Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings All!  Hope everyone had a spectacular Thanksgiving- we did.  But more on that later.  Let's catch up on the last two weeks.  Now that softball is officially over, we are a little lost as to what to do with ourselves.  I started back up with intramural basketball and still really like it.  There are two other girls this year, so that makes it a little easier.  I'm really liking it and since dad found our basketball and pumped it up, I have been dribbling pretty much non-stop all through the house.  Everyone loves it!  Ginger gets a big kick out of it as well but she can be kind of a ball hog.

Last Friday, we had our first class field trip and mom was one of the chaperone parents.  We went to the Pima Air and Space Museum and it was super interesting.  We had the best tour guide.  He was really funny and kept all of us entertained the entire time.  He also mentioned several times how well behaved we were.  He thinks we were the best behaved group of kids he's ever had.  That was good news and made my teacher and the parents happy.

This past week,  I only had 2 days of school.  Really, just a day and half because we had an afternoon of pie on Thursday.  The parents brought in pies, ice cream and whip cream for the fourth graders and let us go crazy.  I won't say how much pie I ate but it was a lot.  And then, right after that, dad and I headed up to start our Thanksgiving camping weekend.  Woo Hoo!  We met my friend Madeline and her dad up there and got the party started.  Both of the moms had to work Wednesday so they didn't come up until Wednesday afternoon.  We made the most of the time before they arrived- Madeline and I were crazy women and Dad and Mr. Mike made all kinds of friends with the other RV folks.  By the time the moms arrived, Madeline and I were covered in cheetos cheese powder and chocolate and the dads were a beer or two into their day.  Good fun for everyone!

The weekend was gorgeous again for us.  It was a little bit cool and breezy but perfect for hiking, mountain bike riding and playing in streams.   Catalina State Park is just beautiful this time of year.  The trees are changing colors, the water is flowing and the sky is blue.

This stick bug came to visit, a long with a lone javelina.

We got back home on Friday late morning and got ourselves unpacked and ready for our next event.  My friend Simon's family has a party every year to kick off the holiday season.  We almost didn't go because we were kind of tired and Simon lives about as far away from us as you can get but in the end, it was a fun time.  A few St. Michael's families were there so mom and dad had people to talk to and I had a bunch of kids to play with.  At one point, mom walked into the kitchen where another group was talking.  She heard the words "industrial war machine", "political socioeconomic base" and she turned right around and joined the conversation outside about camping spots and crazy things people did to get traffic citations.  Much more fun!

Saturday, I woke up sick and was not happy about it.  I rallied enough to go get our Christmas tree.  Dad spent the day putting up our outside Christmas decorations and I was able to help with that some before I crashed on the couch.  Mom headed out that night for a girl's night and dad and I ordered pizza, watched a show on pumpkin chucking and then headed to bed early.

On Sunday, I still didn't feel good but was again able to rally and help mom with the inside Christmas decorations.
We had Grandpa Vern and Grandma Sue over for Thanksgiving Part Dos and boy was it tasty!  Dad made his famous Turkey Roulade and mom made a corn and wild rice custard and Grandma whipped up the best mashed taters.  (She used a whole stick of butter!!).  It was our first "fancy dinner" in our new house and it sure was nice.  We love our house!  Although, grandma and grandpa aren't really smiling, I can assure you, they had a great time and enjoyed the feast too.

 This is just a random picture of me dad took while practicing his photography skills- pretty good shot, no?

Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Feels Like Fall

We have recovered from our Disney weekend and have settled back into life as usual.  As you may remember, we have a little bit of an acorn problem.  Mom is still sleeping in the guest room and the acorns are making an unholy mess in the yard.  Mom and dad spent an entire morning just cleaning up the back yard and roof and ended up with an entire garbage can full of the darn things.  The yard looked fabulous and clean.  And then they went inside for 5 minutes and came out to the yard covered in acorns again.  Fortunately, the front yard is taken care of by our neighborhood javelina.  They make Ginger crazy but they are efficient cleaners.  Grandpa Vern gave us a leaf blower for the backyard and although mom really doesn't like leaf blowers, she is making an exception as they make quick work of things out back.  Since it probably isn't practical to herd the javelinas to the back, we'll go with the leaf blower.

I had my friend Claire spend the night last Saturday and Madeline came over in the morning so her dad could bike ride with my dad.  We entertained ourselves by making mustaches.  All kinds of fun!

Every year, Tucson has this amazing event called the All Souls Procession on the first Sunday in Novemeber.  It is a huge "parade" through downtown that celebrates the lives of loved ones who have died.  It starts with a huge urn that you can put names and memories of those people in and then the urn is burned at the end.  There are big floats and as the parade goes along, you can just join in and walk.  People play music, have signs and all kinds of cool things and about 150,000 people go every year.  Mom has been wanting to take me for a few years now and it turns out that one of my friends has a get together every year for it.  Everyone paints their faces and then we drive downtown and watch the parade go by.  I thought the whole thing was pretty cool and maybe next year, we'll actually walk a little way in it with some memories of friends and family.

This past Friday was mom and dad's 11th anniversary.  Can you believe 11 years??  They both had the day off and went out to breakfast and then spent the whole day running errands together.  It doesn't sound like much but apparently, before I came along, they used to love just running around town together.  They haven't done it much lately so it was really nice to do that again.  Here's to many more errand running days!
Saturday was my last 2 softball games of the season.  It was a little bittersweet.  Dad helped out coaching this year and actually kind of liked it and is going to miss it.  I pitched and wasn't awful- even had a few strikeouts.  Our team was actually in it and we only lost by one run each game.  That is a win in our book.  Mom ended up having to keep score and about had a nervous breakdown in the process.  I guess it isn't easy to keep track of everything going on the field, yelling at us to get ready to bat, answering our questions about how many outs, what the score was, can we go to the bathroom.  To her credit, she only made two mistakes and one, no one except dad knew about.....

 I have started up with intramurals again.  I really liked basketball from last year and even though it was all boys, I decided I liked it enough I wanted to do it again.  Yeah me!  I also tried out for a solo part in our upcoming Christmas show.  I'm just getting all kinds of brave in my old age and it makes mom and dad really proud.  I've always kind of gone along to my own drum and now it's fun to see it in other ways.
Hope everyone has a great week!

Happy Halloween!

We had quite the whirlwind weekend!  We escaped the Tucson rain and cold for the sun and warmth of Disneyland at Halloween and this time we took our friends with us.  I always have fun with just the Goedel 3 but man- you add another 9 year old girl and Disney goes over the top.  We met the Goods at the airport Friday morning at O'dark thirty, made it to Disneyland about 11 AM and didn't stop the whole weekend.  The Goods had only been one other time about 5 years ago so everything was kind of new to them.  We weren't sure if they would be able to keep up with our 14 hour days but they hung in pretty good.

We spent most of Friday at Disneyland but we did wander over to California Adventure so the parents could get a grown up drink.  Apparently, you need one or two of those after a day at Disney.  Everything was decorated up for Halloween in usual Disney fashion.  ( How many times do you think I can say Disney in this post??)  After riding as many rides as we could muster, we headed back to the hotel about 9 to get rested and ready for Saturday.

Because there were 6 of us, we got our own log on Splash Mountain AND our own car in Carsland.  All kinds of fun!

The adults enjoying a grown up moment.

On Saturday, we were up and at it early.  At the park by 9AM.  After a very healthy breakfast of cinnamon rolls and chocolate milk we decided to conquer our nemesis- The Hollywood Tower of Terror.  Da Da Daaaaaa.  This is an elevator ride that takes you up and then you free fall for different distances before being taken up again and doing it all over again.  In the dark.  We have been on every ride at Disney at least once, except for this one.  It just seemed to scary so we avoided it.  But not this time.  All 6 of us were convinced we were going to die on this ride and Mr. Mike swears a maintenance man died on the ride a few years ago.   By the time we finally got onto the ride, it's lucky we were still standing.  Madeline asked the ride operator if the ride was scary and the ride operator looked at her, said "Yes.  It's scary."  And then slammed the door shut on us.  Eeeeeck!

Well, it turns out we all survived and it was a fun ride that will make it into our "ride rotation".  That was decided after we all made our post Tower of Terror bathroom stop though.

The rest of the day was just fun.  We headed back to hotel room about 4 to change into our costumes and then headed back for trick or treating.

We lasted until about 11 and by then no one could walk anymore so we caught the bus back and collapsed into bed.

We got home about 4 in the afternoon on Sunday and this was me in the back of the car.  I'd say it was a good weekend!  

Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween and we'll see you in a week!