Hello world :)

So my lovely sister Liz convinced me to start a blog because she has a blog where I can follow her life and she wants to follow my life. So here I am. :) A week ago today I turned 19. It's really weird being 19. Anyways I got to sleep in a little on that day (til 10) which was nice, and I got to eat homemade chocolate chip banana bread for breakfast which is AMAZING. I opened my present from Cat at this point to - she got me a cd and The Last Song. :) I had to go to a piano lesson at 12 for half an hour, then around 1:30 myself and four of my girlfriends hopped in my car and headed off to Hollywood! It was quite the adventure. It took us about 45 minutes to get there (and it's fairly easy to get there from here), and then we had to find parking while being in awe of the fact that we were in Hollywood (only one of us had been before - not me hehe). We finally see a sign for $2 parking which sounded awesome! So we made our way down there and drove around for a bit before we found a great parking space in a corner next to a stairwell. The stairs were on the sketchy side, but when we got out we were right next to the outdoor mall which was where we wanted to go. I have pictures of it on Facebook if you want to know what it looks like. We found the walkways where you stand and take pictures of the Hollywood sign and we had a great view! Apparently you can't get anywhere near the actual sign; you're only allowed to see it from a distance. And it was neat because there was a cross near the sign.

The Hollywood sign with the cross below it.

After that, we walked around the mall a bit more and then decided to go look at the stars on the Walk of Fame. Numerous pictures of the people's names I recognized can again be found in the wonderful world of Facebook. Apparently the entire Walk of Fame is about 2 and a half miles. We did not walk all of it, but I'm pretty sure we did most of it.

During our walk, we found a restaurant called Disney's Soda Fountain which looked pretty darn awesome. They had a menu outside and we decided to peruse it - we found the Mickey's Masterpiece for 30 bucks. Split between 5 of us, we decided $6 wasn't that bad to spend. So in we go! (Again, pictures of the restaurant plus dessert are on Facebook.) Our waiter comes and we tell him what we want right away. Oh and we steal napkins. They looked cool so we put them all in our purse and were going to ask the waiter for more, but he came prepared. The first thing he did was give us each a napkin as if we'd never had any to begin with! After awhile, we see our dessert on the counter just sitting there. We begin to get impatient. "Why aren't the bringing it to us? Where's our waiter? Why is no one picking it up? Just pick it up and give it to us already! Oh there's our waiter! Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up...no what is he doing? Oh he's putting whipped cream on it! Oh okay, we need that. And cherries are good too. Okay now pick it up, come on, just bring it over here already. Where's he going now? Wait, no, come back! Just pick it up!! FINALLY! Oh no, wait, what is he doing? He's telling the whole restaurant what we ordered??" That was the gist of our conversation. And yes our waiter announced to the whole restaurant that we had ordered the Mickey's Masterpiece and then told them all it was my birthday (my friend had told him earlier that it was my birthday). They then proceeded to sing a zip-a-dee-do-dah birthday song to me! Needless to say, this was my favorite part of the day. :) Plus the dessert was delicious! It consisted of 8 different flavored scoops of ice cream, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream all around Mickey's hat from Fantasia. Unfortunately, we couldn't keep the hat. But after we ate every bite, they gave us all pins that say, "I ate the whole thing," and I got a birthday pin that was advantageous to me later on in the day....

After we'd had our fill, we continued to walk around, taking pictures and wondering if any of the cars driving by contained someone famous. We found the place with all the footprints and hand prints and got some pictures of that. It was a bit crowded there. There were lots of people on the street dressed like characters, trying to get money I suppose. Around this time, my friend Heather had to leave so we waited with her for her mom to pick her up. Then we decided that it was time for us to go.We went to the door where we had come out of the stairwell from the parking garage. It was locked. But there was an elevator nearby, so we checked it out. It didn't go down, only up. So we thought that maybe we're in the wrong place. We walked up some stairs and found another elevator. We got in, only to realize that it was the same elevator we'd been in before, just on the 2nd level. So it only went down one level, not to the parking garage. We quickly got out and kept looking. Another stairwell was nearby so we went down those stairs. It looked different, but maybe it would lead us where we wanted to go. Nope. We went to the bottom of the stairs, walked out, and we were on the first level again, where we'd been five minutes earlier. If people had been watching us, they would've been laughing their heads off at this point. We decided to walk around the street and go in the car entrance because we didn't know what else to do. Fortunately for us, we ran into some fellow Biolans, explained our dilemma, and they directed us in the way to go. We still got a little lost trying to find the stairs or an elevator, but eventually we were in the parking garage. Finding my car proved to not be that difficult. I gave the parking ticket to the guy collecting money at the exit, only to find out that we owed $10, not $2. Turns out you have to get your ticket validated for the $2 price - meaning you have to spend money in Hollywood and get someone to mark it. Thanks for letting us know this ahead of time. On our way back to school, we decided to stop at Chick-fil-a for dinner, because they were having a special where you can get two meals for the price of one if you say, "I want the double," or something like that. When we arrive and I go to order, the girl tells me the deal ended at 7 (it was about 8:00). Drat. Then she says, "But is it your birthday?" I was a bit surprised, then looked down and realized I was still wearing my birthday pin. "Yeah it is!" She asked to see my Biola I.D. and then gave me my meal for free! I will always be eating a meal at Chick-fil-a on my birthday from now on.

We arrived back on campus, and my birthday adventure ended. It was quite the exciting day! And I was bombarded on Facebook with birthday messages. :) God has blessed me with many friends here and back home and an absolutely wonderful family that I wouldn't trade for anything.

I'll leave you with the lyrics from a song on the cd that Cat gave me. You can interpret it as you want to...

"This ain't a threat but I think I outta warn ya, gonna fall in love if you go to California."
- Half Moon Bay, Train