More Surprises...

A few days after I got my dad's surprise b-day package in the mail, I got another package in the mail! So fun!

I got even more excited when I saw the return label
Oh what could it be!
Ha! Giant cupcake pan from Williams Sonoma! YEAH! I am so excited for this baby!

Mom also got me a dough scraper after watching me try to pick up donuts off the counter. Good one!
Thanks mom for some super presents!

Africa, Lion King, Oliver, Wicked, Wizard and Les Mis!

You may have noticed a serious lack of posts earlier this year, well it was because I had a third job... Ok, not really but it felt like it! Between my 2nd job teaching for Scottsdale Community College and my real job, don't ask me how I ever thought I had time to be in a musical! But since its something I love I just had to do it! Our stake has wonderful cultural arts programs and the musical was no exception! Imagine my excitement when I found out I could not only be part of 1 musical but of 4! And not only that, I would be able to sing, dance, act and even play my saxophone! Here are a bunch of pictures of our production; some are taken from dress rehearsals so the lighting isn't the best, but you will get the idea!

We had a pit orchestra/band for the performances that includes 3 keyboards, a clarinet, trumpet, guitar, bass guitar, drums and yours truly on Sax! It was sooo fun! It definitely took a lot of work though as I had to transpose all my music from the original scores as we didn't have full band parts. I spend MANY hours pulling out the parts I should play and the transposing them into the right key.

For a church production, this thing was intense! We had a full sound board, overhead microphones and 12 wireless microphones!

We had all the special lights on stage and a couple spotlights. Our director even got permission from Salt Lake to paint the walls on the stage black. They looked so good but she had to promise to paint them back white.

Serious sound equipment!

Our opening number was an acapello version of Africa (originally performed by the group Toto). It was sooo cool! We started out by making a thunderstorm that actually sounded like rain!

There you can see my up close in our sweet Calftans!

Don't we look good!

From Africa we went into Lion King. The basic idea of our production was to do a musical review of several musicals. We performed the songs from the songs with very little to no speaking parts. Lion King, Oliver and Wizard of Oz were each about 15 mintues long.

This is where I was, in the pit, during Lion King, as well as most of Oliver.

We had costume changes for every musical and they looked so good! I don't know how the seamstresses were able to come up with all the costumes we had. Our cast was around 80 people and almost all the adults where in every musical with lots of the kids in 2 or 3 of them. Thats a lot of costumes!

I did come up on stage for about 15 seconds of Oliver to do a little tap number. So fun!

For Wicked, we had 3 people perform a highlight of songs from the Musical while the rest of the cast changed clothes. Notice anything familiar from this picture? Yep, thats my wedding dress that Glinda is wearing! I was glad I was able to find at least one more use for it!

The main characters of Wizard of Oz, sweet costumes!

Wizard of Oz had lots of glittery green!

Our Final number was Les Mis. This one was amazing. We stretched Les Mis out to about 35 minutes worth of music with lots of movement between the soloist and cast.

Thats me on the end again!

Here I am a "serving wench". I think I am telling someone sorry I am out of drinks!

The picture below is of the full cast of all the musicals. It was so amazing the talent that was in our stake. As we got closer and closer to performances I was just amazed by the quality of the sound from the Soloist and the Choir.

The musical was tons of fun, but I was definitely ready for a break when it was over! Luckily, I think they only do them every 2 years....and I'll probably be crazy enough to participate again!

Cast Party cake

For our Cast Party, we made a huge, crazy cake! There were at least three of us working on this bad boy and it turned out pretty fun! This was the top.. The only credit I can take for this one is I baked the cupcakes!

Obviously the top layer represented Lion King. On the next layer, you can see the red and blue striped. The opposite side of the cake had white, grey, black stripes and this was the Les Mis layer.

This was my favorite part! The bottom layer was Oliver and, well we didn't know what to do so we represented the sellers on the corner with the Knife Grinder, Rose Seller, Milk Maid and Strawberry seller. Aren't those strawberry's so Cute! Yeah I made those!.... But my absolute favorite was Wizard of OZ! Aren't those cupcakes sooo cute! And did you notice the Wicked Witch of the East legs popping out of the cake with Ruby Slipper?! HEHE!

Surprises!

I came home from work one day last week and there was a box sitting on the table with my name on it. I was somewhat confused as I hadn't ordered anything and wasn't expecting anything. The return address was strange so I had no idea what it was.... What was more curious was the markings on the outside of the box:

What in the world? Who would me send me something perishable and what could it be!
As I started to open up the flaps they indeed tell me a surprise is in side!
Um... seriously, now I am really confused its perishable but needs to be brought to room temperature? I was definitely not prepared for what I found when I finally got it opened:

LOL! Seriously? 4 bright colored bags of PERSONALIZED M&M's! Seriously? If you know my dad, you know that you just never know what to expect from his gifts. He had ordered me these personalized M&M's for my birthday (they showed up much earlier than they had told him they would). I definately never thought I would have my name on an M&M. But of course, not only that he just had to throw in one of my nicknames too. Little Devil! I must say it is a little strange to eat something with your name on it..... I took a little double take on my first one!

Thanks Mom and Papa for the wonderful surprise!

Sedona

My parents came to visit last weekend and it was so good to see them! Between eating lots of sweets, watching Celtics and Suns games, the highlight of the weekend was a trip up to Sedona. Ever since I went through Sedona the first time, I knew my parents would love it and I was right! We did some shopping in town, but what I really loved was checking out a few native american historic sites. Our first stop was Montezuma Well.

It was really cool, its a natural well where some native american tribes lived several hundred years ago. At this site, you can still see lots of cliff dwellings. Here are my parents looking down into the well.
My parents looking out over the well. Their was a path down that led you down past more dwellings and up close to the well.
This is up close to one of the dwellings. Its hard to see from the picture, but this "doorway" leads into a very large living space.

The cool part of the site was how close you could get to everything.

Adam my mom and I at the bottom of the well.

Here Adam is checking out the "drain" of the well. This water goes out of this spot at a rate of 600 lbs a day! The ancient residents of this area built a 1 mile ditch to irrigate their crops and it still works and thrives today! It was nearly overflowing when we were there.

Every time I turned around, my mom was climbing on something!

Yep, as soon as I walked away, turned back around, my mom was halfway up this tree.

The other place visted was V Bar. This site was sooo cool! It's a cliff covered in about 1,000 petroglyphs. They have someone on site that tells you all about them and what they know about some of the symbols.

One of the walls of the site was used for their Calendar. There were special rocks that allowed shadows to be casts on the sides of the rock and when the shadows hit a certain spot on the wall they would know when to plant, harvest etc. It was soooo cool!
I highly recommend a visit to this site. V Bar and Montezuma Well are only a few miles from each other. It doesn't cost anything, all you need is the Red Rocks Pass for your car (Montezuma Well is Free!)

Pretty in Pink

I helped throw a baby shower for our YW President, Katie. It was a lot of fun! Katie is a big 80's fan and her favorite 80's movie is Pretty in Pink! How perfect for a shower! I added just a few 80's touches here and there and really played up the pinks throughout. I ran out of time and didn't get very many good pictures, but here's what I got!

This was the dessert table. I hung pink cassette tapes for the backdrop and made up lots of pink treats (tapes were from goodwill that I sprayed pink and labeled with songs from the 80').
This was the main food table... Only got a picture before all the food showed up!
This pictures isn't the best, but these cookies were yummy! They are strawberry white chip, the special ingredient is Strawberry Nesquick! I just used my favorite chocolate peanut butter chip cookie mix substituting the strawberry for the chocolate (and cut out some of the sugar since the strawberry is already sweetened.
These were mini brownies with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with pop rocks!
Pink lemonade cupcakes

Here is a close up of the tapes.

Congratulations Katie! We can't wait to meet your new baby girl!