Limbo

This is pretty sorry, but I am sooooooo bored!

Undoubtedly there are plenty of things for me to do: clean the living room, do laundry, weed the yard, figure out how to paint my very high living room walls (I do have paint), work on other projects that have been put on hold due to school . . .

But it all sounds so . . . bleh.

This happens to me at every semester break; I'm sure it's because I've been used to getting up and running around and hanging out with other people all day. After a while I'll get back into the swing of home life, and then I won't want to go to school again.  But this in-between, non-motivated, limbo period . . . Yuck!

Yaaayyyy!!

Grades are in; that means Spring semester is really, officially finished, and I am taking the summer off from school! Yaaayyyy!!

This semester wasn't really a project semester—at least not like I've usually had.  The cute blue dress I made in Draping was just because I wanted to make it cute; the teacher would have been satisfied with a muslin mock-up.  But I did have projects in my jewelry class so, like it or not, I'm posting pictures. (And, yeah, it's kind of pathetic photography.)

The first thing we did was make a band out of silver wire so we could learn how to use the acetylene torch and how to solder sterling silver. I was a duck with the torch—it scared me every time I lit it. Or maybe a duck would have done better than I did. But, with help, it turned out looking like a real ring/band.

Then we got to design another ring using wire. I learned how to set a little stone and everything!

Our third project was a "plate project." We used jeweler's saws and cut our designs out of a piece of silver plate. Then we soldered the cut piece to another plate, and then re-cut the areas that should go all the way through both pieces. So on this piece the black painted parts are the bottom plate and the rest of it is cut out and filed and polished.

Next up was a wax-cast ring.  We carved the ring out of special jewelry-making wax, cast it in molding material, and then cast it in silver.  But really all I did was carve the wax; the teacher did all the casting. Well, I did polish it
after it was all done.

Then, because my assigned projects were finished a little early, and I still had stuff to work with, I did another plate project. The top layer is copper, and the bottom layer is silver. I am the most proud of this one because I did all the cutting, filing, shaping and soldering all by myself! (The teacher helped a lot with the other projects.)

But here is the very best part of the whole semester:

 Straight A's again! (I was a little worried about the jewelry class because I mostly guessed on the final exam.)  I am very, very happy to report that my GPA is still tip-top! :-D

Overdue

No . . . all my homework is turned in.  No late library books.  I'm not in my 41st week of pregnancy.

No. This post is about April:  Lots of family stuff happened in April, but because lots of school stuff also happened in April I didn't write about any of it.  So, it's overdue, but here it is:

On Saturday March 31 (that's almost April!), while the men were attending the Priesthood session of General Conference, we girls stayed home and painted our toenails. 

Jessica chooses a color

Can you guess which feet belong to which girl?

On Friday, April 6 we had lots of fun coloring our (yes, raw) eggs. We only dropped one on the floor—actually I dropped it.  Should've taken a picture—I thought about dropping another one so I could get a photo, but that seemed

                         . . . a little extreme.

Anyway, we didn't have a store-bought egg-coloring kit so I looked online to find out how to do it with food-coloring. What I found was that if you put a teaspoon of oil into the egg-dye you get some really cool-looking Easter eggs.

On Saturday, April 7 we went to Grandpa North's house to have lunch and an Easter-egg hunt with the cousins.  We had lots of eggs—I sent over about eighty, and Brad & Becky had a lot too.

Yes, Brandon has eggs in his basket.

This is what Becky always looks like at family parties.

Lindsey sings an Easter song.

Lizzy is just cute.

Kaylie and Emma look for eggs.



Brad finds treasures on the lawn, too!



sharing Easter candy

On Easter Sunday, April 8 we went to Temple Square, and to see the new City Creek Center uptown. 

What is Bruce up to?

diving in

"Don't look at my i-pod!"



???

Let's see . . . Our kitchen faucet broke, we went without water in the kitchen for a week, but then Bruce fixed the faucet that weekend. Yay!!

If you look close, you can see that water is pouring from the handle, but none is coming out of the spout.

hard at work

all better!

And another weekend in April ( I don't remember the date) Bruce's brother John came up from California to visit.


John's the guy with the beard. And the dog.

 And Pedals for Hope happened in April, too!

This year they did Locks of Love as part of the opening assembly for the whole project. To start off the assembly a friend of mine, Wendy Burr, told the story of her own little boy who's been battling leukemia for the past year; and at the end of the assembly she donated her hair, too.  Her son, Matthew, got to cut it off.  Jessica also donated her hair!  They set up a make-shift beauty salon in the art room to neaten up all the butchered hair; there were so many hair dryers going at once that they blew a fuse!

Jessica and a friend talk about how short their hair is.

Brandon participated in the bike ride this year—he rode twenty miles.  And he got to help MC the closing assembly, too. This year three teachers volunteered to get a pie in the face if the kids reached certain $$ goals; the whole student-body was pretty excited for this. 

Throw! The! Pies!

Three lucky kids were chosen to throw the pies. (Mr. Horscroft, the science teacher, said to me, "Wow!  How exciting to be a kid who gets to throw a pie!" Although he didn't volunteer to be on the receiving end.) 

The grand total Entheos earned for cancer research this year was $4,431.65 —$1,009.38 of that came from the Penny Wars.  Yay Entheos kids!!

So that is our April in review.  Pretty exciting, huh? :-)