Visiting the Badgers

Ruth, Kaitlin and I headed out on an adventure last Friday, to the thriving metropolis of Ephraim. It's a couple hour drive past cow pastures, little towns that time forgot, and turkey farms.  The city itself is small and when school is in session the population literally doubles.  Snow College boasts 4500 students, 90% live right there in town.  My first impressions of the school were (and in this order): Wow, there is so much parking and no traffic. Is school even in session?; (upon opening the car door) Whew, what is that smell? Is that turkeys or cows?;  This campus is really cute, and much nicer looking than I expected.    We attended an orientation and took a tour with several other prospective students, and the people were very nice.  Not just the people giving the tour but the people everywhere we went.  Kaitlin mused that it was a college full of Hufflepuffs, and from the big signs in the commons advertizing a country swing dance and nerf gun fight registration, I had to agree with her. After the tour, they gave us all t-shirts and waterbottles and then one of our tour guides took us to her apartment and let us rummage through her closets and sock drawers (not literally) while she told us how much she loved living there.  Kaitlin loved it.  Every bit of it.  And following her heart seems to have paid off for Kaitlin again.  


Canning Beans

Once or twice a year I donate some time at our church sponsored cannery.  The cannery (and the farms and everything) is manned by volunteers and then the food is given to the poor or used for disaster relief.  This time I got to help can black beans. For four hours I mixed big vats of brine, that was used to fill the cans.  It was a lot of sitting and watching the vats empty, so I ran guitar scales in my mind to pass the time between fillings.  Overall a good time, and nice to know I'm helping out my brother in need.

This is a stock photo of the cannery. Those vats in the back left is where I was working.  I canned corn last year. Corn is much messier than beans!

Poetry Out Loud

Kaitlin competed in her high school's Poetry Out Loud competition on Wednesday. It is a scholarship competition, where you memorize two poems and recite them for judges and an audience. The winner moves up levels all the way to a national competition.   Kaitlin memorized "Bright Star" by Keats and "I Carry Your Heart with Me" by e.e. cummings.  Kaitlin worked hard on inflection and meaning and did a great job in the competition, taking second place overall.  Unfortunately, only the first place winner goes on to regions, so she was pretty disappointed about that. But there is something to be said about working at something, doing your best, and feeling proud of how you did.

Kaitlin is very forward thinking right now.  It's the last half of her Senior year and she is anxious to get on with her life, go out an explore the world and all that.  We are headed over to Snow College this week to do a campus visit and get the low down on housing and such.



A Month of No School

Jared is back to school tomorrow.  He has been a month out of school, first with Christmas break and then he was off-track.  He has filled that time mostly with playing minecraft and watching minecraft videos.  He also participated in a Boy Scout Pow Wow. The last three Saturdays he went and took classes.  He finished one merit badge and got a good start on the other three.  He also passed off his scout rank and is almost done with Tenderfoot.

Ruth's Reflections 

A week before Christmas Ruth was called down to the office and given a flier giving her info about the Council Reflections Awards Ceremony.  She got no other information, but we took from that that maybe one of her four Reflections entries had won at the school and gone on to the council level.  So on Monday we drove across town to see if we could figure it out.  They had an open-house where all the entries were on display in the cafeteria so we went on a treasure hunt to see if we could find any of Ruth's entries. In the end we located three entries for Ruth: film, photography and art.  There was a lot of competition so we didn't expect much going into the awards ceremony, but surprise, surprise, Ruth won for her film and got honorable mention in both photography and art.

The whole reason Ruth does Reflections is to get prizes, and so far she's gotten one movie gift card and three subway gift cards.

Happy New Year

Nala, the cat, liked Chuck's lap the best at the New Years party.

We spent our New Years eve with friends and neighbors, while Kaitlin also had some friends over to our house to watch movies and play games.  It was a fun evening full of food and laughter, and since they legalized aerial fireworks, people can't seem to pass by an opportunity to shoot them off, so we had a lot of those going off in our neighborhood.

We spent most of our post-Christmas week just hanging out at home.  We slept in, wore pajamas, ate lots of snacks, went to some movies, and were generally lazy.

Can you guess how many new scouts I'll get in 2014?

Chuck did go back to work but came home early several days because they didn't have a lot for him to do.  I also worked on getting my cub scouts re-set and up and going for a new year.  I screened all of my scout shirts for the year as well. 

Cyber Happenings

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Ruth has been doing some drawing and animation and posting it online.  As of today, she had 248 subscribers to her YouTube channel and hundreds of views on her videos. You can watch the first episode of her "Darkside" video here.  Everything she does is hand drawn - she doesn't use any special software to animate things.

Jared, Ruth and I have also been making Minecraft videos. It's fun to make them together, but no one really watches them but us. 

Ruth's My Little Pony videos are getting quite a following.

I hit 400 Pinterest followers over Christmas.  I don't really spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I post Cub Scout things I'm working on, and I also have a board of things that make me laugh.

I loved the music in the movie Frozen, so I spent an afternoon writing out the guitar chords for one of the songs by ear. It's not unusual for me to tab out a song for a student or myself, but I've never taken the time to post one online for anyone else.  As of today, my tab for "Let It Go" has had 33,940 views and is currently #46 at the biggest tab site online.