there's no such thing as ghosts, there's no such thing as ghosts.

I feel like I owe an apology. How about this, I will give one gi-normous apology to last forever. I tend to get in one-minded tracts where I focus on one thing entirely and forget about all else. This usually leaves me to neglect other areas of my life. So I apology for this past month (two months) and in advance for neglectful postings. I promise I will really, really try to be more consistent. I really do. With all my heart.

That said how was your Christmas? All things considered mine went pretty well. It was remarkably different from Christmases past, but that's to be expected. We didn't want my aunt Patti to be alone Christmas Eve so we invited her to spend the night. We went to Midnight Mass, which was just beautiful. I can confidently say I will be attending for years to come. Exceeeept... You see it had snowed like six or seven inches the past two days. So when I walked out after mass a huge gust of wind blew a mountain of snow off of one of the church steeples. And who did it land on? Me, of course. I was absolutely covered. After that I was like, all right I'm going home and going right to bed. I consider myself lucky, however. At least there wasn't any ice that flew down and hit me in the head. It would be just my luck to spend Christmas in the hospital (which reminds me of a real tragedy that I'll talk about in a bit).

Like father, like daughter.

Since we went to bed so late we didn't get up until around nine-thirty. Which is pretty good for us. When we were little my older brother Conor and I would get each other up at like six and try to get our parents to let us open presents. Every. Year. Tradition is we get one big present and a few smaller ones. My big present was a #80 Donald Driver jersey. Go Packers!!! (You're forgiven for being anything but a Packers fan, I understand it's easy to get confused as to who the best team is.) And then I got a bunch of DVDs. (Including Veronica Mars Season 1 boxed set. EEEEE!)

On a more (much, much more) serious note, a tragedy has happened to my community over Christmas break. Real early Christmas Eve a boy(we'll call him DC) I go to school with was rushed to the hospital. Apparently he had been at a party in the downtown-ish area (totally sketch) and got into a confrontation with a twenty-two year old there (DC's seventeen). They got into a fight and DC ended up getting knocked out. They waited awhile before actually calling the police. My friend's dad is a firefighter in that area and he said that when he got there he didn't even recognize DC. When he got to the hospital they had to put him in a drug-induced coma in order to do immediate surgery on his skull because his brain was swelling. The newspapers say they're slowly taking him out of the coma. But who knows what he'll be like when he wakes up? I feel so terrible about it all, everyone does. It's just so horrible. You just can't imagine that happening to someone you know until it actually does. I wasn't close to him really at all, but our school is so small it's hard not to know someone. It's really amazing how our community has come together. He was on the basketball team and they've opened up a fund for donations for his family. He's in my prayers and I'm sure everyone else's.

Does anyone know this movie?

I think I've got everything caught up to date (for the most party anyways...). I really need to go upstairs and clean up my room now... But I'm watching this series called The Haunted on Animal Plant and it's seriously freaking me out. Especially since it's dark out and I'm home alone. I'm extremely superstitious and get freaked out easily. I could have sworn I heard some China fall upstairs... I really have to stop freaking myself out.

...

I guess I'll go upstairs now...

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! Enjoy your holidays!

(BTW, has anyone seen this?  Whose idea was it to use an inflatable dome in MINNESOTA?! Dumby slaps for youuu!)

name change

You may have noticed but I have decided to change the blog's name from My Blog Will Steal Your Soul to Just Give It a Few.

That's all.

snowsnowsnow!

It snowed today!!! Okay, it wasn't the first snow of the season. It snowed a wee bit on Thanksgiving, not enough to stick. Today there was like an inch. An inch really isn't a lot, but it's promising. I absolutely love snow and winter in general. Some people hate it, but I can't get enough. I don't know, something about winter just feels magical. The way the ice glistens on the trees; the crunch of snow beneath my brand new Sperry Top-Siders; curling up beneath a blanket, reading a good novel while the winter wind whistles outside. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. It also contains my most favorite holiday ever, CHRISTMAS! I love the whole Christmas season. I really can't contain myself. I know it will be kind of hard on everybody this year, because of my gramma passing, but I think she would want us to really have a good one this year. I think we'll all appreciate each other a little more because of it. Oh, I also can't forget to mention that my birthday's in February.

We finally got our Christmas tree today. We went out to the local hardware store where the Boy Scouts sell them every year. After we had picked out our own my dad goes, "We should get Aunt Patti a tree, too, shouldn't we?" Aunt Patti is my dad's oldest sister. We're really close, I only have two other girl cousins, but they're not really around all that much. So my aunt Patti and aunt Mary kind of dote on me. So we picked out a small-ish one and strapped it to the top of the Cherokee with our own. She lives on the ground floor of the family's old house and my cousin Michael lives on the top floor with his girlfriend Shannon. We got there and she looked like she was going to cry. Michael and Dad set it all up for her. She said that she wasn't really in the mood this year, but by the time we left she was already looking for all her decorations and talking about going shopping for lights.We haven't put our own tree up yet, I think we're doing that tomorrow. I can't wait, I just love the way Christmas trees smell.

After dinner we went and visited my grampa Jerry. It was weird because it was so quiet. The whole family had practically been living there all week. There was no one else with him, so there wasn't any excitement. I felt really sad as soon as I walked in. It just wasn't the same without her there. You could just tell something was missing. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I just miss her so much, everyone does. Their dog Cubby was acting unlike himself. Usually he's all playful and jumpy, but tonight he laid down the whole time and kept looking at the doors expectantly. He kind of freaked me out, at one point he looked directly over my shoulder. Not at me, at the the area above my shoulder. I guess I'm just superstitious.

It seems weird that I have to go back to school tomorrow (I have four days of homework to finish tomorrow, joy). School just seems like a completely different, unrelated life. It was easier at Gramma's house, because everyone else there was going through the same thing. We all had this huge thing in common, we were all dealing with it. I feel like no one will really get it at school. I know they've all lost people in their lives, but not the same person as me. But it helps to know that I have family member I'm close to and can talk to about things.

Wow, long blog today! Guess I'm just making up for the past few months. Buenos noches, amigos!

short and sweet

Every time I click "Next Blog" it's always a blog about shoes. Blogger knows me so well.

Helllllo beautiful.

"My wild Irish rose, the sweetest flower that grows..."

My gramma F (W) passed away early morning this past Tuesday. God, I don't even know where to start. You could say I'm still in kind of a daze about it all. It just doesn't seem real. The funeral visitation is tonight, the funeral tomorrow. It'll probably hit me then. I wouldn't say it was much of a shocker. She was seventy-eight years old and her health had steadily been going down hill for the past year or so. She'd been through so much; she was a fighter, for sure. I think we all sort of saw it coming, her especially. Just the things she would say and do; we were over there for Thanksgiving and she was pretty insistent about giving my dad a wooden crucifix that had been my grampa W's..

I'm not going to get into the details much. I mean, I really don't think that's what's most important, anyways. That's not what we're going to remember about her in the future. I'm mostly just writing this to honor her a bit. I wanted to do a reading at the funeral, but I think I'm going to be wayyyy too emotional for that.

Gramma was really an amazing, wonderful person. My dad is the middle of nine kids, so the household was a bit tight. Gramma didn't work and my grampa worked three jobs at one point, just trying to feed everyone. She somehow always managed to get everyone fed, though. They say she was constantly doing laundry, cooking, and doing everything the kids needed her to. I don't know if I could even do it. She loved them so much. They were her life. They didn't exactly live in the best part of town, so some of the families that lived around them weren't exactly ideal. My dad was telling me how whenever one of the neighbor kids needed somewhere else to stay she would always let them. She even let one of them move in with the family. He said that you never went to dinner expecting it to be just the family, there were always other people. But somehow, even with all those kids, no one left the table hungry. She make it work somehow.

She wasn't like that with just her kids, though. Gramma always took care of my cousins and I. First thing she'd ask when we came over was if we were hungry. Then she'd go into the kitchen and start putting sandwiches together. It didn't matter whether you were even hungry or not, you were going to eat that sandwich. When I was really little, after my grampa W. died, we used to go over and stay at her apartment with her. She would let us stay up as late as we wanted. My uncle Kenny was living with her then and she would always make him go get us pizzas. We'd stay up late eating pizza, drink Surge (remember that stuff?), eating candy, and just being idiots. I'm pretty sure I saw my first rated-R movie at her apartment when I was like five. You could just tell how much she loved us.

I don't even know if anyone read this or not. And it really doesn't even matter to me. I kind of felt like I just needed to say something. My gramma was one of the greatest people on this earth. She had the biggest heart, the warmest heart. And I'm extremely proud to be able to call myself her granddaughter. We're all going to miss her so much. But it's a comfort knowing that she's no longer in pain. She's with Grampa W now, and she's with God. Rest in peace Gramma, and know that we all love and miss you so, so much.