"Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun." ~ Ecclesiastes 2:11

My grandma and I spent the day today looking at homes. Rich peoples' homes. She's an interior designer and does this stuff for a living... Get this, she just finished re-doing the floor in a client's house with some fancy shmancy flooring... uhh... stuff... and it cost them $32,000. Holy mother... That's, like, 60 times what I paid for my car. And she hasn't even started on the rest of the house yet.

Anywho, the point is, she deals with these ritzy rich people every day (partly because she is one of them and can relate to them). I, however, grew up in Africa and *GASP* I even use public restrooms.

So we looked at homes all day, crazy rich homes, and we critiqued them. Apparently, I have an eye, which doesn't surprise me because my grandma has a pretty good eye. An eye that has become rather extravagant but still, an eye. Some of the homes we looked at, holy doody, they were insane. Finally, in one of the bigger homes, she mentioned something about how she would love to own a home like that one day and I said, rather plainly, "I really would never want to live in anything this fancy, this big, or this expensive."

"Oh."

It's weird to me, how the tendency is to always want bigger, better, more features, more options, more, more, more. I just have no desire for any of that stuff. Sure, there's stuff I want that I don't really need, but the idea of paying $32,000 for your floor makes me want to vomit. Give me the worn wood floors and the tattered brown carpets in the old, familiar Alipaz house any day.

Speaking of which, I went to Visalia and visited Mike & Carol Alipaz on Monday, which was great. I always love going there because it's the only house that's been there ever since I was a little kid. I've lived in it for periods of time, I've ridden their horses, I've swam in their pool for hours on end, and it's just one of the best places in the world to go back to. It was different this time, though. I've always been there with my parents or with my brother before. This time, I went alone, as an adult. One of those turning points, small but significant to me.

I just realized that I'm turning 20 next month. Yup. The weirdest part of that is when I start thinking that, if I'm 20, Josh must be almost 23. It's strange... The first image that comes to mind when I think of my brother is when he was 11 years old and he shaved his head, when we lived in Switzerland. In my mental image, he's wearing these short little black jean shorts pulled clear up past his belly button and his ears are protruding from his head even more than usual, due to the lack of hair. I think he's grown into his ears since then. Today, I saw an old black and white picture of my dad at that age. He had those same huuge ears.

Anywho, I'm going up to visit Auntie 'Nita and Uncle Daryl tomorrow so I should go to sleep. Smaxwell (Max) is laying at the foot of my bed, sleeping peacefully. I miss my Henry, who's probably sleeping on my bed back in Eugene right now. He has his half of the bed and I have mine but when I'm not there, he usually sleeps in my place, curled up on my pillow. He knows he's not supposed to but I just can't get over how cute it is. Some would say that it gets dog on my pillow but I say, hey, dog is on everything else, why not the pillow?

I wuv you Hinnykin. I wuv Smax too though. I think I'll just wuv you both. Yeah, let's do that.

:kiss: :kiss: