too much fun

I have been doing all sorts of exciting things lately, so I haven't been very motivated to type things on the internet.

One of the exciting things I've been doing a lot of is drinking beer with my attractive and intelligent friends.



Another thing I have been doing is making lots of skirts to wear. And painting some pictures, and playing fetch with my cat.

My uncle taught my cat to play fetch this summer. It is hilarious and adorable.



I spent a lot of time while I was in Montana looking for videos of "The State" to beg, buy or steal. I couldn't find any! I have a couple of very old tapes but I want more, and there are none to be had. I looked on eBay and everything. No one could help me.

Except YouTube! I love YouTube.



They are not captioned but I don't even care since I have them all memorized anyway.

If anyone has any more videos of The State please share them with me!

Say Goodnight, Gracie

New York was fun.

If you are ever trying to meet up with an old friend of yours in Brooklyn and you happen to be on the corner of Meserole and another street, you should be sure to find out if you are on Meserole Avenue or Meserole Street and make sure everyone else knows too. That's my advice to you.

Otherwise you are likely to have a weird and creepy conversation in which both parties claim to be standing outside on the southwest corner of Meserole and Lorimer (for example) and yet clearly, you are not both standing on that corner, unless one of you has somehow leapt into another dimension or an alternate reality from which you can still text message each other even while being invisible.

It turns out that Brooklyn stupidly has two different streets named Meserole, and they run parallel with each other and intersect all the same streets, but are a mile and a half apart. Stupid.

After a weekend of looking at art and eating food and talking to people I like, Kate and I finally got back to Washington at 11:00 last night. Kate had to leave for Reagan at 4:00 this morning, so I didn't get much done today, because of being asleep. Hopefully tomorrow will be jam packed with productivity and usefulness on my part. For now, I'm going to bed. I've been awake almost 10 hours! Far too long for someone as delicate and flower-like as I am.

Good night.

staying in one place is for sissies

I'm in Billings now. I head back to the east coast bright and early tomorrow morning. I am pretty excited to go to the airport at 4 in the morning. My plane doesn't leave until 6:30, but the airport security in Montana is unreal. Getting into the airport takes far longer and the procedure is far more thorough than in any big cities where terrorists actually go. Everyone has to wait at the ticketing area until all of their checked luggage is x-rayed and often opened, in front of you, so you can explain anything that looks suspicious. Then you go through the insanely sensitive metal detectors and have to open all your carry-on luggage.

That was back before water was explosive and you could even have carry-on luggage. I feel extremely apprehensive about having to fly all day with no water and nothing to read. Hopefully that aspect of the Heathrow regulations went unnoticed by the Billings authorities. But I doubt it.

So, I have a long layover in Minneapolis and I'm having brunch at the Day By Day. That is going to be a delicious treat in the middle of my dehydrating plane experience. I hope they still let me out of the airport, because otherwise I'm going to be crying in the bathroom for 4 hours.

Then Thursday my favorite friend Kate is flying to DC to have a fun-filled weekend with me. And it turns out that my other favorite friend Chris Koza is going to be playing some music in New York City this week. So Kate and I are taking the Chinatown bus up there on Friday to mingle with famous rock stars and look stylish.

Chris is playing two shows to my knowledge, with his super awesome bandmate Pete. They are both extremely attractive. And talented. And generally wonderful. And good at climbing trees.



One show is Wednesday at Banjo Jim's and the other is Sunday at the Rockwood Music Hall. Everyone should go see them and buy their CDs and compliment them on their haircuts.

Then on Sunday I will go back to Washington and think of useful ways to spend my last week of summer vacation and read murder mysteries and drink beer instead. It's gonna be great. Call me if you want to drink beer with me.

Safety First!

My stepdad and my brothers were teaching Hunter's Safety all week. Today I helped out by being the Cranky Landowner during the field course. I was very good at this job because I excel at crankiness.

All the little 12 year olds with their big guns on their backs would come up to me and say "um, excuse me, we would like to hunt on your land" and I would say "No. Go away."

Then I would make up whatever other cranky things I could think of. Which was a lot. "Don't you think you're a little young to be out here without your mother?" "That's disgusting! Eating meat is unhealthy and wrong!" "You're going to shoot who? Bambi? That's terrible! What's wrong with you children nowadays?"

Eventually I would let them convince me to say yes, (often after making them do fake chores like pretending to water my garden) and they would go off to the next station.

In between groups I drank coffee and read the Atlantic Monthly. What a great magazine. This newest issue has an article about Presidential Doodles. (Doodling as in drawing on your papers during a meeting. Don't be gross.) It turns out that Eisenhower was a pretty good draw-er. And weirdly, so was Ronald Reagan.

They didn't show any of G. W.'s drawings. I cringe to think what they might look like.

G. W. Bush. There is a guy who could use a hunter's safety class. Never point your weapon at a person!

Guns, Relatives, and Beer

I spent yesterday afternoon shooting guns at things. By "things" I mean "targets and little plastic boxes".

My stepdad took me out to the shooting range in East Missoula. It is right next to the brand-new Something Golfing Community, which is pretty fancy. They have two fake waterfalls and a lot of expensive development housing. The shooting range is not so fancy. In fact it is not fancy at all. I was going to take pictures of myself wielding arms, trodding around on empty bullet shells, and looking tough, but I forgot to recharge the batteries in my camera.

Before yesterday I had only ever shot a rifle. Yesterday I tried out some other kinds of guns. A bigger rifle, a smaller rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols. My favorite was the thirty-ought-six rifle which is the biggest one and the one I was best at. Probably because I used a stand. It was my favorite even before I learned the name of it and got the Tom Waits song stuck in my head.

The best comment of the day was after I was shooting the .357 Magnum when my stepdad said "that was your grandmother's gun."

As it turns out, I am a very good shot. So I'm all ready for the Revolution to begin.

Next, we stopped by the brewery to get some growlers filled. If you are not from the wild west like me, you may not know about growlers. Or maybe you do. Do they have growlers in other regions? Please inform!

A growler is a half-gallon bottle of beer. You can bring back empties and get them filled at a brewery. My favorite brewery is the one that makes Moose Drool, but they were closed because it was Sunday so we had to go to a different brewery instead.

When we got back to the house my aunt and my cousin were there. They had just finished up a week at bagpiping camp in Coeur d'Alene. My aunt is the boss of the camp. My cousin was taking drumming classes.

Then my sister and her boyfriend showed up. They are en route from Richmond (Virginia) to some island west of Seattle where they are going to live in a cabin and work on a farm. So we all sat around and drank some beer while Jamie practiced his practical-joke handshake buzzer toy on us.

Suddenly my stepdad's cousin and his girlfriend were in town! So they came over too. It was a pizza-beer-and-relative festival. Some of us went to ride on the carousel, and some of us went to the Old Post for a pitcher of Moose Drool. Then all of us went to bed. And today, there are no more relatives at all, except me. We are having ribs tonight. My stepdad just started up the smoker and there is fresh homemade barbeque sauce in the refrigerator.

And beer!

dancing stick people

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This is a work in progress. The music is "Drum Trip" by Rusted Root. I don't have anyone's permission to use it. The video clips are from Kigali, Ruhengeri, the road between Kigali and Butare, Akagera, and Volcano National Park (Rwanda) and Stone Town, Chumbe Island, the west coast, and the ocean between the coast and Chumbe Island (Zanzibar). I made the dancing statues on Photoshop, iMovie, and Quicktime Pro.