Farty and Toms

This week is the last one left before my play. Several of my friends and family are in it, and we love the class with the possible exception of Brenten, the only single boy in the class. We sing and dance to such songs as New York New York, Route 66, and Oklahoma. Getting around is definitely getting easier for me in the driving aspect. The more I stumble or blunder the more I learn about the map and how to get from A to B. We made it into class to discover that our friends the Andersons were back from Hawaii and were in class. They looked tanned, sunburned and had the relaxed vacation look to them. They brought us each a gift, Savannah brought me back the most adorable bookmark, a little wooden surfboard. Anyways, the play has been going amazingly. We have a few rough parts left, but the gist is beginning to look quite polished! I was very glad to see Savannah, it's good having a girl friend around and I missed the Andersons. After class my siblings and I began the search for a pair of dance shoes for Kate, Lexie and I. Because the play is in a week, we really needed them, and I started at Kmart. There was not such ease to be had however. The shoes had to be soft and stretchy enough to dance in, have enough traction on the bottom not to slip, and had to be entirely black. The entirely black part was throwing us - sure we could go to any store and find a simple pair of black Toms, but the soles needed to be black too, which was harder to find. Lexie found a sparkly black pair of Toms, while Kate and I decided to hold put, unable to find any in pur size. We went to the mall where Kate, Abbie and I scoured Sears, Ross, Forever 21, Footlocker, Payless ShoeSource and finally Rue 21. Everyone had the plain black Toms, but all with white soles. Payless had ballet flats, and Rue 21 had a single entirely black pair in my size but not in Kate's. So we hit up the Payless across the street, where we finally gave in and bought the white soled Toms and vowed to "rig" them. The shoes are pretty cute, they'll be nice to have later, and the dance was a good excuse to shoe shop ;). The other night I rented Parental Guidance. I have seen it three times since, an absolutely adorable movie. It's rare I find a movie with the right combo of comedy, heart and family humor that can keep people's attention, but this movie had it all from a boy nicknaming his grandfather Farty, to a crazy ice cream cake scene! I would really suggest it to any of my friends.

The Most Amazing Gym Trip EVER...

I joined a gym this weekend, and although I admit it is every bit as intimidating as I was led to believe, perhaps as Stephen King says, nothing is nearly so scary as the unknown and untried. Monday morning I rolled put of bed at four twenty AM. Now, I thought waking up at six was a hardship; but this was just crazy! I peeled myself from the warm depths of my bed, pulling on thin gym clothes like some half crazed zombie. I think even the dead would balk at a four twenty awakening. But my mother and I were filled with this strange and undying determination. So we filled up our water bottles, grabbed our granola bars and drove to the gym, meeting a friend. Believe it or not there is a whole group of mentally unstable individuals who congregate at the gym at a crisp five AM. Mostly consisting of conceited, muscle kissing young and middle aged men and a few young and unknowing girlfriends who didn't know what they were getting themselves into. There were men on treadmills, lifting weights, talking next to mirrored walls, and working out on indescribable torture devices. We found our friend on a treadmill and headed up the stairs, bypassing an overweight middle aged man in the hall doing burpees. Upstairs there was a man and a woman working on two of a long row of elipticals like mindless runners, their arms swinging back and forth rapidly like an angry grandfather clock, hands clinging to the tops of each bar. Their sneakered feet moved in blurs, and their eyes remained glued to one of the four TVs hung in a row before the elipticals. Nervously, the three of us stepped onto a machine each, setting in the frightening conditions of our own ensuing exercise. Our friend attempted to shout instructions while working her own machine, and we pretended to listen while we pressed random buttons and tried out the results. "Don't stop walking!" Eventually turned into groans of "It feels like I'm walking in sand!" And our eyes turned to the news on the nearest TV monitor. The end of the cooldown saw me bent over the lower bars of the eliptical, sweating ways I had never sweat before. My face was covered, and despite protests from a certain person concerning foreboding on the wiping of sweat I found myself doing so anyways. Next we moved on to the women's weight room. Mainly because almost no one is ever in that room at that hour, we felt safe trying out the various outdated machines with outlined picture instructions of men and women wearing short shorts and poofed out hair. Honestly they were styling, but we still only had a few moments to devote to that room. The gym experience is hard at first... But it was quite the experience to add to the list, and I won't mind going back... Tomorrow...