Midwest, Midbest

Warning, incoherent blogging ahead!

The blog silence has been because I've been searching for words, which, let's face it, I never really do before I puke-write on the blog.The trip through the midwest is over and I am completely confused about settling back in. Does anyone else get like this after a trip? So far it has been wall-to-wall bewilderment: my house, is that you? Oh, and walking around my neighborhood: this is my neighborhood, yes, I remember now. I have to go to a job and do job things, ok. But what am I supposed to be doing and thinking about? It feels mystifying, my life.

So to ease back into the blogging, I'll just jot some things down about the last week of the tripsie.

Nordic Boy spent a goodly amount of time fixing up busted stuff at my parents' house. He got them a new dishwasher and tv and installed them, fixed wiring, found every last loose closet doorknob or sticky screen door and fixed those up, just everything. This meant that we were at the local mom and pop hardware store every single solitary day, sometimes twice. The folks that work at the store quickly identified me as "cookie man's daughter." The hardware store also provides UPS service (seriously that place is like Oleson's Mercantile) and my dad is constantly showing up there with packages of cookies that my mom has made for sending off to all the grandkids, and he often has a cookie or two for the staff there as well. My dad, therefore, is known as "cookie man." Could you just die from the cuteness?

For more cuteness, see: my mom. Alli and Map dropped me off one night after we had all gone out, and my mom got her pajamafied self together to make them a snack, and then when they were ready to go, she says to me "they aren't staying over?" Like, an assumed slumber party, as it was when we were kids, when none of us ever slept at our own houses on weekends like, ever.

I am so glad I grew up in a household where cookies and slumber parties were a given, with pals to share them both and parents who encouraged the tomfoolery.

One night Alli, Map and I put out a call on the Facebooks for some childhood friends to come out with us. Did we have fun? Dude, we had all the fun. Most of the people that I saw that night, I met when I was in kindergarten, and we all are so, so different from each other now and I love it. I really adore those people. They are just so genuine, and so freaking hilarious. And it's so funny how we all think we have changed so much, and I guess we have, but really every last one of those people seemed, at their core, pretty much the same as they were when they were 5 or 15.

I also got to spend some time with my all-time favorite relative, my cousin R. We stayed up almost all night talking. What is better than staying up all night because you just can't shut up around someone? It's pretty awesome.

Also, there was a lot of time going back and forth to hospitals and such, which was the opposite of awesome.

Anyway, I feel sort of at a loss now that I'm back, just for words in general. So I guess that's all I will say about it, even though I feel like there's so much more to say. How about some photos from my week in Traverse City with my favorite ladies and we call it good?