The Harry Potter Holiday Season

So before I get started on my normal blogging stuff for this post, I have to say something about facebook. Remember how I posted stuff about them doing cool things with the status update bar on Thanksgiving? Well, when I was on facebook today, they did another one of those things, and I don't know why. In fact, it changed every time I refreshed the page. They have a whole bunch of things they say now to switch it all up.

They even used my name in the thing. It's a little weird, but hey, I like variety!

Okay, so since I last posted, I have been "slightly" busy getting ready for Christmas. It started last Monday night when my family went to a Harry Potter themed Christmas party hosted by some of our friends. They totally out-do themselves every year, and it always seems to get better. For example, last year they threw a Whoville party that was  a lot of fun. Here are some pictures of last year's event:

This year, the decorations were way over the top, and it was so much fun to go to! They incorporated the theme into every aspect of the party. They decorated their barn to look like the great hall. It looked AMAZING!

In each of the corners in the barn, they had a "classroom" set up. In the two back corners, they had Defense Against the Dark Arts and Divination.

The last corner they had a classroom set up in was the Potions classroom. This was where one could get hot chocolate or apple cider. They also had several things that could be added that had silly names of things that might be put into a potion.

The Elixir of Life was the hot chocolate and the Wolfsbane Potion was the apple cider. In my personal opinion, the best combo was the hot chocolate with hazelnut syrup. You just had to be careful that you didn't eat too much chocolate from Honeydukes while you were drinking that rich hot chocolate.

I never thought that I would ever get to have butterbeer! They made it our of creme soda and some butterscotch flavored ice cream syrup. It was fairly good. I'm sure it's nothing like "real" butterbeer, but it was interesting.

Just like last year, everyone was invited to come dressed up with the theme. I dressed up in my costume from last year's Tolo. The theme for that dance was sports, so Derek (my date) and I dressed up a Quidditch players. Naturally, this was my go-to costume for the party. I made myself a wand for the party though which wasn't initially part of the costume.

They had a sorting hat there that "sorted" people into their house. It was pretty cool since it looked like the hat and it talked! I got sorted into Ravenclaw. It was interesting since I was wearing Gryffindor colored clothes. Here is a picture of one of my piano students being sorted:

She, along with everyone else, had a lot of fun as they got to participate in the classic Harry Potter event. They also had a Room of Requirement (the restroom), a quidditch set-up and a bunch of owls.

Since the party, Christmas break has started. It was kind of weird though the way that it was scheduled. We have a two week break each year, but this year our break started on a Wednesday and will resume again the Tuesday after New Years. So the timing is a little weird, but I am so glad to be on break right now!

Since break started, I finished getting all of my presents ready, went caroling, and got a tasty and awesome gift from some of my piano students.

The gifts I'm giving my family members:

One of the houses we always see when we go caroling: 

The yummy treat from my piano students:

This year has been full of so much excitement, and while I'm glad that it's over, I will always remember all of the crazy things that happened this past year.

Tolo 2012

Last night, I got to go on an amazingly fun date with MaKormick. It was Tolo (my school's version of Sadie Hawkins). We also had Emily, Derek, Alex, Dillan, Kaylee, and Scott in our group. We had so much fun on the date, and I had fun getting ready for it!

MaKormick, Scott, Derek, Dillan
Me, Kaylee, Emily, Alex

MaKormick was probably the silliest person in the entire group, and made us laugh uncontrollable way too many times that night! When we were trying to take a full group picture, the boys were having too much fun, and it made it so hard to get a serious group picture.

They were hilarious, and the best part was that us girls had no idea that they were doing all this. Pictures can honestly be the best part of the date. You have to have fun with it though, and we certainly had fun! Each couple took serious, and not so serious pictures as well.

We were having a hard time coming up with something silly to do until MaKormick got the brilliant idea of getting knives from the kitchen. Once he had the idea, there was no stopping us at all! 

Emily had no idea what they were going to do for their silly picture, so Derek surprised her by randomly doing a trust fall. Even though she wasn't ready at all and she had no warning, She still caught him and no one got hurt.

Scott and Kaylee were the youngest in our group, and it was both their first time on a date. We tried to make sure that they had a good time, so hopefully they did enjoy themselves.

Alex and Dillan were a lot of fun too! They were extremely energetic and fun to be around. The night was so much fun with them around.

                     

The boys so stole our idea for this picture!

MaKormick and Derek were practically killing eachother (okay, maybe it wasn't that bad at all) in my kitchen while the girls were doing their picture together.

We started with a silly scavenger hunt of sorts at Walmart. My team (Emily, Derek, MaKormick and I) won! We had to put 20 random items from around the store in our cart. We then switched carts and had to put everything back from the other team's cart.

Our cart

Their cart

That was a fun way to start the night for sure! After that, we went to my house to make pizza in our brick oven.

Dinner was quite delicious, and it was so much fun. We put brown paper on the table with a bunch or crayons in the center. There were many games of tic-tac-toe and the dot game played that night. It was ridiculously fun, so I'm glad that we got to have dinner at my house.

After dinner, we went to Emily's house to hang out. We played apples to apples, Foosball, and really enjoyed the giant beanbag chair that she had.

MaKormick enjoying the giant beanbag

One of our rounds of apples to apples. The picture quality is horrible, but if you can read the cards, they are hilarious!

At one point, Scott and MaKormick started playing with the little toy kitchen that was in the room. Everyone thought it was hilarious, and asked me to take a picture so everyone could see that there were men in a kitchen.

MaKormick then decided that he would go "shopping" since he found a cute little shopping cart nearby in the room.

After goofing around at Emily's for a while, we drove out to Coeur d'Alene for dessert. We went to the Dockside inside the resort to have these delicious and HUGE ice cream sundaes called gooeys. We got the Butterfingers and the strawberry shortcake ones.

In case you can't tell how big those are, they are about a foot off the table at the peak of the whipped cream. They are honestly as big or bigger than a human face. That's why we only ordered two for our entire group of eight people. Our waitress was so nice! She was joking around with us while we were there, and after we paid, she came back to our table to personally thank us for tipping her. She explained to us that she had been having a particularly bad night and that we were the only ones that had really tipped her. It made me so happy to have made her day! While eating our dessert, we had a little too much fun! MaKormick was the craziest of all though. He would randomly start singing fairly loudly or do something like this:

It definitely made my night! I am so glad that I had the chance to do all of this. It was a decent amount of work to get ready for though, especially doing the shirts. I painted the backs of all the shirts and the fronts of mine, MaKormick's, Emily's, and Derek's. It was worth it in the end!

Before:

After:

Examples of the front:

 The back:

All in all, it was so much fun, and was certainly something that I will never forget. Ever!



My Crazy Life

I feel like a really horrible person for not posting in so long! I am apologizing in advance that this post might be a little long because of that. The past few weeks of my life have been CRAZY, so it has just been hard for me to find time to sit down and type a little.

First things first. Since I last posted, it was Thanksgiving. I am so grateful that I had this day to stop and spend time with family and ponder on the things that I have and am thankful for. My hope for the survival of humanity was also strengthened that day. Facebook's status update thing looks like this on normal days:

But on Thanksgiving, it looked like this:

I was pretty proud of facebook, and it was a good reminder of what really matters.

The day after Thanksgiving, it is tradition at my house to put up the Christmas decorations. We have SO many! It usually takes the whole day. We always wait until the following Monday to decorate our tree though. I broke the first ornament this year! It was an accident-I promise!

Our tree is now decorated and it is "beginning to look a lot like Christmas". I love this holiday, and I guess that's a good thing since it's the only holiday we decorate for in our house. Sorry the picture of the tree is blurry!

On Tuesday, I asked my good friend MaKormick to Tolo (basically my school's Sadie Hawkins). I wish I took a picture of what I did! I had my wonderful mother make his favorite kind of dessert pizza and bring it to our seminary class at school. The pizza was still really hot when he got it, and our whole class enjoyed the pizza. I left a note (inside a plastic bag) underneath the pizza that told him who was asking him (but I didn't use my name, so he had to figure it out). The way he answered on Thursday was amazing!

He baked several HUGE chocolate chip cookies and put them in pizza boxes. They have all disappeared by now, but I guess that's no surprise since we cut up and shared about one and a half of them in class, he took the exclamation point, some of my other friends took the other half of the second one that we cut in Seminary, and my family helped me out with the last one.

On Thursday in Seminary, we made snowflakes to hang from the ceiling to decorate the room. We do this every year, and it makes things much more fun and almost carefree in a way.

This was the first snowflake that I made. It was the best one too. Snowflake day is the best! Well, I guess that it comes to an even tie with the days that we read Thanksgiving letters.

Thursday was also my yearbook advisor's birthday. She told us over the summer when we were at yearbook camp that she wanted us to go over the top. She wanted everything black and "over the hill" that we could find. Since it was her 40th birthday, we had a lot of fun getting everything ready for her the day before. We went after school once she was gone and decked out her room in black and all things "over the hill".

Her party the day after was pretty great too.

Starting Tuesday night, this week I got to help out with the musical "Annie". My sisters and mom were in it, and my mom was in charge of all the makeup, hair and costumes. Because of this, I got to go spend quite a bit of time at the dress rehearsals and performances doing hair and makeup. I made a few new friends and made many good memories. It was definitely worth it to be able to go behind the scenes and help out with this play. Even though I didn't ever get to sit out in the audience and watch the play, I had an experience like no other. I got to scrub "dirt" off of so many people! And the humor involved in it all was spectacular! I was also dragged into being a photographer at times, so that was fun too I guess.

These two are some of my favorite people in the cast! They played Rooster and Lily and were absolutely hilarious! Maybe it's just because they are two of my VERY best friends, but I think they did an amazing job! I took other crazy picture of them too, but I figured that I would save them the misery of super embarrassing pictures (they switched hats for this picture by the way). The show ran Thursday through Saturday and was, in my opinion, a success. Great job guys!

And one last thing: Emily made another silly picture of Nathan and me in AP Government the other day.

Yeah, it's quite the work of art, and it kind of shows (a lot) how jealous I am of Nathan's mad skills that he has in EVERYTHING that he does. I feel so blessed to have great friends like him!