I was able to take a trip home to Washington to see a lot of my family! It was a long drive! I drove (4 hours) to Rexburg and picked up my sister, Molly, then we drove another 14 hours from Rexburg to Port Townsend. The drive was actually really fun and it was nice to spend time together.
You know how sometimes while spending a long period of time in a confined space you get really restless and tired, and everything starts to get funny? Well, that happened to us on the way there and again on the way back. When my sister and I get together things can get kind of out-of-control. She is one of the funniest people I have ever met. We actually had to pull over the car because I was laughing so hard that it was dangerous for me to be on the road and we were both about to pee our pants. I've never been so close to actually peeing my pants from laughter (or anything else).
I'm surprised that we survived the drive. Not only were we laughing uncontrollably almost the whole way, but I tried to teach my sister how to drive a manual transmission in hopes that I could get a break from driving here and there. Although she did drive for 2 hours on our way up to WA, I did not get any rest because I was hyper attentive to what she was doing haha. We almost died a couple of times and one attempt to exit the freeway ended in tears. But she practiced while we were home and she is pretty darn good at it now :)
Our family get-togethers are quite an experience. My family is awesome. And very funny to be around. All of my mom's parents and her siblings and their families were there. We are very competitive. We usually play a softball game but this year we played kickball instead. We had our annual egg toss, which my grandpa is in charge of and very passionate about.
We have cool traditions. In 1995 we made a time capsule. We all filled out a piece of paper, answering questions about our likes and dislikes and where we saw ourselves in the future. i think I was 9 at this time. Then we gathered up for Thanksgiving of 2003, opened our time capsule and read our papers out loud to one another. Then we added to the time capsule that year. Well this year we opened it up and read our papers from both years and it was so much fun! In 1995 I was obsessed with American Girl Dolls and that's all that I wrote about.
Whenever I go home I feel like I'm 10 years old and I feel like all of my maturity goes out the window. Sunday morning my sister and I woke up and raced to the bathroom, pushing each other out of the way and I won of course because I'm the older sister. And then we had our classic wrestling match with my cousin, Marci, on my parent's bed. And then we drive through down town Port Townsend with our windows rolled down and blast all of our old music that we used to listen to (mostly country and music we would never pick up now, except for the sake of re-living old memories).
I hadn't been to my home ward since I gave my homecoming talk last June so it was fun to be there and see everyone. Singles wards are fun but people come and go and it's nice to go to my home ward where people stay! It's like seeing family. I was expecting the Bishop to embarrass me in some form or another (he likes to do that). My family walked into church a couple of minutes before the opening song and as soon as I sat down in my seat, my bishop motioned for me to come up on the stand. I figured he was going to ask me to speak (because he has done that to me before at the last minute) but instead he asked me to lead the music haha. I had a lot of family visiting that Sunday so I had lots of people making funny faces at me while I was up there...
I got to spend some quality time with my two younger brothers, Anker and Max. We played music in our "music hut". Anker is amazing at playing the bass guitar and Max is incredible at the drums. It was SO fun. I just sang and played whatever ditty I could on the guitar and they would play right along with it.
I feel like Anker and I really connected. On Sunday, before church, we were sitting on the couch together waiting to leave and he said, "Hey, have you ever thought about how weird eye brows are?" Hahahaha...I said, "What do you mean?" and he continued, "I mean, just look at them. Stare at my eye brows. It's like a patch of fur above our eyes. Why do we have them?"
I also got to see a really cool project that my dad has been working on. For the past couple of months, whenever I would talk to my mom on the phone I would ask her what Dad was up to and she would always say something like, "Oh, he's just out in the garage working on his totem poles." And I would always laugh because it sounded like a crazy thing for my dad to be doing. While I was home I heard the real story about it and it is so awesome! The stake scout troop asked him if he would make them a "gateway" for a trip they are taking at the end of this month. My dad took on the job. Then he found out that they wanted totem poles as a part of their gateway. He had never done any kind of carving before but he still felt good about doing the project. So, he read a bunch of books about carving and Native American artwork and even went to watch some "Master Carvers" do their thing and then he went to work. Someone donated a huge cedar tree which they cut in half and he has been carving two totem poles and they are absolutely beautiful. All of the characters on the totem pole have spiritual meaning behind them. He even made most of the tools he used for the carving. While I was home he started painting them which was fun to watch.
It was just so nice and really refreshing to be with my family because I just love them so much. I also just love the Pacific Northwest, (specifically Northwestern Washington). The trees, the ocean, the sailing, the overcast weather, fresh seafood, the hippies, the art, the music. It's all so wonderful. My skin was sooo hydrated while I was there! Utah is dry. But that's okay because I feel good about living here right now. But one day...one day! I will move back :) Probably.
