And the winner is....

What was the best part of my trip?!

Brace yourself here....

Bakersfield.

I know, I know, I even surprised myself on that one! Don't get me wrong, it was so great to see and do everything in all those cities, but hands down I had such a blast with Lisa, her family and brother's friends. Whoever said there's nothing to do in Bakersfield was so wrong. Instead of telling, I'll just post some photos from our crazy adventures.

No, your eyes do not deceive you. We actually opened a bottle of wine with a POWER DRILL.

Money doesn't grow on trees

But it certainly comes out of gas pumps.

Let's talk about something disconcerning right now. Gas throughout California is anywhere between $4.19 and $4.45 a gallon. The lower end of the spectrum to be found only at cheap retail truck stops in the middle of nowhere, and the higher prices in really expensive areas. Don't even get me started on diesel which clocks in at a shockingly high $5.20 per gallon.

As I'm pumping my gas yesterday, I notice some signs on the side of the pump reading something to the effect of "You are not allowed to spend more than $75 on your tank." Which explains a loooooot to me right now, seeing as how the last few times I tried to fill the Explorer, the pump shut off at under 3/4 of a tank. I tried in vain to continue filling, knowing that surely it takes longer than a minute to fill my car.

So, apparently now we're being rationed on both water and gas out here.

Drivin' down the 101

The circular red itinerary is what I'll be doing in just a few minutes!

ROAD TRIP from:

Alamo

to San Luis Obispo

to Goleta/Isla Vista and Santa Barbara

to Los Angeles/Newport Beach

to Bakersfield
(Sorry, I couldn't find any good pictures. This is the best I got.... pretty accurate, actually.)

and then back to Alamo!

Though, as excited as I am, I'm realllly not looking forward to driving through the (multiple) armpits of California. Beginning tomorrow with Greenfield, King City, and pretty much anything between San Jose and SLO. Then again, Wednesday's going to suck going through and beyond Bakersfield, then near Kettleman City where they probably raise 85% of all McDonald's beef on about less than a square mile of property. Don't you envy me right now?

Biggest joke of our drives down 101, "What exactly is happening?" Welcome to Steinbeck land, my friends.

I'm so excited to see all my friends from college, most of whom I haven't seen in about a year now. See the rest of you next Wednesday, when I'll be back to scrapbooking, reading, and overall avoiding any possible GRE studying.

More scraps

Continuing on yesterday's post, I started packing for my big roadtrip beginning tomorrow (Bay Area to San Luis Obispo for lunch with Kat on my way to SANTA BARBARA until Sunday, then SB to Los Angeles/Newport Beach until Tuesday, Newport to Bakersfield where I'll be spending the night at Lisa's house, and then Wednesday I'll drive about 3,945,837 miles up I-5 to get back home in five-six hours.)... I'm really good at sticking to one subject and avoiding tangents, huh?

Well, a bunch of my friends from UCSB are all converging on Santa Barbara to meet with the rest of us who never left the area for quite the undergrad reunion.

But we all know me and my restlessness -- I started scrapbooking again mid-packing.

Here's my third page from the European album. (And this is so me, I'll get on this huge kick and do tons of pages, then take a two-year sabbatical.)

Page 3 includes pictures from Barcelona, where I spent a long weekend with my parents. I told you I found snazzy stickers for decoration, and I've included my metro "flex pass" if you will. Hopefully my limited Spanish doesn't suck too much!

And then we have our 2006 family Christmas vacation to Hawaii (Family Travels Album). Glad I'm finally getting on these updates.... years later. I'm a little bummed because this is one of those 14" x 14" pages, so a lot got cut off during the scan. I also had to be jenky and juxtapose the two page halves together in Word.... because I can't find any photo editing software on my parents' computer.

How do you measure a moment in a life?

Sorry about the sappy title, I'm listening to the Rent movie soundtrack because my iPod's on my favorite spazzy, ADD playlist. Ohhh, and now we're on to Moulin Rouge -- best movie, EVER.

Well that's enough random stream of consciousness outburts from me.

Now that I'm back home with kind of a lot of free time on my hands -- understatement -- I'm sort of getting in to scrapbooking again. Seriously people, I'm a good two-three years behind here. My album from sophomore year of college is almost complete. I kind of started updating my "Family travels" album after being excited by the new New York and Las Vegas stickers I recently purchased at Richards. Thank you working as a traveling reporter for the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour last year! That expanded my already vast arsenal of U.S. travel experiences, and now that I'm back from Europe, I'm ready to start scrapping my European adventures. Long story (even longer) short, this is the answer to the title of today's post.

Problem is though, how the heck do you consolidate 100+ pictures from each of the trips I took in seven months? I have 20 available pages in the new blank scrapbook dedicated to the Assistantship Experience -- as I'm formally labeling it -- and I've made an executive decision to allocate only one page for each trip/holiday that happened while I was based out of France.

That's the problem with digital cameras, I think. After just one party, or one short weekend trip, I imagine we can come up with more pictures than a family in the '50s could amass in a single lifetime. Imagine having to actually develop photos and waiting weeks for new pictures to come! It's also a bit dictatorial to have to decide what 24 images you want to capture on a trip, when you've only got one roll of film.

Thank God it's 2008.

However, having 2,000+ pictures from the past year makes it kind of difficult to sort through them and decide which ones to download to the Costco website for one hour developing.

Which is why scrapbooking is cool. And I think I'm doing this in more of the traditional sense; I'm actually including stickers, ticket stubs, and brochures from my adventures. My little book really will be bits and pieces with tiny snaps printed out from my computer on special photo paper.

This is way more fun than waiting for rolls to develop! (And I feel somewhat productive, even though I'm avoiding my GRE studying time.)

So without any further ado, I bring you my first two efforts:


Page 1: Gym membership card, bus pass (please ignore the fact that "bus" is spelled with two s's), médiathèque card, and my God-forsaken carte de séjour, which is kind of funny to look at it preserved in a plastic page while thinking about all the trouble I had to go through to get it.



Page 2: My trip to visit Florian at his home in Germany during Spring Break! Being the sports freak that I am, I've zoned in on one particular aspect of the trip: SOCCER (Fußball). It'd be too hard to choose without organizing themes throughout my pages. Here we have my ticket stub from the FC Nürnberg match and then the Olympic Stadium in München.

Hello. Bonjour. Hola. 你好. Hej. Hallo. Yia sas. Aloha. Shalom. Zdravstvuyte.

Today I added a new feature. It's nothing really, but for some reason I discovered that I was really excited to see the results.

If you'll look over to the right-hand side of my blog, you'll notice the newest widget in my collection. Besides the sparkly Eiffel Tower, we have a counter of all the people who visit my blog. But more importantly, where you're all coming from!

And since you now know how obsessed I have become with travel, this is really, really exciting news. I didn't even know people in Turkey read my blog!

That being said, please drop me a line if you read! (Even if I can at times be super boring, repetitive, high school-ish, or even too sporty in my entries.)

So again, Hello! Bonjour! Hola! 你好! Hej! Hallo! Yia sas! Aloha! Shalom! Zdravstvuyte!

There, that's about as international and multi-lingual as I'm gonna get. Now it's back to watching French movies and listening to French and/or Spanish music. Maybe I'll pick back up on my Spanish podcasts again...

Surprise

After paying the 77 Euros to have my mail forwarded to the United States back in April, I'm getting some pretty interesting things from France.

For example, the City of Antibes sent me an official package (huge) for my "summer options." What options?

Child care options. For the centre de loisirs -- basically babysitting your kids at the closest school to your house, while you work during summer hours. This is the second letter I've received from the city of Antibes. At the end of February they sent me another extremely official looking document saying that I needed to declare my family earnings by March 1. As in, how many children I had and could get "government assistance" for.

This is all new knowledge to me.

I don't think I ever once registered anything for the city of Antibes, let alone claimed dependents. Maybe they assume if you're registered as a "teacher" then you must also have your own children. Also, last time I checked, teachers don't work during the summer, so where is any logic in this scenario? The only paperwork I filed for the city with my French home address was my carte de sejour application and CAF folder. Both stated I was single, unmarried, living alone and a part-time teacher (also a foreign citizen).

I hope they keep sending me information about my children's summer options, because I really have no clue what I'm going to do with them while I work during the next few months. (P.S. I don't even have a job.)

Black is the new green

Ah, finally the ramifications of over-population and under-production begin to rear their ugly heads.

For the first time in over 20 years, East (San Francisco) Bay residents are now on an imposed-mandatory water rationing -- which has been in effect since yesterday.

The East Bay MUD (Municipal Utility District, aka the best tasting water in arguably all the United States) is asking that single families cut back water usage 19 percent.

See the news broadcast here.

So, now that I'm back from France, I'm finally going to adopt not showering. Just kidding, but I think I'm going to have to revert back to turning off water in the middle of my shower. I really detest that idea because I get so cold mid-shower. It sucked in France because water is so f-ing expensive there, but it was also the thick of winter.

With the temperature expected to hit 102º tomorrow, I shouldn't think this will be a problem.

But wow, really, water rationing? Can't we just ask God to make it rain a little bit up there? Or what about all the ice melt, can't that come back some how?!

"It was just a natural supplement"

Yessssss.

If you're even remotely curious about my current obsessive cheering, read all about it here. Someone's going to jail....

That is all.

Would you like some help out today?

Another glaring difference between the U.S. and France occurred to me today, after taking a detour at Safeway during my afternoon hour bike ride out to San Ramon.

Other than the woman who "forgot" that she was in the express lane with a million items in her cart, peoples' behavior in the U.S. is completely different than anything I ever experienced in France.

1.) When biking, walking, or driving (peu importe) people in France always seemed to huddle up together on sidewalks and roads. When you happen to be coming at them from the other direction or even wanting to pass, the French would not budge. In short, I find that they are very rude pedestrians/cyclists/motorists.

On the Iron Horse Trail this afternoon, I encountered many groups of people and my blood pressure did not immediately increase 55 points upon seeing them, like it usually did in France. Instead, the mothers would tell their children to move over to the side, passing cars would STOP AND LET ME CROSS even though I was the one with the stop sign, and runners with their dogs would pull their dogs off to the side of the trail.... and then *gasp* pick up whatever their dogs left behind. That never happened in France.

2.) At the French grocery stores, people do their own thing and run up to the fastest-looking line, taking no precautions to care about anyone around their general vicinity.

While I was in line at Safeway this afternoon, two older women's carts sort of bumped on their way out. It wasn't really a problem and neither of them were in any ways harmed. But instead, they both genuinely made eye contact and started apologizing at the same time.

And 3.)....

French people just don't do small talk. They don't offer any unnecessary services either. Since we're in the grocery store context, you have to bag your own groceries. I guess this is all part of the "independent me" I learned to become in France and I can say that since living in a different country, I'm so much more self-sufficient and less reliant on others.

But again, at Safeway, I forgot that checkers/baggers always ask, "Would you like some help out today?"

And for the first time -- since hearing that question 1,381,649,503 times throughout my entire life -- I was blown away.

For a second.

Oh yeah

I just remembered why I was a lit major instead of film studies...

After receiving our latest Netflix arrival last week -- P.S., I Love You -- I sort of began to organize my room again. It's a really good movie and I'm now kind of on this Hillary Swank kick after seeing Freedom Fighters two weeks ago.


So I kind of organize my little corner of the house little by little -- such a French saying. What, like you'd actually expect the French to take on daunting tasks and set to work on them until they're completed? Right, I knew I was partially French! Well anyways, I began sorting out my books most recently. That was a.) convenient because I only finished reading Suite Française a few hours before and b.) good for me because I'm such a nerd and can't stop reading.

Oddly enough, the books I picked out to read on the plane back to France after spending my February "winter" break in California surfaced to the top of my book stack. The two I picked -- narrowed down from a pile of 18 more specifically -- were Eat, Pray, Love and P.S., I Love You. No wonder the plot seemed vaguely familiar when I was watching the film. Duh, the film jogged my memory back to one February day in Costco, reading the backs of handfuls of book jackets. I'm sure you can guess, I never actually brought those books with me to France because of my limited packing space.

Well, after seeing the movie, I'm nearly halfway done with the book.

And it's a thousand times better than the movie thus far! Even though I enjoyed the movie, the producer/director took a lot of creative liberty in changing up everything from the main character herself to the actual setting of the story.

So I'm interested to see where this will take me. Even more interested to finally get to reading all those books thrown under my bed -- due to the lack of space in my three other bookshelves -- that I've yet to read in my 23 years of existence. Ok, let's be serious here, 19 years of literacy.

Wanna know the funniest part of it all? I've only spent about three to five hours of the past three weeks studying for my GRE test in June. Between reading, friends, movies, working out, church and Wii, I hardly have time to study! And to be truthful, mentally gearing myself up to brush up on high school math and diving straight into practice problems is tiring enough to actually feel like I've been studying for hours.

At least I've already been accepted to UOP by virtue of my job. Hopefully I won't be the first person to score negatively on a graduate entrance exam.

Wii-tarded

I'm really glad Mother's Day and my dad's birthday are in the same month.

If that sounds kind of weird, it's really not. That just means the entire family (minus the kids, in theory) gets to share in a big communal present. 2007 was sweet because since it was the big 5-0 bash we got to try all kinds of different restaurants after receiving loads of gift cards. But 2K8 is even better. By the way, this is not me being a greedy little kid. This is me being an excited little kid.

Two days ago, the Wii my sister won on eBay arrived! I played one back at UCSB a little under two years ago when a friend stood in line all day to buy one of the first consoles. And then I saw billions of ads in France, but this is unlike anything else.

Of course the Wii comes with the sports pack which includes boxing, bowling, baseball, tennis and golf. What's different about this video game is that it's all virtually receptive and you play with wireless controls. AKA, you actually simulate playing any of the aforementioned sports.

AKA my arms and back are insanely sore. It's just an f-ing video game! But for those of you who know me and my semi-competitive side.... I don't mess around.

I found out this technique that by virtue of throwing the controller -- which is connected to your hand with a wrist strap -- in a certain direction at increasingly faster speeds, the opponent can't return my serve. Yep, and since I was an outfielder for nearly 15 years, I pride myself on being able to throw fast and hard. So I kept pushing and pushing myself.

Basically, I threw out my arm in a simulated video game. How cool am I?!

That wasn't the look on my face, or the exact extension of my arms yesterday.

Stalking in French

Anyone know how I can get Carrefour and Yves Rocher to stop emailing me?!

I don't care that I can get 10 extra points on a 40+ Euro purchase this week if I used my carte de fidelite.

It's not a fantasy until it's everything you've ever dreamed of

My fantasy baseball team's getting better. (All I have to say is that my league should vote me rookie of the year at the end of all this 162-game madness.)

We're in sixth now! That's the highest the Cleat Chasers have ever been in the Lemon League -- and yes, I did name my team the Cleat Chasers, I do have a sense of irony after all. Only five points separate me from the fifth-place team, and I fully intend on moving up!

Yesterday I dropped Curt Schilling because supposedly he's out for 4-6 months. Instead I picked up Randy Johnson and Mark Hendrickson because he's got more wins than any of the other free agents at this point.

My trading skills, however, have proved to be under par as most of my proposals have been rejected. But that's ok, I still have Albert Pujols, Josh Beckett, Ichiro Suzuki and Dan Haren. Oh yeah, out of undergrad pride, I picked up Ryan Spilborghs -- a fellow UCSB Gaucho who I had dinner with during spring training last year!

Long story short, watch out Lemon League. We're coming up.

As much as I love manatees....

If any of you have seen my Facebook account, you've seen this one coming for a few days now.

I have loved manatees since the first time I saw them in Florida and had to write my third grade animal report. Yeah, it's kind of sad I remember that.

But anyways, as long as that's been happening I adopted a manatee from the Save the Manatee Club (FYI: Jimmy Buffet is their spokesperson, wow), I have manatee Christmas cards every year, manatee pictures/postcards adorn my walls, as well as little manatee trinkets and thimbles, which by the way, I used to have a thimble collection as well.

Long story short, I think my manatee fascination is over now.


Yep, the Florida Marlins have male cheerleaders called the Manatees. Click on the picture above and zoom in to read the details... that is, if you don't mind losing your lunch.

Trying to push the entertainment aspect of the game, the Marlins this season have featured a disc jockey in right field during weekend games, plus a heavy-set male dance team called the Manatees.

Wow. Wow. That's really all I can say.

Coincidentally, I finally gave the last push in my room's redecoration today. All the manatee photos are now gone from my walls, as my "French state of mind" lives on in vintage French travel postcards and Parisian prints have taken over. (See below)

Mixed emotions

I'm pretty bummed because Rich Harden (above, also the man I've been obsessing over for the past six years, who by the way supposedly lives somewhere down the road from us!) will be making a rehab start with the A's Triple-A affiliates the Sacramento River Cats this weekend!

While that's exciting because he's finally coming off the DL -- fingers crossed -- I'm kind of sad because I was supposed to go to a River Cats game this weekend! Bad timing. I say supposed to go, because those plans were scraped last minute. However, if he makes more than one rehab start in Sac, rest assured that I will drive my butt up to Sacramento to watch him play!

Oh yeah and I'm watching the A's-Angels game on t.v. right now... it's 14-6 in favor of the A's in the sixth inning. Wow, can we say slugathon?

In other news, I'm really immersing myself back in to the American t.v./cinema/Netflix scene since bailing on it over the past seven months.

It must be spring because every movie I've seen recently is either about babies or weddings. Is someone trying to hint something at me here?! Anyways, I was not once let down by Juno, License to Wed, 27 Dresses, or Baby Mama -- which my mom and I just saw this afternoon. It was pretty funny, seeing as how 90 percent of the cast was SNL people. One of the previews looked pretty decent, it comes out next week and is with Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz. I think my mom wants to take me out to see it when it's released.

This is definitely making up for the only time I went to the theaters in Cannes to see Sweeney Todd -- in English with French subtitles.

I'm also catching up on some episodes of The Office and Grey's Anatomy came back on last week after the conclusion of the writers' strikes. I'm a little let down and I think they could have come up with a better return episode than last week's Grey's. I feel like the writers were trying to take the safe side out, and really, if this is all they could come up with maybe the cast and crew could have hired some scabs or something who certainly could have written a better show. Heck, I could have probably done a little better.

...Here's hoping that this week significantly improves. It's already got one thing in its favor this week: Since the strikes hit, Private Practice won't resume until next season because it's too new of a series. That means Addison comes back to Grey's for possibly the rest of the season! All three episodes that are left this year.