Awesome Youth Activity...

Last night we had our wednesday night church youth activity. But this time it was a tri-ward (three wards participating) activity, and the theme was Willy Wonka (cue annoying theme song used for 2005 remake, starring Johnny Depp: "Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka...").

I wasn't really expecting to do anything that night except eat the desserts everyone brought. The night started off with "Violet's Bubble-blowing contest"...

...which I couldn't participate in for three reasons: 1. I can't chew gum unless it's sugarfree, which "Hubba Bubba" was not; 2. My teeth were too sore from the new wire I got earlier yesterday; and 3. I can't blow bubbles.

Next up was "Augustus Gloop's Pudding-Pie-Eating Contest"...

... which I wasn't going to do originally because I'm not up for eating with no hands. But I thought about the memories it would make, so I sucked it up and did it anyway. I got dead last, but I didn't care... besides, there was an extra "pie", so I got to grab a spoon and eat that, too.

Next up, the classic "egg-carrying" race...

... only it was a chocolate "Wonka" egg. I made it across the room without dropping it, and our team won. So, another success.

Finally, the "OOMPA-LOOMPA DANCE OFF"!!!

(sorry to those who would've probably liked the classic "green-and-orange" ones more, I'm just keeping a theme going here with the remake...)

All 6 teams participated in one way or another: either solo, duet, or the whole group together. The team I was on (#3) sent me out solo, and I did a completely improvised breakdance, including spinning around on the floor, getting up on one hand, doing the macarena at light speed (never saw that one coming, huh?), and... losing my shoe.

Oh, and on top of all that, I got up on stage and told the following joke (take this as a "Thursday Funny"):

A guy walks into a bar and sees some blonde guys sitting around a table with a puzzle in front of them, and they're all shouting "6 WEEKS! 6 WEEKS!" to each other. The guy wonders what they're up to, so he asks the bartender, who says he's not sure either.

So the guy goes up to them and says, "Hey, guys, what's going on here?". One of the guys pipes up and says, "Well, you see, we finished this puzzle in 6 WEEKS, and the box said "5 to 7 years"!.

Believe me, it took everyone else a second too, but I think they all laughed when it hit them.

So, what I expected to be just another activity ended up being the best fun I've had at a church activity for a while.

TAFN (that's all for now).

NO MORE METALMOUTH!!!

Note: I know there's a lot of people out there who've had braces for a longer time than me, so I'm overexagerrating a little bit, but this is just my view on it.

September 14, 2006 was a big day for me. It was the day I got my braces. Looking back on a post Dad put on his blog, I was pretty excited about it, talking about how much easier it would be to get a girlfriend, and that they were my "back to school" present! Oh, and my picture was pretty cute, too:

That was about 2.5 years ago. I was 13.

I went through the rest of middle school with them, and then into high school with them as well. I kept getting encouraged with comments like: "When you get those braces off, your teeth will be PERFECT", and "They're coming off soon!".

Last August was supposed to be my last month of braces, and I'd be headin' to Foss High brace-free. Well, instead, they said it'd be another year or so at first (it's been reduced a bit), and I was bummed. I mean, no Skittles, no Air Heads, no Laffy Taffy, no GUM??? (Actually, we dropped that last one: I'm still chewing gum today).

Hearing I have an orthodontist appointment tomorrow always gets me nervous. They usually put on a new wire that's THICKER than the last, often resulting in soreness for a few days, to the point that I sometimes eat something different than the rest of the family. It's the pits.

But, I can't complain too much, as my siblings all have 'em now too, and Kaylee will have hers for 6 YEARS, including headgear. That alone makes me question why I'm even writing about MY problems with braces. If this 2.5 years was tough for me (WITHOUT headgear), then it's gonna be a heck of a time for Kaylee, especially because she's 12, and in 6 years, she'll be graduating from high school, and she may even still have those darn torture-devices on then! Man...

Good luck, Kaylee! Andrew Brinkerhoff signing off.

More About Music at School

As a continuation of my last post, I'm going to talk a little more about the kinda stuff most of the kids at my school play for themselves.

In 3rd period, Auto Maintenance, I had an assignment that required the computer. So I went and grabbed a mouse out of the classroom closet and plugged it in, then turned it on.

Just as I was doing this, another student came up and sat down at the computer next to mine. Students usually have free access to music and stuff in Mr. Miller's class (I never do this), so the guy just turned on his playlist. Boy, was I in for a time...

I used to think I was sorta taking someone else's opinion on the music the other guys (most of, remember Rick Astley?) listen to at school, and that it might have been unfair to judge right away. But this music changed my mind. That music was probably the stupidest, most idiotic junk I've heard in my entire life.

One song, basically, starts with another guy announcing "The Joker" (apparently the guy rapping) and how he got "da lyrics" and "you betta lissen to it". Then we get to hear his so-called lyrics, which go on about the usual: girls, violence, and so on.

Strangely enough, at the beginning of another song, the rapper announced: "Now I don't want this to offend nobody, so if you are easily offended, you might wanna turn this off" (wise words). Then he says: "Now that we got rid of that nonsense, let's...".

(People actually listen to this???)

Now when it comes to Mr. Miller, he goes two ways: one, when we're doing a "shop" assignment, he actually helps and gives us demonstrations and everything. But when we're doing a bookwork assignment, he sits back and let's us use the computers.

I don't see this as a totally bad thing; I just wish he would block off the music sites first...

That's all I have for today...

Music at School

So, at Foss, we have a new radio station of our own. But, don't get the wrong idea, we're not playing nasty, violent music that most guys at my school listen to on their MP3s...

Instead, we had music from the 60's and 70's. No kidding. One song that came on this morning in 1st period was "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night (you know, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog... he was a good friend of mine"?).

So that was interesting, but while I walking to 5th period from lunch, I held the door open for people coming through, and one guy who walked past had his MP3 on, with the volume up really high.

Now, the whole thing about the kind of junk most guys at school listen to, like Fitty-Cent and Johnny D? Well, believe it or not, this guy was listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." You know, this one?:

Some guys who were walking on past him said, "Yo, what's that dude listening to?". I couldn't help saying out loud, "That was Rick Astley, man!".

5 bucks he didn't understand a word I said there, except maybe "man"...

That's all for today!

My Brain Hurts...

Now, I hear a lot of crap about the WASL, but I never got what all the fuss was about. I'd made it through the Reading, Writing, and Math WASLs without too much trouble, but today (and now tomorrow), I took the Science WASL.

Well, it was difficult.

Biggest understatement of the century. I was pretty much in H-E-double-bendy-lines for the whole nearly-3-hours I spent in that classroom. The hardest problems were the ones where they tell you "Write a procedure", and give you a big space to write in. That's it.

By the time I walked out of there at 10:20, this is pretty much what I felt like:

I actually felt TIRED after that test. I'm really nervous about tomorrow, too.

brrrrrrrrrrr...

@#&%*?!!

I've heard this is pretty common in any school nowadays, but at Foss High, one of the big things everyone does is SWEAR. It's almost like we're on a pirate ship or something, and the students are all sailors.

But, as I discovered today, they don't just swear out loud...

Okay, so last week (I think) in English class we made our own word searches and crossword puzzles. Today, our teacher had xeroxed them and we got to solve other people's puzzles. Well, the crossword puzzle was easy, but the word searches were kinda tough. I had a hard time finding the actual words we were looking for, because the one who made the puzzle I ended up with got his letters mixed up and misspelled some words. Ironically, though, while having trouble finding those words, I easily found SIX profanities written in that puzzle. No joke.

Really, is it THAT much to go 10 seconds without saying (or writing) something obscene? At least I know better...

That's all for today.

P.S: Dad/Cindy, be sure to say hi to Uncle Brian, Aunt Garnett and Elder Cram for me!

A Stitch in Paper...

So, I have a new development in my Personal Choices class: using the sewing machine.

Yep, not only that, but in a couple days, I'll be making a pair of boxer shorts!!!

But right now, we're practicing, by putting a piece of paper under the needle instead of fabric, and no thread. So we get a paper with a bunch of parallel lines on it, and we have to "stich" a line between each pair of lines (the result is sort of like using a REALLY small hole punch and creating a line of holes) to get our accuracy right. This one was pretty easy...

Then they gave us one with a triangle pattern we were supposed to stitch through. This wasn't too bad, just stopping at a point, rotating the paper, and going again.

THEN we had to do ZIG-ZAGS!!! Okay, I'm not gonna lie, this was a tough one. First of all, we had to not stitch between the lines, but TRACE them. I only managed to get two out of four finished by the time the bell rang. Next time: CIRCLES.

(shivers)

When Will it End???

Man, I have never had more wanting for school to end. I'm tired of getting up early in the morning, and writing my name at the top of yet another paper, and everything else. School is just getting more and more boring.

I also feel kind of alone at school, too. For some reason, despite all of the other people around me, I kinda wish that my parents were there. Sometimes this is the case, other times I don't mind as much.

At least summer is only a few months away, I've already taken the WASL, and Easter is coming up. These thoughts should make me feel better.

That's all (yawn) for now.

My Favorites at General Conference

Okay, so as I said on my last post, I took plenty of notes at GC, and there were some I thought were really special, so I'm gonna just post some here:

• "I LOVE YOU": Three most loving words.
• When faced with a decision to buy or consume, say "we can't afford it even if we want it", or "we CAN afford it, but we don't need it, nor do we really want it."
• No matter how rich or how poor, that 1/10 we tithe will bring great blessings. (Even if only one cent!)
• A good seed planted in your heart shall expand your soul.
• If duties are done in the temple, we will reach the celestial kingdom of heaven.
• Some of life's greatest lessons come from the experiences of those before you.
• Spirit prison, where spirits of those who are indignant of the wrath of God, is often referred to as "H-E-double-hockey-sticks", where you stay for eternity, but all spirits are delivered up at the resurrection. (THIS is good to know.)
• Destructive D's: doubt, discouragement, distraction, disbelief, disobedience, lack of diligence.
• Do not take anything addictive or harmful. (That means you, tobacco and alcohol!)
• Two are better than one, as if one falls, he has a helping hand.

The Adventures of Secret Agent Stick

This was the book of the month on my Dad's blog, but I think some people may have missed it, so I'm just gonna post it here, too. Happy reading!

CLICK HERE

I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

Boy, what a weekend!

If you didn't already recognize the picture, it's the Salt Lake Temple. I got to see it in person when we went to the Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

But, let's start back at the beginning...

Okay, first of all, what I said about Miner's (yes, I misspelled it) Burgers is wrong, it's in Yakima. And those burgers were BIG, too. Not only that, but I got a pistachio shake on the side (pistachio is one of my favorite ice cream flavors). Needless to say, I didn't finish it.

Okay, so we finally crossed the Idaho/Utah border at 8 or 9 in the AM, and I had only had a couple of hours of sleep (I normally don't fall asleep in the car) and we drove down to Provo, home of Brigham Young University!

We went to the Gordon B. Hinckley Visitor Center, where we got to just look at all the exhibits (pretty cool, actually) and then we watched a video on how BYU came to be (also cool).

Then we got a tour around the campus, and boy oh boy is it a big one. One thing I really thought was cool on the tour was this structure called the "tree of wisdom", which, depending on which angle you look at it from, can be right side up, or upside down:

Then we had lunch at the food court: WHOA, this place is huge! They had a bunch of different restaurants and everything, and I got a FREE T-SHIRT.

So later that evening, we went to a Brazilian steakhouse. What they do here is they serve you all kinds of meat, and keep coming to the table with those dishes, and we take a piece off of the kabob and eat it. We got a wooden cylinder-shaped thing that had a red end and green end. If the green end was up, they kept coming to us with more food. When the red end was up, they stopped coming. Overall, it was fun.

Then we went to the Friday night BYU volleyball game. Now, one of the coolest things happened before the game even started. They prayed. How many other universities say a prayer before a game?

Unfortunately, they lost, but it was to the best team in the nation, and on the other hand, they had just played each other the night before, and BYU won, so no big deal.

Finally, we got up Saturday morning (we stayed at our Bishop's sister's house) to watch the first session of General Conference on TV. We took notes on what all the speakers said (I'll explain a little more in my next post). I was once again wowed by the sheer size of the crowd, the choir, etc... but that "wow" would get even bigger soon.

We packed up and drove up to Salt Lake City (which looked like a smaller, much nicer version of Tacoma), where we stood in line inside Temple Square for a while to get our tickets. Even though the weather wasn't good (gray skies), the whole atmosphere felt good: people were singing hymns outside, most people were dressed nicely, and the air smelled cleaner than in Tacoma. But one thing that kinda got to me were protestors outside the conference center, who were holding signs that were going against the Mormon church. This kinda made me feel a little less safe, but it was only a minority of the people.

We didn't make it in for the second session, and had to watch it in the Temple Square Theatre one block away. But when priesthood session came, we got our tickets and headed inside. We had to wait a LONG time inside, too, and I almost lost my journal in the men's bathroom (thank goodness I got 'em back!). But we soon made it in, and:

It was a whole 'nother ball game actually being INSIDE the conference center during conference. Don't worry though, I wasn't too wowed not to pay any attention to what was happening center stage. But really, wow.

This time we stayed at our Bishop's brother's house (our Bishop seems to have quite a bit of family here in Utah), and had Papa John's pizza for dinner (we bought like 6-7 pizzas, I think, and we ate almost all of them).

On our last day, we basically got up, had breakfast, drove back to Temple Square, but we watched the second-to-last session in the tabernacle this time. After that, it was time to take the big 12-hour trek back to Tacoma, Washington...

I got home at 1 in the morning, and was dead tired. The front door was locked, so I had to call our home phone to wake Dad up so he could open the door for me. After that, I brushed my teeth, got in my PJ's and hit the wall.

...

Yeah, like I said, it was SOME weekend. But it's good to be home!

To Utah we Go!

So some people who don't know much about the LDS (Mormon) church may think of Utah as "what's special about Utah"? Well, my answer to that question: more than you know.

I actually thought the same thing before I started attending the LDS church, but now I know more about Utah than I ever would've thought.

Why am I posting about this? Well, the bishop of our ward decided to invite along some guys from the young men's quorum to drive all the way out to Utah and attend General Conference on Sunday... IN PERSON.

I caught a glimpse of GC on television a year ago, and I was stunned at how many people there were, and that huge pipe organ, and... WOW.

So this evening we're gonna get into the 15-seat van our Bishop rented just for the trip, and drive out towards Ellensburg, then stop at Minor's Burgers, a restaurant where they apparently make these HUGE hamburgers, etc. Then we drive through the night until we reach Salt Lake. Pretty cool, huh? I'm not trying to be cocky, but I'm pretty excited.

I'll post again when I get back, and tell you guys about everything we did!

If you called in... please read.

Okay, I don't know if any of you called in or not, or if you already got that it was a prank but to all who did:


APRIL FOOLS!!!

Sorry about the prank, people, I just wanted to do something on April 1st. So I did this.

Have a nice day!

PLEASE READ!!!

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THANK YOU, GOOD NIGHT!!!