The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Books, Competetions, Elf-dress, and the Snake

Hello my dearest readers, I've been away for a while... Busy busy busy and all that--they tell me it's called highschool. Well, you need a re-cap of my life of late, so...let's begin with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Most of you know that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a book in the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, well, Logos International School put on a play of it, and I went. I was very surprised with how well done it was. Those of you who have read the book already know that it involves a ship, dragons, people getting sucked into a painting, and Aslan, the lion. How on earth did a school's drama club put on such a production? Well, it was extremely creative. For the painting they used shadow puppets! It was really great and looked really good. The ship had all sorts of cool stage equipment, the costumes were amazing, the dragon looked great (it was partially made out of cardboard with a person inside), and Aslan was mostly done by a shadow puppet and partially done by a guy in a costume. The Aslan mask was awesome. I don't have time to tell you everything I would like to...but the play was great, the acting was great, Bethany, a friend of mine, played Caspian, and I really enjoyed it. Here are a few pics, although they're kind of hard to see since I couldn't use the flash on my camera. In summary: the play was great!

Onto the books, for school we were reading Betsy and the Emperor a historical fiction novel based on Betsy Balcombe (a real person) and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was really good. So good, in fact, that I read it all in one day. It was supposed to take me a week. Heh... And I won't tell you that it was short either, cause it wasn't. Then I went book-shopping with Mom and ended up with four wonderful books to read. I got Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey, the third book in a series I'd started (I have the first two), In the Hall of the Dragonking by Stephen R. Lawhead--new series, yay! And I also got Tolkien: A Biography by Something Something...er, White? Well, I can't remember, but I read it already and it was very good. Then, last but not least, my mom surprised me by buying Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Kristine rather comadeered the book, so I'll read it after her. If she ever finishes it.

Ok, competetions....Horseback jumping competetions, of course. We had the first competetion in a series of three. When I got there I was shocked to learn that I was riding Unique. Hm. Well, this might not sound terrible, except for the fact that Unique is a pony and I no longer ride ponies. He is waayyy too small for me... Oh yes, and should I mention that I hadn't ridden Unique in an entire year?? Well. I was mad. I later found out that Miss Soraya had good reasons for putting me on him, but it still wasn't exactly motivating. Everything went pretty well, I was shocked when the announcer actually pronounced my last name right (this must be a first!) and I ended up with fifth place. Out of seven. Blah. Fifth isn't exactly my idea of doing well, but considering that I had barely jumped since last February and that I was riding a pony that I hadn't ridden in a year.... Well, I guess I did ok. I can beat everyone else next week. Hehe... Oh yes, Hannah, my wonderful friend, got first! I was very happy for her. Emma got second and Caroline got third. Well, I wasn't happy for myself, but hooray for Hannah!

Ok, onto the Elf-dress. I finally have pictures!!! Here they are, I'm afraid that I couldn't put up pics of me in the dress because of ye olde rule about putting pics of self on ye internet. Anyway.... Here they are! There are closeups of the sleeves... I love the sleeves =).

Ok, now onto the snake. Yes, the snake. Well....it was a dark and stormy night--er, alright, so it was a little before lunch time, the sun was shining brightly, and Snowy, my rabbit, was playing outside in the yard. Just as I was about to figure out just why that particular math problem with those particular imaginary numbers was causing me so much trouble, Kristine came upstairs and screamed in my ear, "There's a stink in Snowy's cage!!!" I stared at her, thinking how dare she say my rabbit's cage smells bad? when I realized that she wasn't saying stink she was saying snake. My eyes widened and I screamed, "A snake???" I jumped up, math problems forgotten, and ran downstairs and outside. Sopi, our helper, was standing at the door staring at Snowy's cage. The door was wide open and in the cage was a snake. Not a little snake. A big snake. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was over a meter long. Caleb ran up and closed the door of the cage, trapping the snake inside. It curled up and raised it's head up, hissing angrily at us. Then it started to try to get out of the cage, it could stick it's head out of the cage for up to about five inches before it got stuck and had to go back in. It was disgusting and scary. So I did the most logical thing and called Dad (did I mention that it was just us kids and Sopi at home?), well, dad was in a meeting and his phone was off, so I called Mom who was on the other side of town at Lucky Supermarket. Both of my parents hate snakes, by the way, I think I might have inherited that dislike of snakes. Well, I hate snakes when I don't know anything about them. Was this snake poisonous? Could it hurt the rabbits? Would it hurt us? I didn't know. Well, mom called our neighbors who live behind us and Mark came over to look at the snake.... He didn't know what it was and our internet search proved fruitless. Whem mom got home (she really hated that snake), Mark decided that he had to get it out of the rabbit cage and into a basket-box-type thing. He used the end of a hangar and grabbed the snake, pulling it out of the cage and into the basket-thing. Needless to say, it took a few tries. Well, we weren't sure what to do with the snake, so Mark took it home on the back of his motorcycle. Heh. An interesting Cambodian experience, eh? I must confess that I am rather afraid that there might be others in our backyard... But anyway, that is the tale of the snake. I have a pic too, but it's not that great....But hey, it's a pic.

And that, my friends, is the tale of the past week. Oh, did I mention the mounds of schoolwork? Oh yes, and for my Eng class I have a publishing project. It made me laugh. I like to publish stuff, in fact, I do it every month. Heh... Ok, I'm going now.