My Adventures in 2013

Another year has come and gone...

Wow. That was probably the most cliché thing I have ever written.

But anyway, here's a look back at what I did this year.


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January

We started the year off with a bang with auditions for our eighth musical with Journey Theater Arts Group... SNOOPY!!! I was cast as Frieda (a lead) and Emma was cast as Naomi.

Let's see, what else happened this month... oh yeah. Downton Abbey. We threw a Downton Abbey themed fancy dinner the night that season three premiered. I love that show so much, even if they did kill Matthew...

I swear, if they kill off Isis (the dog) this year, I'm going to punch something...

February

With only five weekends of great rehearsals for SNOOPY!!!, we were performing at the end of February! Frieda has been one of my most favorite characters to play on stage!

Hey, it's a short month. Not much happened...





March

This was the month that we found out that I had hyperparathyroidism. (now you try spelling that... proves that I had it, right?)

Let me explain. In your neck is a butterfly shaped thing called a thyroid. On that are four jellybean shaped things called parathyroids. They control the level of calcium in your blood. Well, my top left one was going crazy, hence the word "hyper" stuck to the front of its name. It was taking a lot of calcium and putting it into my blood, so much that it was having to take it out of my bones to get all it wanted.

You thought I was just being a lazy teenager? Really, it wasn't my fault! This thing made me exhausted... I couldn't even walk up the stairs without having to sit down at the top for a while.

How we found out about this was kind of miraculous. See, hyperparathyroidism is something that usually only happens to women over 40. Near the beginning of March, right after show week ended actually, we all get really sick. Like, fever and throwing up sick. Mine happened to last a bit longer than anyone else's so my mom took me to the doctor. I had been having some pain in the stomach area-ish, and the doctor thought I might have a kidney infection, so he sent us down to have some of my blood drawn.

 

...I may have yelled at him for suggesting that...

When the blood sample came back, the calcium was super high. Generally the level should be around 8 or 9... mine was 14. We had to go back in so I could give up a bit more of my blood... after that, I said. "Never again... never!"

Famous last words.




April.

April 6, about three weeks later, I was work at an all-day event at my church. While I was sitting with some little kids watching a movie, my dad came up to the door. He said that we had to go to the hospital so they could run some tests... on me.

Gosh, my heart is racing just thinking about that moment. I might have looked around for hidden cameras as we walked out to the car... it seemed so unreal, it had to be a joke or something.

Out to Randall's Children's Hospital I went. Ta-da, my mom produced a bag of clothes for me and I was informed that I'd been staying 24 hours, hooked up to an IV.

By request from me, nothing was said to family or friends, nothing was posted on Facebook, no one knew where I was except for the four of us and my boss at work (because I left in the middle of the day).

After surviving 24 hours with a needle stuck in my arm, I was allowed to go home. Now we knew it as hyperparathyroidism, and a few weeks later confirmed that it would need surgery sometime in my life.

Which brings me too...

Auditions for our next show, The Legend of Pocahontas, were coming up. My mom told the directors about my condition because since it made me so tired, I couldn't dance a ton all at once (but not for lack of trying...). I was cast as the Narrator and Emma was cast as Lady Gabrielle along with other parts.

After a few weeks of rehearsals, the day of the surgery came. April 29. I got up at 5:30am and we drove out to the hospital. We checked in in the basement and went into the pre-surgery room. That's when they had to put the IV in.

Oh, that was such fun...

See, I wasn't allowed to eat or drink 12 hours before the surgery. Which meant I was dehydrated. Which meant all my veins were tiny.

They stuck me five times.

FIVE!!!

I had a huge bruise in each spot for at least a week after.

They finally hit a vein on the inside of my left arm. That bruise was as big as my hand and lasted for at least two weeks with all shades of brown, purple, blue, and yellow.

Someone gave me a little drink that would "help keep me calm." What happened was I drank it and then bit my tongue so I wouldn't say anything stupid or embarrassing. That's one of my biggest fears... not being able to control what I say. After a while they wheeled me into the operating room. I moved over to a table with four huge lights above it. They reminded me of those umbrella lights that photographers use, except bigger. 

The first thing I heard when I woke up after was two people talk off to the side.

"She's only 17?" one said.

"Yeah," the other replied. "I still can't believe they found it."

Hm, I thought to myself. So this is what it feels like to be famous...

When I got back to the pre (or now post) surgery room, I chugged a few tiny things of apple juice and we used the fancy touch screen thing to watch the Avengers. I'd seen it before, so I fell asleep in the middle.

The next few days at home were lazy days. Sitting on the couch, trying to find my voice before rehearsal, and watching Mythbusters. A few people visited and made me feel very loved!

May

After all that lovely month... life continued as usual. At rehearsals, I had to explain why I had a scar and four pieces of tape on my neck. Someone asked me three times in one day and I ended up saying that Ursula took my voice... it's just easier to make theater jokes sometimes :)

We're getting close to show week and that's when I discovered.... Psych!

I love that show.

So much.

But Netflix doesn't have season seven yet, so no spoilers!!




June

The Legend of Pocahontas performances!! Wonderful show, wonderful cast, wonderful times!

Emma and I also got into making videos to put on YouTube. They're based abound theater and how you can get better at it :)

Oh, showcase also happened!! At the end of every term of Journey classes, we put on a showcase of stuff we learned. I was in Voice 2 this term and I sang a little group bit with Emma, Meagan, and Hailee and then a full class number. The full class did "What is This Feeling?" from Wicked and I got to choreographe most of it :)




July

Camp NaNoWriMo dominated this month. Writing, writing, writing... and I finished my book! Major accomplishment.. :)

VBS was also the last weekend of this month! For a few years I helped with an age group, the last two years I was in crafts, but this year I got to do something different. Everyday I wandered around and took pictures and videos of all the kids doing what they do best... having fun! Then at night I would create a montage of the footage and we'd play it for the kids the next morning! Best. Job. Yet. :D




August

Let's see, what happened in August... oh, I started this blog :)

Besides that, we went camping a lot! Our first time at our church's family camp and it was a blast!

Oh, I forgot about Star Trek! So, we have this group of friends where we're all pretty much obsessed with the same things. We all go to the same church so we see each other a lot and, you guessed it, we all like to act.

So this summer, we decided to start filming our own Star Trek series.

We have a 1/4 Klingon 3/4 human, a half Vulcan half human, a Betazoid, and two humans on the show. So far we've filmed six episodes, averaging about 8 minutes long each. The latest I'm editing right now! The Vulcan's the script writer, I'm the producer, and we all work the camera which often runs out of power before we're done. We love what we do :)



September

The start of my last year of high school and Journey.

This month I turned 18, I took the ACT, Journey shared my blog post about auditions... (!!!!!)

I started volunteering at the AWANA clubs at my church. I work with the fourth grade girls most of the time, but during game time I'm with all the girls.

Auditions for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer came at the end of the month. I was cast as the Widow Douglas, my biggest role yet, and Emma was cast as Faith Harper and a painter boy, both ensemble roles with plenty to do!

I was also in the Dancing through the Decades class at Journey. Through the next few months, we learned everything from the Charleston to... whatever it is you call dancing today :D



October

Rehearsals all through out the month.

This might just be my favorite show of all time :) Not just because of the show itself, but since the cast was small I got to spend a lot more time with everyone, not just a small group of friends. I hung out with people that I sometimes don't get to hang out with at rehearsal because our parts don't require us to be together a lot.

Also at Journey, I joined the teen leadership team, TREK, which stands for Teens Reaching out to Expand the Kingdom. I was elected president and we started on our fall fundraiser: collecting socks, underwear, and diapers for Northwest Children's Outreach.

We also took a day trip on Amtrak to Seattle!! It was through our homeschool group, but some of our homeschooled theater friends came along! It was fun to wander around town in the pouring rain with them :D




November

NaNoWriMo started back up again and I started working on the sequel to the book I wrote back in July. I managed to meet my word goal of 50k too! :D

The month also started off with show week for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Probably the best show week ever :) The week after that was showcase where we rocked the dancing and the day after that was the Director's Event.

The next week I spent at my computer editing the footage of the showcase that we TREK students had recorded. We sold DVDs of the showcase and I needed to get them ready to mail out before I left on vacation. The day before Thanksgiving, I finished, packed, and the next day we were on the road to Disneyland!




December

DISNEYLAND. There. Enough said.

It was amazing, as usual :) We only had five days in the park this time, but we packed it out! Shows, rides, and more shows... I'll never get tired of that place :)

The drive home was interesting though... You probably read about it in one of my other blog posts. The snow that you all enjoyed trapped us in the small town of Corning, CA for a whole day, and then trapped us again in Ashland, OR! We missed Emma's piano recital and took four days to get home... but we finally made it.

In the days leading up to Christmas, we decorated the house, I wrote some more scripts for videos, and Emma and I went to a few events for TREK: A Christmas party and a dance planning meeting.

On Christmas, we celebrated by lounging around and doing absolutely nothing. There's another blog post about that if you want to read it.

Well, we're almost up to the present... Yesterday we filmed another episode of our Star Trek series and I'm editing that now. I need to cut my audition song for my next show with Journey, Godspell. And... that's pretty much it.



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That may or may not be the long blog post I will EVER write.

And it took me like three hours... because I got distracted editing :)

Sorry about all the typos... I'm sure they're up there but I really don't feel like going to look for them right now.

[Actually my mom made me go back and edit it... :)]

Have a happy new year :)

Those were my adventures in 2013.

 

2014? Bring it on.

Our Christmas Day Traditions

People have been asking me what we'll be doing on Christmas day.

"Opening presents and eating dinner..." I answer.

"Yeah," they say, "but what about after that?"

"Uhh..."

See, we Lindleys don't plan out our holidays hour by hour. We don't like too. So on Christmas day, instead of getting up early, opening presents for an hour, eating, then moving on to the next planned activity, we stay flexible!

Take this morning for instance. We got up whenever we all woke up, which happened to be around 8am. The stockings were cut down from the banister and we pulled everything out!

After our yearly dose of chocolate and candy was revealed, Dad passed out everything from under the tree. We came out good this year! To name a few things - Mom got a couple new scarves, Dad got his traditional boxes of chocolate, Emma got the Guinness Book of World Records 2014 and an iPod Nano, and I got a cover for my Nook and a few new picture frames.

Oh yeah, and for movies... Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, Iron Man 2, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. WHAT!!! :D

After we open presents, there's no big plan. Lunch will be at about 1pm, but Mom doesn't want us all in the kitchen in her way, so we get to decide what we want to do. 

It always depends on what we just got. If we got a game, we'd play that. If it was a book, reading session! This year, we watched Percy Jackson since Dad hadn't seen it yet.

Did you catch the Firefly reference in that movie? Yes, it's in there :)

Lunch was DELICIOUS! And after we figured out and used our new Sodastream machine (thank you Gramma!), we all split off to our different areas for a few hours. I claimed a spot on the couch with my nook and a bag of Gardetto's and chilled for a few hours.

And here I sit! Watching Alaska: The Last Frontier with Mom and enjoying our vacation.

Day 30 of our vacation to be exact....

Merry Christmas :)

What are your Christmas day traditions?

Stripping a Pre-Lighted Tree

My hands are white from dust.

I have bits of fake pine needles in my hair.

The garbage can is FULL.

Yes. We took the lights off our pre-lighted Christmas tree.

 

Why?

Because we plugged it in today and three feet of the colored lights came on and two feet of white lights came on. Total.


Why not buy a new tree?

It's cheaper to just buy new lights? And we'd already dug this one out of the garage and set it up... It's a perfect tree accept for the lights.


Well it couldn't have taken you that long...

56 minutes. Thank you for asking!


You just had to pull on them, right? They couldn't have been on there that hard.

Almost every single little branch had the light strand wrapped three times around it. Have you ever counted the branches on a Christmas tree? There's a ton! And there was almost no pattern of where the string of lights would go next... it always went in a circle but sometimes it decided to move up two levels.


What are you going to do for lights now?

We'll get some LED ones tomorrow and CAREFULLY lay them on the tree...

Now you don't ever have strip your pre-lighted tree of lights.

 

I've done it for you.

Stuck with a Bunch of Truckers

This past week, my family and I were on vacation at Disneyland Resort. After five days of utter bliss, we set out for home yesterday.

We were trying to beat the storm moving down from the north.

...we lost the race.

Now here I am, sitting in a hotel in Corning, California. We spent the night here last night, thinking that the roads home would be clear of snow in the morning and we'd be able to get home.

Well, no such luck.


Have you ever spent a whole day at a hotel in the middle of nowhere?


You haven't? Well, I don't recommend it. 

At least I have internet connection, right? Even if it's spotty at best, it's something...

This morning I spent four hours downstairs in the breakfast area eating biscuits, drinking apple juice, and going to every social media site I'm on while listening to the football game and the truckers in the background.

It turns out that our path home AND the grapevine (the main road to LA) are both snowed out and closed. Which is ironic because out my window is a perfectly blue sky with not a single cloud... but I digress.

What else is there to do though? There's a Subway in the truck stop across the street... nah. I could always upload some pictures or videos from our trip, or watch videos here, or watch videos there, or...

Or listen to Emma and Mom have a debate on what kind of coffee is better.

Wait... now they're on to which fast food restaurant has the best soda.

ANYWAY, while we and a bunch of truckers are stuck here in Corning, ya'll are stuck back at home with an early white Christmas.

Take a picture for me. :)