July 23

I'm going to remember what I can about the day before Pioneer Day. However, since I haven't really considered Pioneer Day as a full holiday, that will make it a little hard.

2014. My brother took my nephews swimming, but Nathaniel didn't want to go, so my mom took him with her as she went other places. She ended up going to Susanne's house to watch Bountiful's parade. After a full day of working at home, I announced to my family that I was going to go watch the parade, so they decided to come too, and David drove and I had to tell him which street to turn on. We were able to park in front of Nan's driveway. Then we met them on her neighbors' lawn; the boys were told they couldn't have the neighbors' food. At one point I went into Susanne's house to get popsicles. We watched the procession; some high school bands got to dress coolly, but some had to wear their hot outfits. The boys were eager to get the free parade handouts; my mom remarked that they hadn't been taught manners not to get in other people's way. After the parade, we went to a firework shack near Dick's Market, where my brother picked out a lot of fireworks to set off. We got some tanks and some ground blooms. We lit off the fireworks at Susanne's house; David almost got burned from waiting too long to throw the "flowers." When we left, Ya-ping wanted Nathaniel to ride in my mom's car, since his carseat should have already been in it, but in fact my mom had not used his carseat. On the way home, we asked him about his imaginary families and houses. I said, "Do you have any dogs?" "We do have dogs!" "Do you have any cats?" "We do have cats!"--a cat named Bottom. My mom beat me to the next question: "Do you have any birds?" "We do have birds!" This is my journal for the day:
"After work today, we went to Bountiful's parade with the boys. They don't understand how to watch out for other people. Then we did fireworks with them. Qi-en really is the cutest."

2012. My ward's FHE was in the Regency Apartment lounge, where we watched 17 Miracles. I sat on a loveseat, and later my future roommate Scott, whom I was afraid of, came and sat right between me and the other person. (Later our friend Carissa told me she found that hilarious.) When Levi Savage was publicly rebuked for not having faith, Scott said, "I couldn't do that." In the scene where the kid eats the buffalo chip, Michelle Sutterfield said "Sick!" and then when he was being threatened by wolves, she said, "Is that the same kid who was eating that thing?" I believe that this was the same night that our "horse" friends Kristen, Hanna, Carissa, and Amberly came over to our apartment, since we didn't have class the next day. They talked about Scott having rearranged our apartment, and they loved the blog I had made; they made my roommate Cameron read it. Then they went and brought back an old creepy dating book with weird pictures and wanted us to make captions for the pictures. One weird picture had a guy looking at the side of a girl's face. I had two captions that I thought were perfect. One was a line from I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown: "'I'm trying to have an expression of looking to the future with hope.' 'That's all right, I'm just drawing your ear.'" For the other caption, I began singing "Trololo" because I thought the guy looked like the "Trololo" singer. Everyone laughed, but only Amberly knew what I was talking about, so I brought out my laptop to show them the YouTube video.

2011. This was a Saturday. I think this was the year I gave Allie a pink owl for her birthday. These are some anecdotes I copied and pasted from an old blog:

• She wanted to play Apples to Apples. Which is strange because she doesn't really get what's going on. Anyway, when it was her turn to be the judge, her green card was "Nasty." Someone put "AIDS." She picked a different card, and then shortly after said, "I was going to pick AIDS but I had to pick this one. 'Cause we all know what that's like." My sister and cousin and I were all laughing hysterically, as quietly as possible.
• I discovered an entertaining website called "Not Always Right." I was reading this, and came across [a comic strip in which a mother asks for a "Playboy" for her son, but she really wants a Gameboy.] I had been reading some of the anecdotes aloud to my mom, and Allie insisted that I read this to her because it was funny. I told her, "I don't think you get it." So she told her herself. I still don't think she gets it. At least, I hope not.
• I turned on Hogan's Heroes. She said to me, "I wish this were Pollyanna." Then in the episode they brought in a small Nazi flag, complete with the swastika. She said something like, "I knew they were in another country. Australia!" This made me laugh, so she "corrected" herself: "Austria!" My mom caught on that she had seen the Nazi flag on The Sound of Music--hence thinking it was Austria's flag.
• I was attempting to play "Linus and Lucy" on the piano. I thought I was doing reasonably well with just the left hand, but then I heard her say, "Mark you need to fix that do better or you'll need to take piano lessons, too!"

I was also amused when I looked at the cover for the August issue of The Friend. It has a bunch of primary-kid drawings of Thomas S. Monson on the cover. But one of them doesn't look so much like the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Rather, I think it looks more like the President of the United States of America:



I pointed it out to my parents, and even Allie thought it looked like Obama. My dad said he had thought the same thing.

2010. In the morning I got up and got ready to go home. As I was driving out of Provo, I saw people walking home after participating in the World's Largest Water Fight. That night my dad turned on the news and I saw the water fight on the news, and I regretted that I didn't participate.

2009. This is my journal entry for the day: "Today we were blessed enough to have our lesson go through with Anna Hamilton, although it almost didn't. Brad and Carey's lesson didn't go through. I guess they had an emergency." Anna lived in a single-wide trailer and didn't own much; this might have been the time we brought George Sabin with us.