The Next Food Network Star?

Based on my Facebook feed, I know that this past weekend was a joyous holiday for the young folk, and that most people celebrated by drinking green alcohol and taking a lot of selfies. Apparently some people even got a snow day Monday to extend the celebrations. Apparently these same people get way too many snow days and it really isn't fair. Well, my St. Patrick's Day weekend in Detroit was not full of these traditional celebrations. Instead I went to a wedding shower, crafted, watched movies, and did other activities typically associated with middle aged women.

I'm the one on the right

First, I will review the movie I saw Sunday, which was Veronica Mars. It was really good. That's my whole review, I guess.

Teenage spy becomes grown-up spy is a good plot

The real reason I wanted to blog is because I was cooking dinner for my house yesterday and realized that I've become sort of decent at cooking and definitely the meals I make are pretty unique (because I'm recipe illiterate), and I also tend to talk to myself like I'm Bobby Flay. If we put these things together, I should obviously have my own show on the Food Network. It could be about cooking on a budget, because another skill I possess is being incredibly cheap.
I went grocery shopping yesterday and used the manager's specials at Kroger to inspire my meal. Here's my cooking blog:
Turkey Pot Pie-ish
Ingredients:
Ground Turkey - $2.99 (buy one get one free!)
Mushrooms - $1.29 (managers special!)
Celery - $I don't know because I didn't buy them
Carrots - $.99
Kale - $.89
Milk - $2.69 (but I didn't use the whole gallon
Flour - $we just have this in our cupboard
Pie Crust - $1.99 (for two pies!)
Pilsbury biscuits (or kroger brand) - $1.25
Add it all up and that's a dinner for six that costs less than $12. And it has meat. Win!
Directions
Step 1. Cook turkey and mushrooms in skillet. Add everything but the pie crust and biscuits and stir till it looks good.
Step 2. Pour into pie crusts, cover with biscuits, bake until it looks done.

It even looks healthy!

I took a picture of the pie-thing in process, but forgot to get one of the finished product. Let's assume it looks like this:

Wow, I'm a good chef

Anyway, you should all visit me and I'll cook you something weird, too! My new Rachel told me yesterday, "If you are what you eat, no one is really sure what you are." But I am definitely edible, so that's what matters.

How all of America Hates Juan Pablo

The Bachelor finale was this Monday night, and although I'm pretty sure it only took 10 minutes to dump one girl and give a rose to the other, this got drawn out into a 3 hour special. Smooth move ABC.

We've been telling you for a while now about the disappointment that is Juan Pablo, and it seems that this week all of America was united in hating him, but I live in Detroit now and we like to be hipsters so now that hating him is popular, I kind of love him all over again. Let me essplain why:

In the final episode, Juan Pablo has to choose between Clare and Nikki. We've liked Nikki from the beginning (because she is a nurse like Ashley!), but in the end it almost feels like she is too smart for this guy who clearly only cares about his daughter, sports, and being attractive. Clare, on the other hand, is super stupid, like, dumb enough to have sex in the ocean on national television, so maybe they could be a perfect match until they break up a month after the final rose? In a fun little plot twist, these two women also hate each other. It's funny how they didn't become best friends in a show that makes dating a competition between women...

Remember that time they had this awkward fight over nothing?

So the episode shows each woman meeting JP's family in St. Lucia (the whole family gets a free trip?? Jealous.), and JP's cousin with braces warns each woman of their boyfriends commitment issues. So that bodes well. Camilla continues to steal the show by being ADORABLE and her little cousin is super cute, too so basically JP for a second has won our hearts again by reminding us that he is a hot Venezuelan single dad. Don't worry though, we'll turn on him soon.

JP shows us a big diamond ring that probably came free from the jeweler, and Clare gets on a boat to go meet him, which seems like a poor idea because we just saw her curling her hair and doing her make-up and boats are usually windy and not conducive to looking like a barbie. She is all smiles and arched eyebrows when she goes to meet him in the middle of some forest on this tropical island and then... HE DUMPS HER. And makes the mistake of trying to hug her, which she rejects. The studio audience cheers for the woman who was previously the most hated contestant as she yells at the man who was previously an adored bachelor because apparently we thought he should have told her earlier he didn't want to marry her, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the show? Clare storms away as well as she can in heels in the tropics, and Chris Harrison and the studio audience wonder what will become of JP. Also, Clare is sent away in a boat which is much crappier than the one she rode over in. Just to really make sure she understands that she lost.

When you put your life on TV, it's easy to find ugly shots of you, Clare

Nikki also crosses over on a boat to Juan Pablo and walks carefully toward him in a dress with a really high slit. Like, her whole leg is showing and I'm concerned she might flash us more. When she gets to JP she tells him she loves him again and he doesn't say he loves her back, but instead tells her that he cannot propose because he isn't 100% sure and her dad told him not to. So that big old diamond was just a quick product placement, and instead he just gives her a rose and asks if she'll go out with him in a normal way and she says yes. Kisses are shared. The end.

See that slit?? So high.

Except it's not really the end! Because this episode was shot three (four?) months ago, and now we have to get the opinions of Sean and Catherine, Des and Chris, Sharleen and her buddies, and most importantly Chris Harrison. He interviews Clare in the "After the Final Rose" special and she gets a lot of cheers for being pissed at JP. He should never have led her on, she says. I'm not sure how else he wanted her to act on a dating show where there's one guy and 27 women, because she then tells Chris she doesn't even want to see JP and has nothing else to say. Bye Clare.

Nikki comes out and some people might think she's pregnant but she's probably not and she waves to her BFFs Sharleen and Kelly and then tells Chris and America that life is good and she still loves JP and is excited to see him because I guess for 3/4 months they've had to have a secret long distance relationship. JP joins her on the couch and is immediately asked if he loves her. He won't answer, which, if I'm Nikki, I appreciate, because I haven't seen my boyfriend in 3/4 months and I really don't want him to confess his love in front of a live audience and a million cameras. But Chris Harrison is not Nikki, and he is not OK with this. So he continues to badger JP and force him to say "I Love You" in order to appease the fans of the show. Nikki, for the record, is totally OK with him not saying it yet.

How Chris feels when his questions don't get answered

So here's the part where I'll tell you why I like Juan Pablo and Nikki even better now. They seem actually to recognize how absurd the show is and how it isn't real life and it isn't an accurate way to actually get to know a potential life partner. JP is really pumped to finish recording and have a real life and a real relationship. So while I still think that they will probably break up really soon, I am glad that they aren't pretending to get married in the meantime. Also, I feel like it's not fair that all the women on the show get to talk about how sexy Juan Pablo is and it's OK for them to like him for superficial reasons but he's not allowed to be like, "Hey Clare, I think you're really hot but that's about it." It turns out he is exactly what we all thought he was: a hot Latino with a daughter. He really is just being honest.

This combination of man and baby is weird.

I went to bed around this point, but I hear that at the end of the 3-hour-special they announced the new Bachelorette, and (big surprise), it's Andi. She practically campaigned for it, and I wonder how she ever got through law school if she is dumb enough to put her life on TV. Get ready for people to hate you Andi, because that's what we like to do with famous people.

I'm not really sure what this picture is...

Well, now this blog will go back to being just our real lives. I hope you keep reading it, Amy!

Haha I Still Get a Spring Break

Ok after my long hiatus from the blog, here is the most recent update on my life.  As you all know thanks to my adorable postcards, I was in Florida for spring break last week.  Jillian and I planed down there on Thursday night.  It was -14 (non windchill) when we took off and 68 when we landed...just a minor difference.  My grandma picked us up and took us back to her house where my cousin, her 3 friends, and my aunt were already situated.  It was a little cramped in the two bedroom mobile home, but the good news was Jillian and I got the bedroom!  Everyone else crammed into the living room.

All the girls on Clearwater Beach

For the first few days, we went to various beaches.  One day we went to Clearwater which has really soft sand.  It was a little cool, but we persisted and laid out all day since it was our first day out of ice age Michigan.  At night, there are some fun tents with people selling stuff on the pier so we looked around those and some of the souvenir shops.  We also saw some street performers and that was pretty cool!

The guy jumped through this teeny hoop!

Basically every night we played games so that was fun!  I think I have an obsession with Mexican/Mystery/Marxican Train because I made people play it with me at least once a day.  Jillian had some sort of train super power because she won almost every game by a lot.  Another favorite nightly activity was shuffleboard!  I'm pretty good at it!  But sometimes I'm bad...

During some of the days we took bike rides.  One day we biked downtown and looked through the shops.  I've been in all of them lots of times so nothing was too exciting, but I always like looking at the chocolate wine and cute decorations and such.  Another day, we biked to Honeymoon Island.  I'm not really sure why it's called that, but it's just another beach that's close and easy to get to.  We even went in the ocean while we were there!  It was cold but refreshing.  A sad thing that happened though was I got really burnt.  I had to spray aloe with lidocaine on my back and legs for the rest of the trip.  I think I'm allergic to the sun :(

Sad Ashley

At night, we went back to Clearwater and went to this resort/nightclub/bar/live band stage thingy called Shephard's.  It was the only place we could go because two of Kenzie's (that's you Rachael!) friends were 19.  It was weird because they checked all our IDs and then the guy asked if we wanted to pay full price for cover and I was like uhh no?  So he made us pay 5 dollars instead of 7 so that's cool I guess.  There were lots of bachelor parties at the outside live band part.  They hung around us basically the entire night which was unfortunate because some of them were kinda boring, but they made up for making us listen to them by buying us drinks which were pretty pricey.  The inside club part included two 7/8 naked girls dancing on stage and lots of dancing.  There was also a very attractive bouncer who one of the girls in our group managed to exchange numbers with.

One of the highlights of the vacation was our trip to Busch Gardens.  Jillian's dad had free tickets so yay for not spending money! We went there on Tuesday which worked out great because there were no lines and the weather was perfect.  A weird thing that happened was right when we walked into the park, we ran into these girls who were on Kenzie's plane so they joined our wolf pack for the day.  Sadly, I don't like roller coasters so I was the mom a lot and held everyone's stuff while they went on.  I did go on the train and the cable cars though and then we finished the day off with the water rides and those were really fun and refreshing.

That night was Mardi Gras, so some of us went downtown.  Our intention was to play drag queen bingo, but since it was a special occasion, they didn't have it.  Luckily, it turns out that Mardi Gras is a pretty big deal in the little town of Dunedin, so we had fun anyways.  There was a parade and we managed to get some beads.  Then we talked to a few of the locals....one young guy who was really nice and telling us all the fun things to do and then another old man who was clearly high and crazy.  It was pretty fun just to see all the bizarre costumes and walk around the streets.

Mardi Gras friends

On Wednesday night, we went to this restaurant called Cody's which has peanuts you can throw on the floor and it was buy one get one free fajita night!  It was the 6 girls plus my grandma so we all paired up for our fajitas and she said she'd eat the leftovers.  Four of us also ordered buy one get one free margaritas.  Our intention was to each get one and split the cost.  However, our waitress interpreted it as us each wanting two (like we wanted to get wasted with my grandma??) and was really pissed when she had to throw away four margaritas.  Idk why she didn't just leave them with us at that point.  After dinner, we went to Derby Lanes, a dog race track.  We each made at least one bet, but sadly none of our dogs even placed.  Mine was called Jack's Tigress :)

Jack's Tigress: 8th Place! (out of 8)

Early Friday morning it was time for Jillian and I to return to the homeland.  The good news was that Bobby came up that day so at least I had something to look forward to.  We watched the Indiana game at Bdubs with some friendys and then had a game night where we played cranium and made playdoh!  Also, my phone went to the phone doctor and although I'm poor now, at least I don't have to screenshot all your snapchats and guess at the third answer for quizup!

Hope this makes up for my lack of bloggage in the last couple months :)  Miss you all!

The Women Tell All (or Cling to Their Last Moments of Fame)

The Bachelor is getting close to the end, and that means my favorite episode: "The Women Tell All." I think it's funny how they now decide to start calling them all women, because throughout the rest of the show they are just girls. Like, "Hi, I'm Claire and am 32 years old. But I still consider myself a girl and get in catty fights with Nikki, another girl, and our shared boyfriend thinks we are all girls, just like his 4 year-old daughter." As Reba might say, these are grown-ass women. Also girls dating men is illegal.
Well, anyway, Chris Harrison welcomes us all like we are old friends and then we get to be reminded of the people that left super early in the season. Some, like Victoria, we will never forget (because she got drunk and locked herself in a bathroom). Others, like this chick, we think may have just snuck on the set for this one episode.

Oh now I remember, you cried the first episode.

To start with, all the women jump on the Andi bandwagon and say how self-centered JP is and how he never really got to know them. Finally, Kelly has had enough of that, and she's all, "Gurl please, you never had any problem with Juan Pablo when you were in the house. Stop playing." Not that Kelly is defending JP, she later asks him why he hates gays. Turns out he said some dumb things in an interview once. To be honest, I care very little about Juan Pablo's opinions on social and political issues, and I doubt that he's much of an activist about anything. 

But this leads us to another common theme of the night, which is the women accusing JP of using his language barrier as an excuse for being rude. Victoria grew up speaking Portuguese, and she feels that it's not that hard to become quickly fluent in another language. Maybe Amy or Rachael can back her up on that? I find it pretty difficult so I guess I'm stupid.

I kept wondering how uncomfortable it would be to sit like this for several hours

So pretty early in the show we establish that these women are not members of the JP fan club. They also think he wasn't fair because he treated the moms differently, and kept telling Renee he couldn't kiss her and then turning around and having sex swimming with Claire in the ocean. But Renee was defending him. She thinks he was very respectful and really improved her dating self-esteem, so much so that she is now "in a

Renee and "The Situation"

situation," which I think means she has a boyfriend and is unrelated to Mike from Jersey Shore. So that probably leaves her out of the running for next Bachelorette. Good thing, because as much as I like her, she'd be way boring.

Besides Renee, the other women who got the most attention/ had little interviews with Chris Harrison were Andi and Sharleen. Also the two women who left the show voluntarily. Sharleen was beautiful as always. I think I'm developing a crush on her. But she would also be a boring Bachelorette because you gotta have more crazy on the show than I think she could contribute. Also I'm not sure she'd want to be on it. I have a theory that she still likes JP (she was defending him all night and they had some serious eye contact when he came out), so maybe she will take him as her Latin lover for a while. 

Andi, on the other hand, is clearly vying for the next Bachelorette season. She made sure to let us all know she is still single but believes in "that great love," which is just as weird of a phrase as "grown sexy." I think Lucy secretly wants to be on it, too. Remember her? She's a professional free spirit. That's not even the weirdest occupation I've ever seen on this show.

This is the weirdest job title.

After the women tell all, Juan Pablo comes out and they tell him all, basically attacking him. He says it's okay a lot, which is his catch phrase. He also says he has no regrets. Probably because no matter how the show ends up, he will be rich and can just go find some other women to date.

Next week, we get to see the Final Rose...... Who will it be?? Nikki? Claire? Or will Sharleen come back and steal his heart? Taking predictions in the comments section below!

Go West (But Not Too Far)

So, for the most part, my life is really boring and not progressing in any kind of way and I don't really want to talk about it, but a few interesting things have happened to me in the last few weeks and I will talk about those things!

First, two weekends ago I went to visit Ali in Chicago. She had time off because they were in between quarters, so it was an ideal time to visit. Our cousin Jesse also came, and I like him, so that was nice.

One of the things that we did actually in the city was go to the Shedd Aquarium. We took the Metra into the city and then walked to the Shedd, which was like 2 miles--but luckily it wasn't one of the days that was miserably cold, so it wasn't bad. We also waited in a really long line to get in, and while we were waiting some man kept walking up and down the line asking people to donate money to the soup kitchen--which, great, donating to charity is a good thing, but he pretty much just stared awkwardly at you until you gave him money, so that was weird.

Us in front of Chicago! This is just before we got in line. Sad news--I accidentally left my scarf at Ali's house.

 It was a good time and there were lots of weird ass fish there. I don't have pictures from when we went, but fish look basically the same no matter what location you're looking at them from, so I found some pictures online of ones I remember seeing.

Japanese spider crab. Hard to convey how creepy it was without seeing it in person.

We spent a lot of time looking at the otters. They weren't stacking cups but for some reason I always think this is funny. The otter is so indignant. 

This picture is actually from the Shedd! They have a tank where they let you touch all kinds of starfish, like this baby is doing. The water is very cold and I couldn't reach all of them with my short arms, but I still touched some. We also got to touch a sturgeon, but I didn't really like it because touching fish makes me nervous.

This is an Australian lungfish. His name is Granddad and apparently he has been at the Shedd since 1933, but they didn't advertise that well there because I'm just learning that now as I looked for this picture. I do remember that lungfish have both gills and lungs, for during seasons when the water levels are low and there's not as much dissolved oxygen for them to get with their gills. Two interesting things for the price of one with this picture!

Anyway, that's enough fish pictures. Once we left the aquarium, we met up with my friend Marie from high school and she drove us to Chipotle and then back to Ali's house. At Ali's house, we had a tattoo party! It was a fun idea--everyone had to have a temporary tattoo in order to stay. I had a Mole Day (because that's also my birthday!) tattoo, and also Ali's friend Bobby drew a Red Wings tattoo on me. Jesse had a mermaid tattoo that I had in my wallet, Ali had a glittery shooting star tattoo that I also had in my wallet, and Marie had an Iron Man tattoo that someone bought.

Left to right: Ali, Jack (Death Eater), Taylor. Sadly, I do not have a picture of the Mole Day tattoo.

A bunch of Ali's other friends came over and we drank a lot and I learned some new drinking games, like Irish Poker. Jesse had lots of White Russians (which I had for the first time as well and I like them even though they sound gross!) and got very drunk. Ali and I both felt like we had to take care of him but didn't know the other person was doing anything, so she fed him like half a bag of pita chips and a bottle of Gateraid and I fed him a chicken breast with BBQ sauce, which was kind of funny to hear from him in the morning--he was like, "You guys just kept making me eat so much!" but he didn't stop us at the time, so how were we supposed to know?

Jesse and I rode the train back the next day, which was very uneventful.


The other exciting thing that happened to me was that last weekend, I went to Kalamazoo to visit my friend Hannah. I've never been to Kalamazoo and I guess she doesn't go out much, so it was an adventure for both of us. We went to a place called the Beer Exchange, which is based on a stock market type idea, I guess. There is this big board that has all of the beers and their prices on it, and as beers get more popular, they get more expensive, and as they get ordered less often, they get cheaper. The prices change every 15 minutes. And then, every once in a while, the stock market crashes and everything is super cheap! It felt like a place people in Ann Arbor would be into.

A picture of the board--the time in the corner is how much time is left til it changes again. 

We met some guys there who were trying to decide if this girl across the bar was pregnant (she definitely was, but they couldn't make up their minds) and they asked us to play pool with them. I'm very bad at pool. Their names were Charlie, Kurt, and Brian... but none of them looked like their names belonged to them? It's hard to explain, but Hannah agreed with me the next morning. Maybe that's why they're friends--their parents all sucked at naming their kids. Anyway, they hung out with us for the rest of the night but to be honest they were all pretty boring and not super nice. Later, we left and went to another place called The Gatsby, and Kurt was SUPER pumped to dance, which was amusing. Like, I have never in my life met a man who was so excited to just dance. Caryn would hate him.

That's all! I don't have an adventure planned for this weekend--probably I'll just see Evan, but I like him so that's okay!

It Never Rains in Southern California...Unless It Does

For reference about the title.

So work shipped me out to Los Angeles for our Student Convention, which kinda made me feel like a big deal. Also, they told me I was going to go back in August but no one mentioned it again until like January, so I wasn't really sure if that was the truth or not.

We have a national convention in June that's a really big deal.  This convention is smaller, and much newer--this was only the second year. So it was cool to watch it all happen and help out a little with the planning.

I flew out Friday morning from the airport that's only one metro stop away.  It was way more convenient than when I came home in October and flew through Baltimore.  The flight was pretty whatever. No food and no movie. But I guess that's standard these days?

Then, when we got to LA we had to start working IMMEDIATELY. I was in charge of helping the students get on the shuttle to UCLA's law school. It seemed like a shitty job because I just had to wait at the hotel and miss all the actual events. I definitely had my crabby pants on when they told me that but it turns out it was kinda fun! I got to talk to a lot of law students and it was pretty stress free. Definitely exhausting though.

So by the time I showed up to dinner I was tired. We ate with some law students. They were all a little confused what I actually do at ACS, which makes sense. We finished up around 8:00ish and headed back to the hotel and all grabbed a drink together. It was a crazy long day. I was up from 6:00am to 12:30am without many breaks--I mean I guess besides flying. And we had to be dressed and pretty in the lobby by 7:00am. So I slept like a rock in my king size bed. I realized this was the first time I stayed in my own hotel room!

After work selfie

The next day I ran the shuttle in the morning and showed up mostly on time to the event.  We had ordered an absurd amount of breakfast so I ate a ton of that. I spent most of the day Friday being hungry so I tried to fill up when possible.

This time though I got to sit in on a lot of panels too! Most of them were about Brown v. Board of Education which I don't know a ton about, but was interesting nonetheless. 

This is my boss, the President, giving a speech.

Then after lunch we did "break out trainings" that all revolved around an immigration case.  This is the Singh Family and the father's fight against deportation.  The father is the one in the back row in the striped sweater and when he told the convention about his family's issue, he started to cry and eventually had most of the auditorium in tears. It was really emotional especially because his children were sitting in the front row and his wife is right next to him.

Then the Convention wrapped up and we cleaned up and went out to dinner. Well all the important people went to fancy dinner. Me, James, and Samantha went out and did our own thing. Then we came back to the hotel and had a few drinks. I had two big glasses of wine and felt pretty tipsy. We also had to be up at 9:00 to leave for the airport/go get our rental car.

The rental car thing went really well! I guess maybe I'm just cynical but I was expecting the rental car company to try and screw us over because we're young and relatively clueless but the whole thing worked out!

Then Sam and I went off to the Getty Center. We stopped first to have weird brunch at this really empty restaurant. The Getty looks like this:

And you get to go up this cool little tram thing. I think it was partially because Sam was trying to rush through it, but I don't think the Getty had like a lot of stuff I hadn't see before? Like between the DIA, Greenfield Village, and all the fancy French museums I've been to, it takes a little more than some photographs and dressers to impress me! Here are some highlights:

After the museum we decided to go find our hotel. It was a little far away from the museum. And everything in LA is like annoying to get to. Either you have to wait for forever on the highway, or you have to take a kajillion back roads. We went the backroads way because it's more scenic.

We found our hotel. It was Japanese themed. So...that was...nice, I guess? We also had the weirdest room set up ever.  We were sharing a bed because that's way cheaper and the hotel apparently thought that our bed needed to be on this weird platform in the center of the room. Also the hotel was close to the highway and kinda loud. But...when you're cheap like we were, you don't get to complain much. After we relaxed a little we decided to go to LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).


LACMA was cool. It was definitely a "hipper place to be" with a lot of big exhibits. This was this cool imaginary city thing made out of like grown up legos or something!

They had a soccer exhibit Zack would have liked. I don't know soccer well enough to be crazy pumped, but there was a lot of mixed media cool pictures. And I think I like that better than random old paintings. Maybe if someone cultured me more I'd appreciate art museums more.

Samantha pretending to be a model

Then we wandered into the Diane Von Furstenberg exhibition about the wrap dress. I didn't know it/she was such a big thing! It was a really cool exhibit with tons of mannequins wearing dresses and her face EVERYWHERE. Lots of patterns, lots of everything.



Then outside there's a bunch of cafes and light posts. We took pictures there. I guess it's from No Strings Attached, a movie I haven't seen. But I guess that's cool. Maybe I'll watch it and just know that I've seen the

If I'm honest, I'm probably the boy and Samantha is probably the girl.

Then we were crazy hungry because all we'd had that day was chocolate chip pancakes. So we went back the hotel and walked to this kinda sketchy burrito place. So I was pretty happy about that, but it upset Samantha's tummy. The burrito life definitely isn't for everyone, but it's definitely for me.

We decided to go to this fancy restaurant that Samantha's boss recommended for us. It's up really high so you can see the entire LA skyline from there! We were too excited about it to remember to take pictures, so you'll just have to trust me, I guess. Also, getting there required we pretty much drive right through the Oscars, so that was fun, but a little nerve wracking.

Then we went to bed super early because we were pretty beat from all the long days at convention.

In the morning we got up and had the hotel restaurant's interpretation of "American breakfast."  It was really just mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs with sausage links. It was free though so I guess you don't get to complain too much.

Can you see the tiny hollywood sign? No?

Then we went hiking! Wooo! It was a pretty steep climb, but not too long so it was mostly good. Only got out of breath a few times. And it was really pretty going up:

HERE IT IS!

 Also, there were all these crazy people RUNNING up the hills. Like it was a hard hill to just walk up, let alone run. Also, this was at like 10:00am on a Monday. Don't you work?! But I guess people say that about California...

 Then we got to the top. There's an observatory. It's closed on Monday, but I don't know that I would really like an observatory anyway? I didn't take astronomy like some members of CART who are now experts. It made for pretty pictures at least!

Hollywood Hills selfie! 

When we got down the car again we decided to go to Hollywood. I'd been trying to tell Samantha nicely that Hollywood kind of sucks. I don't want to be a spoilsport because no one likes that, but Hollywood got me real down the last time I went and I wanted to warn her.  Luckily she agreed after walking around a little. Here are some pictures of stars I took. I mean...there's not much else to say about them...and you kind of get numb to them after a few blocks...

MY NEIGHBOR

When we got to the end we realized the Oscar statue was still up from the night before! Again, I didn't get a picture of it, so you'll just have to trust me.  Also, the saddest part of Hollywood Boulevard is when you get to the characters that don't quite look like the people they're impersonating but are begging you to pay them for pictures. Think this:

We had been walking a long time so we drove to the Venice Beach to hang out and look for some food. Venice beach is funky. A little dirty. A little sketchy. But pretty cool. It's like a super long board walk with like 4 medical marijuana clinics, lots of those stores that sell those drug rags, and some weird people.

We stopped to get pizza, french fries, and milkshakes because we were super hungry and pretty much felt like we deserved it after that hike and the walk around Hollywood. Pretty much all of that sucked. I've never had a bad milkshake before and didn't think it was possible. But, it was definitely a bad milkshake that was mostly milk. Whatever. I guess there's a first for everything.

Then we walked and Samantha realized that she hadn't actually ever put her feet in the Pacific Ocean. It wasn't actually that nice of a day and I was wearing tennis shoes and socks so I let her do that solo and took this picture of her so she can commemorate the experience.

Venice beach is about ten minutes from Santa Monica so we decided to drive over there too while we were at it.  They have this pier thing that has a hundred roller coasters and amusement park games crammed onto one tiny pier.  My boss said she really likes it there so I kind of wanted to go in case she asked me about it.

We didn't ride the ferris wheel, but we probably should have. We were kinda tired at this point and just wandered through the pier pretty quickly before heading to the actual beach. Of course no one was swimming so we just wandered down and saw all the seaweed and collected a couple seashells.

Also Cirque du Soleil was there! Too bad we didn't know ahead of time/too bad tickets to that are crazy expensive. So we just settled on a beach selfie and went home. It took a long time to get home. LA sucks that way--you have to drive, you have to wait in traffic, and you have to pay for parking. That's like all the benefits of the city gone!

So the plan was to just rest for a little bit and then get dinner. Except...Samantha fell asleep at like 7:30. So I felt awkward and waited around for her to wake up. And she just didn't...and i was getting really hungry. So I did something I haven't done since I went to Geneva--I went and sat at a restaurant alone! I forgot how different it is. It's kinda fun, but it's a little scary. Good thing nobody in the restaurant was cool. I would've felt lamer.

The food itself was pretty whatever. But, I guess you can't complain too much about a hotel restaurant, you know?

In the morning we woke up, fought LA traffic, returned our rental car, and got on the plane!

Conclusions from this trip:

• Most law students seem pretty nice--no one too stressed or too pretentious
• LA doesn't usually seem to worth it. All the benefits like the entertainment business is lost of on me.
• A 3 hour time change is a lot! It's hard to talk to people on the East Coast when you're out there!
• I like king size beds. I want to have one when I'm a grown up.