Arches, Movies, Apples, Quince

(Finished on Sunday, but then wifi didn't want to work, then we just lost wifi altogether. I'm at the library today.)

Hey-o, world!

So, this is late- of course it is, did you expect anything different?- but for a different reason. CapSis came up for the weekend to go to the family reunion and a friend's wedding, and so I was hanging out with Sis (and taking a nap with her) for most of Sunday. That was really nice. (Ironically, I ended up going to neither event... which I'll explain later.)

Week 1:

We went to stay at CapSis's on Monday. When we arrived, we basically just hung out in their apartment (and ate at a restaurant in the area, which was decent besides how my and my sister's spaghetti tasted way too much like ketchup). Their place felt rather spacious (though that's partly because they don't have much inside the living room yet), and their kitty- remember me talking about their new cat, Princess Peanut-Butter Cup, a couple months ago?- seemed pretty happy there. I'm not sure specifically which kind of cat she is, since she's got long hair and colorpoint patterns (I'm now thinking maybe Ragdoll?), but she's definitely got Siamese in her because wow does she meow and demand attention a lot. I never thought I could get that easily annoyed with a cat until now; I'd be dreading having to live with her, honestly. She barely let me sleep that first night (well, not really any of us for a while, but I got the worst of it), since I was the one sleeping on their couch, while CapSis and my parents were in rooms with closed doors... She's very pretty, and it's kinda nice that she doesn't lash out at you when you give her affection, but I'd much prefer a cat like the one we're living with (Nutella's cat), who's a lot more like my old kitten Mittens (and my abuelita's old cat Gatuna, RIP); they don't like being picked up (and don't like laps, but instead lay down near/next to the human), prefer to wander and do their own thing most of the day, and only sometimes want attention. I'm definitely keeping this experience in mind when I adopt cats in the future...

Besides that, we did quite a bit of shopping at a Rue 21 that was closing nearby, and I also got to have a bit of fun playing a video game with Captain. At some point, he turned on his Xbox, and I hesitantly asked if he had any two-player games. He had Castle Crashers, which he'd played with his friends a looooooong time ago, so he pulled that out and we played it a few hours (of course, with my dad occasionally giving unsolicited commentary on the game or my weak gaming skills). He was definitely better at it than me, but we still managed to do okay as a team and get pretty far before we realized it was around one in the morning. This sucked, because we had to leave somewhat early the next morning to get to Moab at a good time. (And, like mentioned, I barely got any sleep anyway because of PPBC.)

Yep, that was the main point of the trip to their apartment in the first place. Sis had offered to take me to Arches National Park for my birthday, but I guess she and my parents decided to try going early in the summer instead (which I don't mind at all). The drive to the park wasn't that bad, since we played music and chatted the whole way up. The hike itself, though, was pretty rough on all of us... except Captain, of course, because he works out, that poohead. (He wanted to do crazier stuff, and actually climbed up to one spot on the mountain that was rather dangerous... My sis complained that he's not a mountain goat, so he should stop trying to be one.) It was a relief when we made it up to the Delicate Arch and could take a real break. CapSis and I carefully made our way down to take a picture beneath the arch, and I have to admit that was the scariest part, because you have to edge your way over on a pretty steep piece of rock, plus the wind was hitting us the hardest then... But we made it in one piece and took the pictures, then took a bit more break to rest and snack, and we did the trek back to the entrance.

That whole way back- both hike and drive- I was taking pictures with my phone to send to Carter. One reason was to show off the coolness of my home-state, as I occasionally like to do, but the other more important one that I didn't tell my family was that I thought it might offer inspiration to him for DoH. He's still got some worldbuilding to do for the story, after all, and I know he's trying for a wide variety of landscapes and cultures, just like we have in the real world. Some of what Utah has to offer is rather unique, so I thought having some of the more interesting rocks and cliffs to look at could give him ideas for settings and such. When I sent the majority of the pics to him later (by Drive, because by text would've just been torture), he seemed to appreciate the sentiment, and I hope my amateur photographing skills help him and the story (or anything else he writes in the future) somehow.

Driving from the park to the apartment was a little less pleasant, since we all felt tired and sweaty and covered in dust and thirsty/hungry as all heck (and I was also feeling kinda cold in the car, which didn't seem right). Stopping at Denny's soon certainly helped with being hungry, but half the car ended up asleep at some point after, the only sound being rock and grunge playing from Cap's phone via Bluetooth. When we got to the apartment to drop off CapSis and make sure we had all our stuff, my parents continued on driving back home with 80's music playing.

I'll skip now to Thursday, which began the saga of watching movies with Flower. On this day, I connected my laptop to the TV in her living room, and we put on Netflix. This time was The Giver and The Sixth Sense; I'd already seen both, but she hadn't seen them, so it was nice to watch them again and see her reactions to everything.

I also stayed up waaay too late in her living room because her family's absolutely adorable cat. (Have I even talked about Matty? He's bi-color orange and white with green eyes and he reminds me of Mittens and my mom has called him Azrael since we went to watch the most recent Smurfs movie.) For some reason, he suddenly got snuggly with me and my mom for a week or so starting that day, and since he'd never done that with me before, I felt somewhat obligated to stay as he slept against me on the couch. Though I was pretty content to read meanwhile, I was still somewhat blurry-eyed by the time I found my opportunity to get up and finally go to my proper bed. Nonetheless, no regrets! ...I think.

Starting on Friday, I said to myself, "You know what? You have waited way too long to venture back into FMA fanfics. Get your butt into the FFN archives now before this gets even worse." I literally spent hours- hours- scrolling through the archives and bookmarking stories that piqued my interest, and finally managed to make it into early December 2016, which was around the time I'd last been in the archives. I went through over 30 pages of titles, I believe. I still have tons of those to read, plus a bunch I'd marked for other fandoms on other occasions... Oh, whyyy??? (I think I'd feel better about having a bunch of bookmarked fics during the school year than Youtube videos in my Watch Later list, though, since I'm less likely to wander way off of the original page... So I'm still desperately hoping I'll get through at least most of my Watch Later by late August so that's not there to be quite as distracting. I'm also now thinking it'd probably be for the better to stop sending memes to Cap's brother when school starts, because that encourages me to spend more time in Youtube to find new memes! Memes are great, but they'll take away so much precious time at that point! They already took so much time, especially these past few weeks, since I was sending a lot more than the usual...)

Friday was also a ward activity... that my YW leaders decided to use for us to sell treats to raise money for FSY and other youth activities. The day previous, we'd had to make crepes (the batter did not turn out quite right...), chocolate-covered fruit (mostly apples), jello with fruit, etc. and everything was selling for a dollar. By the end of the night, we'd succeeded in getting about $150, I believe, which was honestly kinda a miracle (there were not very many people being generous- surprisingly, my dad was one of the only people who was giving extra money!). We ended up eating some of the remaining merchandise (I had 3 of the chocolate-covered apple pops and a brownie, and we brought home the rest of the crepes, which took a couple weeks to work through). It wasn't always that bad to be at the munchies table, but... it's still not really something I want to do again. (We're also going to be doing a yard sale this Saturday, so I guess I'll inform ya in a few weeks how that goes... Uuugh, I want to punch myself for getting so backlogged!)

The next day, my parents and I ended up going to a Chinese restaurant (the one I'd always associated with getting takeout from after plane trips), and then my dad and I watched The Fate of the Furious, which was quite cool.

Week 2:

I gave my first tithing! I'd gotten my first paycheck a few days before, so I could finally fill out a tithing slip. (I believe I also donated a similar amount to the Love Army for Somalia charity/campaign/whatever again a few days later. I know my parents warned us to be skeptical of charities outside the Church, but I really have a good feeling about these guys.)

Since it was Father's Day, we also went for dinner at my grandma and grandpa's place, which I spent the majority of hanging out with my cousins J and Yee again. (Yep, I'm giving in to the temptation of calling one of them by the "yee" meme from some months ago!) Once again, they were picky as poo, but I got to spend some time with both individually, which I was grateful for.

Also, I got my night somewhat ruined because Matty (like mentioned before, he was being much cuddlier than usual) decided to stay in my room. At first, I was a little excited, because my mom had never allowed our old cats sleep in our rooms, and he's just so cute! I figured out real fast, though, that having a cat on the bed (especially one that likes to be in the middle of the mattress and on top of the blankets) makes getting proper rest a whole lot harder... I slept about as much as when PPBC was meowing at me in the night just the week before. Ugh, I'm feeling tired just thinking about this again.

My dad started his new job the next day, which he seems to like (or at least not hate), fortunately. My mom and aunt also brought me along to buy some tickets for this show they'll be doing at the theatre my graduation ceremony was in with famous Mexican actresses. (I really doubt I'll do very good at understanding the show, since Mexican comedy tends to be a bit of a mystery to me, so I'm skipping out on it; my sis and a couple of their friends are going, though.)

I spent an hour or two looking through Gravity Falls fanart on my phone... and I don't even remember the original reason for how that ended up happening. Some of it is really good, whether cute or on the creepier side.

You know how it's nice to just hang out with one of your family members? I did that with my mom that night... Yeah, it's nice.

Wednesday, my mom and I went to my aunt's house to assemble this piece of furniture she'd apparently given her. (My parents had used it as a closet over the past few years, so we knew a heck of a lot better than her how it worked.) Besides that, she'd gotten us some pupusas, and I read for a while. At home, I hung out with Flower for a while.

I got a bit more done for the Adelin story mentioned earlier, and Carter took a gander at some of it. Apparently, he didn't like some of the sentence structure things I was trying out that were very much influenced by how some of the TAU writers write, so I guess I don't do it right. Otherwise, he seemed interested, though. I haven't really touched it much since then, though, so I'm wondering if I'll ever get more done for it...

I binged a bunch of this Tumblr blog called "Amity Park Texts" on Thursday, which is basically plausible texts between different Danny Phantom characters, whether something funny or serious (mostly serious). Some of the texts were based on an AU, headcanon, or ship that I was honestly a little uncomfortable with (who the heck came up with some of these?), but there were some others that... I had to admit sounded like they could really happen in canon. I mostly refer to ones about how Dash Baxter is actually abused by his dad, which is why he's a bully (and some related texts were of Dash suspecting Danny of being abused, too, because he'll randomly show up to school with injuries). Also, there was a pretty funny post from back when the "Dang, Daniel!" thing was spreading across the internet of characters texting that to Danny and he's about to scream at all of them from severe frustration.

The Young Women also ended up having a dance class with my mom after the usual Mutual, since we're supposedly all gonna start learning one or two dances to perform at the next Latin festival, which my ward's got planned for September. Since most of the girls had never done dancing with her, she'd just quickly taught some basic moves for different dances, and... it was a little cringe-worthy to watch the other girls. Whichever dance they end up doing, they're definitely gonna need quite a bit of practice... *sweatdrop*

This Friday was the quinceañera of one of my school/seminary friends at my last school, Diamond. (Well, more accurately, she was turning 16, while the girl she shared the party with was turning 15.) She looked super different all dolled-up, and her dress was really pretty! I ended up spending most of the night hanging out with some of her friends (who I got along with a little better than I expected), though when they opened up the dance-floor I also danced with one of my other school/seminary friends, who I'll call... Carl? He can be pretty dang hilarious sometimes, and it reflects in his dancing- so much so I burst out laughing when I first started to dance with him! Besides the usual dances (which, I'm glad to say, weren't painful to watch), the food was more on the Mediterranean side, and there was a Selena imitator singing while we ate. Overall, it was a fun party. (Oh, and for her present, I got her CTR butterfly earrings, just like the ones I own, and some gold glitter nail polish. I'm really hoping she likes both.)

The next morning was my second day of working at the catering place. We came in at 8, and this time I just ended up helping with preparing the food. I was gonna go to help serve the food, as well, but since I'd already worked about 8 hours, I apparently looked kinda pooped-out, and I was advised to clock out then. Though it would've been nice to make a little more money, I think that was for the better, because I really wasn't sure how long I'd last while catering. That night, my parents took me and Flower to watch The Boss Baby (man, I've watched 3 movies more than once at the theatre this year so far... not sure how to feel about that), and once back, Flower and I set up my Wii in her living room, as well, and played for a few hours. (It was Disney Universe, DJ Hero 2, Cooking Mama Cook-Off, and Wii Music, I believe. Some of those games you just don't ever remember just how un-fun they could be until you actually play them again... I'll always love DJ Hero and its sequel, though, despite how crazy it can sometimes get now that I've been playing at Extreme.)

Hm... since, once again, I got behind, and these next weeks aren't quite as filled with activity as some of the previous posts, I think I'll fit in some more!
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Week 3:

This next part probably would've been more appropriate to say last week, but I guess I'll do it now... On this Sunday, there had been a man speaking at church talking about how Independence Day was coming up, and how our Constitution was inspired by God, but now there's some people and situations that try to take away rights that we were granted through that document... and it just got me thinking a lot about Trump. Not just that, but Trump's election, which was honestly pretty hard on me. I was remembering how scared I was, then. I mean, I was terrified about how far things might go, how maybe something might end up happening to my mom- she came here legally, and is now an American citizen, but there could reach a point in which they try to kick her out anyway because she was born Mexican. Some of you might think I'm being ridiculous or paranoid, but have you seen what some of the Americans out there have been doing? For almost a year, now, we've heard about some heinous racist acts against people, Muslims and Latinos getting kicked out of the country- heck, they recently kicked out a family member of some people we know, when she has an 18-year-old son with severe disability to take care of here. Our president has done and plans to do a lot of stuff that's going to make our country go further and further down the toilet. How can I not fear that bad stuff could happen to my family or our friends? To everyone, including the people who think are safe from all of this?

I'm grateful that I managed to hide the fact that I was crying again, just like I had around the time of the election and inauguration, thinking about how I loved my mom too much to be proud of a country that might try to kick her out before Trump's first term is over.

At least I didn't ruminate on this the entire day, because it's not something I like to think about at all. Something funny that happened later that Sunday, actually, was that we'd gone to Elenita's house for dinner again, this time with Flower and her family, and at one point I was hanging out with Elenita and playing games with her on her Kindle. My dad was getting curious about the games, and I had him try a couple out. I don't remember the name of the first, but the second was Flow. I felt kinda proud of him as I watched him figure out the puzzles, because most of the time, he ended up solving them exactly the same way I'd been mentally solving them. When I mentioned that, I said, "Well, I guess the tree doesn't fall far from the apple." Like the other times I've surprised him with my dad jokes and wit, he facepalmed and laughed like he was trying to not be proud of me but was anyways.

Ooh, and something super awesome is that Carter posted the first chapter of DoH that day! He'd never put his writing online before, so it was something big for him. I know, at the moment, it hasn't caught much attention on the sites he used, but I'm really hoping it'll soon earn support outside of his circle of friends and he can gain feedback and confidence in his work!

My mom finally acted on her goal to start walking around the neighborhood daily starting the next day, like we used to, and I've gone with her most of the time. (More recently- at the time that I'm actually writing this- we've often been going with Flower when she's walking her dog.) I think it's been good to get out of the house and chat.

Tuesday, I filled out a couple applications to work at Smith's, which we live super close to. I knew it was pretty unlikely that I'd actually be accepted, seeing as it'd only be for the summer, but I wanted to be able to say that I at least tried. Along with the application itself, I also had to attach a resume and cover letter. I hadn't actually made an official resume, but I had made a hypothetical one for school, so I based it off of that. I have no idea if it actually looked okay, considering I didn't actually show it to anyone before I sent it in... but it's something, right? (Like I suspected, I got an email in return saying that they didn't want me for the job a few days later. I hope how I wrote my resume didn't have anything to do with it, and I was just unqualified in age or experience.)

Next day, I did some beta-ing for Carter and a girl from FFN who goes by BKS! She'd written a Spanish one-shot that I had bookmarked, and then reviewed because I liked it quite a bit. Since her AN had said something about offering to re-post her stories into English, I added in the review that I'd be very much willing to help with translating, and she took my offer! Well, she took it more as being her beta to help with her English instead opposed to translator, as she was now working on a one-shot that hadn't been in Spanish before. Of course, I love being a beta, so I've been gladly doing my job (and adding English grammar lessons, which I'm hoping she doesn't mind). Considering English is her second language, I think she's been doing a great job on her own, but am still very much happy to help.

Besides that, I also spent some of the day at the indoor pool with Flower (the same one I went to with Sir Hot Stuff a few weeks earlier- speaking of, he hasn't really talked to me for at least 2 weeks... I have a feeling he'd just wanted me for a girlfriend and was not willing to stay friends after all, THAT BUTTFACE!!!), which was really fun. We actually ended up doing a lot of singing together there, partly due to reminiscing about actors, shows/movies, and songs that used to be on Disney Channel.

I also finally finished the 5th season of Ninjago, like my little cousins berated me about when I was hanging out with them the previous week. It's the last season available on Netflix, and I found that there are two more seasons to watch now (ugh), so I'm hoping to get myself to watch those before school starts, too... Man, with Youtube, TV shows, reading, and writing that I want to do, I don't think I'm gonna get it all done in the summer... especially because sometimes I end up getting distracted by other stuff or hanging out with people.

Next day, I went with my mom to buy a lot more food than anticipated at three different stores... Then, in the afternoon, my mom somewhat randomly dropped off Elenita to hang out with me (I think she said there wasn't going to be anyone to stay with her at her own house). After a bit of indecision, we ended up just playing a bunch of internet games together. She showed me some .io games, I showed her Electricman, and we also did some Fireboy and Watergirl. The game we stayed on the longest, by far, was Poptropica! I went onto one of my more minor accounts on there and we played all the way through Mythology Island together, which neither of us had accomplished on our own. (As we went through, I could remember bits of a playthrough of this island I'd watched yeeeaaars ago when I was still trying to figure out how to do it, which was helpful.)

As said all the way at the beginning of this post, CapSis came for the weekend. They arrived on Friday, and my mom had cooked up some of the tons of food we'd bought on the previous day for them. (We ended up with fondue, esquites, and pan dulce; I didn't eat any fondue, though, because I just can't handle that stuff anymore.) Besides that, Flower and I pretty much spent the whole day on Netflix. We watched The Imitation Game, Moana (which we'd both already watched, but whateverrrrr), and most of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Alrighty, and now why I said I didn't go to either event: at some point in the week, Flower's mom told me that I was needed to work on Saturday, which is when both were happening. To be honest, I was not all that enthusiastic about going to the family reunion (very few family members I'm close to would be there) or the wedding (just not much into weddings), and it'd be less likely I'd be asked to come work again if I skipped out, so... yeah, I went.

Unlike the first time, this was actually a relatively small cater, which was coincidentally at a wedding. (A completely unrelated one, of course.) It was me, Flower, her mom, another girl, the boss, and two guys who were pulling pork off of the pigs, all serving less than 200 people. (To be fancy, the people who planned this wedding had ordered 2 whole pigs, which really was kinda impressive. Considering how the rest of the food we serve is rather casual, though... it didn't seem like a good fit for all the formal decorating within the venue.)

Us girls had to spend an hour at the beginning of the job putting out glasses to all the tables, then switching them out because there weren't enough of that kind, then being told to switch them out again. (I didn't know I could get so freakin' frustrated outside of school projects...) After that, it was mostly serving the pork and chicken, being busgirls, and helping to clean off all the dishware and tables when the party was nearing to a close.

This was much more like the weddings you see in pictures and movies... not just the venue, or how people dressed, but the fact that there was tons of alcohol. (I couldn't smell it, because my nose just isn't very good, but Flower said that she was having a hard time with the stench everywhere.) The bartender and barista on duty had started to run out of glasses, which should provide pretty good evidence (which isn't including all the water, lemonade, and bottles of beer consumed without the use of extra glasses). (Both were really nice, and actually offered some drinks to us, as well- non-alcoholic ones, of course. I took a bit of orange juice and sparkling cider from them during some slower parts of the evening.) It was fun to see how almost everybody there moved to the dance-floor once it opened up, considering it was mostly white people, but I suspect all of them being drunk had something to do with it. (I couldn't help but dance and sing a little while working.)

Something that made me rage a little, though, was that... I mean, I hadn't seen the cakes in their entirety, but us busgirls snuck away our own pieces once all the guests had gotten their fill, and I saw they were decorated with football teams. You don't do that for your wedding, especially if it's supposed to be a really nice, formal one! (Let's be honest: the food and behavior of attendees did not match the beautiful venue.) (It was really good cake, though; they had four kinds- chocolate with caramel, vanilla with strawberry, red velvet, and carrot cake. Flower and I got pieces of the carrot cake, and her mom got chocolate.)

I don't quite remember which day it started, but I started thinking of doing an FMA one-shot based on the song "Bohemian Rhapsody"... Its plot started looking like a Tortured!Ed fic, which I'm really not sure what to feel about. Guess we'll see if it ends up in that direction, after all.

Okay, that's everything for these weeks, I believe. Nice, Me! *high-fives self* I seriously, seriously need to get completely caught up to the present next week. Until then, hope the past wasn't terribly boring!