Have you heard …

Here are some more famous smart-aleck “ha ha, you’re just saying that because you can’t say anything else” retorts that I have recently added to my superhuman vocabulary:

1. Congratulations.

2. Congratulations again.

3. I’ve noticed.

4. You’ve mentioned that.

Or if someone is being hypocritical and is in need of assistance realizing it:

5. Wait a minute, wasn’t it you who said________*

6. Well, if it were you doing it , you wouldn’t be so against it.

7. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t do it.

*i.e. “Wasn’t it you who said nobody should have control of the remote?” when here they are holding up the remote in the air (to keep it away from anonymous other sibling) and the volume is so low you’re straining just to see what she finds so appealing about that program anyway.

No, it is not.

Originally my birthday party was to be on April 18th. We had to postpone it because most of my family was sick. Now I am still sick on the twenty-fourth and we have to postpone it to next Sunday. I ache all over, I have a cough and a fever, and my mother, hating to be the bearer of bad news, has recently told me that I might have an infection. I feel sickishly bad. I hope I get better soon. We are also supposed to go to a dog adoption event tomorrow, so I don’t know how that will work out.

Illness is not a good thing. No, not a good thing at all.

Hi. Yeah, it’s true.

We are in the process of starting a garden right now, so Mommy has been digging up a certain piece of the yard. Well, I guess Rebekah was out there and she found a little metal sculpture of a person. It was brown, rusty, and it looked pretty basic, not too complicated. It was fairly small, about 3 inches long. If you stand it up (sort of) it looks like it is lifting its arms to the sky. If you lay it down it looks like it is either slithering, crawling, or sprawled on the ground. It has the ears of a bear, and it actually looks like a little bear person. In fact, the more we look at it, the more bear-like it appears. It’s pretty heavy for its size. Actually, now that I think about it, it could just be a sculpture of a bear.

Welcome to the family, chubby little bear person.

I have only two minutes left on the computer, so I’ll tell you a couple of my favorite conversation stoppers when I am talking with Rebekah:

1. Cool.

2. So?

3. And?

4. I don’t care.

5. What is that supposed to mean to me/and that means…?

6. Who cares?

7. Whatever.

8. ” ” (ignore)

I know some of these are mean—well, actually, most of them—,but sometimes my eleven-year-old sister just gets on my nerves.

Whatever.

Well, sort of.

My birthday was ten days ago, on the second of April. That fateful day, I became a teenager.

My family took me out for my birthday to go shopping and go out for dinner. We ate at Red Lobster. It was very delicious, but for some reason I felt full almost as soon as I started eating. For this reason, I hardly ate any of my dinner; too bad for me! Sisters and brother did way better in the restaurant than they usually do in public places (or at home, for that matter). Mommy and Daddy gave me a pretty card. After dinner, we went shopping. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! My parents paid for everything. Again: BWAHAHAHAHAHACKcoughcough…ahem. You get the point, maniacal evil laughter, etc.

I am also going to have a birthday party, which I did not hear is actually my friend’s uncle’s wedding; she’s in it, too, so she will not be able to come. : (
Well, the wedding is more important anyway.

C U L8R.

Hey, Michael Gonzalez, I am blogging from your computer on Easter Sunday at approximately 5:47pm. You remember when you saw Miranda, Antonio and I all stuck at the computer like it was our whole existence, and later, when the hamster went missing? Yeah, around that time. Anyway, thanks, Uncle Mike for letting us use your computer. But you may want to keep an eye on us, the little rascals.

P.S. I hope you find that hamster.

I had forgotten about this one.

Some time late last year I slept over at a friend’s house and we had decided that we would make apple-cinnamon muffins. Yum! Here’s what we did according to the recipe:

1. We mixed the dry ingredients.
2. We mixed the wet ingredients.
3. We mixed butter, cinnamon, and egg to make the topping.
4. We chopped up an apple or two.
5. We mixed the dry and wet ingredients together, put the dough into a muffin pan,
put the muffins in the oven, and waited for five to ten minutes.
6. We put the topping on and let the muffins finish baking.
7. We tasted them.

Then we noticed something wrong. The muffins didn’t taste right. They were lacking in flavor: they tasted just like bread. Here’s what we didn’t, according to the recipe:

1. We forgot to put the apples in.

I know it’s an ambitious aspiration, but still.

I began attending the drama class at Jubilee Christian Center when I was ten years old, September of 2006. I only had one line that year and was one of those kids who doesn’t talk unless they absolutely have to. Last year I was the narrator, who has the most lines, and I frequently get slight reprimands for talking too much and too loud. = ) I also personally believe that the quality of the plays and skits has improved significantly.

The former drama teacher, Wesley Milliken, has moved to a different church. So, we have a new teacher. Her name is Callie Garrett. She has been in a few theater productions. She recently starred in The Wizard of Oz at Ohlone College, which is about five minutes away from our house. She was even in our newspaper! I congratulate her.

What I wouldn’t give to be doing that myself. Meeting new people, getting to “play pretend” for hours each day as a career, and having fun all at the same time. Learning about and playing with different kinds of animals in productions that have animals in them!

One of our friends almost always has a skit written for us whenever we are visiting with each other. I have tried to write skits before but nobody wanted to act them. Another one of our friends used to come over roughly once a week. A few times we didn’t exactly write skits so much as we decided what to say and when to say it and memorized it. Then, we would put on these original skits for our parents. With other friends of ours we are working on a script. A lot of our friends have performed in musicals, among other things. My aunt has been in a few things with Stage 1 Theater, including The Music Man and The Man Who Came To Dinner. Her friend might be working on this year’s childrens’ play. I hope to be able to audition for it.

Being an actress is an ambitious aspiration, but one can dream, can’t she?

Two weeks ago, on Tuesday, I began teaching piano lessons to one of our friends. She is an excellent student, I must say. One thing I should tell you, though, if you are teaching beginning piano, use the Prep Course Level 1A Lesson Book from Alfred’s Basic Piano Library. That is the one I learned from in the beginning and it is working well so far for my student. I started out teaching from a lesson book from Hal Leonard’s and it did not work out too well without the technique book, which neither my student nor I happened to have. In Alfred’s, however, it teaches as you go along in the lesson book. It is better to have the theory book with it, too, but we are doing fine with just the lesson book for now. My student, who I mentioned is also a friend of ours, is doing well. She passed three to five songs on the second week and six to ten the third. I am sort of teaching theory from my brain but the book helps, too.

This week’s lesson happened to be on a rainy day and after worrying if their electronic keyboard still worked (and finding, fortunately, that it did) my student’s mother, my mother, my student and I came to a unanimous decision that on rainy days we are using our piano.

The second week after lessons my mom, my siblings, the Valencias (my student and her mother), and I all went for a walk down a pleasant little path by our house. It was beautiful that day and all the children, including myself, wanted to have a spontaneous picnic. Most of us knew it was pretty much impossible to do that, but one can dream, can’t she? = ) So we had decided to possibly have a picnic this week, but seeing as the floodgates of heaven had been more than simply opened, that plan went down the drain. Way down. Oh, well. We played a rambunctious game of tag with my student, anyhow. She is a faster runner than most of us and it sure got our blood flowing! Hopefully we can have a picnic next week, but there’s always good old tag!!!

So my teaching job has been going well. It is also helpful for me to have a teachable student. I enjoy teaching; the after-lesson activities, too!