Happy New Years!

Family Update

Dad has been doing house projects galore, including painting the master bedroom, putting a floor down, building a loft in the library, starting walls in the library, doors on the master bedroom, ect. You get the point. He got a cast iron pot for Christmas for bread making, and produces delectable crust of which I have already been made privy.

Mom begins every morning by running approximately 43.2 miles. "Old women" my hat. She spent the month of December preparing Christmas for all of us, which was a grand success. Atticus still home schools, and to the best of my knowledge they spend pleasant days memorizing the capitals of about every country in the world, doing math, reading Newberry books, and making hummus.

Atticus has made a friend in the neighborhood, and together they conquer the vast territory in the mountains above our house, play "Sonic and Blaze", mimic the war cry of elephants (or so I have concluded) whilst playing laser tag, and even sit down long enough to enjoy the occasional card game. The Junior Jazz basketball season has recently started, and of course Atticus is involved.

Elias runs cross country, takes an AP class, makes his own duct tape shoes, creates bombs, is learning to "shuffle", listens to "Dubstep" music (which makes me twitch involuntarily) ski's at Sundance, delivers sacrament to widows in the ward, reads, texts, and somehow manages to find important possessions in his room. He was also the only recipient of the "HOBY" scholarship out of the entire sophomore class, which is a school funded trip to a three day leadership conference held at Aspen Grove.

Satchel is attending PUPS, at Provo High School, which I'm fairly certain I have already mentioned. For those of you who might have been worried, I will reassure you he has not lost his silliness or sense of humor, still makes up new words, dances crazily, (often WHILE playing the trombone) and reads like a madman. He has taken up "shuffling" along with Elias, and his innate groove has made him quite the professional. He has started to mention several allusive "8th grade girls" who tell him his hair is gorgeous, and speak of their love for him.

I applied to BYU Provo, and don't find out if I made it until the end of February. Its been an anxious wait already. Meanwhile, I edit the "feature" section of the school newspaper, play percussion, work at a waffle shop, spend hours doing homework, spend hours procrastinating homework, and gripe about the lack of snow. I've discovered that if college boys ask me what my major is, (while I'm at work) awkwardness ensues. But life is good.

Hope everyone had an amazing holiday, and an amazing new years!

Homecoming

My conscience finally got to me . . .

General Update:
Dad went to London about two weeks ago. He had tons of fun, and brought back a marimekko newspaper so I had tons of fun too. Besides teaching classes, he works on the library space doing his favorite activity of drywalling, and sanding spackle.

Mom is homeschooling Atticus which is a full time job. She also is running a TON and runs about ten miles every Friday, which is amazing. As much as she talks about being old, we all know she could beat anyone in a race.

Elias is running on the varsity cross country team. He ran a 18:18 5k, and a 4:52 mile. In other words, way outta my league. He is taking sweet classes, and AP world history as a sophmore. He spends most of his spare time sleeping, eating, and running. Just as an example, yesterday he ate two bagaels, a veggie burger, a carrot, a peach, and a lot of chips JUST FOR LUNCH. Yup people, he should enter a contest.

Satchel is going to PUPS academy, which is at provo high school. It's a program for gifted 7th and 8th graders that lets them take high school courses. He loves latin, and has started playing the trombone, which provides regular entertainment for the entire family. We hope he will progress from "hot cross buns" in the next 5 months or so. He also plays soccer, which will soon transfer to futsal. This is not his absolute favorite activity. Just as an example of his continuing craziness: "this bag smells way weird. I can't find the camera. Dad's awesome hat. Hey, that was a Haiku!". This was about 13 minutes ago.

Atticus loves soccer. His team went undefeated this season, and he scored a goal per game. He is doing 6th grade math as a 4th grader, and can name all the capitals of all the countries in South America. He reads approximately every spare second he has, and keeps me company when I run, or play soccer.

I am not running cross country this season, because I have a job! It's actually really fun. I work at a waffle shop, and make belgian waffles and crepes. My parents told me I can NEVER give my number to guys (the place is right next to campus). Besides working I spend my time doing homework for AP classes. It's really not that exciting. Homecoming is this weekend, and if I feel like it I might post pictures.

A calm and serene Sunday afternoon

Satchel gave a talk in Sacrament meeting today. It was great. School has been going well, and hopefully for spring break this week we will be going somewhere warm. All of our flowers have been coming up and subsequently freezing to death because it keeps snowing. I'm trying to convince Satchel to start blogging on here because I (obviously) don't often enough. I'm pretty sure he would do an awesome job.

Satchel's b day

Satchel turned twelve and was ordained a deacon. He got a flip video camera, so all of us have to be on our guard now. To celebrate we went and saw Tangled, and had his favorite food (pizza). Dessert was blackberry cream cheese pie.

Private

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Thanks Guys!

Beautiful, Wonderful, Glorious Christmas Break

Best Things about Break
1) Sleep
2) Unlimited reading time (Outsiders, What the Dog Saw, Devil in the White City, The Scarlet Letter, Comic books)
3) Skiing - except for the fact that Sundance is closed at the moment because last night they had 240 mile an hour winds, which took down power lines all around the canyon.
4)Family game parties

Not so grown up Christmas list

1) snow
2) snow
3) snow
4) my ipod to magically unfreeze itself.
5) school to end last Friday so I can start Christmas shopping.
6) Guru's sweet potato fries. Don't question it.

Atticus's Baptism (last March)

A wonderful woman in our ward took these shots of Atticus during his baptism. We had them in print, but she just brought them over on CD. Yay!

We're hosting.
My mind jumped to alien life forms, extra terrestrials and possibly Stephanie Meyer literature.
But no.
We're talking about Thanksgiving. One of the holidays associated with food,(duh) certain smells, and lots of family.
Never before.
We've never lived in a place that family could swarm the front door with platters upon platters of food. Our house was sometimes filled with strangers (to me anyway) who had no place else to go.
And Yet.
This year the stars were aligned, and we could offer the space needed for such large amounts of people and food.
We're hosting. Aliens.

Okay, I know this is weird, but I wanted to try using chiasmus.

The top picture will only make sense if you have ever seen Mr. Bean.

Squaw Peak

Fall Break was lovely. So were the leaves.

Maple Flats hike

Cross Country

Monday afternoon I went running with my cross country team. It was a gray day, and everybody was celebrating the lack of sun, for once in a long while. About ten minutes into our seven miles, it started to sprinkle, and everyone yelled with happiness, and took long hair out of pony tails to let it fall free and, in my case, let it tangle and curl into insanity. About two minutes later it started to dump. I have never seen it rain this hard in Utah EVER. Within a minute I was soaked through, and the flash flood, was filling up potholes that we unsuspectingly stepped in. Hail? Lightning? It was all part of the package. We stomped in those puddles with glee. Who cared? We were already sopping beyond words. Three miles later everyone was too cold to say anything. We ran faster than ever before on this particular run, just because we couldn't feel any pain in our legs. They were numb. When we got back to the school we remembered about the showers in the back of the locker room nobody ever uses, and turned them up high. We stepped in fully clothed, and sighed with happiness. Feeling gradually returned in our extremities, and we steamed up the locker room so much it felt like a tropical jungle.

Tuesday was pretty much the same story, minus 4 miles.

Wednesday too.

Thursday? Yup.

Friday it was sunny, and we ran sprints on the track.

Yesterday morning was our last race of the season. It was cold and soggy, but the sun came out, and it started to feel like a proper fall day. When I finished my lungs were burning from the cold air. I p.r.d by forty seconds, and Elias p.r.d by thirty. It was a great way to end the season. And a wet week.

Mockingjay

I finished the third and final installment of the Hunger Games trilogy last night, and was rather disappointed. Suzanne Collins left so many parts unfinished. But my main issue with the book was the violence. I don't think I have read a more graphic book, and almost all of it was unnecessary. Her readers would have been just as riveted to her story without her additions of cruel deaths.
I was going to write more, but there is nothing more to say, except for the fact that I kept being reminded of twilight, in the way that it attracted readers. Love, action, and emotions that run extremely high. *Sigh*.

Her fingers,
stroke
the keys and they comply, willing to bend to her every wish.
The music rolls off her finger tips, a
purring
of types, as it begins to swell, and then
suddenly, she
pounces.
The keys are battered and bruised under her grasp,
but they rebound just in time to be broken again.
Victorious, and not the least bit flushed, she
settles
back, plays a couple of trills, her fingers once again
stroking,
and ends,
a true master of her instrument.

So I feel like I have been gone forever. Not from Utah, (as you might assume from my last post) but from blogging life. How does one catch up?
Well, probably with an eternally lonnnnnnnng post.

New York was amazing. It was great to see my friends, and party for three weeks straight. Eventually the lack of sleep caught up to me, but Sunday's were usually good for that. I did everything I used to do there, including (but not limited to) going to the Hill Cumorah Pageant, tubing on lake Keuka, walking into Pittsford village and eating breakfast by the canal, watching movies lateeeeee into the night, eating (the more appropriate word would probably be inhaling) greasy, amazing scallion pancakes, watching "Shakespeare in the Park", jumping into the lake/pool/closest body of water, fully clothed because of INTENSE HUMIDITY, eating lunch at Moes, going to the mall, bushwhacking in several attempts to find places we just KNEW were supposed to be over that next hill. . .

Cross Country in the mornings is tough as usual. As some of you probably already know, Elias is running this year, so that's fun. Last Friday we did a run that has been tradition at Timpview for a LONG time. It's called four hour relay's, and if you have facebook, you can look up pictures of Elias and I running it. Contrary to what you might believe, one individual doesn't run for four hours straight. Everyone is divided up into teams of six, and each person runs a mile, and than tags the next person on the team. It's really fun, and both Elias and I p.r.'d on our mile times, Elias running one in 5:39, and I running one in 6:48. We start afternoon practice's tomorrow, and our first race is on the first day of school.

Speaking of exercise, mom, dad, and I did a triathalon sprint together, while Elias did it on his own. Satchel and Atty were the support team, if you count eating the snacks as support. I swam, Dad rode, and mom ran. Previous to the swim, both Elias and I had rented wet suits, which would, supposedly, keep us nice and warm as we swam in the black ridge reservoir. However, the combination of nervousness and extreme cold, caused me to hyperventilate the first half of the 500 m, and so I spent the race not putting my head in the water, which I felt rather stupid about, until I talked with a fellow triathaloner, and she said she experienced the same thing. The funniest thing about the whole experience was that we thought many more people would sign up to do it as teams, when in reality, only four did. Two of the four teams, didn't finish, and we took second out of two teams. So we got medals!!!!!!! It was hilarious, at least to me.

Satchel decided to go to charter school again this year, and so he started last Wednesday, at Freedom Academy. Atticus, however, didn't want to, and so he is homeschooling. Elias starts Timpview on Tuesday, a day earlier than me, so he can meet teachers, navigate, ect. Surprisingly, I'm slightly more excited than I have been recently for school to start, but I STILL have summer work to finish, even though I have been working on it ALL summer.

As for the house, dad put in the upper countertop (you kind of have to see a pic) and now they've painted another bathroom. The entry benches have been made, just not finished, and so our entry will soon not look like a construction zone.

The weather has been blistering hot, but today it really cooled down, and everyone is walking around in a long sleeve. It won't last. It's supposed to be a blistering 92 for our first race on Wednesday. Wish us luck (I don't want to evaporate).

I'm heading to New York for three weeks to visit friends.
I'll post pictures on facebook if you would like to follow me there.

The relentless work of the
scruffy
robin, makes me look up when I'm reading on the porch.
At first, I thought she was
single
parenting, when I noticed a much sleeker robin, who also returned to the
lonely
pine tree. So which is
the mother?

When I first was pleasantly surprised to
discover
the robin's secret, the tiny peeps of her babies were
pleading, but now, they
demand.
Much more robust, these babies seem.

I imagine
climbing
the only nearby tree, to see this springtime
marvel myself.
But, with maturity I guess some
curiosity also wanes, or, possibly just the work that must be taken to make new
discoveries.
Still, my sub consciousness must imagine the fall I could take,
plummeting
into the backyard, sans wings.

So, I return to my book,
silently wishing this couple's
vigorous child,
will take its first flight
while
I'm
still
around.