Well, I spent the New Year at J.J.'s house. We watched Hairspray, talked, made pizza and taquitos, and then watched Ratatouille and started binge drinking at midnight.

And by binge drinking, I mean we chugged a whole bottle of 'sparkling grape juice'. The clock in her room didn't count seconds, so we counted down the minutes instead.

11:50
"TEN!"
11:51
"NINE!"
11:52
"EIGHT!"

and so on until midnight. We toasted to us, to our friends, to theatre, and to the New Year. We also toasted to a whole lotta random, irrelevant things such as 'doing stupid things just to see what happens.'

On January 1, I went home and began painting my room. My method was like this: Move furniture, paint a wall, move furniture again, paint the other wall, and so on.

My walls used to be this horrible 'sea-foam green' color. I painted three walls light tan and the fourth wall (the one without a window) brown. I also got rid of my dresser and moved all my clothes to my closet.

As dad was helping me move my dresser to the spare bedroom:
"REEEEOOOOWWWW!"
"Stupid cat!"

Now there's a lot more space in my room. And it looks nicer, too. I also ordered a drafting table from Amazon along with some books on anatomy. The table came earlier this week and I'm about to go set it up and get rid of my old writing desk.

We had our first rehearsal Monday and we spent a lot of time playing theatre games and then having fun with our characters.

I volunteered to design and make the wolf costume and to design the witch's costume for after her transformation. For the wolf, it's basically gonna be a fursuit with some modifications. And by modifications, I mean:
*I'm going to use as little fur as possible and try and paint a lightweight fabric to look like fur, or just shave the fake fur down as much as I can. Because fur get incredible frickin' hot under the stage lights.
*He needs to be able to emote and speak clearly, so I've designed the mask to not hide his eyes and eyebrows, and to not muffle his speech.

As for the witch, I started out with a really complex costume design then went for a more elegant, simplified dress. Mainly because that would be easier to make and hide under her first costume. I've got both costumes drawn and I just need to email them to Mrs. Aplin so she can send them to this guy for approval. ('Cause One-Act has some weird rules. Last year, we weren't allowed to use some people as 'mannequins' because the script didn't call for it. Later, we had to incorporate cubes into the show at the last minute because the script specifically said 'cubes' )

Friday we didn't have school because of the stock show, so we went to Waco to visit relatives. While we were there, I asked if I could go to Barns and Noble, and Mom said I could go by myself.

Now remember, this was my very first time driving in a large city by myself. I made it to the HEB all right, but after that I started panicking. I'm pretty sure I made several illegal turns, but I didn't hear any sirens, so that was okay. And I made it to the bookstore all right, but when I tried to go back to the house, that's when things got complicated.

It didn't help that the sun was right above the horizon and making it impossible to see anything.

Which was why I didn't see the stop sign...

...or the UPS truck...

...good news is, my brakes work.

The guy was really nice about it. We pulled over and I explained the situation to him and apologized for nearly hitting him. He even gave me directions to the HEB. (I could find my way from there.)

I made it back without further incident (except the part where I drove past HEB and had to go out the McDonald's drive-thru entrance to get back on track.)

Right now, I am very proud of myself for making it through rush hour traffic without killing myself, damaging property, or getting arrested.