Time For Change...

It's official! I (Lauren) will be starting school again on October 12th! I was planning on going back sometime in January, but it turns out I don't have to wait! I'll be finishing my degree through Ashford University. It's traditional campus is located in Iowa but they have a great online program, which I'm really excited about. They will accept all of the 83 credits I've already earned at Oakland University, and the part I'm most excited about is how they schedule their classes. You only take once class at a time and each class lasts 5 weeks. I think this will work great with my schedule and I'm excited to be able to work on my schoolwork at my own pace and at whatever time of day I choose! It looks like it was a good thing I went back to school shopping with Kayla after all!

In other news, we just had a match burning experiment and it turns out the only time I can light a match, hold it completely horizontal and not have it burn out within 1 second is when Kayla is also lighting a match at the same time. I'm really not sure what this means, scientifically speaking, but I just lit 8 matches trying to make them not burn out so fast, but it didn't work. I'm really not sure what's going on with my match-lighting skills.

Also, we went to Pei-Wei tonight for dinner and had an awesome roomie date. Kayla will probably want to kill me for phrasing it like that when she reads this post, but it's ok. We're cousins and we're just awesome enough to have roomie dates.Be jealous. You know you wish you were us.  I had some honey glazed crispy chicken, and Kayla got sweet and sour vegetables. DELICIOUS. If you haven't been to Pei-Wei (or P.F. Chang's for that matter), you should totally go. Make it your next dinner out.

So right now you're probably thinking that we've been purposely withholding our adventurous lives from you for two weeks. It's not true. We've pretty much just been living a boring life (Kayla is now an old lady apparently. I came home at 10 last night and she was already in bed. I think I've mentioned this before, but it totally takes the fun out of having a roomie if when you come home from work, you discover that said roomie is already sleeping and therefore cannot hear your crazy work stories from the day, nor can she share her crazy work stories.) But we did accomplish a couple of somewhat exciting things recently. For starters, we re-arranged our monstrous couch as my mom had been advising us to do, and we really love it! My mom also made some covers for our throw pillows. You wouldn't believe it- they actually match our ugly couch but they look really pretty! I know, it's a miracle. But what can I say? My mom is just awesome like that. We were so inspired by our couch moving success that Kayla bought some posters at a concert she went to recently and today we framed two of them! We discovered that we need some nails in order to hang them on the wall, but we'll probably end up getting some this weekend so we can do that. So far, this is what the posters look like in the frames (doesn't our nice clean carpet make such a great background for them?? lol)

Wow! Two Posts In One Day!

I know, I know. It's a miracle. We've gone eight days without posting, and now you get two fantabulous posts within mere hours of each other? No, the world isn't coming to an end, we were both just feeling guilty about not posting. It's been a crazy week for me- I got back from house-sitting on Tuesday night. I was SO happy to be able to sleep in my own bed in my own little cozy apartment! House-sitting is great, until you realize that you miss your roomie terribly and you miss your own bedroom, even if it is torn apart due to a few maintenance mishaps.

I thought I'd fill ya'll in on everything that's been going on around here lately! First of all, can I just say that I was extremely disappointed to come home from work at 10 p.m. today only to find out that Kayla was already asleep? Here I was all excited to hang out with my favorite roomie, and she was already in bed! I'm assuming she must have to work early tomorrow. Oh well. Perhaps tomorrow... :( As for the accusations that I've been "vaulting" fodder for Things My Cousin Says, trust me - you would too if you said as many embarrassing things as I say in a day. I think the only thing I didn't vault with Kayla yet was when I asked her "Wait. Serbia and Montenegro are just one country? Why is it Serbia and Montenegro? Why can't it just be one or the other, or split up into two separate nations??" In my defense, I've really never paid that much attention to the geography of any area (you all know I've actually gotten lost on the first floor of the airport parking structure, right?) so I can't really be blamed for not knowing about Serbia and Montenegro. On the bright side, while we were googling this "two names/one country" business, I also learned that Bosnia and Herzegovina are (is?) also one country. Oh, the things you learn when you Google random information...

In other news, I think I may have caused Kayla to gag this morning in class when I texted her to inform her that I was having a steak for breakfast and that I was washing it down with a nice glass of milk. Oh, and did I mention that I had some double chocolate gelato for dessert after that? (Maybe this sort of eating habit is why I've decided to finally get a gym membership? Hahaha) I'm really not sure how we're roommates. She's a vegan who's allergic to soy, and I'm the girl who will pretty much only eat what she won't! I do enjoy freaking her out with my eating habits though :) And I must say, I've gotten pretty good at making a delicious steak! You know it's good when you dip it in A1 and decide it's better without the sauce! And mom, just to prove to you that I'm not joking, here is a picture of my delicious steak. :) (And the gelato I had afterward. Turns out you can get some pretty good gelato at Meijer for a pretty decent price!)

My favorite way to prepare the steak: mix together some season salt, paprika, cumin, and a little garlic salt and rub it all over the steak before you cook it. In this case, I let it sit like that overnight, and it turned out delicious!

Well, that's about it for this post. I need to actually go to bed at a decent time (for the first time all week) so that I can actually get up and get things done tomorrow before work! I think I'll go have a couple spoonfuls of gelato first though. ;)

...

We've been neglecting our blog- I'll be the first to admit it- it's just that life has suddenly gotten busy. My free time has greatly diminished and my life has been taken over with diagramming sentences, invalid arguments, fricative f's, the worst customers that I have ever experienced at work and an apartment that will apparently not clean itself. I'm hoping that maybe Lauren will pick up my slack and start writing more entries. There have been a few possible entries for "stuff my cousin said" however, someone (who shall remain nameless)  has "vaulted" them. The other possibility would be recapping episodes of  "Hoarders." Although those recaps would involve stories of Lauren and me sitting on the couch with me literally gagging, while Lauren earnestly pleads with me not to throw up. I'll spare you the gory details... You're welcome.

I just found out that blogging is the best way to procrastinate from homework!

So, Lauren is currently house/dog/guinea pig/rabbit-sitting, and I thought that I would update the old blog... We have been throwing out the idea that we want to start writing entries about "stuff my cousin says..." I based the idea on a certain twitter that has some coarse language and is actually about someone's dad. Now, if you know Lauren and me at all, you know that 90% or more of the things we say are utterly absurd. For example: the other night on our bottle return trip to Meijer we had to walk through the entrance to the bottle return, which blows gale force winds onto you. (Note: I may be slightly exaggerating.) So on our way out of the bottle return my hair was blown into my face which prompted the following, "that wind just Biebered my hair..." If you don't know who Justin Bieber is you might want to google it. Although you may also want to keep it that way. Anyhow, you can expect about a billion entries with stuff my cousin says because the source material is literally endless. Hopefully future entries will actually be entertaining. Until then... hey here's a picture of Lauren and me being awesome (or not).

Men of Meijer also known as late night shopping trip...

First of all let me just say how thankful I am that fall is here. The weather has been absolutely perfect the last two days, and Lauren and I are more than excited to break out our sweaters. Now onto slightly more lame matters. If you know Lauren and me at all you will know that we stay up far too late most nights and love taking late night trips to Meijer. We were given a suggestion to make a post about the Men of Meijer. The intentions were good but you would not believe how hard it is to inconspicuously take a picture of someone when they are the only other human beings in the store... Let's just say that Meijer is not a hotbed of activity at 12:30 at night. You also might guess that two girls who do not look like meth-addicts get stared at a little bit. Apparently, it's not normal to be out grocery shopping so late. Who knew? We didn't get too many pictures (read: 1) and it turned out extremely blurry. But here it is:

Somewhere in that picture is a dude... I now feel more than a little creepy. So, while our late-night shopping trip was successful for shopping it was not so lucky for picking up guys. Although I can't say i'm upset given the clientele of Meijer afterhours...
Lauren and I did stop and stare at their large Burt's Bee's section for quite awhile. Eventually we pulled ourselves away without buying anything. I couldn't be more proud of us.

I mean, just look at all of those absolutely necessary products that we really really needed! Anti-aging cream? A million different lip balms? We needed it! Self-control won out in the end and we spent the next 15 minutes searching for Q-Tips. What an absolutely great time. (Ed. Note: I was about 3 minutes away from throwing myself onto the floor and screaming like a 3 year old child. It was a long night at work.) Thankfully we eventually got out of Meijer sometime around 1 a.m. I guess we'll end this post by saying good-luck to Victoria who is moving back to college this week-end. We are going to miss you so much! That's it for now.

Back to School, Back to School

Apparently Lauren likes to celebrate Christmas in late August, only she calls it "back to school shopping." That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I cannot express the excitement Lauren felt when I asked her to go shopping with me for school supplies. For an accurate idea of her excitement it was similar to the commercial for Meijer's back to school sale.
         
The sad part is that Lauren could honestly be in that commercial and she wouldn't be acting. She gets that excited about shopping for school supplies.

                                                    For further proof:

 

Now, Lauren is not actually going to school this fall, but she claimed that she needed supplies for when she starts back up in the winter... I won't make too much fun though. 

There is my haul of school supplies, I didn't have to spend too much thanks to Walmart, but my wallet will be getting a workout this weekend when I have to purchase all of the books for my four classes. I think that is about it for now. Hopefully the pretty school supplies will distract from the fact that we are averaging about one post every two weeks...