Dear Florida

We're here!

Ready to try this again,
Lacey


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I'm not sure about popular demand, but we're totally doing the rest of this.
(one for the clip, one for the full song)

Dear Utah

I thought it would be different this time . . . and it was.  I thought that would be a good thing . . . not so much.  I've made some (hopefully) lasting friendships and had some great experiences and I have only a few regrets.  But the judgement was still there, and now I am not only willing but eager to leave.  Pretty sure I'm not going to miss you this time.

Disillunsioned-ly yours,
(and also totally going to miss those lasting friendship people)

Lacey

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Top of the to-do list (although not necessarily first)? Finally swimming with these guys.

Lesson Number the Last

First graders hug regularly and without any particular reason.

Fourth graders don't hug without reason . . . but when they have one, they come back for four more and try to tie you to a chair with a jump rope and swear up and down that you can't go because they said so.

Those kids were in kindergarten when I started working there . . . gonna be feeling that all the way to Orlando . . .


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My go-to for these sort of moments.

Modern Marvels

Imagine this: you're driving down the freeway in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska (which has been scientifically proven to be flatter than a pancake) and you pass a sign that says "Monument ahead DO NOT STOP."

Little odd, no?  I mean, don't they usually want you to stop and take a look at monuments that someone took the time to create?  But then you drive a couple more miles and then you see this.

And you kinda get why the sign says not to stop.

That was the story at the end of my family's Mormon pilgrimage summer vacation (I'm oddly conflicted about which phrase to strike out there . . . ) back in 2001.  *insert obligatory moment to note just how freaking long ago that was here*  So naturally we had to stop and see just what the crap this was, even though it wasn't in the plan and it was the end of the trip so we were all pretty exhausted and more than a little sick of each other.

Turns out it's a museum.  And a pretty cool one too.

We didn't spend as much time there as I would have liked, seeing as it was an unscheduled stop and my parents are all about schedules, but we weren't rushed through it either.  The part I remember most was at the end.  While you're inside you can totally forget you're actually on a bridge over a freeway and there are cars speeding under you at seventy-something miles an hour (is the fear of being on a bridge when it collapses a phobia that exists?  I'm pretty sure this place could create it).  But at the end there are a couple of windows and you can see those cars whiz past while right behind you is a display talking about people traveling this same route on covered wagons and how the change from one to the other happened in only just over a  hundred years (1840s to 195-Eisen-whatever).  For some reason that's really stuck with me in the thirteen (oy!) years since.  The speed of advancement once the ball got rolling, you know?  Foot to animal took forever, then animal to wheeled stuff took less of a forever, then motorizing the wheel only took, like, a blink of a forever and then before you know it Montana has no speed limit and then BAM! it does before I get a chance to Autobahn it up to Glacier.

On another note, other technology has, naturally, kept up . . . or at least kept on advancing just as (or more) quickly (thank you Phonecians!).  In the 1840s you pretty much weren't going to see the people you left behind again, and you probably wouldn't be hearing much from them either - depending on where you ended up, anyway.  It might even be a year before they knew whether you made it without dying of dysentery or something. (side note: need that shirt!!)

Fast forward to the 80s when my parents (and I) moved from Washington to Idaho.  Not quite as far, but still far enough to have blown some 1840s minds if we'd told them we could make the trip in a day.  A very long day . . . but a day.  But still there was no way for my grandparents to know we hadn't all died of dysentery car crash or vanished into some sort of black hole until we got there, got moved in, got a phone line set up, and called everyone they knew (because as I understand it, they couldn't just text everyone their new phone number way back then) to let them know they were here and how to contact them.  But still, only a couple of days to get there and let everyone left behind know we were there.

Fast forward a bit more . . . I'm planning on instagramming our entire trip.  And updating my facebook status every time we stop for gas.  Not only will everyone we know know when we arrive (and pretty much the moment we do), the people we're crashing with will know almost exactly when to expect us the day we're heading to their place.  And if we do get sucked into one of those black holes?  There will be literally at least a hundred people who know roughly what area to start the search and exactly how long it's been since we were accounted for.

How amazing is that?!?!

It must have been nice to be able to let your kids just run all sorts of amok until it got dark, and it certainly must have been tons cheaper to grow your own non-chemically-infested food . . . but I'll take living in the here and now over pretty much any other time.  Because here and now is pretty freaking cool.


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I wanted to post the cheese episode because it's eriously my favorite, but I'm having some trouble finding it.  I suppose this one will have to do instead.  :-)

Ode to Thirty

Also known as my second twenty-ninth birthday.  Because

Yeah, that sounds about right.  Anyway.

Starin' out into the wild blue yonder
So many thoughts to sit and ponder
'Bout life and love and wonderment of
And this craziness in my heart

Too old to be wild and free still
Too young to be over the hill
Should I try to grow up
But who knows where to start

So I just sit right here and have myself another snowcone
Do my best to waste another day
Sit right here and have another homemade snowcone
Let the packed boxes melt any blues away

Sun comes up and sun sinks down
And I seen 'em both in this two-horse town
Up for days wishin' for a raise

 Or just a job that is full time

From the answers and the reasons why
I'm at these crossroads in my life
And I think I mostly know

 Which way to fly

So I just sit right here and take another trip to the library
Do my best to waste another day
Sit right here and stack the books two feet high
Let the crappy novels (these days) melt any blues away

Maybe I'll settle down, have babies
Or stay kid-less and stay free
Which road I travel
Is still (slightly) a mystery to me

So I just sit right here and cross another square off the calendar
Do my best not to waste another day
Sit right here and grasp at straws for one more line
Let the passage of time melt any blues away

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 Apparently Kenny Chesney employs time traveling songwriters that steal from blogs.  Because that's a much more interesting explanation than saying I heard the song a couple weeks ago for the first time in ages and totally identified with it.

 

Just Thoughts

~ We are T-minus 30 days until we get the heck outta Dodge.  There's so much to do . . . and yet it doesn't seem like all that much.

~ I swear end of the year testing will be the death of me.  Don't get me wrong, on the one hand I am literally getting paid to sit in silence watching a bunch of kids take tests on computers.  But on the other hand . . . I am spending the day in total silence while the kids are working on computers.  Soooooooooooooooooooooooo boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooring!!!!!!!!!  I will miss pretty much everything else, but I am SO glad that this is the last time I will be doing testing.

~ I officially do not get what the big deal is about 5 Guys.  Sure, it's a good burger but there's nothing special about it.  Certainly nothing special enough to warrant the cult following and being voted Best Thing On The Entire Planet by practically everyone.  Give me In'N'Out any day.  Or even Sonic.

~ English has got to be such a difficult language to learn.  Almost every person I've ever met for whom English was their second language has had a hard time saying my name - no matter what their first language is.  It would appear that ours is pretty much the only language in which the C and Z sounds are significantly distinct . . . which, of course, makes my name fundamentally different.  In fact, it took one particularly sweet little second grader from Africa (wish I knew where) about a month to figure out that my name was not, in fact, Miss Lazy.  At which point my name became Miss-Lazy-I-Mean-Miss-Lacey.  If it were a fourth grader doing it I would think they were being deliberately obnoxious, but he's so adorably delighted when he gets it right on the first try.  He's one of the ones I wish I could take with me.

~ Two parts trippy, one part amazing, two parts fueling the mental rant about people who make fun of selfies I've had going on in my head for a couple of months now. Also - I totally want those "reading" glasses.

~ Abbreviated rant: I've been taking selfies since I was in high school, and so has everyone else I was in symphony with because our symphony conductor took them all the time and we all thought he was awesome.  People who think teenage girls taking selfies is a sign of the end of times really need to get over themselves.  Seriously, have you seen those pictures of that bunch of dudes taking a selfie back in the 20s?  And if people - ESPECIALLY teenage girls - feeling confident in themselves and being willing to admit it to the world is a bad thing . . . I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

~ Snow cones last week, hot chocolate this week.  I'd be annoyed if that wasn't so utterly typical.

~ I am in the middle of the biggest reading slump in the history of my entire life - both in length and number of books.  I've read 38 books so far this year, and my average rating is a 2.6  (yeah, I actually did the math.  that's how frustrating it is)  whereas my normal rating for a year's worth of books is in the vicinity of 3.5 (yeah, I did a lot of math . . . which hopefully tells you how bad this slump is).  I have no idea what's going on, but most of the books I've been reading lately have just SUCKED.  It's not like I'm reading a pile of Twilight fanfiction either - I'm reading the same genres I've always liked, and there's been plenty of variety.  And still, they all suck.  Some are less sucky, and there have been a handful - seven, to be precise -  that I've truly enjoyed.  But holy crap, I've had four months of finishing book after book and putting them down and thinking what a waste of time it was and how I could have been rereading something good and just wishing I could enjoy reading new books again and I just have to wonder what the crap the problem is.  I'd ask for recommendations but at this point I'm not sure I'd appreciate them.  Blargh.


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We've totally adopted this as our theme song around here.  If you haven't seen this movie, drop what your doing and go see it.  But I don't think it's in any theaters anymore, so just go download it or something.  It's that awesome.

Here in the Field with My Feet on the Ground and My Fate in the Air

So I was on a Broadway kick the other day and wound up listening to, among other things, Once on This Island, which I still love as much as I did when we put it on my junior year of high school.  (also among other things: discovered I still know the choreography for the entire opening number . . . going on thirteen years later.  did I mention I was on the tech crew, not in the cast?) (on another note someone really should put our version up on youtube.)

Anyway.  Did you catch the part where it's, like, the end of March?  Crazy.  And did you catch the part where we made it facebook official that we're moving back to Florida in May?  Yay!!!

Bringing everything together, I know I've said essentially the same thing for, like, all last year, but this song is totally how I'm feeling right now.  When we moved here we didn't intend to stay permanently (although we didn't know where we were going at the time) and we figured we'd be here for about five years, and it's turned out to be almost exactly that . . . but it feels like it's been so much longer than that at the same time.

Let's just say we're psyched. :-)  To move on, to get out of here, to get going with life . . . just everything.

It's a little weird to me to think we're moving back to Florida.  The last time I did that there was a lot I wasn't ready for.  Mentally, emotionally . . . spiritually . . . ecumenically . . . grammatically . . . seriously though.  I did not see a lot of things coming, and when we left I was so burned out on everything I couldn't even fathom a world where I would want to go back.  What a difference five years makes, eh?  Long story short, we leave in 58 days - and I'm the one who put the countdown on the calender.

Did I mention the part where we have an apartment and everything?  SO.  FREAKING. EXCITING!  It came available a little sooner than we'd hoped, and they can only hold it for so long, so we had to bump up our travel plans by a week.  So I'll be missing the last week of school and all the fun stuff that goes on that week, which is really depressing.  But what can you do, you know?  Besides, that means I'll be back to having a full time job one week earlier too.

And yeah- totally planning on going back to Disney.  So start planning your visit to us, like, now.  Like Ashli.  (seriously - she started asking me question about what kinds of discounts I could get her and her friends, like, three months ago.  and what time of year to come.  heads up - mid-January.  And I say this as someone who's worked at a school for four years . . . unless they're really struggling or something, get their homework, pull the kids out of school and go in mid January.  or early October.)  You know you want to. ;-)

So basically we'll be spending the next two months as a cross between this

and this

but it's kind of okay.

And perhaps once we get to the other side of the country life will get interesting again and I'll start feeling like I have things to blog about again.  So we all win!  (I think.)


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They're missing a lot of the best lines here but looking for the other Pirates clip totally had me remembering how I went to see At World's End the day I got back to Florida after the second time I drove out (did I mention this will be technically the fourth time I've moved cross-country?) because it came out while I was driving but I was dying to see it so I went that night anyway after, like, four straight days of driving and I really don't know how I stayed awake to watch it (especially since I went to, like, the very last showing of the night) but it was awesome.  Anyway.  The first three Pirates movies rocked.  And on of the first things we're doing is going on the ride.