Concert of Hope

Last night was the Concert of Hope. First of all I am so glad that it is over. I am excited to get back to some form of normal at church. I am hoping the flaired up egos and chest pounding will be over.

The concert turned out quite nicely. I was very suprised on how many people actually turned out. Even with Mom's heavy promotion I think the idea of a Christian concert from the get go is a turn off. Mike White's testimony was riveting. It brought tears to my eyes and burned a message into my soul. He is such a wonderful speaker and I hope that his message touched others, non-believers, as much as it touched me.

Troy had yesterday off so he was able to help start setting up the gig at Farivew Park at 12:00 pm. He helped with the sound board, stage set up, and kind of a general goffer helper.

Troy in the sound tent.

Jadon Lavik was a great singer. I was disappointed though because even though he was a great singer he plays more relaxing, driving in your car in traffic, kind of music. I was hoping for something a little more up beat and something we could sing along with. I liked the idea of having a Christian artist play non-secular songs to draw people to the concert and then have Mike White have his motivational speech. I think the turn out would have been better.

Jadon Lavik and his Band

My whole part in this concert was coordinating the concessions. I booked Taco Dawgs with a recommendation from one of the other members of the church and they were a hit! I had told him that I didn't know how the turn out was going to be. Apparently we didn't disappoint because he ran out of french fries about 1/2 way through the concert. Since I had been discouraged by the planning process I stopped looking for vendors after Taco Dawg was booked. I had orginally thought it would be nice to have maybe a kettle corn vendor or a cotton candy or something of that nature. After all the miscommunication happened I threw in the towel and let it be.

Fox setting up his truck.

They had a prayer tent set up for anyone that wanted to pray with someone or who was a non-believer looking for guidance and answers. There were lots of people available to help and they set up Troy's dad's pop-up as their little headquarters. From what I heard there were some people who utilized the people there to pray with and for them and there were also people who dropped their name into the box for more information.

Prayer Tent

If there is a next year I definately hope that some things will be changed. I think that the people in charge of this event don't take me seriously. I had good ideas but they don't trust be either because I am too young or have not "proven myself" to the elders. Whatever it is I am just glad that this concert was successful from what I can tell and that it is finally over!

Crash (The Movie)

So as Troy and I are trying to get a hold of our fiances and try to pay off all our consumer debt and start saving for our home we have cancelled cable. Initially I was shocked and appalled by the suggestion but it has been working out. We are saving $80+ a month on cable and since have signed up for Netflix. They have a new feature where we can watch some movies instantly from their website or from our Wii. Then of course we have the standard DVDs that get mailed to our home. This week we got Crash.

So last night I watched Crash while hanging out in bed waiting for my husband to join me. It was an intense movie! I am usually not one for anything that keeps me on the edge of my seat (or bed) but I am glad I watched it. It displays so perfectly that we may be a country based on "equality" but racism and prejudice still is happening everywhere around us. People are still bought and bribed for advancement in society. It really impacted me and I have been thinking about it since. I even dreamed about it!

Not only is the lack of cable saving us money but it is also drawing us closer. We have more time to do things together without being zoned out at the TV. We started playing card games, sitting on the balcony to eat dinner, talk, play cards, and sometimes Troy and Joe sit out there to smoke hookah.

Family Camping

We didn't know what to expect when we were all headed to San Onofre State Beach to camp. I guess I had in mind that it would be something like San Clemente State Beach when we camped there a few years back. When we got there we discovered something very different!

Troy got off work late so that was an unexpected obstacle. We ended up taking Charlie Brown with us camping as well. I wasn't very excited with the thought that we would have to take him because I wanted a relaxing weekend. I guess this goes along with the idea of enjoying my "child-free" days before I have the extra responsibility. With a failed attempt at a sleep over at Dex's house I picked Charlie up Friday afternoon and he headed out with us.

We made it!! Better late than never!!

Once we got there we had to access the situation and it was looking pretty bad. We hadn't anticipated what we saw... very small camping spots. Not only was there less room than anticipated but we had 5 tents for 8 people, yes I said it correctly 5 tents!

So here we are all set up for camping. Notice that all the tents are sitting on asphalt... our parking spots. Oh yes! ASPHALT! William ended up moving his maroon tent onto the dirt shortly after we decided that it was just too cramped. We have a 6 man tent so ours is the mansion in the back. For some reason no one wanted to sleep in the same tent as us. Apparently I am not cool anymore or something?

In the picture above you can see me sitting in a chair with about 8 feet of dirt in front of me, then curb, then tents. That's about all the nature that we had. Behind us we had brush to the end of the cliff and then the ocean. If you take a close look in this picture you will see the train tracks behind us and the freeway with a truck towing some cars. It only gets better from here... we got to hear and see and feel the train go by every 30 minutes or so until 10:00 pm on Friday night. Thank goodness we had all mentally prepared for this trip so all we could do was laugh. Who knew this was going to turn out like this? No one in their right mind could have predicted exactly what we had just volunteered to do. Each night (thankfully only 2) we were smoothed to sleep with the nice sound of the traffic whizzing by. I love to camp but I can tell you that I am a bit of a sissy and thank goodness that I am! In preparation we swiftly packed our blow up mattress and we were on our way. There were more unlucky campers (Heather, Joe, and Cathleen) who got to sleep on mere blankets in their tents atop the asphalt while William got to sleep on the rocky dirt. Oh joy, this was going to be a great weekend!

Mom and Dad trying out there new air mattress - serious life saver!

Charlie Kicking It On Our Blow Up Mattress

After all the set up was done and we got some food in our bellies (thanks Mom for all the prep, packing, and planning!!) we finally got down to business... family time! Now my father and brother live and breathe for fire so it is only natural that we brought tons of fire wood and started the camp fire right away. Mom and Dad took Charlie for a walk to look around the area and see where we could hike down to the beach the next day. They walked down to end of trail 6 and found a bench on the top of the cliff overlooking the beach. They were lucky enough to be there when the sun was just setting and the sun looked like it was setting the water on fire. Too bad Dad didn't have his camera. I am sure it would have been an amazing photo!

The sun had set and it was time to joke, laugh, and for most of the others, drink.


We all hung out around the fire and talked about all kinds of things. Strangely it turned toward church and our frustrations and quickly everyone started jumping ship. Once the subject changed they came back out to play.


Dad got William a hat light for his last birthday. It is this little light that slides onto the bill of any hat and acts as a hands-free flashlight. In reality we all know that Dad bought the new gadget for himself and gave it to William under the guise of a gift but he couldn't wait until he could take it camping. Apparently everyone in the family found this new toy to be so cool they couldn't stop talking about it! I will admit that since the bathrooms were so disgusting that I had to breathe out of my mouth for the 2.5 seconds it took me to pull down my pants, squat, and pee in the dark it was nice to wear that stupid hat so I could see.

Heather sporting the "hat hat" with the light on a trip to the bathroom

Oh yeah, no showers. At San Clemente and Lake Silverwood there are indoor showers. They look like individual little locker rooms and you put in quarters for hot water. The bathrooms were not nice by any stretch of the imagination but tolerable considering the circumstances. San Onofre... no shower but the standard outdoor public beach showers. Needless to say that I went those 3 days showerless. Oh man did I want to take a shower and wash my hair the moment I got home on Sunday!

Slum'n it without showers

We had some s'mores and then called it a night. We were all pretty tuckered out from the long drive, the long day and the set-up. We brought Charlie's bed and he slept next to us the entire night. I don't think he moved once. It was freezing in our tent. Apparently since we had the mansion and there was only the 2 of us we didn't keep the tent very warm. I froze both nights.

The next morning Troy cooked us some eggs for the breakfast burritos and the rest of the girls got the rest of the ingredients ready: cheese, onions, and bacon. They were so good!!

My hubby manning the grill.

Mom washing dishes at the bathroom sink... loving the star blanket made into a sarong!

It was pretty overcast still and we weren't sure it was even going to be warm enough to go to the beach at all. After we ate breakfast we continued the family time and eventually broke out a deck of cards to play all the games we remembered playing as kids.

Love me some family time!

Charlie spent the majority of his time wrapped up in a blanket cuddling with me, Mom, Troy or Heather while we relaxed.



It was finally starting to warm up and we started self entertaining. We played Speed, Super Speed, Gin, and my personal favorite Bull Stink!


I have no idea what is going on with my face. Obviously I wasn't paying attention. Heather and Joe went to the store and bought cards before the trip to be sure that we had something to do. Heather pulled out one of her new decks of cards and started to play solitare. As I am watching her play she pulls out the 4 aces right off the bat. Then she turns over her next card and it is another ace. WTF?! What is going on?! We look at the box of cards and they are a deck of Pinochle cards. We all bust out laughing. To make matters even funnier Heather exclaims "Joe! You got us Pin-o-chay cards!" At that very moment Mom had taken a drink of a Diet Coke and when Heather got so worked up about her Pin-o-chay cards (pronounced pea-nuckle) Mom laughed and soda came flying out of her mouth and nose. Her eyes started to water, soda was everywhere and none of us could breathe because we were laughing so hard! First for the fact that they bought a retarded deck of cards and secondly for the way Heather kept pronouncing the card game.

My husband posing as usual for his serious photo while William is trying to burn, destroy, and blow up so new object over the fire.

After we played games the family went down to the beach to play in the water. I stayed back with Charlie and I finished the book I was reading and purchased Tori Spelling's 2nd book Mommywood on my Nook and started reading that. It was very relaxing and peaceful. I had the whole campsite to myself, all 8x8 feet of it!

That night Heather came up with the idea to play Charades. At first I thought the idea would never take off but Dad started with Star Wars (never leaving his seat) and so it began. Everyone participated. To my surprise I think William's TV show, Desperate House Wives, was the best one. It was hard enough to be fun but not easy enough that it took 2.5 seconds to guess. And he did a great job of acting it out. We had all kinds of movies, TV shows, and music including Pocahontas, Cinderella, Star Wars, 16 Candles, Family Guy, Killing Me Softly, Mary Poppins, and Frankenstein. It was so much fun! Sadly the charades turned into signing and that is when I hit the tent. While I was laying there listening to all kinds of songs like Lean On Me, then rounds of Row Row Your Boat, I think the finale ended up with the Star Spangled Banner. I wish I was making this up. It got so bad and out of tune that I nearly went to read and sleep in the car just to have the sound proofing. They were all having fun and I didn't want to be Debbie-downer but come on people!! It was 10:30 at night and if I didn't want to hear your singing I am sure the campers 3 feet from us didn't want to either!

Waiting for the next victim to act out their charade

All in all it was a great weekend. I would not recommend this campground to anyone and I hope the next family trip is either to San Clemente or Lake Silverwood. Sometimes it is best to just go with what you know and go where you are comfortable. Mom and Dad did a great job arranging everything. Sometimes I wonder how much longer we are going to be able to get all of us together like this for some quality family time. People move away, grow up, have jobs and careers, families and other responsibilities. I am trying to cherish what little, or hopefully long, time left that we have to do things together as a family.

Laker Game

With 1:30 left on the clock and the Lakers up by 6 I have reaffirmed that I really don't care about basketball considering I am blogging instead of watching. Well... what the heck... GO LAKERS!!

Reconnecting

Now that I am an adult and all grown up I have been thinking a lot about the good ol’ days. This may have been inspired while trying to think of ideas of what to say in my maid of honor speech. So it got me thinking about where everyone else is in their lives so I began seeking out old friends to reconnect with. Thanks to facebook you can basically find anyone in the world and if you are a stalker like me than you can scourer their page for details of their lives and pretty much get a sense of exactly what has been going on with them. But I am missing the personal connection with people. I have pretty much always just had a select few friends, never a huge array of friends to hang out with, and I kept them close and dear to me. After high school and we all graduated and moved on I only kept in contact with one friend, Jared. Everyone else went their own ways and I didn’t make an effort to stay connect, with the exception of facebook. I don’t hang out with any of my old friends or even talk or text with them.

So while thinking about my MOH speech and thinking about all my lost connections with good friends I started looking to reconnect with old friends from middle school. Troy and I were at my parents’ house so that Joe and Troy could play ping-pong. Since after about 10 minutes of that I was done playing and seeking other enjoyment elsewhere I ended up on the computer facebook stalking. Ryan just happened to be online so I instant messaged him. I didn’t think much of it at first. We hadn’t really had a conversation in nearly 5 years so I thought it would be a general hey, how’s life and then a gtg. But instead it turned into a whole conversation. We met in 1998, over 10 years ago and hadn’t spoken since at least graduation 5 years ago so we had a lot to catch up on. Our lives are on such different tracts. We talked about anything and everything. We even talked about the good ol’ days back in middle school when we hung out every day, went to Tommy’s, CVS, or Boomers just so neither of us had to go home. The conversation was so rewarding.

As a silly girl I had a crush on Ryan for over 3 years. It was one of those friendships that you cherished so you didn’t want to screw things up with mushy stuff but deep down would love the other person to feel the same way you did. Neither one of us ever really talked about our feelings for each other. It was something the whole world knew but no one ever talked about. Eleana was a great friend to me, as I have learned recently, as she never told him how I felt. He was the person I would lean on when the world around me was falling to pieces. My dad and I didn’t get along at all and my parents were not in the best place, with my always in the middle of the arguments. There were plenty of times that I would call him just to have someone to talk to or to get my mind of whatever else was going on. Back in the day it was all about AIM. I spent hours on that stupid thing talking to my friends from school or in chat rooms to people all around the world.

After our long conversation I broke out all my old journals and started reading my old entries. I wrote about everything and those things were dripping with drama. I wrote about all the fights I had with my dad and how I hated my life and everything about it. Troy started to read one of my really old journals and he said it made him sick to his stomach to hear about the relationship that my dad and I had. My dad is a different man now than he was when I was growing up. He couldn’t read much. I read all of them. So much of it I had forgotten. I guess it is true that you tuck away bad memories and move forward. Even though they were filled with such dark places of my life I feel like those experiences shaped who I was and who I am and looking back makes me realize how much stronger I am today because of it.

In October 2001 Ryan and I got in our last and final fight. At that point I was over it all. Our timing was never right and we were always on opposite pages. I had been in the friend zone for so long I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I remember the very day that I decided that I wasn’t going to talk to him anymore. He had hurt me for the last time. I had made the decision to start eating lunch at FV West where all the bandos ate lunch. Shorty after that I became best friends with Leslie and we double dated with Matt and Jeremy. Next thing I knew we were like the inseparable four-some. And that was the end of my friendship with Ryan. Come to find out he had no idea why we started talking and doesn't even really remember the incident that had hurt me so much.

Now nine years later we talked about all the good and bad times, everything we thought and felt and pretty much hashed out all kinds of questions and feelings we had had and never talked about. He apologized, I apologized, and we both explained how and why and what we felt. It was an absolutely rewarding conversation. I felt like everything that I thought I knew about how he was or how he felt he finally verified for me and said out loud. It brought so much peace and closure. I miss the friendship that we had though, aside from the other feelings. We were best friends and we had so much fun together. We plan on having a mini-reunion with Eleana and Brett. We have been texting back and forth ever since and it has been fun to have a friendship again that is completely unrelated to any other aspect of my life. He doesn’t know or get involved in any kind of family or work drama. I would love to reconnect with even more people and make the effort to be a good friend again. Time, stress, and actual distance has taken its toll on my relationships.