Adventure Weekend

This weekend turned out to be the most fun I've had in a long time. I've found that it is usually the case with the weekends that I don't overplan, because I don't get my hopes up too high. This weekend was supposed to be a quiet one, starting out with my best friend Lauren spending the night at my apartment and then ending with laundry at my parent's house. But I ended up having an amazing, fun weekend filled with new experiences.

Lauren came over on Friday night. Let me just say that Lauren is my very best friend, along with the best person I've ever known. She's motivated, smart, funny, and she is always there for me. She works at Petco, so when she got out of work on Friday, she came right over. We got pizza and just talked, which was actually a lot more fun than it sounds. She is literally the only person that I can talk to for hours and not run out of things to say. She got to my place at ten, and we stayed up talking for seven and a half hours, only stopping because I was starting to get drowsy. When we woke up the next morning (actually only three hours after we went to sleep), a man was at my door to install my WiFi, which was one of the most exciting moments that I've had at my apartment yet. Living without internet is really hard, and before Saturday I had been doing it for over three months!

After he left, Lauren and I decided that we wanted to go out somewhere, and I remembered that Shipshewana was coming to an expo center about half an hour away from us, so we just decided to go on a whim. It was amazing. They had so much food, and the way to my heart is with free samples. They had meat, dips, cheeses, fudge. This was all in addition to the clothes and crafts that they had there. By the time Lauren and I left, I had bought three different dips and fifteen honey sticks for my tea, and Lauren bought a big bag of kettle corn to share with her mom. If we weren't so broke (me from my expensive internet installation and Lauren from her impending trip to Florida with her boyfriend, Jordan), we would've bought much more. I had decided on the cheapest dips I could find, which also happened to be my favorites out of all of the vendors. Plus, I felt kind of obligated to buy them after I spent ten minutes at the stand and almost all of the poor vendor's pretzels trying to decide which dip flavors I liked best.

My Dips! I've tried the Dill one already, I can't wait to try the other two!

My honey sticks. They come in some of the weirdest flavors:)

After Shipshewana, Lauren and I parted ways and I headed straight back to my place to get ready to go out again. Earlier in the week, my dad had invited me to an auction. His best friend Dave had invited him to go, like he did every year. It was an auction to benefit Dave's son's school, Valley. Valley is a private school, and every year they hold an auction to benefit their scholarship fund. I was a little nervous to go with my dad, because practically no one I knew was going to be there, but I went anyways. It was a ton of fun. There was a silent auction first, and my dad and I walked around placing bids on anything that we wanted. I was dying for this Vera Bradley duffel bag, and I almost won it, but another woman there bid it up out of my price range. Anyways, during the silent auction they served this amazing dinner, and I'm sad to say that I majorly cheated on my diet. They had scalloped potatoes, and once I saw them, I knew it was all over for the night.

After dinner, they ended the silent auction and started the live auction while the volunteers tallied up everyone's totals for the silent auction. The live auction had a random compilation of items, ranging from a half of a pig to a signed picture and script of The Big Bang Theory (signed by the entire cast, and the script was from an episode that hadn't aired yet). My dad ended up winning Red Wings hockey tickets with Dave at the live auction that he was pretty excited about. When we left, we picked up our silent auction winnings and found that he had also won three giftcards to various restaurants, bottles of wing sauce from Buffalo Wild Wings, and Detroit Pistons basketball tickets. I won a coffee mug and a bottle opener, and I was thrilled even though I didn't win my Vera Bradley bag!

I found out after I took my mug home that it also had fifteen dollars worth of gift certificates for my favorite coffee shop! I only spent seven dollars on the mug in the first place.

The whole reason I bid on the mug was because it was from Cafe Rhema, my favorite coffee place. They serve bubble tea, which is totally amazing. My favorite flavor is the watermelon.

This is the bottle opener that I won! I had been needing one for a long time, and this is one that Dave's mother brought back from China, which I thought was pretty cool :)

Here is the actual mug that I won! I see these mugs every time I go to Cafe Rhema and I always want one, now I finally have one! Even though I don't drink that much coffee...

After the auction I went back to my house and watched some Netflix (thanks to my newly installed WiFi), and then Sunday morning came. I wasn't too excited for Sunday, it was laundry day, and I had a lot of laundry. I could, in all honesty, go a solid three to four months washing nothing but my tank tops, socks, and underwear. I have that many clothes. But, my pile of dirty clothes was starting to climb to a ridiculous height, so I decided it was probably time to wash them. So, I drove over to my parents' house. My sister and I had lunch plans with her friend Andrew, so we left for his house as soon as I walked in the door. We went out to Red Robin for lunch, which was fun, even though my little sister and I unknowingly got lemonades that were five dollars apiece with free refills, and once we found this out we both guzzled three of them just to make up for the ridiculously high price.

After lunch we drove home, and I just got to spend the day with my family. I am the oldest of four, and the only one who doesn't live at home anymore. My brother and sister are twins, and they are both sixteen. My youngest sister is eleven. We all just have a lot of fun together. While my laundry was in the wash, me and the twins (Adam and Megan) played Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which was our favorite game to play when we were younger. Adam talked all about how he wanted to get a pet fox, and how he had researched all of the laws about owning a fox in Michigan, he just had to convince mom and dad first. 

After that, Megan made dinner and my dad showed Adam how to tie a tie, which was a show in itself. Sunday was just a normal day when I think about it, but that was what made it so special. In a few years, Adam and Megan will be off at college and I'll be pretty close to done with it altogether, and things will be different. But for now, I like to appreciate the moments when everyone is still young and living at home, before we all go our seperate ways to live our seperate lives. Weekends like this one are the most fun, because they are mixed when new experiences and completely normal days. 

That's my dad trying to show Adam, he couldn't tie Adam's tie, he had to show him how to by doing it on himself :)

I really hope that I can post more very soon! Thanks for reading my ramblings :)

Hayley <3