I've never had a blog before...

...unless you count my Xanga. That worked out well for me in middle school. When I was little, I used to always try to keep a journal, but I never did fill up a book before starting a new one with a fresh approach. I've traveled to Nicaragua twice and, most recently, to China, and I kept a fairly diligent travel journal each time...until it got to the point that I would fall asleep from exhaustion while writing and I would be reduced to hurriedly describing my many adventures on plane rides home. Writing is my life, but I'm as focused on it as I am on most other things. My newspaper experience is a testament to my ability and my persistence, but I'm not usually so willing to share personal happenings as I am to write a sarcastic, clever, and/or pleading opinion column. Anyway, I'm turning over a new leaf, what with my entrance to college and all. I'm going for all of the experience that I can get - hence the creation of this, my BLOG. You know, now that I think of it, I'm not sure why I don't have a blog yet - one might think that my dedication to journalism and my travels would have led me to create one by now. ::shrug::

For application and review purposes, I will make my first blog entry about a summer experience. Last night was a unique example of the melding of summertime and the relationship between my best friend, Daniel/Danny/Scott/Daniel Scott (right), and me.

What's that? Couldn't I just pick a name to call him, you ask? That's not so easy: his first and middle given names are Daniel Scott, and for the seven or so years that we have been great friends, he has always been Danny to me. However, upon his graduation a year ago, he felt the need to flee to a college five hours away and become "Scott." Now that he's back home, his new friends and employers call him Scott, his old friends and my parents still call him Danny, I would assume that his parents call him Daniel, as they always have, and I call him whatever tickles my fancy at the moment - when I am with a new friend, so as not to be completely confused by their reference to "Scott," I usually choose "Daniel Scott;" when relating an adventure to someone here, it's "Danny"...you get the idea.

So, he finally admitted to me last night that I just have bad ideas, which I know but tend to ignore, and he knows but goes along with. This is a good lead-in as to why, at midnight yesterday, you could find us 30 minutes from our hometown working on a half-gallon of ice cream with chopsticks (well, I used chopsticks) and fourteen day-old doughnuts.

Since a fun, spontaneous adventure to Marietta, OH last week (left, below), we have planned to go nightswimming at his grandparents' pool before we leave to go to our respective colleges. We deemed yesterday a wonderful time to do so, as I had returned from my brief stint of pretending to be a counselor at my old church camp and he had had to mow at his grandparents' house, anyway. So, I picked him up at his parents' house (I'm still not sure why he didn't just stay at his grandparents') and we headed to Reno (on the way to Marietta) at about a quarter to nine.

We arrived to find his grandparents presumably asleep. Before diving in, we reclined on the patio furniture and, after setting up his iHome, I had him listen to R. E. M.'s "Nightswimming" - epic. Everyone should learn this song at some point in their lives...preferably right now. Anyway, we then dove in to the Garden State soundtrack and...well...we swam. He taught me how to do different strokes (seeing as he's the lifeguard, I figured that he would know) so that I won't look like a TOTAL idiot trying to swim laps at Furman. Then we floated on rafts and talked between bites of potato chips (note to self: never ever try to eat potato chips in the pool again) before deciding that we a.) NEEDED ice cream and b.) could make it to Dairy Queen before it closed at an unknown time.

Thus followed the epic clean-up involving a good bit of hopping, dripping, and tossing. We left the house at 10:51 and made it into the DQ parking lot at 11:00 on the dot only to find that it had already been closed for quite some time. So, we continued on into town, searching for someplace other than Wal*Mart or McDonald's that sold ice cream at such an hour. As we were turning around to go back to Kroger, which looked most promising, we saw an array of lights still turned on in McHappy's. Neither one of us had been before, as we later discovered, but we found that said eatery was a 24-hour bakery proudly serving Broughton's ice cream...and they didn't tell us until we got inside that the ice cream counter was only open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; ipso facto ergo, it was a half-gallon or bust. And as we were arguing over Cherry Nut or Moose Tracks (Moose Tracks eventually won; even though I was for Cherry Nut and I won the coin toss, I was feeling charitable), the only other person present (the cashier) was persistently advertising the two-for-one day-old ("Fresh Yesterday"!) bags of one half-dozen doughnuts on the rack beside us. Even though I don't even like to eat doughnuts, this sounded like a great idea to me. Hence, we ended up with a half-gallon of ice cream and fourteen doughnuts (we found two what I like to call "bonus bags" of seven doughnuts each) at midnight (left).

If you're still wondering why I used chopsticks, that may be explained by the fact that I recently traveled with Furman on their Summer China Experience and have henceforth carried a pair with me in my purse at almost all times.