Every house here in Phoenix, Arizona is a concentrated blend of architecture, from rounded corners to terracotta shingles. This is probably to detract your mind from the ridiculously bright sunshine. If I thought Houston was hot, I was wrong. Houston is humid, but a little less tolerably so. You see, with rainwater comes mosquitos. And those are no fun at all. For the moment, my only battle is keeping my feet from burning in the concrete. Best part is - every house has a pool and Indians don't sunburn easily, foo!

I'm staying with my cousins who are conveniently older than me. They have two kids — Neil (9) and Nivea (4). Neil is authoritative and a sports fanatic. He's outgrown every boy's early fascination with cars to delve into something a little more interesting. With him, I watched the semi-finals and finals of the World Cup for the first time ever. Which is amazing, because I really like soccer. Either way, congrats to Italy, 5-3 on PKs. Moving on...

Nivea has a princess complex and a cute kiddy voice that seems to scream (and she does), "I'M SO CUTE". It's true. Undeniably. In fact, she told her older brother Neil this, "This is a pwincess woom! You can't stay hewe because you'we not a pwincess!" The two of them drive each other to sixes and sevens, and when we're all playing, the whole house is in chaos. Nivea has that astounding talent of turning extreme quiet into warfare. But she does it very cutely.

My first commentary in Phoenix would probably be about the Wal-Mart here. My cousin was buying some margarita mix and stuff for the adults at my VERY FIRST POOL PARTY OMGZ (I turned 16 on the 8th!) and we went through self-checkout. At first, I though the system was flawed because the one person watching over four checkout lanes wasn't paying attention. Additionally, you could likely scan anything and be able to buy it.

I thought wrong. Wal-Mart isn't quite that stupid and the scanner pulled up an age authorization tag, to which the one supervisor over our lanes came to oversee. Good for you, Wal-Mart — combating the greatest trials of our days in the form of underage drinking. /sarcastic.

There's probably a good deal more that I'm not writing about. Once I upload camera pictures, you'll get to see exactly what life is like here. Maybe I'll upload pictures of the heat-ripple effect so prevalent in the southwest.