T-4 Days

Today my family went to Damascus, VA to ride on the Creeper Trail for Dad's birthday. Yes, I know this makes us all sound like pedophiles. It's a 14 mile ride downhill (which is fantastic) through parts of the National Forest and it was absolutely beautiful.

Until we got caught in a flash flood.

This would be more amusing had the forecast been for clear skies. No, dear reader. The Weather Channel very clearly alerted us that an afternoon thunderstorm was certain to strike the area. Because my family never has normal outings (last year we went canoeing and all of us flipped out on placid water) we decided to go anyway.

What the Weather Channel didn't say was that we were going to be in an absolute deluge, complete with spattering hail.

It began raining around mile seven after we had eaten lunch at the halfway point, and mom commented that the clouds behind us made the sky look "just like tornada alley!!". The drizzle wasn't bad at first, but the monsoon that followed was blinding. The trail flooded - there were several places where we biked through water about a half a foot deep - and it was raining so hard dad and I had to keep stopping to adjust our contact lenses so they wouldn't fall out of our eyes. The situation became even more comical when mom made me get off the bike and get under a tree because "bikes are made of metal" and I could be struck by lightening! By this point all we could do was laugh - mom had mud running down her face and neck and her legs were completely black. By the time we got back to the car all of us were completely covered with it. I mean completely. I had to shampoo my hair twice when we got home and put on my glasses so I could get the dirt out of my eyes.

Needless to say it was a good adventure. Spending time with the family is never boring for sure - and on the ride home I couldn't help but think about how cool it is that we can do something like that together and laugh about it afterwards. My family is fun, especially when we also get to stop for coffee :)

I can't believe DYA is almost here! We're having another family adventure tomorrow while dad is on vacation (maybe canoeing again? oh dear...) and I have a nine-hour shift at work Wednesday. Thursday I will pack and prepare to leave early Friday morning for the most wonderful place in the world!!

I am so excited about making dinosaur door tags for my residents. They are going to be AWESOME.

Risk = Hazard + Outrage

First of all, I’m sorry my blog has been spastically morphing for the past month or so. I’m finally figuring out how to play with the settings and I know it’s obnoxious. I’ll stop soon – promise. It’s been ugly for so long and now that I have discovered hotbliggityblog.com I can’t keep my cursor from clicking all of the layout schemes. It’s a disorder; don’t judge me.  

If you haven’t noticed, awesome. Forget that I ever admitted how obsessive I have been about my blog skin and assume that it has always existed in its present form.

Second of all, I finally have work for the entire summer! I’m so relieved. I’ll begin training at Old Navy this Saturday and I’ll be working there in between commitments to Duke Youth Academy and Timothy Project. Only two and a half weeks until DYA is here!! I’m so excited it’s insane.  

Speaking of insane, I need a tranquilizer, preferably with an extra strong shot of consistency and/or routine. I’m down with all the new experiences I’m having but my brain needs to play recovery. Bouncing back and forth from home and school (I was in Boone this weekend with Caroline and Elizabeth) is keeping me incredibly confused about this whole child/adult thing. It’s so weird because essentially I am responsible for doing everything for myself, but all of my financial ties are still with my parents. I do my own laundry, but they give me the quarters, if that can be applied in a broader sense.

I’m certainly not complaining about having to be a dependant. I’m really blessed to have parents that are willing to help me out whenever they can even though I am technically an adult. And it’s also great that I get to have a transition period where I can have freedom to do things on my own but still have mom and dad as a safety net. All the same I am still in a bit of a funk.

When I was thinking about blogging earlier today I had lots of interesting things to say, and now it seems as though they have escaped me. I’m reading Freakonomics and a book about immigration reform and by brain is boiling over with ideas that I can’t fanaggle into sentences yet. I’m in the process of training my brain to think instead of obsess so anything I try to say will be nothing more than incoherent babbling at this point.

Surprise, surprise. This is nothing new.