Free the Crawfish!

Labor Day weekend, 2009 has turned out to be one of the top three favorite times of my life. I'm not generally a big fan of being outside for prolonged periods of time, and for as much love and respect for the earth as I have, I am by no means any sort of wilderness girl.
When I heard that my family was going to be having a HUGE family camping trip on my cousin's land in Wisconsin this year I was pretty excited because my family functions are a hilarious great time but I had zero intention on actually camping. Actually, where they camped was so close to my home town on the Illinois/Iowa border that I figured I would go hang out during the day, then head to a friend's and crash that night so I wasn't technically camping.
Friday night I had a cousin's bachelorette party to go to, and things got a bit wild. It was an amazing time, everything went great and everyone got along swimmingly, but I stayed out too late, had too much to drink, and woke up entirely too early on Saturday morning to go hang out with my family. It also doesn't help that when I woke up I had a sore throat, allergies flared up and severe congestion in my chest and brain that I couldn't think straight (but I did not have a hangover!)
I ended up going out and hanging out anyhow, and as horrible as I felt I know that seeing my nieces and nephews will ALWAYS make me smile and forget that I just don't feel that well. Also, since I use my parent's address for everything, they brought me my mail, and included amongst said mail was a survey from PETA with some return address labels and some little stickers in there. As soon as my two year old nephew saw those stickers he was on a mission to have those stickers, and even more enthusiastic about sharing these stickers.
My family is absolutely enormous and Haden was sticking PETA stickers to everyone, and everyone was so happy to have them on, and he was patrolling to make sure that nobody removed their stickers. I stuck the big blue I <3 PETA sticker to his back, and had to take pictures of him! He's so adorable, and I fall madly in love with this little man every time I see him!

Hahaha, he was pretty proud!

Here he is putting PETA stickers on Gramma while rocking his pretty sweet fanny pack. Isn't he a stud?!

I was wildly proud of my nephew for insisting that everyone be a PETA supporter, and not a single person made a stupid remark about it!

Saturday was probably the best day out there, I came back pretty early in the morning and since I slept in my clothes for some reason, I still had my pretty darn cute, and favorite, green capri pajama pants clean and in my car, otherwise I only packed jeans since it was pretty chilly. Since I wasn't feeling that great still, I ended up feeling hot, and sticky and kinda crabby, so I changed into my capris and a tank top and stole my little cousin's crocs and went gallivanting about the creek for nearly the next 6 hours. I had a GREAT time, the water was freezing but it was so peaceful out there I didn't want to go back to the chaos. I knew my younger cousins were hunting crawdads, and they were intending on boiling them up and eating them (ugh), so I was finding and many as I could and moving them further upstream than the kids were searching trying to spare the poor things' lives. I also ended up finding this little wild vine plant on the bank of the creek, and I sat around there weaving vine bracelets and putting them on my arms, they looked pretty cool actually.
After a while I was frozen solid so I made my way back, did a little socializing with the family, played with the kids and slipped off into the trails in the woods that just out the other way, and ran into the most beautiful yellow wild daisy patch ever, and went wild myself picking flowers! I suddenly got this great idea that I was going to weave daisies into my bracelets. When I finally got back to the campsite, every little girl (about 12 of them) had to have a daisy bracelet like mine, so I took them out to the little vines, then to the flower patch and me sat around weaving bracelets and talking about the boys, it was a great time!
By this time, every one of these girls thinks I'm about the coolest thing ever and will pretty much do whatever I suggest at this point, so I convinced them to rescue all the crawdads and chubs that the boys had in their buckets and free them back into the creek. It actually became quite the game for the girls, and I kept reminding them how we had to be sneaky so nobody would stop us from dumping them back in!
All night long, the girls were slowly taking all the crawdads and putting them back in the creek, I was so happy!
I wish I had pictures of us making the daisy bracelets, but I'm fairly certain that some family member of mine has photos of it somewhere because I distinctly remember the sounds of shutter lenses all over the place, pretty much all weekend long.

I hate.

I love a lot. I love hard. I love deeply. I love passionately. I don't mind sharing this with people, because I have so many things in my life worth loving. Loving people can be a downfall, so I try not to confuse love with trust. I don't trust often, but I love much.

If this sounds familiar it's probably because I took it from my very first blogspot post. I had to take a look at it because as much as I try to remind myself to love and smile and laugh and giggle, I've been filled up with many other emotions lately and I've been having a heck of a time dealing with them.

I know hate is a strong word, and I really dislike using it regularly but it seems to be the only one that fit well with me today.

I hate myself
I hate my life
I hate my ear infection
I hate that I can barely pay my bills

I'm not a big fan of myself, which everyone I think feels that way about themselves so I don't think I'm all that unique in having that mindset. I say that I hate my life, but my life has so many wonderful qualities that I can't seem to figure out why I just can't make myself appreciate them all the time.

Who doesn't hate an ear infection, but what I hate worse is that I don't have medical insurance to go do anything about it, so I'm just toughing it out being miserable and hoping it will just go away.

Money is always a huge issue, I just don't have enough of it and with the economy the way it is, I feel discouraged about that ever changing.

I hate my face, I hate my body, I hate my heart, I hate my ugliness inside and out, but most of all...I hate hurting.

Have you ever heard anybody running around estatic screaming "WOOHOO I HURT! I HAVE A BROKEN HEART AND IT IS AMAAAAAZING!!!"? Yeah, me either.

I do know that things will get better with time, and eventually it won't hurt to exist, and actually I thought that I had just started to reach that point where I wasn't donating all of my spare thoughts to the very reason I was having a hard time focusing in the first place. It's everywhere I go, random catchy tunes in my head that lead my thoughts back where I am trying so hard to avoid.

I want really badly to just erase the hurt and the pain and not have to mask it. I almost think it's hazardous for me to be alone right now, and what sucks even worse is that I haven't told ANYBODY about anything that is going on. So not only am I in a world of hurt, I'm dealing with it completely by myself, which is fine I suppose, I'm grown.

Today in class we got into some pretty heated discussions regarding ethical decision making and abortion and a word was tossed out that kind of hit home with me. I want to expand on it, but I don't really have the time right now so I'll do it later, but I wrote the word on my had because it's the third time I've heard it and wanted to write about it but I kept forgetting what it was. VICARIOUS TRAUMA! (LOL I wrote it on my hand!)

Supporting KFC

So I was driving around in a mindstate of deep(ish) thoughts, and as I drove past an area where there is Taco Bell and Pizza Hut across the street from each other. I was taken back to my high school days and I remembered helping some friends move, one of which worked at KFC, so a lot of the boxes he had taken from work.

While I was moving the boxes I noticed on the sides of the KFC boxes there were the logos of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell all next to each other. I questioned my friend about this, and he responded that they were all under the same corporation or something. I tucked that away in my thoughts, under "research later", but I tucked it away better than I knew because I never again gave it consideration until just the other night.

In the years that have passed since seeing the three business logos together, there has been a merging of KFC and Taco Bell to the point where they are together under one roof, sharing one menu.
I have done a little bit of research, unfortunately I came up empty handed thus far, and would like to know what other people think about this.
I have seen on the peta2 website where it lists what you can get from taco bell and pizza hut, but we are advised to avoid KFC altogether.
The ultimate question is 'If KFC is owned by the same corporation as Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, then by eating at both of these places aren't I essentially supporting KFC?"

Cute...

I'm visiting my parents house during winter break from school, and went grocery shopping with my mother yesterday (I'm slowly wearing her down!). I was able to get an entire meat-free shopping trip out of this, and made sure I got everything I needed to cook some tasty meals for her (She loves vegetarian food!)

My mother has told me, on several occasions, that since I was a little girl she has had a difficult time trying to get me to eat meat. It was different this time though, on our ride home from the grocery store, my mom was telling me about her pregnancy with me and how she was basically a vegetarian since the sheer thought of meat would send her running nauseous to the bathroom.

I thought it was kind of cool that I've pretty much been vegetarian since in the womb, even though I have meat-eating parents.

When we got home, I quizzed my dad on the stories she told me, and he looked like a light bulb went off in his head and said "That's right! I remember, (turned to my mom) so she's YOUR fault." He was only teasing though. He is always trying to blame my mom for all of the silly things.

He even tried to tell her that I'm "weird" because of her, and that he should have known naming me Angel would make me turn out to be a hippie (lots of tree hugger jokes (comedians I tell you)).

Even though it has taken some time, my parents have both accepted me for who I am and what I believe in. My mom is fascinated by my will power and thinks I'm one of the coolest people she'll ever encounter (what's a mother if she isn't your number one fan?)!