{{ MEET RYLA.

[RYLA]

well. that right up there... is me. i'm your lovely admin, although my real name is rachel, not ryla. sorry to break it to you. ryla is the name of the cousin of my brother's flour child's mother. and i thought it was cool. a flour child is basically this project you do in grade ten planning at my school, where you carry around a little sack of flour for a week and email the teacher every few hours to feed it and all the girls dress it up in build-a-bear clothes. my brother had to do that in january, and they named their flour baby ryla, after the mommy's cousin. so i stole the name and now use it on a whole bunch of different sites i'm on.

anyways... i'm sixteen, and i'm canadian. i'm actually not so far away from vancouver (i was there last weekend...) and that's why i chose to use vancouver as the setting for the site. i've lived in the same house my entire life and i have an obsession with carrie underwood and taylor swift. i dislike school, except for the last block of the day, which is dance, and the dance teacher has been my teacher outside of school from when i was five to when i was eleven, at the dance studio i go to, and then she left us for a few years to teach at the high school i go to, and now i have her again. i'm just excited for graduation next year, when i can call her chelsea again, because i can't call her by her first name at school.

my favourite season is the summer, and that's not just because that's when my birthday is (july 14). summer is full of sun and beaches and eating candy. there is no school, you can have a sleepover with your friends any day of the week, and most of the time is spent hanging out with said friends, because you guys are all awesome together. now, the thing is -- this summer might be a little different. one of my friends got a job at mcdonald's, so she won't be able to hang out all that much -- and my other bff might be a volunteer at a summer camp... five days a week... all day... and here i am, having applied at a bunch of places and still having no job, and i'll probably end up home. alone. on the computer. all summer long.

let's see... the most amazing experience of my life was in march 2009, when i got to go to africa as my christmas present from 2008, with my brother and my nana and granddad. we went to namibia (which is right above south africa, on the west side) and stayed for almost a week in this place called auas game lodge, outside of windhoek, which is the capital of namibia. then we flew (with wings... no, just kidding, in a plane) to cape town, south africa and rented a car and drove across to port elizabeth and back, stopping at a whole bunch of places along the way, and it took most of march for the whole trip. it was amazing. i rode an elephant, saw eleven giraffes about fifteen feet away from me, had the most amazing chocolate milkshakes, and then this happened:



yeah, that's right. that is an eighteen-month-old cheetah. it was really calm and amazingly soft. that was taken at this place called tenikwa, which is like this sort of sanctuary for endangered wild cats.

what else can i tell you about myself? i have a little brother who's only a year younger than me and is actually taller than i am (i'm just over five feet, i guess), and a little sister who's seven, and the scariest thing in the world was last year right after spring break when she had been really sick and we took her to the hospital and it turned out her appendix had burst probably a week before we took her in. the doctor said it was the worst case he'd ever seen; it wasn't even just like a rupture, it was literally little tiny pieces everywhere. and there was lots of infection and stuff. it was so freaking scary.

so last weekend i was in vancouver. it was fifty-five students from musical theater and drama programs at my school, plus the drama teacher and his wife, the dance teacher and her husband, and the music teacher and his wife, and a bunch of the parents. we have vancouver trips every year, but this one was by far the best -- i'll give you a run-down of the events.



we went and saw that. it was amazing. then we checked into a hotel, ate dinner, and split into two groups -- forty-six students with a bunch of adults to this improv event, and seven plus drama teacher plus his wife to bard on the beach (this shakespeare event) to see as you like it. yeah, i was one of the seven. i'm cultured -- what can i say?

then we stayed in the hotel overnight, had a buffet breakfast, did a lot of shopping in the pacific center mall (which is on here, yay!) and then we went to see wicked! which, in case you didn't know, is the best musical in the world. like, legit. it's about the witches in the wizard of oz, and it's freaking amazing.

basically, i thought hairspray was awesome... until i saw wicked. beccy (that's the blonde chick up in the hairspray picture) was hyperventilating and crying before the show even started, and the whole way through defying gravity (amazing song that ends the first act), i was just sitting there with this stupid, idiotic grin across my face. it was actually kind of embarrassing.

and although the word is backwards in this picture, i don't care, it's awesome. i took it with my webcam, so it was like a mirror, but that's okay. i got this awesome jacket there, and i'm wearing it right now:

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