Okay so this was like the most bipolar weekend EVER!!!!!!!!!! But I LOVE the way it ended. Before I get to the awesomeness though I have to start at the beginning of the madness.
Ok, so Friday morning: woke up at 7:40am (I was exhausted!) Took my car into the shop with my dad at around 10am, Huong pretended that one of my tires had uneven wear and said he couldn't balance the tires because of that. (But he didn't even test it properly -__-) He just wanted us to buy tires from him. Well haha on you we saw through your ploy and fyi we NEVER buy tires at wal*mart anyway. Left my car there to get various things done.
Then drove home and started cleaning the kitchen and doing some other chores; got ready to go out with friends. Left with my dad to pick up my car, stopped to grab some late lunch at fast food, rushed home, changed clothes, and got in my best friend(Jessica)'s car.
We were on our way to watch her sister play a tennis match for our alma mater. She followed in our footsteps and is team captain right now (her senior year). So we drive all the way out to Chaparral for the match.... and there are NO girls on the courts... so I ask Jessica if she's sure it was at Chaparral or if they came to our school. She says she thought it was at Chaparral and nobody corrected her the whole time, so we call... it's a home match -___-. So we drive all the way back, my other best friend Victor and his whole family was there. It was great to see them again, and our friend Nicky came too. Had a lot of fun, Leah (best friend Jessica's younger sister who was playing tennis) did really well in her last set with her partner Angie (best friend Victor's younger sister).
I went out to dinner that evening, ate some good food, had fun, etc. Then noticed I'd lost my phone -_________________- omg fail. Retraced my steps from the day: checked restaurant, checked car, checked friend's car, checked friend's house, checked tennis courts, checked purse (a MILLION times), checked between couch cushions, under seats, etc.... NO LUCK :[
I was pretty bummed about that, as well as some personal drama that I won't explain here, getting sick, and I was totally stressed about getting the house clean in time for what I thought would be a very strained visit from my grandpa whom I haven't seen in ten years and have only met about 4 times. I didn't think things could get much worse.... I was VERY wrong -___-
Okay, so I'm exhausted from a long non stop day (7:40am-midnight at that point), so I'm thinking about going to bed. Only before I shut off my computer for the evening and everything, I decide, well I'll just check my email really quickly first...
Oh I have an email from the student registry at school, huh wonder what that's about...
n(O.O)n [<-- face, with huge shocked/terror filled eyes (as in: THIS CAN'T BE REAL...), a slightly agape mouth wanting to scream, but lacking the ability due to the shock, and hands clapped to the sides of my face)] .... hope you have a bit better picture now.
Anyway, now for the contents of that email:
Tuition was due by 4:00pm on September the 15th (at this point it's the 17th keep in mind), since you failed to pay all your classes have been dropped, you are no longer enrolled in classes at UCR, we have charged you a $50 late fee, and you may attempt to re-enroll in some classes during the makeup enrollment session.....
OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!!!! This must be a joke!! I paid it didn't I? I mean I had financial aid, I accepted my loans, I filled out the necessary promissory notes, my parents did the same, it's set up for automatic dispersal at the beginning of each quarter.... wth!?!?!?!?
At the bottom of the email it says, if there is a mistake and you have already paid your tuition, call this number immediately. Um okay, only here's the problem: you freakin' morons sent me this email 10 minutes before closing on a FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!!
I called your stupid number to at least leave a voicemail since it was after hours, but OMG you don't even have an answering machine!!!! (In this day and age, REALLY?)
Okay well I'll at least go on growl and try to see what happened.... Growl closes in the evenings -__-
Fine I'll wait till morning.
Saturday morning:
Woken up at 8am (couldn't set an alarm cuz I lost my phone, so my parents wake me up). Go straight to my computer, open it up, log onto Growl(OH! which is our like financial, and permanent records type site thingy btw), but it's not available at the moment!!! (Too many students trying to get on at once, or just a technical difficulty, who knows?)
So I start to clean house some more, scrubbing cabinets, cleaning my room, doing laundry, etc. Meanwhile, I still don't feel well, my phone is still hopelessly lost, and my classes are still GONE!!!! Which is especially tragic because I had been on a wait-list ALL summer for one of my classes and had just now FINALLY made it in last week; now I'm not in ANY classes, and the chances of getting back into the ones I had are VERY slim :/
I'm still stressed about meeting this grandpa that is a stranger to me, and still dealing with personal drama.
My sibs and I then go out to lunch to meet this grandpa of ours, and eat out with: him, his dad (who we do know), and our parents. We went to Chili's and OMG, my grandpa is AWESOME!!!!!!! He's not at all like the vague shadowy memory I had of him from 8 years old! He's not uptight, not anti-social, not intimidating, not looming and serious, none of that stuff!
My grandpa, is an ex navy seal(which we knew), has lived all over the world due to that and the fact that he works in international business, tells amazing stories in a very entertaining way, has a very genuine smile, and loving eyes, a hearty laugh, and a light atmosphere to him. He told us stories about his life growing up, about my dad as a kid, about his ex-wife (my grandmother who recently passed away) and how beautiful and talented she was, and about his dad, (my great grandpa, who was also visiting, but has had a stroke-- possibly several-- and fell off a telephone pole while working years ago, severely injuring himself, and permanently damaging his motorskills and stuff. So he can't talk very well, it's VERY hard to understand him, and he's soft-spoken, AND he's hard of hearing)... so having my grandpa tell stories about my great-grandpa was cool too. My great-grandpa fought in WWII in the Battle of the Bulge, alongside General George S. Patton!!! Can you believe that?
Oh my goodness, my grandpa had endless cool stories to tell! He also bought me a TON of desserts (sneakily. He pretended he had to go out to the car and really just talked to the hostess or whatever and ordered tons of desserts that later showed up on my table as a surprise), because the first desserts I had ordered ended up having nuts in them, so I couldn't eat them. We had a great time. Toward the end he announced that tomorrow(ie. Sunday/today) we were gonna go on an adventure, so we needed to start thinking about what we wanted to do. Some idea starters he threw out were: para-sailing, motorcycle riding, skydiving, hang gliding, paragliding, etc. ANYTHING!!!
WOWIE WOW WOW!!!!!!!
So eventually we decided on an outing everyone would be okay with, and that was feasible...
Later we went to watch my dad play a gig at a church and my grandpa and great-grandpa came too. Afterward we went out to dinner at Applebee's and it was even better than lunch, more stories, more desserts, more awesomeness.
So next day: SUNDAY
We wake up, go to church(which was awesome cuz a group from CBU's choir came as musical guests to lead worship-- they were AWESOME-- Some missionaries were down visiting and showed a cool slide show and talked about AWANAs (which is a kids' program I volunteer in) and that was the whole day at church. There wasn't a real sermon or anything. It was nice), and go buy yummy Ralph's sandwiches for lunch.
We go home, eat them, watch part of the jets, patriots game. (Rooting for the Jets of course now that they have Ladanian Tomlinson and Antonio Chromartie)
& then for our ADVENTURE!!!!!!!!!!!!
We chose: INDOOR SKYDIVING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There's a skydive place in Perris that has an indoor wind tunnel!! So we drive out to Perris, and do it!!
WE FLEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH EM GEE it was the coolest thing EVER!!!!!!!! I can't even explain cuz I'm way too excited!!! (YES STILL!! I am STILL SUPER excited about it. I've been saying every 5 minutes or fewer "I flew!!" (I think I'm starting to annoy my family haha, but it was just so cool).
It's kind of like.... well when you're going for a drive in the car, and you're going pretty fast, and you roll down the window and stick your arm out, and you tilt your hand up and down a little bit and let the wind move your hand... have you ever done that? It pushes it back upright if you tip your hand up, and if you tilt your hand downward it kinda plummets forward and down until you level out again...? & you know that tingly, slightly numb, refreshing feel you get from the wind?
Well it's pretty much JUST like that, only all over! Your whole body, and you fly!
We did flips, and spun around, and flew up super high, and practiced maneuvers down low.
Oh! & the set up: K so you go into a little semicircle hallway after you've geared up, and there's a bench, and two additional doors that lead into the wind tunnel. The polygonal tunnel has windows in each segment from the floor to about 8 feet up. The door that you originally enter the hallway from seals shut, and they start up the fan. When you enter the wind tunnel, you step out onto a cable net that stretches the expanse of the tunnel; the fan is not directly below that though, it's WAY down there, so you're suspended on this thin little net above a crazy powerful fan (yes the net is made of metal cables, but STILL! It's a little daunting at first). & as you fly up past the windows the tunnel widens out and the sides are made of a dark metal. Okay so that's how it's set up.
Then you fly!!! (Before you fly they "train" you; we watched an instructional video, practiced the positions on this padded bench thingy, and learned the hand signals (cuz you can't hear the instructors or much of anything in the wind tunnel--esp cuz you have to wear ear plugs). & you go up for 2 minutes at a time, and keep alternating people for the duration of the total allotted time. Okay well I'm done gushing about it I suppose, but it was AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh and p.s. I NEVER wanted to before (was always petrified), but now I absolutely want to sky dive for real at some point!!! I wanna jump out of a plane and fly all the way back down to Earth, even the little simulation we did was an amazing sensation and now that I've had a taste I want more!!!
I picked up an application to work there as soon as I was done, and I REALLY hope I get a job!!! If I do, the place is between my house and my college, so it's convenient, AND if you work there, you get 10 free minutes of flight time per month (which may not seem like a lot, but trust me IT IS!!!!!!!) Oh my goodness, I'm so excited! I really hope I get hired there! (Plus all of the instructors were pretty darn good looking and young hehe, and they were playful and talking me up (ignoring my sibs and my brother's girlfriend) before the session started. & oh my goodness, one of them was asking about college and my major and stuff, and when they found out I could speak some Chinese they all FLIPPED haha, they made me say some stuff for them lol. It was funny, but made me really nervous, I don't like talking in other languages
until I feel comfortable that I've got my accent right and such. But it wasn't too bad lol.
Okay so for really reals, I'm gonna stop typing for now, I've written WAY too much, and I was too hyper and spastic, so I don't think ANY of it made sense, and it's getting late-ish and I have to try and take care of finding my phone, and the whole financial/enrollment screw up tomorrow morning.
So goodnight folks. Oh and here are a few photos of me from today:
(keep in mind I could not pick the get up lol):
Me flying hehe
Hehe I got pretty high on this one, but I was WAY higher later on
practicing low to the net
In the midst of a front flip
Coming out of the front flip/landing lol
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Grandpa Gerald for paying for us to go on such an EXCELLENT ADVENTURE :D
I love you, and it was great to have gotten to know you better :)
Thanks for flying and driving all the way out here to visit us and for showing us such a good time. I loved every minute of it. I can't express the joy meeting you has brought me and my gratitude for the weekend we enjoyed.
Love you!!!
Chelsea
(Oh! & p.s.... the Chargers won today baby!!! Woo woo!!! Oh and also, Happy Birthday to my friend Tam (pronounced Tom), he turned 25 today :) --well when I say today, I mean the 19th lol. Glad you had such a great day, and that you are out of the hospital and in your home sweet home again.
Nighty night folks :)
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