My Life in Pictures: The White Room [dun dun DUN!]

Lucky for us, I've got a story to draw about today! It is short and sweet and sure to make you believe that I am a dork.

The time when I legitimately thought I was going to die.

My family owns a beach house here along the Oregon coast. It is a place of refuge from the drudgery of daily life and the noises of suburbia/city life. The Ericksen's Beach Abode houses family reunion, birthday celebrations, and even a Christmas morning or two. We have created many memories and look forward to all of the memories our family will make in the future. People come from all around America to also take refuge and enjoy what our little beach home has to offer.

However, I am slightly scared of sleeping there.

My life is such so that I had to get used to sleeping in noisy situations. Oldest child, roommates, traveling, living next to a busy road, etc. In fact, I now can only sleep with background noise. I can't be the last person to go to bed because it's too quiet in my apartment/house. I sleep with the window open so that I hear the cars/dogs/nature noises. I take comfort in people snoring in the next room over. This is my problem with our peaceful beach house. It's a little too quiet for this city girl. No cars. Well-insulated walls. Quiet neighbors. Even with the window open at night, it is silent. That gets into my head and I can't sleep at the beach house. I look forward to big family reunions because I get to share a room with someone. Get the picture? If not, I drew some for us.

A couple of trips ago, I begged my sister and mom to let me sleep with them, but they are those weird people who like the solitude and silence of sleeping in the beach house. Weirdos.
So I sucked it up and charged my iPod, ready to create noise and sleep like a big girl all by myself in the White Room (it's called that because white people like to name everything).  The White Room is the second scariest room in the beach house, next to the Red Room, which is freaky just in its name, but that's for another post.
Here is what normal people see when they see the White Room:

And here's how I see it: 

The first night, I'm delaying my sleepless night by reading and following my family around as they get ready for bed, which is their favorite activity to do with me. I finally decide that it's time for bed and should stop annoying hanging out with my family, so I get ready for bed, which includes making a sweep of the room to make sure there are no murderers. You know, like every normal adult does. I'm half-bracing myself to see something in one of the nooks of the room, so you can imagine what would happen if I were to actually see something. 

Well while I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, my loving mom and sister, who know of my fears and heighten them by forcing me to sleep by myself, decide to not only make me sleep in the White Room, but then think it would be funny to hide in my closet. So I come back from the bathroom, make my sweep, then get to the closet. I open the closet, and this is what I see:

I scream bloody murder, scramble like a skittish cat who can't get traction on the wooden floors, and bolt out of the room. I collapse onto my mom's bed, in tears, heart racing. My grandpa stumbles into the room, still working on his pants, ready to kill the person who could possibly make me scream like that. By now, I realize that the two demons in my closet were actually my super supportive mother and sister and so I start to calm down. 

This is what they claimed they did:

..but we all know how it really went down.

Needless to say, I slept in my sister's room that night.

Close Encounters of the Eight-legged Kind

Last week, I got into my car to go pick up a friend for a YSA FHE activity. I shut my door, put on my seatbelt, glanced towards my mirror to look before I backed up and froze. On my side mirror, just separated by a thin sheet of glass, was the biggest spider I have ever seen in person. I sat in a panic wondering if I should call my brave little sister aka the killer to take out the spider. But then I thought, "No that's ok. I will drive fast enough for it to fly off." So I started to drive to my friend's house. The whole way, I wa hyperventilating and whispering under my breath "I'm gonna die I'm gonna die." AND IT DIDN'T FLY OFF. On the contrary, it started to climb. Ok, stationary huge spiders are scary but moving huge spiders are nerve-shredding. Am I right, am I right?
So I get to my friend's house and wonder if I should call HIM to come out and save my life, but I hadn't seen him in awhile and so I didn't want to look like an idiot. Instead, I nonchalantly on the way out his door asked if he was afraid of spiders. He was like sort of but why and I was like BECAUSE THERE IS A HUGE ONE ON MY CAR AND MY HEART IS STILL RACING SO KILL IT OR HELP ME BURN MY CAR. And he was, like, chill out woman and he killed it with his shoe. Lucky for you guys, we lived to tell the tale.
Ok guys, there are stories out there in the news about a new species of orange spider in Oregon and the spider was orange, so don't judge my freak out.
I have a picture taken at high speeds to prove it.

fun friday things

1. This is a recording of a father interviewing his two little girls about the worst haircut ever.  The 5 year-old decided it was a good idea to cut the 3 year-old's hair.  It's so cute and made me LOL. lol brb ttyl

http://www.prx.org/pieces/73865-two-little-girls-explain-the-worst-haircut-ever

2. I thought this was clever.

http://www.dump.com/parentsrap/

I hope I'm this cool of a parent some day.

another picture story

It's that time, again! I had a funny thing happen to me last week, and I wanted to illustrate it to prove my "artistic abilities."
Last Friday night, Hilary, Kimberly and I went to Seven Peaks.  We were going down the slides in a three-person tube together and having a jolly good time. We quickly discovered that our favorite slide was "The Cave" (dun dun DUUNN!) and we were probably on our third trip down.

One time, we were walking up to go down "The Cave" (dun dun DUUNN!) again and there were three ten-ish year-olds with their own three-person raft.  We thought nothing of it, until we got behind them.  They went down first and then we went soon after.  The thing is, three adult women can pick up speed--at least we are faster than three little ten-ish-year-olds.  Half way down the tube, we met up with the boys. Actually, we more like collided with the boys. And we became a six-person train for the rest of the trip down.  Once we hit the pool, we just crumbled all over each other and scrambled for the surface from underneath each other and the rafts.  We as the responsible adults we are were concerned that we had injured the boys (because, honestly, we were feeling a bit beat up, ourselves).  However, instead of crying when the boys popped out of the water, we saw a slightly different reaction.

aka: the best day of their young lives.

Well, once we saw that they were OK, we went to go down again.  We tried to walk faster than they so that we could go down before them and not have a painful repeat of the last ride down.

We get to the top of the tower and see the boys ahead of us (how?!).  We both sat on other side of the slide push-off.  I was in the front this time, so I look up to the lifeguard lady and tell her that we need to go first because we are faster than those boys.  She says that's OK, but as we get situated, the boys started to push themselves off.  

I looked at the boy in the front of the raft (the same one who did the victory stance the last time down) and told him that we didn't want to run into them again.  

He shook his head and gave me a look that said "We're going first and there's nuttin you can do about it lady" and then pushed himself off.

We just waited for a while longer to make sure we didn't run into them again and then pushed ourselves off.

Not even 5 seconds into the slide, we met up with them.  

They were just hanging out playing video games and drinking chocolate milk. Not really. But their raft had popped and it was sideways and they were just sitting there waiting for us.

Since I was in the front, I just pushed them along so that we wouldn't collide and have another mess at the bottom.
And what do you think their reaction was at the bottom of the pool?

 The end.

how NOT to play volleyball

AKA why Michelle never liked playing volleyball during P.E.

Today I was walking to campus by the place where I lived last year and I bumped into a friend from that complex.  I was late for class so we quickly exchanged pleasantries.  Then he asked me, "Hey. How's your face?"
I'm never going to live it down.
When I lived at this complex, we would go play volleyball at the RB on Saturday mornings.  I have never really been the volleyball playing type, but I liked to play sports and no one would listen to my basketball requests.
So one Saturday morning, I found myself with 6 guys playing a normal game of volleyball.  We were playing la-ti-dah so fun.  Little did I know that this would go down in history as the most embarrassing volleyball game of my life.
Every time someone re-tells this story, they do the actions.  So I decided to make this version in pictures.
Brian was on the other side and it was his turn to serve.

My team had our game faces on.

Me, ready to OWN this serve.

...I caught it with my face.  Remember how I said there were 6 boys there?  Just me and 6 boys? Oh, and I was somewhat dating one of them.  Yup.

My pride was hurt more than my face. I collapsed on the ground laughing and trying to hide from my embarrassment.  Since I was on the floor, there was that awkward pause when everyone is waiting to see if I was laughing and not crying so they can join in.  I've NEVER seen Brian laugh so hard.

Ever since that fateful morning, whenever I run into any of those guys, I am asked, "Hey Michelle! Remember that one time you caught the ball with your face?"  

"...YOUR face..."

I promise that I have hand-eye coordination.  Just sometimes issues with depth perception.