I Know What We're Gonna Do Today!

So many false hopes. So many vain expectations. So many crushed dreams result from this fickle season that occurs each year between May and September.

That's right, I'm talking about summer. Every year when school gets out, I'm all, "Oh my gosh! Summer! Free time! Stuff I can do! Books I can read! Places to go! People to see! Time to sleep and to work and to sleep and to eat and to sleep! I CAN DO ANYTHING!"

*cue theme song* (Because I definitely have a theme song. I just don't know what it is yet.)

And to sweeten the deal, now I'm in college. Which means I have college summer. Which means I have a whole extra month of DOING ANYTHING.

ANYTHING.

Except we're more than a month into summer now and I have done NOTHING. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. I've done some things. But as usual, summer isn't anything like my fantasies built it up to be.

Last summer is on my list of the Top Five Most Productive Summers Awkward Mormon Girl has ever experienced, and I still spent like ten percent or more of it watching Netflix.

I watched Fraggle Rock, arguably the best show ever. I watched Lalaloopsy Land, arguably the worst show ever. Particularly I watched a lot of Phineas and Ferb.

See, Phineas and Ferb is about two brothers who decide to do one amazing thing every day all summer long. Also, they have a platypus. And Ferb has green hair. And a British accent. Basically, this show has everything going for it.

Every time I watch an episode it almost brings me to tears with its wonderfulness. I just come away feeling so inspired. I hear Phineas say, "Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!" and I watch Phineas and Ferb build a rocket ship or give a monkey a shower, and I'm just all, "Yeah, Phineas. Yeah, Ferb. I want to do amazing things with my summer, too!"

And then I'm like, "Or I could just live vicariously through you." And then I watch another sixteen and a half episodes, including the one where they sing about how glad they are that they aren't spending their summer sitting around watching TV.

Phineas and Ferb is tricky like that.

Once again, I entered into summer this year with a determination to not waste it. And once again, I've had a very hard time doing just that thing.

For example, the other day I hit my snooze button twice, but I still managed to get up before seven-thirty. I was productive for several hours Then everything took a nose dive when I ate ice cream and watched Psych until I was brain dead.

I realized that watching so much Psych maybe falls under the category of "wasting summer," so I decided to be productive and make a dessert that requires boiling tin cans of sweetened condensed milk for three hours. And when I say tin cans, I mean tin cans. Like, the sweetened condensed milk is still in the cans. And you peel the labels off the cans and stick them in a pot of water and wait for it to boil. And then everyone in your house walks in and says, "Why are there tin cans in this pot of water on the stove?" And then you're like, "Don't judge me."

It's super weird. Also, not that effective. 'Cause apparently water has problems with getting hot enough to boil with cans of sweetened condensed milk in it. It takes way more than three hours for the water to actually boil for three hours. When it does actually boil, the water bubbles up around the cans like they're geysers or something, and then the cans rattle against the pot. They sound like dry bones. Or like an explosion waiting to happen. Something unpleasant, anyways.

I sat on the kitchen floor, eating more ice cream and listening to the cans rattle and watching Youtube videos by Rhett and Link on my iPod. After five hours of waiting for the water to boil for three hours, I realized I was once again wasting my summer. So I recruited my father to keep an eye on the cans and went running.

"Tomorrow," I said to myself as I ran off all the ice cream. "Tomorrow, I will do everything."

And so the next day I hit the snooze button three times and got up before nine. It took me about an hour to coax Little Sister to watch a movie with me, some two hours to watch the movie, and then like thirty seconds after that for me to revert back to sitting around, watching TV and reading teen romances and eating ice cream. That is all I did before heading to work at five o'clock that night.

Once I'd returned, I was forced to once again conclude that I was wasting summer. I needed to do something productive, and fast.

I was hastily trying to finish the special desserts I'd started the day before when Baby Sister came home in a blaze of summer sunshine and glory.

BABY SISTER: School's out! I'm going to have SO much time on my hands now. Awkward Mormon Girl, we should hang out all the time.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: (perks up) Want to hang out right now?

BABY SISTER: Uh.... no.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: (perks down)

BABY SISTER: But you know what we should totally do one of these days? Go to Disneyland. Like, really soon.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Okay. Let's do it.

And that is the (mostly) true story of how I recently spent an entire week at Disneyland.