Halloween and More!

In the last entry I talked about the trip I would be taking to California with Mom and Dad. Well the trip was amazing! We had so much fun! The hotel we stayed at and the surrounding area was so incredibly beautiful. It was such a difference coming from cold and dry Provo to sunny and humid San Diego. I honestly just wanted to stay, but I guess it was good we didn't because if we had stayed one day longer we would have been right in the middle of the fires. Dad was fighting the horrendous wind that caused all of the havoc on our way back. We even saw a Wal-Mart truck that was all tipped over because of it. We were pretty blessed to get out of that when we did. The city our hotel was in was Rancho Bernardo, one of the places that got hit the hardest with the fire. The first day we were there I went out with Phil and Lisa on a Geocache hunt. If you don't know what that is it's a hobby some people have where they hide little caches in various places around the world. Then they record the GPS coordinates and put them up online so people can look it up and try and find them. So that's what we did. We went walking all around the neighborhoods and found three caches. It was pretty fun and kind of addicting I have to say. Maybe when I finally have money I'll get a GPS system and do it myself! Anyways I took this picture of one of the neighborhoods (they were really expensive nice ones too) and it was literally picture perfect, like it came right out of a movie, as you can see. It probably doesn't look like this now after the fire. Scary and sad to think about!

That night we went to Grandma's community club house where we met up with a bunch of the Hoggan clan and celebrated her 90th birthday with some of her friends from the area as well. She loved it! It was great to see all of the family again. I was able to play the piano and sing for Grandma and that felt really good. She was really grateful and I was glad I could do that for her, sort of my personal gift to her.


Then the next day Mom and I went to the beach in Oceanside and took some pictures, looked at the hot surfers, and enjoyed the salty sea air. We ate lunch at this little oceanside diner which was amazing and looked at the beautiful parrot perched on the fence. It was so much fun. Then I took Jaron to the mall and we hung out for a while.



After that, we all went to Olive Garden for dinner. I got to sit next to Grandma there so I took this picture. I can't believe she's 90! What an amazing woman! So the trip was great and it's great to see family!

So for Halloween Nate and I decided to make and a decorate a cake. Nate has a cake decorating kit so we used that to do the lines and detail of the frosting. We pretty much made up the shape and had to get creative. We used a heart-shaped pan for the head (we cut off the round part) and then a square one for the body and just cut parts out. We also used crushed up oreos to make the chocolate look black. It was pretty fun and everyone had fun eating at FHE.

We also went to a murder mystery party the night before Halloween. It was a pirate theme and Nate was the first mate and I was the governor's daughter. I was having a rebellious love affair with the first mate to spite my father who hated pirates. Well Nate ended up getting murdered and we had to try and solve the mystery. It was so much fun! We had fun shopping for the costumes too :).


Then yesterday we went to the BYU football game against CSU, which we, of course, WON! It was a great game and we even saw Mom, Dad, Cody and Jayla there. The day was perfect too. Not too cold or too hot. All in all we've had a lot of fun!


Now I just get to look forward to doing my research papers and other projects for the next few weeks. Let's hope I can get through it and graduate!! I guess the next big break is Thanksgiving and I'll be in Seattle with Nate and his family for that. I'm excited! I hope I won't get too confused with names and people though because it'll be all of his extended family too. But I guess it can't be as bad as it was for him meeting just my immediate family...lol. He saw all of the little kids and just got overwhelmed. I think he even said that he'd never seen so many little kids running around all at once and that it was chaos. I guess I'm so used to it that it doesn't even phase me...lol. Oh yeah! Yesterday we went to my cousin Dia's house and hung out with her and her husband Andy. We had a blast talking and playing Gamecube. They have a really nice place and they want to have us back again to watch movies or a football game in the community theater that's in the clubhouse or something. They are such nice and cute people! So much fun!! Well I guess I should get back to doing other things I need to do.