mine mentioned that there aren't very many pictures of me on this blog. In response to her comment, I give you an entire post of pictures:

Re-enacting a picture from our wedding day at the Central PA Bride Fair.
(September 2008)
The husband and I doing our best impression of a WASP-y couple with an adopted "Asian" baby girl. Her name is Maureen or Mo for short.
(December 2008)
Us being totally geeked out by our shiny new Field Museum Membership. Hooray!
(December 2008)

With my family in Vegas for my brother's 30th birthday party.
(February 2009)

Surveying the battlefield at Gettysburg, PA.
(March 2009)

Me wearing a dog face headband that was on sale at the Gettysburg National Battlefield Gift Shop. I have no idea why they were selling said item of randomness, which is most certainly why I had to try it on.
(March 2009)

Celebrating my very first loaf of Challah bread. Yum!

(April 2009)

Us on the double decker carousel at Six Flags Over Chicago.
(June 2009)

So there you have it...photographic evidence of the last 10 months of my life. :)