Klondike Bars and Heavy Metal

or, My Not So Subtle E. E. Cummings Fetish, or Sun Burn and Capos, or Painting Rainbows on the Morbidly Obese.

It's a party right?

I went to the Boyfriend's house yesterday and we went to the store, with his older brother driving. We bought Klondike Bars and listened to heavy metal. That is, incidentally, the first time I have ever eaten a Klondike Bar. Why are they so delicious? They're made of ground up kittens.

I've fallen in love with E. E. Cummings. Especially his poem, 'i carry your heart with me'. I want it tattooed. I love it. A lot. I wish I was that talented.

Boyfriend won't take me seriously because he has a funny name.

Crap, I totally forgot to blog about my issues with capos.

This is a capo -> http://www.johnnykeys.com/images/lost_and_found/capo.gif

It changes the key of the song you're playing (on guitar) up or down.

And that's actually the one I just got today. But before I got this one, I was constantly losing my old one. Which was really, really shitty. Like ten bucks at Target and sponsored by boy bands shitty. But it was cheap and I needed one really badly.

I lost the thing maybe four, five times a week. It was absolutely impossible to keep track of, and each time I'd lose it I'd have a minor melt down because most of the songs I play require it.

But I brought my guitar (and old shitty capo) to Boyfriend's house a couple of days ago, and we went to the local beach. And I forgot it there.

I had to spend four painful days capo-less.

But today I got a new one which sucks less, so maybe it was fortunate after all.

Today I also had to go to my mum's work picnic and paint faces, which was absolutely miserable. I spent five and a half hours sitting outside painting the cheeks of morbidly obese people in wheel chairs on respirators. My mum works in health care.

Now I'm extraordinarily sunburned. It's quite impressive.

But because I suffered, I got a slushy coffee drink with an unmentionable amount of calories and a new capo. Which rocks.

This is Gonna Get Mushy.

I mean it. It may be nauseating. Seriously. If you're that intent on reading this then prepare a garbage can and go purchase saltines and ginger ale.

I love Boyfriend. A lot. We've been together for over a year. Fourteen months yesterday actually.

He puts up with all of my crap. And there's a lot of it.

He's really supportive, all the time. I'll be fucking around on guitar and being awful and he'll applaud and say I'm brilliant. He has most of my paintings and every story I write he reads, then raves over.

He texts me good morning every single day, and goodnight every single night.

He's a dork with me.

He's musical, and horribly tone deaf, and it's amazing.

He says I love you first.

He makes moments, and then he ruins them.

He always makes me smile, and I mean always.

He likes old cheesy movies.

He's polite, he opens doors for me.

He laughs really, really loudly.

He loves awful jokes.

He has horribly red hair.

He holds my hand in public.

He shows me off.

He calls me beautiful.

He's absolutely convinced that we'll be together longer than eternity. I have to say I'll agree.

I Broke My Toe Yesterday.

Sounds like a party right?

I was at the boyfriend's house last night, (I'm always at his house) and I decided that we should go swimming for like, the fifth time that day. I have yet to discover why he's dating me, even I piss myself off.

And he hates swimming. Like, he'll go into his knees and then sit on shore and watch me splash around like an overweight otter. Yay for metaphors! Or similes. Or whichever, I was always a bit hazy on which was which. But doesn't the phrase overweight otter just put an awful picture in your head? It looks about as bad as it sounds.

But anyway, while I was trying to pull boyfriend into the 30 degree water for like the eight hundreth time I slipped on the nasty slime-y whatever that covers extraordinarily pointy rocks at the bottom of the lake. I then got the middle toe of my left foot caught between two minor boulders and fell backwards and was submerged in murky water up to my eyebrows.

Which was deeply unpleasant, incidentally.

And I had to limp all the way back to his house in 3 dollar flip flops, in a soaked sundress. Which is like 3 miles away from the beach.

But the same day he happened to be having a family reunion which he conveniently forgot to tell me about. Hmm.

So I was introduced to great uncles twice removed and his great aunt Mildred, or whomever, in soaking clothes and a toe that had grown to twice its natural size. Sexy, right?

But it was adorable when Boyfriend's two little cousins, ages 6 and 3, ran in and gave him a huge hug, then saw me and gave me a bigger hug than they gave him.

Because I'm awesome.

And I'm mostly kidding.

But anyway, when I got home that night my dad (a male nurse, don't laugh, it's awful, I know) prodded my toe a couple of times and told me it was broken. (I could have surmised this from the interesting purplish color and the fact that it was now about as big as my big toe and throbbing mercilessly.)

He then told me to take a couple of ibruprofen and suck it up.

And that, my friends, is why America has the best healthcare in the world.

And you know what the worst part is? This is my first broken bone. What a rip off.

Blue's a Food Group, Right?

I went to Despicable Me today with The Boyfriend, and it was absolutely fantastic. Even though I'm not a little kid anymore I reserve the right to act like one. We had a Skittle fight (technically Reeses Pieces vs. Skittles) before the show started, much to the chagrin of the surrounding parents, but I thought I was going to die laughing.

I got a blue icee. Screw the diet, bumming around by the lake with a giant blue slushy is one of the best things in the world.

I brought up the brilliant idea that we should go "wading", so I hiked up my leggings and he rolled up his jeans and we exposed our glowing legs.

He went in to just above his ankles and I ended up soaking wet, and it was fantastic.

And to his credit, he dealt with my whining about being soaked and bought me another icee.

The End

The next night we were supposed to go camping again at a National Park near Bozeman, Montana, but my father finally broke down and let us stay in a hotel, because there was another thoroughly nasty front rolling through.

Bozeman is exactly like the town I live in.

It's a college town, extremely liberal, and has lots of funky stores. Nasty, I just said funky.

Anyway, there was this cute little jewelry store in the downtown area, run by a cute little old man and his son. It was populated by lots of blown glass, two cats, and a dog.

One cat had three legs and the other had a third of a tail.

I got a cool necklace.

I bought a bunch of books and then we ate.

And then we drove home. 18 hours.

The End.

Yellowstone (the Second Middle)

The same day we went on a huge hike. Like, 7 miles round trip in thin mountain air. But we saw Fairy Falls at the end of it, which, despite the girly name, is absolutely gorgeous. But crowded with tourists. Later we found out that there was a 1 mile walk from a parking lot that'd get you there as well.

That night we built a fire and started to roast marshmallows. I'm such a bad vegetarian. Mmmm. Cow hooves. But anyway, after about 20 minutes the sky turned green. Like, big freaking huge storm green. And there were massive bolts of lightning going absolutely crazy.

So we bolted into the tent, and like, 5 minutes later it started to monsoon.

Which really sucked.

But anyway, the next day we left, and got stuck in 4 traffic jams due to 2 black bears, and 2 herds of bison.

The second time we didn't see the black bear immediately, and so we pulled over to ask a guy what was going on.

"What's out there?"

"It's a baahh!" the man said, in an unfortunately thick Australian accent.

This was met with a universal "what the hell" from everyone in the car.

It took us a good 20 minutes to figure out what he meant.

Yellowstone (or the Middle)

Was beautiful, even though we had to drive 8 hours to get there. We came in at night, unsure of where our camping spot was, (literally at all), with the charming warning of the ranger at the check in that several large animals had been hit on the road we'd be traveling for the next hour, and that all campgrounds were full.

But it was absolutely gorgeous. We caught the very last of the sunset over Yellowstone lake, setting behind the mountains. The sky was a magnificent canvas of purple and pink and red and orange, streaked madly against mountains the color of twilight, and perfectly reflected in the pool below.

Thankfully we were able to find our campsite and get a tent up without a hitch, then we collapsed into bed.

In the mountains, it gets freaking cold at night.

The next day, we went to see all the attractions.

Old Faithful blows, literally and figuratively. It should be renamed Old Letdown.

But thankfully we saw another geyser erupt at the same time, admittedly a more impressive one.

The hot springs were absolutely gorgeous, so many different colors, but hydrogen sulfide permeates all of Yellowstone because of the thermal features, so pretty much everything just smells like fart.

More to follow.

The Beginning

Of the vacation that is, don't expect an 800 page novel. Jesus.

We started the vacation by going to my cousin's wedding. The fiancee's mother makes my head want to explode. I lived off orange rock candy for two days, which made squeezing into this awful dress surprisingly difficult. I was afraid I'd cough up my small intestine.

And then we drove, from 9 at night until noon the next day, through driving rain. I took a gorgeous photo; we had to drive through Minneapolis, and I put the camera on long exposure, and the picture is through the windshield. It's splatters of liquid gold dribbling down against a dark background.

At about three in the morning my dad nearly veered off the road.

And then we got to this little tiny motel in South Dakota, within driving distance to Mount Rushmore. Our room didn't have TV because it would be an extra like $15 to pay for it, and my father the stickler didn't want the extra expense.

Mount Rushmore sucks. It's patriotic and nasty. Full of chubby tourists (such as myself) taking awful pictures (like myself) of a monument to disrespect.

Lovely.

Why Vacations Suck

When your father has the mentality of a Great Depression era housewife. I just got home from this massive road trip. I live in Minnesota, fairly far up, which means that we are pretty much hours away from anything and everything. And my mother, in her infinite wisdom, decided that it would be a fantastic idea to cram four people, 2 weeks worth of clothes, 2 tents, and enough food to stock a small super market, into a five seat Subaru. Which, in hindsight, wasn't such a fantastic idea.