My life story: Hairs in Mysterious Places

If you're a girl who wears her hair long, or if you're a dude has ever had long hair, then you know what the unpleasantness of having a long hair stuck in your butt crack is like.

I don't know exactly how they get there, but they do, and it's miserable until you can get to the bathroom and get it out.

But when you're in elementary school, you can't just go to the bathroom whenever you want. ("That's what recess is for!")

One time. when I was in third grade, I had a really terrible hair in my butt. It was made worse by the fact that I was wearing leggings, and I just couldn't wait until recess to go get it out. So when I thought that no one was looking, I reached my hand down the back of my pants and got that butt hair out.

But of course, to my horror, what do I hear from across the room?

"Megan's itching her butt!"

I felt as stupid and useless as a hair stuck in a butt crack.

And the kid's name was Ty. I remember him because he was pretty much bald himself and I was bothered by the fact that his name didn't have any proper vowels.

I'm sorry if you were offended by this post. But this is a true story, and the world needs to know that butt crack hairs are the worst, and there are millions of men and women with long hair who have to deal with this misery.

-Meg

I'm going to the windy city tomorrow

I like the way that the second C and G softly ricochet around my mouth when I say “Chicago.”

I hadn’t really thought about the city a lot until I knew that I would be going there. But I knew that it was one of those giant cities that was different from New York and Los Angeles, the first two biggest cities in the US. Chicago is the third biggest, and I know it has its own identity, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it is. I think I'll know more after I visit it.

Chicago reminds me of red, the world fair, deep-dish pizza, and that really big fire. Oh, and Michael Jordan and the Bulls. I know it is a windy city and that it is really cold.

I go to Chicago for the first time in my life tomorrow. I am excited to eat, fly, and hear other accents. Those are my favorite things about traveling.

Eating is the best part of any trip. I love eating good food.

I will miss Sam while I am gone.

Nothing as lovely as a tree

We took in a stray tree a few days ago. We just found it on our apartment doorstep and couldn’t bare to send it back into the cold.

We weren’t sure about its breed, but we knew it was sick and hungry and that it needed our help.

We’ve never been parents, so we turned to one of the experts for help--Sam’s mom, Sue.

She suggested some disciplinary tactics...AKA pruning. Sam lovingly started working with our newly adopted child, clipping away and cleaning up the poor little tree. Although the mother in me kept saying, “You’re being too hard on him!”, Sam kept trimming and shaping the disheveled tree.



I know that it doesn’t look like much now, but at least no one can accuse us of being sissy parents.

We are working on nurturing this little guy back to health. Our apartment is not well lit and painfully small, but we hope to turn it into a positive environment for the tree so it can grow up healthy and strong.

-Meg

Laissez les bons temps rouler

We're not Catholic or anything (Mormons, if you must know), but we celebrated Mardi Gras yesterday. This is mostly because Sam served his mission in Louisiana, and that's the land of Mardi Gras. So I figured it was a great excuse to have New Orleans food and celebrate in our very tame, Mormon way.

I made seafood gumbo. It was hard to pick a recipe because there are so many different types of gumbo out there, but one can always trust Martha Stewart.

 Notice the "Bon Appetite" sign. And you thought I didn't like French.

OK so the masks make us look kind of creepy. OK, so they make Sam look kind of creepy.

We were also going to have bananas foster, but it got late and we were tired. So we'll make them tomorrow.

-Meg

An Update

I guess it took a sick day to force me into writing a blog post finally! Life has been pretty crazy for us Thorntons lately, but we are getting settled.

We moved into a new apartment. I would post pictures but it's kind of scary right now and trust me, it's nothing you'd want to put on pinterest.

We were sad to leave our old place, but we came up on the list for Married Student Housing, so we decided to take the offer and make a change! We love our neighbors and it's nice to be so close to campus. Even though I am done with school, Sam is still going strong.

Christmas and New Year's was great! It was our first as a married couple. That meant a lot of figuring out how to split our time between our families and creating new traditions.

The year 2012 was a crazy year for us. I graduated and got a job, Sam and I got married, and we've already moved twice! (I moved three times this year!)

I know I still haven't posted wedding pictures yet, but I promise one day I will. We got more than one thousand pictures, I kid you not. It's a lot to sort through.

Well, that's a little update! I'm hoping to start feeling better by tomorrow because tomorrow I am turning 22 years old. But whatever.

All the Words!

I know I was really naughty and didn't write a single word on this blog the entire month of November and half of December. But I was writing 50,000 words somewhere else--on a Google document that held my novel. And after that was over, I just had to have a break from social media and crap.

Every year, thousands of writers all over the world participate in National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. That equates to about 1667 words a day, and the end result is novel that's about 100 pages.

I have tried the past two years, but I decided not to finish both years because I was in college and was working 30 hours a week.

This year I have a full time job, but I don't have homework. So I decided that this was going to be the year that I finished.

I wrote every day except one, and it was one of the longest months of my entire life. It was a blast, but it was harder than I ever expected it would be.

I had to give up a lot of things. This blog was one of them. I also didn't write in my journal, or read the book of the month for book group. I barely did house work or laundry and cooked really simple meals. I still found myself staying up late to get my word count in for the day, but I got it done.

I did tweet a lot. Sorry if you follow me and I spammed your feed. It was one way to really get the crazies out when I was really frustrated.

I reached 50,000 words on the last day, at about 9 p.m. The event was pretty anticlimactic  All I wanted to do was just go to bed. And although I got the word count, my novel is not finished. It's close though.


Here are some of the songs that I listened to:







(And like every other Lana del Rey song out there.)



(And like every other Ellie Goulding song out there.)


Anyway, I'm going to write more on here. I'm ready to be back.

Wandering through Streets

I have a great sense of direction. Unfortunately, that does not translate to giving good driving directions, or at keeping myself from getting lost.

Sam has figured out by now that he can't trust me when I say I can get us somewhere. When we drive somewhere I've been but haven't been recently, I really can't be trusted. We usually end up kind of lost and then kind of getting where we need to go. Eventually.

Sam is not your ordinary man, which is why I married him. He has no problem asking for directions. He'll take the GPS, call our parents, or go into a gas station. No hesitation.

I'm all "no, I swear this will start looking familiar in a second" and "just follow the signs and we'll get there."

Living in Salt Lake City spoils you. It's so easy to get around here. Most of the roads have boring names, but at least they follow the grid system religiously. (That's what happens when a city is founded by religious people.)

Syracuse at large is even easier to navigate. The major streets are straight and they are numbered logically. Better yet, there are no east streets. Everything is west, because Syracuse is so western.

The subdivisions are another story. Most have catchy theme-named avenues and streets and cul-de-sacs. I don't think the developers wanted them to be easy to just wander into. They are private residences, after all. Neighborhoods aren't for finding things easily.

I also appreciate Syracuse because it's flat. Although this makes sledding hard, it makes driving a stick shift significantly easier. The first time I drove a manual for a significant distance by myself was in Syracuse. Sam's car is a stick shift, so I've been learning and I'm alright. The steep hill of Salt Lake still terrify me.

So this time when I drove stick all by myself... it was to Brittni's bridal shower. Do you know why this is significant? Because the first time I drove a car alone was going to Brittni's house for a party. True story.

I'll probably spend the rest of my life going places without knowing the way exactly, but just kind of figuring out. Looking at the signs, making U-turns.

-Meg