Oh, to be in Carpinteria!

With all this freezing spring business, I'm having longing memories of a few weeks ago at the beach!

Happy Independence Day!

It truly is a great day- the 234th anniversary of our country's independence.  America truly is a great nation, founded by great men under the inspiration of God.  It's constitution is flawless and amazing, and if we stick to the principles outlined in it and the Declaration of Independence, we will continue on throughout time as the greatest nation in History.  That sounds like a great cause for celebration to me!

So, to celebrate, I wrote this silly poem in my English class a few months ago.  Hope you enjoy it, folks. :)

The Fourth

By Yohan

The flag, it waves

My heart, it soars

How great it is to be outdoors

Observing all my family’s quirks

Waiting, to watch the fireworks.

The grass underfoot is thick and wet

The pavement, black and hot.

The sun overhead is shining bright

We all wish it would not.

We are all waiting, watching, wishing —

The sun starts to descend.

We leap for joy, and scream, and shout

We want the day to end.

For when it ends the fun begins —

The fun from Indian reservations.

The fireworks leap and pop and burst

And I think back to the very first…

How great it is to be outside

At Grandma’s house on the Fourth of July!

Spring Break: Day 2 (Or Jack the Plucker)

Okay, so I'm a tad late posting about the rest of spring break.  Oh well.  I will continue, undaunted.
The second day started off overcast and horrendous.  We slept in even later than the day before, then stayed inside and read for about an hour (going to the library payed off) :).

Once we felt the inclination to get up, we decided to have a wonderful French Breakfast, and pretend we were there on vacation.  It was glorious.

A buttered croissant, toasted in the oven. . . 

Wonderful, fresh, thick hot chocolate with lots of cream. . .

And Quaker Oats.  So it wasn't 100% French.  Who cares?

They all combined nicely into a beautiful breakfast.  We all felt like we were being served in  Paris :)

Simple pleasures, I guess.

After breakfast we settled down for a long bit of rest and relaxation with our library books as the wind and sleet howled outside.  Then, we decided to head off shopping, since Saturday is Corn Nut's 8th birthday.  Big day!  

We went to Walmart.  And ended up buying shirts and pants for Chestnut and I instead.  Then we went to DownEast, and from there to Toys R Us, where we got Corn Nut more well-beloved and obsessed over Star Wars Legos.  It was good.

Things weren't so good after that, when we got home.  You see, as we pulled into the driveway, we saw Jack in the front yard with a chicken in between his paws.  He was happily guarding it and chewing on it and we were shocked and horrified and sure it was dead.  It was horrible!  We got Jack away from the chicken and locked him up in the kennel, then came back through the sleet (now snow) for further inspection.  The chieken's entire back was bare of feather's and it's skin was open near it's neck.  It was a grim sight.  It sat there, huddled on the ground, twitching every so often, completely motionless and unresponsive.  We were then sure that it's back was broken.

We sent Chestnut to go get the gun,  but when he came back, the chicken was gone.  It had moved six or so feet across the yard.  Obviously, it wasn't paralyzed, but it continued to twitch.  Deciding to give it a chance, we moved it to one side of the chicken coop, shut it off from the other chickens, sprayed it with wound spray, and left it alone, sure it was going to die any minute.

Jack had become Public Enemy Number One for the day.  We just couldn't believe that he had actually attacked a chicken.  Things looked grim.  

Later that night, we found that the chicken wasn't twitching any more and that it was moving around, so we celebrated by getting a blizzard at Dairy Queen, then coming back to watch a "Foyle's War," a british police drama.  It was great!

A good, but dramatic day!

Spring Break: Day 1

Spring Break started this Friday, but things didn't really get going until Sunday when Dad, Cashew, Pistachio, and Corn Nut left for Nevada to visit the Fallon Boys.  

They were so excited!  This left my mom, Chestnut, and me home to relax.  We had a blast!  I don't know if it was exactly relaxing, but it was extremely fun.  So this is yesterday, from the beginning:

We started off the day by getting our work done, having a flop quiche turned into a delicious scramble for breakfast, and getting some independent study courses done which we were way behind on.  From there, we decided that Jack was bored and depressed, so we took him on a walk in the hills.  Unfortunately, I took no pictures.  It was really fun and we talked about politics the whole time.  

After the walk, we dropped Jack off at home and headed off to lunch at Dixie's Diner, a fun little 50's themed restaurant with delicious shakes.  Since I took no pictures here either, here's a family picture taken there a few years ago. 

See the shakes?  It was delicious.

We continued the adventure by heading off to the library and checking out about a gazillion books and movies.  Mom suddenly realized that I haven't read for fun in about a year, and soon she checked out four books for me to read.  I have my hands full :) .

After the library, we headed into grandma's house and made a gazillion tortillas to go with our gazillion books.  We flipped tortillas and talked about England, and grandma showed me the finished skirt that she's been making for me.  It was a blast! 

We got home late, but decided to watch Casablanca anyway.  Neither Chestnut or I had seen it, and Mom decided that wasn't acceptable.

It was delightful!  I think it's my new favorite movie.  

Hopefully I'll take more pictures to document Spring break day two.

The Secret Garden- Hair and Other Things

Well- as you've noticed, I've kind-of disappeared for the past two weeks. This is the reason why.

Well. . . It's sort-of the reason why. I happened to be involved in the play "The Secret Garden" in my high school musical theater class and that just happened to take up my entire life until recently. Does that make sense?

Let me clarify:

I was a wall.

Who had to sit still.

Absolutely still.

During a two-hour play.

But anyway- not focusing on the bad of things. This (picture above) was what we did to prepare for that two-hour play on the day it was performed (or the three days it was performed- many people lost a lot of hair).

And since I didn't happen to get any pictures of the actual performance, I will mainly focus on the hairdressing segment of the whole affair. Here is the cast of Characters:

Lovely bunch, aren't they?

Well actually, they are. The pictures above are the result of a lot of this:

Ratting the heck out of their hair to create an "authentic" hairstyle for the period. I feel bad for the women back then. Of course- they didn't wash their hair very often. . . . but I won't get into that.

Moving on. Step one- the hair is ratted. Check.

Step two: It is pulled onto the top of the head with about one billion, two million, four thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three bobby pins. Check.

Step three- the remaining hair is arranged into about nine miniature buns on the top of the head and the hair that has escaped is curled with a curling iron. Check.

Pretty isn't it?

Yeah- but perilous. . . and painful. Especially afterward when you have to remove all the rats and about a half-gallon of hairspray.

Bon apetite!

Bombarded!

For the past few days that the snow has actually started falling, this has been the situation at the farm:

Yesterday it hit full force, as it was new year's eve, family was still up from Christmas, and cousins wanted to play in the snow. Soon everyone in the vicinity became subject to snowballs whirling everywhere- any kid's definition of fun, right??

There was scuffling,

Whitewashing,

And then. . . came Dan.

Snowball in hand.

Right towards me- the most innocent bystander of them all.

He took aim at my feet, then threw snow everywhere.

Luckily, he missed.

But he was not to be deterred.

No way.

Soon, he hit his mark.

And seemed pleased about it, too. (Darn kid :) )

Never mind. He's too cute for me to be mad.

We Gave Thanks

Our Thanksgiving was absolutely wonderful. Because we didn't have any plans for what we were doing, we decided to go down to Utah and crash my aunt and uncle's party. This turned out great for us. . . you're gonna have to ask them what they thought of our family's massive food consumption abilities. :)

The day before Thanksgiving we drove the long 41/2 hours down to Provo, UT. For some reason, driving seems to always be a little less pleasant when you have five energetic kids packed into the car.

Luckily, we survived.

And boy am I glad we did. Here are some of the events during our Thanksgiving weekend:

First: The actual, long awaited for, much anticipated, bite-your-nails event-

Carving the turkey. Looking back at this even makes me hungry. Having not eaten anything since breakfast has nothing to do with it, I promise.

See? They were hungry, too.

As soon as the prayer was finished, a line arose out of the dust of Thanksgivings past. Fortunately, it didn't take very long to get through seeing as people were grabbing plates and such secretly during the prayer. :)

Who wouldn't want to be in a line that led to such ambrosia? Vegetable trays, cranberry salad, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, deviled eggs, ham, olives, cranberry sauce, and of course, the turkey.

Soon all that could be heard was satisfied grunting at all of the tables.

Afterwards, we raked a gigantic pile of leaves and dumped it off of the terrace in the back yard.

The little boys jumped off the terrace into the leaf pile.

It was deep. And big.

Then yesterday, after packing up to leave, we set off to the Bean Science Museum in Provo. Within was this darling animal nativity.

Let me just say that no matter where you have Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving in itself is a holiday to be thankful for.

Highlights of My Week

While my mother Almond Joy's been in Japan with my dad, Chestnut and I have been staying in at our grandparent's house. Here are just a few of the fun things we've done this week:

Drove down to Maddox's in Brigham City, Utah for a bite to eat.

Carved Pumpkins

And made caramel popcorn (recipe later this week) along with a bunch of other "spooky" snacks and partied Halloween away in at a neighbors.

Fun week!