Summer 2014

It was a long and hot summer.  Even today, in late October it's about 75 degrees out. Still seems like summer! I guess that's what I get for planting those himalayan poppies, which rely on cooler temps and lots of rain. We ended up getting the driest summer on record and they didn't grow. At least I bought us some good traveling weather.

I spent way more time at the coast this summer than I think I ever have.... To be honest I'm not crazy about the coast, the smell really bothers me and it's usually cold and the mist is all sticky and it sticks to your hair. But I've been so antsy to get out of the house and it's only an hour away, and they have stuff to entertain tourists, so I just ended up going there quite a bit. Pictured below is Newport Oregon.

Spent some time up at Mount St Helens. And managed to miss all the excitement too. A few weeks after visiting there was a report that the volcano is starting to act up again, after about ten years of inactivity. 

You may be wondering about the graffitied building that Laura is looking at in the graphic above. That's the UofO EMU (student union building). They are rebuilding it and this was taken right before they started demolition. They invited everyone to come and draw on it before they tore it down. We didn't participate in the tagging; and to be honest, we didn't even know about it, and when we showed up to art class that week we were shocked to find it that way.  

Most of these pictures are of Enchanted Forest, a fun little amusement park up by Salem, Oregon. It's an entertaining little place to visit every so often. They've got a couple of roller coasters, and a few other little rides. Everything within the park was made by hand by the owner. Apparently he's a pretty artistic guy. Not wanting to disturb the forest that it's build within, they had to drag all the materials for building it in themselves without any big machinery. It's a nice place and considering it was all done by hand it's pretty impressive. 

Flowers

This is me every spring when they start selling flowers at the home improvement stores:

I always think of myself as a rational person, but that goes completely out the window when I see flowers. Like when a bull sees the color red- I just lose it. After my flower planting spree, I step back from the yard, covered in filth, wipe my hands off on my pants, nod with satisfaction, go inside and suddenly, sanity returns and I think "whoah. What happened to me? WHERE'S MY MONEY??"

Childhood

I've been revisiting a lot of old interests lately. It's been fun! For example, I discovered I STILL really like rocks! Who would have thought, right??! But they're so cool! Opals especially. So shiny. I'll have to figure out what to do with my old rock collection from when I was a kid. Maybe someday when I have kids I'll go scatter the rocks in the backyard and see if they discover any of the awesome ones.

But anyway, that's not really where I was going with this post. Nope nope nope. What I really wanted to do was share some old fun memories on my blog here.

Not really sure why. Just cuz I randomly remembered them.

I've always been a really creative person. I've always had a big imagination. Recently I've been wondering, why is that?

Well, maybe it could be because of the media I was exposed to as a child? I remember watching stuff like Fantasia, Little Nemo, The Snow Queen. But that was just the stuff I picked out for myself at the video store. It's not like my parents picked it out for me. They didn't force me to watch creative stuff, I just picked it out.

So I guess I just always had weird tastes. But I digress.

There was some stuff my mom wouldn't let me watch. Like Power Rangers. Because the one time I did I kicked my big brother in the face.

When I was about 7 I became obsessed with the cartoon "Sailor Moon". I had to watch it every day at 4:30 or else my life wasn't worth living.

4:00 was always a painful time.

Because I had to wait a full half hour for Sailor Moon to come on.
And they always had not very appealing shows on right before, like Captain Planet or Thundercats.

There was this one time though, when they decided to air something different. Something good. Though I didn't realize it at first.

It was called Ronin Warriors. It took me a few episodes before I figured out that it was good.

But soon I was hooked.

Before I knew it I was running around with the little neighbor boy pretending to be Lady Kyra. She was so cool. She had GREAT HAIR. GREAT EYE MAKEUP. And REALLY COOL NINJA SWORDS. And she was so pretty!

What little girl WOULDN'T want to be her??

Lady Kyra was a tragic heroine- forced to be a villain by the Evil Emperor Talpa. 

All of the other bad guys were jealous of her. Which only made her more awesome. 

Lady Kyra's plight was relatable to any little girl with too much energy and time to spare.

When she wasn't being evil she was sitting quietly in her room whimpering to herself about how she couldn't understand why she was being evil.

Which made sense to me.

But, that didn't last forever. Pretty soon I had to learn how to shut up and be quiet because there was a new baby in the house- my little brother. And if ANYBODY woke him up- ohhh they would rue the day. They would be wishing they were never born.

Everybody thought he was a cute little angel:

But I had him pegged:

That was ok though. 

It didn't really bother me that he was evil. Since, you know, I had been pretending to be the Tragically Evil Lady Kyra this entire time. Maybe villainy just ran in the family. 

It has actually come in very handy having a little brother, especially now that he's a lot taller than me.