Hunger Games

Oh the Hunger Games.  That seems so long ago!  All week was exciting.  Everyone was talking about it, changing their profile pictures to the movie poster, posting countdown, etc.  Or maybe that was just me.  :)

The day of, I made 1.5 more shirts but then ran out of gold paint.  My roommate Lindsey and I went to the distribution center and Joanne’s and I picked some more up.

At 7, Jeff and I headed over to the theater because we heard that people had been camping out.  I think that was a different theater, but it was probably good that we got there so early since we had such a huge group. The theater had 12 showings and so the lines were the 12 districts, which I thought was really clever. We were district 1, the luxury-making district.

Jeff helped me make the last shirt.  You can tell in the picture below which shirts I made by myself and which ones Jeff helped me with.  ;)

 

And then we waited there for a lot longer before anyone else showed up.  Some people showed up at 8:30 but most people showed up about 9:30 when we were let into the theater.

Going into the theater that early was nice because we could get our seats staked out right away, but they never really turned the lights all the way on so you couldn’t see well enough to play any games and it was too difficult to go outside and do things.  So it ended up being a pretty boring wait since all our plans were ruined.  The one good thing was that a couple girls from Jeff and Aaron’s ward brought some bows and arrows so we spent a fair amount of time playing shooting games.  I was surprised no one came in and stopped us.  I tried taking pictures but my flash was crazy bright and annoying everyone and then I realized that I had the camera on manual mode but I thought it was a different mode and so all the pictures are super blurry. Argh.  Still getting used to this thing.  So here are the crappy pictures of waiting.  We ended up having 26 people in our group!

  

I loved the movie.  I thought it was pretty much flawless, although other people didn’t think so.  I could understand people who were annoyed at the filming or whatever, but I couldn’t understand people who thought it was very different than the book.  They left almost nothing out and there just really isn’t a way to film Katniss’ inner thoughts!  I loved it though and had a great time!  Of course I was tired the next day, but I got over that quickly.  The worst part actually was having gold paint all over my hands for the next two days.

The Festival

I almost didn’t go this year.  I’ve been before, and when the day came around, I didn’t really care to go anywhere, much less when it was going to take hours and hours.

But go we did!  My friends were going and I didn’t want to miss out on anything, so Kate and I headed down there to meet up with some of our friends.  It didn’t even take hours!  The Benjamin exit is the key everyone!  We got great parking and there was no traffic. 

I didn’t take my camera into the event, and also decided that I had no desire to be caked this year, so I went up on the upper balconies in the temple and watched the throwing from above.  I’m glad I did.  It was really cool to watch.  We went to the 7pm showing, which we thought would be the least crowded one, but it ended up being the biggest one of the day!

So this was my view (image from internet).  I was standing on one of those terrace things (the one on the left).  It was pretty great AND I could breathe!

Here are some pictures right after.  Unfortunately I didn’t get pictures of the whole group. See how awesome I look since I wasn’t caked!  :)

There wasn’t any traffic on the way out either, although there was tons I guess going the other way.  And then we saw that there was a really pretty sunset so we decided to get out and take some pictures.  The road that we were parked on was semi busy though so when we were taking them by ourselves, we had to wait for a substantial gap between cars and then set our 10 second timer.  There were a lot of attempts, but the last picture here was our best jumping picture result.

Lastly, I finally remembered all that money I spent on an external flash and we took this picture.  Then we were almost run over and we decided it was probably time to leave, especially since the sunset was gone.

Washingtonian Party!

Kirsten from Maple Valley decided that it had been far too long since all us Washington people had gotten together and orchestrated a Washingtonian Party.  It was a big hit!  We all planned it like the couple days before it was supposed to happen although the day and time had been chosen for over a month.  I was in charge of choosing the park.  Jamie and Matt even showed up!  She was excited to see Kristina and Brayden.  Kirsten is leaving on her mission in a few months to Temple Square!

Most of the people were from Maple Valley or were Running Start students at Green River, so I wasn’t very close to most of them but it was really fun anyway.

There were probably about 30 people who came.  This is about half of the group.  We had huge Costco hot dogs that were delicious and played football, frisbee etc. and then went to Tyler’s apartment to play games.  It was a lot of fun to see people I haven’t seen in years, even though they all did running start to graduate early and I’m graduating earlier than them.  ;)