Moving Fast

Welcome back everyone to yet another entry on my blog. I know that not that many people are reading this as much as usual which is quite sad to me but still there are things to write about still. First off I was reading through my last blog entry and realized that it was 4 days after 4th of July and didn't give anything about a single minute of what I did. Of course there was something else going on that seemed more important at the time which was the Mission trip. Heres the main reason why 4th of July was one of my last priorities last time. It's because my family is notorious for not wanting to spend any money on fireworks so the most we usually do on the 4th of July is sit around the house on the computers and listening to everyone else launch their fireworks. This year we got back into some of the usual festive spirit of the national holiday by getting some of our own fireworks and launching them off at our grandparents house as well as grilling with the whole family. 4th of July is all about spending time with family more then the launching of fireworks and we have accomplished this for this years 4th of July so now we have to keep ourselves from falling back into old habits.

I felt like that first paragraph was extremely nessacary but felt a bit like filler so lets move on to the real stuff that's going on recently. My brother is going to be moving out of the house here soon which is a huge event for all of us. I have talked about Nate before on my blog but not very much and especially anything about my relationship with him which is just a little bit shaky at times. I know i've mentioned this before but I can't find the exact date so my brother has Aspergers which is a milder version of Autism. Because of this his mind set is a little underdeveloped but that doesn't mean he isn't smart and that we don't get along with each other every once in a while but there are some very definite problems that we have each other. For example my brother thinks I'm a know it all and I think he needs to grow up at times but this is all opinion and we have been through thick and thin together. He has been with me since the day I was born and when he leaves I really don't know how well things will work for me. I do spend the night at other peoples houses and go away for weeks at a time but there is still something nagging at me about him leaving the house after so long. It is a mix of pride and sorrow. I spent most of my life trying to help him no matter what happened so it feels like I'm letting parts of my life walk out the door. Also I feel like the effort has been worth every minute and that it is his time to go out and prove it.

Recently I have been working hard on my Tae Kwon Do and have even started getting into going to more tournaments after my first success. I got an invitation for a tournament and was told that if I wanted to go that I would have to RSVP myself this time. I tried sending an email to the dojo saying that I wanted to go ahead with the tournament but they never gave me any information for it so today is practice and I don't know if I am even allowed to go.This just in I have just gotten back from the dojo and I have been informed that the practice is at the dojo. Also that both me and Zoe can go as well and I will be giving update next blog entry cause I'm getting spinny and can't write anything else without making it all messed up and all over the place.

Helping the Needy

I am so glad that I didn't post anything this last Friday because even if I could I would have missed a good weekend worth of a fantastic post. Thank you all for being patient and still checking out my blog every once in a while because I do try very hard to leave some good posts for everyone. I went to a Foster home this weekend to volunteer. To help out along the way I am going to load a couple pictures to give you an idea of what I was doing and of course to make it easier to get my point across. These are the pictures that I have access to at the moment and not all of them have actual pictures of me in them so look for the kid in the  deep blue shirt and you'll see me. Ironically I did not plan that one out it just happened to work like that

To start off I went there with my cousins, Abby and Calvin ( Kristi's side of the family )  and the friends that I had met during the Lansy Writing academy courses right before Summer vacation. This was comforting because not only was I going with someone that I knew but people that I could hang out with during my free time. I went there to work so before I go over all of the fun stuff that I did lets go over the the work I did while I was there. The first thing that I worked on while I was there was cutting wood all for a total for 6 hours in a day. This was grueling work in the least due to the fact that all of the work was done with sun bearing down on us the entire day. Next up was the work on reorganizing the shed which I don't have a picture of up there which I apologize for but that took a good 8 hours of the day to complete including some of the nasty little things we found in there as well like rats and termites. After the long day of work we were all satisfied as the place was at the cleanest point that it had ever been.

While we were there we had more then hard labor to do including cleaning in the kitchen. Everyone was assigned a job soon after eating. These things included mopping, sweeping, wiping down tables, putting up chairs, cleaning dishes, and drying dishes. I don't think I missed anything in there but I might've but those were the things I had to do with lunch clean up.
 
We didn't all just work our butts off we also had quite a bit of fun while we were out and about. The things we did included swimming mostly but the pictures that you see on the right are apart of the more planned activities. Those included barn swinging first and then paintball on the bottom and the people in the paintball picture includes Sarah, ( far left )Andrew (far right ), Abby      (front )and I don't know how to spell his name on this one so forgive me if I mess this up Emaeus ( back ). Andrew and Emaeus are two of the boys from Landry academy and Sarah I didn't know very well at all. Abby of course is my cousin as I mentioned earlier. paintball didn't go very well for me at all because on the first round I was hit in the hand and it is now bruised and torn up making it a little uncomfortable to move. The swinging around was fun except my constant fear of hitting the ground from tall structures. The more menial things like Swimming was more of what I had fun doing as well as playing sardines. If you don't know what sardines is it is pretty much reverse hide and seek. One person hides and everyone tries to find them but instead of them coming out of hiding you then hide with them. Me and Abby managed to hide the longest. Abby hid in the clothes drier because she is small enough to do so comfortably. I hid behind a mattress beneath a bunk bed in such a manner that no one could even spot me without moving the mattress.

I hope that this was all worth the wait because I certainly think that it was and I got it in with reasonable time so I am quite happy with it at the moment and I honestly can say that it doesn't feel like I was there for 4 days. Instead it feels like about 2 months I was there. I felt very content when all of it was said and done as it should be. Thank you all for tuning in for this new update and I will make sure to keep you all up to date on anything new going on.