Parable of the 10 Virgin Performance

For church, I sang in a musical parable called "The Ten Virgins" by Emily Freeman for a Relief Society Christmas activity. It's based on the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25. I had a couple of numbers as the "narrator" of sorts. It was awesome to sing again (it's been a long time since I've done a performance like this), and it was great to get such good feeback from all the ladies. And of course, it was wonderful to have Mom and Barb come! I don't have any recordings of it, but I think you can check out the work on itunes.

The cast:

Barb , Mom and me

Good friends Vonna and Diane

Thanksgiving fun on the Farm

For a few years now, we have made the trip to Penokee, Kansas to visit my dad's cousin Mary and others for Thanksgiving. It's always a fun trip, and great fun to enjoy the simple life for a bit. Highlights of this year's Thanksgiving for me were playing games with my cousins, making bracelets with Deborah from Venice, visiting the kitchen store in Norton and walking with the giant dog Bear.

Below are some of the pics from our Kansas adventure.

Halloween and cholita wrestling

For this Halloween, I chose to represent the fearless, the underestimated and undervalued cholita, of the Bolivian type I mean. For the most part, my costume was somewhat authentic, except for the straw hat from Goodwill and the cabbage pat doll wearing my North Face hat. But other than that, I feel as though I've represented my South American female counterparts well. I had to carry around some pictures I took of the cholitas to help people understand what I was supposed to be. But, to my joy, one of our local missionaries from Ecuador recognized me right away. I even got a few "Most Creative" votes at a friend's party.

On Monday, we are having Sports Day for our school spirit week. I am dressing as a cholita. Why, you ask? Because some of these fearless women are also known to participate in professional WWF style wrestling:

So I figure, I'm perfectly justified in sporting this garb on Monday too!

Hope you all had some great Halloween fun!

(The pumpkin I carved this year)

Green Christmas

After much delay, here are some pictures from our Brazzale Family Christmas. If any of you out there have more pictures from this grand event, I would love to see them.



Highlights of the evening included eating delicious Italian food (I helped with the ravioli!), beating my uncles in Cribbage (Aunt Cathy, you and I make a great team. Let's keep that up.), playing a crazy Euro version of Jenga (can anybody tell me the name of that game?) and listening to Dad and Uncle Tony sing.

But....the proudest moment for me was when all of the extended family was downstairs watching football, me, Dad, Mom and Nick were upstairs by ourselves watching the Planet Earth series. While people were yelling and cheering for tackles, we were mesmorized by a wierd bug that lives in the rainforest. If you haven't seen any of the Planet Earth series, it's amazing. Disney is putting together a lot of the same footage for a movie called Earth this spring. You should check out the trailer on Youtube.

Come to think of it, I am a big fan of Mother Nature. I remember watching the March of the Penguins for the first time in Provo, and while everyone else had fallen asleep I was wide awake and crying because I was so moved by the plight of the mother penguin. And, now that I think of it, my only publication so far was about environmental stewardship for a BYU environmental journal. I guess I really am a tree hugger.

I am still surviving student teaching. One month down, three more to go!

Pictures from Thanksgiving

This year, Mom, Dad and I took a different route for Thanksgiving. Nick went on a rock climbing trip to Moab, UT over the break (he's stuck in CO because of bad weather as I write this), and all of our other family and friends were going to be out of town too, so we decided to have Thanksgiving at Elk Moutain and Saratoga, WY. We finished up the trip by cutting down Christmas trees at Fox Park, WY.

If you click on a picture in the slide show, it will take you to my Picassa site and you can see bigger versions of the pictures.



Also, here are some pictures of my roommate Cassi and I during our Christmas decorating fun. I am really proud of our tree.

Only two more weeks of school!