Where in the world does the time go?

I really don't know.

But Brian, Laura, and Gatsby pretty much just go to the beach! :-) We've been down to my grandmother's house on Oak Island every weekend except one in July and before that we spent some time in Ocean with my parents.

I'm not going to lie. It's been pretty awesome.

This weekend, I'm heading to Charlotte to see my best friend Shannon and then Saturday night we're heading to Shelby to my good friend Mandy's wedding. It should be a lot of fun. On Sunday we're going to see the new Harry Potter movie. I am so super excited about the trip.

The last weekend in August we're going to OKI with Brian's parents, grandma, and brother. This is the third year in a row that we've spent a weekend down there in August and I'm really looking forward to it! Brian and I are planning to take Monday off so that we don't have to rush back. That's our one complaint about beach weekends--they're wayyyyyy too short!!

And the weekend after that--you guessed it--FOOTBALL SEASON, BABY!!!! App. is starting out the season at ECU! So, Brian, Gatsby, and I are going to go to my parents for Labor Day, so that I can ride directly with them to the game. I am SO ready for football. Y'all can't possibly imagine how ready I am.

I am so ready that I tried on "my" football game-day jersey a few weeks ago at my parents' house:



The jersey is at my parents' house because it's Callie's (and it hasn't quite yet made it to her and Clay's apartment yet...). But I'm claiming it for the start of football season because none of my App. stuff fits anymore. Here's the cool thing about that shirt--it's a boy's XL. (Not men's!) It's still a little tight in that picture, but it will be ready for some football action come Labor Day!

I'm pretty sure that between weekend trips to visit my parents in Ocean and OKI during the spring, summer, and winter, and trips to Boone in the fall, I definitely spend the majority of weekends in a year away from home. I love our house, but I LOVE spending time travelling and Brian and I are so incredibly fortunate to have such fun places to visit...and wonderful people to see when we get there.

That much driving has definitely taken a toll on our cars. In fact, poor Brian's car had a rough time coming back from OKI over the Fourth. It broke down on him in beautiful Pender County and needed a new distributor-thingie-mc-jig and then the mechanics told us that it really needed considerable more work (his car was a 2000 Civic with 150K+ miles). So when we got back to Raleigh, we took it to the Honda place and they told us that it needed about $1700 in additional work to have any more of a lengthy existence. Considering the car was worth pretty much $1700, we decided to say our goodbyes and purchase a shiny new Civic.

We're quite excited about it and LOVE, LOVE, LOVE having a new car. We're definitely the people who will drive a car for as long as humanly possible before buying a new one, so it's super exciting to see what Honda has come up with in 10 years of new models! (Our favorite is the USB hookup for our ipod that interfaces with the car's stereo.) It's very nifty.

It made its maiden voyage to OKI last weekend and performed without flaw--we were so thankful to be in a good car with super tires when we drove through a rainstorm second only to Noah's flood!

That's pretty much it for now...though I'm going to post a weight loss update in a few minutes...

I'll separate them out, so that you can ignore that one if you don't care ;-) (And, so that I'll have 2 posts in one night!)

Oh yeah, and if you want to...you can follow me on Twitter now...

http://twitter.com/SushiBeach

If you're friends with me on Facebook, it's the same status updates...