Crunchtime for school

Don't expect too many blog posts this January; I've got a LOT of homework to work on! I'm going to quickly summarize my latest journal entries and then go to sleep so I can take care of all of this fascinating, yet pressing work.

1/3/11
Woke up from a bean bag and helped put away Christmas decorations. Later that day Diego and Shane came over, bringing guitars and amps. We jammed some more and had a crazy time! Some of the songs we played were Better Together (Diego brought an acoustic-electric ukelele!), Dead or Alive, Grace Kelly, Haven't Met You Yet, What Hurts The Most (which is now online), and Vanilla Twilight. Autumn played some of her other piano+voice solos, which were pretty awesome. They all have her Autumn-y style, hm, how to describe it? Free flow, changes in rhythm, emphasis on major chords, emotional alto-level melodies, and poetic lyrics. She has a ton, but the two that I remember that she played today was It Must Be Love and Do You Want to Know Me. I've said it once, and I'll say it again; I'm her #1 fan! Well, I still have to take care of all of those other "Autumn's #1 fans" out there...

For family night most of the family got to go to a Les Miserables rehearsal. It's early in their practice, so now they're only practicing songs. Autumn has the role of Fantine! I had fun singing along with the rest of the group as we rehearsed Act I. Their director (whose name happened to be Scott) was amazing in his leadership and vocals. He had a very powerful voice and an overwhelming voice range! I even made some new friends as I sang. Not only is the music wonderful, but the story is a very inspiring tale all about forgiveness and mercy in a cruel, unbalanced society. At the most filthy part of the play, I felt tears come to my eyes when Val Jean pledged to care for Fantine and Cosette, and to save Fantine from the horrible situation she was in. It made me think of how the Savior is willing to help all of us, no matter how low we've come.  I wanted to be in the play very much by the time we were through. They are going to have a great time with that!

The Finale is AWESOME! I think I'll have to learn it on guitar (tch, as well as it can be played with just a guitar...)

1/4/11
Early in the morning, we went to Denny's to meet Diego and some guy named Zack to play Jenga and drink extremely overpriced hot chocolate. Good times, even though my internal value of Thrift was screaming. $2 dollars for a 10 cent cup of chocolate! But hey, we had a good time anyway. I finished Nightlight that morning, a parody of Twilight written by some college students. The ending wasn't very interesting, but the beginning was hilarious. I guess maybe the humor was stronger at the beginning but then grew old as the story neared to the end. That and I think the poor writers ran out of ideas.

Autumn had an eye doctor appointment today, and needed a ninja to follow her so creeps wouldn't get her. But she couldn't find a ninja, so she had to take me along instead. It was a lot of fun. We were dropped off early, and so we ran around in a nearby mall (btw, Windsor is VERY urbanized. A very well developed city. A lot of engineers must live there. Well duh, Autumn's dad is one of them! anyways...) and nothing was there. All of the shops were closed, but that was probably just because everyone else was at school or work. We ran to a gas station, bought a disposable camera, brought it back to the empty mall, and then took random pictures of us doing crazy things there! We had one of Autumn hunched up on some very tall display like a statue (one thing we wouldn't do if the mall was open), and another with my legs sticking from under the same display. So we went on and kept on taking those sort of pictures, until we got BUSTED. That's right. As Autumn sat in a fancy swivel chair holding up some cardboard sign-thing goofily to my camera, a mall cop walked towards us. I'm going to add a few juicy details just to make the encounter more interesting....

"Hey! What are you doing over there?" The man growled as he advanced.

"Oh, hi officer! We were just taking pictures. In an empty mall." Autumn said to the man from her swivel chair.

"(shouldn't you kids be in school?) Why are you here?" He inquired.

"Oh, I have an appointment over there and we were just..."

"Mhm. Well, I could send you both to prison, but I'll let you off. You can't take pictures in a mall, for one thing. Copyrighted stores, you know. And second of all, tt's against the law to be inside of a closed mall if you are not walking. You can't just sit there."

I looked over at this point, and noticed some elderly person who was quietly sitting on a bench in the distance, his back turned to us.

"Alright, I guess we'll just go then." I said as I started walking towards the closest exit.

"Wait! Officer, can Keenan take a picture of you and me real quick? Last one, I promise! Pleeeeeaase?" Autumn whimpered, using her well practiced airhead-innocent-believable-girl act.

"No, now get out of here."

And so we left, but just as the officer walked away, Autumn snuck a picture of him!

And that is my latest crime.

No, that didn't really happen. But we were joking about the incident afterwards and by the time we were done beefing up the story it came to be something like that. But those two reasons he came up to us were really the reasons why he had to tell us to leave. The bureaucracy is EVERYWHERE! They've got laws for everything.

We sat at the bus stop for awhile after Autumn's optometrist appointment, reading good stuff. If you ever want a really wonderful and clever read, read Proverbs all the way through. It's a very fun book to read. That day was the first day I have EVER used a public bus for transportation (not counting those ones the stake used to get our youth to Wyoming for the Trek last summer); it was awesome! It even had wifi!

Not much longer after we got back, grandma and grandpa finally drove up to take us home. They had went to Concord to go to an old friend's funeral, and they were just picking us up on their way back to Oregon. It was a smooth ride home.

These past two days back home have been full of cleaning, organizing, dreaming up visions for the future, and schoolwork. Ha, so much for being brief! Oh well. Don't expect too much blogging going on this month; everything's piling up! There are so many things needing attention.