I Just Ain't the Same Without You in My Life

As I write this I'm still a big, teary, snotty ball of a human. "Has something happened back home?" you wonder. Nope. "Has something happened between Little D and Boyfriend?" you might be thinking. Nope, again. What has happened is I made the mistake of watching the Will Smith movie Seven Pounds. If you haven't seen it: DON'T! I was sobbing so hard through the end of it that they were like waves rolling through my body. I'm going to spoil the movie for you if you haven't seen it, so stop reading if you don't want to know. In the end Will Smith's character is wracked with guilt over a car accident that he caused that killed seven people. To make up for what he has done he sets out to change seven good people's lives. He repays them each with a pound of flesh, which is a reference to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". In Will Smith's character's case that pound of flesh is literal as he ends up killing himself by taking a box jellyfish in to the bathtub with him. He saves seven lives through organ donation, but makes the ultimate sacrifice and repayment of his wrongs by giving up his own life in order to do so.

I thought Seven Pounds was going to be a feel good movie and it was in the sense that seven lives were saved through the sacrifice of one man, but I hadn't read much about the movie and didn't know there was a suicide in it. This week has been pretty rough because it was the two year anniversary of Uncle B's passing. I forgot on the actual date and I usually email my pseudo cousins then and let them know I'm thinking of them and their Dad and that he hasn't been forgotten one bit so I was feeling awful about that and then my little cousin tells me no one even brought up the anniversary on the actual day so I felt even worse for her and her brother. Then I got to talking to my Mom about how the anniversary had just passed and was sad realizing that two years have passed and it still doesn't seem real. So I've just been thinking about him this week and missing him and his crazy antics and missing the little cousins and feeling super bad for them and I just didn't need a suicide movie on top of it, I guess. If you're feeling sad it really isn't the movie for you!

Anyway, I'll just close this by saying that we still love you and miss you Uncle B and I wish you were still here to inspect my boyfriends for me and call me a Rugrat and yell our last name over the fence when you wanted our attention and stop in for dinner at our house unannounced whenever it suited you and make fun of some of our prissier neighbors and I wish you were still here for your two great kids because they still really needed you and would've been so stoked to have you at their soccer games and wrestling matches. We'll never forget the fun times, the laughter, or the craziness and drama you brought to our lives. Rest in peace xoxo Oh yeah and "Stussy Rat Patrol" for life/forever!

Waves roll in and the waves roll out. See the water squirting out of your spout.

Boyfriend and I are still on our get healthy kick (I mean, it's only been a week, we would be wusses if we had burnt out already) so Saturday afternoon we thought instead of lazing aroud and wasting a day we'd head down to the beach for a nice, long walk. We hadn't even gotten in to the parking lot on the hill that overlooks Soldiers Beach when I told Boyfriend to pull in to the first spot he could find. I thought I had seen a whale. I think we just missed it doing a full breach because there was no way that I could've just seen a little spout of water from where we were and I saw like a whole wall of water in the air. So we jumped out of the car and sure enough we soon spotted a couple of whales way far out. They didn't breach again in the 10 minutes we watched them, but it was still neat to see them surfacing and the shower of mist that they blew out of their blow holes.

We then walked the beach and

the tide was super, super low.There

was a bit of water cut off by a huge sa

ndbar and we walked through it to get on to the sandbar and out to nearly where the sur

fers were. The water was absolutely freezing and we couldn't believethere were a couple of kids out without wetsuits on, but then Boyfriend and I both agreed at that age we would've done the same thing.

As we walked along we saw a ton of tiny little jelly blobs on the beach. They looked like bubbles on the sand, but once you got up close to them you could see they were solid.

Further along the beach we came to this outcrop of rocks offshore by about two feet and we walked through calf

deep water out to the rocks to look in

their holes to see if we could find any fish or crabs. As we got up on the rocks we were blown away because there was a deep crevice between the two sets of rocks that looked to be about ten feet deep and filled with water! Like I said,

we were only about two feet fromdry sand and here was this deep pool of water. I had never seen anything like it. Boyfriend ran back to the car to get his phone so we could take pictures of it.

When he got back he said he really wanted to jump in and see how deep it was so I said go for it. He jumped in at the far end of the rocks where it was closer to thewaves, but actually a lot shallower.He walked further and further in to the crevice and was trying to dive down to figure out how deep it was, but the water was so cold that he couldn't get any air in to his lungs.

He finally put his hands over his head and

sunk down and we measured it to be about 6.5 feet deep at that point, probably 7 feet at the d

eepest and this was at low, low tide. When we walked back past it later the tide was up and it was at least 10 feet deep at it's deepest point then.

We walked on to the end of the bay and were

blown away to see just how low the tide was.

We were standing 15 feet out from the normal tide line and could see on the rocks behind us where we would normally be standing. We explored the tide pools and came across lots of cool shells. Boyfriend found a really big snail shell with a snail still in it. When we turned it over and it was unfurling itself, it looked a lot like a cow'stongue...gross!

We walked the length of the bay back and up to the car and headed home to get ready for the night. We had a proper date night and went to dinner and a movie.

For dinner we headed out to this town called Terrigal, which is about a 40 minute drive from us and on the beach, but I had never been there before. We went to a cute restaurant called the Cove right on the water and we were sat on a closed in balcony overlooking the water. We sat and ate and watched the boats just beyond the breaking waves bobbing up and down. The desserts looked amazing but we were worried that we would be late to the movie so we had to skip it this time, but I'd love to go back and try some, as well as drink more of this yummy, warm, spiced, red wine we had. It tasted like Christmas!

We headed over to Erina to see Inglourious Basterds. The theater there was so much bigger and nicer than the one we normally go to. It felt like an American movie theater. They even had nachos! And unlike how the Greater Union cinemas do it now, they didn't have assigned seating so you could go in and sit where you like (you don't know how much the assigned seating thing seems weird to me and bugs me).

We both thought the movie was really good. It was gory in a few parts, but you expect that from Quentin Tarantino, don't you? For it being a movie about Nazis, we sure laughed a lot! Boyfriend is still quoting lines to me today from it.

Today is just a lazy day. Boyfriend is sitting out in the sun right now reading and then he's got big plans to wash the car. I'm doing laundry and stoked that it'll dry on the line in one day because today is hot like summer and sunny here. I'm also going to make some jam thumb print cookies (the recipe is over at this blog http://www.survivingoz.com/) to take to a bbq at Nan and Pop's tonight. We are also bringing REAL american style hotdogs to their house tonight for our dinner! All in all, a real nice weekend!

Oh yeah, we saw The Hangover on Friday night, too, and I would recommend it for a good laugh, too, if you haven't seen it yet. I just love the little baby that they find (especially, and I don't know why this part killed me so much, when they just strap him in with a seat belt in the car like it was normal, and safe, to do with a baby)!

Hope you all had a nice weekend, too. Enjoy those last days of summer while you still can. I hear that it's supposed to be an El Nino year which means lots of rainy days for the upcoming winter.

Sad Story

I know that I still need to finish the Costa Rica adventure, but I thought I'd give everyone an update on what's going on around here these days...

I still don't have a job, though I put in resumes for two jobs in schools last week so I hope I get a call for interviews for them soon.

My Mom officially got a job offer from where she has been doing consulting work and so she and Dad are bidding on condos in San Francisco.

My Dad went out and got himself a new Audi TT a few weekends ago. Talk about living the good life!

He and Mom are on an Alaskan cruise this week and I talked to Mom for a minute today and she was so excited because they had been to a glacier and had seen a porcupine up in a tree!

Nae is trying to work out an internship on a shark cage diving boat at the Farallone Islands for September.

Boyfriend and I had a relaxed weekend: we went and saw Angels and Demons on Saturday and grocery shopped and bought something for Junior's 1st Birthday, which is coming up in a few weekends. I was craving those Animal Style Fries from In-N-Out so we made our own In-N-Out at home-the fries, chicken burgers with cheese, and Oreo shakes. Sunday LC came over for a hang out and then Boyfriend and I went for a walk to the lake to feed the ducks and fish. We are a little bit worried about what they put in Jatz (like American Ritz) crackers because neither the fish nor the ducks would touch them!

When we got back from the walk, Boyfriend had gotten a text from his Mom about his Nan (grandma). She had been in the hospital for awhile and had just been recently moved to a nursing home. Boyfriend's Mom got the terrible news while on vacation in Queensland that it looked like Nan might not make it much longer. Boyfriend, understandably, was pretty upset. Bob called and asked if Boyfriend would like to go visit her and so they did and Boyfriend said it was a pretty sad time, but nice because a lot of the family was there with her visiting.

Boyfriend got the call yesterday morning that his Nan had passed away so I am really glad they all got that one last chance to go visit her. Everyone is pretty broken up about it. She was a really nice lady- from the moment I started dating Boyfriend I became a part of her family...she sent me Christmas cards in California and made me birthday presents. From the stories I've heard she was also a pretty feisty lady in her time, too. She was a big partier, loved the pokies (slot machines) and was a true country girl...Boyfriend said she was pretty handy on a ride-on mower and used to mow her whole huge property back in the day. She won't soon be forgotten by anyone who knew her.

Boyfriend and I have often talked about this and my Mom and I have also talked about it, too...his Nan and my Grandma on my Dad's side were like the same person...They were both partiers, they both had lost a child, they both took in "stray" children and made them part of their families, they both could meet a person once and become life long friends with that person, and they both smoked and died from complications due to their smoking. It is really incredible to us how much they had in common.

Boyfriend said the other day that he is glad that we got together when we did because he had the opportunity to meet my Grandma once before she passed away and because I got to know his Nan pretty well and my parents got to meet her and know her on their last trip out here, too. Our grandmothers will never just be people in stories to each other; we both knew and loved them and it just feels like an extra bond that we now share between us.

The world lost a good person yesterday...

Losing a Whole Year

We had all the god sisters, A, R, and J, plus two boyfriend in tow, and the rest of the travel group over for New Year’s Eve. Nae popped in, but had plans with friends so she didn't stick around for long. It was a weird night, I was still upset about the Big Sur fight and just didn’t know what was going to happen with me and S, even though he said nothing was changing because of it. I didn’t drink but still had an alright time.
We heard the coyotes in the field behind our house as we sat out by the pool and it was a really eerie sound. R's boyfriend, Emo, said it sounded like they were trying to tempt a dog away from its yard. J or R said this had happened with her dogs when she lived at home at her parents house up in the mountains. What happens is coyotes, like wolves, will send in a female in heat to attract a regular dog to follow it or they will send one coyote out to play with the dog, like "look at how much fun we're having" before running away and getting the dog to follow it. The single coyote then leads the dog back to the pack of coyotes where it gets eaten. R or J, I'm fuzzy on which sister it was said a coyote charmed her dogs and the next thing she knew they were off, in the middle of the day, chasing after it. She had to run barefoot across the property to try and get them. I think she said she ended up with a ton of thorns in her feet.
S must have hit the bottle hard, cause he was up at 3am puking in the garden. He had fun the next day watching the Rose Bowl with all the guys and learning the rules of American football. In the morning, we all took a walk down to the beach (like 15 of us) and we joked we must look like a big Mormon family or people from a commune.
Everyone left on the morning of Dad’s birthday and I was really sad to see them go, especially my godparents. I feel like I don’t see them or my godsisters enough and we grew up together, seeing each other probably a few times a month. I don’t know, I had tears in my eyes when I hugged them good bye. I hate that a whole year goes by between seeing them. They and Glen and his wife, Barbie (in a cute way, she wears all pink all the time) are like my aunts and uncles and their kids, our cousins, because Nae and I only have two uncles, no aunts, and no cousins in our real family.
We took Dad to see Gran Torino for his birthday present as he is a big Clint Eastwood fan. I was blown away by it. Lots of people didn’t like it, but it hit me right in the gut. We then went out to dinner at this seafood place at Moss Landing and watched the sea lions on the pier for a whole .5 seconds before it got too cold to be outside.

Finding Home

I was excited to be back in California. I was nervous to see the new place, I mean it wasn’t really MY home anymore was it? I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t lived there or grown up in that place, I wondered if I’d feel comfortable. Nae and Mom came and picked me up, Dad hates that kind of stuff, and we drove back to their place. My parents are so lucky. Nae’s house is maybe a 15 minute drive from them. They are out in farm land and have a nearly 180 degree view of the ocean from their front balcony. It is an awesome house and they set up the pool room as a separate apartment for me to stay in. It was like heaven getting in to their Jacuzzi, it was so deep, you’d sit and the water would be over your shoulders. Most mornings when I got up there would be muddy raccoon footprints all around the pool. At night we would hear and see 3 great horned owls fly around the pine trees. We went for walks pretty much daily, with Mom down to the beach, and Dad and I started doing this loop walk with a killer hill on it. Dad and I even saw a bobcat one day in the parking lot near the beach.
I had hoped to get a job at the local Target until S arrived. I applied the day after I got back. I got a rejection letter from them. Me, who already had experience working there. Me, who had a freakin college degree. I couldn’t get a job at Target! So I applied other places. Nobody called me back so I didn’t work before S came out, I had only a few hundred dollars (like 4?) in my account for Christmas presents, travels while S was here, and money to take back to Oz with me. It wasn’t looking good.
It was really nice to spend the time with my Dad everyday though. We lived at the movies, walking, treasure hunting, and at the dollar store! They have the best chain Mexican fast food place up there, Super Taqueria, I love that place.
It was a pretty stressful time for my parents. They had just moved for my Mom’s work, my Dad had retired for it, then there was rumblings that she was going to get laid off. She was freaking out. She eventually did get laid off, after Christmas, along with a boat load of other people, but she’s managed to get by and find work again so it’s turned out ok.

A Plain Morning

Two days before I was supposed to go home, I stepped on a bee or a wasp while playing with a puppy in S’s backyard. It hurt, but I didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal. The next day I had to take all my luggage and catch a train to Sydney. The foot was killing me; I could barely put any pressure on it and it had swollen up so much and was an angry looking red/purple. S took a half day at work, met me at our hotel, and we went and grabbed lunch.
The Hungry Jacks (Burger King in the U.S.) we went to is attached to the biggest movie theater in Sydney and it’s where they do all their movie premieres. There were tons of people lined up waiting for movie stars, even though they wouldn’t be there for hours. We wondered who they were waiting for, until we saw the signs: Zac I love you! Go WildCats! We had just stumbled upon a preteen gay boy’s wetdream: The High School Musical 3 Premiere. When we got back from lunch and were in our room, we could look down to the theater entrance. We think we saw a tiny Zac (whom by the way S and I call Vas Deferens because it makes me laugh and sounds similar, look it up) and Baby V waving to the camera.
I couldn’t even get my high heel on for dinner so I wore thongs to Malaya and we took a cab cause I was straight up hobbling at this point. Our hotel room was a studio apartment so it had pots and pans and stuff. I filled up a pan with cold water and tried to get ice (the hotel didn’t have ice or ice machines anywhere, WTF?) to put in it and soaked my foot for an hour before bed. I also put some toothpaste on it cause I had read online (hah) that that was supposed to help the pain. It kinda did? The next morning we woke up, grabbed a coffee, then said our goodbyes for 6 weeks while everyone was rushing passed us on a busy Sydney street trying to get to work. Of course I was crying. People probably felt sorry for me like “Who is this D-bag breaking up with his chick on a Tuesday morning in rush hour?” I made S laugh by telling him not only did people probably think he was a dick for breaking up with me in public, but he was a double dick for breaking up with in public a girl they probably through was crippled, once they saw me limping away from him!
Not gonna lie, the foot looked like a sausage and I thought it might explode and kill me on the plane ride home. Luckily it wasn’t too crowded and I got an empty seat next to me. I took an antihistamine and that didn’t make me sleepy so then I took some sleeping pills and passed out. The foot looked better in the morning but I still was a little hobbley.