Taxi...TAXI!

I. Love. This. It makes me stir crazy and all wanderlusty.

A note from my past

Back in August I told you about a website I stumbled onto called Future Me. You write an email to yourself and the site will deliver it on whatever future date you specify. The only rule is that it has to be at least 90 days in the future.

So...way back then...I sent an email to myself as a test. I completely forgot about it in the meantime, and was surprised when my message was delivered last week. Now that I know it's legit...it's game on. I'm going to send all sorts of notes to The Future Me. I absolutely love this idea. The Future Me might get sort of annoyed with The Past Me...but whatever.

Totally addicting waste of time

So over Thanksgiving weekend my dad showed me his virtual cafe and virtual apartment, encouraging me to become his business partner and neighbor. He introduced me to the Facebook apps Cafe World and YoVille (they're like SIMS lite, more or less). Up until two days ago, I was completely unaware such apps existed. I scoffed and ridiculed him for indulging in such low-brow time wasters. Important people have important things to do, I explained, and I couldn't possibly find the time to play these silly games with him.

Well, about that.

That's a screen shot of the living room in my YoVille apartment. Yeah, I know.

And that's a screen shot of my cafe (aptly named: my madeleines). I know, I know!

But dude, seriously. He tricked me into this addiction by letting me remodel his cafe. He had taken all the starter furniture items and done nothing to the cafe, focusing only on the food served leading to the bottom line dollar. Pssh...that's where I come in. I rocked a remodel and his business went through the roof. "Money well spent," he said as I drained his bank account from over $30,000 to $500. You gotta spend money to make money, I always say.

No. I don't actually say that. I'm not even sure I know what that means.

But I do know what it means to design and decorate. Blame it on the Libra genes or some other inherent esthetic, but I've always been good at it. After remodeling my dad's cafe I held out as long as I could (about three hours) before caving, downloading both apps to my Facebook account, and proceeding to establish my own little virtual empire.

I find it kind of annoying that I have to play stupid games and cook food and work and stuff in order to get enough little gold coins to do what I want to do; which is to say shop and decorate. It's also all well and good that I worked ahead with my homework and had time to indulge this weekend...but I don't wanna think about the mess my little virtual world will be in when work hits the fan tomorrow morning. We'll see if I bother to maintain my addiction or decide to detox.

Bloodsport

My family is highly competitive. I, thankfully, got the recessive genes and only care to compete with my perfectionist self. However, for the rest of these yahoos, everything from Jeopardy to making it through the soon-to-change traffic light is a very. serious. competition.

Take for instance the pleasant arts & crafts project my mom whipped up for us today: Decorate a gingerbread house. Seems simple enough, but oh no. It was only a matter of time before we were entrenched on opposite sides of the dining room table, men versus women in a battle to the death, our voices raised as we debated the engineering of the graham cracker roof beams.

Shouting trash talk across the table we hurled, "Your Necco roof is not structurally sound!" "Oh yeah? Well your garden path is so not to scale!" Not a hint of irony. Not a whiff of the absurd. We were dead serious.

Just as we thought we were finished with our task, my mother called two different neighbors over to the house for an independent judging commission. The tiebreaker turned to Facebook. A post to my mom's wall, a post to mine. It was on.

House #2 was the women's creation and I don't need to tell you it's clearly better. It also won the Facebook polls by a landslide. I'm just sayin' ...

Beats doing dishes

My grandparents flew in from California, as they have every Thanksgiving since my family moved to Utah; and we enjoyed the outrageously awesome feast at the Foundry Grill at Sundance Resort. I'm grateful for a family that plays hard, works hard, laughs hard, and loves hard. I'm also grateful that we genuinely enjoy each other's company.