Utah... And Testing. And the whipped cream game!

I hate driving to Utah in Mom's car. Bleh.
That aside, our trip was fun.
Katelyn entertained me during Nikol's graduation. It was exciting to see her walk across the stage though!
Another fun part was the family party. I got to see lots of my cousins, so that was great.
At one point I was trying to entertain Josh (Herrin) by playing on the slide and he kept saying, "No you go first" and "Ladies first!" Wow. He's trained!
When Nikol and I were waiting in line to board our flight back, I saw a guy who I thought I recognized. I thought he just looked like Mr. Rogers, but when Nikol saw she said that it was actually our former stake president. Oops. I was a little off.
Now that I'm home, I've been having test for school every day from 9-12. Tomorrow's my last day- HALLELUIAH! However, I admit that it really wasn't that bad. I even made a couple friends.

Last night I had YW. I can't tell you what the first part consisted of because it's a surprise, but I can tell you that the second part was a blast. We played all sorts of weird/fun games with them. One of my favorites was the whipped cream game. It basically consists of:

1. Getting a parter
2. Ones the... thrower and the other is the... catcher.
3. The thrower puts a glob of whipped cream on their wrist
4. The thrower hits the arm with the whipped cream with the clean arm
5. The catcher tries to, well, CATCH the whipped cream in their mouth.

It was so fun. We made sure everyone washed their hands and wrists before and after. =)

We are family!

This is another exciting thing we did at the party. It's called spider. Super fun. Super scary, but super fun.

Hold on tight!

I think we got the most air. =)

This is Megan being... Megan.

Earth Day

Okay... Was today Earth Day or was is yesterday? I dunno.
Anyway. Yesterday I went to the community center for Earth Day with the YM/YW. Though it turned out to be a Beehive/Deacon activity, because nobody older came. It was great. Who knew just picking up trash could be so fun? We did find some interesting stuff though... Tires, credit cards, bones... Yeah. Then we went back to the community center and got all this free stuff for the service we did, like posters, mixing spoons- made out of recycled plastic! (Oooh, ahhh...)- a t-shirt, a bag, and much MUCH more. I was shocked at how much eco-friendly stuff there could be... Plates made out of sugar-cane so you can put into compost!? Hm.
...I forget things very easily... So I don't remember anything else too exciting that has happened in the past while. Oh well. Nikol told me to post. Is this good? =)

Achoo, ouch, bleh, cough, ect.

I'm sick. Wahhh. And I have to miss going to Utah because of it. Here are my symptoms: Sore throat, headache, runny nose, MAJOR headache, and sunburn. Heh. That probably has nothing to do with the sickness though. =)
Well. How about I go onto a happier subject? Yesterday I spent nine hours at Krista's house. We we started watching a movie, but we discovered in was 6 hours long and got a little discouraged. But mom rented the movie for me again so I can finish it if I get bored of laying around and drinking water all day. I'll probably watch it tomorrow.
Krista has a tennis court right around the block, so we went there and played for about two hours. It was SO FUN! I'm horrible at it, but it doesn't matter when you're just playing with Krista. =)

I really don't have much to write about, but I'm just trying to pass the time away and get better- fast. Hmmm. I guess I could do something more productive, like work on school or something...

Easter

What're you lookin' at?
I love that picture. And his outfit! SO CUTE!

Easter was eggsellent. Very punny, right?
No, but really, it was great. We got to see Ryan, Andrea and Jakob. I always love that! And to top it off I get to go to Utah on Wedsday! YYYYYYAYYY! I MISS FAMILY! Especially Amy and Danny AND Katelyn. =) But anyway. Easter. Yeah, we had a competitive Easter egg hunt. I got 41, I believe. It was a fun night!
Funny story. Apparently we didn't get some of the Easter eggs. Of course. No one gets all of them, right? Well- no worries. They didn't go to waste. Karmen apparently found them all, opened them, and ate them. Or someone did. Because earlier today, we found a bunch of empty easter eggs all over the grass. Hmm. It's possible. After all, Karmen has also shucked corn and ate it neatly right off the cob.


What a dainty animal we have.

I like long walks on the beach with elephant seals.

(Don't you love how my blog post is a mile long because of all the pictures?)
Oh man! It's be fun lately! First I'll write about our trip to San Mateo Memorial Park. It was SO PRETTY with a crazy amount of trees. The campsite we were at was beautiful, though we didn't stay there much during the day.

We went on a guided tour to a beach with tons of elephant seals... It sounded like it'd be 3 miles of boring torture, but it was SO FUN! It was basically a long walk on the beach! =) We saw probably 100 elephant seals, although apparently there were a thousand. WOAH. They're actually really cute, unless they are a full grown male. Then... Ugh. Since it was on a wildlife preserve, they didn't clean anything up... and I mean anything. We probably saw around eight dead bodies of elephant seals. Lovely. Smelled lovely as well. And to top it off, one of them had deteriated from the inside out so we got to see a nice shell. But most of them were... well, graphic.A beautiful view from the guided tour.

That's a lot of seals.

A cute baby elephant seal! Awww! I'm asking for one for my birthday. Hahaha.

Then we went to the cove beach right next door to the elephant seal beach. We didn't stay there long though.

Mom and Dad looking wistful.

After THAT we went to Pebble Beach. That was awesome because we (we being Dad and me) got to climb all of these rocks and then we went down to the actual pebble area. Mom and I then decided that it'd be fun to take off our shoes and walk around in the pebbles for a while and then wade in the water. Hm. Painful. But fun.

I loved those rocks!

I think Dad enjoyed it too. =)

The next day we just hiked all around and found all kinds of cool stuff like the swimming hole and a large amphitheater. Plus the trees were so fun to hide in.

Banana slug!

I see youuuu.


A swing thingy! Yay!
Peekaboo!
What a pretty creek!
I forgot how fun camping can be!
Wow. This post is getting pretty long, so I'll do another post about Easter. =)
PS
I figured out how to do a slideshow, but by the time I did I had already uploaded about half of these so I was too lazy. Heheh.

Here are some things that have happened during this week:

• Went to the YW thrift store fashion show. Each Young Women had a few weeks before hand to buy an outfit with $10. You could chop anywhere. Then we had a fashion show and we told how much each item was and where we got it. I won the "Biggest Bargain Shopper Award" because I got a skirt for $1.10, a shirt for $1, a mini jacket for 1. a necklace for $2 and shoes for $5. The shoes we expenses but really cute! =) It was a great idea. I have amazing YW leaders!!
• Thursday was our swing dancing night. Uh. that was interesting. Five 13 and 12 year old girls came, one 13 year old boy came, and then it was Nikol, her friends Don and Jaren, and me. I felt sorry for Jaren and Don. They were expecting an older age group. Nope! Sorry to disappoint. But the girls caught on FAST! Especially the Inokuchi girls. They were good follows. I know this because I got to learn to boy part. It's hard! Gah! What's even harder is keeping the parts straight. Nikol told us this to make it easier though: "Girls are always right, so girls always start with their right foot!" I think I can remember that. =)
  
• Went to Audrey's birthday party. Needless to say, I had a blast. We played this improv game where two people started acting out a scene, anything that came off the top of their head, then the announcer person would say "FREEZE" and the two would freeze in their positions and then another person would come in, take the exact position of the person they replaced, and then as soon as "ACTION" was said, come up with an entirely new scene and act it out with the other person until they were frozen again. It was great fun.
  
• Went to Mom's Eggstravaganza. Even though I had stayed up 'til four the night before, I still had tons of fun at the carnival. For most of the time I stayed at my booth ("Guess the Amount of M&M's") but I also hung out with Annie Sandholtz and Andrea Pickett. The cotton candy was delicious, until the cotton candy machine lit on fire. Heh. Ask Mom for details, because I don't know them.
• Sang for the Japanese kids that were visiting. It wasn't very fun, but we did pretty well. I fell asleep during the practice, but luckily (this is sarcasm, just to let you know) Wyatt was there to nudge me awake. I was very grumpy after that.
  
• Today I had BYC at 10 am, but I was catching up on my sleep so I slept in until 10... Luckily, I got ready in 4 minutes. Yes. 4 minutes! And the funny part is, I got a compliment on how pretty I looked today. Hmm.

That's all for now, folks!
Aubrey

Carmina Burana

Note to self: Avoid being in operas. On Saturday we performed Carmina Burana. Sure, it was fun to sing and listen to the adult choir and the amazing soloists, but it's pretty tedious by the 20th song. I did enjoy it though. Especially when the soprano sang. She could sing SO high and hold it for SO long. However, I've got to admit, the tenor was better. He belted out the incredibly loud yet beautiful notes. Mom said that was her favorite part.
What entertained me through the boring parts though was the drummer. I'll leave out the long conversation Mom and I had about him and just tell it in my own words. He was basically this hilarious guy who got SO into the music you could help but smile. During the practices he goofed off with us until the director, Jon Bush, told him to "Focus!".

On Sunday I told some Young Women about the swing dancing Nikol's teaching. Then I gave a note to Peter to tell the rest of the Young Men. Apparently Briant told some too. However, it turns out that next Thursday, which will be our first meeting, the Relief Society are taking a lot of our Young Women away to babysit. That bummed me out, but of course I won't tell them to leave their jobs to come dance. The Young Men responded well. I'm sure we'll have a decent sized amount of boys. Ryan Gewondjan called me to tell me that he was coming and Peter probably was too. So we for sure have... two. =)

Today I am working on my birthday card for my friend Audrey. She's not letting her get her presents, so I'm making this binder called "The Audrey Book". It's a card, just a very large one. It's going to have lots of stuff like 14 Reasons Why We Love Audrey (she's turning 14) and lots of stuff of that sort. I'm sure she'll like it.
One thing I have in there is "My First Memories of Audrey". It was painful to put in there because one of my first memories of her was when Krista, her, and I were playing a make believe game where we were puppies and we told her to go play hide and go seek. She hid in the closet, but instead of looking for her, we went downstairs and played video games. I know. Mean! But wait- there's more. When she finally came out, she said, "Hey! You guys are puppies! Puppies don't play video games!" We told her we had found a magical potion that turned us into humans.
When she asked us for some, we simply stated, "Oh sorry. We just ran out."
I was so mean! I've apologized to her many times now and I also apologized in the story after writing down the events. I then told some more pleasant memories I had of her.
That's basically it for now!
Bye!