Virginia here I come!

Wow, totally unexpectedly it has worked out that I get to go visit my very very oh so dear friends Rebecca Beers and Chaz Chase for a whoooooole week Sep. 13-20!! I am so totally amazingly excited I can't even believe it!! Sorry I just wanted to let others share in my joy and excitement.

Oh this was wicked. On the first night of camp, to start things off with a bang, the director organized for a real live helicopter to land and drop off the guest speaker who was cherading as "Gill Bates" because the camp theme was "UpGrade, the old has passed the new has come." It was really cool and exciting and they hyped it up all big. Good memory. 

This is my family the night before Julia and Viggo left for Norway. Aww, so sweet. Miss you sis! 

So if ya'll were wondering where I've been for the last week... or even if you haven't been, I was a camp counsilor for my very favorite church camp, Camp Crestview. This is a picture of me and my cabin of 7 Jr. High girls. I love each and everyone of them an unbelievable amount and had SUCH a great week getting to know them and seeing them grow. It was really so great. I was pretty scared going up there but God just did awesome things. I grew up going to this camp so it was a blessing and an honor to get to return as a counselor. 

Sigh. My sister left. She is gone. That stupid Norwegian came and took her back to his home country. (Just kidding Viggo. I love you very much). Yep... so my parents and I took them up to the airport on Monday and it was sad. They are now official residents (er, I guess Viggo already was but whatever) of Norway. It is their home. Not America, NORWAY. It's this little country which is stinking far away from the one I live in. Grr. But what can a girl do. At least there's always Christmas 2006!

And here we have the happy bride and groom. Good news, the wedding was a success. It seems to have worked quite well and these 2 have now been married for a whole 4 weeks! Yep, the roughest part's over now... should be smooth sailing from here on out. 

Aw, the ever classic and always hot "cute bridesmaids pic." Yep, here we are adoring our beautiful bride as we should be. Left of Julia is Kathryn, or as she's better known around these parts, Vive - she's 3 months pregnant... er I guess 4 by now! Then that's obviously my sister in the wedding dress and veil, Julia, then me... if you didn't know that then you really shouldn't be reading this, and there down in the corner is our beloved Nicci. Nicci and I have been friends since we were about 4, she is a doll I will tell you what. 

And this here is my family. This is like the first picture we've had in years without one of my little brother's making a silly face. And it's also the first suit my dad has worn in 30 years. Weddings truely are magical things. 

This is the wedding party. there is a ten year gap between the bride side and the groom side but I'd say we still managed to all be pretty dang hot. The bride's maids dresses turned out looking great together which was quite the relief since none of us saw each other's dresses until the day before the wedding. Julia's short, it's true, but she was also the prettiest little bride you're likely to ever see.  

Capernway Reunion Pictures

Below you will find a series of pictures from the past Thursday and Friday when Allison, Josh, Danny, Janice, Janell, and I got together for some good old fashioned down to earth fun. We had a blast together going to the beach and then the next day hanging out and going to the Bite of Oregon festival. As I said with the Mexico pictures I also just posted the chronological order goes, as always, from the bottom up.

And here we have the final picture of this very long series of posts. We got to see the Decembers play who I hadn't known of previously but who I found to be very enjoyable. It was the first show Josh had ever been to which I find nearly unbelievable and was very crowded and dusty but still loads of fun.  

Afer our day of enjoyable nothingness we met up with Allison and Josh at "A Bite of Oregon", the big beer and wine festival down on the riverfront in Portland. It was fun, there was lots of food and live music on 3 different stages and even some free beer which I of course, being only a mere child, did not have any of. No seriously, I actually didn't. But anyway, this is me and Josh making angry faces. I believe our thinking behind this was that Allison Janice and Danny had just done a self photo where they were standing a couple feet away of them making excited faces and we didn't want to be left out so we did one making angry faces which they didn't understand but Josh and I did. We are very cool.

This is Janice and Danny and I feeling ultra hip riding around in Danny's bright green '72 Buick convertable. Aawww shyeah. Janice and I stayed the night at Danny's house so the 3 of us hung out most of the day watching TV at Danny's house. We enjoyed making fun of the people on TV and our single outing of the daytime which was this run in the car out to Subway. On a side note, I had no idea subway now does toasted subs. When did this happen and how did I miss it?! This changes everything. Not only that they now carry swiss and pepper jack cheese! Man, the world just keeps getting to be a better and better place, I will tell you what.

We forgot to bring matches to start our fire on the beach at night so we had to bum some off of a neighboring group of people (although they were far enough away that we were the only group we could see on our beach). So anyway, they gave us 4 matches and told us to just strike them on whatever we could find. All we could think of was zippers and the only zippers we had were on our pants. So this is Allison and Danny trying to light matches off of the zippers on their pants. Heh. Funny, yes. Luckily Janell remembered that she had a nail file on her swiss army knife which worked MUCH better, though it wasn't nearly as fun to watch.  

Walking along the beach at sunset with "old college buddies" does it get any better than that? 

Yaaaaaaaaay Capernwray Reunion!!! Allison's boyfriend Josh is here visiting for the week from Southern California so a handful of us got together to take him to the beach on Thursday. Here advertising the fine taste of classic CocaCola we have Janice, Danny, Josh, me, and Janell (from left to right). We had a really really fun day laying out on the beach talking and getting sunburned. 

Mexico Pictures

Below are a bunch of pictures with captions from our youth group trip down to Mexico. As always with picture posting they are chronologically posted from the bottom going up. Hope you enjoy.

We went to 6 Flags, Magic Mountain the day before we came home to ensure that we all left of pleasant memories of this exciting adventure of a trip and not memories of blistering heat and small portions of food... it worked pretty well, we had a really fun day riding ginormous roller-coasters all day long.  

Mission Beach in San Diego California is definetly in my top 5 favorite places in the whole world. I don't know why but it's just happy for me. I can't help but be happy when I'm there. It's magic. So even getting to be there for only 2 hours on our way from Mexico up to LA where we spent the night pretty much made the whole trip worth it for me, break downs and all. 

This is my 17 year old brother, Charles, at our favorite resturant in the world, Luigi's in San Diego California. That pizza has a 30 inch diameter and tastes like heaven with a crust. Mmmmm.... Luigi's! 

You see those boys under the table and the U-Haul. Yeah, that's about the extent of the shade provided at the campsite... none, so when we had to wait around in the heat of the day for the van to get fixed the kids got creative. That's my brother under the table and the oh so imfamous, or famous... depending on the story, Walker under the U-Haul. 

This is our oh so luxurious campsite, basically just a bit feild of dust where we set up our tents and some portapottys that smelled oh so very very bad.  

This is the house we built. It's not exactly Beverly Hills material but for 13 unskilled people in 2 days it isn't bad. We got behind because of our van breaking down so what we would have taken 3.5 days to do we did in 2 days. We didn't quite finish all the stucco but the kids really rocked it and we got an amazing amount done way too quickly. It was awesome.

This then is the 2nd time Jeff had to fix our van. It broke down about 8 miles from our camp site but luckily one of the guys working for the organization we were with pulled up behind us just when we died and towed us back to camp. The funny part was when he only left 2 feet of tow rope between his back bumper and our front and then proceeded to tow us at an aproxamet speet of 45 mph. We were pretty certain there was absolutely no way to make it all the way to camp without hitting him at some point but once again God was good and we came out unscathed. We then had to wait around camp for a good 8 hours the next morning while Jeff once again worked his butt off fixing the van. Things got a little hairy for a while there when we ran out of water and the kids started getting dehydrated but yep... we made it through alive. 

This was the first time out van broke down, in east LA. It took a good 4 or 5 hours of working on the van right here in this little neighbor hood with nothing around except some buildings with bars on their windows and lots of grafitti. Yeah... not the environment I would have chosen to hang out with 10 high schoolers in for 5 hours... but God was good and it all turned out alright. 

These are all the girls who went down to Mexico. Besides us there were 7 boys, but they're not nearly as important. Next to me is Whitney who is married to Jeff, the main leader of this trip, and then the other 3 are all Onyca, Alden, Bethany, and Rachel - three of the most wonderful girls under 18 you are ever likely to meet. I love them all lots and was really excited to get to know them on this trip.  

Como estas el banio?

Maybe I should clarify, why I say "adventuring around Mexico" I mean... I went to Tijuana and built a house. That's not really "around Mexico" I know... I think I was pretty tired when I wrote that. Anyway - it was cool we took a group of 10 high schoolers and 2 other leaders in an extremely ghetto 15 passenger van hauling a U-Haul. Yes. We did break down. Twice. It sucked. Aside from the breaking down, running out of water once, not having quite enough food, and working long days in the blistering heat it was a grrrreat trip! No, seriously though, the circumstances did suck much of the time... waiting around for hours for the van to be fixed in a dusty campground with no shade, driving 24 hours down to and up from the border with NO airconditioning... these things were unpleasant and uncomfortalbe - but what made the trip rock was the kids. I'm not even just saying that. They were totally awesome. All of them had just great attitudes the whole time and were just rockstars in everyway - though generally I would never use that term to describe someone because I think it sounds really stupid I feel that it applies in this situation.
They kicked butt on building the house, which was the main thing that we went down there to do. It usually takes 4 days to build one and we got it most of the way done in 2. We got put 2 days behind because of the various break downs of our van - one in LA and one in Tijuana. I'm really sorry if I'm misspelling Tijunana, I'm never really sure on that one, although I should be cuz I've been there multiple times. Oh well.
The other great thing about those high school kids, besides their terrific attitudes and hard work, was their amazing sense of humor. A couple guys on the trip - one kid in particular, were just HILARIOUS. So funny. So it made the difficult circumstances just that much more bearable.
But, as I stated before, the biggest factor to us making it alive through this trip, much less coming away with pleasant memories, is that God is TOTALLY awesome and was so faithful to us all the time, even in the moments when we did grumble and complain and wish for death rather than one more moment in that stinking hot van. Oh wait, that was mostly just me.

God is good. I promise.

First of all, is my blog showing up all weird to anyone else or is that just for me? I'm getting random doubles of this pictures. Not really sure what the deal is there...
Anyway, I just got back from adventuring around Mexico. It was an adventure to be sure. I shall write about it more at a later date, preferably when I can post pictures as well but I can't do that right now because my computer is dead and it's very sad. So yeah, all I will say for now is that God is good all the time, even when your van breaks down in east LA and you lose track of 10 high schoolers you're in charge of. Or when it breaks down again in Tijuana and you run out of water to give your kids, or when you get pushed back 2 days on building a house for a poor mexican family and so you have to work double hard to catch up. Yes even then he is good. He is very good.