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I went to Michigan to visit my friend Jessie. Several days of singing, doodling, and prolific yakking ensued!

Click on the thumbnail or the words to see a large image.

DAY 1: ARRIVAL AND KARAOKE!

ivyonaplane.jpg: I took a plane to Detroit, and here I am close-up! (So close you can see I actually have a yellow-green ring in my otherwise blue eyes if I'm in good enough light!) I flew courtesy of my pal Kari's buddy pass as she was a Delta employee, so this was a free flight!

Now you must suffer through photos of the clouds I took. (I like the sky!)

I also got a couple cool shots of the city from above when we got into the area!

Jessie picked me up at the airport and there was much rejoicing! We went back to her place and . . .

jessiebedroom.jpg: Look, it's Jessie in her room!

ivybedroom.jpg: And guess what, I was in it too!

ivyjessiecouch1.jpg: And . . . together! On the couch in the living room!

ivyjessiecouch2.jpg: That's so cool you get to see it twice.

So we took a nice little walk, stopping for lunch (where I ate a massive amount of macaroni and cheese, with tofu), and then onto the campus in Ann Arbor.

jessielibrary.jpg: And this is Jessie's library. She owns it! Just kidding. But she does work in it!

jessieivybubbletea.jpg: According to Jessie, bubble tea is an important experience to have while visiting her neck of the woods. So I got some. Mine was green tea with green apple flavoring and black bubbles!

And then . . . after we went back to Jessie's and rested a bit, we ventured out to meet her friends for dinner, where I had only french fries because I was totally full still from the macaroni. But next up was . . .

KARAOKE!

Yep, lots of karaoke in our own room. The gizmo even had a place to stick a USB drive, and I had one full of backup music, so we got to sing some songs from Wicked and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and all kinds of unusual stuff. It was a blast! (Though I appear to be making an extraordinarily weird face in that last picture!)

DAY 2: EAST LANSING AND TORNADOES!

One of the wonderful things about Michigan is that our friend Cara also lives there! I've known Cara since she was, like, a preteen, but I've never met her despite the long-lasting Internet friendship. And guess what? That changed on this day!

carafood.jpg: Here is Cara eating her food at the cool Asian fusion restaurant she took us to! It was so cool to be able to finally take pictures in person!

jessiefood.jpg: Jessie's lunch was a MOUNTAIN of vegetable tempura! It was totally huge!

ivyfood.jpg: I had veggie sushi. It was excellent!

3girlsrestaurant1.jpg: This was a picturesque spot to take pictures, so we did.

3girlsrestaurant2.jpg: Slightly different shot of the same.

jessiecarabubbletea.jpg: And then we ended up getting bubble tea again! Here are the gals being cute with an additional mochi ice cream.

batting1.jpg: Puzzling over some very important phrasing. ;)

batting2.jpg: She got some help from Jessie. Hehehe. We have evil plans.

After hanging around chatting for a long time, we had to get back to Jessie's, so we headed out . . . into some very dreary rain. Jessie drove like a pro in the downpour, but it was pretty freaky, and we saw a car that had spun around facing the road--presumably just a result of hydroplaning since there had been no crash. As soon as we got back the tornado sirens started going off and we had a tornado warning! But we didn't get hit, even though there were tornadoes that touched down in the same county. . . . Besides that, we did get time to see an episode of The West Wing, which is Jessie's favorite show!

DAY 3: DRAWING AND HOCKEY!

jessieivymarkers1.jpg: Jessie and I both like to write and draw, so we spent quite a lot of the day drawing our characters!

jessieivymarkers2.jpg: She doodled some of her newer characters and I was working on a poster of Negative One characters.

jessieivymarkers3.jpg: Here's one of our cheesy "look, we're drawing!" shots.

jessieivymarkers4.jpg: It's so great to have someone to draw with! We doodled pretty much all day.

jessieivymarkers5.jpg: A different angle; this time with Jessie's camera.

jessieivymarkers6.jpg: Don't we make you wish you had a drawing buddy?

manymarkers.jpg: Pretty impressive collection, eh? (Only a few are mine, though; I mostly left my collection at home.)

We watched another West Wing episode and I showed her some of one of my favorite animes, Eyeshield 21; then later we went back to drawing while a hockey game was on and her friend Eric came over to watch with us. We even had ice cream!

DAY 4: SINGING AND PIZZA!

We practiced singing some duets with my backing tracks, but couldn't record them because Jessie's computer wasn't cooperating, so we decided to spend the day doodling and watching fun programs before trying to record at her parents' house!

jessieivypretzels.jpg: We ate yummy soft pretzels while watching Eyeshield 21.

oohyoufoundit.jpg: I lost my camera at one point, but when I found it, I snapped this picture of Jessie to inform her that I'd found it. ;)

toothfairy.jpg: Jessie drew this picture the night before and I was laughing my head off about it; this is a depiction of my character Delia from Bad Fairy, but if she were pushed into having to work as a tooth fairy because of a bad economy. BWAHAHA!

We drove to Jessie's parents' house and I got to see her little city, and I got to meet her mom and dad! They let us have pizza and cool almond tea cookies. I ate three pieces! And then, after some technical difficulties, we got to record our duets. . . .

letssingwicked1t.jpg: Here we are with the Wicked songbook!

letssingwicked2t.jpg: We performed "Defying Gravity" from Wicked, and also "My Eyes" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. (You can totally hear us sing by clicking those links! She was Dr. Horrible and Elphaba; I was Penny and Glinda.)

ivypushupt.jpg: We got back pretty late, but I wanted ice cream!

jessiepiet.jpg: And Jessie had hot apple pie that her roommate had made.

DAY 5: HOME AGAIN!

byeivyt.jpg: There's only one picture for this day because I left in the morning, but this is us at the airport saying our goodbyes. We're both wearing our star jackets, as appropriate!

AND THAT'S IT! BACK TO TAMPA! LOTS OF GREAT MEMORIES, LOTS OF FUN HAD. THE END!

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