Halloween

Here's the pumpkin I carved (with a lot of actual carving help from my fiance) this year for Halloween. I think it turned out really good.

Field Trip

On Thursday, the fourth grade at my school was going on a field trip, and I got to go with them as a chaperone. We went to the Museum of Natural History up at the University of Utah. I had heard people talk about how cool it was since they redid it, so I was pretty excited to go. The bus ride up was kind of noisy, but I was surprised that I didn't hear any kids break out in song. I remember that being what we always did on field trips in elementary school. They had three to a seat, so it was kind of squishy, but it was fine.

When we got there, we had to pass out pencils and wristbands and get everyone in their groups. I had six kids in my group which wouldn't have been bad if they were kids that would stay together. I had a couple kids who wanted to be in other groups, so if were a little bit ahead of one group, they would lag behind to talk to their friend; or if we were a little bit behind, they wanted to move on with them. There was also one kid in my group that was always trying to move ahead and go on without us. I had to keep telling him to come back or to wait until everyone was ready to move on. Luckily, the other four were pretty good at keeping together, but I found myself counting heads at least every five minutes.  The museum was really cool though. I kind of want to go back and actually look around for myself without having to worry about losing children.



The view from on top of the museum



The dinosaur exhibit

(Note: I don't know why these pictures have the lines across them. They don't have them on my camera.)

New Year's Resolutions

For New Years, we had a party with some cousins on the Friday right before New Year's Eve. Then on New Year's Eve we went to a stake dance, so those were both fun. I sat down to write some New Year's resolutions, like I do every year, and was pleased to see that I met one of the resolutions I made last year, and that was to read 100 books during the year. I finished the last book on New Year's Eve, in the morning. For the complete book list, click here.

Sad to say, that was the only goal I know I met for the year. I will try to do better this year. I am going to try to read 100 more books this year. There are just so many that I want to read...

Happy New Year!

Gingerbread House

This post is a little late, but I finally got around to posting it. We had a family Christmas party the weekend after Thanksgiving, and one of our aunts and uncles gave us a gingerbread house kit. So the next weekend, we put it together. Here are some pictures of it. I think it turned out pretty good from what we had to work with.

NaNoWriMo

Wow! November went by way too fast. I decided to do NaNoWriMo this year. I had no new ideas for a story, but I really wanted to do it. I got an idea from a fellow NaNoWriMo writer and went for it. I got super close to winning, but didn't quite make it. The thing that makes me mad about it is it's my own fault. I had a day last week that I had planned on spending prety much all day writing to get caught up, but let myself get talked into wasting the whole day doing nothing productive. I did manage to make it to 45,500 words before I went to bed on Wednesday night. With that one extra day, I know I could have made it. I really wish I had won, because I'm pretty sure that next November, I'll be even busier, but I did get way farther than I did last time I attempted it. I only got to 12000 that time, so this is a major improvement. Also, I've never written anything this long before in my entire life, so that's really cool too. The longest story I've ever written before now was about 28,000 words. This one is still not finished, and actually has quite a bit to go.
Here's a chart of my progress during the month of November. It's a little bit off, because I always updated my word count the day after and didn't have a chance to update the last two days, so push all the colors back a day, and add two green ones onto the end, and that's how I did.

Red means I was way under the goal for the day (1667 words), Yellow means I was a little bit under, Orange means I was over the goal, and Green means I was way over.

Now that November is over, I have time to do all those things that I didn't do during November because I was working on this story, like reading books...  and planning for work...., but eventually, I'll get around to finishing this story... after I have a break. 

First Snow

We had the first big snow of the year, and my younger brothers went out and made this snowman. I think it looks great! I'm pretty sure it's the biggest one we've ever made. It used up pretty much all the snow in the yard...

Halloween

Only the youngest two went trick-or-treating this year. Here are their costumes. It's funny because my brother said at school, nobody knew it was him behind that mask. Apparently, he thought it was funny, so he didn't tell anyone, and he avoided talking so noone would know it was him.

Pumpkin Craving

In case you were wondering, the title was intentional. We just had an activity in our ward where we did pumpkin carving. They had a flyer to announce the activity. It said, "Bring a pumpkin because we will be having a pumpkin craving contest." I thought it was funny. Anyway, the last time I had carved a pumpkin was probably when I was about 12, and my dad did most of it for me. So, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing. They didn't have the best knives for cutting, but it worked out okay. One of my friends in the ward suggested I carve this, and this is how it turned out.





Hopefully, you can tell what it's supposed to be.

Happy Halloween!

Book Festival

I went to a book festival with my family a few weeks ago. It was pretty fun. We got to hear Brandon Mull and Obert Skye talk about their books. Also, we saw Alex Boye. He's a singer in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He sang some songs from his CD, but they weren't Mormon Tabernacle Choir Songs. He had one about scouts that was the best. He even had a little dance that went with it. He had all the scouts in the audience come up and do it with him. It was pretty funny, but my brothers missed it. They were off somewhere else and missed that song. Also, we got to see this magician. He was pretty good. He said there were three things you can supersize at McDonalds: fries, drinks, and then from this tiny paper sack he pulled the third item - straws. He pulled out a six foot straw. It was huge!

The funny thing was, there was a McDonalds that was sponsoring the event and were giving out free smoothies. I told my brother he should've asked to supersize the straw, but he wouldn't. It was really fun to go, even though we didn't even buy any books. They gave out prizes and stuff though, which was cool. I hope they do it again next year.

Vacation Pictures

Here are the pictures I said might be coming:

On the ride there



In the condo





Playing basketball



Tennis



Tea party with a cousin in the play room in the rec center



Barbecue on Saturday

 There's a few snapshots of our trip.