30 Day Challenge: Day 6

Day 6: A Picture Of Something That Makes You Happy

I've been trying to decide how superficial I want to be with this blog. I could go with something that everyone would expect:

my man, Peyton Manning!

Matt Diaz with his son [right] and daughter [left]

or something potentially unexpected:

curled up by the fire with a good book and apple cider

But I decided to go with:

family tree

We took this picture on Thanksgiving. We always take pictures in Memama's backyard, and a few years ago we had all of the kids climb a tree in the basin and take a "family tree" picture of Greatmama's great-grandkids. So this year we decided to do a family tree picture with our family. The picture turned out GREAT. Everyone is smiling, even Grant [and without his usual Asian eyes!] and it was fabulous. Mom decided to use this picture instead of the beach picture for our Christmas cards [which I am SO thankful for.. I look better in black and jeans than in white and khaki]

It makes me happy because this was the first time that we've ever been together on an actual holiday and not argued. Julia didn't want to do pictures, so she got upset later, but there were no major blowouts. First time ever, I believe. Holidays are always rough because I know a fight is coming eventually, but they're still my family and I love them. And I wouldn't trade them for the world. Though I would change Julia's attitude most days.

In other news, tomorrow will probably be my favorite blog. It will also probably take me forever to write. I have too many favorite movies. It's a curse. But I love it!

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30 Day Challenge: Days 4 & 5

Day 4: Your Parents
Day 5: Your Siblings


Well, I've written about my parents for the 30 Day Meme, so I'm cheating and skipping that one. Instead I'm writing about my siblings today.

My brother is 17, 6 years younger than me. We used to hate each other. Like, seriously loathe each other. My parents always said that we'd become best friends one day, but I never believed them. Dad was an only child, and Mom has a less-than-ideal relationship with her siblings. But when I went off to college, it was like Grant realized, "Oh. Now it's just me and Julia, and she's the favorite because she's the baby. Crap." So we became friends and teamed up to take out the baby.

Of course, I'm kidding. Kind of. We do seriously team up against Julia quite often. She's a tad bit spoiled.

Grant is an amazing swimmer. He swims fly, back, and free, and he's finally the top of the pack as a senior! He's .08 seconds away from a state time in fly, and he's about half a second back in backstroke. This is our year! He's finally motivated to do well and try his best, and he gets upset when he doesn't do well. He used to not care. He still doesn't care about school, but he does eventually want to be an engineer. That's better than his original goal of trashman.

My sister will be 13 on Saturday, and I'm still not sure that we're related, except for the fact that our baby pictures make us seem like doppelgangers. But we are polar opposites. She is perky, clothes-and-shoes-obsessed, and athletic. And not musical, though she wants to be. She does cheerleading, plays golf, and wants to run cross country and track in high school. She doesn't eat anything but mac and cheese, bread, pizza, and cereal. And I wish I was exaggerating. She has admitted to being terrified of getting fat, but Mom and Dad don't think it's anything serious. She eats a lot.. just not anything healthy. All carbs and cheese. It's not fair, really.

Basically I'm just extremely jealous because she's all of the things I'm not. But I'm okay with who I am.. I just wish I was her too. Which makes me sound more emo than I intended. It's supposed to be a joke. I promise :]

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so I might have had a date today...

Today at work, I was asked to be Geoffrey's [the Toys R Us giraffe] handler, which means that I walk around with whomever is in the Geoffrey suit and make sure that they don't fall or walk into things.. or that kids don't attack him/her. Pablo was Geoffrey, and we had a BLAST. He is hilarious, even without saying anything [because obviously giraffes don't talk]. So afterwards, we talked about getting milkshakes because it was so hot in the suit, so we went to Steak & Shake on our break. We went and had a good conversation about family and sports and school and such. We went up to the front to pay, and the lady said, "Okay, that'll be $11.52." I was like, "oh, no, it's separate tickets." and he goes, "no it's not" and shoved his card towards the lady.

I didn't know what to say.

Nobody has ever paid for me, except a date. All of my friends always tell these stories about how their guy friends never let them pay for anything. I only have one guy friend like that, but half the time he's broke so I won't let him pay. Oh, and Henry at work. He always offers to get me something when he goes on break [fries, drink, etc] and he got me cough drops when he saw on facebook that I was sick. But other than those two, nobody has ever done that for me. I almost stroked out when Jake paid for fries for me at Chick-Fil-A one time and told me not to worry about paying him back. But I thought it was just him being a nice guy.

Then he texted me tonight. He got suckered in to staying late at work, so he texted me when he got home. We just talked for a few minutes, then he sent me this:

"We should go eat again sometime when we don't have to be back at work."

So now I don't know. I'm finally getting a good group of guy friends again after.. well, after whatever happened. That's another story. But the guys at work are so great. Derek, Henry, Pablo, ROB,  Brandon, Joseph, John.. everyone. I love them to death. I finally don't just get treated like one of the guys, but I don't want to worry about boys right now. Not there. Does that make sense? I don't know. I know I tend to overanalyze things because I worry like no other, but I really don't want anything to get messed up here. We have a great groove at work, and it needs to stay that way.

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30 Day Challenge: Day 3

Day 3: Your First Love

This is the hardest thing for me to talk about in my life. I've only had one boyfriend. He was the first guy who liked me back, my first slow dance, my first date, my first kiss, my first 'I love you', my first Valentine, my first love.

senior breakfast -- May 06

He was the first guy that I ever considered marrying, the first guy that told me that he wanted to marry me, the first guy to ask to spend the rest of his life with me.

one of my favorite pictures ever. I loved this pirate statue!

And he was the first guy to break my heart.

Christmas party with our high school friends -- Dec 06

For my previous blog challenge, I wrote about him in great detail, so you can read it there. For now, I'll just wrap this up with some of my favorite pictures of the two of us from a much happier time. [I know they're small, but you can click to enlarge them]

first picture together, D-Now -- Mar 06

first dance, senior prom -- Apr 06

senior prom -- Apr 06

lifeboat drill.. he was Rose, I was Jack. I got jipped -- Aug 06

formal dinner on my senior cruise -- Aug 06

my first ever college football game -- Sept 06

Chick-Fil-A Bowl, UGA vs VT -- Dec 06

SAO semi-formal -- Nov 07

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December Bucket List

I got inspired by Rachie, who got inspired by Kay, so I'm going to do a December bucket list.

1. Read Voyage of the Dawn Treader before seeing the movie. The movie [with BEN BARNES] comes out on the 10th, so I should read quickly! Alysha and I are hopefully gonna have a date night to go see it :]

2. No cokes for a week. It's been SO hard for me to do. I'll do it for a few days, then I'll have a really bad day or I'll get a REALLY bad headache from caffeine deprivation, so I'll have one. I know that it's almost impossible to cut cold turkey, especially around the holidays, but I'm gonna try.. for one week. Then maybe I'll decide that I can have 1 or 2 cokes per week, Sunday to Saturday, or something like that. But none for now.

3. Bake an apple pie. I love apple pie, and it's pretty easy to make. Maybe I'll make several and share with friends, neighbors, and/or co-workers.

4. Run 20 miles each week. And by run, I mean walk/jog/run. Now that the semester is over, I can actually justify going to the park instead of going around my neighborhood. And the park is so beautiful that I want to just keep going and going and going! So it'll be easy to do 3+ miles each day!

5. Have a family game night. Our family is constantly going, between swim practice, cheer practice, Wednesday night church, Mom working, Dad travelling, and early morning and after school meetings/homework help.. so when we're all together, we're resting and usually watching tv. But one night, I want to play games instead. Julia got The Amazing Race for the Wii, so maybe we could all play that?

6. Complete 30 Day Challenge. This means that I have to blog more than once every two weeks. More like once every two days. And then some. AKA I need someone to be like, "Lynn, have you blogged today?" Any volunteers?

7. Unpack my boxes from Athens. Yeah, they're still sitting in my room beside my bed. From August. I just haven't been motivated to mess up my room to organize things before putting them away. But I need to before Mom has a duck.

8. Print pictures to put in room. I have zero pictures up, and I just got two new frames for my birthday from Jordan and Katie. Therefore I need pictures. I also am newly addicted to Mod Podge. So I want to print some pics to mod podge a canvas for my room as well.

I wanted to do 10, but I couldn't think of more. So we'll do 8 this month. I'll update this list in January with "pass" or "fail" and make a new list for January. You should too!

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30 Day Challenge: Day 2

Day 2: Meaning Behind Your Blog Name

So the reason this blog took so long is because I don't actually have a blog name. It's been "SRSLYlynn" just because of where I used to be hosted [srsly.nu], but I wanted something real. I thought about using a song like April and Ansley, so I started thinking of my favorite songs.

Somehow, "Love Shack" didn't seem appropriate.

So I went through my iTunes library and started listing some of my favorite songs:

1. Joyful Noise - Flame
2. Livin' On A Prayer - Bon Jovi
3. Blemish To Beauty - Kristen MacDonald
4. Gold Digger - Kanye West
5. Running Just To Catch Myself - Mark Schultz
6. Holding Out For A Hero - Bonnie Tyler
7. Gravity - Sara Bareilles
8. Slide - The Goo Goo Dolls
9. Shadowfeet - Brooke Fraser
10. The Mixed Tape - Jack's Mannequin
11. Scream [yes, HSM3]
12. Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison
13. In Love With The 80s - Relient K
14. Dancing Through Life - Wicked
15. Girl Next Door - Saving Jane
16. When The Stars Go Blue - Tyler Hilton & Bethany Joy Lenz
17. Empire State Of Mind - Jay-Z
18. Little Miss Can't Be Wrong - Spin Doctors

And as much as I wanted to go with Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, I decided on Livin' On A Prayer. It's one of my all-time favorite Bon Jovi songs, plus it's got a double meaning regarding my faith, so it's a winner.

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30 Day Challenge: Day 1

Day 1: Introduction, Recent Photo, and 15 Interesting Facts

INTRODUCTION
I saw Daniel start to do this 30 day challenge, and slowly but surely, most of my friends with blogs joined in. So I finally decided to cave and do it, even though half the time I don't have time to BREATHE, let alone blog. But I'll make it work!

RECENT PHOTO

Emily & I, tailgating at the Idaho State game on my birthday!

15 INTERESTING FACTS
I've done a few of these before, but here goes:

1. The only Beatles song that I like is "Let It Be," and that's only because I heard the Dave Barnes cover of it. People are generally surprised by this, especially because of how wide my musical taste is.
2. I've had 10 surgeries in my life: 4 sets of tubes in my ears, a tympanomastoidectomy [basically my right eardrum burst and was rebuilt], two surgeries to remove a dysplastic nevus [basically a raised mole on my leg that could have become cancerous later in life] that was ovular in shape on the back of my right leg [8 inches long, about 5 inches wide - I still have an 8 inch long scar about 1 cm wide which feels no sensation], adenoids removed, wisdom teeth, and my jaw surgically broken and expanded. Pair that with my super small veins that like to roll, and needless to say, I don't like hospitals.
3. We moved around a lot, so I went to 8 schools in 9 years, including 3 different high schools. But no, I'm not an army brat; my dad's an engineer. Go figure.
4. I can't hear a song without singing. I don't care if I'm in public, in a car with people I don't know, whatever.. I have to sing. Even if I'm sick as a dog, I will try to sing until my throat gives out.
5. I'm dying to go skydiving someday. I have a feeling that I would chicken out once I got up in the air, so someone might have to give me a little nudge, but I want to do it. I also want to bungee-jump, but not as much as I want to sky dive.
6. I'm addicted to games, especially card games. My current obsession is Nerts, but I also love Phase 10. Oh, and Skipbo. And Euchre. And Rook. And Spades. Yeah.
7. I want to teach middle school science. I have such a heart for that age group, and I can't wait to be around them all day every day! The irony here is that I always hated science, although now that I think about it, I did take two extra sciences in high school. Then I got to college and thought I was done. Each semester, I thought, "This is it! The last science class I'll ever have to take!" But then the next semester I would take another science class.. and then another.. and then another. My last science class was my Earth Science For Middle School Teachers class last spring, and I thought I'd die when it first started. The more we learned, however, the more I fell in love with it. And now it's what I want to teach! Earth science or physical science.. I could live without life science though. Blech.
8. I can't stand silence. I have to have some kind of noise going on when I study, which my parents think is absurd. But my calc 2 professor let us listen to music during our tests.. I made high A's on all of them. Coincidence? I think not.
9. I hate Macs. With a passion. But I'm so sick of spyware on my computer that I will be purchasing one as soon as possible.
10. I have tried to give up Cokes, but I can't. That is my one weakness when it comes to food.
11. Sports are my life. Football and baseball = LOVE. I would give up my right arm to meet Peyton Manning. It is my dream to see them play in the Lucas Oil stadium. I would also die if I ever met Matt Diaz. I am his biggest fan. -sigh-
12. I can quote almost every F.R.I.E.N.D.S episode. Phoebe is my favorite, followed closely by Chandler. I could also act out The American President, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, Miss Congeniality, and every single Disney movie. And I know all of the words to "Whoomp, There It Is," "Baby Got Back," and "Can't Touch This." And yes, I am proud of this fact.
13. I am newly obsessed with running. I don't go as often as I'd like because I only like to run in the morning, and I work almost every morning.. so yeah. But I love it when I get to go!
14. I hate to shop. I especially hate to shop when I have certain things that I have to buy [ie. red shirt for work, dress for formal, etc] because I can NEVER find what I need, especially not at a good price.
15. I have a terrible time getting to sleep. No matter how early I get up, I'm never tired enough to fall asleep until around midnight. I'll get in bed, lights off, and just lay there. This makes it very difficult to get up at a decent hour in the mornings.

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