Death

It's been a long time since I have written anything and I don't really have anything to write about except all of the famous people who have been dying recently. It's kind of scary really. My father is 48 now and Michael was 50. I don't know how old Billy Mays was but he can't be over 50 and if he is it can't be by very much. Farrah was an inevitable death, being that she had cancer. Ed McMahon was old at least. Hearing about all of these people dying makes me wonder if anybody in my family is in danger. My dad was overweight his whole life until the past half year or so and it's really great that he's healthy now but I have to believe that those 47 years of being overweight brought his life expectancy down. My grandpa is going to be 70 years old in August and he is still healthy and everything but a lot of people die before they are seventy. My aunt is only like 52 but she has numerous health problems, most pressing is her diabetes, especially since she really isn't doing much to help it. Sure she eats healthier than she used to but she still eats a lot of junk food that she shouldn't eat with or without diabetes. My grandma is turning 68 or 67 or something like that at the end of September and she has been overweight since I can remember so who knows what's going on with that. It was just scary to hear of all of these somewhat young celebrity deaths. Makes me wonder about a lot of people in my family.

Phone

So I got a new phone yesterday. My mom's phone broke so we went to the Sprint store to see what she could do about it and she ended up getting a new phone. Also, my sister and brother got new phones. I am still under contract with AT&T until next month so canceling with them would result in a $200 early termination fee and we didn't really want to bother with that. We had been planning on switching me over to Sprint to join the family plan anyways when my contract was up but now we had a dilemma. Then my mom says, "Why don't you just get the phone with Sprint now and just keep your AT&T phone for the next month then cancel it?" Sounded like a plan to me so I started shopping phones. I really wanted the brand new Palm Pre but it is over $200 and you have to have a data plan with it and it would make the whole bill much much larger so I put the kibosh on that. We already have the unlimited messaging plan for our family and adding that data would be a lot more. So then I looked at the Instinct s30...but that also means you need a data plan, along with any Blackberry. I settled on the Samsung Rant as my new phone. It has a full keyboard, which was my main concern, but it doesn't have any other features that the others had. Now that I think about it though I realize that I don't really need any of those...if I really want to use a touch screen or get on the internet on my phone I will just use my iPod Touch. So far the phones great, and having unlimited texting is fabulous. Using the keyboard to text is so much easier than using a regular keypad. The only bad thing about getting the new phone was having to get a new phone number because my old one is still in use with AT&T. Parting from my extremely easy to remember number, 760-4888, and switching to a new one seemed like a nightmare to me but the new one isn't too bad, 352-3139. Hey, at least for the next month I will have two phones, maybe it will make me look super cool or something...or maybe just a dork.

Reading

Last night I finished John Grogran's "The Longest Trip Home", the second book of his that I have read, "Marley & Me" being the first. I wasn' planning on it but I stayed up until about 1:30 because I couldn't stop reading. I think I ended up reading about 100 pages last night in bed and, surprisingly, I enjoyed it. I used to hate reading, used to loath having to do it for school; now, I actually enjoy reading and have a short list of books that I would like to read over the summer. First on the list is "Tuesday's With Morrie" by Mitch Albom, after that I'm not sure. Getting back to Grogan...I really enjoy reading his books. He blends humor with seriousness like he has been doing it forever. One minute he has you feeling good about something he wrote and the next you are about to cry because something bad happens. Reading a memoir obviously makes me relate a little as I think every memoir does but having it set in Michigan made it more special to me. Once I got to the thrid of three sections in the book I couldn't stop (all last night). It was all about how his parents' health was declining and how he went home and all that happy stuff. I don't know why I'm saying so much about the actual book but I think that everybody should read it as well as "Marley & Me". I think everybody should just read more books in general. There is something special, something homey, something gentle, heart-warming, peaceful, and most of all something calming about reading a book. Sure, watching TV is great, but reading a book is kind of like writing a hand-written letter instead of a printed one, it captures that sense of personal touch that the other just can not, and who doesn't like personal touches?