URG URG URG URG.
Why is this so hard?! I want to keep updated with this blog but time is escaping me. Or rather, it's running away like "haha *or other evil laugh*! You can't catch me!" Sigh. Yes, I seemed to vanish after November 17th... but I really want to change that. Maybe a lengthy, detailed, hopefully fun-filled post can fix that/be my peace offering to y'all. So I guess uh... Make yourselves comfortable and settle in as you read this what-I-plan-on-being-a-kind-of-long post. Just so, you know, I can catch you guys up. And perhaps regain some of my sanity (;
Since I cannot seem to recall all that happened November 27th, I feel like I'll start there.
OH WAIT! November 18th was my dad's birthday... He's (I'm not quite sure how many years old and I feel like he's perfectly okay with that!). So we made him a special dinner and got him presents and whatnot (: It was a fun day. Also, I LOVE YOU DADDY (: You're the bestest most wonderful dad evar-- you're always there for me, whether I need a:
a) knight in shining armour. Dads are always brave, right? No matter what comes along, they're the stand-still-stand-strong rock, unwavering in whatever storm is approaching/happening. When it seems like everything is falling apart, he's got the super-hero "Never fear, Dad is here!" schtick down. Even when he's probably scared out of his mind... That takes a lot.
b) medic (I've always been squeamish with blood and band-aids and cuts and gashes and the like)
c) body guard (yeah, I guess J better watch out, seeing as you probably have a shotgun in your lap most of the time when I'm around him... if not in real life, then inside your mind... but that's okay, I know you're just looking out for me (;
d) computer technician. (Yes. Thank you so much for having a really techy-into-computers-and-other-various-technology-things personality! I'm purty sure you could make anyone's unresponsive, wrecked up, black/blue screened computer come to life again.
e) bear hug. (Indeed. This guy is the BEST when it comes to bear hugs. Just the right amount of bear, just the right amount of hug. It's an instant picker-upper whenever feeling down or blue or you simply just need a hug.)
So yes. In short, he's the best. <3 And I love him. So much. (:
Annnnnnnnnnnnd now we get to the point where I can't remember anything. So I guess I'll start from where I do remember, and that's
Wednesday, November 27th.
I slept in. It was good. We had intended to leave for my grandparents (we'd be staying with them for Thanksgiving festivities) earlyish in the morning. However, that didn't really happen. Instead, I slept in (like I said) took a while getting ready, and then got an electrician lesson. So we have had kind of a sort of hole in our ceiling for a while now, because the light fixture we previously had was in need of replacement. Why you may ask? Well, a pipe above the kitchen had burst a while ago, and the water purty much kinda destroyed the drywall of the ceiling and ruined the light fixture.So, one weekend, as a sort of DIY project my dad took on, he took out the fixture and got some guys to help fix the piping and ceiling. Well that was splendid, only we hadn't really gotten around to putting a light fixture back up there. The morning of the twenty-seventh of November, my mother decides that she can tolerate the minimal light in the kitchen no longer. So my dad gets out the ladders and screwdrivers and my brothers and I help him put up the new fixture. Because I'm purty sure he got some degree in electrical engineering at one point, he was able to teach us about different wires and stuff. So I guess I'm like, an honourary electrician. Hit me up if you need any wiring done-- of course, I'm totally qualified. 20 mins of electric 101 is the qualification needed, right?
Anyways. We finished the project, and I couldn't resist saying "Let there be light!" followed by a flipping of the light switch. Watching it turn on, it felt almost weird to have that much light in the kitchen again. But after that project was done, we went on our merry way to the house of my grandparents, in Maryland. The traffic was terrible. A normally 2 hour drive took us about 3.5 hours. I swear, we spent so much time stuck in traffic. When we finally got there, we were all tired... we ate dinner and went to bed shortly. It was a full day.
Thursday, November 28th.
Officially Thanksgiving! My mom and grandmother were up rather early so they could put the turkey in and have it ready by like 3 in the afternoon. (You know the elderly, they like to eat dinner REALLY soon (: )
All throughout the morning, in addition to watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, the heavenly smells of turkey and stuffing and green bean casserole and other things wafted through the air. It was almost cruel-- it's like locking a kid in a candy shop and telling him he can't eat a single morsel. But we had some things to distract us until dinner time...
One of those things was the Devil Dog. Puppy From Hell. Hound of Hades. You get the picture.. You're also probably wondering who this hound could be... Well.
My uncle's girlfriend, in the midst of all of my grandfather's surgery antics/hectic-ness, surprised my uncle with a dog. A puppy, of dachshund and German shepherd mix. What I find amusingly ridiculous is that she got the dog, and basically dumped it on him... And since my uncle lives like, down the street from my grandparents, he's up at their house all the time. So therefore, the dog would come with him and, lets be honest, you can't really expect my grandparents (up in their 80's) to care for a puppy, who isn't even house trained. She's made too many messes already in that house for me to count... Add that to the fact that my dogs, Tasha and Travis were staying down there for a while. (They are older and calmer and do not cause them any real problems). Apparently, the dog (they named her "Suzi" by the way...) scares the shit out them, and she's a puppy! She's uber aggressive, and my dogs won't go near her.... This is what I heard, anyways. Well. We were told we could see the puppy later at my uncle's on Thursday, as they didn't want her at the house with all the people around for thanksgiving. Oh, and did I also mention that my little brother and mom have allergies to dogs with long fur? That's why we have cock-a-poos. They're hypoallergenic.
Anyways. We went to see her. She was really scared and shy and didn't look too happy to see us. I tried to pet her, and while she eventually warmed up to me, she was nippy and grow-ly at first. I still don't know why my uncle's girlfriend got her...
But back to the important part of Thanksgiving!! The family and food! All of my family was there, both my uncles (on my mom's side anyways) and her older brother's daughter dropped by at one point with her two kids and husband. So it was purty packed. We said grace and gave thanks around a ginormous gorgeous table of food... Turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potato casserole (with marshmallows and brown sugar! ...Sinful, I know...) bread, apple butter, pumpkin pie and apple pie. It was fantastic. And that thing about gaining a ton of weight over the holidays? Yeah. That is so true. I probably ate my way to 5 pounds heavier that day... Good thing I was able to run it off the next day on a somewhat lengthy run through the woods/neighborhood. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep that night thinking I'd never eat anything again.
Friday, November 29th
Purty sure that was a chill day. Like I said, I went running. Not sure how much stuff that burned, though. It was also a lounge-around-and-hang-with-family day.
Saturday, November 30th
That day was so fun! My cousin Tiff (daughter of my mother's oldest brother) was having a birthday party for her youngest child, Reid! She was turning one, and they decided to have the party at her husband's mom's house. It was so pretty where they lived... near a bay, I believe. They had the event in her mother-in-law's barn thing (it was heated and basically looked like another house inside, minus wallpaper and carpet. It was cool. There was lots of food, and she had some family friends who were in a band play some music. Because one-year-olds don't really have friends per se, she invited a bunch of her close friends and their kids, as well as family. We all went with my grandparents and various uncles, and I swear. All of us kids (with the exception of Boo) were the only kids there over the age of five. It was crazy... there were kids running around everywhere. But it was fun. And baby Reid had a gorgeous little cake, and of course, it was a two-hand effort, resulting in icing all over the face. But it was adorable, and she has the cutest laugh/smile/facial expressions in general EVER. After the party ended, we went back to my grandparent's house to pack up, as we were leaving that night to get back to our house for church on Sunday and other things. Purty sure I passed out on the car ride home.
Sunday, December 1st
Woke up, went to church, hung out with J. Great day.
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd after Sunday ended, hell week started.
My school was doing a full-length play production called "Go Ask Alice." It was a really sad and somber play, but delivered a strong and good message in regards to drugs and peer pressure. I think I'll let you read the description yourself, as I don't really want to give away anything. They also made a movie out of it, and you can watch it here on YouTube. It's set in the 70's, and I thought it was done rather well. Fascinating. Anyways...
December 2nd-December 7th was crunch time. Every day was rehearsal 4-9pm after school, complete with dress rehearsals, Chinese food and fine tuning. The shows were Dec. 5-7th, and the Saturday of the last show was Cappies night, where some high school critic organization came from various schools to watch and critique our play. It's basically like Oscars for high school productions. Each performance was really intense and awesome; we were on fire. Even though on the last night, the power went out for a brief 3-5 minutes. After finale night, we said goodbye to the set and took everything down... it was weird seeing the stage empty again.
Sunday, December 8th
Cast party that day! Everything was fun until it started getting later at night... when the weather was getting bad (it had snowed for the first real time this year!) and people wanted to go and get wasted at other parties, not having a designated driver... It made me wonder if any of those people had learned ANYTHING from the play we just did. Sometimes people are just stupid. But anyways. The party was held at the house of the leading lady, my senior friend who played Alice. The food was marvelous and we all got in on a group game of Apples to Apples. (If you haven't played it, it's a really fun game, and you should give it a shot (: In some ways, the more people the better!) After a while, people started getting notifications on their phones about how school was cancelled the next day due to a massive snow/ice storm heading for the area. Elated, I felt confident in screwing my homework (I didn't have much anyways.) Come Monday, it snowed.
Monday, December 9th
I spent practically all of it with J. We worked together on an egg-drop parachute project for his physics class. It took a while, but we made a state of the art parachute out of a garbage bag (most likely Glad) and a basket thing out of folded paper, lined with red fancy foam and attached to the actual parachute with dental floss. It was magnificent. Testing the device by first putting a phone charger in the basket, we dropped it out his bedroom window down the front of his house. It landed/tumbled ever so gently, and it turns out we didn't even need the sparkly easter grass stuff we had put in for extra cushion! We put an egg in there as the final test and...
*DRUMROLL*
It emerged from the parachute's basket unscathed. Success!
Later, after his mom got home, we went with her and his little brother in the car to go look at Christmas lights. Armed with scarves, gloves, pj's, and hot chocolate, we drove for a while to see a festival of lights in Bull Run. It was so pretty, and I think baby D got a special thrill from being able to see the lights as we drove under them through the sunroof. To be honest, I think I was as excited as he was, if not more so XD
It was a great night.
Tuesday, December 10th
Guess what? School was cancelled again because there was more snow. I was so happy. I woke up to big, gorgeous flakes falling from the sky and J messaging me to ask if we could hang out. I took my sister sledding down a big hill in our neighborhood first, then headed over to his place. He and his mom were baking cookies when I got there, though some didn't really turn out that great... They were kinda black and the oven was smoking XD But it was okay. We stopped things before they got too serious XD We also salvaged the good cookies. Later on, we went down to Gaylord National Hotel at National Harbor to see "ICE!", a display of beautifully carved and colourful ice inside a most likely sub-zero tent. They gave us special jackets to put on before we entered the dome/tent thing, and by the time we exited, it felt WARM outside. The 32 degree weather felt WARM. That's how cold it was in the tent. But it was so cool-- they had an ice slide, too, and if you turned your big blue rented coat inside out, you could slide down it with even less friction. Sure, it was uber fast and super fun, but man. You sacrifice a ton of body warmth taking off and flipping the coat inside out... XD But I feel like it was worth it. We walked back through the grand hotel upon exiting, and got back in the car to go back to J's house. On our ride back, however, we found ourselves driving behind a car with a license plate of "AAA 1111". His mom wondered aloud, as she tried to keep up with the car, if that was one of Alex Ovechkin's cars. His license plates are never random, they're always pretty obvious and significant to his name... Plus, according to J's mom, he certainly drove like Alex Ovechkin. If we had tried to keep up with him, we would have been so breaking the speed limit. Though we're not entirely sure if that white range rover thing was his car, it was quite exciting. (Also fun bit of information-- that night, the Caps won just barely with a goal by Ov! They were losing at first, and J and I attributed that to the fact that Alex Ovechkin was late to the game... in fact, that's why he was speeding. So when he finally got there, he figured he wanted to make it up to the team by scoring four goals. Totally. That's logical, right? And it's totally how it went down. (; Another fantastic night.
And so we get to today,
Wednesday, December 11th.
School was finally open again, though we got off with a 2-hour delay. So instead of starting at 9am, we started at 11. I swear, it's almost hilarious how wimpy Loudoun County is when it comes to snow. They're forecasting snow again this weekend... who knows, we may get lucky and get more cancellations!
So.
My busy life up until today. It's been hectic. It's been icy. It's been more wonderful than anything.
I hope I can post again real soon... Hopefully with details about a certain talent contest that my acappella group has entered! We're performing at this church sponsored event, singing "Pompeii" by Bastille. It's going to be epic (: In fact, if you haven't heard the song, I'll post it on my fun songs/videos page, which you can check out here. (:
OH and I also should probably mentioned that I spent a good 2-3 hours or so with my nose in a book, hungrily devouring the pages of "An Abundance Of Katherines" by John Green. It is such a great book.
Great way to end the night. ...In an addition to this blog post, of course (;
xoxo