So Many Dress Up Parties!

For the first time in my life, I was in the States during Halloween! Project 12, however, had movie night that evening so we didn't really celebrate. Rich and Andrew, however, did go around all day dressed up as rappers which was hilarious!!! Therefore, us girls decided to dress up anyway, too. Dora wore Jesse's wedding dress and went around as a fairy and I dressed up as a gypsy pirate or something like that. Carolyn, Amanda Sue and Sarah had the best costumes ever! They all dressed up as old ladies and it was awesome!!! I wish they would have decided to do that before I got dressed up so that I could have been old, too! It was funny when we went downstairs and no one could recognize them haha. Tomorrow we have another dress up party!

About two weeks ago Brock, Brach or however you spell his name told me that his birthday was coming up, but that he wasn't going to tell anyone what day it is and that he hoped that no one would do anything, especially because he's turning 30. Well, living in JPUSA, if it's your birthday, people will do stuff. I told him that I'd find out the date and I'd dress up as a bunny and follow him around all day singing happy birthday. Then, on Sunday, at church, we all looked in the Rev Rag (a thing they give out with the message of the day and a whole bunch of info, including birthdays and prayer requests) we saw that his birthday was Nov. 1! Therefore, after we had (halloween) movie night on Wednesday, Hannah and I came up with a plan and ended up in her "family's" room to print out stuff and blow balloons up. Jesse and Michael helped us out, too. Then, when we were sure that Brock wasn't around, we sneaked into his office (Hannah got the key from someone) and put bunny rabbits and balloons all over his desk. We then put "Happy Birthday" signs up all over the building (each one having his name spelled differently since everyone gets it wrong and I still don't know what the right one is) which had funny pics of him that he had taken himself with Hannah's camera. The next day, Cindy (Hannah's "mom") let me borrow bunny ears and I went around all morning with them on looking for Brock (I didn't go to work with them on though). He finally saw me when he came in the dining room for lunch and not 10 seconds went by before he ran out cuz he thought that I'd actually follow him around haha =P

Thursday morning when I went to work I did my first intake by myself (since Raye's sick)! I was kind of nervous, but fortunately, I had decided to look over all the forms and stuff before I did it and the guy was really nice. I was so happy and proud of myself =D
Thursday was also All Saints day and for DM we all helped out with the different activities going on for the children.
The evening, however, was probably the worst I've had since I've been here and I was pretty down for the rest of the day. I then ended up in Hannah's "family"'s room again, which kind of cheered me up. It was so uplifting to hear from Cindy how she went through the same stuff I'm going through, only worse. She told me how JPUSA used to be even more disorganized and conservative than it is now and how, when she came here 15 years ago, she slept on a mountain of blankets for a whole year because no one ever gave her a mattress and she didn't know who to ask for it. She told me that she was also 18 at the time and that she had a really big problem with all the rules because she also didn't know any of them. She actually had thought that they would kick her out cuz of all the times she would unintentionally break the rules! That makes me feel a lot better.

Today I also hung out in Cindy's room cuz she had a bunch of people over to watch a DVD of a really funny stand up comedian.

Oh, yeah. I've decided to go decaf now. Have been doing it for about a week. Aren't y'all glad? haha Now you don't have to worry so much for me João =P
Now I just have to start eating less and start having later dinners and cooking more. I think I've gained wait since I've been here and I know it's cuz I get big quantities of food without realizing it and I eat a lot during the day cuz my body's just not used to having a big meal at 5pm. Also, weekend dinners consist of meat, buns and ice cream so, like yesterday, I end up having two buns and a bowl of ice cream for dinner =(