Well, gosh, this sure has been a while. Two months now, it must be. My last access to the internet was over a month ago, and that was on the other side of the country and I was being charged $10 an hour for it. But now my internet has returned. It’s dial-up until a DSL port opens up. I’ve got a couple hundred emails to read, a couple hundred songs to download, and a sense of both exhaustion and relief.

But I am back. Back, hopefully for good. Catch me up, please. What’s been goin’ on? Weddings, divorces, births, deaths, anything? I’m terribly behind.

The following tale is a long one, so it’s been hidden to protect the eyes of brats young’uns and those with a short attention span.

Now, if I’m not mistaken, my internet conked out on June the 14th after our massive phone bill wasn’t paid on time. On June 29 (or something like that) I was able to have three hours of internet access through my mom’s work (god, I love feeding off other people’s resources). On July 8, I had an hour of access. That’s four hours of internet over two months. Normally I spend eight hours online a day. How did I survive? The tale follows.

For a half a month I sustained myself on video games, songwriting, and more games of solitaire then I would’ve normally cared for. Every day I would open up Firefox and refresh, hoping for a miracle, for Yahoo to pop up and show me my email. It was in vain. I was alone. No phone. No internet. I felt like a hermit. A hermit, a recluse, all cooped up in my little house with only my killer duck for company. However, the prospect of a week-long school trip to Miami in early July occupied me somewhat. Fantasizing kills time. Speaking of time, I spent about 19 hours a day sleeping, and the other five refreshing Firefox, eating, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and imagining the fun to come.

So it’s a bright, sunny Hawaii morning. July 7th, 2007. 10 AM. I awake to a cluttered room, a suitcase in the corner and clothes strewn across the floor. I spend an hour or so sitting and imagining Miami, and then it hits me: I leave for Miami in seven hours. Frantic packing, prepping, and flipping out follows.

Me and the four other kids going arrive at the airport at 5. Our plane leaves at 6, departing from Hilo, Hawaii, International. It’s a misleading name - it only flies in-state, so we’re off to another island first. From there we’re off to Los Angeles. By the time we get there, it’s 5 AM California time. Then we go to Houston - we get there at around 11 AM Texas time. And our final flight - best one of my life, despite the turbulence - to Miami. We arrive at about 5 PM Florida time. 23 hours of travel, including timezone changes. I’m not tired, though. We were all underage and going across the country alone. Our teacher chaperones weren’t flying with us, but meeting us in Florida.

I won’t go too into detail about the trip here - I’ll save it for another day, maybe tomorrow - but I will tell you this. It was amazing. No, you know what, maybe I’ll just tell you here anyway.

Including the teachers, there were five girls and two guys. It was originally gonna be that the girls were gonna be in one hotel room, and the guys in another. Didn’t work out. The room was too small for five girls and their ten suitcases. One girl was gonna have to room with the guys. Yeah, I had to room with the guys. It wasn’t that bad. They knew how to be quiet, at least. THEY didn’t watch crappy teen dramas, THEY didn’t leave their clothes everywhere. It turned out to be fine.

My trip was filled with such wonders as swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic is warm. Really. Like a jacuzzi. And there’s seaweed on the sand. Lots of it. It was still good fun though. More often than not, I went with my teacher roomie - the other guy wanted to hang out with the girls since one of them is his girlfriend, and the girls were more into shopping and watching TV than swimming and sightseeing. The pool at our hotel was very shallow. Five feet at its deepest. I’m five foot two (I grew in Miami!), but I’m a bad swimmer, so it was still hard for me. I feel pathetic.

On two of the days we were in Miami, the seven of us (and a bunch of others from the conference we were attending there) went down to South Beach. South Beach is like an off-district of Miami Beach, filled with colorful buildings and colorful people. Now, the female teacher and the girls and the other guy wanted to go shopping - S.B. has lots of expensive shops - but the guy teacher and I were kind of “ehhh” about it. I had 300 dollars, which was about the price of one thing in those shops, and I wanted to buy CDs with it anyway. So me and him went off on a walk through the city on both days. It was great. I love architecture, and there were lots of great buildings there to look at. Lots of kooky people, too. They were fun to laugh at. There was a place that was renting Ferarris, and there were signs all over that said “Please do not touch the Ferarri”. I touched the Ferarri. They’ve probably got me on camera, waiting to arrest me over there.

On our second full day there, there was a strange phenomenon on TV. This phenomenon was Spanish football, aka soccer played by teams from Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Uruguay, who were playing this particular game. The announcers were classic. Every time someone scored a goal, they would yell either “Goal goal goal goal GOAL” in a deep voice or hold a single “Goal” for an entire minute without stopping. At the same time, a large flashing “GOL” would appear onscreen. My teacher wouldn’t stop yelling goal, either. I couldn’t stop laughing. Look up some Spanish football games on YouTube if you can. They’re classic, and now I want that one channel on my TV.

We went on a yacht cruise in Miami. But it wasn’t that great. It was really slow. I also went to a disco. No, I didn’t. It was just a disco radio station that was playing in one of the stores.

I spent just $80 in Miami. I got a shirt each for two of my friends, a hat for myself, a hoodie for myself, and a coffee at Starbucks. I didn’t want to leave Miami. You MUST visit Miami sometime or another and walk the entirety of South Beach. That is my kind of town. Any city is my kind of town. It’s no fun walking through the country. All the trees start looking the same after a while.

But I had to come back. In Honolulu, one of our flight connections, there was a flight to Newark, New Jersey (not too far from New York) that was leaving, and I was tempted to go and exchange my ticket for one to Newark, but I figured the FBI would be all over my ass, so I didn’t.

School started up on the 30th of July. I like school. I need school to function properly. But then, three weeks into the school year, some damn hurricane named Flossie came and canceled school with its mighty winds and heavy rain. Bullcrap, that is! It didn’t do anything, that hurricane. School was off for two days because of nothing. The only thing we got was a cloud. Really.

And the unrelated earthquake. 5.3 on the Richter scale. For those unfamiliar with the Richter scale, 5.3 is really fucking big. It shook like something else. I was listening to the radio in my room, and I fell off my bed when the earthquake hit. Then my mirror shattered in two and landed a couple inches away from me. Near death experience. I realized too late just now that I should’ve called the radio station to request “You Shook Me All Night Long” by the always awesome AC/DC when that happened.

Speaking of radio, I made my radio debut on the 3rd of August. I requested AC/DC as well. When they asked me what my favorite radio station was (self-endorsement crap), I said that I didn’t have one - I just wanted to hear AC/DC. They put me on the air, but cut me off at the part about my fave radio station. I didn’t give them permission to do that! Lawsuit! Lawsuit! Then a week after that I made it on again, this time requesting Mika. That Grace Kelly song is one of the catchiest things I’ve ever heard.

So let’s cap things off. Miami was wonderful. The radio sucks. Spanish football is awesome. Earthquakes are weird. Hurricane Flossie is retarded. I am back, ladies and gentlemen. I am back.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK (long overdue): Have you had any bad experiences with flight attendants?
Back in ‘05 when I went to Los Angeles, I had this awful lady as my designated flight attendant. She was irritating beyond belief and would tap you on the head roughly if she didn’t like what you were doing. On my return flight, I prayed to god she wouldn’t be my flight attendant. She was.
And just a month ago, on my flight from Miami to Houston, there was this flight attendant. I’m gonna sound like a total bitch, but she had a huge ass. When she walked, her ass would bump into you and knock over what you were doing. She seemed oblivious to this as well. Horrible.

REMEMBER 7/7/07 - LUCKY DAY. Day I left for the best week of my life. Lucky indeed, am I right? This was an exhaustive blog, I know. Thanks for reading. Katie off.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Rantings, Question of the Week, Internet, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are closed. Deal with it.