Two of my closest friends have moved.

You think you’d get used to it, you know. People walking in and out of your life. It’s part of life, especially that of a military kid. You move, you meet people, you love people, you leave people, you start over.  It should get easier, shouldn’t it?  The pain of separation should lessen. After all, it happens all the time. We should be used to it, right?

It doesn’t happen. That pain doesn’t lessen at all. But it’s always worth it in the end. Every time. You never regret getting close because the memories you create make the ache worth it all.

Like the time we threw a Secret Santa party and all had to dress up “Christmas-y” for it.

Or the time Cliffy and Chris and I sat in the park listening to music randomly.

Or how Matt and Gabe would take these balls of sand home and stick them in the freezer just so they could carry them back the next day to make them bigger. This lasted about 2 weeks.

Numerous bowling trips.

Many beach days.

Countless memories.

Yeah, they’ve moved across the county and are living in the big apple now. But that doesn’t mean our friendships are over. Each of us still carry these memories, even as we all grow up and continue our lives. We will never forget our good times, or the ways we have impacted one another over the last year.

They say that friends are the family we choose for ourselves.

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
- Helen Keller

Mom had to remove any potentially harmful objects from my reach so I wasn’t tempted to take drastic measures. This included Fruit Rollups.

And not only that, but my wonderful family followed suit, and then my friends (who are always trying to be just like me because I’m obviously awesome) decided they would pick up the sickness too. One right after another. Christian for four days, then Cliffy for three, and now Chris has got it.

Guess what day Chris got it?

Two days ago.

On his birthday.

Happy birthday.

Love,
Karma
XOXO <3

I swear I’ve texted the question “How are you feeling” at least 8 dozen times over the last two weeks. They started looking into restraining orders for texting. Luckily such a thing doesn’t exist so I was able to bother them effectively.

So now, a week and a half later, I’ve yet to have my birthday party. I have no idea when we are actually going to have it. Luckily, I just don’t really care that much.

Plus I managed to go outside on the porch for a few minutes to talk to Clifford on my birthday and we got into a food fight.

Then I made him clean it all up.

So that was pretty much the highlight of the day. Nothing else happened.

Nor has anything happened since. Except the Superbowl. We watched that. That was actually a pretty good game, even though being the Steelers fans that we are, there really was no winning for us. We were happy when the Ravens won though. Can’t have those 50minus1ers tied for SB wins with us.
Course, the power did go out. Everyone was quite confused at that moment.

We were all waiting for Bane to come out and be like “Hello citizens of New Orleans”

Sadly(?) that never happened and 5 minutes later they had fixed the issue and the game resumed.

Really I was just hoping for this.

Also never happened.

Since the both of the boys missed half a week of school, they spent the other half making up for the homework they missed.

Needless to say, we haven’t seen much of them.

Hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

Until then, I have to find other ways to entertain myself. Like watching 5 seasons of Malcolm in the Middle and having  text conversations like the one I had last night with Christian.

Christian: We are done playing.

Me: Ahoy matey.

Christian: Yeah

Me: I turned into a pirate while you were gone.

Christian: Sweet. Did you find any gold?

Me: I wish.
I did get a sweet hat though.

Christian: …Photoshop…

Me: No way. This is legit.

Christian: Arrrrgh

Me: It’s contagious! Are you going to be a pirate with me?

Christian: Heck yes.

Me:

Now we can rule the seven seas.

Then this morning I sent this as school started:

Have a spectacularly awesome and piratey day!

Needless to say, today has been a pretty good day so far.

February:

March:

April:

May:

June:

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:

December:

January First, Two Thousand and-freaking-Thirteen

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I don’t expect you to get it unless you’re really awesome. If you do get it, you win.

Mom’s yelling at me across the house at the moment because of this post’s title. “NO Kait just because it’s not snowing doesn’t mean Florida hates happiness. That means it LOVES people who can’t take the cold. I can’t believe you hate Florida.”

My response?

“JERRY DID IT. DANGIT JERRY!”

I’m sorry. No more Parks and Rec references. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.

So the Herd, as we call ourselves(and by that I mean, I call us the Herd and no one argues because they’re kinda scared of me. It was inspired by Ice Age, ok?) decided a few weeks back to do Secret Santa this year. Mom helped out and was the moderator. We each drew a name out of Chris’s fedora and had two weeks to get a gift for our person.

What did we learn from this experience?

Most of us are really bad a secret keeping.

By the time we exchanged gifts, I knew who Ian, Chris, Christian, Joe, and Gabe had as their people. And several knew who I had.

What else did we learn?

We are really a pretty darn awesome group.

It wasn’t originally going to be a full blown party, but Christin and I decided that we should because that was the only day that we all were going to be around this whole Christmas vacation. Matt and Chris left for the whole break this morning and won’t be back until the day school starts.

After deciding to go ahead and throw a party, the plan was to order pizza. But Christin insisted on making something I could eat, I’m on a gluten-free diet right now(long story) so instead we ran to the store and got stuff to make sloppy Joes.

Best. Gluten free meal. EVER. Sloppy Joes on Fritos was so good…definitely a new favorite of mine. Nom nom nom.

Anyway.

Christin came home for the weekend(yay!), and we decided we were going to make a Minecraft cake that we saw on Pinterest. This cake, to be specific.

Yeah we’re adventurous.

So not only did we have to make the cake, but we decided we would also try making our own fondant. And that is why this cake took about 4 hours to complete.

Here are pictures of the process after we went shopping for all of the stuff.

Before we started.

After melting the marshmallows, we had to mix powdered sugar into them until it was a texture we could handle. Then we had to knead it on a powder sugar covered counter.

Christian joined in and "helped" us. A.k.a played with the dough and got it everywhere.

Yeah this is what Christian did with the fondant we let him use. At least my phone is happy.

Kneading...so much kneading...

Then we added food coloring. Aaaaand lots more kneading.

So after a lot of kneading and trying to get our balls of fondant the right colors, which was just about impossible when it came to brown, we put them in the fridge and went to the beach. It was an absolutely gorgeous day.

Then we came back, got all cleaned up, ate dinner, then got back to the cake, which Christin had baked while we ate dinner and was already cooling. The boys went to play kick ball and man hunt and we got back to cake making.

So we got out the fondant and rolled it out. One of the blobs didn’t really work out that well. We tried adding chocolate to it for the brown one because working with red, green, blue, and yellow food coloring wasn’t working out very well, but I guess the chocolate…messed it up. Or something. Because it turned into weird tasting fudge like…stuff. Christin thought it tasted good, I thought it tasted weird, and Christian thought it tasted like death and spit it out so we ended up just throwing it away.

The light brown, where we only added a little chocolate, turned out okay though so we rolled it out and attempted to cut squares into it. That was an adventure. Christian stood over our shoulders criticizing the whole time. Most of them did not look like squares of fondant, but more like strangely proportioned rectangles of bologna.

After we got all of the fondant square/rectangle things done, we cut the cake and got them into square shapes and started dirty icing them.

Handyman/critic Christian took a lot of pictures for us.

After that, we started applying the fondant.

Nailed it.

Okay so they may not look perfect but all four of our brothers knew what they were and said they were awesome, and so did the other neighborhood kids that came over to try it.

And then it all kinda turned into a party.

And then yesterday evening we all hung out again, doing nothing really. We rode Ripstiks and tossed a football around. Some of the guys played basketball. It was nice.

And then today we played cards. For hours. Christian, Joe, Gabe, and Ian played Minecraft while Christin, Cliffy, and I played Garbage/Golf, later joined by Chris and Matt. When they arrived we started playing Spoons. It was so fun.

No idea what is going through some of these people's minds.

And then after Christin left to go back to college around 2:30, we played four square and messed around with Ripstiks again and after dinner we played basketball, aka took turns making hoops, which I am actually starting to get fairly good at surprisingly enough.

So basically, we had a fun Labor Day weekend. It was nice having Christin back — another girl amidst all these boys I’m surrounded by.

That’s about all that’s been going on. In 9 days I’ll be going up to South Carolina again, as has become tradition, and staying with my aunt for a week and a half. I am really excited to go see all my cousins. It’s sure to be fun!

Now please excuse me while I go watch more Bones. I’m totally not obsessed with this show.

What am I doing right now? I am cleaning my room.
And not just cleaning , but really going through and decluttering and all that jazz.
Gosh, I hate doing this.
Okay, its not that bad. In between I’m playing Words With Friends(and totally kicking BUTT by the way) and, obviously blogging.
Yes JULIE I’m blogging on my gossip blog TWICE in one day.
Don’t be too jealous dear.
Anyway. We’re having a garage sale on Saturday and my parents are totally making me get rid of stuff.
Aren’t they brilliant?
To answer that question, yes. Because a lot of this is useless junk that I really don’t need.
Amid doing all this I found an old, special possession of mine.

Why yes, this is me in a cowboy hat.
My cowboy hat.

I haven’t gotten to wear it in forever because, ya know, there just aren’t many horse ranches here in Florida.

Sad, sad face.

But anyway. I was all like “Ohmegosh its my hat!” And then all these memories of riding horses with my cousin, grandmother, and grandfather and showing my sheep and wandering around the fair with my many friends cousin and everything country that I used to do and immensely enjoyed.
Then I sobbed for a while because those memories are 5 years past.
And then I put my hat on Lucy.

And the world was good again.

UPDATE:
Wow y’all would never believe how much sand is covering my surfaces in here…like I lifted my lamp up to wipe under it and there was like 3 pounds of sand sitting there.

“Surprise! Happy birthday, Kait!”

February:

“Ohmygosh! It’s a girl!”

March:

“No Mom, not that far away.”

“Okay, just do a bunch of funny poses now.”

April:

“Are we at Disney World yet?”
“No Mark.”
“Oh. What about now?”

May:

“Can you believe it? We’re finally graduating.”

“…congratulate this year’s graduating class.”

June:

“Hey boys, I need the floor cleaned.”

July:

“Kids, we have some news: We’re moving onto base.”
“Yay!”

August:

“Kait, that doesn’t look anything like a platypus print. ”
“Yeah…it kinda looks like a chicken. Give it a beak.”
“And legs.”
“Why the heck are it’s legs coming out like that? Now it’s going to have balance issues.”
“Okay. Here are some wings.”
“Skylar. Those are flies wings. And where on earth did the mohawk come from?”
“That wasn’t supposed to be a mohawk.”
“Well it is now.”

September:

“Did you guys see the turtle?”

“Can I sign your cast?”

October:
“Yay! I can’t wait to meet Jack and stay in South Carolina for a week!”

“Ohmegosh ohmegosh ohmegosh NANI!”

“Hey lets be kids and play tic-tac-toe…hey how do you spell that anyway?”
“…What?”

“What are you telling Taylor?”
“Nothing…”
“I thought you said texting was bad.”
“No. You just won’t ever catch me doing it.”
“Umm. Savanah just took a picture.”
“Oh. Darn.”

November:

“Ohmygosh. These peppermint milkshakes are to die for.”

“Alright, it’s time for those braces to come off.”

“The Johnsons for Thanksgiving? A second visit this month? Heck yeah!”

“My stomach is going to explode.”

“Wes, urit.”
“No you’re- darnit! Kait no, urit!”

December:

“Wanna come over and help us build a trebuchet?”

“I’m so excited for our family reunion!”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!