i learned.

this weekend has been good. and i've learned a lot.

1. on friday my father bought me new running shoes. they're beautiful and i love them. but i learned never to show dad the scheel's ad on sunday if the scheel's ad says that running shoes are $15 off this week. doing so will only result in being told to bring the shoes back to scheel's tomorrow and get $15 off. so that's going to be fun.

2. dad's taking a photography class. (i think my parents are cool because they are always doing things, even though they're old. (just kidding. they aren't.) like biking hundreds and hundreds of miles (dad), taking chinese classes (mom), taking a photography class (dad), making family cookbooks (mom). thirty years from now, i hope i haven't just settled into a routine. i hope i'm like my parents.)

anyhow, dad's been wanting to take a picture of a strawberry for a while. so after scheel's on friday, we set out to see if we could do it without a timer, which would have made it infinitely simpler. somehow we figured it out.. even if we did make a bit of a mess in the process. so i learned a whole bunch about photography and also about timing when i press the button on the camera. (it's not as easy as you might think..)

3. on saturday, bri went to the state speech tournament. (am i a tiny bit concerned that my baby sister has been involved in speech, debate, math league, science bowl, scarlet ambassadors, student council, national honor society, golf, cross country and peer tutoring, plus many more equally [insert adjective here] things i am forgetting to mention? yes. yes i am.)

mom and dad and i drove up to the cities to watch. brianna is in discussion, which basically means a group of teenagers get together to pretend like they're grownups and try to solve the world's problems. here is a brief list of what i learned.

a) i loathe pompous, arrogant teenagers who think they know everything.

b) however, many of those pompous, arrogant teenagers have bigger vocabularies than i do.

c) if i hear the sickly sweet phrase "actually, i wasn't done. you can make your point in just one minute." one more time in my entire life, i will probably kill somebody.

d) i am more grateful than ever before that i did not sign up for speech just to impress the boy i liked freshman year, because one saturday spent at a speech tournament was more than enough.

4. church today was really fantastic. some weeks i just struggle in church and i have such an awful case of the wiggles that getting anything from it proves to be almost impossible. today was the opposite. it was one of those powerhouse trios of sacrament meeting, sunday school, and relief society that just make it all worth it. and i learned that sometimes, no matter how little you think you're going to get from church, heavenly father has a way of giving you just what you need.

5. i learned last night that the blueberry white chocolate cheesecake from the cheesecake factory is quite possibly the richest dessert in the world. except, maybe, the s'more concoction brianna and i made for dinner with the missionaries tonight.. (ps, love missionaries. so much.)

6. due to the veryyy long day that brianna's speech tournament was, my parents went on a long hunt to find me a time magazine, which i read and it was glorious. however, until then, i was forced to download app after app to keep myself entertained. and i learned that my new favorite is scoops. so if you don't have it yet, you can thank me later, after you play it and fall in love. (you're welcome for the weekly app update.)