Oh. Hey there, Jon

In celebration of my return from college and his high school graduation, my brother Luke and I decided to venture downtown to the House of Blues to see one of our (well my) favorite artist's, Jon McLaughlin!!!!, in concert. I've been looking forward to that concert for quite awhile and was SUPER excited.

Now, when I get excited about something I have a really hard time waiting patiently at home like most normal people. Instead I have to get there WAY early. (...Like the time I may have made all my friends wait outside the movie theater for four and half hours just to get tickets for the Avengers premier...) Our concert started at 9:30 with the doors opening at 9:00. So of course, we logically left at 5:00. Don't worry I'm not completely crazy, we had dinner downtown too. But, even so we still have quite a bit of time to kill before the show and so we spent a good amount of time just walking around downtown. As we wondered it struck me how when we first moved to Houston, I thought it was one of the ugliest cities ever. But now that I've lived here awhile I've come to appreciate the certain beauty our city holds.

 

Around 8:00 we finally decided to go get "in line," and by "in line" I mean we stood against a wall behind the only other two people there. That's right people, who was the fourth person through the door??? This girl. We mostly passed the time taking stupid pictures of ourselves, wondering at the fact that apparently it's against company policy to let you sit down while in line, and creating an elaborate plan for how we were going to touch Jon's piano.

These well laid plans, however,  proved futile. Not because we were unable to carry them out, but rather because once we got in there we were right next to the stage and all we had to was reach out our hand and give that keyboard a little love tap.

Less exciting perhaps, but definitely no less awesome. And the concert? 

It. 

Was.

 AMAZING!!!!

Jon puts on a good show and being THAT close for the whole thing was just cool.

Moving Out/Moving In

When I was getting ready to leave for college, many people had lots of really great advice to offer about packing--what to bring, what not to bring, that sort of thing. While I may have chosen to ignore some of that great advice (turns out there really is absolutely no reason to take more than, oh, let's say, 10  t-shirts to school with you since free t-shirts are about as prevalent as exams on a college campus), for the most part I listened to them and moving into my dorm room went quite smoothly. But NO ONE ever mentioned anything about the difficulties of moving all of that stuff back into your room at home.

It never even crossed my mind that moving back in would be a problem. After all, all that stuff in my dorm came out of my room so, theoretically, it should all just fit right back in, right? WRONG. Maybe it's because when I was at school I only took what I used/needed, whereas at home I'm tucking in all those extra t-shirts around years of acquired craft supplies and my stuffed animal collection.  Maybe it's because my parents have secretly been stashing random odds and ends in my room for the past nine months. Maybe, Luke moved the wall between our bedrooms to give himself more space. Maybe aliens came down and shrunk my entire house ever so slightly so that everything else would be slightly too big to fit just so that they could sit back and laugh as I went crazy trying to find a place to put everything. I don't know. Regardless, I clearly have too much stuff and it is seriously time for some serious spring/summer cleaning.

 

My Birthday Was in Septemeber

We have a tradition here at Austin College know as the "Improv Study Break" each year you bring that textbook you've been staring at for the past 48hours and watch our improv team use it, and anything else with words you care to throw at them, as their script. This year in addition to this traditional routine, they also performed a made up musical about a yellow tadpole named Pippin living in a pond of toxic waste.
So anyway, I went to that thinking it would make for a nice study break. After all, as I learned in Psychology 101, laughter is one of the best stress relievers out there. This "study break" wouldn't have been a problem except that after the improve show I got a text from my friend Sophie informing me that real life fruit ninja was going down and I just couldn't pass that up!***

***Just in case you didn't know, fruit ninja is an video(?) game where you chop random pieces of fruit that fly across the screen while trying to avoid the bombs that are also flying around. My friends, being the wonderfully crazy, creative people that they are, found that this could easily be replicated with some extra caf fruit and a wooden martial arts sword. Obviously there are no bombs, although someone did bring a slingshot to the party.....but I digress.***

Looking back I should have realized I was headed for trouble since I was breaking one of my cardinal life rules:  always be where you're supposed to be (because 98% of the trouble a person can get into is from not being where they're supposed to be doing what they're supposed to be doing). I should have been back in my room studying my little heart out, not out in some field with my friends pelting each other with citrus. If I had been studying, it wouldn't have mattered that as we were packing up to leave Michael reminded everyone of their vow to throw me in the birthday fountain. (---I mean, never mind the fact that my birthday was back in SEPTEMBER.) If I had been studying, I wouldn't have found myself running from what, to an outsider, would appear to be an angry mob of college students covered in fruit juice. If I had been studying, I wouldn't have been picked up and dragged clear across campus kicking and screaming and dunked in a fountain.

But alas I wasn't and so I was.

In case you couldn't tell, I was not overly pleased with those two

I wasn't the only victim that night. Ray and Susie both have summer birthday's and Talia's was in January so our friends decided to just throw all of us in.

Now, to be honest, it really wasn't that bad. I mean sure it was a little cold, and I may have lost a little chunk of hair in the struggle to "get away", but I made them buy me ice cream after and so it was all good.