Now the Summer's Over...

^ (Sunday evenings are never boring at our house) ^

Wow. This is sad. One post a month? Time is slipping away. This has been my fastest summer by far. The days have completely blended together and I don't know what happened what day or if today is Wednesday or Thursday or if it's the 12th or 13th. I feel like it will be Christmas before I know it. Tash and mom will drive me to Virginia in a little over a week. I feel so unprepared. All of my textbooks haven't come in the mail yet! There's been so much drama with that. Like there was a $150 textbook that I needed, and I found it for $70 on Ebay. So I bought it. But then I found it for $45 on half.com. So I was grrrrrred. (Yes that's a word). But the $70 one never came in the mail. So we were able to get our money back. And get the cheaper one. Hooray.

^ (Why yes, we can amuse ourselves with plastic glasses) ^

Pageant is over. I'm not as sad as I was last year. Probably because we still live in Nauvoo and will always be here for it. And we can always stay in touch with all the pageant people. It was so good to see people from past years and meet so many amazing new people. We met the Richardson family. They have 25 kids - 20 of those adopted from all over the world. 18 still live at home. They live on a big ranch in Missouri, and came to Nauvoo to sell a book about their story. My mom bought a few. I still need to read it. So they were camping at the State Park for the whole month of July. With that many people!!! But their kids are all super nice and well-behaved. I wish I could've gotten to know them better. They watched pageant every night they were here. Can I talk about pageant enough?

^ (We went to Bloomington for the weekend to visit the Smith family) ^

All my friends are leaving for college within the next few days. Technically I don't need to be there til the 26th, but we're leaving the 20th to take a D.C./Virginia history road-trip. I really want to go to a North Carolina beach too, but maybe I can do that later because one of my roommates is from NC :)

^ (Ethan, a workcrew boy from pageant) ^

I had an amazingly fun time at the Smiths. I love Ella and Charles. We can just sit there and play card and board games for hours. I got to go to the mall and Barnes and Noble ♡ And I discovered that jeggings aren't for me. We got to go to their ward and I just went to YW with Tash and Ella. I answered a question and got it wrong. I was very glad they thought I was a Miamaid instead of almost 19 hee hee. We had so much Japanese food while we were there too. And got to buy some yay

We have a new kitty named Jiji. Named after the cat on Mahou no Takkyubin (or Kiki's Delivery Service). She is so pretty. Her tail is super long and she has piercing yellow eyes. Yes she's all black, but her fur is long and silky and we're not superstitious. She followed me and my mom home on a walk. She called out to us and just wanted to be held and fed. There was no momma or other baby cats around. And she was old enough to be weaned, but young enough to train for a litter box. And yes, she's trained now. She's the perfect cat. Seriously, the pooping all over the garage was the only problem at first, and even that's fixed now. She doesn't scratch or bite, and she loves to be held and rub up on you. She's also super afraid of cars, which is a good thing. Hopefully it will protect her from getting run over. She's an outside kitty. We let her roam the soybean patch to the west of our house, and the woods behind our back fence. And she always comes back. We almost named her Kiki, but the babies (Mia, Noah, and Grace) insisted on Jiji. No matter how much water we give her, she insists on drinking the collected water in the broken pool.


So I didn't leave the Tri-state area this summer, but I have learned to enjoy the places and people close by. And hopefully college out east will be a fun adventure for me. I'll miss everyone. Including Jiji-kitty. It's hard to go to school out east when it seems like everyone's going to school in Utah :( But I KNOW i was supposed to go to SVU, so I'm not going to doubt it.