TOMORROW!!!

I'm so...excited? Happy? Thrilled? Energized? Glad? Joyful? I think the best word to describe my feeling on turning 15 (TOMORROW!) is eager. I'm eager to start a new year-and I think the New Year really begins for each of us afresh on our birthdays. I always like to start on a new drawing with a fresh, clean piece of paper. I like to start new, to start fresh, again, once more...with a clean slate. A fresh surface. A new start. Every birthday is, for me, a new beginning. It's a chance to not exactly start over, or right past wrongs, but more to have another chance of doing right this time. I've learned so many lessons in this past year. And boy has it been a year to remember! I participated in a discipleship program at my church, along with MOPS, and I really learned a ton through both of those. I started HomeLink last year, and I took Entrepreneurs and American Sign Language (ASL) and I can't believe how much I learned from those two classes either! And then I moved. And it's been a whirlwind of activity. Meeting billions of people (okay, mabe not billions), enduring the stifling summer heat of Winnemucca, reading a whole another loooong list of books, taking trips to Reno, moving into our house, painting, driving, mowing, chaos, arguments, crying, screaming, organizing, finally starting school, homework, and now...What next? What does the future hold for me? To be honest, I don't know. But in reality, there is no future, only the present and the past. We're living the future right now. But if we're living the future, it has become the present. I've learned a myriad of new things this year. I few of them might be...

• If a child is holding a cookie, don't even attempt to take it from them
• How to change a diaper
• That good food makes people happy
• Plenty about ASL vocabulary and grammar structure
• The fundamentals of advirtising, though not how to spell it
• That God works not just in mysterious ways, but humorous ones as well
• I like my hair short
• Hair straighteners can be bought for only $7.00
• Wal-Mart has incredibly low prices...
• ...but you get what you pay for
• When shining shoes, and putting on blackening to shine up the edge of the soles, never hold the shoe upside down
• War of the Worlds, The Island, The Brothers Grimm, Charlie and the Choc. Factory and Just like Heaven are exceedingly good movies, though for different reasons
• Water that is more than 3 days old tastes disgusting
• No matter how many times I try tomatoes (DAD) I'm not going to like them
• My dad doesn't think that it's even possible to have enough stuff to talk about in order to be on the phone for more than an hour
• My dad has no idea how much stuff me and Lace have to talk about, because he only hears less that .002% of what I talk about with her.
• My dad doesn't understand that girls have many things to talk about, most of them none of his business
• That old show, All In the Family is actually kinda funny, even if slightly cheesy
• 90's movie previews are mind-bogglingly dumb
• Hilary Duff may have a good voice, but she can't act
• Return of the King was amazing, and I can't believe the LOTR trilogy is over
• I'm dying to see Peter Jackson's King Kong and I really hope he makes the Hobbit
• Revnge of the Sith wasn't a quality movie, but I guess George Lucas did his best
• That I'm very glad that George Lucas finally figured out the JarJar is a dumb character and needed to be removed from the Star Wars films
• Eldest, Year of Wonders, The Man in the Iron Mask, Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, When the Legends Die, and The Thief (to name just a few) are very good books
• On Walden Pond is a really hard book to read in which the author rambles about all kinds of things and makes no sense, and I'm not going to try to read it again till...later
• Apparently philosophers feel the need to make their philosophical discoveries really hard to read
• Despite what I may thing, indenting paragraphs is indeed important
• HTML is fun to learn and to use
• I can make cool websites by typing in weird codes that mostly make sense (sort of)
• Geometry is really, really boring
• It's really annoying to sit in front of people who sit and brag about how they're a senior and they failed this class last year, and they have to take it again so that they don't fail the proficiency test-again.
• Officer Dawson is nice, and he just took his tazer test
• When you get certified to use a tazer, you must get tazered yourself
• I like my teachers, Mrs. Nachiondo and Mr. Espinola
• Mrs. Knight is nice too, and she reminds me of my mom
• How to spell the word nonantidisestablishmentarianism
• And more...

But that'll have to wait till next time. So long readers!

Your ever-so-much-wiser-from-this-past-year's-lessons blogger,

Katy