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.