I did something absolutely insane this year, and that was to ask a guy. I asked Tommy, in what was probably the nerdiest and craziest way I could come up with. He got a baseball with x-values written on it, a llama stuffed animal with anempty message attached (like hangman), a cake with the function xsinx written on it, and a frisbee which corresponded the y values to letters. Following me? Then at the end of Calc 3, I came in with a single sunflower and asked him for realz. It was pretty fun!

Homecoming was essentially the bane of my existence for a while… I accumulated homework and studying that I needed to do but wasn’t because I was planning for homecoming. I think my grades have survived, but I probably won’t know until I take a bio test tomorrow morning that I have been putting of the reading for until tonight (still on chapter 55). In any case, some highlights:

Zach put on an AMAZING assembly, full of hilarious games and other fun things. Zach and I were royalty nominees together, and we went around waving our rejuvenated FHS flag and hip checking each other. We didn’t win (Zac and Emily! HAHA), but it was still pretty fun.

While decorating for the dance, I spent the entire morning (like 5 hours) on a cherry picker, duct taping paper vines to the ceiling of the student center. It was basically terrifying but extremely fun!

And then of course the actual dance. Andrew and Tommy and Dylan made this beautiful candlelit picnic for us at the reserve on top of Arapahoe road. It was good food (brie and jam!) and just so romantic and fun! It was quiet and not too too cold, and peaceful. It was essentially awesome. The dance went by so quickly too! We arrived and the next thing we knew, it was 15 minutes until the end. We never even stopped for water. Good songs, and good friends the whole time. Plus the decorations stayed up! Afterwards we went bowling at the UMC and then watched Stardust at Andrew’s house. All in all, a pretty fantastic night.

Okay, first a few fantastic photographs, and then I will update with some individual stories about some excellent things that have happened (and perhaps a few non-excellent ones).

Sarah and I were hanging out after school during the big Fourmile Canyon fire. That part was devastating, as at this point Sarah still did not know whether her house would be safe or not (it was, thank god). I was in the middle of a huge gift card drive for Fourmile victims (we raised over $2,000 in a few days for them, and gave them to the president of the homeowner’s association to distribute. Very successful and heartwarming. Plus, my counsellor, Mrs. Lee, and I bonded quite a bit).

We eventually went and got ice cream, but before that we chilled in the senior lot on this couch that someone had placed there. It has since disappeared, but it was kind of cool while it lasted (and it smelled a bit of alcohol, which was not cool). Here is Sarah on that afternoon, looking classy and comfortable.

This next photo is a tile that I made as a 5th grader at Heatherwood Elementary. I was hanging out with Kira, a best friend who I have known since elementary school. We were walking around and I saw the tiles. They look pretty ridiculous! Mine has this huge bump in the head, as you can see. I thought the yellow paint would cover it but apparently not!

This morning I was interviewed by Denise Plante on Colorado and Company! It showed on Channel 9 at 10:00 am. It was truly a fun experience! And I think I made some valuable contacts for the YIG program!

I kicked off this week by ditching school on Monday to spend my day at the Cleo Robinson Dance Theater in downtown Denver. It was for a CHSAA symposium that was ultimately useless and even painful. It was Zach, Kevin, Carlee, Matt, Matt, Grace, Ellie, Ryan and me, hanging out in Denver at what was essentially a meeting of the Regis fan boys club. It was awful. They were like… “Why don’t the Regis Rowdies just come up here and tell us about their student section.” And other ridiculousness. They also played some pretty painful clips from the FHS/Regis state championship last year. That was REALLY awful and sad. The five minutes we actually did spend talking about the CHSAA student section rules were useless–basically they said that their rules were arbitrary (“we were deciding what was in, what was out, and we had to draw the line somewhere,”), and that they wouldn’t even enforce them. And that we are not allowed to bring cowboys to the game. Haha. Well we had some good group bonding time there, basically bashing everything during lunch. I don’t have any pictures, but that was a good event.

Wednesday I had lots of tests, so that wasn’t quite so fun. But Mrs. Lee and I have been bonding over our Gift Card drive for those affected by the Fire  and I feel so good about what we’ve been doing.

Thursday was fun. The senior photo happened. And then some other things. Thursday night was the best and is the above featured photo. Soccer practice and a football game. Unfortunately the Knights did not do so well, but it was fun to be there with everyone.

This week has been crazy, and really it all started Monday. Around 10:30 am I was doing homework in the living room and noticed that it looked weird and orange outside. I went out, took some pictures of the strange orange cloud, and eventually realized that it was smoke. And that there was a lot of smoke. A fire had explosively started in Emerson Gulch up Fourmile Canyon near Boulder. Six hours later, flames burned through parts of Gold Hill, Sunshine Canyon and neared the ridge to Boulder proper. And the Boulder County fire department had run out of resources to fight it.

By Thursday, 169 homes had burned, making it worse even than the Hayman fire a couple of years ago. Colorado Mountain Ranch alone lost 35 buildings (including the family home), and several people I know either knew their house was gone, or that their house was pretty close. Even more people had been evacuated and were without clothing and school stuff. It was devastating.

In any case, on that first monday I climbed the hill behind my house and took some pictures of the plume. Smoke streched right over my house, raining ash. Some of the pictures I took are posted here.

We just put these new windows in our living room. This summer I stayed up all night once watching the West Wing (I was trying to gather inspiration for my college essays) and watched the sun disappear from these east facing windows, and then rise in the morning. It was absolutely beautiful!

They have really changed the character of our house. As I’m sure the new wood floors we are putting in soon will as well!

Just another YNP photo. I just got these off of my phone so expect more soon.

We were bored. We didn’t know what to do. So naturally we went to my house, and made a cake. It started off like any cake-making operation. We mixed the batter, poured it into pans and baked the cakes. All while watching Fight Club, which we had never seen before and were surprised when the first half hour just included Brad Pitt and this other guy whose head we were inside of hanging out in a filthy house with Helena Bonham Carter, who we all immediately disliked because she plays Bellatrix in Harry Potter. It was seriously half an hour before any actual fighting took place, and at that point we were really distracted by the cake. (Some notes though: that scene with the acid on the hand looks SO PAINFUL. LIKE OMG. It was bad to even watch. And then lots of stuff blows up later and Brad “Tyler” Pitt disappears for a while before returning to shoot the main character. That is basically all I got from what I saw of the movie.)

In any case, we (Sarah, Ian, Lindsey, me and later Emma) started making our cake. We had two small Devil’s Food cakes, and one large Yellow Cake. Lindsay suggested that we make presents as our cake design because it was my parents wedding anniversary. So we did.

We also had a fondant adventure. I melted some marshmellows and mixed like our entire store of powdered sugar into it. We later started using flour because we were running out of powdered sugar. I have some really really amusing pictures of Sarah and I “kneading” the fondant like the directions told us too. It was less kneading and more squishing and trying to get it off our hands. The sticky marshmellow mixture was ridiculously sweet and took forever to start drying out. A picture of this adventure is at the bottom.

We made fun of New Jersey accents and that guy on Cake Boss who is really mean to his employees. Then we started throwing fondant at each other and trying to flatten it pizza dough style.

Part of the yellow cake didn’t bake. Like literally there was this one square in the middle of the cake that did not bake. So we cut it out and used the rest of the cake as our base for the presents. We put everything together in the organization that we wanted. Then we tried to frost. It was a little bit of a disaster. The frosting wasn’t sticking to some parts of the cake, and it had crumbs all over. This was probably because we didn’t freeze the cakes first, but whatever. We’re experimenting. Ian made some fondant bows and we put it on top.

Eventually Emma, who is a legit cake baker-maker, showed up and started insulting our cake. So I threw some fondant at her and it kind of started a mini-war. In any case, she eventually added some colored frosting to our cake.

After it was done, the cake was basically a little… quirky. That’s why we’re calling our cake business “Cakes with Character.”

Fondant:

Future staff of the best cake bakery ever:

I have now spent three seasons on this team. We are the U18 Force Buffs (formerly Red) and it is amazing to think about how far we have come since Freshman year. I know that my personal improvement in skills and intensity on the field has been huge. I’m so lucky to play we these awesome girls!

This was before our first game. Not everyone is there.

Scope: Keely, Sarah, Melissa and Katie. Hahaha.

Also in the upper right hand corner is the one player we all want to defeat. The team we played is like a vendetta for us.

Before our first soccer game last weekend, we were watching this air show go on a few miles away. It was pretty amazing! It was pretty neat and amazing!