Tests and dances

I tried to post this several days ago, but my blog wasn't publishing anything correctly, so here is a little glimpse of my life now:

After much trepidation and sporadic studying, I decided to bite the bullet and go into Conval to take the PSAT. Now this is not the time where you start declaring, "Eazhy shmeazy Joe Shmoe!" Instead, this is the time where you say, "Poor Kayla old girl. But way to overcome trepidation and take your good old daddy's advice and plug it through to the end!" But now that I've said this for you, you don't need to feel obliged to say it again.:)

Anyway, as I mentioned previously, I actually did go in and take the PSAT. It was a new experience, rising half an hour earlier than usual and arriving at the school just like any other kid my age would. But of course I am not just any other kid, as most of them would see once they took a quick glance at my weird self. It was neat however to recognize a familiar face now and then out of the sea of strangeness. A friendly greeting and query from a girl my age who plays the viola, and later, as we sat in the cafeteria waiting to take the test, another girl from string group saw me. "Oh Kayla!" she said in surprise. "Are you here to take the PSAT?"

What else would I be there for?

"Um, no, I came all the way in here just to sit in your cafeteria and eat my breakfast, thank you."

(I didn't say this.)

Oh yeah, and there's good old Laura among her friends. And then, "Connor!" I heard someone call across the room, and immediately alert I turned and sure enough, there was 6'4" Connor from Clyde's basketball team striding in. Then I spotted our double bass player, who has the eccentric style of wearing large glasses and a British style hat with bushy hair falling to his shoulders. Why is it that most of the people I knew were the strangest?(no offense to Laura)

The test went all right. I say it went all right, meaning that I didn't breeze through it like some genius, but it could have certainly been worse. I shared a table with four other guys. Not that I sat with them, but they sat with me, because I was the only one at an empty table. They were sort of typical highschool guys, kind of cool, but not very much so. They had some sort of thing about admiring one another's calculators and complimenting each other on them, which seemed a little odd to me, but I guess it isn't really. I kind of got the impression that a couple of them maybe took full advantage of using the guess-and-go multiple choice method, and as a result they were exclaiming at the difficulty of the grid-in portion of the math test. Perhaps they came to that section and were suddenly stumped when they had to come up with there own answers. But I'm probably not giving them enough credit. . . .

When the test was done, they told us to stay until we were dismissed. So a man came by, collected our tests, and walked off. I waited. In the meantime the kids were all standing up and crossing the room to chat, which I naturally figured was what they were doing until they were dismissed. Um, okay, when are they going to let us go? I wondered. With a nagging suspicion I rose, and left the room free and clear, realizing that I could have left a long time ago. I made my way through the swarming halls and left with my dad, extremely happy that all was over.

****************************************************************************

Last weekend, for the ignorant's improvement of knowledge, was the bibleschool's free weekend. Also, my parents were going away, so Clyde and I took advantage of these two factors by taking the ride to New York to visit the Holschers. It was, like it so often is, a scrumptious time. Of course it would start to snow as we wound through the country roads closer to their home in the boonies, but luckily it never really accumulated, and it didn't keep up forever. So we arrived there, warmly welcomed, and that night I got to squeeze onto the floor of Klara's cosy room, which was much better than sleeping in the yellow room, where it's messy, or the guest room, where it's noisy.

On Saturday, Ruth and I accompanied Klara up into the woods to dispose of a chicken. Klara made quite a fearsome picture, all bundled up in sweaters and armed with a shovel from which a limp neck hung. After she erected the bird's monument, we trekked up into the woods where they showed me the towers of rock that they had found up there. Each one belonged to one of them, and they were given remarkable names such as Klara's Tower of Wood, or Rebecca's Tower of Fire, or Caleb's Tower of Stone, or Ruth's Tower of Water. We actually discovered another one, and we temporarily named it my Tower of Thunder, which is quite striking is it not?(my puns are so droll, aren't they?;) So we wandered about, marching along stone walls as we prepared to face the dauntingly invisible foe, or trudged along as I threatened them whips, or experimented seesawing on a thick stick in the crook of a tree (of course you would automatically know that it would break, but that didn't immediately occur to us), or clambered onto towers, or laid out a tableau of Romeo and Juliet on a moss covered rock. When you have an imagination, the sky is the limit.

The rest of the weekend involved twirling in the dusty hayloft as Klara and I made up dances, reading out loud to the kids, doing chores in the barn (which were rather fun actually), and decorating or playing games for Caleb's seventh birthday on Sunday. First the five of us (the four younger Holschers and myself) gathered in the hayloft to play musical tires. This was rather intriguing because it was easy to fall into the middle of the tire and if you sat down too quickly your legs could go flying. And then whenever Caleb or nine-year-old Ruth did the music, they would be making up these spontaneous songs, before breaking out into a mixture of sound effects and laughter. At this point I could never tell if they were done singing or not, so I kept sitting down way too early, which didn't make me look very intelligent. Then Klara and I adopted the fun task of teaching her younger siblings how to dance the Virginia Reel. We learned this during girls' week this past summer, and we were so infected with the joy of doing it that we're always wanting more people to learn how so they can do it with us. Somehow I ended up with the job of teaching Caleb, and he needed plenty of repetition in order to get the hang of it ("Oh, oh, let's start over again!"), but soon he got it, even though both his sisters were able to learn it from Klara in the space of time it took for him to learn it from me. What was rather shocking though was that as I came to a certain part of the dance sequence (and by the way, Caleb is the only boy I've ever danced this with), Klara told him that now he is supposed to put his hand on my waist, to which he giggled and responded, "Oh Kayla, I'll love you forever!!!" Klara and I exchanged looks that expressed amusement and "Oh dear," at the same time.

Next we filed inside and played hot potato with everyone, including Mr. H., Clyde, Katherine, Megan, Ben, Klara, Rebecca, Ruth, Caleb, and me. Fortunately we had real music playing this time. . . . . then it was time for a movie, dinner (Caleb asked for a surprisingly healthy dinner--rice and veggie casserole, corn on the cob, homemade bread, and brussel sprouts!:), and then we were off.

And that, my dear friends, was my weekend.