Ugly Juice Spends Spontaneous Saturday with Momma and Sisters

It was a fun day. While I was garage saling, I got a call from my mom and sisters--they were going to be in Minneapolis for the day. They live three hours away, and were driving through the Twin Cities on the way to Chicago and Lansing, Michigan to look at colleges for my super-genius sister Sarah (University of Chicago and Michigan State). Sarah really is a renaissance child, she got all the smart and creative genes in the family. She's going to be a Senior in high school this year. She's a super creative artist genius, awesome musician (piano and guitar), class valedictorian, star volleyball player, just aced her ACTs, etc. The endless outpouring of talent is truly vomit-inducing. Anyhoo, since her ACT results came back, she's been getting letters from all these fancy schools. It will be fun to see where she ends up.

So I spent the day with my momma, Sarah, Greta, and Mary. We went to the Spot On comics show at the center for book arts. Shad was presenting on a panel when we arrived, and BTA had a table there, so we just stuck around for awhile to check out the show and say hi to him. Then we went to IKEA. I bagged two swell end tables from the scratch n' dent section for $10 each. One has no problems on it that I can see, the other I plan to mosaic on. I also got some matchstick blinds for the bedroom and mirrors with wide frames to mosaic on ($2 apiece!).

We went to downtown St. Paul and did some people-watching at Rice Park. They're celebrating Sommerfest, and there was a ball at Landmark Center. Lots of the ball attendees were dressed in period costume. There was a band playing in the park, too. At 7 p.m., we went to "Kilimanjaro" at the IMAX theater in the Science Museum. And now I want to go to Africa and climb that mountain/volcano. That is a beautiful movie, I recommend seeing it.

The movie reminded me of what was pretty much my only mountain-climbing experience, which, it would be an understatement to say, pales in comparison. When I was going to school in London in 1998, some friends and I took a bus up to the Isle of Skye for a week or so. It was so beautiful. We hitchhiked to the southern end of the isle, where there was a little hostel next to the Cullins. We called them the Cullin Mountains, but I think they are actually hills (or, at the risk of sounding too technical, I think they were actually monroes.) Anyhoo, we thought we were pretty bad-ass, and we were going to climb these mountains. We duct-taped our ankles and packed a whole bunch of food and water. After about half a day of climbing, we thought we were super high up, because we were surrounded in fog (okay, duh. It's SCOTLAND. Of course we were surrounded in fog.) We had reached a sharp rocky incline, it jutted straight up, and there was nothing we could do without equipment. Also, we couldn't see how far up it went because of the fog, so we were sure we were just, you know, 20 feet or so below the summit of this huge mountain. We took tons of pictures. We were pretty sure we were the only people ever to conquer this rocky peak. We ate celebratory Snickers bars, etc. Finally, we started to make our way back down. After we had walked for an hour or two, we looked back. By this time, we were almost back to the hostel. When we looked back and saw the spot where we had taken all the pictures, it turned out to be not even one-tenth of the way up! We were so pathetic! We nearly died laughing. We went back and changed, then hitchhiked to the northern end of the island (Portree) and spent the rest of the day at a pub. Drinking, now THAT was something we could do, and we did it well.