Happy Independence Day (just a little late.)!

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July yesterday! We went to the local parade, which was a lot of fun, and in the evening we went to over to our friends' house. We ate, played Capture the Flag, badminton, Apples to Apples, and then set off a whole variety of small fireworks. It was a wonderful day remembering the fight that was fought to gain our liberty.

Field Trip!

Today we went on a field trip with some friends to Treemont, a wildlife place in the mountains. We hiked on one of the trails, looked for and caught some salamanders, took pictures of wildflowers, stuck fingers in cold streams, and at our lunch spot, made war paint. To make this war paint, you find rocks (red works best), wet them slightly, and rub them on an even bigger rock. The end result is a war paint that is (usually) easily washable. So all in all, it was a really fun day!! Here are some pictures below:


My brother hunting for salamanders....

A absolutely gorgeous flower!

A very, very, very loud waterfall: beautiful!

Mea Culpa!

My title is for the benefit of all my Latin scholar friends; for those who have not taken Latin, "mea culpa" means "I am guilty." And I am guilty of the sin of not posting very recently and so much has happened! Let's see; my last post was five days ago. Here's what has happened since then...

1. I had my softball practice on Friday night, with my first game on Saturday. Both went absolutely terribly. My coach has always said that if you practice well, you play well. The same can be said for practicing badly, and we did. Nothing went right; people goofed off, balls were missed, and this was just in practice. Game day was really no better. We got in some dynamite hits, but our defense was lousy. Consequently, we lost by 9 runs! 9 runs! It was utterly demoralizing. The good news is that we have eight games to redeem ourselves!
2. We had some great meetings with friends over the weekend. It was wonderful; I got to see some of my good friends twice in two days when I usually see them only once a week! All us kids invented a new game to be played on the trampoline; President and Assasin, in which one person is the president, one the assasin (who is on the ground - everyone else is on the trampoline-), and then everybody else is the president's bodyguards. It's like dodgeball on the trampoline with body guards. So that was a lot of fun!
3. My aunt and uncle are passing through this weekend, so it will be nice to see them. They are coming to pick up a dog a few hours away, but they'll spend a few days with us. I can't wait to see the dog; my uncle breeds purebred labs, and this is a new dog for breeding, so he must be something special!

That's the news from this neck of the woods! Have a great rest of the week, everybody!