eau claire

Yesterday I woke up at 6 AM and got in a tightly packed car to drive my youngest sister to Eau Claire. From now on for the next four years or so, that's where she'll be living and going to school. We passed cabbage fields on the way there, and a truck that had dropped a few cabbages in the road...we had to swerve around those. That was the most excitement on the car ride there, except maybe going and buying sausage at this little store on the way. Yay for free homemade root beer and good sausage.

After driving for 3 1/2 hours and arriving in Eau Claire, we had to wait until 2 for Kelly to move in, so we went straight to my other sister Molly's house where she's living with four other girls and Petey, a puppy. We dropped some things off there and locked down their wireless network so that their neighbors wouldn't steal their internet anymore :/ It looks like things have gotten better with her living situation since I last heard about it - she's gotten used to the dog and the dog is used to being there = it's not upset and chewing everything up, and apparently it's only one roommate in particular that's causing everyone grief, and it's not the one with the dog. I didn't actually get to meet said roommate, but since her room is twice as big as everyone else's with its own bathroom and is paying the same amount of rent, this girl could just be a giant brat who refused to have the smaller rooms. Speaking of rooms, Molly's was really quite small, but she's making the most of the space, and the ceiling has an interesting shape :) I'd have liked it. Better than my hallway of a room in Madison this past year. o_o;; One of the girls in the house works at the mall and gets all the store ads when they change them, so they have Abercrombie & Fitch and Express and American Eagle ads all over their house, including one of some guy sitting in a chair, which they originally had at the bottom of the stairs in a dark corner, making it look like there was always a strange man sitting there in the dark. That creeped them out one too many times, so he's the official greeter at the front door when Petey's not around. :)

For lunch, we went to the pub where my sister works. Around here we make lots of cheese, and have something called cheese curds, little bits of freshly made cheese. Restaurants generally bread and deep-fry them and serve them as an appetizer. My sister and the waitress recommended them, so we decided to try it. 15 minutes later, the waitress comes out with deep fried BLOCKS of cheese about 1 1/2" cubed, about 3 times the size of normal cheese curds. They were nicely fried, but I think those are going to stay with me for a while o_0;; Molly told us how they were made, and how they go through two giant wheels of cheese on a busy day making these things. We also had hamburgers, which were also really really good. Hard to finish after those cheese curds, though.

After that, we went to move Kelly into the dorms. No sooner had we parked the car than 10 volunteer move-in helpers (called Hallraisers, basically like Badger Buddies in Madison) came right up to the trunk of the van and offered to carry things up! I only carried a couple of things, and we had the car unloaded and the stuff outside her room in 5 minutes. We spent about 1 1/2 hours setting up her room with Kelly's roommate, who was there alone (her parents just kind of got her stuff in the room and left her there) seemed pretty overwhelmed with four extra people in the room helping set everything up. Then we shopped for groceries while Kelly set up more things in her room. We got her groceries back, said goodbye and then brought Molly back to her house, and finally got on the road at 6 PM. We got home at 9 and I bummed around and watched TV with my parents and took a bath.

I woke up around 10:00 and haven't done much except cook myself breakfast. I need to make a schedule of things to do next week (my parents are going on vacation and leaving me here ;_;) so I don't end up sitting around forever. I need to make my life go somewhere, after all, and nobody ever got anything done by sitting on a couch :) I'm going to get groceries with my dad soon, and maybe go ride my bike or take a walk. またね！

P.S. Every time I log into mixi.jp there's a new diet program! Honestly, most Japanese people have absolutely no need to go on a soy milk cookie diet, or a strawberry yogurt diet, or any diet. I think this is one example of borrowed Western culture that makes absolutely no sense and it's really annoying logging in every time and seeing how you can lose 10 pounds in 9 days if you just click here and eat this one thing. You're losing weight there because you're underfed and fighting with malnutrition. Maybe if they stopped wearing shoes that are horrible for your feet and companies stopped working them so hard, they wouldn't feel so unhealthy and fat. Then they'd also feel like having babies, maybe, and isn't that what Japan wants so badly right now? Little children to take care of the old people so they don't have to 'stoop to' hiring nurses from Brazil and Southeast Asia?

I'm blowing this all out of proportion here, I think. Diet programs are probably not fucking up much except for really stupid Japanese girls. But I always get this angry thinking about politics and society, whether about America or Japan, and it makes me feel like whipping the country into shape, no matter how impossible it is. The government will always have liars and cheaters in its midst that will exploit the public for personal gain, and when confronted they will defend their hypocritical actions to the death. What really gets me is that they usually still can get away with it.

And on that note, I'm off to start my day.

starting again

I realize just how much I miss having a place to write down what happens to me and how I think. Especially now that I'm in the post-college stage of my life, away from everyone I know except my family (which will be down to just my parents tomorrow after my youngest sister moves away to her new dorm, and my parents are both pretty busy), I'll have a lot more time to think about myself.

Though I have to admit, having a boyfriend and friends you can hang out with every day is pretty nice.

Now being alone after being with them all this time, I realize that I almost never do things for myself anymore. If someone else wants me to do something I feel motivation to do it, but if it's just because I think I should do it, I don't. It's like I think I need someone else's approval before I can do anything...and I'm past the stage in my life where that's going to work for me. If I don't start trying things for myself, I'm never going to get anywhere.

Time to grow up. Time to do things just because I think I'll be better for it.

and this blog, in case you were curious, is named after a favorite drink of mine. It's special tea ceremony tea = maccha (powdered and usually bitter all on its own), mixed with milk and sometimes sugar is added. The picture to the left is maccha milk pudding but it still looked good enough to put up :)