Hippo Hardware: Check.

Blazers Game: Check.

Bad family photo: Double check.

This has gone well.

Tom is coming!

That’s right – my dad is coming to visit this weekend. And I am no small amount of stoked.

Top Five Things I Want to do with my Dad this Weekend:

1. Go to Hippo Hardware. It is the Tom in me that appreciates that place.
2. Go to the Japanese Gardens. I’ve never been there except one time when my dad came to visit me in college and we tried to get in 15 minutes before closing time. When they said no, we tried to climb up on a park bench to see over the walls. I think this time we might buy tickets.
3. Go to a brew pub… Can’t decide… Hopworks? Rogue? Ack!
4. Go to the ReBuilding Center. He may find something he didn’t even know he needed (highly likely).
5. Catch up, have fun and laugh. You know… the usual.

Any other suggestions? These probably all won’t happen, but they seem like good ideas!

This video reminds me so much of Out to Lunch in Caras Park in Missoula, it’s not even funny.

(Alternate titles for this post include, “It’s a Long Story” and “I am SO Big Time.”)

I think most people who start blogs have blog-idols. I started my blog because I wanted to be more like the following people:
1. Holly
2. Blythe
3. Abby

Abby and I went to college together and I consider her one of my closest friends. She was the first friend I had that started a blog and I am continually impressed by her writing and insight.

Blythe is actually the woman who let me in to college, which is why I often say that she is responsible for every good thing that happened to me after the age of 18. She also recently moved back to Portland, and I’m proud to say she allows me to occasionally play with her son Theo, the Cutest Toddler Ever. Blythe’s blog is always interesting not just because she’s funny and smart, but because she writes about everything from having a baby in Germany to her memories of growing up in a small town in Montana to what she thought of Natalie Portman’s dress at the Oscars.

Holly is the only one I don’t actually “know” in the traditional sense of the word. She and I don’t actually have much in common, other than we’re both brunettes with blogs who enjoy shopping and board games. She grew up in multiple foreign countries and now lives in an amazingly well-decorated apartment in San Francisco. I grew up in one place (Like one of my favorite T-shirts says, “Missoula, Montana. A place. Sort of.”) and now reside in an apartment where all decorative pieces belong to my roommate except the random paintings I did and the license plates I turned into a coat rack. Holly has a fiance she has been in love with and lived with for years. I’m rockin’ the single life and living with a gay man.

She’s hilarious, though, and I love her stories. Last year, I read about Holly’s attendance at a conference called BlogHer and thought it sounded like a blast. Lots of female bloggers interested in similar things getting together and talking. Great, right? So I looked into this whole BlogHer thing and thought it sounded interesting. I decided I might want to attend the conference someday to see what fascinating things I could learn.

Jump to December, when I was home for the holidays and my mom told me she had talked to her mentor about me. She said she was talking to him about ways to connect with other people who do what she does (of which there are none in Montana). He recommended she start a blog.

So she told him about her daughter who had a blog. And he told her about his daughter who started a company for women who blog.

When she came home, she told me about her meeting and said his daughter was one of the founders of BlogHer. Had I ever heard of it?

It was as if she just told me her mentor was Justin Timberlake’s father.

I couldn’t believe I was separated from one of the founders of BlogHer by only 3 degrees. I immediately got online and decided I would like to support the BlogHer community in any way I could, considering I now felt connected to them in a different way (i.e. we were both somehow related to Montana). I signed up for a bunch of stuff on their website. One of those things was their advertising package. They had a waiting list, so I didn’t anticipate hearing from them anytime soon.

However, I did. And it turns out in order to host their advertisements I had to host my own web page. So you can now find me at megolomaniac.com OR continue to use the old address and it will redirect here. You might also start noticing ads on the right-hand side. Think of them as a way to support my illegal-parking habits.

When I switched my blog over, I had to redesign the site, too. (Sort of a bummer, but I’m getting over it). I don’t know if this is what it will look like forever, so don’t freak out if the scenery changes in a month or two when I have more time and patience to figure out what the hell CSS code is. In the meantime, enjoy the flowers.

Any and all feedback is always appreciated!

My cousin Kevin was on MSNBC. Like, the national TV channel.

He’s kind of a big deal.

I had the most amazing experience yesterday at a hardware store. I know how that sounds, but I’m not joking.

It all started a few weeks ago when I got my new Oregon license plates. I decided I really wanted to do something fun with my old plates. I have always thought license plates were pretty cool – I’ve kept my old ones whenever I’ve had to update and I even bought an awesome French plate when I was studying abroad. (I found a store in Cannes that would print them for you!)

So I decided to hang my license plate collection on my wall and attach hooks to some of them. I needed to buy some hooks, so I went online looking for the closest hardware store. I came across Hippo Hardware, which is locally owned, so I decided to check it out.

This place was unlike any hardware store I’d ever been in. First of all, the building covers approximately 30,000 square feet and is divided into 3 floors and one large entry room. The entry room is chock-full of every kind of hardware piece you can imagine, from hooks and pulls to doorknobs and mail slots. The various items are stocked in drawers (some labeled, some just waiting to surprise you), cabinets, shelves, and wall mounts. Just walking in the door is a completely overwhelming experience. They have new, used, broken, rusted, and handmade styles of… everything.

The other three floors are divided into plumbing, lighting, and architecture. However, these labels only loosely describe what you can find there. For instance, the plumbing floor may include bathtubs, sinks, and toilets, but it also features incredible antique fixtures for bidets, for instance, and an old school drinking fountain. The lighting floor was pretty amazing, but I definitely spent most of my time in the basement looking at doors, windows, ladders, and awesome decorative heating grates. The entire establishment sort of makes you feel like everyone’s grandparents emptied the contents of their attics (and various pieces of their houses) into the same building and then hundreds of people spent years organizing all of it. I mean, they even had a lime green toilet. And if my grandma didn’t own that, it’s only because she didn’t know it existed.

I walked around the place with my mouth agape for almost an hour, until they pretty much kicked me out (20 minutes after closing time) and it never even occurred to me to take photos. There are already lots on flickr, but I’m planning another trip back there next weekend to take a few of my own.

I do want to note, however, that the staff was incredibly friendly and quite funny. They not only let me roam around long after closing time, but they were very helpful and continued to joke with each other all afternoon over their paging system. I’ve never seen a group of people have so much fun working together and providing customer service. They seemed downright excited to hear about every customer’s project and the crazy things we had all dreamed up before coming into the store.

It’s hard to believe I left with only the hooks that I needed and not a ladder or window pane for my next craft project (although I’m already planning what I’m going to do with those items). Unfortunately, I was rather limited in my selection of hooks due to the placement of the holes in my license plates, but I’m very happy with the final product.

Hippo Hardware, thank you for helping me honor my Montana roots while supporting a local Portland (AWESOME) business.

I moved to Oregon today. It only took me 3.5 years of living and working here to finally commit. And that doesn’t even include my four years as a student or the various rivers I had to ford and friends I had to bury in roadside graves along the way.

It’s true. I now have an Oregon driver’s license, Oregon license plates, and a DEQ story (an Oregon must). I can no longer get away with bad highway merging on account of my out-of-state plates or flash my driver’s license to get out of paying Washington sales tax. Wait, I guess that one’s still good.

I feel a little less like Mego now, but maybe this is just what all commitment-phobes have to go through… It doesn’t have to be for forever, right? Montana may still take me back someday?

Instead of listing the things for which I’m thankful this year, I’ve decided to show them to you. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I don’t think I’ve talked enough about my cousins on this blog.

My cousins mean the world to me. They are like the extra siblings that my parents just couldn’t handle (and I’m sure my aunts and uncles could never have handled my brother and me). I really do think of them as extended siblings, and I look up to them in many ways.

I only have cousins on my dad’s side. There are 14 of us, currently, and some are beginning to have children of their own. I am the 7th, and I’ve always liked being right in the middle. I’ve learned from my older cousins – I look to them for guidance and examples. I learn what it’s like to grow up and to make big decisions before I actually have to do these things. Through Molly, Patrick, Katie, Brian, Kevin and Kristin, I have learned how to choose a college, the importance of traveling abroad, what to look for in a life partner, the value of never really growing up, how to be responsible and live on your own while staying close to your parents, and most importantly, the significance of family in my life. Whether they knew it or not, they’ve been role models for me since the day I was born. Or at least since the day I learned who they were.

But my younger cousins have taught me many different things. Emily, who I can barely count as younger than I am, has always been my partner in crime. I’ve always looked up to her for her fashion sense, her intelligence, her drive, and her ability to find and appreciate the beauty in life. Connor, Sean, Kathleen, Maggie, and Kellen never cease to amaze me. They are some of the most caring, understanding, and funny people I know. They remind me that fun should never be compromised, and that being honest and being who you are is beautiful.

I would do just about anything for my cousins. Today, I wish I could do the impossible for one of them in particular. But I am thankful for them, my extended sibling family, and I hope they know how much they mean to me. From the side yard at Grandma and Grandpa’s house to the top of the Bear’s Hump at Waterton, from Kodaikanal to Baltimore, from Spokane to Bozeman, we’re all one big loving family.

A man named Noah passed away today in Missoula, Montana. He and I had gone to school together for years, but had never been particularly close. He was an amazing guy, from what I knew of him, and was one of the upperclassmen that always went out of his way in high school to say hi to the younger kids by name. Stuff like that was always a huge deal to me.

One of the incredible things about small towns is the strength of the community. I heard about Noah’s death from 3 different people all over the country this morning in a matter of hours. This is testament to how many lives he touched and what an integral part of the community he was.

It’s pretty incredible to google his name and see how many videos, articles, and blog postings come up (about him, too. Not some celebrity with the same name). There will be another article in the city paper tomorrow about what an amazing person he was, but today I read this one from last month. And here is my favorite part:

He taught us that, if by being true to ourselves, we wind up looking silly, so be it.

He taught us that the best possible target for poking fun is ourselves.

He taught us, Liston said, the value of human warmth, of friendship, of devotion, of humility. He also taught us that sometimes a bit of inappropriateness makes a point perfectly.

“What he really taught was that it’s OK to be ourselves,” Liston said.

At the end of Noah’s graduation of one, the speaker closed with one of the nicest things anyone may have ever said; “May you experience more love than you thought possible.”