Long time, no post, eh?

Hello faithful and devoted readers. ; p
I am sorry. I have been really busy and tired. I have not been able to stay awake long enough to read your blogs, let alone write one of my own. So much has happened the past week and a half.

1) Rhode Island. The vacation was a lot of fun. Here is a link to the public facebook album: Link! The purpose of the trip was to attend my brother's graduation from officer candidate school with the Navy. Once he gets a bachelors degree, he will be an officer. For the next three years, he is Officer Candidate Jordan and will become Ensign Jordan after graduation from the U in 2012. So he is home. It's a nice change. Even though I don't automatically have privacy anymore, it's nice to see him and talk and everything.

2) Rhode Island take 2. I didn't really talk about Rhode Island in the first attempt, did I? Anyway, we went to the beaches a lot. It was too cold to do anything but dip our feet in, but it was still nice to see the ocean. We spent our first morning at Easton's Beach. Some of the water was maroon/red from the algae/seaweed. There was a big machine/tractor that scooped up the red gunk that piled up on the beach. I prefer small freshwater lakes to the ocean, but it's cool to see every now and then. We went to a few nature places, including Purgatory Chasm. It was cool. Just this large rift in the rock. It was a pretty cool place with lots of exploring opportunities. It is just off of Purgatory Road. It's also Cemetary #32 of Newport, though I was not able to find any markers unless you count an unlabelled cement block. We went to some history places, too, including the Newport History Museum and Shop, which was a little biased and boring, and the Plymouth re-creation of the 1627 village with a Wampanaog village as well, the Mayflower 2 and Plymouth Rock. It was all pretty cool. The graduation ceremony itself was super short, only 20 minutes or so. That's ok with me. I don't need to sit through a long ceremony and neither does my brother, I'm sure. Although he had to stand.

3) Girl Scout Day Camp. Oh man, I love day camp! It is sooooooooo fun. I usually don't write an exhorbitant amount of letters to emphasize my meaning, but it's the only way I can really describe it. It is sooooooooooo fun. It was my first year being a leader, which is less fun than a caddy but less exhausting. Although I conked out at 8:30 usually every night after camp. It's very tiring, running around from 7:45 am til 5:15 pm. I was bus check-in for L-Z last names, so I had to be there early and stay late to make sure there were no abandoned girls left. It was tons of fun, though. I was a brownie leader this year, so I had 15 8-year-olds running around all the time. Brownies don't follow instructions as well, nor to they have much respect for personal space (I got felt up a lot and people just plopped into my lap without much notice), but they're so darn cute. I learned a lot about their families in 4 days. They don't require much prompting to talk, just a "hello" and off they go. Even the shy ones will open up with some one-on-one attention. There are always a couple tough ones. I used 3 bandaids on one girl, and another one cried 3 times a day. Others were out of control hyper at times, and a couple were so tired by the end of the week, they got really crabby and upset about things easily. Overall, I think everyone had a lot of fun, though. Myself included.

4) My 12 year old cousin got a cell phone for her birthday. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't think she needs one yet, but I probably should have gotten a cell phone about 4 years before I did. Ah well, now I can keep in touch with her better. : )

5) I need to clean my grandparents house. My cousin and my aunt shunted house cleaning duty onto me, and the things I need to clean are really obscure things that I would never think of cleaning, such as baseboards. Who honestly cleans the baseboards?

6) Sorry that I don't have pictures with this. The internet is slow so it's taking too long to upload even 1 picture. I'll try to do a picture post tomorrow while I'm at Dunns.