I'm back.

I got home late last night (around 10:30) from my family vacation. It was pretty cool, even if I only got to sit out on the beach two days instead of all six. We were in this area that's all sand and only accessible by driving down the beach for an hour and you can only do that with a powerful 4x4 vehicle (we saw a ton of people stuck in the sand). The beach house we rented was great (I especially loved the PS2 and stock of games.) and the beach was crazy beautiful and we had it almost all to ourselves. And then there were the horses. A couple herds of wild Spanish Mustangs live there and just roam around doing whatever it is that horses do. There's also this lady who drives around in a Hummer yelling at people for looking at them and trying to solicit money for the protection of the horses (We called her the horse Nazi. Goodness. Those horses lived 400 years there before she was born and they did perfectly fine without her). I've got a ton of pix of them, so I'll get some up here as soon as I can. (Right now I can't upload anything because I'm trying to get a video onto facebook and the little timer thing says 2.5 hours. That's pretty dang slow, but better than the 542 hours it was telling me an hour ago.) I actually got trapped by the horses at one point. Four of them decided to eat stuff growing in the yard of the house and I had left my camera in the truck, so I ran out to get it and then the horses decided to get all close to me, so I had to get up on the bumper and wait for them to leave. They've been known to "bite. kick, and stomp tourists" and there was a colt, so if the mother felt like I was too close...I could get some serious hoof prints embedded on my body. Besides that, the other interesting things are that I climbed a lighthouse (there was some crazy wind up there), flew my first kite, let go of the kite, and had to climb up a dune to get it back (which is illegal), met this amazing Romanian guy that's working there over the summer and my mom invited him and his friends to stay at my house (he's got the beeest accent ever), and boogey boarded for the first time (next year I get to learn to surf! And my mom's gonna make me hang glide so that I don't go skydiving on my 18th birthday. I don't get that logic.). Other than that, there really isn't much worth telling.

School starts Tuesday and I'm excited like omg crazy muchh! I'm gonna be a senior this year and have a lot of cool (easy) classes. Now that whole thing I get going sometimes when I walk down the hallways of my school that says "I own this place" won't be unfounded. I can be as cocky as I want (within reason) all cuz I'm a senior, I completely owned my APs, I'm getting stalked by some of the best colleges in the nation (I'm serious about that. They call me and email me and snail mail me and then they go and email my mother!), and I've got the best first day of school outfit ever. It's a little out of character for me, but after my mom forced me to try it on (I'm not so into the whole dress thing unless its for a dance), I fell in love and bought it and decided the only thing that's occasion to wear it is the first day of school. Now I just gotta work on standing up and walking in those high wedge shoes that go with it. That will be a laugh. I'll film it. But I don't think I'll post it anywhere. There's 45 minutes left to upload my other video and that was after I went and converted it and compressed it to less than half the original size. It cut an hour off of the time, but it's still been ages.

One last thing I'm going to say before I go occupy myself somewhere else is about Roanoke Island, the site of the mysterious lost colony. I hate going to national parks and looking at old houses and all that stuff. It always puts me in a bad mood. But I really wanted to see Roanoke Island since I had watched a documentary on it a few years ago. So we went there while on vacation. And after running into a friend from my school (crazy coincidence muchh.) I settled back with my camera to enjoy a tour full of mystery and wonder. Oh boy was I disappointed. The poor tour guide tried her hardest to make it interesting, but after she explained the meaning of the mysterious "CROATOA" that was carved on a post, she lost me and I decided that it wasn't worth my time; that was much better spent taking pictures of a sign from every angle I could contort my body into. The documentary had said the warning might have been related to Satan, so my imagination was busy dreaming up evil that could wipe out an entire colony. But in actuality, Croatoa was the name of an island where friendly American Indians lived and Manteo's home (he was a dude that helped the colonists). So no mystery or devil there. And then when Gov. White returned to the colony after being gone for three years and he saw that mark, he couldn't go to the island to see if his people were there because of bad weather and sucky ships. Alas, the romantic lost colony turned out to be a boring story of people starving, so they decided to go live with people that had food. Seriously though, couldn't they have carved a better message? Maybe "We're going to live on Croatoa because we haven't got any more food" or even "Going to Croatoa." It would have saved me some enthusiasm because then there wouldn't be this whole hype that made me happy to go to a historic site. I guess the story is kinda interesting (I don't wanna turn anyone off of it), but it didn't live up to my expectations.

Now I must go beat the computer. There have been 43 minutes left on my upload for the past 45 minutes. I'll prolly write again tonight while I procrastinate on my homework and college apps (I found out last night that my first deadline is Oct. 1st!!)

♥ j.j.