ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2006, MY HAIR SMELLED REALLY GOOD.

I decided to post these photos from the family reunion we attended back in June. This time it was in east Texas instead of Arkansas, which kind of disappointed me (despite it all, Arkansas is gorgeous) but east Texas isn't bad. I wouldn't want to live there, of course, mainly because of the "culture."

This was the storm we drove through on the way to the reunion. It was really really awesome. My dad had put some of that Rain-X or whatever on his windshield a few days before so he hardly used his wipers.

And right before it started pouring, we passed two nicely dressed guys on motorcycles. Hahaha! Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of them.

I think it's safe to call that the Texan Vortex of Terror (yes, it's different than a tornado). I love Texas thunderstorms!


The lake we went to this year was huge. Growing up in the Texas panhandle meant 1) I didn't see much water and 2) I didn't see many trees. So it's always a treat to visit places like this.






If you look closely there, you can see the guy fishing.

This is the camp site's restaurant and the building where the reunion people rented out a space for all of us to gather in.


I never ate at the restaurant but I liked that it had a concrete boot planter sitting on the porch (and it's bigger than that man!).


The upstairs room of the main restaurant building had really cool furniture but I never saw it first-hand. I think I liked the window/furniture combo. I want windows like that.


While we were bored we'd sit on these steps and either watch the various uninteresting stuff going on or play a game. Some stupid kid sat on the lid to my brand new Scattergories game. That made me mad. But I don't have a picture of that either. Lindsey's hair looks great in this photo.


We spent some time playing this game called In A Pickle.


My cousin, Amy, played with us for a couple of hours one night and got pretty mad whenever she wasn't winning. She's cool to be around and it's really amusing that she and her brother used to make fun of us for living in Amarillo when we clearly ended up with no southern accents, no tendency for yelling in public, and no jokes about how our butts are the size of Texas (I find that slightly endearing of her--at least she's got a good sense of humor, albeit self-depricating).


On the other side of that, this is my cousin Jared. His last name is Wolf, which is really awesome. I've got two cousins named Josh and two named Jared, one on each side of the family. This cousin isn't actually a first cousin, but he's some distant cousin nonetheless. He and his little brother live in east Texas somewhere with their tomboyish, bouffant-haired mother. Most of the people I'm related to seem to come from really cracked-out households (except me, of course!).


Oh yeah, this is my dad.


Jared is pretty cool, though. He has an extremely dry personality and he clearly has spent too much time with these folks. That's his grandmother, Kat. She's one of the nice ones who makes an effort to talk to me and Lindsey.


This is the essence of family reunions: really old people who don't talk to me. A few of them do and are really nice, but most of them don't. And a lot of times that's okay.


This is my great-uncle Jay waiting in the food line. He's Kat's brother. They are the siblings of my now deceased grandmother. Jay is awesome. He lives on a big farm in east Texas and makes his own dulcimers from trees on his property. He's extremely bluegrass-savvy. He also uses the internet and keeps up with new music and stuff going on in the world.


Oh, and he also wears overalls every single day. He wore overalls to both my grandfather and my grandmother's funerals. Nobody has ever succeeded in deterring him from his wardrobe and I'm sure they've all given up trying.

I don't know whose kid this is but she painfully reminded me of me when I was that age (and if I was hoping nobody else noticed her, I was wrong: Lindsey said she reminded her of me, too). Please know right now that her reminding me of me has NOTHING to do with the cowboy hat, the jeans purse, or the soda can coozy. Those are three things I wouldn't be caught dead with even as a 10 year old. But it's her build, skin color, and hair that nails it. Also she stands around a lot.


Every time I go to one of these reunions it rains. At least this time the people in charge had the smarts to book an indoor meeting place.


Those were the windows in the great meeting place. Hey, I'm just sayin'! I'm glad we had an indoor place, come on!


One of the most memorable aspects of this trip was deciding to use my dad's laptop to watch Futurama DVD's. Jared got permission to use his grandparents' hotel room for this since we didn't want to draw a lot of unwanted attention from other reunionites. The room was absolutely FREEZING. Jared said his grandfather, Clayton, can't handle the AC going above about 50 degrees. I was wearing sandals and I wanted to die. Another funny aspect of this story is that Amy, when we told her we were staying in a Holiday Inn in the nearest town, gave me a disapproving look and said, "A hotel room is a hotel room!" Uh huh.

Someone had jammed a golf tee into the spot where the knob was missing on this television set. We didn't ever try to turn it on, but we did hopefully look for jacks where we could hook up the GameCube. Yeah, that was stupid.


It takes a special person to appreciate art like this and hang it over the beds in a hotel room. It takes a different special kind of person to take photos of them for making jokes (are they crossing the border or merely trying to escape this room?).



We noticed this hairbrush on the floor by the doorway in the hotel room and asked Jared about it. He said the hairbrush was there when his grandparents arrived (though I'm pretty sure it belonged to his grandmother) and added, "Would YOU pick it up?" when we looked puzzled as to why it was still there. No way was I touching that thing.


It was probably the combination of hairbrush + really ugly carpet + really ugly linoleum + really ugly wall paneling that made for the ghastly effect.


The next day, Lindsey, Jared, and I took my dad's truck down the one-lane road to find the nearest convenience store (any store close by would be convenient). The place was called Brushy Landing and I hate myself for not brazenly snapping photos of it the entire time we were there. The inside had a variety of objects, from Ban deodorant to cake mix. The shelves were a delightful mish-mash of objects. Would you believe we found Starbucks iced coffee (the canned kind) in that place? We bought one each, and we also got some ice-cream-on-sticks treats. Jared hated the coffee but we were glad to get a break from our makeshift Folger's iced coffee we'd been surviving on at the main hall. Chalk it up to Lindsey and I both having worked at Starbucks for at least two years each.

Fortunately I got ONE shot of Brushy Landing before we got in the car. The gas pumps were just begging to be photographed, and I loved the faded banners hanging above them.


By the time we were waiting for the whole thing to be over, we sat around a lot just observing things and talking in the Coke Hut. It was interesting watching groups of strangers who were camping in a different area. Their kids were really ill-behaved but their old guy's were certainly confident.



We also observed this guy who was swimming in the pool. Okay, more like I observed him. He has one of those appearances that I find attractive because he was really nice, a good dad, and not a douchebag. Maybe it's one of those finding them attractive in a weird feeling-sorry way, like Angelo on that show The Pretender. I like this guy's tanline but...well, he looked better with his shirt on. Give him a break!


While also hanging out at the Coke Hut, one of our reunionites was driving through the parking lot in a car I found really comical looking in the sense that it looked downright sad. Like this car was barely hanging on.

I tried taking a photo of it and to my surprise (horror, maybe?) he backed up and asked me, "Are you taking a photo of my Oklahoma plates?" Yeah, goofball, because I've never seen those before and WOW ARE THEY COOL! Also, Oklahoma people ALSO COOL! I didn't have the heart to tell him I just thought his car was hysterical.

To end things on a pathetic fizzle, I'll show you the wonders of the Coke Hut.

It looked okay until you looked up. Now, I've not really ever been camping so I don't know if it's terribly common for structures to be so filthy. But it wasn't surprising or anything. Just amusing like everything else.