Homecoming

Hello world!

My dad was on the computer last Sunday literally the entire day.

So, two weeks to cover, and one of them was more eventful than usual. Oh boy.

Sunday: As I mentioned before, the song "Glorious" by Russ Dixon is good. Also, "Look Up" by Taylor Olsen is good. I downloaded them onto my phone, and I already have both memorized, pretty much. (That's what I do when I really like a song nowadays.)

Monday: Homecoming Week commences! For Pajama Day, I wore my Batman pajama pants with a dark blue T-shirt and black Toms/Bobs/whatever knockoffs. A lot of people at school wore onesies, though. (I would've done the same, but the only one I have stopped fitting one or two years ago. *sweat drop*)

Tuesday: USA Day. Ironically, it was also Mexican Independence Day. Since the grades were competing to see which grade would have more people that dressed up, I wore red, white, and blue. (Tastefully, might I add.) I was not that surprised to see so many Southern folk have so many clothes with the flag pattern. One guy even had an American flag towel tied around his neck like a cape.

Wednesday: Fresh Prince 90's Day, perhaps the funnest of all. I borrowed a pair of my sister's pants that have a really colorful Indian pattern on them with a striped shirt layered over a navy blue shirt, Converse, and my Spongebob snapback to top it off. Plenty of people wore 90's stuff, but I really only saw, like, 2 or 3 people that did Fresh Prince 90's besides me.

Okay, and guess what they had for the last hour of school?

A beauty pageant.

A beauty pageant where guys dress up as girls.

It was pretty dang hilarious. SO worth $3.

Thursday: Class Day. Every grade had a different theme. Freshmen were twins, Sophomores had fake injuries, Juniors were babies, and Seniors were senior citizens. Some people really took this seriously, which made me happy. Since I'm currently a sophomore (aw dang, I'm OLD!) I had a bandage around my head and a knee brace thingy from when my sister needed to use those.

That day, I found out that my gay friend (still need to come up with a clever name) was a little into special effects makeup! During first period, he was using silicone and paint and all of that to make some gnarly stitches and stuff for his best friend. (*tear* I have been dropped to "friend" instead of "best friend"!) He had also made a funny little fake mustache the day before, but I had not realized that he actually had equipment for special effects makeup.

Friday: School Spirit Day, the day of the Homecoming game and dance. All the grades dressed in different colors (my grade was white). The whole school day was very tiresome.

We all reported to our first period for role call, and then about half an hour(?) later everyone filed into the gym and went into the bleachers separated by grade. There was something called the Class Olympics, where kids signed up to represent their grades in some short competitions. I didn't know very many sophomores that were playing, but I still rooted them on like there was no tomorrow. (I also secretly rooted for the freshmen since I have some friends in 9th grade, but I wasn't supposed to.)

By then, it was 5th period (yes, we were there for hours), which is also lunch. We did nothing there. After that, we went to 6th for role call again, and then we all went to the gym (again) and the auditorium, half the school in one and half in the other. In the gym, we watched what I guess was the school news, since there were student reporters and stuff in the video. In the auditorium, we played Family Feud, one grade pitched against the other. It was freshmen against sophomores, and I have to say... some of the people that went up are kinda stupid, especially on the freshmen side. They often repeated answers or said answers that do not answer the question, repeated the same answers that do not answer the question... The room was so filled with frustration.

Finally, at the end of all this, we all went into the gym (AGAIN) and had a pep rally.

Saturday: We brought our friend from the sock hop (I'll call her Kay, which is her middle name) to the Spanish branch party, along with a guy the missionaries asked us to bring. (He is a very recent convert.) While it was pretty slow at first, it eventually got to the dancing and was a blast. There was even a clown there, which did some stuff for the kids (most of it I participated in *nervous chuckle*), and then was making balloon animals and stuff for all of them until the end of the party. Kay and I had eventually gone over to get us some balloon swords! When I held both of those red swords, I kind of felt like Kirito from SAO. *dramatic fighting pose* Kay told me that she wants to keep coming to the parties with us, which is cool. (She learned how to Latin dance super fast, unlike some other Gringos. That made me happy.)

Now, for this week (which luckily is not as much)!

In Career Prep, we had to make All About Me Powerpoints (like that hasn't been done before), but the teacher let us choose whether we would present to the class or not. I thought I would probably not do it, but I saw that not many people were volunteering. Plus, I realized it was possibly an opportunity to make new friends, or just for people to know me better since I don't talk much. Once I saw one of my friends go up (turns out she speaks a little German!), I decided to just kick my own butt up to presenting. I heard a few people comment that they didn't know I speak Spanish and wanted help with Spanish and blahblahblah after I did the presentation. Although I doubt most of it was really all that interesting and memorable (maybe people will remember the long list of towns and schools I've gone to...), I liked that people now knew me a bit better, at least those in that class.

On Friday, I finally finished the Fullmetal Alchemist manga series for the 2nd time! *whooooooooooo* I also watched some more episodes of Pandora Hearts. I am so glad I decided to watch it! It's pretty intense and awesome!

My family went to the temple for the first time in Alabama! (Yeah, I know, we should've visited already! Shutyofaceeeeeee) It is so tiny! It's the same size as the chapel right next to it! We went with the Spanish Branch. We came back home super late, so I didn't have the time or the energy to shower to get all the chlorine and stuff off me.

On Saturday, I Skyped with Broranges for a little over half an hour (so I could take the shower), then went to Kay's house. I was there for about 5 hours. (Dang, me!) While there, we watched some of the first season of Glee and ate Chef Boyardee Beefaroni (I think the ravioli is better *cough*). Then, when her dad came back from the store, we tried to make cream puffs. Apparently, she had already made them before, but she accidentally got a different recipe this time. The puff itself came out perfect, but I accidentally burned the cream in the middle, so it looked gross. It still tasted okay (at least for me and some of her family members), but if I had not burned it, the cream puffs would've looked and tasted so much better.

After that was the General Women's Meeting that happens a week before General Conference. (♪It's that time of year again...♪) This time, almost everything they were talking about involved the temple! (Thank goodness we went the day before, cuz otherwise we all would've felt so guilty during it...)

I can't wait for General Conference to start! I always love the talks with the familiar faces! (Monson and Uchtdorf are probably my favorites.)

Listening to Music

Hello world!

I've never been big on LDS  (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) music, but today, after Young Women (I think I forgot to mention before that we are now in a very tiny Spanish branch. It feels more like home than the English wards.), we were given a CD with some. I love a lot of the hymns and stuff, but the rest of the songs they record... It's mainly contemporary, which is not really my thing. It's pretty, but it all sounds the same. There were a couple songs on it that I liked, though, so right now I'm listening to music on LDS Youth to see if there's any more that I like. So far, I've found "Glorious" sung by Russ Dixon is good, at least to me. ...I'm pickier in music than I thought...

I'm thinking that, maybe, I can find some good songs and share them with my friend... I'll call her Blondie. Blondie (who has naturally very light blond hair) is a Baptist, and she is enthusiastically Christian. One of the first things she told me when we first met was that she'd love to be a Christian singer when she grows up. She's a huge fan of religious songs, like a lot of people in the South, but she probably doesn't know that there are Mormon songs too. I didn't know until I became a Young Woman. It could be that the best way to introduce her to this church is through music... I just need to find songs I like more and figure out how to download them onto my phone for free or something.

Yesterday, there was a stake sock-hop for the youth, and my sister and I went with a girl in the English ward, which we do Online Seminary with. (Oh jeez, there's more stuff I haven't talked about than I thought.) My sister has a lot of vintage-style clothes, and so she found this as an opportunity to use her vintage-style dresses. We both dressed in 50's style dresses (we didn't win the 50's contest because we didn't have poodle skirts, but we definitely looked from the same period as the other girls that bothered to do costume) and she did our hair in vintage curls. She attempted victory rolls (that's what it's called, right?) in my hair, but my hair is so long, thick, and heavy, it took about an hour just for the 2 she made in the front. They made my hair at least 3 inches taller than it usually is. With such huge hair, I seriously felt like a cartoon character. That was kinda awesome.

The prob, Bob, was that they didn't play enough 50's music at the dance! Most of the songs were modern, but the kind that you can't dance to! What the heck?!

Afterwards, my parents took us (this is including our friend) to Steak-and-Shake, making it ironic that we were dressed 50's style, where we ate some late dinner and then went home to shower and go to bed.

Next Saturday, there's gonna be a dance for all the Spanish branches in our area. This friend might be going to it with us, since Latin parties are so much funner and she didn't get the chance to dance much at the gringo dance. (I mean, they didn't even 'jump up and down' dance like the kids in Utah do!)

Also, this week is Homecoming Week, in which they have everyone dress up as different things every day and have events and stuff. (It's like a more extreme Spirit Week, I guess.) I will tell about everything that happens next Sunday, if all goes according to plan.

Things haven't really done according to plan lately, after-school-wise. I mean, last week, I did the posts on Wednesday. I have been getting less chances to get one the computer because my dad uses it! I only get the computer for Online Seminary, and besides that, I usually can't do much because he'd want it back as soon as possible. This sucks butts, man! I keep wanting to get on, but he is a fanatic for downloading a gazillion of things, so if you get out of his account or something, it will probably cancel all of that and he'll get mad at me and I just wish he'd buy his own laptop before he yells at me for just trying to do something that's important to me like writing stories and replying to e-mails and stuff! (English learners: note that that wasn't a very proper sentence, so don't copy me.) Is he gonna force me to do everything through my phone from now on? I like my phone and stuff, but I prefer laptop over touch-screen. Y U DO DIS, DAD?

...I'm done with my dad rant.

My sister decided she would start learning a bit of ASL (American Sign Language), so both of us are watching Signing Time. They are really cute videos made by my dad's distant cousin for little kids. The way the videos are made, it is really easy to learn signs. So go watch them! They're now on Netflix!

Last thing! I finished reading Scott Pilgrim!

K bai!

Daddy-Daughter Band

Hello world!

Part 2!

Aight, I got stuff to say!~

I'll start with this Sunday. I Skyped with Broranges for an hour or two. He wanted to Skype so that he could tell me about an idea he had for a manga series. It would be very tiring to write the entire plot to you, so I'll just say that it was something kinda in-between Sword Art Online and Psyren. It could be really cool, but I don't know if it would be original enough to sell.

He also gave me the username and password for his family's Hulu account, because there is a lot of anime on the site, but we don't have Hulu. I protested that I didn't want to use it, but he insisted. I gave in, and went on yesterday to see what there is.

Oh my gosh! SO MUCH ANIME! The list just went on and on! I never got to the end! Mainly because I settled on watching Pandora Hearts, since I've heard about it and was interested. It's cool, but I'm just so confused at the same time. I hope they make more sense of it over time...

Also, I tried copying one of my favorite drawings of Ed in the manga. It's a little off (like, he's supposed to be looking up more than directly forward), but in general, it's a good copy. The bottom left of the pic was covered by a speech bubble, so I guessed. *sweat drop* The shoulder should probably be wider, but oh well.

Sorry about the shadow at the bottom; it's pretty hard to take pictures with my phone without the shadow without ruining the quality of the picture itself.

I also wanted to draw my outfit from the day before, since I just felt so awesome. It somehow kept going more and more diagonal as I was drawing it...

My orange Kool-Aid shirt. *nod* ...It looks better in person.

My hair is bumped up like that because I put it in pigtails. Just to mix it up, I put them directly behind my ears instead of below them, and my hair suddenly looked even bigger! I just left two short pieces of hair in front of my ears, as shown. Also, later in the day, a little piece of hair near the part stuck out a lot, and I suddenly looked like I had some kind of anime hair! More reason to commemorate the outfit.

Yesterday, I played an instrument with someone else for the first time! My dad!

My dad can play lots of different instruments (at least a dozen or two), but his favorite is bass. As you should already know, I play drums. When I was about 5 minutes into my drums practice yesterday, my dad opened the door and walked in with his bass, and said that he wanted to try to play together.

Once he got his bass hooked up to an amp, we tried to play some Green Day songs together. (He did really well, considering a lot of those songs he had not attempted before.) After that, he told me to do simple beats as he played the bass for an iconic song, and we both sang. It was so fun!

I personally do not remember hearing my dad perform, although he was part of bands when I was really little. He tends to play while watching TV, but without the amp, so I didn't know how it would sound like with an amp. (I know what bass sounds, like, duh! I just had never heard my dad play electric bass). It was really cool to finally hear him doing what he does best. And he is quite good at what he does best.

I still was a big worrywart (ew, gross) while playing, because the only part I focused on before in Green Day songs was the drums, so I didn't really know what bass sounded like. And, as mentioned before, I have never played with someone else for anything. I messed up a few times because of my nervousness, but he kept saying that I was doing just fine.

Now I want to get even better at drums and know more songs (and know better what the other instruments in the songs are doing) so that jam session can go smoother and we will be awesomer together!

I Am Yaretzi (Hernán Cortés Project)

Hello world!

I know, I know, I haven't posted in much too long. I keep TRYING, but my dad has been using the computer all the time. It wasn't that bad when he did everything on his OWN laptop, but it died, so now he's using OURS. Already, it's slower and needs to be restarted more often. I really hope he can buy one for himself and transfer everything from his account on it or something so that this one still lives.

Since I have more to say than usual, I will separate this into two posts.

I had to do two history projects, as I think I mentioned before. They were both for Hernán Cortés, but they were pretty different. I particularly like something I wrote for one of them from the perspective of an Aztec. (Yay historical fiction!) I shall post it below, with definitions/explanations/translations after it, since I'm guessing some stuff will be confusing otherwise.

~~~

I am Yaretzi. I am a young daughter from the city of Tenochtitlán. The Mexica Empire was once very large and powerful, but it has been brought down by a white man. I have seen many friends and family die and houses crumble. I am currently hiding from the conflict, watching what goes on from a distance.

It began a few years ago when my mother and father told me and my siblings to come with them to the procession. We stood in the audience as the tlatoani greeted the visitors. I was shocked by their appearance, with their light skin and bright, shiny clothing. Most of them wore metal hats atop their heads. They nearly glowed.

There is a story I had been taught when I was little. It told that someday Quetzalcóatl, who is described to be tall, light-skinned, and bearded, was to return to our land in the year of Ce Acatl. We had been waiting during Ce Acatl for him, and he came.

The leader, the one thought to be Quetzalcóatl, spoke in a strange language, which was interpreted by one man into a different language, and then a woman interpreted that and translated to Náhuatl. I was not close enough to hear what was exchanged, but everyone knew they called themselves Españoles.

For a little while, the Españoles staying in the city were nothing more than a nuisance. A few wandered around town at times, while most stayed near their leader, who was usually with Huey Tlatoani. Moctezuma II, the tlatoani of the time, was seen giving lavish gifts to the white man. I knew this was true when I noticed that all of the Españoles on the streets gradually had added jewelry and fine clothing to their wardrobe.

In the middle of one of our festivals, a fight broke out, in which Moctezuma was killed. I do not know whether it was by Mexicas or Españoles, although the latter seems more likely. Following the event, my father joined many others in pushing the Españoles out of our city. There were many casualties on their side. By then, I believe most of us knew that it was not Quetzalcóatl.

We went on with our lives.

The fake god returned about a year later. He was now determined to take over our Empire. What happened between that day and now is a blur. We are warriors, but the fighting had always occurred in other places, not in Tenochtitlán, until then. There were battles that cost the lives of so many people. My father left to face the Españoles again, but did not come back. Then my brothers left to fight. My mother warned me and my sisters to try to find safety as quickly as possible, which I complied to. Along the way to my hiding place, I saw many of my neighbors in struggles, and my friends in danger.

From the safety of where I currently am, I have seen my fellow Mexicas come into the city with their mighty weapons, then leave tied in ropes as slaves. I feel sad, knowing that there is nothing I can do to help anyone.

I understand little of their language, but I have heard a few of the light-skinned men refer to the land as Nueva España, and our city as Ciudad de México. They have already toppled some of the buildings to put new ones in their place. They are destroying our gods and putting their own instead. They may spread their ideas as they please if it is peacefully, but I believe forcing this upon us is wrong.

I hope that, at the end of all of this, the gods will save us and everything will be alright.

I am Yaretzi. I am a young daughter from the city of Tenochtitlán. The Mexica Empire was once very large and powerful, but it has been brought down by a white man.

~~~

Yaretzi: My mom was the one to help me with the concept for this. We started with looking up names that come from Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs. This is a girl name.

Tenochtitlán: This is the center of the Aztec Empire. Notice that the accent is at the very end, not on the 'i'.

Mexica: This is what the Aztecs were really called. 'Aztec' came many more years later, not sure from where.

tlatoani: The closest translation for this word would be governor of the empire.

Quetzalcóatl: This is one of the most important Aztec gods, so you can understand why they pretty much worshiped Cortés until they figured out he was just a horrible, greedy guy. (I'm totally not biased.)

Ce Acatl: Go look up the Aztec Calendar.

The interpreters: Cortés picked up two interpreters before he went to Tenochtitlán. The first was a Spanish ex-priest who learned the Chontal Maya language. The second was a woman known as La Malinche who grew up speaking Chontal Maya, then learned Náhuatl. Through these two, the Spanish could speak with the tlatoani.

Españoles: Spaniards

Huey Tlatoani: This is how they called the tlatoani. I guess it's kinda the equivalent of "Mr. President".

Moctezuma II: He treated Cortés like a god, since he believed that he really was one. He didn't just 'give' everything, though; the Spanish stole a lot of the Aztec treasury, too.

Moctezuma: Some accounts say that he was killed by a rock to the head thrown by one of his own people, but we can't be totally sure.

Noche Triste: This is what the night in which many Spanish were killed is called. It is in the same night as when Moctezuma was killed.

Nueva España: Cortés declared the Aztec Empire for Spain, and so Mexico was now under Spanish rule. Naturally, it was named this. Cortés was the one to name Ciudad de Mexico, or Mexico City. He was governor of New Spain for about 4 years.

Ruins: If you go to Mexico City, you may be able to find the ruins of Tenochtitlán. There is very, very little; just chunks of walls, basically. I saw them a few years ago myself. It was very depressing to see.