Ever wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy and lay in your bed for a loooooong time and try to WILL yourself to go back to sleep because it is only 7:03 and WHY CAN I NOT SLEEP PAST 8 O’CLOCK??  


So you lay in bed and think about a whole bunch of random things like how you failed at seeing 11:11 on 11/11/11 TWICE yesterday, because in the morning you were at work and got a phone call so you were distracted, but then your high school English teacher reminded you via your Facebook status that you still had one more chance to see it at 11:11 PM.  But then you went to dinner with the love of your life and his co-workers, and when you got home you had to lay down on the couch because your stomach hurt really badly because you thought it would be a good idea to eat ice cream for dessert without taking a Lactaid pill, even though you know you are lactose intolerant and that you would be in pain and want to die later.  So while you were on the couch cursing yourself for eating ice cream, and cursing the love of your life for LETTING you eat ice cream, you were watching Seinfeld, and then you fell asleep sometime between 10:30 and 10:45 and woke up at 11:08, but since you are confused and disoriented when you wake up anywhere except your bed, you forgot that you should sit in front of your computer for three minutes so that you could see 11:11 PM and 11/11/11 underneath it.  Instead, you got up from the couch and went to bed in your clothes because you couldn’t muster the energy to change into pajamas.


At 7:43 you accept that you are awake and then you roll out of bed and remember that you slept in your clothes last night for no apparent reason other than laziness, so you put on sweatpants and a tshirt.  You then open your bedroom door and are blinded by the morning light shining into the hallway, so your eyes start to water.


Then you see the shirt that you wanted to wear TONIGHT is sitting in the basket right in front of the washing machine so that before you went to bed last night you would remember to put it in the washing machine, because you were SUPPOSED to put it in the washing machine before you went to dinner but you forgot.  That shirt had to go in the washing machine asap, because said shirt can’t go in the dryer and needs to line dry.  So you put a load of clothes in the washing machine.


And then your mom calls and is all chipper and says, “GOOD MORNING!!” and you croak, “hiiiiiiiiii mooooooooooooom” and she remembers that you are under the age of 80 and you don’t have children on a Saturday morning, so you should really still be sleeping.  So then she asks if she woke you up and you say that you’ve been awake for 45 minutes but you feel like you have a scratchy throat.  She says that she hopes you’re not coming down with something, and then says, “Well, I already talked to Peter about this-” and you cut her off and say, “You talked to Peter about something before me?!?!” and she continued about Christmas presents and ideas and then you laid down on the couch and cover up with a blanket and close your eyes while your mom keeps talking to you.  And then she says that she has to go, so you hang up the phone and continue laying on the couch.


After 20 seconds of listening to the washing machine run, you decide to turn on the tv, and when you start flipping through the channels, you think for the millionth time how you wish you had cable TV because NOTHING is on regular TV on the weekends until Sunday night at 7 PM.


While you’re flipping through channels, you start to get hungry, but since you’re not much of a breakfast eater, you don’t have any breakfast food.  You get up off the couch and shuffle over to the kitchen wishing you had a pair of slippers, make a mental note to add it to your Christmas list, and then decide to detour to your bedroom to get a pair of socks and a hoodie, all the while trying to get your knotted hair out of your face and into a knotted ponytail.  


Upon entering the kitchen, you rummage through your cupboards and find a box of Betty Crocker quick-bread mix for Lemon Poppyseed bread.  You have the necessary ingredients, so you pre-heat the oven and throw all the ingredients into a bowl and use a wooden spoon to mix it all up.  You think about how hungry you are, and then when you put it in the oven you remember that it takes 35 minutes to bake, so you eat a couple pistachios to hold you over.


While the bread is baking, you move your clothes from the washer to the dryer and watch Gumby on TV.  


After you get bored with Gumby, you decide to open up your computer and go online.  While you’re Facebook stalking, you see a Youtube video of the Ellen DeGeneres show that you watch, and then you start to remember how on Thursday night you were watching Youtube videos while Peter was working on his computer, and then you started watching videos of soldiers coming home and surprising their families.  Then you remember that while you were watching the videos on Thursday, you started to get teared up and Peter looked at you, but decided not to ask what’s wrong.  You THEN clicked on a Youtube video that was a 10 minute long montage of clips of soldiers coming home and surprising their families, and a lot of the videos are of little kids, and you started getting a little more teared up and your nose started running.  You tried to hide your emotions from Peter because you didn’t want him to roll his eyes at you, but then by minute 4, tears were streaming down your face, and Peter asked if you were ok and you said yes, but then by minute 6 you couldn’t hold the emotions in and you were sobbing and Peter kept looking at you like you were a lunatic saying, “What the eff are you watching??  Are you going to be ok????” and you kept saying that you were FINE even though there were tears and snot dripping all over your face.  You really were a mess on Thursday night.


Then the kitchen timer beeps and you take the bread out of the oven, and wait for it to cool even though your stomach is eating itself and you really want to break a hunk of the loaf off with your hand and shove it in your mouth, but you decide against it because you got burned a lot in cooking class, and hot things on your hands hurt.  You sit back down on the couch and take clothes that you should have folded yesterday out of the dryer to fold today.  But then you decide that they are too wrinkled, so you throw them back in the dryer to heat up and you decide that THIS TIME when they come out of the dryer you will fold them RIGHT AWAY so that they are not wrinkled and you don’t look like a schmuck.


You sit back down with your computer sitting on your lap, and then you  look at the clock and realize it’s only 10:53 AM and that you’ve wasted your whole morning when all week you were thinking about what a productive weekend you were going to have.  


But then you decide that relaxing is productive.  So you put in Mary Poppins and lay back down on the couch.  Folding clothes can wait until later.


Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Dear Mom,


I know that I should have said this a long time ago, but I think a part of me just didn’t want to admit it.  Now, I’ve been pushed over the edge, and I just NEED to say something.


Yesterday, I had Peter bring 2 baskets of laundry over to my apartment so that I could make him look presentable and be confident that he is wearing clean clothes on a daily basis.  When I started sorting the laundry, towards the bottom of one basket, I began getting suspicious.  Then, I realized it.  He had put dirty laundry into a basket ON TOP OF already folded shirts and shorts and socks.  I. was. pissed.  Why the eff was he giving me CLEAN CLOTHES that were STILL FOLDED to wash?!?!


I don’t mind doing his laundry.  Especially because he buys the detergent.  And he brings me out to dinner.  I don’t mind putting his shirts in the dryer again because I neglected to fold the laundry right away and they got wrinkled.  I don’t mind folding all of his clothes, or ironing his shirts and dress pants.  


What I do mind, is when I see clean clothes in the dirty pile.  And I mind when I see him take a shirt from the bottom of the pile, leaving the rest disheveled.  I also mind when he leaves his clothes in the basket instead of putting them in his closet or dresser.


Mom.  I realized yesterday that I am becoming… you.  I remember, all those years ago, you screaming at us after we cleaned our rooms because we would put anything on the floor in the dirty laundry.  I remember you following us upstairs and showing us our drawers in disarray, making us straighten them.  Threatening that we will have to do our OWN laundry if you EVER saw our drawers like that AGAIN.  And I also remember rolling my eyes at you.


For this, I apologize.  Because now that I have someone putting clean, FOLDED clothes in the dirty laundry basket, I send them texts like this “Peter Romenesko.  The bottom half of the basket of laundry you gave me is still CLEAN.  And halfway FOLDED.”  And when he responds “Whoops!”, I respond “THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD EMPTY THE LAUNDRY BASKETS I GIVE YOU OF CLEAN CLOTHES.  You’re lucky I still love you and don’t ABANDON you and make you FEND FOR YOURSELF.”  


Why don’t I abandon him, you ask?  Two reasons.  The first one, is because I fully realize that if he had a disheveled appearance in public, it would reflect poorly on me.  The last thing I want someone thinking is, “Who is the girl that is dating that poor schmuck?”  And the second reason is because I don’t want to let his parents down.  They trust me to take care of their poor, helpless child when he is away from home.  I don’t want them to think poorly of me.


So, Mom, I apologize to you now for taking advantage of your mad laundry skillz.  For every clean shirt I didn’t want to put back in my drawer.  For every pair of underwear that I took from the bottom of the pile, leaving the rest in disarray.  I only have one person’s laundry to do beside my own, and I am almost going crazy.  How you managed with 7 children and a farmer husband, I will never know.  


I also thank you for passing these skillz on to me.  Although, I’m not sure if it is a blessing or a curse, because I find myself cursing a whole lot when I’m doing laundry.


Love,
Your favorite daughter.

I’ve been spending kind of a lot of time on airplanes lately, and that results in two things: (1) All of these great ideas of things that I want to share with the world.  (2) A lot of things to catch up on when I get back into the office, and then I forget all of my great ideas, and then I am tired at the end of the day and don’t want to stare at a computer and try to remember my great ideas.  I think I’m going to start bringing a notebook or something on planes, because then I can write things down, but it’s kind of pointless now, because I’m going to stay on the ground for a couple months.  

SO.  I have grand intentions of typing until my fingers bleed when I am back in the homeland!  


To hold you over (and prove to all of you doubters…):

That’s Ryan Braun.  If you were wondering.  He smells really good.

Whoever came up with the wonderful world of emoticons is my hero.  


🙂


What a genius it was that figured out that HEY!  Putting a : before a ) and tilting your head to the left… Well I’ll be damned!  That looks like a little guy with beady eyes grinning, yes GRINNING at me!! 


😀


I’m not kidding.  


(8|


I EFFING LOVE TO USE EMOTICONS.


( 8D


Text message convo last night around 9 – 


Pete: Hot dog. I got hit by the tired monster!


Sara: Then go to bed.  You had a long week.  And a long weekend.  Don’t fight it!!


Pete: Forgot to tell you that I have enough Mountain Dew to last the winter.  So that’s helping me stay awake 🙂


Sara: Do you know what?  I’m going to dump it all down the drain if you tell me ONCE tomorrow that you’re tired!!


Pete: 8(


Sara: 8|


Pete: 8D


Sara: >8|


Pete: haaahahahahaha (8D


Sara: STOP TEXTING ME AND LET ME SLEEP -_-


Pete: 8( Ok! Sleep tight 


Sara: Seriously, stop texting me.


*Note: When I first opened the hot dog text on my phone, it just said, “Hot dog. I got hit…” because my phone previews the text before I fully open it to read it, but I read “Hot dog. I just got bit…” And when I first saw that little snippet, I thought OMG he got BIT by a DOG.  Reminder to self: read the whole message instead of skimming.


When I texted the emoticon of me sleeping like a peaceful angel -_- to Peter, I was going to send a text that said, “You should go to sleep too!” and then include an emoticon of HIM sleeping, but I couldn’t do this one    -_- because Peter does NOT look like a peaceful angel when he sleeps.


I couldn’t figure out how to make the emoticon of how he sleeps when I was falling asleep last night, so I just didn’t do it. 


But I figured it out.  Even though it’s not an emoticon.


Peter sleeps like this:

Everything that I know about New York I learned on Seinfeld.  For example: when Travis and I were trying to decide which airport to fly into – JFK or La Guardia – I knew that they weren’t THAT far from each other because in a Seinfeld episode, Jerry and Elaine’s airplane keeps getting re-routed back and forth between JFK and La Guardia, and George and Kramer have to drive back and forth and George gets all in a huffy because it was going to be the perfect airport pick-up, but not it won’t be because they have to drive back and forth so much.


Anyways, you can imagine how thrilled I was to see the Seinfeld Restaurant.  The REAL Seinfeld Restaurant.

When I called my dad and told him that I saw it, he asked if Jerry and George were sitting in their usual booth.  OBVIOUSLY.


So, my friend Travis and I spent 5 days in New York a couple weeks ago.  I was prompted to take the trip after receiving an email from one of my dear friends that I met in Ecuador when I was in the jungle, Bibi.  Bibi was taking a vacation to Canada and NYC and thought HEY!  Instead of buying a ticket to Amsterdam, Sara can just buy a ticket to NYC!!  


I initially invited Peter to go along with me, but “big city vacation stress [him] out… Except for Vegas”, so I invited my other boyfriend Travis to come along.  And we had a grand time!!  While I was in Ecuador, I made a lot of friends, and this makes travelling in the USA especially awesome.  Travis, Bibi and I were able to stay with our friends Peter and Carin.  They have a wonderful house built in the 1700’s with more than enough room for us to sleep.  They live in a town that is a 45 minute train ride outside of the city – which was really nice.  It was refreshing and relaxing to be able to leave the hustle and bustle of the city at night and fall asleep to the sounds of crickets instead of car horns.


Here are some pictures and maybe a story or two from the trip.  If you saw the album on Facebook – the pictures and most of the captions are PROBABLY the same.  Fair warning.

We sat and stared at this building for a while.

Sharpest angle in the city.

As we were walking around the city on the first day, we saw a lot of strange things.  I didn’t take pictures of a lot of them, because I didn’t want to get shot, but then Bibi talked me into taking this picture.  At first we thought this guy was a street actor, but it turned out that he was a homeless man standing with his head down so he looked like he didn’t have a head.  

It really DOES look like he’s headless.

 Since we were staying with Peter and Carin, we went grocery shopping.  

Cart for the groceries.  Cart for luggage.

Bibi started out pushing a cart, but then he would just leave the luggage cart while he wandered off.  I’m not just saying that he went to the other end of the aisle.  He went to the other end of the STORE.  That’s when Travis volunteered to just stand in the foreign foods aisle with both carts while Bibi and I went looking for food that we wanted.


I really enjoyed looking at all of the buildings.  Lots of old buildings.  Lots of new buildings.  My neck hurt by the time I went back home.

One of these things is not like the other…

 

Thanks to my friend Ashley, we bought tickets online so that we could skip the line.  We bought the “Flex Tickets”, advertising SKIP THE LINE!!!!!!!!!!!.  Because we had these great skip the line tickets, we took our time getting to the city.  Took our time moseying to the tent where we present our skip the line tickets and get to immediately get on a boat.  

Plenty of time to get a pic taken in front of the Financial District

MORE than enough time for a photo-op in front of the Statue of Liberty, even though we’ll be able to touch it in a few short minutes since we have SKIP THE LINE tickets.

As we mosey our way closer to the tent where we were going to skip the line, we decided to ask a nice police officer where exactly we’re supposed to go.  He was inside the gate on the side of the white tent where we wanted to be.  I showed him our tickets.

Paul: (looks at Bibi) Does Elvis know you stole his glasses? 
Bibi: Maybe you could let us in right here? 😀 😀
Paul: (opens jacket slightly to reveal a taser) If you get in line here, you get a free dose of electricity.
Sara: 8|
Paul: >:)
Sara: Is there ANYTHING that you can do?  
Paul: 😐
Sara, Bibi, and Travis: 😀 
Paul: :]  I’ll tell you what.  Go on the other side of the tent, and find Big Rob.  He’s big.  You can’t miss him.  He might be able to help you.
Sara: … (:D And who sent us?
Paul: … Paul.  Tell him Paul sent you.


So we went over and found Big Rob.


Sara: Hiiiiii, are you Rob?
Bibi: Big Rob?
Big Rob: Ye-uh. (He was a big dude)
Sara: *shoves tickets in his hand* Well, Paul sent us, and he said you might be able to help us?
Big Rob: Paul who?  I know a lotta Pauls.
Bibi: Paul with the electricity!
Big Rob: Uh-huh, cop Paul.  *stares at papers*
Sara, Bibi, and Travis: *stare at Big Rob*
Big Rob: Follow me.
Sara, Bibi, and Travis: *shocked faces* OK!


And then Big Rob ushered us to the front of the 3 hour line, and opened the gate.  And that was that!  We were in!  Amazing what a nice smile and some small-talk can do.


After going through the equivalent of airport security we finally made it on to the boat.







 


And then we were on Liberty Island.

Being tourists.

Just staring at people picking their noses.  Yes, I really did put in 50 cents.

This a church right near the site.  It became a memorial on its own.  The ribbons all have something written on them, like a person’s name and the floor they were on when the towers went down.  It was so sad, looking at all of those ribbons. This is one of the pools.  They looked like they would go down forever.  There are two identical pools, the North Pool and the South Pool.  They are the footprints of the World Trade Centers.

Strawberry Fields

 And then we went home and I was happy to sleep in my own bed.


I’ve seriously been working on this blog since last week, but Blogger is dumb and not cooperating, and it isn’t turning out the way I want it to, and it doesn’t look the way the I set it up when I push “preview” so whatever you see, like the large spaces and not lined up pictures, is NOT my fault.


I’m happy I’m done with this post, because I’ve been SO frustrated with it that I just exit out and one time I did that without saving, so THEN I was REALLY mad.


But now you know about my trip to NYC, and you can tell that I was sick of writing at the end, but that’s ok because now you don’t have to read anymore.  And if you made it this far, thanks.  I like you.

I’m working on the post about New York, but sometimes computers are dumb and make it hard to put as many pictures up as I want to.  So then I get frustrated and have to stop working on it before I throw something at the computer screen.  But it is in the works, and will be coming soon!!


This week, Peter and I celebrated our 3 year anniversary.  


On Monday, we went out for a nice dinner and looked all pretty.

We went to our new favorite restaurant called Fetaz that serves tapas and sandwiches and other yummy things.  The waitress asked what we wanted to drink, and I ordered first, and since we’re soooo romantic, I ordered wine.


Peter ordered Mellow Yellow.


When we decided what we wanted to eat, because we’re soooo romantic, Peter ordered three different tapas that we could share.


I ordered the Tyrannosaurus Rex sandwich (DISCLAIMER: It is not as gluttonous as it sounds.  It’s actually quite delicious and more the size of a Raptor.  Honey barbecue chicken, pineapple salsa and some sort of light, delicious bread.).


On Wednesday was the actual day where three years ago Peter asked me to be his giiiiiirlfrieeeeend.  


Peter’s been super busy with work and presentations and things, so I didn’t think that I’d be able to see him last night, but then it worked out that he could come to my apartment for a quick dinner.


I exercised right after work.  When I exercise, I sweat like no other and my face gets all red, and I disgust even myself.  But HEY.  I’m EXERCISING so SHUT UP.


Via text –


Sara: I just want to remind you that I am the least attractive (1) while I’m working out and (2) until I’ve showered after working out.


Pete: Well I’m heading over to see you now!


Sara: Ok, just remember how much you love me while you’re on your way.  At least I changed my clothes.


So then Peter came over and we were super romantic eating chicken wings and using 3428397 napkins.  He looked super put-together because he came right from work.  I, on the other hand, was much less attractive wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, and my hair slicked to my head, cheeks still slightly rosy.


But we took a picture anyways.  This is, after all, the first time that we’ve actually been able to SEE each other on our anniversary.

Thanks, Peter, for still liking me even when I’m in my least attractive state.


And also for letting my write about you on my blog.  Because I don’t know if I’d let you write about me.


PS: When I was writing about the tapas, I kept writing tatas, and it made me laugh every time.  Mature, I know.

Seriously.