the day that the 17 year olds look forward to...

i recently (as everyone anticipated) made the trip up to visit the grand casino in mille lacs (sp?).

it's not what i expected, although i expected nothing really....i somewhat wished it was like how i saw them in the movies you know with oceans 11, people getting dressed up to roll big and spin the wheel. i didn't even see anyone win "chips". to the contrary most of the people who were there were pretty old and were wearing the clothes they bought at wallmart a few years back when they still weren't in style, i would also say that about 80% of the people there smoked. and yet what caught my eye were the bright colored machines with catchy names and promises of HUGE jackpots.

i thought i would try the first game, a bowling one, little did i know it had almost nothing to do with bowling i just kept hitting buttons, and apparently my parents were more confused than i was. i moved on to another fishing game after a while and noticed it was similar, aka i still didn't get it. then i moved over just a few seats to a game that was at least more interesting to look at. some kind of trailer park theme i made about two or three bets then i must have gone into a bonus round or something, and it began playing for me as i moved to the third and fourth party's, the machine was so loud that i couldn't hear what the lady a few chairs over was saying to me, so i just nodded at her, as the machine continued to congratulate me. by the end of the thing i had won $61.73 and that was the take home prize of the night. after that we just put some dollars in other ones, and i realized you had to look hard to find any machine different from the last. yet the wierdest part of all was that not a single person ever asked for my id, everyone makes such a big deal about it, but it was like going on the honors system. go figure

el mas viejo y el mas joven.....?

well it's four day's until my 18th b-day and im questioning wether i feel any different.

i feel older in this situation: at poncho's im able to start waitress training which is done when your the age of 18 so that you can serve alcohol. this makes me finally feel older. and as wierd as it seems the other night i was just eating my dinner when someone from the bar came in and had a plate full of cake: there was a bachelorette party in the bar: the cake was no ordinary cake, because we often get cake left over from party's or weddings ect. this cake was a little more original....it was shaped like a penis. there's no other way to say it. naturally like adults we were very mature about the whole sitiation, had a good laugh (and lots of inuendo's and jokes), but by my guess if i were 16 i wouldn't be so cool about it. the cake was actually one of the bast we've had!

on the other hand: when i came home from work today (about 3:50pm) i noticed a little car driving around the circle on the other side. i got out of the car and went to get my mom and show her the little car coming around the circle, and now noticed it was playing a high pitched tune.......OMG! it was the littlest blue bunny ice cream truck and it was heading toward me!! i got way more excited than i probably should have, but they didn't even have this when i was little. it was amazing, everything i had imagined and more. the car was no longer than 5 feet and the man inside of it could have been a football player. the ice cream was great and just what i needed, even though it made me feel a more like a little kid. worst part though was that im pretty sure my mom took a picture of me getting my ice cream. sometimes she doesn't know when to quit. oh well. keep your eyes open as well as your ears for this amazing ice cream mobile, cause im pretty sure it made my day! the car is most similar to this one but smaller and says blue bunny on the side. (and a large man with a yellow shirt inside)

The Windy City I've Fallen in Love With

Chicago....i can't really find a word to describe it. It is beautiful, sophisticated, and suprisingly clean. I absolutely love this city. Chicago is known as the city of architecture, and here there are tons and tons of really cool buildings and i had a chance to see most of the top ten buildings in chicago (i saw 9, missing the John Hancock Center which was a little farther north). The Sears tower was right outside of Union Station, where i was dropped off at by the train. That is really big to look at when you are across the street from it. Its huge. I then walked down most of the streets of Chicago taking pictures of the buildings and wierd, old, cultural things like old theaters and operas. In the middle of the divided streets, there is a margin, and instead of just having a cement margain like we have in B*Town, they have these marble planters with lucious plants and flowers. And walking down all of these streets, there wasn't one peice of trash. It was insane. Also, their sidewalks are really wide across. I think that they are like 30-40 feet wide so tons of people can fit down the sidewalk. I then went to the worlds largest bean. Yeah, a bean. And it cost something like a little over $4 million to polish. It was ridiculous. I couldn't believe that so many people flocked to this ridiculous place to see the worlds largest bean. It wasn't even that exciting. Ok, going on the inside of the curve was pretty cool, i'll admit it, and people watching was hilarious. You had a lot of rednecks coming into the city to see the worlds largest bean. I watched some crackpot guy actually lay down at the bottom and just lay there for over 45 minutes. It was wierd, and the polish actually works because you can see your reflection in the bean when you walk up to it, and it was designed to show the Chicago skyline, as you can see in this picture. The bean was in what's called Millenium park, where they have a lot of really neat things, but im only going to tell you about one other thing. They had this place with two brick rectangles that were like 40 feet from eachother. The bricks turned into faces of people that moved. Like, the faces actually blinked and their mouths moved. It was so cool!!! And in between the rectangles, there was water and little things that shot water up. And the brick rectangles would have water leak out of them when they weren't the faces of people. At one point, the rectangles where people, and they moved their mouths into a circular shape and....spit out water. It was awesome. I was completely unprepared for this kind of techonology in the middle of a city park. Then, i went to the Chicago Field Museum, which is huge and i didn't get to go through all of the exhibits, but i did get to see King Tut and his mummified body, walk through and learn about all of the african tribes and their ways of life. I also got to learn about how they mummified people and thought that that was way interesting. We walked through a dinosaur exhibit, but by far, the gem and mineral rooms were my favorite. I saw a 5,980 karot diamond, which let me tell you, it was extremely gorgeous. I wanted to steal it. I also saw a really really cool Mesolite mineral, which i could have stared at for hours. Then, i looked at the clock and almost missed the train. It was bad. I did a five mile sprint across the city of chicago and felt cheated since i didn't get to site see the way back, since i took a different route to get to the field museum. I experience the dryest throat i have ever had in my entire life on the two hour train ride back to Geneva (suburb of Chicago). I think i would have boughten a bottle of water for $200 on the black market i was so thirsty. I would have given my left leg and sold my soul to Lucifer i was seriously that thirsty. But, i got back to Geneva and experience two firsts in my life. I experience my first Jamba Juice, which was good, and then i experience my first Carnie Posada Cuisine, which was very good. It's like this spicy steak in a torilla shell, with cheese, sour cream, guacamole, some wierd salt, bean, corn, pepper, onion, celery mixture. It was very good. I also had a very very enormous Chicago hot dog. Which filled me up, so i could only fit one Carnie Posada in my stomach. I wish i would have skipped the hot dog and had another Carnie Posada. You guys have to try one. MMMMMM. Delicous. Ok. Tomorrow i leave for Pennslyvania, really really early in the morning. I think we are driving like 600 some miles, but i have full faith in MONA to show us the way and lead the blind (us). So, keep it REAL all, and be safe. And please, try not to party to hard without me.

Amen for MONA!!!

Ok. Howdy all. I'm in beautiful Chicago at this very minute staying at some really good friends' house. It is really pretty here and i love the big fancy houses and the expensive cars that everybody drives. They also have really weird town set ups. Like they have this really really old falling down piece of shit barn, right in the middle of this outlet first class mall, expensive nisswa little shop type things, and big buildings surr0unding it. I thought that that was really weird. I will have to say though, that we rented a car to drive to the east coast and back, and with this car, it has come equipped with a GPS system, aka "Mona." Mona is a god sent gift for my family on this road trip. Most of our fights happen because nobody can "read" a map good enough for my father. So, you plug in the address you start at, and the address your trying to get to, and it calculates the quickest route there. It even tells you where to turn, what direction, how far you're going to travel on that road, your next turn, when to get on and off the interstate, and it like talks to you and reminds you things and gives you places to eat and do activities when you approach a town. SO, AMEN FOR MONA!!! I saw jennifer anniston and vince vaughns new establishment and let me tell you, it is in the suburb of Chicago, in a town called Wayne that has a population of 1900. It is gorgeous, and has a white picket fence, a fountain in the front, some statue of lions by the fountain, a circular drive way, horses, and a barn. It is a huge. Oh, and one more thing. I totally saw Mrs. Medin the art teacher, going into Menards ( i believe that was the right store) on our residential tour that went through five parking lots. It was so weird. My sister was looking out the window, and she's like OMG, look kayla, and i look and BOOM! Mrs. Medin. I travel 9 hours out of B*Town, and i still can't get away. It was insane. Ok. That's the update on my trip. I'm taking the one hour train ride into downtown Chicago tomorrow and i'm going to see King Tut, at the museum, and a bunch of other chicago lifestyle type things. So, i'll talk to you guys later! Keep it REAL!!!!

The Lewis And Clark Expedition

Dear Friends~
I restart and finish my summer "world tour" starting thursday night at 4 am. I have already been to MN and TX and everything in between. And tomorrow i will go through MN, WI, and Illinois, where i will stop first in Chicago at our dear good friends the Kerns. And then from there we will go through every state that is from Kentucky and Virginia on up. Every state on up. We are going to spend 2 days in Boston, i wish that we were staying more days there, and 5 days in NY. We are going to go see the broadway play Wicked in NY. I really don't know what else we are doin anywhere else. I haven't been home to really hear the plan. I'm going to go to the New England Six Flags, which will be tight. I hope that i get to go to a real museum with authentic art from people like Da Vinci, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh. There's a place in NY that i would love to see, and i think that it's called Shakespeare's Garden and inside this place are real flowers and plants that Shakespeare had in his plays, sonnets, and poems. No other flower or plant is there, and i think that that would be really neat. We are going to do all the tourist stuff too. Like we are going to Ground Zero, empire state building, and the statue of liberty. F.A.O Schwartz is a must of course, and i almost wish that i had rented Big and watched the part where he plays the piano a few hundred times just so i could do a duet with my mom in the store for everybody's sick pleasure. That would have been sweet. There is also this really cool ship that is in NY that i would love to tour and a really neat aeronautic museum that has like an IMAX theater that is exactly identicle to the stars, planets, and galaxies that you can see when you look up at the sky at night. We are also going to Washington D.C., which i hope that i get a good look at our amazing president and i chance to speak with him and really let him hear a piece of my mind. That would be perfect. We are driving there, as a family, in a car, with five people, in a car, that's my family, for 20 days. We are going to kill eachother i think. But, who knows, maybe this is exactly what we need. I'm going to have fun either way. Even if it is listening to my 5 star music selection on my ipod or listening to Dane Cook (by the way kate, i got sick of waiting for you to burn me the retaliation cd, so i just went out and bought it). So, i will see you all when i return on my trip, which my arrival date back into town is September 4, i believe. So, you guys, try to keep the blog arrive, that sucks that we couldn't fit it into our busy schedules to hang out before i left, try not to party too hard with out me (i'll be jealous), text me so i can keep my sanity and talk to people outside my family, and if i love it out there too much to where i just stay out there, i love you guys. It's been REAL. Just kidding. I'm sure i will be comin home. Hey maybe next year, us four can take a trip together somewhere. That would probably be a better time. Ok, i really have to start packing since i haven't done that yet. So peace out! Hope to see you guys soon!

CLARIFICATION!

Adian kummet is NOT my brother.......debbie kummet is NOT my mother. i think that takes care of most of it.
today at poncho's ashley sliver had a bet with erica hensel that i was (although NOT) adians little sister. she lost of course. we also called valeries photography the other day...megan kummet..."oh is this debbies daughter!" no. in all truth we are pretty distantly related. 3rd cousins really. he is my dad's cousins son! his grandpa and my grandpa were brothers. im not quite sure how they think we're related, maybe it's based on hair color... it sure isn't skills...


if you have ever seen my attempt a sport, i would not have my picture on google like this. even though from time to time i do make similar facial expressions don't try to prove me wrong we are NOT closley related. and tell your friends. :)

when frogs attack..........!!!!!

last night something horrible happened. we were at AO's house, and though we didn't watch saw what happened that night was way scarier. while we were chopping wood for the bonfire we all noticed ash's huge fear of frogs (we had to get all the logs, bc there could be frogs on them). we made fun of her then talked about other things. later (10:45 ish) we had a need for coldstone ice cream and headed over about ten minutes before closing. all went well, until we got in the car.......tori was in the front (her buick) and so was ash, and i was in the back.
here is what happened in pictures..................

ashley calm sitting in the car eating her ice cream, when we notice bridge, robbie and taylor outside the car laughing, we stare at each other as to what's so funny then we see it (right in front of her on the windshield) and so does ash

..............................................some staggered breathing..........................................then.................the rest of us were laughing, but ash continued to scream until someone flicked off the frog from the outside of the car. talk about a close call. just an innocent trip for ice cream and we end up causing ash severe psychological trauma. protet yourselves people the frogs are out there!!

"what's new?"

ahhh yes one of my favorite phrases! well, what IS new....?
wednesday was turtle race day...........what to say. nisswa, the chocolate ox , it was all a blur. i opened at 10 and joe, paige, and savanna, came at 11, but they had to work until close. apparently i'm better at ice cream so i end up working with joe. about 200 kids participate in turtle races plus two parents two grandparents and a couple siblings, all decide..."HEY I WANT ICE CREAM" within the same hour. it was the four of us all day, bc no one else could work (even though bo and blair came in and felt sorry for us). there was also this one couple that spent $5 on ice cream and left me a $5 tip! (i think he thought it was a one) so over all $11 extra isn't bad. then my parents and i went out to eat at kelly's, and after we visited the "spec" house that my dad was working on. took a little tour, and realized this was like MTV cribs. ohh you know nice lake front and vaulted cielings, that would only cost us like 1.3 mill......yeah chunk change (did i mention i made $11!!!). maybe when i become famous for doing nothing 50 years after i die my grandchildren can buy that house... but in the meantime.

today i began with the elks booth, things were a little different than we remember them, but actually better and more familiar. we were makin the $$$, by 1pm we had over $90 in tips! laleen is like the funniest mom i know (jared's mom "he play's percussion!"), just one of those people that you could put in a closet and she would find someone to talk to. oddly enough after the fair amanda j and i both worked at poncho's hostessing NOT waitressing. to add to spending the previous four hours together we ran into many previous band members at poncho's. first brittany stegora who previously checked out the fair (and was not impressed), but could relate to us, then of all band people the folkeringas arrive, we noticed the trend, and as they leave karla and amy esperson arrive! what?! i'll ask amanda tom. who came after them, but if it's paul himself maybe there's some secret conspiracy to check up on us.

well i guess i'll do the same thing all over again tom. maybe throw in a bonfire just to change things up a bit, and don't worry NOT commenting is the latest rage i hear (jk). NO ONE is too "busy" to chek the blog (unless your out of state). there's only so much summer left, don't forget to enjoy it and stay away from the back to school section of the department stores ( it could damage you health it's so overwhelming), although you are allowed to purchase duck tape.