Dana Burland

Happy birthday dear roommate of mine! As a pre-present, please enjoy this throwback picture of us as slightly sweaty freshmen who were oblivious as to what the next 4 years would hold.

I would hate the hundreds of people who get my posts via email to miss out on the new header I spent far too long creating. Yeah, I realize that's a whole lot of me, but look! I'm doing funny things and wearing funny hats! Also it's my blog so I can cry post trillions of pictures if I want to. I have not forgotten to update on R's wedding from two weeks ago. I need a little more free time ( more than what it took to cut yourself out of all those photos, Dana? Why yes. More than that. ) to decide on posting format for that bad boy. In other news, I saw my first Michigan license plate (besides my own, duh) this past weekend. I miss home.

Guess what's coming in August? Thelma & Louise's great semi-east coast road trip 09. More details to come.

Considering my day trip, it was quite ironic that this was popped into my head while in the shower this morning. Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air Theme Song No, I didn't go to Bel Air, but I did hang out with the fresh prince of Philadelphia! I was able to scoot out of my internship early today to catch Dave within the last few days of his summer in Philly. I could have had to crabwalk the 25 miles in the middle of the night for 15 minutes of Dave time and I still would have done it. I've been itching to get to Philadelphia and dying to see someone who knows who Louie the Laker is. I'm so glad that we both found time to meet up while in the same state!

Not feeling so hot today. Couldn't have been better timing for these to arrive: My best friend is clearly superior than your best friend. More to come later.

First off—if you weren’t home for a week (due a total of 43 colorful hours of travel time for 31 hours of absolute wedding/up north awesomeness) and came back to see the place you live in look like this, would you be concerned? I’m back to my newly decrepit apartment after what feels like just blowing through half the state of Michigan. My life has been such meshugas since last week — I haven’t been able to update on all the happenings! The weekend clearly deserves it’s own post, but here’s a brief recap on last week’s sitchus leading up to my trip to Petoskey: My new job I work part-time out here in an attempt to keep food in my fridge and to pay for all of my East Coast desires like driving around looking for Amish people and babysitting my inner 8-year-old at a day of arts and crafts . I’ve been coaching, but the season is almost up and gosh if I’m ever going to go to the Jersey shore to partake in a day of drunken beachery and nighttime drug induced raving, I better find a...

I was invited to have lunch with the chairman of the company I'm interning for tomorrow. What do I wear and how should I do my hair?

As promised, here is a video of my city! Sorry about the noise/wind, I'm not really saying anything all that important; oh but I do mess up the name of the school I'm living near by. It's Lehigh University not Lehigh Valley. I guess I'm just missing GVSU, ha. Also excuse the awkward face I make at the beginning of the video. Yeah, no good excuse on that one.

Once I landed here and realized the Lehigh Valley had it's own signature hot dog place, I realized this side of the world might have some potential. See, a good hot dog place is like a staple in my life. A necessity. Not that I crave the mystery cased meat all that often, but I grew up hugged in the tasty arms of Coney Islands ; one at almost every major mile road. I might not have made my college decision based on hot dog restaurants, but I might as well have. When introduced to Yesterdog in the greater Grand Rapids area, I fell in love with the steamed dogs, weighed down with ladles of gooey chili and topped with a perfect layer of thinly shreaded cheddar cheese. An outing to Yesterdog was always something to look forward to all week.

It only took me three weeks to get in the newspaper out here. Impressive, no? A reporter and photographer from the local paper came to do a story on our team's first win in five years . Thus, the lovely left half of my body graced the seventh page of the first section this morning. Despite being hounded for autographs due to this recent fame, little else is new here. My very small fortune from coaching is undergoing much scrutiny to determine how it will be stretched to cover all my 'must do' activities out here. More to come on that front later, I hope. Today was video day at work, a.k.a my favorite day in the work week. I got a sneak peak at some footage we shot last week and helped out in the organizing, producing and acting in another video. I did a couple one handed cartwheels and oh! had my Michigan accent recognized for the first time when I said 'rock', haha. Anyway, there are definitely a few videos I'm looking forward to see on the site . I...