Saturday - State Tournament !

So Saturday started off with the JV boys game first! They played a hard game but lost by four points! It was SO sad!:(

After the JV lost we were determined that the varsity was bringing home 1st!!! It was a very nerve wreaking game! The other team really expected to beat us, but we pulled it off! We were behind by 10 then came back to get ahead by 20, when they came back in the second half! It ended up going in to double over time!!! Our guys battled it out and at the end stood high by only four points!! At the sound of the buzzer we ran the court jumping and screaming!! It was SO much fun!:D Here are some pictures, thanks again to Sarah H.

The JV team second in state!
Congratulations:Sean,Calab,Reid,Mark,Cameron,Emmanuel,Logan,Jordan,Daniel,Micah and Coach Matt!

Our starting line up- praying.

Tip off!
Yes, that other guy is grabbing my brother's wrist! He is just too short!;)

Nick doing a lay-up Devin is in front of him(24)

Nick,doing another lay-up

Raleigh Hawks Varsity Boys Basketball
2009
State Champs!!!!

Congratulation:
Eric,Devin,Chris,Sam,Kyle,Sebastian,Nick,Brandon W., Brandon G., Adam, Coach Matt and Coach Chip!!

Holding the trophy all sweaty, and tired, but #1, baby!

It was just Nick and I, but then Adam(30) and Devin(24) were like, hey they're taking a picture!

Kara (One of my best friends) and I!!
The whole second overtime Kara and me were praying and praying!
We were both SO nervous!

Lizzie(Another one of my Best friends) and I both have to work the concession stand!
We had a lot of fun!:D

The girls, all my best friends!
I have no clue why I'm so short in this picture!?!


My water bottle, which I had all the guys sign!

BTW, next week I'm turning 16!!;)

NCHE - Eastern Regional Tournament!!!!

This past weekend Nick's basketball team when to the Eastern Regional Tournament!! Not only did we win first place but, we also get to go to the State Tournament this weekend!!!(Natalie, sorry for all the exclamation point, I'm really happy!:))

Raleigh Hawks Varsity #1!!

Way to go guys!

They were all really happy, as you can see!:)

Deven and Ecir

Nick

1,2,4, legend dairy!;)

Chris, Kyle, and Nick made the Eastern All-Conference Team!

Brandon, Sam, and Eric got awards.

Also the JV got second place. Since they made it to the finals they get to go to Sate too!

* Thanks for Sarah Hargett for the pictures. My camera batteries always seem to die when I most need them!:(

WOOH!!!!!

John Paul Taylor is HOME!!! Hooray!!
This was his last trip to Iraq, since he is getting out of the Marines in just a few months!
He left the same day Nick went in for his chest surgery, which was way back in April!

Welcome Home John Paul!!!

Sarah and I are back! Twenty seven plus hours of worship and Biblical teaching squeezed into a long holiday weekend, thirty five hundred young singles and married couples all filled with the unquenchable desire of learning more about, and glorifying their Savior, such was New Attitude '08. It had been a number of years since I was a participant in a large Christian conference/gathering of this magnitude and I was curious as to what it would be like. I knew it would be encouraging just by the speakers coming but I underestimated just how encouraging it would be. The worship also deserves mentioning because anytime you have 3500+ passionate people together in a group with a singular purpose of praising God, it is simply wonderful!

I would strongly urge readers to prayerfully consider going next year. It is going to be in Baltimore, MD for the 10th anniversary and Sarah and I are already thinking about how we can get a large group of folks from our church to commit to making the financial and time commitment necessary to go. Yes, you can download the messages online, which I would encourage people to do, but the fellowship with such a large gathering of other believers, the communio sanctorum, per se, is I feel, of great benefit.

There is much I could say on the messages themselves but since they are online, I would once again encourage you just to download them and listen for yourself they are all worth listening to. Since this was a road trip, we of course got a large number of pictures, some which sadly I have be ordered should not see the light of the internet, so I will just post some of the calmer ones:

Two very passionate speakers, John Piper and CJ Mahaney:

Sarah and our friend Rebekah, who went with us:

Sarah and a slightly unkept looking individual:

No the conference was not in Elizabethtown, that picture probably makes no sense unless you know what I am talking about when I say "livin' large, lovin' life" :p

Sarah and Rebekah demonstrating the size of a bridge over the Ohio:

Panorama of the Ohio River: (Click to view larger)

Another panorama from a view we passed in WV:


Playing in a hotel mirror which was around 8ft tall:

I'm sticking with you, 'Cause I'm made out of glue....

Pretty catchy little line eh? It's been in my head all day :p Last Wednesday afternoon I climbed in my car and headed south to help my dad with some work. If you have been reading the blog for a while, you know I love driving, especially with the music cranked up and the windows down. It being a beautiful spring day, perfect for driving, I was happy to spend several hours with the wind whipping my hair as I sang along with my music.

I arrived at my destination roughly two and half hours later, met my dad and we got checked into the place we were staying. No sooner had we parked the cars when his phone rings and he gets a call requesting us to do an interior shot. This requires lights, which are at home several hours back up the interstate.

Being the crazy always willing to drive person I am, five minutes later I was back in my car, windows rolled down retracing my steps. Fortunately the lights were not needed until the next day so I arrived home, put them in my car and got to sleep in my own bed Wednesday night before I was back on the road early the next morning.

Several hours later back on site, we set the lights up for one shot, ate some lunch and headed outside to do another shot. It was then realized that one of our lenses had some serious issues, as in, it was not working at all. What do you suppose happened? I got back in my car and drove yet again back in the direction of home.

Except this trip I stopped before I got all the way home to pick up the replacement lens from a friend. Then I reversed course for the 4th time and headed back down south! I arrived back around 9pm and was just getting ready to park (literally feet away from the parking space) and grab something to eat when the lovely sound of a police siren filled my ears followed by the flashing of bright multi-colored lights. "Rats!" was my only thought as I pulled over and waited for the officer to come to my window.

No, I was not speeding, my passenger tail light was out so I spent 20 minutes out in front of the restaurant waiting on the officer. Finally he comes back and tells me the reason for such a long wait is because his printer is on the blink and he was having issues printing off the warning he wanted to give me. :p Friday was downright slow in comparison to Wednesday and Thursday, the only driving I accomplished was the few hours return trip.

Overall though, I drove 590 odd miles in three days which is not much by my standards, a little more than driving to New York City and a little less than getting to Boston. Unlike a drive up the east coast though, it was the same stretch of road just repeated over and over and over again. It is a good thing I have my ipod in my car, because by the sixth time driving on the same part of the interstate it was getting pretty boring and I could probably have driven it with my eyes closed. I did come up with a cheesy song though and since it has been a while since I posted any seriously crazy stuff I thought I would share:

Well I hopped in my car
for a little drive
a two hour tour
that got multiplied

With the windows rolled down
I'm zipping along
the music blaring
'an I'm singing a song

Pulled by the police
but not for burning rubber
seems my taillight
had gone undercover

With the windows rolled down
I'm zipping along
the music blaring
'an I'm singing a song

Drove the same stretch
of road six times
you can bet by now
I've got it memorized

With the windows rolled down
I'm zipping along
the music blaring
'an I'm singing a song!

Basketball !!! :)

This last week Nick and My Dad plus the whole Varsity, JV, and MS, basketball teams have all been at the East Coast Home school Basketball Championship. Friday night was the finals. JV, lost by 11 points and came in second. MS, lost also and came in 4th. Varsity, won first place in overtime by two points!!!!!!!!!!!! I am SO happy for them! The whole team played awesome together! Nick called Friday night and they were jumping around and screaming all over the place, they were SO happy !!!!:) Great job guys! What a great way to end the 2007 - 2008 basketball season!

~Anna~

Thanks to Sarah for the pictures!

Ah I missed one o' me favorite holidays!

A belated St Patricks day greetin' to everyone!

Since heading north was not going to happen I decided to head south to Florida, since as everyone knows it is the place to go on "Spring Break" So early Saturday morning I departed for palm trees and warm sand for a few days. That is the reason the blog was pretty much silent. I mean, why get on the computer when you can be on the beach!!

Ok well actually I was not going on vacation, I was working with my dad and we never quite made it to Florida, stopping about 30 minutes away in Georgia. Rather than have crowds of people around me on a warm beach I had clouds of nasty little gnat type flying insects. These of course decided I, as well as everyone else on the job were perfect candidates for the menu special of the week, Bonhumancarni - 10 magic cookie points if you figure out what that means. :p

I am not kidding about the bugs, there literally were these grayish clouds floating around people's heads. I look almost like I have chicken pox on my neck, arms and hands. Next to the hot weather in the south, which I have discussed numerous times, I dislike the bugs. The amount of bugs actually has something to do with the weather never getting all that cold enough to kill the suckers but I like to look at them as two separate irritants....And yes I know about bug spray, it never seems to really help me all that much, I guess you can say the juice is worth the squeeze, or maybe it should be, the blood is worth the bite, for bugs when it comes to me. Anyway, except for the little flying demons the trip was good, and I have some pretty funny stories which I would post but they are of the type that unless you have been on a job they probably would make no sense so I will just post some pictures, since everyone knows a picture can tell a thousand words..... oh and that is not me on the swing :p

So I am back

As you have probably noticed, no notebook blogger today. I was out of town and not in class the first three days of the week so that is why. The weather was spectacular but not too much more happened that is worth blogging about, well except for the Cormorants that were everywhere. A Cormorant is this funny little bird that looks somewhat like duck in size and it has webbed feet. Unlike a duck though it dives completely underwater and catches little fish and or bugs. Half the time they were swimming around with just their heads out of the water it was rather funny looking, just seeing this long neck and head moving through on the water's surface. That was not the best part about them though, the best part was they like to sleep in trees!

As dusk approached, in pairs and one by one, they flew into this larger tree on it's own little island. Did I mention they have webbed feet? They literally did fly into the tree accompanied with much crashing and shaking of branches. I tried to take a picture but I could never quite get them caught in the act of crash landing. I did get a picture of some of them in the tree though:

See how the foliage is lacking somewhat where the Cormorants are perched? That is from the Cormorants. Of course the golf course where we were did not really like them messing up the foliage, so every night around dusk they had a guy come out and shoot a flare gun at the tree to scare them out. I am serious! He did it three times just while we were standing there. It sure scared them out of the tree. :D

Probably the highlight of the trip was getting to drive this beautiful thing:

Boy was it fun to drive, zipping around cart paths, you would not believe the speed of that thing! Ok, that last line had no truth at all. You could walk faster than that lift! Plus it was very wide so as you can see in the picture I drove it mainly looking down to make sure I was as close to staying on the cart path as possible so as not to mess up the grass. :p

A rather large post on our trip, part deux

So remember at the start of my last post I said we had "enough warm clothes for an expedition to Antarctica"? Well this was not far from the truth. The funny thing was, although the week before we came had been quite cold, the whole time we were there we had experienced pretty mild weather. That is, until the day of our departure, Thursday. Thursday morning I woke up and was greeted by this view out the window near my bed:

It started snowing that morning and kept right on snowing for almost the whole day! We had become snowed in!

Sarah and Olivia waiting to give the snow plow guys hot coffee and cookies, Judah is manning the camcorder.

Judah shoveling the road

The following is a video shot by Judah of Sarah and Olivia being, well, excited about the snow or something :p



More pictures of the snow...

Snow fight! Olivia and Sarah went out to shovel the walk, except Olivia had an ulterior motive. As soon as Sarah had her back turned away, Liv, with her shovel full of snow clobbered poor Sarah.

Sarah tries to fight back

Notice Sarah's sweatshirt? What was green several seconds before is now almost all white.

Sadly the snow stopped Thursday night and the road crews were able to get the roads clear enough for us to head home. Seeing a significant amount of snow made me really wish we got some where we live. One more snow picture: