Vito the Alien

I just wanted to leave this very short post to tell you that I have made my cat, Vito a Twitter account. Yes, I'm one of those people. I've just done it today and it's quite fun! Just last night I was looking at him and he looked at me directly in the face. I realised that he looked quite a bit alien. Not in a bad way, he's still very cute. He just has a very thin neck and face. So I've started him a tumblr and my friends Maggie and Christine made their cats, Hadley and Aiden twitters as well. So it's a whole twitter family!!

Cheers!

A Foggy Day in London Town

But the age of miracles hadn't passed!

Right, so as of 3 minutes ago there are now 588 days 'til I move to London. I thought I would just post about London since my friend just recently visited there and posted pictures and became jealous. Also because I keep listening to Frank Sinatra's version of A Foggy Day in London Town.

So, I've been having a rather difficult time in school as of late. I've just been wondering if those 500+ days were even possible to get through and I seriously considered for about the 4th time this semester alone about dropping out. I thought about this because I just couldn't really stand it here in Lubbock. It's just so ugly and apart from the few people I like, I really hate everyone here. With there unnecessarily big trucks and ugly accents and boots and cowboy hats. It's just ridiculous and I was getting so sick of it. And then school itself was just becoming overwhelming. I missed Florence so much and being there and being able to take my quiet walks alone across the Arno to get a bagel. I missed the cobblestone streets which, before had been the cause of my injured feet. I missed Italians and their yelling and honking and crazy driving. I even missed the tourists with their silly, unattractive tourist clothes and the fact that I was able to call a city that drew so many of them my home.

I started wondering if I could just leave school, drop everything, hop on a plane and move there. Maybe I could get a job in a pub as a line cook or a waitress or something. And get a small, albeit shitty flat. But I would be happy. Because I would be there.

Well in the end I decided that, even though it is painful, and just plain cruel of the world, but I have to stay here. Stay here and get my degree. When I walk across that stage I will have 38 days left. And then I can leave. I'll have the summer that I can work and save up last minute money and then I'll be off. I'll be one of the few in my family who will have graduated in four years and I'll be the second that has gone off far far away. My sister moved to New York straight after her graduation but she came back to Texas after two years. Not me though. I'm there for the long haul. For good. And then my life will have started.

I quite like the idea of completely uprooting myself. At this point in my life I'm quite apathetic. Both about my relationships and school in general. I'm basically doing enough to get my degree and that's it. No extra. Cause, I'm not a Ravenclaw or an overachiever. I just really like the idea of moving somewhere completely different and staying there. Not many people do that or want to do that.

I'm not saying I'm special. In fact I'm saying I'm weird. I don't actually know what's wrong with me but I just don't care anymore. Nothing can really keep me here. Nothing and no one. Maybe I'm just a really horrible person. I kind of like it though. Not caring. It's a very nice change from what I usually am. A blubbering mess because I care too much and don't know how I will possibly ever say goodbye to everyone. Now I just don't give a shit and want more than anything to leave and never come back. I would honestly be completely OK with not ever seeing some of the people that are in my life ever again. People I once cared so much about and would do anything for. I finally realised that they aren't actually that great and not worth giving up everything for. Kind of like Margo in Paper Towns. Now, I'm not claiming to be anywhere near as cool as she is. But like her, I've realised that I just need a change. A permanent one. To completely uproot myself. A different experience and different life. I can literally be anyone I want to be. Like myself for a change.

Plans:

I suppose I have to have some sort of plan for living there. For fitting in there and making my life and such. So I'm signing up for British history classes so that I know about British history in more detail. I am currently trying to convert myself to Celsius. Next comes the metric system (fucking America and it wanting to be different from everyone else! If you're an American you've basically been screwed over and it will now be harder for you to go to different places outside of the US. Fun, huh?). I would like to take a course in British politics cause I find it all a bit confusing so I'll have to see if Tech offers something like that. Then that's it. I'm basically going to do that so that I can know as much as possible about being a British citizen before actually coming one.

I'm not exactly sure of the process of becoming a citizen of any country, whether it's a test or an oath or a blood pact or what have you. I just know that I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm looking that up right now actually. I'm a bit ahead of myself and clicked to read about the Citizenship Ceremony. Sounds exciting!

If it's a test then I am going to pass that test so hard that Her Royal Highness, the Queen herself is going to be like, 'Let's you and I have tea and we can discuss how you should have been British this whole time'. And I'll be like, 'yes, let's do that'.

I just can't wait to live there! To have my own Oyster Card with my FACE on it and have to ride into the city every day for my job and ride back again with groceries in hand and cat food for Vito. I wonder how he's going to like London. I'm sure he won't really care where he is as long as there is an abundance of food and another boy cat (I am about 99% sure he's gay. No, really. He totally is.)

I'll walk down the busy streets on the pavement in my khaki overcoat, umbrella hanging around my wrist. Chef's coat on underneath, on my way to work. It will have just rained the night before so there will be puddles to dodge and it will be cold and still have that damp, heavy feeling in the air. But the sun will be overhead. Right in my eyes probably as it will be the morning when I'm walking to work, in the direction of Parliament and the clock tower. Taxi cabs, Citrogens, Fords, Pugots, Audis and cars of every kind, passing me as I walk on the pavement. Businessmen on mobiles, talking importantly as they pass me, walking in the opposite direction. People walking out of side stores with Costa Coffees in hand, trying to juggle their briefcases, newspapers and umbrellas as they rush to the office or back to their car. Passing red telephone booths, buses, and post boxes.

So there you have it! Only 588 days, 22 hours, and 49 minutes to go! I think I can make it. And when it finally does happen it'll just be that much more sweet since I fought through so much time to make it.

'The sun was shiniiiiiiiiiinnng E-everywheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrr!'

Kitten Name!!

For some reason I didn't post his name in that last post, but since a lot of you have asked, his name is Vito. Sometimes I call him Don Vito like in the Godfather (cause I'm obsessed). It was between that, Lorenzo, Tony, or Giovanni (Gio for short). He just looked like a Vito so I'm really happy with it. I can't wait to see him tomorrow!! He's super cute and loves to cuddle! Whenever you're holding him, he climbs up to your neck and just kind of curves around it for warmth. It's adorable and I'm so glad that I have a snuggly cat. He's precious. : )

I wish you all could meet him!!

New Kitty! :D

So I was out riding my new bike and stopped by this field cause I saw some rabbits and prairie dogs. I heard this mewing (more like a scream mewing) and walked over to see a small black kitten in the grass. So I called my sister to ask what I should do and she said I should take him and bring him to a no-kill shelter. So I snatched him, put him in my basket (such a good idea to get that basket), rode back to my dorm and snuck it upstairs to my room. My roommates and I took him to the shelter but it was closed and figured that we wouldn’t be able to take him there till Monday since Sarah had band on Saturday. So I called my friend Christine and told her what was going down and she said she knew of a place where he could stay till Monday.

Then she saw him and saw how adorable he is and said, ‘hey, you want to keep this cat, right?’ and I said yeah and she said that we could make it work. So he’s going to live with her when her parents are over and then live with me after I move out. And Maggie and I were talking about moving in together so that we can both have our cats and we both like to cook and it will be awesome. We’re going to live in the same complex and have dinner paties with Christine and Kenneth and Josh and it will be awesome.

So I have a cat! Yay!! I’ve always wanted one. And it turns out that I found him at just the right time cause apparently people sacrifice black cats on Halloween. Even the shelters won’t take them cause of that. That makes me so angry and so sad! Who would harm something so cute? I’m seriously thinking about going to find some of these people and beating the shit out of them. Like, I could crash one of their crazy, fucked up parties and then when the cat sacrificing part came up, start screaming in rapid Italian and tell them that if they touch that cat in any way that is more than loving, ‘Ima fuck them up’. I could be the black cat rescuer. Legit.

The Anglophile talks about Britain

Hello again! Well I believe it's been a while since I last posted and to make up for that I am going to brush on the same subject of the title of this blog. Not so much the wandering part as I haven't done much of that since I got back from Italy. No, I am going to talk about Britainland and why I love it. Inspired by a post written by this man. You should all read his first. Go ahead, it won't take long. Off you go!

Right, all back? Good. Let's carry on.

In the aforelinked blog, Jazza writes briefly about the reasons he loves his country. He talks about their general liberal take on things, their superb education, and their brilliant sense of humour. Instead of writing several novel length comments I decided I would just cover everything in a separate blog post.

After thinking about it, he definitely got a lot of my feelings toward the place spot on. For instance, the humour; I love a good dose of sarcasm and it would be wonderful to be surrounded by it and have someone else be able to dish it out as well. I am extremely jealous of their education system because, being from America, I can honestly say that we generally only learn about America most of the time. But most of all I really love the simple things. The things British people do every day. Like grocery shopping! At Tesco and Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's! I can't tell you how confused my good friend Martina was when I asked her, very enthusiastically where she grocery shopped over my visit there this summer. And I'm sure it must have been a very strange thing to witness as I stared in wide-eyed wonder at the size of the Tesco Extra she took me to. I hope it was at least entertaining and that she got a good laugh at her silly friend from Texas.

I love just thinking about how some day I will walk down the streets and pass the red telephone booths and get to look at all the fancy cars that I love so much every single day. And that I will have an apartment of my very own with a kitchen and a window down to a street that will look like this!

Which brings me to my next topic: Living there. I have a countdown to my 2012 birthday simply as an approximation date. As of 26 minutes ago it stands at an audacious 604 days. The current countdown date is set to May which will be right after I graduate from uni. Obviously I will need a little time to spend with family and to set my affairs in order before leaving the country for good so I was thinking about setting the official date at July 4th 2012. You see, the first two times I went to England with my church we left on the 4th of July. And because I enjoy irony as much as the next person I think it would be nice to carry on with the tradition. Well, I guess I'll be ending it there, but whatever. As my friend Chelsey said when I proposed this idea on tumblr, third times the charm!

So there you go, readers of this blog. The official date of my escape from the colonies move to London is set to the 4th of July 2012. I can't wait to start looking at flats and neighborhoods and stuff. It's all so exciting! And I'll go to Top Shop to get cool clothes and Tesco to get food and Marks & Spencer to get yummy fruit and Boots to get Lemsip and Soothers for when I get a cold. It'll be awesome. I'll be the weird one in my family for leaving the country and staying there, but when has that ever bothered me, right? Hey, I'll just be the cool, cooking, world traveling one at family reunions. The one with the best stories. Oh yeah, my awesome British life starts in 653 days.

Operation CHEER: An Introduction

Greetings Blogspot. I thought I would just post this pre-even-beginning-to-think-about-the-holidays-for-most-people because well, I have already begun to think about them. That's right. This is the start of many Christmas blogs to come. Mainly this post is to inform you about Operation CHEER! Inspired, of course by the great Maureen Johnson, Operation CHEER is a three part prank I will be playing on my siblings this December. As you may know, or not, I have started pranking my eldest sister Megan in the office of the Family business we both work at. The first one I did was called Operation Michael Jackson in my Co-Worker's Ceiling where I did just what the title implies. I waited for them to go out to lunch for one of their meetings, snatched the ladder from the store room, snatched the worlds longest, GREENEST and most attention drawing extension cord from the bathroom/store room, some old computer speakers I had found a couple days before, and of course my iPod. I made all the necessary technical connections of the equipment and started to work. Up the ladder I went, moved the ceiling tile to the side, placed the speakers up there, threw the end of the extension cord 2 offices down so that I could reach it from that ceiling and get it to a corner of the room where, despite it's greenness, would hopefully not be noticed in the corner. Then I put an alarm for my iPod to start playing Michael Jackson's Thriller through my sister/co-worker's ceiling at exactly 15:23 at which point I would be out of the office on important "errands". Replaced the ceiling tiles and ladder and continued on filing until they got back and I could leave.

I so wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that. I actually set up a camera in my sister's office to try and catch the reaction but unfortunately the camera decided that it would go off after 2 seconds of recording an empty desk and chair. So I just had to settle with them re-telling the story. And re-tell it they did. Many, many times to many different people. There was a lot of searching for the source of the music. My sister was going crazy. Hahaha. I would have loved to see that. She picked up her purse, computer, presser her ear against the filing cabinet to try and find out where it was coming from. Apparently my other sister even got up on the desk to try and see if it was coming through the ceiling some how ; ) I actually probably could have stayed because they didn't assume it was me for a long time. The hardest thing would have been keeping a straight face though. I don't know if I could have done it. I mean I'm pretty good after extensive training from my roommate Sarah, but I'm not that good. I don't even know if she's that good.

I haven't really done anything since then except for stuffing almost all the chairs in the entire office into her office. That was kind of spontaneous as I just walked by and saw it unattended and thought I should do something about it.

I'm hoping to spark some sort of desire to get back at me in her. And ideally I would like her to team up with the other siblings so that they could do something really un creative and lame to try and get me back so that I could have real incentive to carry out Operation CHEER. I mean besides the obvious of it just being amazing to hear their reactions. I think after I do that it will definitely spark something. SO! Moving right along...

The Plans

Megan's House: I'm going to purchase some really inexpensive wrapping paper (Walmart will probably have a really good special or something) and wrap everything in their house. I mean EVERYTHING. Including their CAT! Every item in their house will be gift wrapped!! CHEER!

Whitney's House: This needs a bit of backstory. My sister Whitney HATES those inflatable Christmas lawn ornaments that people put in their yard and is also VERY particular about her Christmas lights. They have to be white and they have to be perfectly straight. So naturally, after her husband Jamie gets up all the decorations to her liking I will... re-decorate. Starting with the lights. They will be replaced with coloured lights and depending on how many are needed I might splurge and by the ones the twinkle. These will be put up both carelessly and crookedly. Then I will put some of the aformentioned inflatable lawn ornaments that my parents purchased for the front of the Family business in their yard just to add even more CHEER!

Liam's House: This is the most complicated and daring of them all. First I am going to switch all the light bulbs in their house to red and green ones. Then I am going to set something up so that when they come in some confetti or fake snow falls on them. Both easy. Then I am going to try and rig something to their light switch so that when they come in Let it Snow starts playing. That's the hard part. My friend Joel gave me the idea for the light switch. He's really smart and good at that stuff so I believe him. I just need to get him to explain it to me better. He said you can just take the switch/face part off of it, switch and maybe add some wires and then it'll work. I'm thinking about using my old iPod mini so that it doesn't ruin it or something. Or an old stereo or something. That is if my iPod mini works. One day it just decided it didn't want to be an iPod anymore and deleted my whole library. Hopefully it'll work again after a 3 year sabbatical. To see how this might work I undid the light switch for my closet to look at the wires and stuff. It's a bit confusing but I think after some google help I should be OK. I did get shocked a bit though. I accidentally hit the switch to turn it on at the same time touching one of the wires that was wrapped around a screw in the side of the switch and got a bit of electricity. It was weird. It didn't really hurt but my finger still feels a bit tingly. It was quite shocking (lame) more than anything, really.

So yeah, those are my plans. I do have a slight problem however. I am debating whether or not I even want to pull one over on my elder brother because he, as Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather) puts it, "He is a man of respect". Not that he's a violent gangster but I mean he is the only one who could really get me back. And since I'm the younger sister he won't hold back. Especially after I've gotten him so good. Then again, not doing something after I've done something to all the other siblings may show a sign of weakness and he may peg me as a scared, easy target. I think I'm going to do it. If I can dish it out I have to be able to take it as well I suppose. And I have a couple pages in my notebook of potential things I could do. One of them involves the ransom notes that I got from the dollar bin at target. They literally read "I have _____. Please leave ______ by the ______ if you ever want to see _______ again. -Master of the Seven Seas". Awesome. I was really excited when I found those in my closet.

So that's pretty much it. Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions. : ) I'll be posting more about this in the future when the time comes to actually pull it off.

Pace

I'm back, Baby!

It appears that my blog went MIA from everyone's reading list. I thought this most curious in the beginning (like 2 days ago) and it caused me quite a bit of stress. I mean, I LOVE hearing from you guys. However, I found the source of the problem and fixed it. You see after my post about the crazy roommate I went a bit paranoid and privatised like everything about this blog, except I thought for you guys. That is, I made it impossible to be found if you searched on google, changed the url and a few other things that I can't even think of. The culprit, it seems was the URL change. So I found out what my old one was and VOILA! It was FIXED! So let that be a lesson to you, DON'T. EVER. CHANGE. YOUR. URL. EVER. Unless you want people to not be able to read anything you right. It's just such a relief that I found out there was a problem because I thought you all had abandoned ship and thought my reading so atrocious that you didn't even want to blog yourselves anymore! Haha. Speaking of which, I have a dunk ton of posts from the past 5 months and I guess I'll post more about the trips and stuff. I'm so behind! I understand if you don't want to read them because when I write blog posts I tend to write epics and catching up with 5 months of that might make one physically ill. So yeah, basically you really don't have to unless you feel like it. -OR- I could re-post one every day and that could be my last half of the month BEDA (which might mean I could break some of them up and make them shorter. You can choose that too. Make them shorter or keep them long?)! Which do you prefer I do?? I'll leave it up to you.

Really though I have Elisabeth to thank. Thank you so much!! If you hadn't brought the problem to my attention I would have just gone on commentless and sad until I just deleted the whole thing! So thank you. That was very nice of you. : )

So normally I would say: now that we've had our Blogspot.com lesson for the day, let's continue on with our normally scheduled blog post shall we? but that's actually all I have for you. Sorry. Basically just an explanation on what happened and asking you what I should do about all the posts you missed. Well it was refreshingly short at least! Leave your answers in the comments! : )

PS. I've missed you guys.