@Ela: "Pumpkin chocolate?" Sorry, but that sounds disgusting!
@Jaygeee: They are sooooo good! I thought it sounded gross before I tried 'em but they actually have a very good taste (as long as there aren't too many chocolate chips).
Pumpkin chocolate sounds yummy! ("Too many chocolate chips"? There's such thing?! 😉 )
Christmas cookies are so fun! 🙂
@Ella: haha! didn't you say "goodwill to me" instead of "men"?
@Ariel: Chocolate is good but I only can eat so much and I love the pumpkin taste so, for me, the chocolate shouldn't overwhelm it. 🙂
@Shi: Yes, haha. I was having such a bad typing day. 😛
It's hard to believe, but this chat thread was started over a year ago! So far there has been 486 posts. That's a lot of TLC talking! 🙂
Wow! Good for us! Um...you guys, actually. *assumes Peter Pevensie accent* I haven't exactly been here very long.
And my favorite cookie is gingerbread all the way!
I just deleted like 2000 words worth of what our camping trip was like... here we go again.
So... I just came home last night from the best weekend of my life -- a TLC campout in a regional park on the West Coast. Kristi and the E's attended with my family, and the next day held a meeting with Ariel of Narnia (who had traveled in from somewhere or other, no one knows :P) and Benisse 🙂
My family left our state at 7 am and got to the campsite at noon. We went ahead and set up the two tents we had brought, leaving room in the middle for the tent Kristi was bringing. The "tent circle" where the tents were set up was enormous. Five or six tents could have fit in it! It was gravel/sand with a fire pit in the center of it. It was a beautiful site really. Lots of trees outside in the grass away from the tent circle, six picnic tables, and a lovely view of a lonely, solitary peak between some trees.... yeah, I sang Misty Mountains and thought about Thorin and fireplaces. 😛
When we got done with our tents, we heard that Kristi was on her way and lost in the park. So Gyps and I ran up the side of the hill and down the road to meet her. We were wearing cloaks and so they were flying out behind us as we ran. She tried to take pictures of us, but couldn't get it while driving. She followed us back to the camp, without driving off the road more than once. When we arrived at the campsite again we helped her unload all her Narnia stuff and set up the tent she brought. This one: 
?oh=ea77fc321b3b00fb2542531ac48671b0&oe=5542F591 link approved by Tooky. And yes, that is a Narnia tent, from a Narnia film scene 😛 We have located it in the film. And we had it for the campout 😛
It took a while to set up -- we had to deal with the center pole first, and screw the poles together and raise it up slowly. Then somebody had to be in the center of the tent to support it while all thirteen outer poles were raised up. It was a rather difficult task and took several people and an hour, but once it was up it was all worth it. It was a beautiful tent, as you can tell from the pictures.
Well, the E's got stuck in some crazy traffic, so Kristi and Gyps and I hung out for a while. We had dinner, which no one ate nearly enough of -- we had to bring soooo much food back home 😛 And then we lit a campfire and sat around it for a while. Kristi and I read NarniaMuck RPs together and gave Peridan a funny voice for a few minutes. And we roasted marshmallows for the first time in my life! That was really fun. And we played Narnian cubes, and Kristi got the Narnian standard and that was SO not fair! 😛 Mom and Dad went to bed really early because Mom was starting to freeze.
At 9:30 the E's came in, and I welcomed them in Elvish, and brought them over to the fire. They brought mattresses, the smart people! We warmed up and got started talking a bit, and then Kristi decided it was time for the gift exchange and birthday/Christmas cake. She had made a cool cake with little porcelain Narnia figures in it. There was Aslan's head, Peter, Susan, Edmund Lucy, Caspian, Trumpkin, Edmund's Shield, and Peter's Shield, and something else, I think. 😛 Which one you got determined which order you got to choose your gift (Kristi had brought a gift back and it was a choose your own present sort of thing, with various neat items!). I got Caspian 🙂 My gift was assigned though, so it didn't matter. Later though, Kristi let me choose something, so I got a dice game set -- those things are reaaaally cool ^.^ The E's gave me something off of my elf list, and Kristi was like "I'm sure there's a rule against asking for RL things in your Elf lists!!"
After cake and presents, we stood around the fire for a few minutes, and then retreated into the Narnia tent for a game of Apples to Apples (and lion cookies! Those were yummy! ^.^) During the game, some weird sounding howls came up and a chihuahua barked a lot with the howls and then the chihuahua stopped barking and we wondered if it had become lunch 😛 We left the tent after that to wrap up some things and go to bed.
Ethan went to bed first, and then Kristi, leaving instructions on how to put out the fire. Well, we didn't have anything to stir the fire with, so we used water. It smoked for a while, and Ela and Eri went to bed. But the fire didn't completely go out, so Gyp and I stayed up for another thirty minutes to an hour and watched it and kept an eye on it -- the embers kept glowing and lighting up again. That was annoying 😛 But I pretended to be a Narnian guard and marched back and forth and looked for guardy-ish.
Sleeping in the Narnia tent was interesting, except the door didn't go all the way to the floor and I got the spot by the door so I was a bit cold 😛 And I couldn't find the extra blankets... 😛 But I didn't freeze to death...
Is anyone interested in hearing abotu Saturday morning's rendezvous with Ariel?
@Alex: LOL 😀
@Tenny: WOW!! I am SO jealous. 😛 Sounds like a fantastic weekend! And yes, I would like to hear about it! 🙂
*is sooooooooo jealous!* Yes, tell us about the rendezvous with Ariel!!!!!!!!
That sounds awesome, Tenny! Wish I could have been there!
Sounds like fun, Tenny!
*is curious as to the manner in which Tenny will tell this tale*
Yeah, Ariel's a creepy stalker 😉 no one should trust her! (kidding. She was awesome. She even let me rest my head on her shoulder, but Gyps says I was way too outgoing.)
I'll have to post the whole story later -- too much craziness at my place.
I made two batches of cookies, and burnt the entirety of BOTH OF THEM! 11 relatives coming tomorrow, five trips more to the store to make, a house to clean... oyyyyyyyyyyy, I shouldn't have burnt those...
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!
