It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

So its not midnight yet, but here's all the great stuff that happened to me this year that I haven't posted about yet. First of all Winter formal! I had the privilege of attending the dance with the amazing Ariell Bratton. We had almost all of our classes together last year and it was so much fun to hang out with her again.I'm so glad that she asked me! Since then we've also done our day activity where we made breakfast for dinner, played games, and gave out awards to houses for having something special in their use of christmas lights (including mine; my mom was so proud).

Then, I skipped the last day of school and spent the weekend up at our newly built cabin with my whole family including all my nieces and nephews. All us guys had to shovel a path into our cabin. It was the first time I'd ever had to shovel snow and it was great!

While we were up there we:

Made snow angels

Had snowball fights
Looked at weird snow formations

And did tons of other fun stuff like sledding and playing games. I could have spent forever up there with my family!

Next big thing was Christmas. Even though we had to wait until 12 for eveyone to come over from their other houses, it was still one of the best Christmases ever cuz everyone was there. Later we tried getting a big family shot by ourselves and it took a lot of effort, but we finally pulled it off!

Hurray for 2008 and all the good memories! I can't wait for next year!

Turkey Fest!!!

So it finally came. One of the best holidays if not THE best holiday of the year. Thanksgiving. Oh how I love the wonderful aromas of all the delicious tasting foods, the annual Turkey Bowl celebrations, the Turkey Trot, the requisite sleep in between stuffing yourself at meals, and of course just chillin with the fam. I could go on forever in my Ode to Thanksgiving. However, I'll just stick with the out of the ordinary stuff of which there was a lot this year. First of all, my family decided to give thanks for our many blessings in St. George this year where my Great (in all possible meanings of the word) Aunt Shirley lives. My Mom's parents came down as well and with the addition of my parents, Bryce, and I we had a small little family reunion. After the 8 hour drive Wednesday night to get there, we were definitely ready to chow down. Thanksgiving day was filled with cooking, playing cards, cooking, receiving ever-present comments about how big we had both grown, and more cooking. Finally, it was time for dinner and it was delicious. I would go into it more, but i'm sure you all had similar delicacies so I will just show you instead.

Oh I love food so much! (Except for the turkey stuffing. Bryce ate it again this year...I did not partake. End of story.) Anyway, after all this great food we cleaned up and then we watched this awesome movie called The Errand of Angels. Its about a sister missionary and it was really great. I never realized how good looking a girl can be when she's preaching the gospel. :D Haha jk. I've known it all along. Moving onto Friday which was fantastic cuz Bryce and I got to go SNOWBOARDING! We had been looking forward to this ever since we missed our chance to go last year. It was great because Brian Head got a foot of snow on Thanksgiving Day so we had fresh powder for the day. (Of course that was the only foot of snow they had so only one ski lift was open at the whole resort.) On the way up there, the scenery looked amazing and I had a whole bunch of Christmas songs going through my head that actually started to make sense.

So, the lines for the lifts got to be a little long, but it was still so much fun. After getting used to being on the snow again, Bryce and I decided to go down the Terrain Trail where a bunch of rails and jumps were set up. It was the first time we had ever done it and it was great! By the end of the day we were getting pretty good at all of them. Bryce and I decided we wanted to take some pictures of our sweet jumps. It actually took us a couple tries to pull off any decent looking shots and none of them still look that great.

(Napoleon Dynamite quote kinda comes to mind on this one.)

Just kidding. I probably have made it sound like Bryce and I are pros at snowboarding...we're not. We try hard to be though and its fun to pretend. :D

This picture is my favorite one. Because the lines were so long, Bryce and I would go into the faster singles line and be put on the chair with people we didn't know, but we'd always wait at the top for one another and go down together. He's the best little bro a guy could ask for.

I don't have pictures for the last big thing which we did on Saturday. About half of us went to the St. George Musical Theatre's musical they were putting on right then. I actually had never heard of it before, but "Nunsense" turned out to be really good. As you probably guessed...its a comedy about a bunch of nuns. There ended up being a little inappropriate subject matter for children (me and bryce) or maybe it was just boys (me and bryce) but my mom told us to forget what we heard. :D (It really wasn't anything too terrible and luckily for me and bryce we only understood about half of those kind of jokes.) Right after the musical we came back down to nice, warm Mesa. We got back really early Sunday morning and then after church we ended up playing with Ben and Macey and Kiley and Sterling. While Kiley and Sterling were asleep we busted out Settlers and played the familiarly intense kind of game that we always have in the Bishop household. Mom and Macey both declared that they were not so intense in these games because they technically were not members of the Bishop bloodline so then they made a temporary alliance of poking fun at our competitiveness. All in all, I had a splendid Thanksgiving and once again I realized how much I truly have to be thankful for. Hence, the reason why I took up so much of your precious time that you could have spent otherwise. So I must thank you for reading this ridiculously long post and ask you to consider reading my stuff again sooner or later. See ya!

Sterling Silver!

He's here! So my little baby nephew Sterling Clyde Bishop was born on Nov. 3 so Bryce, my mom, and I all got to go down to Tucson and see him for Veteran's Day. As you can see by this picture, he has already become pro at knowing how to chill. He slept most of the time we were there aside from the occasional opening of one eye to look at us whenever we would start talking about him. It was good fun and we had a great time hangin' with Ben and Macey and Kiley too. Kiley is an awesome little girl and loved to come over to her new brother and point at him saying, "Baby!". We got to go hiking with a couple of families in Ben and Macey's ward that morning and had a lot of fun chasing Kiley all up and down the trails. To sum it all up, this was the best way I could have spent my day off from school.

Just because I haven't said anything for so long, I'll just list a few more things about what's been up with me over the last few months. I'll keep it all to a minimum though. I went to Homecoming with Lyndsie Lenkersdorfer (awesome last name huh?) and had a great time! I also got to vote for the first time and that was pretty rad! It made me feel a little too old though. I finished applying for BYU which again made me feel ancient. As far as sports goes, I ran a 16:57 at the city X-country race which made me happy cuz I had been wanting to break 17 all season. Then, I re-tore my Achilles tendons which was no fun. So i didn't run in regions or the week leading up to state. As you can probably assume I didn't do so hot, but I'm just glad I came away from it all still being able to run so i'm trying not to beat myself up about the lame way of ending my season. Besides, I have a loving sister in whom I may share my overwhelming woes of running disappointments and failures because she too had similar traumatic circumstances that affected her running career. :D Sometime soon I'm gonna give her a call and cry on her shoulder via the telephone wires separating us, but until then I guess i'll just have to hold it in. Um...I also got asked to winter formal by Ariell Bratton and that's gonna be a lot of fun. I have decided that mission prep is possibly one of the coolest things I am doing right now and I get a greater desire to serve my mission right now every time I go, even though I learn even more each time how much I have left to prepare. Anyway, enough of talking. I think that's it for right now...or the next couple months for that matter. Later!

P.S. Apparently these shoes used to be put on my feet and now they've been passed on to the next generation of Bishop boys. Also, I want to mention that Sterling also has red hair, but it's not as flaming red as his big sister's and so we don't know if it'll stay or not. :D

Oh the things I can do!

So I'm finally 18. I'm not gonna lie that it sounds a bit anti-climatic considering it is society's equivalent of me becoming an "adult." Despite this recent transition I still feel like a kid and I plan on staying that way. No growing up for this dude. As I have been thinking about my coming birthday these last couple of weeks I started making a list of all the new things I could do. Here's some of the things I came up with in no particular order: buy dry ice, get drafted into military service, go to elders quorum, vote, hold puppies at the mall (that comment is courtesy of Bryce), jury duty, buy Cuban cigars, get a church calling, no longer being charged as a minor, go to mission prep, and a bunch of other stuff that I haven't thought of. Well, considering that my birthday this year is on a Sunday, I can't really say that anything exciting happened. We had ward conference today though and there were some really awesome talks given that brought the Spirit so I guess that was as good a birthday present as any I've ever received. Thanks to everyone who made my birthday so special though. Yesterday was a really long day but it was probably one of the best I've ever had. I had a race yesterday that I had to get up at 6 for even though I wasn't running until about 10. It was a rough race because I was already injured and it was the first one of the season which is always stressful, but I did good so I'm excited for the season. Then I went straight to work because I was supposed to be there at 10 even though I didn't actually come until 12 because of the race. I let my manager know ahead of time though and she said it was OK. Work was also very eventful. I finally escaped the clutches of my manager and told her...that I couldn't work any more. It took me about 10 tries to say it though. Everytime I would start explaining she would change the subject and then walk away. Then, I went to our man night where we had epic video game battles, battles with swords and other medieval weaponry, and other manly stuff. Then I got kidnapped to a surprise birthday party for me and maddi. It was way fun and Maddi's mom made these awesome, giant sub sandwiches that made a big #18. It was way cool. Then the girls thought it would be funny to cover me in tape after they had put lipstick on it. Oh and all the guys brought swords from Nolan's house to the party so we took a picture of us holding all these weapons. Anyway, thank you everyone who came to the party! And I would just like to wish my very good friend Maddi a very happy 18th birthday as well. Well, I think I've talked too much now so I will be merciful and let those who actually bother to read my posts leave in peace. Bye!

So I finally got the picture of our man night! This is all of us guys posing for Maddi's mom in her front room with pretty much every variety of weapons you can think of. Some day we will have an epic battle and bloody up all these weapons!

First Week of School! First Week of School!

So this week went by kinda fast/slow, but I'm glad its done. I decided that I probably won't have that much to write about during the school year, so I might as well get all the standard stuff out of the way. I'm finally a senior and life is sweet! I can finally leave my Cross stuff in the car and not have to drag it around all day. Plus, I can't wait for the senior assemblies and all that jazz. I did realize this week that like half my friends have all graduated and are either going to college or on missions. It's crazy! But it's all part of life I guess. I'm going to miss you guys so much. But I know I'll see you all again one way or another. This year is going to be way fun though. Between two choirs, seminary, cross country, english over at MCC, Anatomy w/ Hatch, and Gov w/ Baser, life is gonna be awesome. Of course its still gonna be kinda insane, but I'm looking forward to it. And I've decided to give my new Cross coach a chance cuz he seems like a good enough guy. It's kinda depressing though when almost your whole team, including your coach, either graduates or decides not to come back. This years seminary will be with Bro. Janes and he is really awesome. And I can't think a better way of ending up my Senior year of seminary than with Christ's life in the New Testament. It'll be fantastic. Just as a side note, you've probably noticed by now that the music you're listening to is all thematic. I love listening to music when I'm doing my homework, but I've realized that I can't really make it work that well cuz I start singing along. So, at least now I have some awesome music I can listen to and actually get my homework done! I've probably missed some really good ones, but these were all the ones I could think of on the spot. I'll probably download some later. Well that's all for now folks. Later!

Vacation!

So Bryce, my dad, and I all went on vacation to texas last week. I would have posted earlier but first I was waiting to get the pictures and then our computer decided to go on strike so I had to wait. Anyway, we had a blast thanks to my awesome sister and her family! We did lots of fun stuff while we were hanging out there!

Like make human towers...

and play "House" after Bryce, Kaytie and I figured out how to put it together.

We also went to the zoo and Fortworth Botanical Gardens!

We also got to plant a little garden, play DDR Hottest Dance Party on the Wii, go swimming, and play board games every night after the kids went to bed. All in all everything was fantastic. I could go on forever about all the fun we had. Even the 15 hour drives there and back were made OK because I got to finish 3 books! This vacation defininately made up for the whole summer of work! Thanks so much Kaytie and Ryan for letting us come and hang out with you guys. I can't wait to do it again!

Howdy!

Ok first of all I'd proudly like to say that after nearly doing 40 hours on my history class this week, (in addition to the 40+ hours I put into Lifeguarding and Nielsens) and completing at least 25 days worth of material...I'M FINALLY DONE! Ya its been a pretty insane week, but I got through it thanks to the thought that I will be spending all next week saying, "Howdy Partner!" Yep. Thats right. I'm going to Texas and gonna wrangle me up a couple hundred hugs from two of my favorite people in the world...my niece and nephew.

They're pretty much the cutest kids I've ever seen. Except for Kiley. Can't forget her either!

I've been able to hang out with this little red head all summer. She definitely deserves the nick-name Smiley Kiley! Anyways, I think the best part of the trip is going to be the 15 hour drive there and back. Haha. Actually I've decided this will be a good opportunity to catch up on all the reading I've missed out on this summer. I'm bringing 3 books (all courtesy of Marc's recommendation. Thanks Marc!) and two books on tape. So I think I'm set to go. Well, I better stop now before I suffer from a blog overdose. I've never had one of those, but I've heard they're BAD! See ya'll when I get back! Maybe I'll git me one o' those Texas drawls. Haha. Later!

IT'S ALIVE!!!

So I decided to get on board with everyone else and make myself a blog. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it going...I doubt I could ever come up with enough posts and pictures to keep it interesting, but maybe I'll just keep it as a sign to everyone that I'm still alive and well, and taking the world head on! Anyways, have a fantastic day! Talk to ya later!