Snow 'n flip-flops

Typical girl road trip “necessities” for 48 hours: 1 Aero bed, 2 pillows, 1 blanket, 1 expandable case of makeup that weighs approximately 12 1/2 pounds, 1 pair of camel colored Kuggs (Knock-off Uggs), 1 pair of brown boots, tennis shoes, 22 makeup brushes, 6 pairs of earrings, 3 necklaces, 4 bracelets, 3 long sleeved shirts, 7 short sleeved shirts, 2 hoodies, zebra print pajama bottoms, 1 pair of jeans, 1 pair of sweats, 1 pair of brown corduroys, 2 scarves, 1 baseball cap, 1 zip up sweater, 1 jacket, 4 pairs of socks, 1 laptop, 1 digital camera with all the lenses and filters, 3 Netflix movies, 1 scrapbook project to share with fellow scrapper, 1 apple, 1 banana, and 5 oranges. Options. Give a woman options and you’ll keep her happy.

Lauren road trip necessities: Music.

~ P!nk, Hinder, James Otto, Colbie Callait, Shakira, & Muddy Waters. Daily servings from all the major music food groups. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, with enough blues, spice, and Bubbly to keep things interesting.


So far today, safe trip, good scenery, good friends…great day off.

Quote of the night:
Gary (mid-story): “We were drinking one night…was it a holiday?” (ponders the thought, looks up, scratches his chin).
Patti: “No. There was no occasion, Gary. It was Summer and you had a porch.”

Today, I took myself on a 4-hour road trip to visit the Robinsons up in Susanville. I have to admit I wasn’t overly thrilled at the thought of driving in the rain, and possibly the snow, for 4-hours by myself but I had already planned on being gone for my weekend and I was expected.

~Just outside of Red Bluff

My GPS was steering me towards all kinds of routes as I drove north up I-5, but I took the “pretty” one on good advice. Glad I did, because it was absolutely beautiful! I gotta get out and get my drive on more often!



I was mesmerized by the greenery as I turned out of Red
Bluff onto I-36 and then I was captivated by white snow as the elevation got higher. Every time I passed one of those big, yellow “Watch For Snow” signs, I chuckled to myself. I am! I am! I swear I am! Minus the windy, rain-slicked, winding road bordered by 4 foot snow banks on both sides, I was watching the snow all around me like a kid glued to cartoons on a Saturday morning. I must have stopped about a half a dozen times to take pictures. This is the most snow I’ve seen in my 27 years. Really, truly, it is. It’s strange (and sad) for me to hear myself admit that considering how often I take flight and travel. I figured I would have spent at least a little time in the snow by now during one of those adventures, right?



~ Mill Creek, CA

I am not a snow person, but it’s not like that on purpose. I can count the number of times I’ve been in the snow in my lifetime on one hand. The last time I was “in” the snow, it was April or May of 2005 and I was:
1) in the snow
2) in the Swiss Alps
3) in flip-flops.
Yes, you read me right. Flip flops. The only thing that could have been more obvious was a blinking fluorescent sign around my neck with an arrow pointing down at my next to naked feet: “Tourist, tourist! Look, it’s an American tourist!” You see, I am never prepared to be in the snow. Ever. I don’t live close enough to snow to have snow clothing. I mean, it’s a cold day in Vacaville if it hits below freezing at 4am on a mid-January night. It just doesn’t ever get that cold where I frequent.


~ Lake Almanor just outside of Chester, CA

Really though, I could be a snow person. I think I want to be a snow person on occasion. I live pretty damn close to Tahoe, so I could have snow gear - really I probably should have snow gear, but I don’t. My family was never an adventurous one while we were growing up. We didn’t really go anywhere on vacation. I can only think of a couple trips that we ever took as a family. One summer when I was about twelve maybe, we went to Hearst Castle and the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it was miserable the entire time. Imagine a two-tone brown Ford Aerostar van circa 1989 filled with the sounds of childhood misery, bickering, and the non-stop nagging of 3 siblings, 1 cousin, and 2 parents. Needless to say, we never bundled up as a family and headed towards the powder to revel in a full day of cold, wet, miserable non-stop nagging and bickering. Still, as close as we were to the snow growing up, I should have made at least one snow angel as a kid even if I had to sit in that brown van to make the trip.

Note to self: when you have some, take your kids to the snow while they’re still kids. Just make sure they’re not in flip-flops.

Just roll with it.

I feel

like...

work is good tonight. Actually good. Not soul crushing or blood pressure elevating. I don't want to put my foot through the radio or rip anyone a new anything. It's an odd feeling.

I feel like it's back to when it used to be fun and managable and rewarding. When we used to set up the scenarios for the night...a pursuit of a stolen vehicle with shots fired, tc'ed into a house, fully engulfed, multi-alarm structure fire, foot bail, perimeter, SWAT call out. That's the stuff we used to wait for.

Dare I even say it? Tonight felt like it was a few years ago. I hate being that "it was never like this back when I started" person, but I that's what I've become.

I used to feel unshakable. Unbreakable. I was so confident and believed in the work I did 40+ hours a week so strongly, that I actually used to say that. "This job might make me stumble from time to time, but it can't shake me. I've got this. Whatever it is, I can handle it. 'Cause that's just what we do. Whatever the situation might be, we'll find a way to work it out."

And we did. The great shifts and crews that I've been assigned to in the last few years have handled all kinds of natural disasters, crimes, and ridiculous shenanigans and we thrived off of that stuff! Just a bunch of adrenaline junkies just waiting for THE Code 3 traffic.

Tonight: I understand the officers, I'm not stumbling over what I need to say, I didn't miss anything, I didn't forget to add a unit or upgrade a response...I was into it. I cared.

I've always told myself to be the best at what I do and be proud of it. I felt like that tonight - proud and into it - and it baffled me just a little bit. I even said outloud..."I don't...quite...know what to do?"

My answer from the far corner of the room, "Just roll with it."

Yeah. Just roll with it.

I've been shot

by the anti-cupid. Playa down!!! Yes, anti-cupid is exactly what it means. The anti-Christ of relationships just hit me with a shit arrow completley out of the blue. So, this is what Bon Jovi was singing about.

You give love a bad name.



You see there is an ex-troll, an ex-hole, and ex...something that I just can't seem to escape. The saying "don't shit where you eat" - yeah, he was somewhere in the making of that saying. He's the plague, but he's not the issue here. The problem is the former friends, now acquaintances, that feel the need to tell me when they see him at the grocery store with his new female victim or at starbucks at 8 o'clock on a Friday night. I don't need to know. No one needs to know.

It's one thing coming from the ex-hole - the random late night texts, the mass Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas tidings, the accidental "bumping" intos - that's always been part of his game, and trust me, I hate the player AND the game. It's entirely different when I have my guard down and I get struck by a wayward arrow from some random bystander who's head is so far up, they can't see the daylight. Really? What did you think I was going to do with that new nugget of info?

I got it - he's just not that into me. I read the book, I eventually applied the principals to my life, now let's just let it alone. Now is the time to let the troll crawl back under his bridge. Anti-Cupid, stop misfiring on me or I will drown your fat little punk ass in my dating pool!

I found serenity in my living room

I'm in a serene moment in time right now.

Ok, I'll level with you, I do have some Advil PM on board, but I'm not giving a couple of pills all the credit for this.

It's 0137 in the morning and I'm sitting in my living room at a 6 foot table covered with baby/Hawaiian scrapbooking supplies. There are 5 candles lit in the room filling the air with just enough frangrance to make you stop and wonder what the scent might be. Is it mango, rose, peach, melon something? At this point, I couldn't even tell you which one it is.

Always - always - always there is music. Right now it's the calm strum of Let Him Fly drifting out across the room. A second ago you would have caught me in a trance singing along with Bonnie Raitt. I love her voice. If I could sing and play with half of the talent she has, I would hit the road with my guitar in an instant.

It only took me about 4 months, but I finally figured that I could set up my external portable speakers to my ipod. So far there are just shy of 1800 songs on there. I think I know them all by heart. The reality is that I should be at work still, but not today. Not right now. Today, I took a day to myself - part recovering from this weekend's intestinal evacuation and part just because, well, mental health counts too.

I love moments like this.

I force myself to have a photographic memory on occasion. There are some moments in time that I tell myself to snap a picture of while I'm in them so I pull them out of my memory bank when I need a good thought.

There was the "Aretha Franklin" moment. That was a great one. :) Have you ever seen a 26 year old Filipino-Irish woman dressed up as Aretha Franklin? Yeah, imagine it. That's one of the reason's why I've become Karma's Punchline. Win the karaoke "contest" drunk early in the week, perform in the all-stars show sober at the end of the week.



I remember that moment right before I went out on the stage, dressed in full costume head-to-toe black wig and all, holding the mic in my right hand, holding on to Mateo's arm with my left, taking a deep breath, closing my eyes, tilting my head up to the sky, and asking myself with a smirk on my face, "Lauren. What. In the Hell. Are you doing?!? Well, it's too late now, you got yourself into this, now you gotta get yourself out." No one saw that...I was still standing behind the curtain then but I'll always remember that self-pep talk. Then in about 3 minutes...it was all over with, but that brief moment in time, standing behind the curtain, that moment was all mine.

Peacefulness escapes me on a regular basis. So when I do find it, I take note. I remember a day in late October, two years ago, and about an hour north of the Michigan/Ontario border. It was sunny, beautiful, cold day; but from where I sat in the driver's seat, you'd never know it. The sun was shining on me just strong enough that I could feel it's warmth on my skin. My passenger was sound asleep, which left me alone with the sunshine and Kenny Chesney's The Road and the Radio. I can still imagine what the flat green Earth looked like against the blue sky, it was simply beautiful. There were clouds too, but not the meacing ones. Remember that painter guy with the afro who used to be on PBS all the time? Bob Ross was it? The guy with the voice that was waaay too soft and waaaay to smooth...he used to say things like "ok, and now we're just gonna paint in a happy little cloud here, and a happy little cloud there. There you go, just some happy clouds." Those were the clouds, there were happy clouds all over the sky. Every once in a while there would be a few Cypress trees or a car would pass me by, but for the most part it was just me singing along to every song that played. Just about then, my passenger woke up just long enough to mention how ugly the "flat" scenery was before rolling over and going back to bed. Funny, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.


Somewhere in Ontario.

I have a picture of that moment somewhere. It was worth capturing. Right then, I didn't think about anything else but being in that car on that highway. I was completly wrapped up in that moment in time. It was like a band-aid for my soul and I clung to it as long as I could. I still remember thinking that I was so at peace with myself, I could feel myself breath and I could hear myself think. Clarity. It was an absolute moment of clarity. There were no smudges and marks from every day life in that moment. That was a good trip. No, actually that was a great trip.

Wrap around porch

It's a rainy Tuesday. I'm in bed eating chicken soup and watching Fireproof on my laptop. It's a calm and peaceful scene until you interject the reality of my otherwise "lazy" Tuesday. I have a) the stomach flu b) late onset Montezuma or c) food poisoning. I have lost 3 lbs since 10 am when my trainer text me to see if I was still coming in to workout. There was NO way, squats and crunches would have propelled my intestines with a velocity that would impress NASA scientists. This is really no way to spend a day off.


Made you smile. :)

The upside: laying in bed has afforded me the chance to seriously daydream. I'm currently daydreaming about living in the Midwest or the South - somewhere on a horse ranch or a plantation. I spent all day looking up ranch real estate and properties with big barns. I am currently distracted by the idea of living in the grand daddy of all states - Texas. I don't know why exactly, but Texas seems like it would be an experience and a place that I could get into. I can't pinpoint exactly when I got all these romanticized dreams about living on estate, but I suspect they run pretty deep.

I had a flashback to when I was 11 or 12. I read Gone With the Wind in a few days (the hardcover edition); which if you've seen those novels, just their size alone is epic before you ever crack the pages of the cover. "Great balls of fire. Don't bother me anymore and don't call me sugar." ~ Scarlett O'Hara

I loved the Anne of Green Gables series growing up; I couldn't get enough of those movies. I still get hypnotized by them when I catch a glimpse now and again.

I'm a sucker for Nicholas Sparks novels and all of those are set in the South. I am in love with the scenes that I managed to paint my mind from his last one The Lucky One. If for nothing but the music alone, I could live in the South. Country, rhythm, and blues sing to the soul of me.
"All I can say is that there's a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes sweet music. . . . If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I'd just have to tell him that it's music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That's my soul; that's how I sing. And that's the South." -- Al Green


I could live in Hope Floats. Granted Justin Mattise (AKA Harry Connick Jr.) is one fine piece of cowboy to stare at on the horizon, but it's the scenery and the landscape of that movie that is just as romantic as the story. Speaking of, don't get me started on them boys with the Southern accents. I won't lie. You see, I'm a sucker for a good accent.



I think I've always been a little bit country at heart, but now it's really starting to manifest itself. The hustle and bustle of having an adult job with adult responsibilites weighs heavily lately and living in the city with neighbors breathing down your neck has never once appealed to me. I never used to understand the urge for people to move their families from the city to the country, but I get it now. I totally get it.

I am a strong believer in keeping some things sacred. We are all so "wired" and "plugged in" to myspace and facebook and all the other online portals, that everyone knows your thoughts and dreams and desires at all times of the day and night. It's nice to have some of your dreams still tucked back away and safe in the conrners of your mind. Blogging about my life is both theraputic and intimidating at the same time. Who says that I always want everyone to know what I'm thinking or what direction I want to take my life in? I mean there's some benefit to putting all out there for the world to see, but at the same time there's that reservation about letting the world in to criticize, or question, or even steal your dreams and ideas.


I could see me here. Not just imagine myself here, but see me here. This is my dream home. Not what most of the people who know me would have imagined. In my mind, this is in a clearing on property that also houses a stable and a barn, a tree lined driveway, and a lot of land to roam on. I can see a lot of other scenes here too, but those are the ones that I get to keep in my mind.


I have a new background on my laptop. It's my dream house. I've never actually found a picture of anything that I can say was my "dream" anything. Really... I found it during another one of my late night insomnia searches on "wrap around porches". You see this is all a little bit strange for me to admit because I've never been the girl who dreamed about picket fences, her wedding dress, or what she wants to name her children. Not to say that those thoughts don't cross my mind, but I've never staked anything on them. I've been busy in the way of being single, independent, industrious, and travelled. Has the thought of settling down struck accord somewhere inside me? I guess it's high time that I dust off some of those dreams that float around in my head and wash away the cobwebs. It's one thing to believe in keeping things sacred and a whole other thing to breath some life into your dreams by making them known and speaking of them outloud. I think it's time to start writing a new chapter in my life. After all, there were 63 chapters in Scarlett O'Hara's story. 63.

I better get to writing.

Picture of me

A webcam can be dangerous business. I tried playing it off like I didn't know how to use it last time I was asked to show myself. It's like being in a fishbowl on display for everyone to see. It's strange stuff, the webcam. I'm not a fan, but I'm not a hater either. I It dashes the anonimity of hiding behind your keyboard. I couldn't imagine being on one of those reality shows having cameras follow you day in and day out. Funny, I can't even be in real life without getting caught doing stupid shit. Today I got caught adjusting the bottom of my nose ring by some guy in a silver Saturn. I guess from his point of view, me sitting up so high in my Tahoe with my pinky finger so close to being up in my brain, it looked like I was mining for gold. It was like a scene out of Seinfeld. "I swear, it was just the nose ring. The nose ring!!!"

So yeah, the camera. I guess it's ok to come out from behind the lens now and again. Just now and again...

Weather the storm

There's a war happening in the sky above my head. The sun and the clouds are at battle with each other. It's actually a beautiful sight. Some wars aren't gruesome or bloody. I suspect the rain will win for tonight, but the sun always finds its way to shine through somehow.

I have found the perfect blog spot in my driveway, Safety tucked away in my urban assault vehicle. Just me and my laptop listening to tunes watching the clouds roll by. This car is my safe place. It's carried me to and from some great moments in life. It's also been part of my long drive home after those oh so many walks of shame. I just saw "He's Not That Into You" - I liked it. I've had that book for years now...years. I've worn the pages slightly, yet I still chose to ingore it's advice when it was convenient for me. I like to think that I am the sun in that battle in my life. Always managing to shine through somehow...always managing to weather the storm.