I've had a lot of questions about my trip, worthy atypical questions, but one person has won the coveted prize for best question.

Come on down ... Jay Dee Bateman!

Jay wandered downstairs the other afternoon, and we had a delightful conversation about movies he's seen, movies he thinks I shoud see, movies that are coming out, movies that he has recently bought, and how he wants to teach me how to help him do yard work. After nearly choking on my P & B when I saw the length of his fingernails, I steered us towards the topic of appropriate length of nails keeping gender in mind. He was not very happy at all, but hooray! I noticed last night that he followed my advice and cut those suckers back.

Anyway, you're desperately waiting for the question aren't you?

Jay closed his eyes and asked, "How the food over there?" then came, "Amy?"

"Yeah Jay?"

"Big Question."

"I'm ready."

"You went to Egypt. They have lots of trapdoors there?"

Don't be fooled; I was terrified.

We paid for an excursion into Cairo and got to see pyramids and the Sphinx. We rode camels at one point, and I was not very brave at all. The guy leading our line kept laughing at me and asking, "Still scared?" My camel's name was Michael Jackson, and I did calm down after awhile, and then our guide made the camels run ... I got scared again. It is not a smooth ride, and I didn't feel like I had the best grip, and I was planning my escape jump the whole time. Would I do it again? Priceless. (That means yes.)

Real Quick-like

1. Red sassy-pants luggage returned late last night!


I started to get extra pouty and nervous because only one of my two checked bags made its way back to my parents late Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the non-red one came first. The non-red one (also known as black) is actually Katie's (a girl who taught with Ben in Ukraine), and she had too many pieces, so I agreed to help her out.


I was not very happy to see that hers made his way home first. How dare he leave Red? What on earth made them think it was okay to split up?


Delta called last night, described poor little Red, and said that they've been trying to find me. I'm here! I was so very very excited. Cute little Jay called me while I was roaming the streets of the grocery store to let me know the, "Great news," that Red was now hanging out on the porch, probably getting peed on by Moe.


Thank you Red for being brave and keeping it together.





2. I am ready to admit that the night before I left for my 2nd summer adventure in Europe, Moe (Em's cat) peed the biggest nastiest pee puddle I've ever seen in my life all over the stuff that I had carefully laid out as I pre-packed. Here's the ready to admit part: I totally started crying, then gritting my teeth while I cried, then planning sweet revenge while I cried. I pledge to never let him in the house again, and I pledge that if I ever catch him in the house again, he will promptly, swiftly, not-so-gently, be placed outside where pee-monsters belong.

We eat there you big dummy!

3. Curious ... you know how when you comment on someone else's blog, you have to read those crazy string of letters, retype them, and wow! You've made it through our high tech security screening? Well ... lately ... all of the ones that I have come across have been extremely inappropriate. Has anyone else experienced this? Am I alone? Is the computer secretly laughing to itself as it watches my face as I retype the letters, make the obscene connection, pause, worry, then keep typing so that my comment is saved?

Back to the Good ol' U. S. of A.

Dear Luggage,

Remember how you got lost on your way from Kiev, and now you're having a blast hanging out in Paris? That was so crazy of you. I miss you, and I especially miss your contents such as: deodorant, phone charger, memory cards with all of my fabulous pictures, Hello Kitty face cards (as seen in the picture above) ... Let's both thank the dear airline for their excellent service in promising to drop you off at my parent's house. Please tell me that you didn't explode, and please promise to hurry back to my loving arms.

Cheers

I think that Dra wore these spankin' new goggles more than I ever did in Egypt.

My next adventure:

I'm flying into Kiev, vacationing in Egypt, back to Kiev, then on to the Czech Republic!

My new best friend

A few weeks ago, my dad and I were sitting at the table. I was graciously letting him beat me at some card game, when I was startled by a streak of white in our back yard. I watched patiently through the sliding glass door, and soon enough, my new best friend came bounding around the corner into view again.

"A dog, a dog!" and I threw my cards down and ran outside to play. We had a grand old time racing back and forth between the fences, fighting over the squeaky chicken, but I had to scold him a few times:

No jumping, you give me scratches.

No eating the cat poo.

I grabbed him and tried to keep him from licking me to death while I read over his green name tag. I yelled the phone number to my dad, who eventually yelled back accusingly, "That was the police, Amy!"

Like I knew it was going to be the police. So I laughed it off, ran into the front yard with the dog, and eventually explained that he needed to head home. After I shut the door on his cute little face, I peeked through the window to make sure he was safely on to his next adventure.

Last night, I was laying on the porch swing, intensely reading my super frustrating book, when I heard a low deep cough down by my feet. Extremely startled, I jumped around, and there was Best Friend! We ran around and around and I screamed into the house that Best Friend was back to play with me, but no one seemed to care. Good.

We ran around to the front yard, and he quickly ran to the old ice cream bucket and started drinking the cat's water. Then he quickly moved on to their dumb cat food, and this struck me as extremely hilarious. A dog eating cat food? Now I've seen everything. I just loved how messy the whole process was, his face going crazy all over the old pie tin, cat food flying into the water ... I tattled on Best Friend to my dad as I showed off the empty tin, but my dad just shrugged.

We played and played and I watched as he caught a trail and ran crazy eights around my yard smelling his way through everything. He ran through the flowers, around the tree, jumped up on to the porch, jogged around the rocking chair, then stopped at a carefully cubed bush. He sneezed, and I heard a cat's low growl, then spit, then hiss, then low growl, then saw the bush shake with a swipe. Best Friend sneezed again, and I held my belly and laughed and laughed. Best Friend loves it when I laugh so he came leaping towards me, and we had to review 'No jumping, you give me scratches.'

Poor Daisy was the one being terrorized, but I still secretly loved it. I can't wait til Best Friend finds me again.

Hooray! No more Europe posts!

Yesterday, Zach, Em, Em, and I went on a hike up to the waterfall on the Bell Canyon trail. It was a spectacular hike full of squirrels, bumblebees, marcupials, butterflies ... Em and I led the way, and it was fun to talk to all of the people on their way back down. One guy would not stop looking at us, then finally, "You two look so young!" Yes!

The mist from the waterfall was insane. It muddied up our trail ... and I fell on my bum bum.
Top of the waterfall.
Curse you mist!
Careful little Zach.
It was hard to capture the rage. Just hike to it and you'll see. I think that we were up and back in three hours.

Europe - Day 12/13

Airplane mania and New York City bus tour

Anna and Em.

I didn't sleep one wink on this dang flight from Athens to New York, the food was unrecognizable, and when they turned off all of the lights and made us shut the blinds for sleepy time I got fidgety, and then I got hissed at by all of the vampires when I snuck a peak out the window and a sliver of blinding light shot through the entire airplane.

Beginning of my horrible pictures of our New York City bus tour.

I love this sign because I don't get it.

Firestation
Where's Conan?
Ground Zero
Our best view of the Statue of Liberty
One of those man-made waterfalls My position on the bus as we headed back to the airport.

I was bus sick, unable to sleep, annoyed with our lame tour, dreading our wait at the airport ... I snapped at Em for laughing her asthma laugh over and over ...

Europe - Day 11

Delphi and the Bus

Dear Bus,

Thank you for letting us be with you for over 6 hours today.

Uncle Bill jumps into my picture at Delphi.

View at Delphi; think Utah with ancient ruins.
View of the switchbacks. Can you imagine the buses on that?

Delphi's columns
Another view of Delphi
Em and Anna on their way into the museum
Em's boyfriend ... okay ... mine.
View of the city

Europe - Day 10

Crete and Santorini

Crete - Old Train
Crete - Loved the graffiti

Crete - Bag o' live, squirming snails
Crete- Sweet old lady
K's present the plaque they made for Mary
Santorini!

From far away we all speculated that there was snow on top of the cliffs.
View of Santorini from the active volcano believed to be the cause of the sinking of the great city of Atlantis.

Volcano - Don't get burned!
Uncle Bill gets a rock out of his shoe.
Mom gets left at the dock.
The only picture we have of me jumping off of the pirate ship.

We swam like crazy to shore; I had no idea I had it in me. Swim or drown, I guess.
Em's a wee bit nervous, but I was already in there.

John Allen and one of his many poses.
My favorite hairy helper
Tram back to the boat, so steep!

We should have taken the donkeys.

Never seen such a big wake before. We were about 15 minutes late ...
Yummy little fruit tart.

It was my favorite dessert by far. Dad liked it too, I just didn't give him fair warning that I was about to snap a picture.

Europe - Day Nine

Rhodes (our first full day at the beach), Baked Alaskan ice cream adventures, and the night of the infamous Karaoke

Rhodes - Flowering tree and mom
Starfish
Platform jumping!

We had a blast swimming out to it and jumping off.

Rainbow speedo Enjoying the swim.
Anna, Em, and I paddling our little hearts out.

"Lookin' out the window, you better believe that's a paddlin'."

Sweet apartment
Best picture of the Baked Alaskan ice cream

Blurry, but I love how excited Eileen is.

While we enjoyed our ice cream, the dear staff entertained us with songs.

Denise Allen (Andrea's mom) always had the sweetest moves and always knew the perfect moment to bust them out.

Karaoke Details:

All of our pictures were way too blurry, but someone, somewhere has this on video. Talk to Andrea Allen.

Later that night, we wandered upstairs, and delightedly realized that there was karaoke going on. Unfortunately, we soon couldn't turn our frowns upside down as we suffered through lame annoying song after lame annoying song (Example: Can You Feel the Love Tonight?), and nobody was dancing or making it enjoyable or anything. I was getting stir-crazy so I told Em that I'd had enough. We were going to spice up the joint.

We signed up to sing ABC by the Jackson 5, I pulled out two headbands, and we nervously waited for our number. We had about a minute and a half of scheming and brainstorming. My heart was beeping when they called our song, and we immediately bolted for the stage, accepted the two mics, and (probably against the rules) jumped up on the stage where the screen was.

We had our backs to the crowd, we snapped our headbands on hippie style, sassily flipped around in unison, and pose-jumped off the stage. I spread my legs, Em slid underneath (sort of, the floor wasn't very slide-condusive, she ended up getting a burn on her hand), and in the mic I planned to jazz up the crowd with, "Em and Amy here. We're ready to rock your world," but got lost in all of the excitement and forgot.

Our group went wild, and we busted out crazy move after crazy move. The singing was absolutely horrible, turns out we only knew the chorus, but our energy made up for the gap. I'm squeezing my lip trying to think how I can describe the moves that we put on our audience. We were all over the place. At one point the words kept saying, "Shake it!" and being sisters, we knew exactly what to do. Again, in Christmas-miracle unison, we turned our backs to the crowd, jumped up and clapped, then pointed with both hands to our butts as we did a masterful booty shake.

We were all over the place, and I tried to end on a breakdance spin, but had so quickly forgotten about the lack of movement that the floor provided. Basically, all the glory in that move was that my shoe went flying off. The song, ended, we got a score of 31 out of 100 (given by the computer based on your singing), and enjoyed the pats on the back from strangers and friends and family alike. We couldn't gauge whether it was accepted as ridiculous or ridiculously cool. Anna kept breaking her sentence with fits of laughter, "I have no right to ever be unhappy again," and Andrea couldn't stop re-playing our sweetness on her camera, "I had no idea that that was coming." It was absolutely invigorating.