oh my!

hi hi hi!

this is me and my younger brother. [he's a cute dork in this picture. heh.]
me and my freaking awesome family just got back from a week long vaca.
it was perfect weather then, and we came home to perfect weather.
on the cool side. breezy.
scarily like autumn, even though we shouldn't have autumn weather till late september. weeeeiiiirrrrddddd.
i'll take it though.
makes it even more natural [and not weird] to drink good, hot coffee. :) all the time. ;)

sarah and justin's littlest kiddo.

 

...cute things happened last saturday. the last 3 pictures are proof. ;)
you're welcome. :)
i'm not going to get much sleep in the next few days. not like vaca. sleeping by 10:30 pm, awake by 7....
life is changing. and it's good.

p.s. i almost never log into my blogger account because google screwed with my email not being able to be logged in at the same time as my google/blogger one. :P oy!!!! inconvenient much?!

part 2: august vaca.

. . . also known as part two of the week i realized i need to live by the water someday. huge lake, nice-sized river, or ocean . . . i need to live by the water someday.

it's not simply romanticism.
it's the flipside of the coin of beauty that He made. land: one side. ocean and waters: other side.
[humans are a whole other story; not really a coin. hahah.]
it seems to feed my soul.

saturday or sunday afternoon, we got the speedboat out on the river.

:)

and, for the first time in my life, i went tubing. i can't guarantee i'll ever do so again . . . i don't like the prospect of getting flipped. :P
and now, for charla, here are some pictures that were taken by mum when we went tubing. :)

of course, with my crazy wild imagination issues, i hate seaweed and everything that comes with the dark, unsearchable types of bodies of water . . . especially if i grew up with irrational stories told to me by my two older siblings while we sat in a paddle boat smack dab in the middle of this very river . . . uh. yeah.
as evidence by the slideshow below, this river has a lot of seaweed. :P

august 14, a sunday, we woke up . . . i slept an hour more than i normally do on a sunday [at home: 7am because i have to be there earlier; singing and everything, y'know.] . . . we went to church with gramma shirley. a lovely place where i smiled inside and outside when i saw the greeters and thought of the ones at our church; people i've known since we started going there when i was a baby. people like family.
they even had a sweet library set up outside the sanctuary; a coffee corner with an espresso machine . . . too bad it wasn't open that day. :P hah.

next: monday, the 15th, we left.
and stopped, as tradition [and my camera] calls for, at a lovely place on the rocky shore of lake michigan.

we took pictures, pictures, and more pictures.

i fell in love with the waves.

the wind.

the sunflare i captured.

the frothy edges of waves crashing on my feet.

overall, i'm sure you can see we quite enjoyed our hour or so there. :)
then, back into the van for a few more hours . . .
here are some random ones from rachel's ipod, and nikon camera.

 

by the way: that tall cliff i'm sitting on? a daddy long leg with a dark red body came walking towards me while i was waiting for a sister to hand me the flip-flops i had forgotten on the lower level.

yikes.

:P

p.s. a veryveryvery good post by amber: what is your identity? read it!!

part 1: august vaca.

this was a long time coming.

friday august 12
heading out . . . nice, long 5-hour drive.
let me tell you, drives go way faster and on one gets on anybody's nerves [hey. over a small amount of time, a van gets to be close quarters.] when you're all watching the first season of white collar.

heck yes.
me and anna had seen it all . . . but we still quite enjoyed it. :)

so, friday night we arrived at gramma shirley's house.
she's one of grammy's nieces. she's super sweet.
we've gone up to her house by the river most summers. [sadly, her husband, papa stan, died 4 years ago. :(]
lots of good memories of fishing, pontoon boat rides, hugs, fish fries and lots of homemade onion rings . . .
mhmm:)

 

so, saturday we woke up and just . . . kinda . . . lazed around.
anna and i stayed home while the rest of the family went on an errand with gramma shirley . . .

we made vegetarian tacos, and i found the shop around the corner amidst the many, many channels.

we ventured out to the pier, and anna took pictures of the sky . . . and me . . . my imagination takes over sometimes when i'm near bodies of water . . . and quite irrationally, at that.
soon enough, it rained. and rained, and rained.
it poured for a good 10 minutes.
then it finished.
caleb and rach went out on the paddle boat. heh. those two are hilarious.
anna and i played the card game garbage with gramma shirley, and saw hummingbirds come to the sugar feeder just outside the dining room window.
lyddie named him mr. hummer.
:)

after some really good pizza, we had the most beautiful sunset ever, out on the river.
i posed with an old fashioned gun. [no bullets . . . i don't think. heh.]
then, gramma shirley was craving some v8 juice, and because me and rachel were trying it too, she got out the, er, fancy glasses. to do it right. heheh. :)
ah, talk about memories . . .

and thus commences the first part of the vacation posts.
i figured i better get on it, or it'll never see the light of my blog. ever. :)
btw, this was when i had some really lovely guest bloggers post here.