leftovers

Dad Helping me unwrap my gifts at Grandma & Grandpa Strecker's. After last year's commitment to post a blog entry each day, I've understandably been pretty absent this year. I think I've averaged one blog post per month. To end out the year, and to pay tribute to my second favorite holiday season, I am going to write each day from now until Yuletide, also known and formerly referred to by myself as Christmas. Each day I will touch on a different topic either relating to the holiday season, or completely unrelated. Today, I will recount the typical holiday seasons of my youth. At school, we would all be very excited about the arrival of Santa Claus but were busily concerned with things like the winter musical or concert, the gift exchange, and all the tests and assignments we'd have to finish before the break. At home, I would anxiously thumb through the pages of the JC Penney catalog, dog-earing the pages that had the toys I hoped so desperately to find under...

Yesterday, I lamented the closing of Del Taco. Today, I found out that my old dorm, Agnew Hall, had been demolished. This was very sad for me, because not only was it my first home after I moved out of my parents house (if you don't count me living in our old farmhouse for about 2 weeks right after high school graduation), and my mom also lived there when she went to FHSU. I still remember going in there for the first time, and being excited that I had a place that was mine and there were no parents there! My roommate, Jason, arrived a couple days after I was there, so I had the room to myself the first few nights. Dad helped me put in some carpet that we had ripped out of the living room of their house when they recarpeted, and I brought in my TV, stereo, microwave and dorm fridge and got it to be a pretty cool little place. I lived there my entire freshman year. Jason and I were very different people, we got a long fine but we never really bonded as friends. He had his li...

This morning I went and toured the YMCA since it's part of the Sunset/Vine BID and I'd never been there; Kitty who is on our board had invited me to come check it out. It's a great gym in a really old building and they have a lot of cool things going on there. She asked me if I was thinking of joining and I told her how I have a membership at LA Fitness but never go. I got the newsletter all finished and Sarah had some corrections for me and then it was ready to go. It was great timing because right when I was ready to send it, Kerry sent us an e-mail from England saying we could go home early for the holiday weekend. We finally got a chance to hear the whole Scissor Sisters CD at home while we were cleaning and hanging out. I really, really like it. It's so nice to enjoy the Scissor Sisters again. I loved them when I first heard of them, which was through the Party Monster soundtrack. At that point they were almost completely unknown in the US. They had only h...

I had to be back at the Chamber of Commerce this morning at 8am for another Walk of Fame meeting. This year is the Walk of Fame's 50th anniversary so there are some events coming up that we are planning, including a Community Festival on July 25 which sounds really exciting. I'm really looking forward to touring the Capitol Records building, which is going to be one of the activities that day. It's an iconic building that's not usually open to the public. My favorite association with that building is in the film "Dig" where Courtney Taylor-Taylor goes there to bitch about the way the record company is treating them - that's about all I remember about it, but it was classic. Maybe Brandon can shed some light on that scene. I saw on my calendar that it was "Canada Day" so I sent messages to R and J up in Winnipeg. Later that day I went to the groundbreaking for the Villas at Gower, a project that is going to provide homes for homeless people. ...

I sat my alarm early cause I wanted to wake up and cook breakfast for everyone before we had to go to the airport, since I had bought artichokes to make artichokes benedict and I knew mom wouldn't use them if I didn't. So I got up and tried to make breakfast as quickly as I could for me, mom, dad, Dylan, and aunt Sharon. I ended up just making eggs benedict for most of them but I put a steamed artichoke out on the table for everyone to share and then I had one myself so it went over really well and everyone liked it. But, then I had to rush to get ready and finish packing; I had pretty much gotten everything packed the night before, though. It was a whirlwind getting out of the house and I had to hug Royal goodbye of course and then we all loaded into the Highlander and headed up 35 which was completely backed up so dad exited and took some street further north so when we finally got back on interstate it was moving again. I told mom she couldn't cry when we said goodbye...

Today was a pretty lazy day. We didn't do much of anything for most of the day so I played Bully on the wii in the basement. Mom and I went shopping at Wal-Mart later to get food for brunch on Memorial Day since we ended up making plans with Shelley Nondorf, and her daughter Samantha and husband Jake who we had just recently hung out with in Hawaii over the holidays. My parents have been friends with the Nondorfs for years but I hadn't seen their kids in ages until Hawaii. We also bought a croquet set for the backyard since neither one of them could remember what happened to Grandma Strecker's old set, which dad insisted had either fallen apart or had been sold at a garage sale. I find it hard to believe they would have sold anything of Grandma's at a garage sale. We also stopped at the Dollar Tree and got some drinking glasses and other assorted little things. I wanted to get a new outfit for Spike, but he already had all the ones they had there. Just like the D...

Adrienne drove us over to Katie's parent's house so we could go swimming in their pool. It was a gorgeous day and I pointed out to Dylan how nice a Kansas City afternoon could be poolside! Katie's parents had several dogs who all enjoyed swimming, and so did Katie and Dan's dog Cuzco, so we wanted Maddie to swim too. It took her quite a while to warm up to the idea but she was a natural at it. At first we would have to sort of push her in, and then she would just start swimming as fast as she could to the other side, so we would have to turn her around so she could go back to the steps so that she could get out. But eventually we would be in the pool and Adrienne would call to her and she would just jump in on her own and swim out to Adrienne! It was so cute. I felt so happy to be there for her first swim just as if I was watching a kid take his or her first steps. For now the Strecker family is content with dogs in lieu of children! We swam there for most the a...

Adrienne woke up early to go get a spray tan so Dylan and I tried to sleep in but Maddie and Rocco apparently like to just bark all day while Adrienne and Emily are gone. So it was hard to actually sleep in. We got up in time to help Adrienne clean up her house when she got home and bring everything in from the backyard. Dylan had done a bunch of the dishes last night so it was actually pretty easy doing everything else. We packed Maddie up in the car with us and drove to mom and dad's in Olathe which is just about 15 minutes away, stopping at Dunkin Donuts on the way since we don't have those in LA and Dylan and I love their coffee after we had it in Boston. Ronnie, Lisa and Caitlyn had already gone back to Hays so we missed them. When we got home we just had time to get ready to leave for Lawrence with mom. We were going to meet all the Strecker cousins for lunch. We joined them at Free State Brewery, one of my favorite places in Lawrence, and all of the cousins with t...

Marc came and took us to the airport and we made it through security relatively quickly and soon we were on our way! The flight was delayed a little bit because of thunderstorms near Kansas City so we had to fly around in circles for awhile until the airport was reopened. Then we didn't end up getting in to Kansas City until after 6pm. Mom and Dad were there to pick us up and it wasn't raining anymore by the time we got there. Ronnie, Lisa and Caitlyn were at mom and dad's house waiting for us with Adrienne and her dog, Maddie. Royal and Maddie were very excited to see us and they both seemed to love the gifts we brought them, which was a little blue California bear for Royal and a purple California hippo for Maddie. Mom had made "Chipotle" style burritos for everyone for dinner and we all ate out on the back patio. Dad had just built a privacy fence around the back patio because their yard slopes down in the back so that everyone else around them who's...

It's almost incomprehensible to me that over 10 years have passed since Y2K. Although so many amazing things have happened since then, it still seems so recent. It was a time of such optimism for me; knowing that I would be graduating from college and moving to LA in a few months put me in one of the best mindsets of my life back when the ball dropped at New Year's Eve 1999. I remember that night very well - cavorting around Hays, Kansas with a white streak sprayed in my hair; glow-bowling with my brother Brandon, my cousin Andrea and our friends; and ending the night at Village Inn. On Jan. 1, 2000, I began a journal to keep track of every day of a year that I believed would live on in my mind forever. Now, ten years later, I'm going to do it again. Unlike back then, when I would write my thoughts down each night in a rose-scented diary (complete with a lock and key), this time around I'll be blogging each entry. In 2000, the Internet was fairly new and nobody had he...

I remembered what I had set out to blog about earlier tonight. Recurring Dreams - always a fascinating and bewildering topic to me. What do dreams mean, and moreover, why does certain imagery or a storyline constantly weave itself into our nocturnal movie theatres? This one has been going on for awhile. I always have dreams where we either still live on the farm in Paradise, either as a whole family, just Dylan and I, or just myself. Sometimes we are just visiting, or squatting, or some weird situation has brought us back there. Whether or not any of this is explained within the confines of the dream, one thing is almost always bound to happen. At some point in the dream, at least one car will come down the driveway and we don't know who the person driving the car is. Then, they either turn around and speed back up the driveway, or they keep going deeper into the farm, heading east towards the creek and hills. There's always a slightly sinister feeling to these dreams, l...