Monster Jam

This post is mostly about the monster jam, but is also about the awesome ping pong tournament we had at my house this weekend! I didn't even have to organize it. Julie took care of business again.

We had a really good turn out and a lot of fun. Probably besides the ping pong, we all enjoyed hitting each other with those "snaps" or "pops" that you get from the firework stands. My dad had given me some for Christmas and we used them all on Friday night.

Sadly, I did not win. Jason took the championship this time. There's always next time, though! I had to include the brackets in this post because the doodling on it totally cracked me up.

On Saturday evening Collette, Megan, and I went to the Monster Jam down at the Reliant Stadium. We even dressed up for it. Here are Megan and Collette in their white trash (but still cute) outfits.

I thought this Turtle truck was pretty cool looking. His poor shell got cracked by the end of the night, though!

Here are Collette and I enjoying the festivities. Notice she was the smart one who brought earplugs. Next time!

Grave Digger is the most popular truck that was there. He wrecked in the first round of racing which really bummed us out because he's the most daring in the free style round, but not worries, he got all fixed up in between races.

He was even in the racing finals with Ironman. He had to settle for second, though. We had to watch the replay, but it was Ironman by a bumper!

Here's that car up close. I thought it looked really cool. It's headlights were a brilliant white like Ironman's in the movie.

The freestyle round was so much fun to watch. Here's the Ninja Turtle jumping over some of the dirt. He caught some serious air.

Here's some crazy air from Ironman too. This big jump was amazing to watch people go off of.

This video shows some truck, I can't remember who, going off the big jump. It was pretty amazing. I never got a good video of it, but this one guy jumped it from the other side and cleared the whole thing. It was awesome. It popped one of the guy's front tires, though!

Here's one of his jumps. He doesn't slow down on his jumps like most of them do. He jumped this whole thing, when most of the trucks did it in two smaller jumps.

This last video was of a couple of his jumps. He jumps from the other side of the big one like I was talking about earlier (the one who popped his tire), but he didn't clear it all the way. I wish I had that other guy on video.

Here's Grave Digger posing after his freestyle round. He is quite a show off, but was definitely the best and most daring.

We wanted to get some pictures of us in front of the arena after the event. Grave Digger is between mine and Megan's heads.

Here are the 3 of us. Deaf, but happy!

Maui Pineapple Company

This is a sad news post, along with a little walk down memory lane.

First of all, for those of you who don't know, I spent many summers in Hawaii growing up, while my dad worked for a group called Youth Developmental Enterprises (YDE).

YDE would bring boys from the US mainland over to pick pineapples in Hawaii, on Lanai and Molokai at first, and then on to Maui. Initially, YDE worked with Dole, but later began working with Maui Pineapple Company, now known as Maui Land & Pineapple.

My mom heard a rumor that Maui Pineapple Company was shutting down at the beginning of 2010! Just an FYI - YDE stopped working with them several years ago.

That made me so sad. I checked on the Internet and found an article about it, and also confirmed it with my friend Megan who is from Maui. She said that they've shut down the pineapple area, but are still alive as a company in their other endeavors, whatever they are.

Apparently they've already laid off hundreds of workers! Sad news!

I've found all these pictures on the Internet just at random sites. I just kept finding them so, sorry, there are tons of pictures on this one.

For more information about the closing, click HERE to see an article about it.
So, I couldn't resist. I went on Facebook to the YDE group and found a bunch of pictures that some of the boys had uploaded. It was fun for me to look through the more than 600 pictures. This one was from the plantation that I lived at most of the summers we were there - Haliimaile.
One of the boys got this awesome shot of a pineapple field on Maui.
This photo was taken at Haliimaile in 1990. That was my last summer there with my dad working for YDE. We weren't on this plantation that summer. We were at a house just up Baldwin Ave. with the boys who were working at the cannery instead of in the fields picking pineapple.
I can't believe that I'm actually posting this picture, but I just had to. It was an obvious ugly stage, but it's hilarious. It's not so bad of Kara, but . . . dang!
This one is much cuter! I was a cute baby for sure!
One of the boys had this picture of Lavern Teves. She was the cook at Haliimaile for many of my summers over there.
Another favorite over there was the McDonnell family. He (Skip) was a coordinator with my dad, and he and his family later moved over there. Stacy (on the right) was the closest to my age.
I liked this shot one of the boys got of another pineapple field.
Yet another cool picture.
I got a good laugh at all the these. Those boys used to look so old to me and now they look so young! I must be getting old!

Farewell, Maui Pineapple Company! I will miss you!

Done with the Singles Ward

So, it's official. I am no longer a member of the Singles ward here!

I told the folks at my ward that my last day would be the 24th. Our ward executive secretary is super on top of things. My records were probably transferred on the 24th, but I just logged into the ward website page on LDS.org and I am officially out of the singles ward.

I'll be honest, I'm a little freaked out about it, but it's all good and I know I'm doing the right thing. I'm sure I'll meet lots of great people and will have wonderful experiences. Right now, I'm just glad that I will still see my friends often! :)

School Shenanigans

I had some fun and/or interesting happenings at school lately, so I thought I'd post some of them on here.

It was class picture day last week. Kristie and I have known that we have the same sweater, but luckily have never worn it on the same day . . .until picture day. So, it will now be recorded that we have the same sweater and that we wore it on the same day.

We made our Oreo penguins again this year for our Antarctica unit. The kids really enjoyed it, probably because they got to eat this art!

I loved this shot!

Here's a close-up of one that is missing part of it's head. I decided to take a close-up a little too late. Most of the kids were munching away.

Also part of our Antarctica unit was a presentation last Friday. A friend from my ward, Melissa, works for Exxon and has been to Antarctica twice. She's a geologist. Anyway, she made a powerpoint and did a presentation and even let the kids drill her with questions. Everyone loved it!

We also did our snowman scenes like I do every hear with my class. This little guy was too cute for me not to take a picture. We use model magic and they always turn out so cute!

This one keeps cracking me up. I noticed a few weeks ago that some of the girls in my class were doing this with their hands during a couple of our "pledges" in the morning. We do FOUR PLEDGES! We pledge to the American flag, the Texas flag, we have a Panther Pledge for our school and a "Go Green" pledge. For the American and Texas pledges, the kids had their hands over their hearts, but on the last two pledges, they were doing this. I asked what it was all about, and apparently, they're panther claws. Instead of holding their hand straight up (like when you take an oath), they raise their hand and make a panther claw. I can't stop laughing when they do that! I meant to get a picture of them in the act, but settled for grabbing a couple of them after school at the YMCA program at our school.

This video is ridiculous. Every morning the kids come in and unpack. They have a warm up paper on their desks that they get right to work on. They get a book after that. That's been the routine since the beginning of the year. Well, the tardy signal in our school is the "Pink Panther" theme. When the kids hear that music, they know they better get to class so they're not late. Every once and a while, the office puts some different music on. This day, they randomly put the Charlie Brown music on and this is what happened. Notice my good few who are actually doing what they're supposed to. Also, my apologies if you see one of my boys dirty dancing at the very beginning. He wasn't doing that when I got out the camera. Bad timing for me!

Biker

Check this guy out! Thanks for sending this to me, Mom!

Thanks to Nate for sending this one! This girl is awesome!

Where's Waldo?

I've been a bad picture taker lately! I had a super fun weekend and I didn't take a single picture. Worse yet, this weekend was two weekends ago!

It was all in honor of Kim's birthday. We started out with lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in the Woodlands. It was delicious, of course.

We then watched "Leap Year." It was very "chick flick" ish, but it was enjoyable. We were all fans of the guy in the movie!

The fun, creative part came as we played the Martin version of Where's Waldo in The Woodlands Mall. We wore disguises and dispersed ourselves throughout the mall. Those who were not dressed up had to go find those that were. I got found right away - BAD LUCK! Julie and Katherine kept everyone searching for quite awhile. They had that baby carriage that really threw folks off.

Here are all of us that dressed up. We had a good amount of people that showed up for some or all of the events. We all hung out at Katherine's after and enjoyed some time by the fire because IT WAS COLD!

Happy New Year!

My New Years this year was low key and a lot of fun.

I had a few friends over for some Navajo tacos. We should have used a timer so Julie could be in the picture too.

Katherine brought a lot of her hats so we could add a little more fun to the evening.

After dinner, we headed upstairs for some ping pong. Here's Kim posing with the "guardians." We put these guys by the stairs to keep ping pong balls from going down.

Here are Katherine and Julie #2 getting warmed up. We were going to do another tournament, but ended up just playing around the world.

After ping pong, we were ready for round 2 with the fry bread. We put honey on it this time and it was quite tasty.

I was excited to have Jessica and Jason come for a short visit. They played ping pong with us and visited for a while.

We got a picture of the girls who knew Jess when she lived here.

I thought this was a funny picture. I had a marker out so we could write our names on our cups so they wouldn't get mixed up. Julie's hilarious!

Jess & Jason left and we watched a movie. Julie #2 had to leave because she was headed back to Idaho the next day. The rest of us had a little slumber party.

I made some yummy breakfast on Friday morning. These are aebleskivers. Susannah gave me the pan for Christmas. We made them Christmas morning, but I had to try it out again. They were pretty good!

I only had enough buttermilk to make 3/4 of a batch so I made some pancakes too. It all tasted really good!

This could actually be another post, but I thought I'd stick it on here. After the girls left my house after breakfast, I headed over to the Tomball area to pick up my new bike that Adam found for me on Craigslist. I LOVE it! On Saturday, Katherine, Julie, and I got our bikes and headed downtown for a ride. It was a lot of fun.

We stopped by Minute Maid park for Katherine to jump around for a bit. She did really well!

Julie and I wanted to see how steadily we could ride. We stayed right next to each other for about a block before we had to stop at a light. It was a fun time all around.