Vampire Cat Strikes Back!

This evening, I was minding my own beeswax and chillin on my bed and my cat makes a little mew sound at me. (But it did not sound nearly as cute as the word "mew" implies. Rather, it came out as a kind of half-hearted meow, as if he is tired and old and already starting to give up on life.) And I follow through with the usual routine--which is to ignore him until he meows loud enough that it gets to a point where we can't ignore him anymore.

This time, instead of growing steadily louder, he decided to skip that whole stage and he bit my hand! I snatched it away from his angry jaws exclaiming, "Hey! Not cool! Leave me alone!" and returning back to whatever article I was reading on Bernard. (Probably an article about vampires or dangerous cats or animals that eat cats...)

And then! Next thing I know, I had a cat flying towards me, jaws open wide, and he bit my shoulder! My cat literally attacked me, completely unprovoked! Needless to say, I was shocked.

From the picture, you can see two vertical fang marks on the right side and a red line sweeping to the left. There are matching puncture wounds on the other side (not shown in the picture). And this was taken an hour or two after it happened!

Who knew... who knew that THIS:

could be capable of such malice and anger!

I am now convinced that my cat is a vampire who needed to satisfy his thirst for blood. Now, I will be looking up anti-vampire solutions and home remedies. If you know any, shoot me a note. In the meantime, this cat will be sleeping outside tonight. *angry face*

Meat Ian!

Ian, Ian. There is so much to say about Ian. First, he's the person just left of me, and I know he's hard to see, but I don't have a better picture of him. Next time I see him though, I'll try to get one. And he'll probably tease me about it, but I'll just tell him I'm capitalizing on his image now before his imminent fame. I don't know. Something ridiculous like that.

Annyways... Ian is a freshman I met at camp. (His status as a freshman is of importance because it was a subject of great debate at camp: the difference between good freshman and bad freshman, the awkward freshman stage, and much much more.) He is one of those people who would really get on your nerves if he wasn't so funny.

I met him while playing ping pong with the Amigos during free time. (Funny story there: I was playing against Jim and I was really bad, but Trevor was keeping score so he gave me extra points whenever Jim should've scored! ^-^) I believe I played Ian in ping pong, but I don't remember who won. I'd like to say it was me, since I'm a senior and he's a freshman, but I really can't remember.

After we tired of ping pong, we decided to play Hearts. (One of my favorite games!) Right as we started dealing out the cards, two other guys joined us: John and Cory. They were from another church, but they were pretty cool. So we're playing Hearts and in the middle of the game, Ian starts giving me this really creepy smile. And I'm like, "What?"
"I'm cheating." he says, his grin getting even wider. Indignant, I said, "Are you looking at my hand?!" because up to that point, I'd been very careful not to be flashin my hand to everyone.
Without a pause he says, "Why yes, you have beautiful hands!" Which sparked a conversation all about my hands (at a table of guys.) A few moments later, it was John's turn and he wasn't going fast enough so I tapped him on the hand to go and he was like, "Oh my gosh your hands are so soft!" which sent the conversation back to my hands. I was flattered that they thought so well of my hands, but it was a little bit awkward; I kept them in my lap after that.

Then, during chapel the next day, Ian was sitting next to me and Kendra comes up with a stack of letters from my family. So I start in on the first one from Cam, and he's watching me. Then he grabs the next letter (from Dad), opens it, and reads it. And hands it back to me. The picture was taken right after he gave it back to me. I wasn't mad; just...surprised. Like, I'm glad he felt comfortable enough to open my mail and read it!

So that's Ian for you. He has a strange personality... He's one of those annoying kids whom you would hate if you couldn't love him. Or if he didn't make everyone laugh so much. I had a good reason to dislike him since he was trying to make me angry (just to see what would happen; he liked to push buttons like that.), but he made me laugh and I liked the kid, even though he was a freshman.

Meet the Four Amigos!

These are the 4 Amigos! Left to right, Alex, Jim, Joe, and Trevor.

These guys are so awesome! They crack me up all the time. XD I've been hanging out with them since middle school awana.

Kind of a funny story about them: One year, Mattea came to visit me and I took her with me to Awana, and she looked at all the guys and she was like, they're kind of like you're seven dwarves! (only there weren't seven there were more like five.) So we gave them their appropriate dwarf names.

Alex was named Bashful, because he was really quiet. (He still is very reserved, but when his sense of humor comes out, it's great! He is funny in the most subtle ways.)

Jim didn't actually get his own dwarf name, but we called him Meanie-Jim. Except the name was actually much longer... Jim was Grumpy-Annoying-Selfish-Ignorant-Mishchievous-Little-Boy. I forget what exactly he did to deserve that name, but it must have been something really bad. Or really annoying. Or both. Or me and Matt were just messing around, blowing things out of proportion in our middle school minds... I can assure you, Jim has outgrown his dwarf name. Mattea also admitted that Jim is really funny, but that he shouldn't flatter himself.

Joe was nicknamed Doc, "because of what Jim did." If I remember correctly, Joe had shown up that night with his wrist in a brace and blamed it on Jim. So we called him, "Doc" because he needed to see one. Joe could probably still keep his dwarf name as he gets injured all the time. He also has the most amazing stories about how he gets them too! Last time, he was chasing the guy who kidnapped a little girl in Tucson (it was all over the news) and they were in Mexico city and the kidnapper jumped over a forty foot wall and Joe followed him and as he was falling, he had to decide, "well, it's either face or foot." and landed on his foot, spraining his ankle. No one knows what really happened.

Last but not least, Trevor. We had a lot of trouble coming up with a name for Trevor. When it came down to it, we had three names to pick from: Sneezy, Dopey, or Sleepy. We ruled out Dopey. And Sneezy didn't really suit his personality, so Sleepy won out. But honestly, he does look like he's tired all the time.

So hopefully, none of the 4 amigos know this blog exist, or they would know their dwarf names (which occasionally, me and Matt still use, though it's been a while). In any case, that's the four amigos and a little bit about them. They're just a bunch of goofballs, and they're kind of like the three musketeers, except there's four of them. Hence the 4 Amigos.

Summer Camp: The Best Times for Showers

In all honesty, the best time to take showers at camp is during free time. Why? Because everyone is at the beach! I do have a terrible shower story to share at the end of all these beachy pictures.

 Someone is being buried, I wonder who it could be?

 It's Jim!

So we get back to the dorms after the beach and all the girls want showers before dinner. So many girls wanted showers, we actually had to limit shower times to under five minutes. Somehow, I ended up towards the end of the "waiting for open showers" list, but I was okay with it. We still had time for dinner.

When a shower finally opened up, I was all, "Great!" I grabbed my towel and shampoo and took my shower. I left my clothes in the room because I was just going to be quick and I didn't want to take extra time for someone else who might need a shower after me. And, that's just what we did: we walked back to our room wrapped in a towel to change. That's just how it was. No big deal, right?

So I get out of the shower and I walk back to the dorm room and the door is locked!! And my roommate had the one and only key and she had gone to dinner! First I checked to make sure she wasn't hanging out in her friend's dorm or something. I asked the girls in the bathroom if they'd seen Kasmira. Nope. So I told a girl who was heading up to the mess hall to look out for her and we got one of our counselors to go look for her too.

Meanwhile, I'm just awkwardly hanging around the dorm room wrapped up in my towel, just waiting. and waiting. and waiting. (In reality, it was probably only 15-20 minutes, but still.) Thankfully, one of my friends/counselor Hannah gave me some of her clothes to wear, but I still couldn't go up to dinner, because my meal card was locked in my room. (No meal card=no dinner.) I had been in Hannah's room and I decided to go check the door again, just in case, I had just freaked out for no reason and it actually was unlocked.

The door was wide open! Kasmira had come and opened the door and left again. I grabbed my meal card and went to dinner with Hannah, before I got locked out of the mess hall. She was kind enough to stay with me until we got it all sorted out.

At first, I was really annoyed, but when I talked to Kasmira, it turned out that the door had locked itself and the wind had blown it shut.

I got locked out of the room several times thereafter (simply because I got to the dorms first, not because she had locked the door and left), but by the end of the week, I got smart and put the things I would need on a shelf in the bathroom so I could just grab what I needed without access to the room.

So that's my shower story of the week.

Drunk on the Beach

 This is a funny story. And if you know my dad, he is probably the best storyteller in the family and listening to him tell it just does not compare to any way in which I would be able to tell the story. So, I recorded him telling the story to my mom on the phone and that is my skeleton for the following story.

So we went out to dinner with Aunt Nancy and Uncle Brian and the kids. Nice place in old town San Diego. And we decided to hang out at their rental house for a little while afterward. Not being loaded down with three children (boys under twelve, no less.) We beat them to the house and were locked out. So me and Dad are hanging out on the boardwalk and Cam goes off on the beach, which was right there.

And he's sitting on the beach, lies down in the little hollow where the boys' big hole used to be (now filled in by the wind.) And he's just watchin' the stars and hanging out.

A little ways down, there were these college kids who were obviously drunk and one of them says, "Look! There's a dude on the beach!" and they're laughing and pointing at Cam and being drunk. They let well alone for a little while and then Cam gets up and he's packing the sand down to make the hollow space more comfortable. One of the guys shouts, "He's digging his own bed!" And they all laugh at him like he's some kind of fascinating zoo animal.

Eventually they see us and they ask, "Hey! Is that your buddy?"

Dad goes, "That's my son."

"hahahahaha. I remember my first time..."

Dad mutters "whatever" under his breath.

"...Except I was naked!"

We just kind of ignored the guys. But dad was like, "I love drunk people I don't know."

So they're hanging out and they start dragging out the bikes to go cruising down the boardwalk. They come rolling towards us and the one guy (I know I keep saying "one guy" but there were a lot of them and hard to distinguish.) and he says, "Is that really your son?"

Dad's all, "Yeah, that's my twelve year old son."

"He must be really drunk."

And very calmly dad says, "Um, no. My twelve year old son."

"Is he okay?"

Dad says, "Yeah, he's find. He's just doing what twelve year olds do."

The guy says "Alright man." And they go off on their wobbly bicycles, while me and dad sat there chuckling and Cam, still laying in the sand, had not a clue as to the conversation that took place.