Last week we went to Disneyland for two days and then on a cruise to Catalina Island and Ensenada, Mexico. My mom, Paige, Cody, Alexis, me, Kristie, Bryant, Tyler, Rachelle, Stacia, Cooper, JJ, Ashley, Carla, Adrian, Ruth, and Grandma all went. It was tons of fun! We flew , which was sooooo much better than driving. We talked Ruth into going on all the rides at Disneyland and Cali Adventure. After California Screamin, she screamed "that was awesome!" and raved about how fun the ride was for hours lol. She also swore really loud on Tower of Terror when the lights went out and the elevator doors closed. It was hilarious. l was surprised by how much she and my aunt Carla loved all the rides! When we got on the ship, we found that all the couples had rooms with bunk beds while all the single people were in rooms with twin beds that slid together to make a bigger bed. How ironic is that? I thought it was pretty funny. Catalina was pretty fun. Part of our group went parasailing and they loved it. I wanted to go, but there was no way I was forkin over $80 to do it!

In Ensenada we took a fun tour to La Bufadora. It's one of three blowholes in the world, and supposedly it is the largest of the three. I have now seen two--Mexico and Hawaii. At La Bufadora there was a really cool restaurant, Habana Banana, that was built like a tree house. I loved it. There were also tons of really fun little shops where we bought lots of fun stuff.

I was actually pretty brave (for me) at dinner on the ship. I never ordered anything weird myself, but I tasted everything that everybody else ordered. I know it's crazy, but I tried crap, lobster, and salmon for the first time! I also tried this yummy pumpkin soup that I wish I would have ordered because it was DELICIOUS!

There was a really fun piano bar on the ship and in the first video, we are singing along during Name That Tune--which we totally won! They gave us six trophies for winning lol. We sat in the bar and sang along for hours almost every night. We loved it, and the pianist was great! He called us Utah and remembered us every day.



The next video is a shaky recording of La Bufadora, the blow hole in Ensenada. I was trying to get one of the really high blows on camera, but I never succeeded so this is the best you're going to get!

Final Destination

Wow. It has been a really long time since I have even looked at a blog. I guess I just don't have a whole lot of exciting news to post! This summer has went by way too fast, but it has been fun. Once again, I almost died at Lake Powell. Have you seen Final Destination? Well, that's how my life is, but only at Lake Powell. Just Kidding. Seriously though, I have some sort of near death experience every year. This year, I was climbing up a cliff to go cliff jumping and a huge five-foot segment of the cliff broke off and fell on me! It was terrifying, but luckily I was low enough to jump backward in the water so the boulder didn't take me down. It was very intense. I took the Praxis test the weekend I got home from Lake Powell back in July. For those of you who don't know, the Praxis is a test you have to take to become a licensed teacher in Utah (and other states as well). The test was definately hard and I was sure I bombed it, but I finally got my score on Saturday and...I PASSED! Woo-hoo! I am super excited to have that over with! Nothing else has really happened this summer. Right now I am trying to read as many of the required novels for my classes as possible before fall semester starts on thursday. I have finished four of the six I want to have done, which will hopefully relieve a lot of stress as far as homework goes this fall because I won't have to cram a ton of reading in since I don't believe in using sparknotes in place of reading a novel. Well, I guess I should get back to work!

What's up!

Well, I guess it's about time for an update! First--my car is all better, but here is the kicker..the problem the whole time (while we were changing all sorts of expensive parts) was that the first part that got changed (the cam shaft sensor) was faulty! What a waste of stress, time, and money! I have to register my car this month, and it darn well better pass inspection! Clogging season is over and we get to learn some fun solos for the summer. It's sad to be done with competition season but...we did awesome at nationals! We won another overall, which was way exciting for us! I literally jumped up and down and did a happy dance when I heard the news! ;) I will try to get some pictures up sometime. I have been pretty busy with work and school. The instructional technology class I'm taking is very fun and useful, and the teacher is great, but it is also very time consuming because every homework assignment is more like a big project! The class is nowhere near as bad as others in the program made it out to be. I was totally scared to take the class because everybody complains about it constantly and whines about how awful and torturous it is, but I am enjoying it! I had to miss the last class because I'm ridiculously sick and now I'm all sorts of confused. No bueno.

Today was our annual block party. It was pretty fun. I must admit that our ward puts together a pretty awesome party, even though I swear there were way too many kids for the amount of parents that were around haha.

Well, that's pretty much all that has been happening lately... TTYL!

PS....Totally loved Up. Go see it!

My Latest Frustration

So...a couple of weeks ago I paid about 200 bucks to get my car fixed...well it wasn't actually fixed. So, I took it back to the same guy and asked him to try again. Well, he was going to change the part that he thought was causing the problem, but my car doesn't have that particular part, so he told me he didn't know what to tell me and sent me on my way. I talked to another guy who was going to charge me $80 an hour just to figure out what was wrong, no including the price of fising the problem but he had no clue where to start and told me it would be a process of elimination changing each part one by one until the problem went away. Well, needless to say, I didn't go to him. I took my car to a Chrysler dealership. They changed three more parts, charged me another 400 bucks and then test drove the car before returning it to me. On that test drive, the check engine light turned on AGAIN! So, they took it back to the shop and apparently they now have to replace the ECM(I think that's what it's called), which is basically the computer system in my car and it is a whopping 900 dollars to fix! Yikes! Luckily, my warranty will cover the $900, but this whole situation is causing way too much stress. I cannot wait to have the problem resolved, if that ever happens! This computer thing better be the last thing that gets broken for a very long time.

WOW

So, I am taking a class called multicultural education. It is a required class in the education program at UVU. It is basically an awareness class. We read a lot of articles about different cultures, races, and other related issues. Most of them have been extremely eye-opening. Yesterday in class we watched a documentary on the civil rights movement. I was appalled. I have never really seen or heard such haunting detail about the movement. My high school textbooks mentioned some of the main events such as the bus boycott and the sit-ins, but they did not fully describe the violence that occurred. The documentary was full of footage of beatings, shootings, burnings, and bombs. It told stories of many innocent people who were killed simply because their skin was not white. One fourteen-year-old black boy from the North who was new to the South and was not familiar with their society, whistled at a white woman in a store. Later that night, a group of white men took the boy from his home, beat him to death, tied weights to his ankles, and sent him to the bottom of the river. The murderers were arrested, and witnesses(black) testified in court, but it only took the all-white jurry one hour to find the suspects not guilty. We watched footage of state troopers beating men, women, and children in the streets. We saw white people spraying the blacks with powerful fire hoses from extremely short distances, causing immense pain for those being hit by the forceful water. One black man and two white men who supported the movement were told by the sheriff to leave town (somewhere in Mississippi). As they left, police followed them until they were outside of town and then shot them. The federal government charged the police with breaking civil rights laws, but the state of Mississippi refused to press charges for murder. In Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were changing into their choir clothes at Sunday school when they were killed by a bomb planted by the KKK. Nine high school students were the first black students in an integrated school and they faced persecution as they attempted to go to school. State soldiers guarded the school and refused to let the black children enter while civilians were threatening the students and begging the guards to lynch them. It wasn't until the federal government sent soldiers, including personal body guards for each students, that they were finally able to attend school. I cannot believe how brave those young kids were. Their parent must have been brave as well. It would take an immense amount of courage to send your children into danger for a higher cause.
The entire time I was watching the film and witnessing footage of barbaric beatings and nauseating maltreatment of innocent people, I could not help relating it to the Holocaust. There are too many similarities. We did not send blacks to camps, but we did beat them and shoot them for no reason. We planted bombs in their churches and killed their children. We refused to allow them equal rights and treated them like animals. It's disgusting. The whole time we were hating Hitler and the Nazis and wondering how anybody could be so cruel as to treat other human beings the way they treated the Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other groups, we were treating the blacks like garbage. The documentary we watched started in 1938. That is one year before the official start of WWII. The civil rights movement went on much longer than the war. I love this country very much, but parts of our history are painfully difficult to study.

Why

Why is it that when everything seems to be going right, everything suddenly goes wrong? That is exactly what is happeneing to me right now. Lots of things have come up and I have no money, no time, and plenty of stress but it was all okay until this week. Everything is going wrong this week, and now that I have saved the money to pay for student teaching, licensing, and textbooks my care breaks down and there is a high chance that it is a problem with the clutch, which means it will be an expensive fix. I guess maybe everything going wrong is the best way to know for sure that you're doing something right. That is how I'm trying to look at ths situation. Of course, it could also be a sign that I'm doing everything wrong. Who knows. Anyways...that's my rant for the day. Sorry.

Another Win!

The trip to St. George was awesome. The weather was perfect down there, and I had lots of fun hanging out with the team, but the best part was that we won ANOTHER OVERALL at the competition! YAY! Now we just need to aim for nationals, and we can totally do it! Click HERE to watch to video of the competition!

Our Fantastic Weekend

***Chels, if you read this you should add me to your list so I can see your blog!!!

Well, we (me, Paige, and Ashley) have returned from our amazing trip to San Diego! We went for the sole purpose of seeing Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp in RENT at the Civic Theatre in San Diego but we also went to Sea World and met up with our adorable cousins/aunt. Our trip started out with some hotel drama. Our room smelled like urine (I couldn't really smell it cause I was all stuffed up with a cold), and the smell was coming from the closet! So, after fighting over who would call the front desk, we switched to a nice, clean, odor-free room and then went for a swim! dSea World was, as usual, super fun. We splurged on the dolphin encounter where we got to hang out with two dolphins and a trainer and signal them to do tricks, pet them, shake their fins, and get in a splashing war (wait, that was just me and the dolphin kicked my butt)! I absolutely love dolphins. They are incredible! Ashley almost broke hundreds of snowglobes and shot glasses by missing the top shelf when attempting to return a souvenir mug. It was terrifying, but luckily nothing broke. Sea world was fun, but not as fun as RENT! We were walking around looking for a place to eat dinner when we saw Anthony Rapp signing autographs behind the theatre! We didn't get an autograph at that time, but we definately got pics!!! The show itself was AMAZING--way better than the movie, and I am even more in love with Adam than before (even though anthony is the best part of the show)! After the show, the cast mentioned they were raising money for some AIDS organizations and asked for donations. Cast members stood by every exit with buckets and a limited number of autographed playbills, which were given to the first few people who donated. Well, the three of us booked it over to the hot man who played Benny, donated, and got PLAYBILLS AUTORAPHED BY THE ENTIRE CAST!!! We later inspected them to figure out if they were all just lame photo-copies, but they weren't! I was ECSTATIC...I still am ecstatic lol. Our flight home was on the smallest plane on the planet. It only had twelve rows, with a total of 48 seats! It was crazy! We had to check our carry-ons because they wouldn't fit in the tiny overhead compartments. Mid-flight, Ashley wanted to look at the pics on my camera so I let her take my camera (she was a row behind Paige and I). A few minutes later, this extremely loud noise turns on and half the people on the plane woke up and looked around to see where it was coming from as the stewardess kept repeating "Ma'am, please turn that down." Well, I turned around and what do you know--it was Ashley!!! She had found a clogging video on my camera and was watching it, but didn't realize how loud it was and was oblivious to everyone else on the plane so she had no clue how disruptive she was being. It was HILARIOUS!!!

We Won!

Well, we had our first clogging competition of the year on Friday at Thanksgiving Point. We did 9 to 5 in champ and pro. Well, there's aren't any other teams in our age division so the overall awards are our real goal, and we reached it! Yay! Tons of teams of every age compete, and 5-7 teams with the highest scores win the overall and according to Greg, no score was higher than ours!!! It was super exciting! The pic is of the team members who stayed for the awards and got to take a pic with our new trophy!

My Glorious Week

Glorious... yup. I definately looked glorious with my greasy, messy hair, sweats, and make-up-missing face. I have been sick pretty much all week. It was no fun. I missed school and work for days. Now I have finally run out of PTO at work, but am still sick. I went to work anyway, and I am trying to make the best of the situation! It's not so bad really. I have finally started catching up on my homework which I have neglected all week. The girls I am working with tonight saw my laptop background--a picture of Paris--and began asking me questions about Europe. Talking about Londond still makes me miss that amazing city like crazy! I cannot wait to go back someday!!!

I booked a trip to San Diego with my sister and my cousin. We are going to see Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp in Rent (they are part of the original cast and the movie version)! I am in love with Adam Pascal. He is beautiful, and so is his voice. ;) I'm totally stoked, and the trip is only one month away! yay!

I saw Coraline and Push. Both were just ok. Neither was quite what I expected. Dakota Fanning was fantastic in Push though. It was a really cool role for her. I hope she sticks around in Hollywood! I also splurged on a bottle of Lucky perfume while killing time before the movies. It has been discontinues, and the store only had two bottles left, so I had to buy some. I love that stuff.

Anyways...that is my week in a nutshell. Ta

101 things

I started bolding the ones I have done, but got lazy at the end and put *** instead!

1. Ridden in a train
2. Slept under the stars -
3. Played in a band/orchestra
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disney World
8. Climbed a mountain -
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Had a letter to the editor published
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when not really ill -
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping -
27. Run a Marathon -)
28. Seen the running of the bulls
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person -HT
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Been on a draw-bridge
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Received a traffic ticket
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance-i haven't really been transported, but when my aparmtent almost burnt down they made us all sit in the ambulance and get checked out
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing -
49. Been a story on the news
50. Seen a wild mustang
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Received flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square -
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Won a contest
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. ***Been in a cave
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. ***Had your picture in the newspaper
85. ***Read the entire Bible or other religious book -BOM only
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. ***Had chicken pox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. ***Met someone famous
92. ***Joined a book club
93. ***Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. ***Been involved in a law suit--well, my parents anyway...but my sister and I were the ones supposedly at fault for destroying a fence
98. Been to the top of the Gateway Arch
99. ***Been stung by a bee
100. ***Seen Mount Rushmore in person
101. ***Learned to play an instrument

yahoo!

Well, I am not sure how many people read this now that my main supporter (Jill) is gone for 18 months but I'll write away!

The semester is going great so far! I love every one of my classes. I'm taking secondary instruction/curriculum/assessment, educational psych, Methods of teaching literacy I, Contemporary Criticism of Lit, Modern American Lit, and multicultural education. They are all time-consuming, and will probably be a lot of work, but I honestly enjoy them all, so it's not so bad. I started my field work at PGHS today, and loved every minute of it! I can't wait to have my own classroom!

Clogging is still fantastic. We are learning a new dance to Madonna's Express Yourself. I think its going to be awesome! I love it so far. I can't wait for the upcoming competitions, especially St. George!!!

I will hopefully be going to Boston in May!!! I am BEYOND excited. I have wanted to go there for years, and now I finally have the chance! YAY!!!

Anyways...I hope life is going well for all my friends and family because I am lovin it and that's the way it should be!

ps...extra bonus today---I totally got a prescription that is normally $50 for FREE! heck yes, I love free stuff.