Summer Bucket List

     So you may have noticed that on the right side a new bit of information has shown up. I have decided to start a bucket list for the summer! I am hoping I can do this and I want to share all the expereiences, right here, with you. Whenever I finish something I will bold the words. Wish me luck! And if you have any ideas of something to add let me know.
     I have already accomplished some of the things on my list. Here's what happend:

1. Take a trip:
Last week I traveled to West Virginia on a mission trip.

2. Impact someone's life:
While I was on that trip I met some amazing people and I feel that, maybe not alone but as a group, me and my youth group, with the help of God, really helped them to come closer to christ.


8. Try something new:
So on this trip we had a "fun day." For our fun day our group decided to go white water rafting. I have never been white water rafting, mostly because I was afraid. Well with the encouragment of my friends I did it, and it was actually pretty fun. I may never do it again but I can say I have concord white water rafting (without falling out of the raft, if I may add.)

I'm Back With Some Pretty Cool Shoes

     It has been a long time since I have posted.... again but I'm out of school now so maybe I will be able to post more! I just got back from a mission trip on Sunday to West Virginia. It was really fun and very good to emerse myself into my faith wihtout the outside world for a while.
      One fun this about the mission trip was that we had "family groups" which were like small bible study groups who we also worked with and spent part of our fun day with. I became really great friends with one of the guys in my group nammed Tanner. One night during family groups I started drawing on Tanner's shoes (with his permission of course) and here's what happened:

     I personally am very pround of how they turned out and I think Tanner liked them as well :)
     So I am finially of summer break! This is the summer before my senior year so I am excited for it! I hope I will be able to keep this updated as I go. I hope everyone is having a great summer!

Easter Weekend

HE HAS RISEN!!!
     This past weekend was Easter weekend for all of you that were not aware. Easter is a big deal to me. It didn't used to be, until I got into the youth program at my church. That's when the whole idea and my way of viewing Easter changed. Each year my church has an Easter vigil. A vigil is "wakefulness maintained for any reason during the normal hours for sleeping," according to dictionary.com. Each year on Easter weekend we all show up at the church Friday night (Good Friday.) That night we have a "Good Friday Service of Darkness" which the youth runs. This year we sang some songs and showed some videos. During the last song 12 different youth members got to go blow out 12 of the candles on the alter (I being one of the chosen youth members) until there was only one candle left. From that candle we lit a torch that we took outside to a fire pit in this big grassy area in front of the church in sight of the road. We lit a fire there, our goal for the weekend was to keep the fire burning for the rest of the weekend until Easter morning. For those of you not familiar with the story of Easter, Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and died. He was dead for three days, and rose from the dead on the third day which is the day we celebrate Easter. (Just FYI that's a very watered-down, short, not very good, explanation. I highly recommend you read the actual story in the Bible.) So the point of it all is we are "waiting for Jesus." Its an interesting experience, we all stay at the church, sleep on the couches in the youth room, and everyone sign up for a shift out by the fire. There is always someone out by the fire unless there was a storm warning (which we did have a few of those.) It was lots of fun! Here's some pictures from it:

Drew on Saturday morning

Rebecca and her new camera

Drew makes a face

The fire

The fire and the cross

Drew playing his mandolin

Real life Chelmo

Mandolin Playin'

Hat hair :)

     It was a lot of fun and me, Drew, and Chavis stayed the whole weekend except for a few hours on Saturday night me and Drew left. Me and Drew went to my grandmas house where my dads side of the family was celebrating Easter. Yep, Drew met my family. And I'm happy that Drew still likes me even after meeting my insane family. Over all the weekend was really good, and defiantly an Easter to remember. How was your Easter? What did you do? I'd love to hear from you.

God Bless

Four Day Weekend

      FINALS ARE OVER!!!!! YES!!!!!
Last week was finals week, the week that all high school students dread. A week where every class forces you into taking a test over every single thing you've "learned" since school began, that counts for a BIG portion of your grade. I, along with most high school students hate finals. I would have to say the hardest final I took was my orchestra final. My teacher told everyone not to worry about our orchestra final. So I didn't, then I got the test and I didn't know most of the answers, I think I knew like 2, and to top it off she made the test only 8 questions long, which she thought was doing us a favor but in all actuality it made it all worse, because then just missing one question brings your grade on the whole thing down. Also the last question pretty much nobody knew and then I heard her say "oh, I just put that on there to see if anyone would know it," I was so mad, I was thinking "hello!!! This is our final!!!" Well with some prayer and some good guessing skills I only missed two, so I got a B thank goodness! We graded the test in class and graded our own so a lot of people just cheated and changed their answers but I didn't, I didn't want to cheat.
      Well we got a four day weekend after so that was good. My four day weekend was busy though. First of all I had a debate tournament. So Friday morning I woke up at 6:30 like every other school day and headed to my school to get on the bus. The tournament was around three hours away, and we had to take school buses. On the bus ride my friend Brenden fell asleep with his hands inside of his sweatshirt,

 so I tied his sleeve in a knot.

 When he woke up and tried to put his arm through the sleeve it was hilarious! Then when we stopped for lunch, there was snow on the ground so me, Drew, and Brenden got in a snowball fight! I won because I didn't get hit once and I hit both Drew and Brenden, Drew got second cause he got hit less than Brenden did. Drew might have won if it wasn't for the fact that he was being a good boyfriend and didn't aim at me. I appreciate that but I still say I won. Brenden aimed at me, he's just really bad at aiming.

When we got there the tournament was tough! My coach referred to as a "blood bath." I ended up getting a 4 and a 5 in my HI (Humorous Interpretation) and a 4 and a 6 in my Prose (Its on a scale of 1 to 6, 1 = good, 6 = bad). The rest of my squad didn't do much better. We ended up getting 4th or tieing for 3rd... I'm not sure which it was. The tournament was still very fun! I got to meet Drew's cousin Ian, and he was really cool. Very funny! You could defiantly see the family resemblance between the two them. When we got back to the hotel Friday night it wasn't so fun, though. I was rooming with my friend Cheryl and these other two girls. I was tired so I just wanted to read a chapter of my book and go to bed, but the other girls had other plans. I didn't end up getting to sleep until somewhere around 3 AM. Then later that morning at 5 AM the other two girls woke up and started getting ready. We didn't have to be on the bus until 7:30 that morning, uuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhh!!!!! Then they turned on the light and forced me and Cheryl to sleep the rest of the morning with the covers pulled over our heads :( Not fun.
      The tournament the weekend before last went quite a bit better. I ended up making it to semi finals with my HI, and Drew and Brenden made semi finals with their Duo. Our squad as a whole even ended up getting 1st at that tournament. Plus my cousins Taylor and Tinsley, who live near by where we were, came to visit me and even brought me Burger King! Yum! Plus the hotel room I had was the best one I've ever had! In the room was me, Cheryl, my friend MoJo, and one of my best friends Emily! It was awesome!!!
     Also this past weekend I went on a ski trip with my youth group. I love snowboarding and this is the only time I get to go each year.

These are from my first time snowboarding

Me and Rebecca on this year's ski trip

Photo by Rebecca Marie

Once again I had to wake up early to get to the church by 7:45 AM. We set off sometime around 8:00 AM. I ended up in a car with my friends Bailey, Sarah, Tori, Sydney, one of my best friends Rebecca, and Sydney's dad (who was the driver.) We were all squished in there but it was so fun! We played go fish and BS (which I say stands for blood sugar even though that doesn't make since with the game.) We even put this hat on Bailey's sock monkey which on him looked like a sombrero

We stopped at Taco Bell for lunch and me and Rebecca decided to give fake names with our orders just for fun. So we chose names of characters from this book series we really like called Kiki Strike. So she said her name was Kiki and I said mine was Betty :)

Photo by Rebecca Marie

Photo by Rebecca Marie

It was so fun!! A little later we made it to the church we were gonna stay the night at (which was in a town like right next to where I was for debate). We changed into our skiing/ snowboarding stuff and we were off. Once we go to the ski/ snowboard place we went in to get our rental gear (boots and a snowboard for me.) I actually own a snowboard but its not a real good one, really just good for messing around in the snow at home when we get enough. It felt good to snowboard again. I helped a couple of my friends learn how to snowboard, my favorite quote came from my friend Tori once after she fell she said "how can you learn to do this in only two years!" After a while everyone got the hang of it. I only fell really hard once, and though my tail bone hurt pretty darn bad I was ok. I'm not too bad at snowboarding except for the fact that I'm not able to turn left... lol. Once me and Rebecca were in line for the ski lift and these two boys deliberately cut in front of us as we were getting close to the front of the line. Rebecca said "thanks for cutting!" and one of the boys just said "your welcome" like he was all that. Once we got the top of the slope, I was sitting putting on my snowboard and Rebecca was waiting with me and the boy started going down the hill and well.... he stunk, total fail on his part. Me and Rebecca were laughing our heads off, not to be mean but just because we found the fact that he was acting like he was so cool and then fell like ten time while going down the hill. Every time he fell he would look up at us to see if we saw and we always did. After that we never saw the boy again, I guess he left. Once we composed ourselves we prayed for the boy just to get a better attitude and then we headed off. It was so fun and almost everyone walked away ok, other than being quite sore. Except we found out after we got back to the church and changed into our PJ's, that one guy in our youth group hit his head and had to go get a cat scan. He ended up being ok and returned to the church with us later that night. We did our praise and worship and our youth director preached. Then she gave us the option of either going to bed or playing a game so I went to bed. I was the first one to fall asleep. The next morning she woke us up at 7:00 AM to head home. Sore and tired we all piled back into Sydney's dad's car and about three hours later we were all back home. I spent the rest of the day napping on and off and watching TV.

     Have any of you gone to McDonald's and gotten a McChicken or gone to Wendy's and gotten a spicy chicken sandwich? Well these are two things I was introduced to this weekend and I must say, I love them!!! For years at school I loved the spicy chicken sandwiches but I never thought to get one from a fast food restaurant. Well I now have a new favorite thing from Wendy's!

Photo from here

     Lastly I just wanted you show you guys this, its a picture of the original Dailey Hailey

God Bless