November in Pictures

Just like that, another month has flown by. I think the week before Thanksgiving break was the longest two days of my life!

Thanks goodness we got our pumpkin pie fix taken care of in advance, at the annual orchestra pumpkin pie sale. We sold 50 pies during our 15-minute break between 7th and 8th periods on the Friday before Thanksiving, and made almost $700!

That night, I watched my beautiful friends perform in their show, The Knight of One Axe. The drama department puts on One Axe (“One-Acts”) comedies every year, and this was the first time I attended the show. They were fantastic!

I had three Thanksgiving meals this year: My church holds a pot-luck luncheon every year, where I got to see all the college students that came home for break. Then we went to a family friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, for which I made a pumpkin roll. Lastly on Friday night, a bunch of the students in my AP Russian class had dinner together with our Russian exchange students from Pskov, Russia.

Did you know that they don’t really have dinner parties in Russia? They told us that people always do it potluck-style. Thank you to Alex for being an excellent host and Mama Sands for the amazing food (notice the clean plates in the picture)! We watched Rocky IV afterwards… it was quite the experience. Sadly, the Russian students are headed back to Pskov on Monday, but we definitely had a great time during their three weeks here!

Sunday night I ventured into DC with these ladies for the screening of Il Regno di Napoli (The Kingdom of Naples) at the National Gallery of Art. It’s an Italian movie filmed in 1978 that we had to watch for our Global Studies class, and I’m not going to lie, it was really bad. The acting was horrible, the filming was, well, from 1978, and the plot was miserable at best. We didn’t even get gelato from the museum cafe afterwards because the movie was so long, by the time we got out the museum was closed! 🙁

Dazzling Christmas lights, giant snowflakes, balloon arches, long dresses, waltz music, hors d’oeuvres and fancy finger foods  – this is the Viennese Ball. It is the orchestra program’s premier event, and school dances don’t get classier than this. I have attended this event every year since I joined orchestra as a freshman, and I’ve come full circle now as an orchestra co-president, planning the ball itself. We spent the last month reading waltzes (symphonic plays live music for waltzing), and now it’s all over – all that remains are some great memories and the balloons I brought home last night, now sadly deflated. It’s in moments like these that I’m reminded of how shocking it is that I’m really a senior.