Walking the Walk

So I'm pretty much a native Washington DCer now (and I can make up terms like that because I am so in the hood...haha). I have seen a robbery, a cop pull a gun on a high school student, rode the metro at 3am, been to a dance club where a shady man named Kamiry got me and my friends in (My code name on the list was Annajelina) and every day upon my arrival home I am greeted by street performers near the entrance of the subway (my favorite is this quartet group in the picture on the right, they sung the Lion Sleeps Tonight the other day! It was amazing, they are seriously talented- and yes I gave them a dollar). In addition I am learning the DC versions of hand games (You know like Miss Mary Mat etc that all the ladies did when we were in Elementary school), my favorite one is the Jail Bird Rock ("Mommas in the kitchen cookin rice, daddy's outside shooting dice, brothers in jail ringin a bell and sistas outside sellin fruit coctails! Rockin Robin...). On that field trip we went to (that I mentioned in my previous post) some of my kids parents complimented on me on my ability to "jam" with the kids. Yup, I'm pretty much a rock star out here. Oh and don't worry about me taking all these pictures, its totally normal and I don't stand out at all as a tourist when I do it...anyways... (Side note, Can I just say that I really, seriously LOVE IT OUT HERE!)

In much bigger news (I know the mind reels to think that there could be more after the above statements) we have a T.V. in our apartment now!! Yes, before this moment we had no working T.V. and were unable to watch movies anywhere other than our laptops, but now that has changed. For those of you who know me, I love watching movies. So I pretty much freaked out and documented the entire T.V. placement into our apartment (partly because in order to get it from our friends apartment into our apartment we placed it on a Costco shopping cart that we just happened to have- its ok to take the carts here, they pick them up in the parking lot downstairs once a week- and the image was hilarious, and partly because I was very excited to have a T.V. again). You can see the two lovely gentleman who transferred the T.V. into our apartment for us on the left. They were kind enough to pose for me:) Needless to say I've probably watched at least one movie or show on it a day since we got it. (We don't have cable, but my roomie Lene has a bunch of shows on DVD- including Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Awesome.)

In other news the ward out here is GREAT! We went camping up in Maryland awhile ago for a ward camp out and it was a blast. Roasted marshmallows, an impromptu dance with someones I-Pod, several games including baseball (which I am not at all good at haha- although in this picture I did hit the ball), ultimate frisbee (where I ran around in circles almost the whole time- looking awesome while I did it of course) and soccer which I actually wasn't half bad at. We even had this series of competitions. Our team was Team 13, so naturally we gave ourselves the name Black Cats and Broken Mirrors! We ended the competition undefeated (it ended after two rounds because we got rained on but still, undefeated. :) haha).

Last night we went to the ward Halloween party. As you can see we have Joyce going as her gorgeous self, Lene the Zombie and my wonderful Megan going as Sue Sylvester from Glee. Shalyn who you'll see in the picture below with me, went as a spider web. And we can all totally, walk the walk. It was awesome, we carved a pumpkin (no faces for us, we carved the word Swag into our pumpkin- because hullo it had swag). It was Joyce's first time ever carving a pumpkin, she did very well...the A in swag is a little weird but other than that it was pretty sweet. Another person there carved two pumpkins, one was the Death Star and the other was that one planet that gets destroyed by the Death Star in Star Wars. Don't worry, I took a picture of it. It was awesome. There was also an impromptu dance (started by me, my lovely roommate Shalyn, and a fantastic girl by the name of...Kim? Dang I suck at names.), and a costume competition that Lene my roommate totally won for her wicked awesome Zombie costume. I was goth, as you can see it totally fits me. I used a piece of an earring to make a fake lip ring for the evening, but after several weird looks and questions about whether it was real or not I took it out for the sake of my delicate reputation haha. It was a night to remember for sure:) (There was also this all things pumpkin treat competition, my roomie Lene the zombie- zombie name Zoe- made pumpkin brownies! Freakin delicious. Pumpkin rocks.)