This really awesome blog idea came from Mo Chirdhe, you should check out her blog.  It’s quite awesome.

Favorite Movie:  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  This movie was amazing on so many levels and each time I saw it was memorable and awesome.  The first was the midnight showing the day it came out, in which I participated in the Harry Potter Alliance’s What Would Dumbledore Do? campaign.  The second was in IMAX, and I got to see it with one of my LeakyCon friends, as well as my family and some other friends.

Favorite Song:  Tough one!  I’ve had a bunch.  Currently it’s Play On by Carrie Underwood, so we’ll go with that. Favorite Wizard Rock song is Gryffindor Rally Cry by the Ministry of Magic.

Favorite Lyric:  “Play on when you’re losing the game” from Play On.  It’s just such a good motto.

Favorite Line:  “What the hell is a Hufflepuff?” from A Very Potter Musical.

Favorite Trip: LeakyCon, without a doubt.  I can’t summarize that amazing experience in a short paragraph, but I have multiple blog posts on it.  It was just one of the most awesome experiences of my life.

Favorite Moment:  The ball at LeakyCon, when I met most of my LeakyCon friends.

Favorite Holiday:  My birthday.  I turned 21 and my friends made it awesome.

Something Bad:  Probably should have worked on my thesis more than I did this past semester.
Something Good:  Meeting the most amazing people at LeakyCon.
Something you regret:  Nothing, really.
Something you learned:  Who my true friends are.

Someone that changed your life:   All of my awesome LeakyCon friends.  They made me realize that my family and I aren’t the only Harry Potter crazed people out there!

My family used to go camping a lot.  We’d go a couple times each summer and we occasionally went in the fall as well.  Each camping trip brought with it its own disasters such as us burning all the food on the campfire and having to eat bread the whole trip, the car breaking down, and it snowing (in October).  Nothing tops what happened the summer I was 11 or 12, though.  In fact, this takes the cake for all of our vacation disasters.

My family always takes a lot of luggage with us when we go on vacation.  We don’t ‘rough it’.  Camping is no exception and we usually have even more luggage for that since we have to bring tents and sleeping bags.  It was always interesting to fit all of this into the van along with six people.  Our old van did not have a roof rack.

However, my dad discovered this storage unit that could be placed atop the roof of a car without a roof rack.  It attached to the roof with these clips.  My dad thought it was great and bought it.  We loaded up the stuff into it and started the trip.

We made it to the highway without any trouble.  After a few miles, we heard this clunking noise.  Then I saw the straps from the storage unit dangling in front of my window, something they had not been doing seconds ago.  My dad shouted, ‘What was that?’.  My brother craned his neck around and replied, ‘It’s that roof rack thing!’  To which my dad replied, ‘What?’  Then my brother said, ‘It’s that little black dot all the way back there!’

My dad immediately pulled over.  Thank goodness there were no cars behind us or it could have caused an accident.  By another stroke of luck, the storage unit landed on the shoulder.  My dad got out of the car and walked the mile back to where it had landed and proceeded to carry all the luggage back to the van, where we had to cram it in.

There was no room for the actual storage unit in the car, so my dad stowed it in the woods next to the highway.  We then continued on to the campground, where we probably had a rainy campout (I don’t remember, but it usually rains when we camp).

After we went home, my dad drove back to where the storage unit had fallen off the van and dug it out of the woods.  Then he brought it back to the store and got a refund.  I can only imagine the look on the person’s face when my dad answered his or her question of ‘Why are you returning this?’ with ‘It fell off my car as we were driving down the highway.’

Last night one of my roommates and I were bowling on my other roommate’s Wii.  We were listening to music on my laptop at the same time and for some strange reason my screen saver came on.  It never comes on since I have my laptop in Power Saver mode and it usually just goes to sleep if I don’t move the mouse for a while.

But, for whatever reason, it went to the screen saver.  My screen saver is set to flip through all the pictures I’ve got in my iPhoto.  I had completely forgotten about this one picture I took a few years ago until it showed up on the screen last night.

That was the freakiest bug I’ve ever seen.  The thing was huge.  It’s some sort of cicada.  And no, I wasn’t in the South when I saw it.  That thing was found in the good old Northeast.  Had to get a picture of it, though.  So my dad set his keys down next to it to show how humongous it was.

It seems hard to believe that 9/11/2001 was seven years ago.  The years have flown by so fast.  I was only 12 then, and in 8th grade.

I remember being in French class and my teacher was getting ready to put in a movie.  She was flipping through the channels and paused for a moment at a news channel.  They were showing footage of the towers on fire, but my teacher thought it was just old footage of the Oklahoma City Bombing, so she changed the channel and put the movie on.  Nobody thought anything else of it.

Next class was gym, and we were outside.  We came inside while the principal was partway through an announcement.   The only part I heard was the part where the principal was telling everyone who needed counseling to go to the student counseling center.  I, as well as the rest of my class, thought it was strange that the principal announced that.

I was walking to my next class, English, and one of my friends told me what happened.  I was completely shocked.  We spent the rest of the day watching the news.  Someone in my English class had family in NYC and she was frantically trying to find out if they were ok.  My Health teacher’s son was flying through Pennsylvania and my teacher was trying to find out if he was on the plane that crashed there.  Luckily he wasn’t.

I came home to find my mom watching the news.  We have distant family in NYC and Long Island, so she called them to make sure they were ok.  Luckily they were.  My brother and sisters were in elementary school and hadn’t been told about it, so we told them when they came home.

My family and I went to church that night and we had a candlelit service.   This year, my school had a flag raising ceremony, but it was at 5 am, so I didn’t go.  However, I thought about the family and friends of those who died all day.

Spring has sprung.  Well, we kind of skipped Spring and went straight to Summer here.  It’s been 70-80 degrees the past couple weeks, with hardly any rain.  It’s very strange, considering we usually don’t go 3 or 4 days without rain.  But whatever.  It’s now warm enough to open the moon roof in my car, Benny has started shedding off his winter coat, and the dandelions are in full bloom.

Ah, yes, the little yellow weeds that send many people running for chemicals to wage an all-out war against a small, but resilient flower.   My entire neighborhood  is  filled with people who hate  dandelions.  The little yellow signs that warn you of chemicals are all over the place.  Except my yard, of course.  My family does not feel the need to spread hazardous chemicals throughout the already hurt environment.  But that’s a rant for another  post.

The dandelions reminded me of a very profitable venture I participated in when I was much younger.  I must have been only 10 or 11.  My dad wanted to get rid of the dandelions, but not use any chemicals.  So he had the brilliant idea of paying my siblings and I to pick them all out of the yard.  For a nickel each.  I’m sure he thought this was a great idea to rid the yard of yellow weeds without having to do it himself or pay much money for it to be done.  However, nickels can add up.  Either he vastly miscalculated the number of dandelions in our yard, or he underestimated how much time 4 kids could spend picking weeds out of a yard for money.

By the time I finished picking the dandelions, I had picked enough to earn me somewhere between $30 and $40.  A nice profit for a 10 year old.  My bro made about the same, or a little more.  One of my sisters made around $20 or $30, and my other sister who was only about 3 at the time made $10 or so.  Needless to say, he never asked us to pick the dandelions again, even when we offered to lower the cost of each dandelion to only a penny.

A week later, our yard was once again filled with the little yellow weeds that we have surrendered to.  Never again has anyone in my family tried to get rid of the dandelions.  They are just starting to bloom now and soon our yard will be the only yellow covered one, in a sea of perfectly groomed and manicured suburban lawns.