A Day For Dead Relatives

Man, today must be some day. It would have been my grandma's dad's 99th birthday if he were still alive and my grandma's going to one of her aunts' funerals tomorrow. And I blogged about Shappees long departed a few minutes ago. Maybe the old adage, "If you want to know what a girl's going to be like when she's old, take a look at her mother." applies to me.
I would know nothing about dear old Dad's side of the family if my mom weren't into stalking her dead relatives on Ancestry. She followed my line all the way back to New York and found out that they were French barkeeps. It's actually kind of neat.  She's even traced us back to Henry the 8th.
Not that I would mind following in my mother's footsteps

Cooking and My Missing Family Tree

Tonight, my mom is making chicken alfredo and asked me to cut up the veggies. While I was slicing, I began to wonder about what my paternal grandmother was like. She died when I was two, so I don't remember her. I wondered if she liked to cook, or if she didn't. What, if she did, she liked to cook. What she wished she could cook but didn't have the time/money to make.
It's always bugged me that I have no ties to my dad or his side of the family. It's like, I have this whole half of myself that I know nothing about. Both my grandparents on his side died before I was five years old.
I used to have a bond with that side through my Grandma Pauline, who was my grandfather's mother. She was the greatest. About once a week for about two or three (maybe even four) years I would go out to her house on Lapeer and we would drink Diet Coke while playing Chinese checkers. She would tell me about "Bobby" while we watched her soap together, pointing out pictures of my dad as a graduate. Eventually, the visits stopped happening. Maybe she got sick and couldn't take my rambunctious nature. In any case, she died when I was a senior in high school. I miss her.
Wow, all that from slicing some cheap-o peppers for dinner. I should cook more often. I liked my Grandma Pauline. Thinking about her makes me happy and it wouldn't kill me to be happy more often.

I'm Still Around!

Wow, it's hard to imagine that back in August I was gabbing about starting my certificate, and now here I am in March and I'm finishing off my second-to-last quarter of classes before I can do my externship and graduate. Weird how time flies, huh?
On the first night I posted, there were thunderstorms going on, and right now there's a pretty good wind storm going on. I think, since it's been raining pretty good recently, that we're all done with snow for the year (pleaseGodplease!) and moving into spring. It got up to fifty degrees Fahrenheit here in old PoHo today, so I'm not abandoning hope. I miss summertime and it's been a really long time since I saw it.
Along with the "Holy **** I'm almost done with school!" comes the "Holy **** my sister's almost done with school!" My baby sister, Kelsey will be graduating from high school in June. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I mean, I'm glad she's on to bigger and better things, but she's also leaving the nest and going off to college. After twelve or so years of sharing a small bedroom, it's going to be weird sleeping there by myself when she leaves. It'll be nice to have some extra space (although we did make a lot of changes this past week) but I will miss her. Who will wake me up at three a.m. and ask to watch Billy Madison or Austin Powers? Who's gonna make sure my nails look good? Aw man, I'm tearing up! New subject!
It's about five minutes to one a.m. here and I'm really not all that tired, but at the same time, I am. I might do a few things online, start my Office Grammar homework and head off to bed.
Nighty-night.

Ugly

It's 2:30 in the morning, and I'm swallowing massive sadness. I was looking at a friend's Tumblr account when I came across the story of a stray cat named Ugly. It was one-eyed, one-eared and had been beaten pretty badly, but it continued to wander the neighborhood. People told their children to stay away from it, and adults threw rocks at him and shut his paws in car doors when he tried to get too close. One night, Ugly got too friendly with some neighborhood huskies and ended up mauled pretty badly. The narrator of the tale said they tried to get to Ugly, but by the time they got there, it was pretty much the end.
They scooped up a dying Ugly and tried to get back to their house. Ugly, despite being in immense amounts of pain, wanted to suck on the narrator's ear. All he wanted in his dying moments was to show some love. He started to purr, and died before the narrator got inside.
I started to cry typing that. I'm an animal lover and hearing anything about mistreated animals just kills me. I don't know how true all this is, but that poor kitty!
If you want to, you can read it on Tumblr.

A Fresh Start

Today, I turn 22. As I'm writing this, legally, I am 22 years old. I don't feel older; I feel like I did yesterday when I was 21. But then again, I don't think you totally feel older at any point in your life, much less when you're done growing. I suppose you start to feel "older" once every decade or so after you become an adult; more wrinkles, graying hair, aches and pains you didn't feel ten years ago, but this morning, I just feel like a 21 year old who isn't 21 anymore.
Later today, I'll be biologically 22. I was born in the afternoon, seven minutes before two. Maybe I'll feel it then. All I know is that today, I can shed off my 21-year-old skin and be a new woman if I want to. I can dye my hair pink and start a rock band. I could become even more of a hermit. The world is open to me at this moment and maybe I should spend some time today reevaluating who I am as opposed to who I want to be.
Or maybe I should just relax today and have some cake. Let the makeovers, should I want them, wait til tomorrow while I enjoy the fresh slate.

Are They For Real?
The article doesn't say there are any bidders, or even that it's going to happen, but even the thought of watching an execution is not my cup of tea. "Ultimate reality TV" my hiney! Of course, though, there are people who would get their jollies from watching this kind of stuff. The article cites those Casey Anthony nuts who lost sleep watching as probable viewers, and the author is probably right. As you can probably tell, I wasn't as swept away by the "riveting TV" the Casey Anthony trial created. I watched the little bit my grandma made me watch and it wasn't all that blown away. Personally, I didn't see why she was so sensational.
I just can't fathom why this would be put on television. But then, I can't fathom why a lot of crap's on TV. Road Rules anybody?

Flash Mobs

With all this crap over in London and in Philly, it's been all over the news how wretched those damn "Flash Mobs" are. What those people were doing were in no way, shape or form a flash mob. A flash mob is when a group of people gather in a certain place and do a synchronized act ( i.e; the prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson and the Oprah birthday one.) It is NOT meant to be violent. Those people who beat people up were bastardizing the term so they could do their insidious deeds without prior detection.
Now that the media has started calling the aforementioned deeds flash mobs, old people (and some young people) have been up in arms about flash mobs because they don't know what the term truly means.
Flash mobs can be fun, and there was one in town today on one of the bridges. But because of all this recent press and the fact that there was a problem with the bridge (OH NO!) an older gentleman  was crabbing that the people who participate in such acts should be shot en masse after being told to break it up and counting to ten. Is anybody else reminded of that movie in Home Alone that Kevin is watching by that last comment?
SMH.

Squirrels and Saggy Pants

Case in point about there being nothing here for those between eight and eighty... the two most commented-on items in our Talkback section of the paper were... get this... squirrel infestations and loony person (probably old) declaring that saggy pants should be outlawed. While I agree that saggy pants are completely bass-ackwards (how do they walk?), a law banning them? Really? What's next? They've already pushed to ban skateboarders from the park and birds too. I think the elderly in this city won't be happy until they can sit on their front porch all day and say, "Yayupp..." "Uh huh..." to each other back and forth to fill the silence of nobody else being allowed to do anything.
And squirrels? Who gives a crap if there are squirrels in your back yard? They're God's critters too. Just educate your youngins to stay the heck away from them and not to pet them and I doubt there will be a problem.
 My grandma had a pet squirrel who fell out of the tree when I was a tiny. His (or should I say her?!) name was Buddy and she munched on peanuts on our porch from about 1996-1998. I'd play Barbies on the porch while she ate them, occasionally feeding them to her myself. We followed the epics of her life (she had a nest of babies in a tree down the street) until one day she disappeared.
Sorry for the rant. I just find it silly.

Spiders

Spiders creep me out, but at the same time, they're a lot like me. At least, the Daddy Longlegs variety are.
I was just in my bathroom when one came strutting on by (do spiders strut? Yeah, maybe not.) My first urge was to squish it dead, but then I decided to observe it for a while. It eventually made its way to the tub, all the while I'm urging it to stay away from me, and began its descent up. It was kind of clumsy because every time it took a step (steps? Eight legs? I don't know.) forward, it would poke one of its legs out cautiously, or maybe to catch itself. I'm kind of like that too. I'm constantly tripping or having accidents. So, because of this, the spider lives. Other members of my household might not appreciate my sentiments, but Harold the Spider rolls on.

WSGR

Over the past seven months, I've been a DJ for SC4's radio station, WSGR. For those in Port Huron that are reading this, the frequency is 91.3 FM. In those seven months, I've grown a lot as a person. For one thing, before my first show, I developed stomach cramps and drymouth thinking about broadcasting my voice over the air. What if I choked? What would they do? Would they give me the boot?
That first show was- how you say?- horrendous. It could have been much worse, but the first thing I did was the first thing the instructor said not to do. I shut the folder with all the music in it, leaving a smaller, less varied folder of the top 30 songs for that month. Trying not to panic, I piled my playlist high with those songs and desperately prayed for the big folder (we're talking thousands of files here, folks!) to open back up and breezed through all my talk breaks.
 Everything was going to heck in a handbasket. I'd get the big folder open for a few minutes, throw a few songs on the list and it would begin malfunctioning again. In desperation, I began clicking frantically. A song from the list cut off one of my songs, and I decided to let it play through. It's whatever, it's a hairflip, right? Well, I tried again and the darned thing started again. I clicked something else and it began again. Groaning, I let it play through a second time. Things began normalizing after that, and despite being very rattled, I pressed on through the end of the hour.
Nowadays, I barely ever have that much trouble. Last week, I had the best week I've had in months. I still have the odd hiccup here and there, and people who call in with song requests that can't be fulfilled (I always feel bad when that happens.) but I'm so much more confident than I was back in January. This coming Monday is my last day in the studio for the summer and I welcome the break. If I can't get a slot in the fall, that's okay. WSGR has expanded my horizons both socially and musically. I've heard wonderful songs by people who I've never ever heard of except through the radio station and I think that's really cool.

My Grandpa

The thunderstorms entry got me thinking about my grandpa more in-depth. I was reading this forum post on my local paper's website where somebody was commenting that they were a book kind of family and their twenty-four-year-old son just got a Kindle and bragged that it had revolutionized reading, and how they missed print papers as opposed to online ones.
 I don't know why it was, really, that the comment made me think of how it was my grandpa who taught me how to "properly" read a print paper. You quarter it, and then fold it over to the section you want to read. It also made me think of all the word games we used to play together. I'd eagerly ask him for a word to spell and he'd pick one he thought was hard. He'd do the same thing for math.
Fishing was never my thing, but when my grandpa went fishing, I went fishing. I mostly played with the worms and made him bait the hook, always, but it was a good time out at the pond. He taught me how to cast, patiently. This was no easy task; Ms. Perfectly Balanced I am not.
Grampa, you rule, dude.

Thunderstorms!

There was the greatest thunderstorm here tonight!
I've loved thunderstorms since I was a little kid. My grandpa and I used to sit out on the porch and watch them and he taught me how to figure out how far away the storm was. One second=one mile, I think it was. Anyway, we'd sit there and talk about the storm and other random stuff. We could have talked about the color gray for all I cared. I was hanging out with my grandpa, who's really like a sort of father figure to me. That's why I love thunderstorms; the louder and earthquake-y-er, the better.

Get To Know Your Narrator

I figure that if you're going to read a blog, you want to know something about the blogger. Something to give you a sense of, hey! There's a person on the other side of these words!
So, here goes.
My name is Angel. I'm twenty-one (but only for another week! EEE!) and I live in a smallish city called Port Huron, Michigan. It's an all right place to live, if you're seventy or five or own a boat. For anybody else, it's pretty dull.
In late-September, I'm starting my certificate to become a medical receptionist at Baker College. It's not exactly what I'd been dreaming of (I just finished my second semester of journalism at SC4 before my Pell tapped out) but maybe God has other plans for me. Maybe my feelings of inadequacy were Him telling me that I wasn't on the right path.
As you can probably tell, I'm a Christian. I profess that I'm not exactly the posterchild for it, but I believe God's up there watching out for us and that Jesus died to save us.
I live in this dull city in a multigenerational home. About ten years ago, extenuating circumstances forced my mom to move in with her parents, bringing my sister and I with her. Since it's a three bedroom house, I share with my younger sister. It can be a real pain in the pin cushion sometimes, but at least I have somewhere to live and the people here love me. At least I can always see my grandparents when I want (although that can get to feel a little claustrophobic.)
What else is there to really know? Anything else will probably pop out at you through my posts. Good night!