I, I live among the creatures of the night..I try, and try, and try,, and try to fight

Today is my cousin Alysha's birthday, and so throughout the day I kept thinking of funny memories I have of her through our years together.

While most may consider people from outside their family their "best friends", I am one of those people that consider some of my family my best friends. The people who have known me the longest, who share with me the most memories, and the people that know that most about me and love me anyway.

Alysha is one of these "best friends".

But we weren't always so nice to each other.......well I guess I wasn't always so nice to her.

Alysha was two years younger than me, and yet such an old soul (hahah), and was never happy when I would insist that she hung out with the cousins her own age (daishan and kimmy) and leave us older girls (Cali and me) to play by ourselves.

In fact, I believe, I made my poor, sweet, tender-hearted cousin Alysha cry on almost every occasion we girl cousins got together. But she loved me anyway...and never stopped insisting that she hang out with me.

then Cali left me and went to Peru...

and me and Alysha became really close...and never looked back. When we girl cousins would play "college", It was Alysha and I that shared a "dorm room"...of course it was kind of forced onto us, since daishan insisted she and kim always be roommates with their own "keycard" for their room that you had to have in order to get in....but I digress.

Me and Alysha loved hanging out together. I love my dear cousin Alysha.

My favorite memories of Alysha:

1. Sitting in the Astro Van in her garage, making up our own secret language..and pretty much forgetting it the next day.

2. Helping Emily win a lip sync contest at a singles dance. We were her amazing back-up dancers for Britney Spears' "Lucky", and we were so in sync with our dance moves that people thought we had choreographed it.

3. Playing Barbie's with Alysha who always named her Barbie "Julie". Julie never had a boyfriend, always did her homework, and constantly make sure the other "girls" were being good. "Julie" was a barrel of laughs....hahaha

4. When Alysha finally admitted that a boy was cute....the boy in question...Donnie Wahlberg of NKOTB

5. In a roadtrip back from an Nsync concert in Vegas, Alysha started a discussion in the car with a single question "okay so if you were nsync, like what would you have changed or needed to work on in the performance last night?"....Lindsay, Kim, and I couldn't stop laughing...oh Alysha!

6. Having Alysha come over to Bellevue and attend the stake dances. She was always down for good dance party.

7. Dealing with her "interesting" food interests such as tuna straight from the can, cheese-less pizza, baby food..oh and going out to eat with Alysha who says "nah I'm not hungry", and then nibbling off of your plate...classic Lysh.

8. Her WATER BOTTLE...enough said

9. Trying to read Alysha's handwriting when she worked at the office...often times penmanship lost out to getting everything done very....very...quickly.

10. Making up dances, roadtrips, hours of late night talks, warm loving hugs, words of affirmation-encouragement-and love, and tons of laughter.