Harvest Festival

Last week on Saturday, my church had its annual Harvest Festival. We support a lot of missionaries, and this entire festival’s earnings go towards all the missionaries. Everything is with tickets, and each ticket is one dollar. So as you would guess, with about 75 families, we would get a lot of money to send to the missions. My family and I always help out with making the Harvest Festival spectacular, and it’s always really fun!

3:00 PM is when everybody usually starts coming. We still have a sermon, but instead of starting at 5:00 PM, on Harvest Festival we start at 3:45 PM so there is a lot of time to be outside after the sermon while it’s still light outside. There is great food, and usually cotton candy and noodles additional to all the regular Indian foods, like spring rolls, poori, you get it. I always hang out with my friends, and we get our faces painted. Usually by each other, because my friends and I are the ones who man the face painting station. Other than face painting, we have lots and lots of games. We have darts, musical chairs, and plenty of other games. At 7:00 PM, that’s when the auction starts. Now when you think of the word “auction”, the first word that probably comes to mind is “serious”. But not for the Austin Christian Fellowship of India. No sir, for ACFI, everything is easygoing, laid back, and just plain funny. The same guy does it every year, and he is hilarious. So you would imagine how everybody would be fine with staying till about 9:30, and this year it was even later than that. The whole thing was just great, and as a bonus, at the end, everybody gets byrianni. And everybody loves food.

Harvest Festival usually includes a lot of pictures, and this year was no different. People were taking pictures for our church’s website, and at the Harvest Festival is usually when a lot of people take their family pictures. I should probably tell you now, I am NOT a photogenic person. Even when I know people are taking pictures of me, even when I’m staring straight at the camera and smiling my very best smile, I just can’t look good. So yeah… I don’t even know how to look natural when people say “SMILE!” I just kind of look at the camera and and try smiling kind of decent. But now you know, I am not one of those people who have a superhuman ability to look great in every single picture, even if they don’t even know someone is taking pictures of them. And that, my friend, is why Harvest Festival is the low point of my appearance.

This year, since we were um…”old enough” as some people said, we got to go in the bounce house at like 9:00 PM. And in November, 9:00 PM is pitch black. But that didn’t mean anything to us so we still did it. Yeah, probably not the best idea. Our time in the bounce house felt like a long time when it was probably just 20 or 30 minutes. It included lots of screams, all high pitched because well, we are middle school girls… And a lot of minor injuries to places like elbows and knees. Yup, never go in a bounce house when it’s pitch black outside… But it was great, and I had an amazing time.

I love Harvest Festival. I really do. I’ve been to every single one of them, and I never get bored when I’m there. I had a lot of fun at ACFI’s Harvest Festival for 2013.

Allegiant

Allegiant. What on earth. Veronica Roth, did you just. But seriously, how could you do this to us, to me. Absolutely not okay. Not at all.

I just finished the last book of the Divergent series, and I have to say, I knew it would probably happen, but I didn’t think Veronica Roth would actually just kill the main character, and one of her best friends. Like what? I was in a literal state of shock for the rest of the weekend. And it wasn’t enough for Veronica Roth to kill Tris in a simple way, she has to go through the entire first level of her mission, survive the actual death serum in fog which, she already had a very close experience with it, but no, that wasn’t enough. She still has to drag herself through the glass doors barely alive just to be greeted with, ” Hello, Tris.”

And that’s when I started to panic. Because everybody knows that when anybody says, ” Hello, (insert character’s name)”, that something terrible is going to happen. When somebody says that, that’s usually when the bad guy come in and does some awful deed, or that’s when you find out the good, innocent character is actually the villain, the evil mastermind the bad guy. So of course, when she goes in and is about to save everybody, David has to come in and just kill her. Because that’s exactly how you end a book, right?

Well, no. Also, to top it all off, in Insurgent, Tris about to be injected with death serum. She says, ” Am I done yet? I can’t be.” And then again, in Allegiant, while her life is seeping away, she sees her mom come to her in a hallucination, and she asks, “Am I done yet”, and her mom replies, ” Yes my child, you’ve done so well.”