God bless the oceans of snow

It was the day of a choir concert. I was excited. I love choir concerts. Okay, maybe not all the time, especially if I'm in the audience, but most of the time I enjoy performing them.

The resounding notes of the last song ended. Our audience clapped happily, as we bowed and smiled. As we started to walk off the stage, some person in charge suggested we sing 'God Bless America'. Being the patriotic American that I am, I had only a faint memory of singing the song somewhere, sometime, but had no clue what the words were at that moment. So, proud of my American country, I patriotically (and loudly) sang the words

"From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with snow!
God bless America, My home sweet home!"

Nice.

The difference between Prime Rib and Ham

Last night an elegant formal dinner and night of entertainment was held at my church to pay for camp legal expenses.

I arrived an hour early in Portland attire to do a sound check as I was leading three worship songs. In the midst of that hour, I was pulled into doing a skit about earwax and got in the way of my 6'4" friend numerous times, almost knocking him over.

When the dinner started, I had a rush of energy, and got up numerous times to socialize and ask questions of people other than those who were at my table. In the course of that time, I ate my food, which consisted of potatoes, turkey, uneaten vegetables, a roll, a salad, and, ahem, what I thought was ham.
Standing in line waiting for my meat to be cut, the lady serving me a very pink meat asked if I wanted it rare or medium rare. Confused as to why there would be uncooked ham, I simply answered, "normal, please". To which she pondered what was normal, but I pushed my plate in front of her, got the meat on it, and went back to my table. In between the numerous times in which I left the table, I ate my ham. I thought it was very unsalted and fatty, but other than that, I ate it quickly.
As I got back to the table for the tenth time of getting up, a man went up to the microphone and announced, "There is one whole Prime Rib left if anyone wants it." I got excited and started to get up to go grab some, as I had...missed...it the first time around, but then I realized -

My 'ham' was in fact, prime rib. Duh.

Back. Home, Sweet Home.

I'm back. From a tremendously busy month. I spent eight days in Oregon, four of them driving to and from.
I had a wonderful time at City Bible Church's Thrive conference, where I learned a lot about worship leading and got to listen to Israel Houghton speak. I then came home for two days, got a call from my former youth pastor wanting to take me to Oregon with her, and left an hour later to go paint her new house. We went to a youth group in Gresham (and a Dairy Queen too) and ate food from Arby's in front of Multonomah Falls. By the way, Arby's makes DELICIOUS curly fries, but their cheese is basically chemicals, it is so processed, and it will almost make you throw up if you eat more than half the sandwich. Trust me, I almost left a souvenier from Elisabeth at the falls.

I'm hoping to post a thread on the Rebelution Forum about serving in the local church. Stay tuned for what everyone says. I'll put a blog post on here about it after I get enough replies.
*Goes to post the thread in the Greenhouse*

And yes, I am seventeen now. I had a wonderful birthday party, and I will put pictures of some of the guests all covered in shaving cream on my photoblog sometime soon.