My new hobby

It's amazing what becomes interesting when you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want, but nobody to do it with. My latest discovery is hula hooping. Last week at FHE we played "boys vs. girls". It was a series of competitions, like basketball freethrows, high heel races, paper airplane throwing, jump roping, and hula hooping. I was easily the worst hula hooper in the crowd. So I borrowed a hula hoop from the ward and have been practicing ever since. My record so far is 60 revolutions without dropping it. I can consistently get into the 20s or 30s. It's a great workout, it's fun, and it will come in handy for the rest of my life at ward talent shows, primary/young women callings, etc. And it's a great way to start a conversation: "Hi, I'm Carolyn. I can keep a hula hoop going for a hundred revolutions." How can I miss with a line like that?

Birthday and Stuff

Last week a couple of my friends and I went to see a free show Jay Leno put on for the unemployed in Detroit. It was at the Palace of Auburn Hills, which is where the Pistons play. It was pretty cool. A super loud jazz band played first. I don't like jazz at all, and this was as jazz as it gets. I tried to suffer through the first song, but it went on and on. I kept thinking it had to end eventually, but every time it sounded like it might be ending, it just kept going. Finally one of my friends and I went out to the corridor to escape. They finally stopped playing after half an hour. One song- 30 minutes! What?! Then Kid Rock came out and announced Jay. I thought Kid Rock would sing, but he didn't. And then Jay was great. It was a lot of fun.

For my birthday last week I didn't really care what I did, as long as I got to make my own cake. my biggest challenge with cakes is that the filling is always too runny and it squishes out the sides and makes the outer frosting look weird. So rather than dealing with a filling, I made a big cake-sized strawberry marshmallow and put that between the layers. It would have worked really well, but then my frosting was too liquid and still looked weird. But the point is, it tasted good. And I had a great birthday. I played soccer with some people from the ward, then made my cake, then went to Red Robin with my friends (I'm in the Red Robin birthday club, so I got a free burger), and then we came back to my house, ate cake, and sat around talking for a few hours. It was good.

Pasttimes

I don't know how many of you know this about me, but I love birds. One of my favorite things to do (in warm weather) is to go bird watching. Basically it's just hiking while looking up. But I love to find birds I've never seen before or with really bright colors, and I'm building my collection of bird calls that I recognize. I have a birdfeeder on my back porch. The last couple of weeks I've been trying to take pictures of the birds that come and eat. Some of them (finches and blackbirds) are more shy than others, so it's hard to get really good pictures, and the pictures I did manage to get are made worse by the fact that I had to take them through a screen door. But here's what I've got (and I just know that now that I've broken down and posted before I could get good pictures, suddenly the birds will start posing for me- that's how life goes). The two that are hardest to see are a cardinal. I wish the color was better. I think some of you have told me you've never seen a cardinal. They're so bright! It's so cool to see this shock of almost neon red flying through the air. The other picture is some sparrows. That's what I see the most of. They stay in flocks and I sometimes get 10-20 walking around my porch. I also get red-winged blackbirds, red-breasted finches, mourning doves, and robins. We have a lot of blue jays (my favorite bird) in the neighborhood, but they never come and eat.