My blog talked to me today.

He said, "Hey! You used to spend more time with me!"

I said, "I know. But lately, my math book, my English PACEs, my history books, and everything else, have been taking a lot of my time."

My blog (his real name is Calvin*) said, "Come on! You can't fool me with that! It doesn't take that long to write a blog post every once in a while to make me feel appreciated, now does it?"

"Calvin!" I said, getting annoyed. "It takes time to think of something interesting, and then I have to feel semi-creative before sitting down and trying to type. You wouldn't know, I guess, because you're not in high school!"

Calvin got a little irritated too, but he said, logically, "That's it! I'll help you write it!" And then he just sat there and glared at me, and so there was nothing left for me to do except to say:

"What shall we write about, Calvin?"

And he said: "Tell them that funny story about what happened last night! Remember? When you were laying under a bush and -- "

I interrupted him before he gave it away, and so, ladies and gentlemen, Calvin and I would like to present to you the story of The Line Search!

*********************

So. Last night, I was at my CAP meeting, and we decided to do a little ground team exercise.

"Terminology!" Calvin interrupts. "Do we look like we care?"

At any rate, I was voluntold ("Volun-what?" "Voluntold. It's where someone volunteers someone to do something. It's one of our core values*, Calvin.") to be a person to be searched for. I was told to lay on on ground and keep my head down while the cadets were taught how to search for people, and then while they actually searched. I had the good company of 4 mosquitoes, who danced around above my head and didn't bite me, which was nice of them.

"Why don't you get to the funny part? I think your readers are falling asleep," Calvin says, clippily.

Well, to get on to the funny part, I was lying behind my designated bush, and the search line of cadets was nearly to me. They were close enough that I could hear their conversation, and it was hysterically funny.

"You search the bush!" one of them said.

"No! You search the bush!"

"I don't want to! You do it!"

"I don't want to. What if there's something in there and it jumps out and grabs me??"

By this point, I was laughing really hard, but silently, even though I'm surprised they didn't hear me snickering. You would have to picture it: two 16 year old boys, in BDUs, avowing their fear of searching behind some bushes in case a Terrifying Object of Unknown Origin or Species --

"That describes you!" says Calvin, snottily! "Calvin! If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. For your information, I was not referring to myself, as I am fairly sure that none of my cadets live in fear of me leaping out from dark, obscure places. Anyhow."

-- should jump out at them. I was planning to do exactly that if they didn't spot me. However, they saw me, even without having to enter the scary bushes. However, I will never be able to look at those cadets the same...scary bushes indeed!


*The name Calvin -- and the character thereof -- is purely fictitious. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, except he reminds me a little bit of my dad, but that is rather beside the point.

* The four core values of the Civil Air Patrol are: excellence, integrity, respect, and volunteer service.

The Card

My mom and dad's anniversary was a couple days ago, and so we kids made them a very special card. It was so special that I am sharing it with you. First, you look at the card, and it looks like this:
But then when you start to open it up, you notice that the card is backwards...

...and upside down!
And this is the inside.

Life -- the game

Last Sunday, we went to our friends' house for lunch. It was a very nice meal, and I say that because it truly was, and not because they read my blog. They don't read my blog, actually. But after our lunch (which consisted of eating, with forays into conversation, we played Life. Those of you who do not know what the game of Life is may now take a break and google it. The rest of you, no matter how much you may wish to leave and not come back, stick with me.

The game of Life was made especially interesting by one, general, factor, and that was the players. One player in particular made the game very interesting by his manipulation of the rules. Not to mention any names, of course. I should like to warn those of you who may have the horror fantastic experience of playing Life in his company: Do not let him have the Tech Support card -- cheat if necessary. If he does get it, he will charge a $50,000 fee for fixing the spinner every time it gets stuck. However he won't actually fix it, but will leave it for the next hapless victim of his embezzlement player. Then he will end up having over 2 million dollars and will consequently win. Shocking that such fraud should find its way into a circle of homeschool friends playing an innocent game of Life, isn't it? However, I am such a nice person that I am keeping the naughty player anonymous to avoid recriminations, etc.

The game of Life lasted a long while, which was time enough for someone to work his mischief and collect, from his fellow players, more money than he could count. One of his victims of high crime was an innocent Monopoly car, aka "hunk of junk." The owner of this car was so unfortunate as to not be able to ride in his car (have you ever tried placing a Life guy in a monopoly car?) and was forced to drive his car by remote control, but even these unfortunate circumstances did not assuage a certain smug player's relentless, Silas Marner-like qualities.

Aside from the tech support dude drama, we also saw some interest in the swapping of salary cards. Duncan found himself the much-envied owner of the $100,000 salary, and Jordan made it his Life's goal (yes, that was a pun) to get it. It worked, and except for a brief interval when yours truly was in possession of said card, Jordan was rolling in the cash.

After the game of Life, which Logan won (and I shall not say how exactly he came by his millions, nor how he earned the nickname "Moneybags"), we talked intermittently, defended ourselves against the jogging elbow of our friends dad (wait, that would have been "me" instead of "we"), and went home.

the Amazing Chocolate Chip cookies :)

Here is the recipe (complete with my notes on ingredients), and then a photo essay of sorts showing the mixing and forming of aforementioned Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookies.

5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (but they won't explode if you use the quick cooking kind)
8 ounces semisweet chocolate (like a package of chocolate chips)
1 pound (yes, 4 sticks!) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 cups light brown sugar
4 large eggs (have you ever seen a recipe call for tiny eggs? Or monstrous ostrich-sized eggs? They always seem to use "large eggs".)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (As opposed to a whole vanilla bean pod.)
4 cups all-purpose flour (Have you ever tried no-purpose?)
2 teaspoons baking soda (Yes! The stuff everyone allegedly keeps in their freezer to keep it fresh!)
2 teaspoons baking powder (This would be the stuff you don't put in your freezer, normally.)
1 teaspoon salt (I actually use salted butter and skip the salt.)
24 ounces chocolate chips, the largest and best-quality possible. Chocolate chunks are really good. (Chocolate in general is good, so the bigger the better!)

Okay. So, the first thing you do is unbury your food processor, or dig out your blender. Then you grind up the oats and the 8 ounces of chocolate as fine as you can.


Then you mix up the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract, in a bowl of some sort.

Then you mix up the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt (if you're using it), and add that in.
This is where the batter gets stiff. If you just have a handheld mixer, you should probably do this by hand (plus, by hand is fun). And you add the oats/chocolate mixture to the wet stuff.

Then you add the 24 ounces of chocolate chips/chunks.

Preheat the oven to 375° Fahrenheit, and get out your cookie sheets. You now have two options: 1) line the sheets with parchment paper, or 2) grease it regularly.

Then, make gigantic cookie balls, each one about the size of two golf balls. I don't actually know how big a golf ball is, let alone two, but that is what the recipe says. I just make them really big. You are supposed to end up with 24.

Then you stick them in the oven, one sheet at a time, and bake them for 11 minutes, reversing the pans halfway through. After 11 minutes, they won't look done, but you have to take them out anyhow. They'll have little cracks on the top, and if they are brown on the bottom, they've baked too long. Let the cookies cool on the parchment paper rather than on cookie racks because they will drip down through the racks. If you didn't use the paper, let them cool a few minutes.

They dry out, so store them in plastic bags, preferably in the freezer, but they don't last long enough around here to warrant doing that.

Enjoy!

Blackberry Picking Expedition

So, today we (Jessica, Annetta, Rachel-our-friend, Elizabeth-our-neighbor, and I) went blackberry picking.

To start off, this is a blackberry "sprig," as Rachel calls it. Isn't it picturesque?

Blackberry bushes have prickers, which are...prickery. It is painful when they come in contact with your body. This is useful information if you get out into the real world. So if you heard a chorus of ouches, that was us! Rachel kept getting berried buried in briers.

In fact, we were so loud that Reuben heard us and came to help. At least he claimed to be helping...we think he just ate and made faces:

We ended up picking 22 cups, which is a lot. It made 4 pies and one cobbler-thing (we ran out of pie crust). I sorted the berries...

and added the sugar, tapioca, and cornstarch.

Then, after Jessica and Rachel made the crusts, we filled them, added top crusts,

and decorated them with smiley faces.

Then, we had our neighbors up and ate them. The pies. (Why, what did you think I meant??)

Hungry yet? :)

(*Jessica, Rachel, and Annetta also contributed to this blog post.*)

Beginning of September

Yes. How is that for an original post title that sets your creative teeth on edge? (Maybe the reason your teeth are on edge is because you are noticing how dirty our vehicle window is in the above picture. Whatever.)

Grandpa has been doing second-cuttings of hay. I wanted to get pictures of the whole process, but just caught the last step. And then when I remembered that I wanted pictures, I raced outside.
We have end-of-the-summer flowers, such as goldenrod and asters, now.
Josh and Katrina are cute. This picture was taken at Jennifer's graduation party.

So that's a short update. Now my blog doesn't look so forlorn. And I am issuing a challenge to my fellow bloggers: take some pictures of your end-of-the-summer/fall-ish flora or fauna or weather and blog them :)

Jennifer's Senior Pictures

Congratulations as you graduate, Jennifer!

The Airshow

The Great Chautauqua Airshow was held this year from August 21-23. Like last year, my squadron helped out, mainly with parking and flight line. We bivouacked out on the airport hill. For those three days, we were doing Volunteer Service. We worked till our poor little feet hurt, and then worked some more. We worked in the rain and mud. We made it our Civic Duty to perform these acts with a minimum of sarcastic-comment-making towards the dweebs dear people we were parking. Why, we were practically Public Servants. (Freebie: that phrase is a very good attention-getter. People will be very impressed if you use that phrase about yourself, but you do have to use the proper tone.)

I arrived around noon on Friday, with my tent, air mattress, and overnight stuff. Cadets trickled in, and we set up our campsite, and tried to figure out what we were doing. (That last item was a futile, week-end-long effort, incidentally.) The gates opened around 1600 [Ed. note: This means 4:00 PM. JLS], and we were ready. We had a couple cadets down near the road, a cadet along the parking driveway, and a couple cadets in the pond field, parking people. With all disrespect, these people (for reasons unknown to us, because we had vests on and all they had to do was what we were telling them to do, so you would have though it was fairly simple) had relatively no clue what they were doing.

The people organizing the airshow took about 5 of the cadets (including the cadet commander, deputy cadet commander) for flight line, so yours truly inherited the rest of the cadets and the parking stuff. Parking an airshow with roughly 7 cadets is a logistical nightmare, and that is all I shall share with you on that. I had fun, though, and all my cadets had meals at regular intervals (which is a good thing.)

Friday, we managed to not have rain. (It was wet and dewy for PT in the morning though.) But on Saturday, in the afternoon, it let go and rained! We said to ourselves, "Selves, we frankly don't care about the five vehicles who will pull in during this deluge. We are going to go sit in the quansit hut with some other unfortunate drowned rats until it is over with." And so we did. It only lasted 15 minutes, and then we went back out to our posts and parked and unparked people.

It also rained Sunday morning, and Sunday afternoon. We once again got wet, but this time, we said to ourselves, "Selves, we frankly don't care that water is running down our backs -- it's not deluging, so we are going to stay out here and park cars. However, we are going to put our blouses back on to avoid severe hypothermic reactions to the rain and wind." And so we did.

Then Sunday evening, when it was all over at 1600 [Ed. note: this also means 4 PM], we packed up our stuff, loaded our soggy selves into our parents' vehicles, and went home and took showers.

Lydia

Lydia's twelfth birthday is today.

(Wait...did I say twelve?? *I* was just twelve, like last year! I mean to say she's nine again, I'm sure. Someone tell me she's nine, please?!)

Regardless of her current age, Lydia remains our "nine volt running on a twelve," as my dad puts it. This is a very true statement. It describes Lydia quite well. It has been use to describe her over the years, and rings true today still. Even though I don't know how much a volt is, I still concur fully with the statement...just...because.

Happy birthday, Lydia!

:)

(Lydia, during wiffleball at Jessica's graduation party.)

Encampment

This is a very condensed, pictorial record of encampment. Due to length constraints, I only included some (very few!) of the highlights. The photos were taken by Captain Hall, the PAO. (I did not take my camera with me.) All the pictures have me in them, to make them more interesting to the viewers :)

This first one is us marching...somewhere.

This one doesn't have me in it, but it is a full length shot of the rappelling tower. It was fifty feet high. That's tall.

Before we went up, the rappelling people checked our equipment. He is feeling my gloves, to make sure my fingers are all present and accounted for (I guess).

This is me telling him my last will...no, I'm probably asking him if he would like to go down with me. He didn't, so I went down by myself.
One of the nights we went to the base gym for some basketball and volleyball.

Leadership Reaction Course: This is us walking over to the first one.

The next series (the following 8) is of an obstacle where we had to get over the wall, be lowered on to the ropes, crawl across to the other side, and get a heavy box of 'ammunition' to the other side too. But we were not allowed to touch anything red, or fall in the water. It was one of those annoying situation where it's easier said than done.
Up...and over...

...and down on the ropes which swayed scarily.

"Hello, tadpoles!"

"I think I need some help..."

Safely across, and then it was the amazing jump/yank thing, where he made it safely to the other side, but we both fell down. But we made it safely across. Did I mention we got across?

yay...

This was 'exciting' KP. I have no idea what I'm doing. I think I'm sweeping underneath the toaster, though.

Formation before one of the meals. I love the reflections. I'm in the flight (group) farthest to the left, in the blue hats.

Drill
This was the dress blues inspection.
And this last is an extremely random picture of the barracks, which is where I slept.

I wrote a very long thing on what I did during encampment. It is so long that I decided not to blog it, but if anyone is interested, leave me a comment with your email address and I will send it. (I won't publish the comment, of course!)