PINE COVE BOUND!!!!

Okay so I know I haven't written in this thing in about a gatrillionzillion years, but I had a random impulse to write in it tonight!!! Right now I'm extremely antsy/excited/pumped because Lauren Gray and I are leaving to go to PINE COVE tomorrow!!!! Week number ONE baby!!! Ah, its going to be amazing. What a great way to start out my summer, spending a week hanging with God and having the time of my liiiiiiiife!! Yeah, so I COULD make like, this whole "summary of sophomore year reflection" type thing, but I don't have that kind of time, considering I have to pack my whole freaking life away tonight! Well, you should write me and Lauren letters so we can look cool and popular at camp, hahahahahaaaa jussst kidding. But not really. :] um heres the address!!

Lisa Hall
Week #1
PINE COVE Shores
PO Box 9055
Tyler, TX  75711

Egg-Yolk Yellow

Long time no update! So, Refuge was this past weekend! It was amazing, as always. I love our sophomore group of girls so much, and it was just so fun getting away from all the stress etc and just getting to focus on God and be with each other!!! I reflected alot on my relationship with God and how I'm so inconsistent in spending time with Him. I don't want that, I want our relationship to be so intimate and Him to be a part of every little thing in my life. Isn't a relationship supposed to take time and effort? Sometimes I'm so selfish and ignorant of Him. Sometimes I just wish I could easily know all the scripture in the Bible, and understand it all perfectly. But that will never happen, and it takes alot of time to read the whole Bible. It intimidates me sometimes. Oh, the youth rally on Saturday night was incredible! I love being together with all the kids from different churches in Kingwood and all of us praising and loving the same God. His presence was unmistakable. I love being so filled up with the Holy Spirit and experiencing God like that! I loved church Sunday morning. I love KUMC. I love feeling stress-free! I love worship songs! I love knowing that God will never leave me even when I drift so far away from Him! I love having HOPE! I love my sophy girls. And I love our little egg-yolk yellow crayon!

Pudgy

Last Sunday night one of my ferrets, Pudgy, passed away and went up to ferret heaven. He was six years old, and he gave me so much joy. :) I'll miss my baby dearly.

The Rose Parade Adventure

Oh wow, California was amaaaaazing!!! It was definitely waaay up there on my favorite trips ever list!!! And now, we have gross lame-o school. I'm exhausted beyond belief (we barely got any sleep on the trip), and I want to go baaack. We were on the last flight out to Californ, and the last flight back to Houston. On our first day, we left Houston on Thursday afternoon, got to California, and went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Universal!! Basically all us band kids filled up the whole restaurant and people got annoyed with us (which was the same thing everywhere we went). The hotel we stayed in, Embassy Suites, was really great, and egyptian themed! Oh boy! I think a big contributing fun factor to the trip was just getting to stay in a hotel room by ourselves. We had mucho fun (aka jumping on the beds, singing/dancing, watching tv, going out on the roof, etc). Then on Friday we spent the whole day at DISNEYLAND!!! But before that we had a band rehearsal at some random high school that had wrong hash marks on the field so we didn't even get to practice our drill. Laaaame. But disneyland was WONDERFUL!!!! Although it was suffocatingly crowded, it was still magical. I love the disney atmosphere. :) We started off the day with a tea party with the Mad Hatter, Alice, and the March Hare! We were eating lunch on the ground (there were no tables available to sit at) when the 3 characters came and joined us for a tea party! We chatted for a while; the Mad Hatter had some clever jokes, Alice was girly and cute, and the Hare just nodded his head. It was splendid! We only managed on going on about 5 rides because the lines were so long, but it was good fun, and I didn't really mind. I only wish I got to meet more of the disney characters...

The next day, Saturday, we went to the Rose Bowl Stadium and got our official picture taken! Then we saw alot of the rose parade floats being made "behind-the-scenes". It was pretty cool. Then we proceeded to Pasadena College for BandFest! That turned out to be alot more fun than I thought it would be. We had an awesome, exhilarating performance, and the audience LOOVED us! Most people had never seen a military style band and were totally shocked and amazed by our drill. We were the only band of the day to get a standing ovation! It was a great feeling. We socialized some with the other bands, then at night we went to the Pirates Dinner Theatre! That was super neato and entertaining. What a fun job it would be to work there as a pirate!

On Sunday (New Years Eve!) we went to Six Flags Magic Mountain!!! Wooo!! It was particularly spectacular because the park was practically EMPTY and the lines were mostly nonexistant!!! We went on the best day. I mean, its one of the best theme parks in the WORLD! We went on about 10 or so rides. Some of them we rode multiple times! My faves were probably Tatsu and Goliath. We came back to the hotel before 11 this time (the first time yet) so we could go to sleep early and stuff for the Rose Parade. We celebrated New York's new year at 9, and Kingwood's new year at 10, and then we went to bed. =D At about 3 am in the morning, we woke up! We were all pitifully tired and pooped out, but we lived. We waited around for about 5 hours until the parade started, much fun eh? Actually, it was!! The weather was absolutely freeeezing though. Before the parade started people flashed cameras at us like crazy, Mr. Balch got interviewed with the HGTV lady, and we saw George Lucas ride right by us! Then, the thrill began!!!! We ended up not going our special column turn thingy, but it probably would've looked bad anyway. And we played Boys of the Old Brigade about 50 times. I thought my arm was about to fall off at one point. And the parade basically felt like it was never going to end!!! People on the sidelines were pretty annoying. They would yell "Play something! Play play play!" every 2 seconds even though the drumline WAS playing. And they would tell us how many more miles were left to go, even though I didn't know who to believe. But people were also really excited and would cheer really loud for us! That was fun. The whole thing felt pretty surreal. Finally, after 5 and half long but memorable miles, the parade was over. Phew! Everyone was wiped out and hungry and tired. But happy at the same time!! We had a picnic lunch with all the other bands and we got to see the star wars people from the star wars float! Yayyy.

The rest of Monday afternoon we just relaxed and hung out at the hotel. We even went to the pool for a little bit! Then we traveled to the Queen Mary cruise ship for the dinner/dance!! That was a great way to end our last night there. The DJ was supercool and I loved him. We played fun games, had good food, and danced like craaazy. It was a blast. The ship was beautiful. And my band friends are way fun, not to mention really cool dancers.=)

Then came the dreaded Tuesday, the day we went back to Texas. We wore our psychadelic highlighter yellow tees and cried at breakfast because we didn't want to go back to school. But before we took our flight home...we took a tour of Hollywood!!!! Hooray!! We went to the Hollywood Bowl and ran up about 700 thousand flights of stairs to the tippy top to take pictures then nearly passed out, then we went to the Kodak Theatre and Grahman's Chinese Theatre! At Grahman's we strutted down the hollywood walk of fame and took pics of all the stars and hand/footprints. PLUS!, there were people there dressed up as actors/famous people! I took pics with batman, spiderman, and barney!! Yeah, intense, I know. Oh and we got interviewed by some obscure videogame channel. Haha ohhh the fame. Then we sadly went to the airport, played catchphrase for 2 hours, then got on the plane and arrived in Houston at about 10:15. And the next day we went to school. Boooo. Oh well at least its only a 3 day week! Oh and I deeply apologize for the lengthiness of this entry, I usually don't get into details like this, but I really felt like it this time so, deal. :]

more pictures

Currently Watching The Little Mermaid (Two-Disc Special Edition) By Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Paddi Edwards, Buddy Hackett, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Ben Wright, Samuel E. Wright, Hamilton Camp, Ed Gilbert, Anne Lockhart, Caroline Vasicek, Charles Adler, Gail Farrell, Gerrit Graham, Kimmy Robertson see related

"Lets pack up and move to California!"

So wow, in less than 24 hours I'll be in California!!!! CRAAAAZY! I'm so excited, I hope I'm not setting my expectations too too high, but I don't really care right now! Marching rehearsal was actually pretty fun-ish today! Probably because we didn't have our instruments, so we sang while holding our imaginary horns to our faces. And because we yelled little chanty things and lots of people had to run and the awkward camera man was there! What a satisfactory 3 hours. I just feel so bad about Mr. R. He definitely needs our prayers.

Oh yeah! So Christmas was two days ago, believe it or not. I had a most wonderful Christmas eve and day. It was really nice, relaxing, and enjoyable! On Christmas eve we saw The Nativity Story, which, contrary to popular belief, was very very good! It was very moving, and the portrayal of Mary and Joseph was amazing. I loved it. This one little child's birth changed the world forever! We also went to the Smith's as usual, then to the candlelight service at church, which is always beautiful. There wasn't much build up to Christmas, it just kinda came. Too bad my mom and sis spent most of the day watching 24, while I wandered around bored to death. Ugh, stupid tv show. Its taken over our household. But other than that, it was good. My madre got us some goofy giggle gifts (the best kind), but we also got some real nice things. We went to the Cipriani's for dinner, and then to the Billington's after that. Everything was great! And now, its over.

Now today I get to pack, pack, PACK! I hate packing. Really. I'm always afraid that I forgot something or something isn't clean or if I'm bringing too much or too little. Its pretty complicated. BUT, this time I already made a temp packing list in advance! Yay me! I also checked out disneyland.com and sixflagsmagicmountain.com to see which rides/thrills are the best! I only wish we could spend more time in disneyland, but oh well, I'll make do with the time we have. As for the rose parade, well, you guys all need to watch us on tv!! Its on like, 20 different stations on New Year's Day (big duh) at 10 o'clock in the morning (i think?) so theres no way you can miss it! We are 6th in the parade line I believe. :] I'll miss you all dearly!