in the heat of summer sunshine...

we had an intense water balloon/water bottle/golf cart fight today in the south quad.
josh hit me with the golf cart.
i know it's hard to believe.
but it's true.
mick failed to move the trash can out of the way.
fortunately, collisions with trees were miraculously avoided.
ice was applied.
we went to hunan for a pre-prom, (or perm, we're not quite sure) dinner.
mick got to wear the father of the bride's boutonniere.
josh got to wear the minister's.
picture party!!
interesting movie, to say the least.

and the golf cart is still roaming around out there somewhere...



take down those frat boys, fred!



...and nobody needs to know.

another summer day has come and gone away...

my hands smell like guitar. is that possible? alright, what did i do today...............oh WAIT GUYS, did we win????? ohhhhhhhhhhhhh yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, we DID!!! yeah, don't ask why we didn't think of 5-hand sooner. good game y'all, good game. then what? absalom, absalom, i broke my first pick, dinner, phones in old kenyon, sarah and i "lost" mick in OK (hehe, we're soooooo sneaky), we almost crashed into fred on middle path, market for the 3rd time today, the end of ever after, the beginning and end of the prince and me with a lengthy Phone Call in between. oh and mick stole my phone. twice. but he still can't look me in the eyes................now mick, just don't be like those girls and turn to the dark side...........don't do it! alright, i have to go now and find out what position i sleep in.

"[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they wil be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away." 1 Corinthians 13:7-10

piece them all together...

so i'm sick yet again. it sucks. but cleveland was good, ryan and i dominated as i knew we would. poor emily. at least she never got confused about what suit was played ("that's a diamond"...oh it will be funny forever). and i guess we're just good luck in general cause we went to an indians game and they won for the first time in a long time (sorry ATL kids, no offense, the Braves are still better). and now i'm sitting here feeling gross and hoping that eventually my computer will get better and i won't have to reboot it 20 times a day to try to get rid of all the adware and crap. so it's 12:43 and i haven't eaten yet today, so i think i'll venture downstairs for some chicken noodle soup and lots of orange juice. ugh. oh well. mind over matter, right? right. oh my gosh, only a month til school. wow. wow.

but i still love technology...

tonight was hilarious. denny took us out to ruby tuesday's; it was so good to get away from aramark for a meal. at this point i think i'm too tired to tell any good stories, so i'll just list the night's amazing activities: a pink shirt argument which resulted in the set up of me and a certain S-word ("that's why they're the martial artists, dear"), a scarring game of chicken or go (please don't ask), a jam session, klondike bars, and the destroying of the reign of Apple Corps. Go us. Tomorrow I'm off to Cleveland to hang out with the Ruffings. We're planning on playing four hand, and I am all set to dominate. But just remember y'all, I can still swing both ways.

worn out with grooves of wheels and gasoline...

so i learned a Sandra song on my guitar today. and am ridiculously excited about it. it really kind of made my day. i mean, i'm even over the tragic euchre loss. last weekend turned out to be amazing with a surprise visit from Mr. Ruffing, at the very last minute; it was pretty darn good. man, there are far too many books i want to read, besides all the ones i should read again. summer is almost over and i am not doing so hot on my book list. that just means i need to quit spending time doing stupid things like blogging and do important things like reading A Tale of Two Cities again, right guys? It really is a good book...that part with Sidney Carton and Lucy gets me every time. It is Lucy right? Oh I don't know. Alright, I have sufficiently rambled. Off to catch some Zs. sleep tight y'all.

strange how hard it rains now...

ugh. i'm sick of the bad weather. and this weekend is slowly spiraling into not such a great one. i'm kicking myself for not taking the car when i could have. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh well. the moment i complain out loud i realize how petty my complaints really are. especially when i have been blessed with so very much. yes--ohhhhhhhhhhhhh well. life goes on. there is work to do and fun to be had...you will be missed but i got to keep movin. i can't stand to be too down for too long, not when there is so much reason to keep looking up. so i'm plunging into another weekend Incredible Hulk style with the rest of our Fantastic Four.
after the last tear falls there is love...........:)

lost for you, i'm so lost for you...

blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. i'm antsy. tomorrow is the day for chris and jess--well, tomorrow and saturday--and it doesn't seem real; of COURSE it doesn't seem real. and it probably won't, for a while. and selflishly, as usual, i can only think of my own excitement in seeing Bethany and Liam and hopefully, hopefully, *hopefully* Ryan. i'm so ready for a good weekend. for whatever reason i'm just aching for us all to be together again..............and of course, we'll be together again for now, and then it will never be the same after that, not without the Whites. and I hardly feel that I have the right to talk like this when there are so many others who will be missing them on a level so much deeper than my own--my own level that isn't much more than the relatively superficial discomfort of change. so. yeah. dinner time. i'm antsy.

and did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there...

i'm having an incredibly reminiscent night for whatever reason. was telling sarah about good old stach, then started to remember it all...the lit club meeting at julie's...it was christmas time and i was so sick of it all and ready to get away and angry at him...i made the brownies. and W.H. Auden helped me tell him that i would love his crooked self with my crooked heart forever. i guess that's as much as any of us can ever do. i remember julie crying that night; it just never turned out like we planned. and yet...it was so wonderful, looking back. anyway, i somehow made my way to the lovett site and found that they've got this cool photo album thing now, except of course, as lovett is, they charge you something hefty for those pictures and you can't exactly copy them online. anyway, i couldn't keep myself from ordering a couple, the ones of us posing in front of the Headmaster's house at Bacchalaureate, if that's how you spell it. so i was remembering it all...making john drive, or being terrified that shiv was really going to kill us all, and going outside the perimeter and late nights in the hot tub at michelle's. haha this is kind of Random, of course, but i also have been spending a little too much time on facebook recently and discovering mr. flamingo's rather impressive photo album...he really did everything he wanted to. and he does take some darn good pictures. it reminded me how badly i want to go to italy. and, as much as it sucks, that kid will always be absolutely beautiful, even if he is getting sketchier and sketchier. don't even try to deny it. well, i know you won't deny the sketchy part. and i think i will probably still always defend him to the end, no matter what you all say. it just feels wrong otherwise. oh, memories. i remember steen singing something from even stevens or some crazy thing--about a boat, and pirates??--oh i have no clue, while we were sitting in taylor's mom's car waiting to figure out which cheesecake factory to go to and i could hardly breathe because my heart had just been broken for the first time. and it had all been going so well. it's strange, looking back at people who were older than you then but you're older now than they were then...wow, that sounded weird. but you know what i mean. hahahahaha. anyway, they're waiting for me downstairs. should probably let my reminiscing come to an end. miss you all and love you more than i can tell.

i thought, hey i can leave, i can leave oh...

but now i know that i was wrong. oh brother. confusion to the max. wonderful things and then, not so wonderful things. waiting for the click and wondering if maybe it's actually waiting for me. but it's not possible to make a mistake, right? right. whatever is meant to happen, happens. and no matter what, saying that and believing that truly does make me feel better. more confident. and more confident because of the fact that i'm NOT in control. the last thing i want to be is in control, because i'm pretty sure that i'm bound to screw it up. but i also feel that there are necessary measures to take in order to get things out of your own hands and into the Hands they belong in. at least, that is what i'm hoping. all i know is, please don't put me in charge. i'm really not so great at that.

take it to the limit one more time...

Wow. there is so much to remember about the last couple days that i don't know if i can fit it all in. i don't think i actually have any memory of yesterday before bonnie's amazing cheesecake. there are so many hilarious moments that we have, i wish i could just write them all down the moment we have them so i'll remember. anyway, after the cheesecake we piled in the minivan--Fred, Charlotte, Sarah, Mick, Josh, Nhu, and I--and dropped Nhu at the airport before stopping at the famous Hoggy's for dinner. Josh didn't go for the Hoggy's challenge to my disappointment, but he did get the full rack, which was funny enough. Then we drove to Granville for fireworks and carnival rides. Sarah and I accompanied Charlotte on the ferris wheel although really it was more like Charlotte accompanying Sarah and me--she hardly seemed to notice the height but let's just say it was plenty high enough for me as I tried not to pee in my pants. Fortunately we were some of the last people off before it broke down for the night. Probably wouldn't be too happy of a camper if we had gotten stuck up there. Then we went and watched the "boom-booms" which were beautiful. When they were over we went back to the airport to drop Josh off for a nice airport sleepover before heading to a gas station for some Snickers icecream bars and Mick's G.I. Joe BattleJuice. Which, for the record, did not taste all that great. Our last stop before reaching hope was the old insane asylum in Bangs, Ohio...where Fred went to Bible College 20 years ago. So it was a Bible College for a while, after the asylum years. And last night he informed us that it was abandoned and condemned...and it was definitely creepy looking at 1 AM, for all we could see with the car headlights.
This morning we set off checking out dorms that the 450 EYFers had stayed in. My job was letting Charlotte take me around and shutting all the windows. Somewhere around there, when we were in Hanna, Fred and Mick came running out with squirt guns. That's where it all started. Like the good and fair person Fred is, he piled these mysteriously appearing squirt guns in the hall for us to grab. I didn't put mine down for at least an hour, when it started to get more intense. We found a 12-pack of relatively large water bottles in one of the rooms, and someone had the bright idea of using those rather than squirt guns. That's when the real fun began. We were lifting mattresses all over the place and Fred had no idea what he had coming when he said mid-laugh, "Olivia's really just an accesory." I grabbed that water bottle so fast and ran after him. It's all a blur from there. It turned into the girls against the boys pretty quick, and I don't even know what happened when all of a sudden, I mean, seriously out of NOWHERE, I had NOTHING to do with it, Fred put me in a choke-hold and wrestled me to the ground and maintains that it was Mick who poured an entire Nalgene bottle of water on my face. So at this point I'm just laughing hysterically and might as well have jumped into a pool, or so I thought. But I'm not about to let Fred get away with it so I'm still running after him with a bottle of water or two, when he gets the great idea to go into one of the bathrooms, "looking for a towel." Of course I follow, bad-mouthing him all the way, when again, OUT OF NOWHERE, he grabs me and wrestles me into the SHOWER and turns the water on and closes the curtain. Oh man, it was just so funny. Words really just don't do that moment justice. And I was just shocked. I mean, I guess I knew he had it in him but it was just so hilarious. And of course I'm still trying to run after him but my flip-flops are all slippery and soaking wet. Anyway. I don't know what happened after that...I wasn't too in a hurry to give it all up. Anyway, I made sure I had the last word with Mick but he says he has a whole month to get back at me. We'll just see about that. For dinner Mick went to visit Ashley and Fred took Sarah, Mary (her sister who is visiting for the weekend) and I to Peggy Sue's, the famous pie place, where we ate a whole lot of food and solved Fred's crazy mysteries in record time. I think it was somewhere along the drive there that I had the bright idea to go check out the asylum in the daylight, and Fred wasn't about to let that go after dinner was over. So we drove over there, expecting to find the freaky looking building a little easier to see in the daylight...but little did we know exactly what would be visible. So we're driving along the road in front of it when we get there (and here's where the picture comes in, compliments to Sarah), and I'm looking up at it, and I either started screaming at the top of my lungs or yelled, "Isn't that a face in the window??" or both. Oh my gosh I'm still freaked out just thinking about it. Sarah and Mary are in the back and they start screaming too and I keep looking back at it to make sure I'm not imagining it, but it's definitely there, a face with a body, a pretty dead-looking body, right in the window of the house. And Fred is sitting there about to cry, he's laughing so hard. And of course he drives the car right up to the house, parks it and gets out to get a better look. Before we know it he's disappearing back behind the trees and we're honking the horn at him but not daring to get out of the car. He was gone for so long that we eventually called him and after several rings he yells, "Help me!! Help me!!" into the phone, but by that phone Sarah just says, "You jerk, come back here." And he comes sprinting out from the other side of the house, jumps in the car, tears down the road, and I'm thinking, "oh, he's just trying his hardest to freak us out" but, I'll admit, there was a teeny part of me that at that point was still pretty worried. He took us around the back of the house, where a man and a woman were standing with a truck, and said, "This is a haunted house now. This guy's been working on it for a while and is going to open it up later in the summer. Want to check it out?" So after a crazy scramble to find a bathroom, the three of us reluctantly agreed to go in and see what it was all about. And it was definitely scary looking in there. The guy who's working on it, Dave, took us around and told us that when it's up and running, he's got 50 actors in there doing various terrifying things. Check it out at www.thehouseofnightmares.com . No joke. It's scary. So scary that we figured we need to go rent an old, happily-ever-after movie in order to be able to sleep tonight. So now we're gonna go watch Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn, the love of my life. Hopefully I'll make it through the night, and I'm sure tomorrow will include plenty more excitement. Oh, it's all so great. I really love these guys. So much fun. Goodnight everyone.

i'm a bad boy, cause i don't even miss her...

oh but he does. tom petty does. he misses me desparately and just wants to say, why oh why olivia didn't you come to my concert tonight?? but i just have to say, you know what tom, it would've been great, it really would've, but then i would've missed a lot of other great stuff, like getting paid to watch 3 hours of tv, a nice sticky cake fight at dinner, discipleship studies with the gang minus one, a late night pizza run, and of course, the Phone Call. And to polish it all off, an online rant:

MickR2002: did you know Tom Petty started the Cornerstones?
Liverly14: really?????????? oh my gosh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now i feel even MORE special that i'm in it
MickR2002: it's true...he'd tell you himself...
MickR2002: BUT YOU DIDN'T GO!
MickR2002: :-)
Liverly14: MAN
Liverly14: SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT
MickR2002: I KNOW
Liverly14: I MEAN, JEEEEEEEEEEZE
MickR2002: GOOOOOOOOOOOSH
Liverly14: CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP
MickR2002: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Liverly14: UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDGE
MickR2002: CIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICKLE
Liverly14: hahaha that one took me a minute