Christmas Letter 2008

December 2008

Dear Friends and Family,

Merry Christmas!

This year was all right. A few things happened, but approximately 241 days of the year were simply blank spots on the space-time continuum. The other 125 days, however, were filled with fun, excitement, and undergraduate studies.

Linda (Travis's sister) is 21 and has moved to a classified location to continue her studies and become an underground music appreciating superhero. Superheroine? Whatever. Anyway, her goal is to save the world from villainous musicians. She’s already captured a rogue violinist as part of her training.

Travis (me) is now 16. He (I) is (am) making great progress on his time machine invention, but he needs an automatic quantum field oscillator. Also, he thought he won the Nobel Cake Prize, but then found out there wasn’t one.

Mom and Dad escaped, but our search party found them in Florida and immediately returned them. They have trained our chickens to lick envelopes and are now running a profitable pre-sealed envelope business.

Our rock farm was doing well, but in June the rocks started getting scarce, so we moved to an active volcano where rocks grow more quickly. It’s very exciting living right next to a lava flow, and it’s very convenient when you need to cook something. We have had three straw huts burn down already, and it looks like this one is about to catch fire right as I type, so I need to print this letter before the lava completely engulfs the printer.

Be sure to write me (Travis) soon!

TTYL,

Travis (And Mom, Dad, and Linda too I guess)

News!

First of all, I've changed the template, as you can tell. I hope you like it, because it took ten minutes to fix everything after I installed it. Let me know what you think!

Also, I got an A in my English class. :D

It's almost Christmas, and I haven't posted my annual Christmas letter! I'll do that later. :P

-Me

Thanksgiving

I'm tired. Mostly from playing with my 6-year-old cousin. But I get more pie tomorrow, so I should be okay. :D

 

I found out that since I didn't wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving on my Facebook profile, I'm the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving. And I get my own movie, apparently. Although I don't think Jim Carrey looks anything like me.

Hello!

Since I got out of class early today, I came over to the library to check my email and thought it would be nice to use this spare time to post on my blogs. :D

Hopefully my essay was good. The person who reviewed it said it was good, but who can tell these days? What if she didn't even read it? Oh, well. The essay I reviewed didn't have a title. So, yeah. Poor guy. I probably messed up my works cited page, for all I know.

Anyway, hopefully I can get enrolled in Creative Writing class for next semester. It sounds like fun.

I haven't posted in a while.

But, then again, I just put the broccoli in the microwave.

Does that make any sense at all?

New Post

I am posting. O.O

Since I haven't posted in about forever, I'm re-posting now. This post represents the last month or so. If you know what I did, good for you. If not, then imagine me doing happy and fun things. Adios!

-Me

Long Time No Write

:) I suppose I haven't written in a while. Well, I'm going to try to start writing regularly again. Okay? Okay.
On Sunday we collected and processed 225 ears of corn. That was just thrilling, as I'm sure you can guess. :P
We have two fewer puppies now than when we started; Penguin was adopted and Chloe was as well. So now we only have five puppies. :(
Then again, that's less to keep track of. Pappy and Dot think my shoes are something to eat. :P I also learned that their claws are quite sharp now, since they keep jumping up and scratching my arms and legs.
I think I'm going to town today. But who knows? :D
Well, this week has been so boring that there's nothing left to say, I guess, so bye!

-Myself

Summer Camp!

I had a great time at summer camp last week! I went to Teen 1 at Cohutta Springs Youth Camp. I left on the 6th and came back today, the 13th. I had a good time, got to spend time with my best friend Stefan, had an awesome counselor and my cabinmates weren't too annoying. ;-) At the beginning of the week, there were 8 guys in my cabin, not including the counselor, but two more came later in the week.
Stefan and I did the Digital Photography attraction. Every morning for two hours we had our photography class. We got to use digital SLR cameras (Canon Rebel XTs). Everyone in our class had their own memory card, but there were 12 campers in our class and only 6 cameras, so everyone had to share with a partner. Stefan was my partner for the week. We went around the camp to the other attractions and took pictures. Our teacher taught us a lot of interesting things about composition, and we all took some really good pictures.
The food was good, even though our cabin was always last in line. Just kidding. :-P
In the evening, there was campfire (they call it campfire, but there is no fire) where we sang songs and the staff put on awesome skits. This year the skits were about being healthy mentally, socially, physically, and spiritually. The staff did an awesome job.
I will be posting more about camp as I remember it, probably, so stay tuned! :D
By the way, my pictures are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/travismyhamster/SummerCamp2008

I guess...

I guess I haven't posted in a while...

I'm too obsessed with the ToO, I think... O_o

We has puppies... :D

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Puppies!

Linda's latest stray dog had seven puppies. She says she'll never pick up another stray animal again. :P They're cute, though.

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Campmeeting was fun!

Friday: We packed up, went to campmeeting, unpacked into our tent, had supper, and went to meeting.
Sabbath: Went to Sabbath School and church, had lunch, went to a presentation called The Entertainment Trap about how TV affects your brain, had supper, went to meeting.
Sunday: Went to book sale, had lunch, read, had supper, went to meeting.
Monday through Friday: Went to Lessons from our Adventist Pioneers meeting, went to Sanctuary Snapshots meeting, had lunch, went to Lifestyle Matters workshop, went to Understanding Ellen White workshop, had supper, went to meeting.
Sabbath: Sabbath School and church, lunch, went to a meeting where a bunch of people came up and told about how they evangelized, read while listening to a woman sing, had supper, went to final meeting.
Sunday: Packed, went home, unpacked, collapsed in exhaustion.
Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m.: Mom woke me up and we went to the dorm because of a tornado warning. And a tornado came and destroyed everything! (Okay, I made that last part up. But the first part is true.)

Only 353 days, 22 hours, 12 minutes and 3 seconds left until campmeeting next year!

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I... am...

going to mow today.

I can't wait till campmeeting! Only 3 days left! Campmeeting is my favorite holiday. :-)
I guess I haven't posted much lately- sorry about that. I've been so busy preparing next week's posts for Talking Paper Clip (with Blogger's new post-in-the-future feature, I'm writing a post for each day I'll be gone) that I'm... just... busy... :P Don't worry, though, I'm still here. By the way, I was looking at my stats on Google Analytics, and I'm wondering who looked at my blog from Las Vegas and from Portland, Oregon. I didn't think I knew anyone there. :P

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New Blog!

Yes, I'll still post in this one! I'm just making a new blog to post about interesting software and websites I find. It's called Talking Paper Clip, and you can go to it by clicking on Talking Paper Clip.

My exciting day (so far)...

I just had lunch.

Well, that wasn't the most exciting part. At church this morning, the local Adventist Academy had a graduation program in church. Nobody actually graduated, but it was still good

But even that wasn't the most exciting part of my morning. On the way home from church, we were happily driving along when the car broke down. My mom called AAA and they sent a tow truck. While we were waiting, my mom tried to call Granddaddy (her father) to see if he could pick us up, but he wasn't home. The tow truck finally came and the man who was driving it drove us home, which was very nice of him. We got home much earlier than I thought we would. Our car is now at the car hospital (I hope).

Also, today (which I did not know until I was already driving to church) is the annual yard sale day, with yard sales lining a certain highway, which means car parked everywhere and people randomly crossing the street directly in front of you. That was exciting... especially for the people I ran over! (Just kidding about that last part.)


Anyway, my mom will probably post pictures of our exciting car adventure sometime, so you can visit her blog and click on ads or something until she does.

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Flock!

I just downloaded Flock, the social web browser based on the same platform as Firefox! It's pretty neat. I can access Facebook, do updates on Twitter, and upload photos to Picasa or Flickr from my browser without even having to access the websites! I can even see new e-mails on Gmail and read them with the click of a button. Flock can also be used with del.icio.us, YouTube, and many other social networking sites. And even though it doesn't have built-in support for StumbleUpon, I was able to install the StumbleUpon plugin for Firefox because, as I said before, Flock and Firefox are based on the same platform. Flock has a Web Clipboard to help save images and text I find on the web. There's a lot of great features in this browser, and it ought to really help me with things like updating Twitter, blogging, etc. Oh, speaking of which, I'm posting this using Flock's blogging tool! I don't even have to go to the Blogger website!

Check out Flock!

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My Weekend

On Sabbath afternoon, our Pathfinder club had investiture. I was invested (believe it or not)!
On Sunday, I got up at 5:20 in the morning and went to the Pathfinder Fair. At 7:30 we got there and I helped set up our club's booth. Then each club's drill team marched. Our club was the seventh to march. We did really well, which kind of surprised me because normally when we practice at our meetings, certain anonymous members keep talking and wiggling. :-P And no, I don't mean me (I do wiggle sometimes though).
After the drill teams, all of the Pathfinders had a drilldown. Everyone went into the middle of the room and we were given commands. If anyone messed up, they had to step out. I was actually the last person in our club to stay in (of course, our drill instructor wasn't in the drilldown, so that's probably why). Then the staff had a drilldown.
After the marching, we had lunch and they started the pinecar races during lunch. I forgot to bring my pinecar, so I didn't really watch the races that much. I had lunch and then went back into the gym where we were having the other events after the pinecar races. I practiced my knots with some other club members for a while, and then the pinecar races were over and it was time to start the events!
First was a knot relay. I was first in line. I ran to a line, the judge told me a knot, and I tied it to a blanket. Then I ran back and tagged the next person in line, who tied a knot the judge told him to the end of my rope. We only had three people from our club including myself participate, so we each had to do several knots (except one of us, who didn't get to do his last knot), because there were 6 knots in all that we had to tie.
Next was a first aid game. Myself and two others were blindfolded and sat around our "victim", who we performed simple first aid things on as instructed by another un-blindfolded Pathfinder.
Finally, we had a Morse Code relay. I ran up, picked a card from the judge, translated into morse code, and ran back where the next Pathfinder decoded it, ran back and told the rest of the club what it said. They were generally things like "Name three ways to purify water" and "Pull your hair". Only two of us knew enough morse code to do the coding and decoding, so both of us did most of the work.
After that, they gave out the awards and we went home (after cleaning up).

Nope...

Not sick. At least, not as sick. I'm just coughing a little bit. :-)

Anyway, I'm glad my midnight post worked! Maybe I'll make all my posts at midnight now. :-P

12:00 AM, May 3, 2008




No, I'm not really writing this at midnight. I'm writing this at 2:41 PM yesterday. How, you ask? Well, Blogger just added a feature to post on a future date and I'm trying it out, that's how! :-D

I hope I'm not still sick... when I wake up I'll let you know.

Bleh, sick

I'm not feeling so great. In fact, yesterday I didn't even turn on my computer. :-O
I am feeling better than I did yesterday though. My throat is only about half as sore and I'm only about half as congested. I'm very tired, though.
As long as I'm all better by 3:30 tomorrow afternoon for Pathfinder Investiture, I'll be okay.

-. . .-- .--. --- ... -

.. .-.. .. -.- . .-- .-. .. - .. -. --. .. -. -- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- -.. . -... ..- - -. --- - .--- ..- ... - -... . -.-. .- ..- ... . .. -- ..- ... - .-.. . .- .-. -. .. - ..-. --- .-. .--. .- - .... ..-. .. -. -.. . .-. ... .. - .. ... .- .-.. --- - --- ..-. ..-. ..- -.

- - -.-- .-..

-- .

Kentucky Down Under & Camping!

On Thursday, I went with my mom and sister to Kentucky Down Under. You can read more about that on my mom's blog.
On Friday evening, my mom dropped me off behind our church's school for a campout with my Pathfinder club. We built fires, set up tents, cooked our food over the fire, went hiking, and had a good time. I was the only kid not to get any ticks, I think. On Friday night, just after we were almost all ready for bed, our Pathfinder leaders decided that we should move our tents under the overhand in front of the school entrance. That was most likely a very good thing, except it was a slight inconvenience to get back out of bed and unstake and move the tents. Eventually, we got to sleep, and in the morning I learned just how evil allergies are when I woke up and, to put it simply, most of the parts of my face were not working correctly. :P I took some decongestant and felt better eventually. We went on a fairly long hike around the trails behind the school and went back to the campsite to have lunch at around 1:30. We also tied knots, toasted marshmallows, and build a rocket ship to take us to Mars. Okay, that last one wasn't true. :D Anyway, we had a lot of fun and our parents came to pick us up at around 7:30.

Pathfinder Bible Achievement

Pathfinder Bible Achievement is over for the school year! There were 45 teams from all over North America (including some Canadian teams who spoke French) and 40 teams, including my team, got a first place! The other 5 got second place, and nobody got third place! It was an exciting day. Unfortunately, this was my last year I could be on the Bible Achievement team because it's only available to those in 5th through 10th grades, and I'll be in 11th grade next year. But maybe I'll come again anyway next year if my Pathfinder club's team makes it this far again (and I hope they do). I also met someone who had been on our Bible Achievement team the first year we went to the NAD level and then had moved away. It was a good day. Talk later.

-Me

I'm in...

Michigan! :D We're in some hotel. Fortunately, they have wireless internet which is how I'm posting right now. :P It took hours and hours to get here and we're finally here but I'm kind of tired and there's not really anything to do but post on my blog. So I'm posting on my blog. The world's strongest woman is on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. That's about it. Bye!

What's new?

Well, I've been geocaching, doing schoolwork, studying for PBA, building lenses on Squidoo, practicing my piano pieces, looking over peoples' shoulders, putting the finishing touches on my personal spaceship, secretly managing Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, brainwashing children through my television show and influencing them to eat more healthfully and be kind to others, forming my personal army of blenders to overthrow the kingdom of Atlantis, disproving gravity, downloading the Internet, making my own gasoline using my secret recipe using only water, grass cuttings and mayonnaise, inventing new colors, writing a book with no pages, hiding away the billions of dollars I make every day, capturing giant squids and selling them as pets, writing extremely long run-on sentences, broadcasting subliminal messages to make people eat more Fri-Chik, rewriting the Constitution to mention my name as Supreme Monarch for Life because I discovered America first, and writing in my blog as well.

Geocaching!

Yesterday I found my very first geocache! It was an ammo can hidden in a tree. Specifically, it was geocache number GCGV9K. My mom and I took a short walk after the homeschool group meeting and picked up this geocache. I got a neat knotted keychain and left a pen (because I didn't remember to bring much of anything with me to trade). Here's some pictures of my first geocache hunt:

This is a post on my blog

I suppose that I have not posted in a while. I guess I'll do that now... oh, wait! I already am! :D
You'll notice that I have a widget on my sidebar to show you what books I've read. However, I currently have only two books added.
I did my achievement test yesterday. It was... an achievement test. I think I took the same one last year because freshmen and sophomores have the same test book.
If you read my mom's blog, you know that my Pathfinder Bible Achievement team is going to Andrews University for the North American Division level in two weeks. Another team member and I had a practice last night, and we got 89 percent of the possible points; but then again, we got a few answers from my dad who was saying the answers too loudly for us not to notice.
I guess I'd better go get ready for church...

Script Frenzy!

Script Frenzy begins today! In case you're wondering, Script Frenzy is a writing event in which you must write at least 100 pages of a movie or television script, stage play, or any other kind of script during the month of April. And only during the month of April. Considering I have about... 1 page currently, I'm not so sure I'm going to get that snazzy certificate and web icon that you get for writing all 100 pages. I'll be glad just to write much of anything, though, so I'm confident that I'll improve my writing skills greatly! I'm working on an adaptation of In His Steps (by Charles Sheldon) for a stage play. Script Frenzy is from the same people as the NaNoWriMo, which is a novel writing event that takes place in November. It's pretty much like Script Frenzy, but you write a novel. And it's in November.
So, anyway, I thought I'd spread the word before it's too late to write very much! :D
Oh, and the website is at scriptfrenzy.org.

-Me

Yesterday...

Yesterday, as I'm sure all of my readers know, I went to the museum/library/park with my mom and some friend's of ours. The museum was the Adventure Science Center, the library was the Nasvhille library, and the park was Centennial park. We had an awesome day. The squirrels and Centennial Park had moved to Las Vegas or something (we couldn't find a single squirrel!), so we went to another park that had ducks and geese. Thus begins the saga of Baby Duck.

Baby Duck was found swimming happily (I guess) near the edge of the lake. We took pictures and such, and mom theorized that it was an Easter duck, bought as an Easter gift or something and then taken to the park when whoever bought it realized that ducks were animals, and like all animals, they needed food and care and love. So this person took Baby Duck to the park and went home glad that they had done the best thing for Baby Duck. Anyway, while we were at the park (not Centennial Park, I remind you), two kids came up and started bugging the ducks and geese we were feeding. I began to suspect that they had no idea what the difference between ducks and geese were and they probably didn't care. They found Baby Duck and picked it up out of the water and held it and they talked to us for a few minutes. We said something about somebody should take it home and take care of it. A few minutes later I heard eyewitness accounts that the two kids had thrown it into the water. Upon further investigation, we saw that Baby Duck lay sideways on the rocks by the edge of the water, presumably from when the careless kids had thrown it. We later guessed that his neck was broken, because when Kid 1 picked it up out of the water later, its neck was bent up in a strange way. And that was the last we saw of poor baby duck. It probably died. :'(

Please don't buy baby ducks or bunnies or chicks for Easter! Too many of them get thrown away into the cold March weather to fend for themselves.

Needless to say, none of us were very happy. It was a sad ending to a happy day.

Here are some pictures of Baby Duck before it was hurt badly:

Easter SonRise

Yesterday I went to the Easter Sonrise Pageant at Southern Adventist University. Here are some pictures I took:
Leetle Sheep
Finest bricks in Jerusalem...
...made while you watch.
Eat More Chickens!
These girls are singing and dancing.
They don't peck!
The Garden of Gethsemane
The Crucifixion
Resurrection
Arise!

Today I am going down to Collegedale, TN for the Easter Sonrise Service. :D I've been once before and it was very good, and I can't wait to go again! Hopefully this time I won't get sick. And I hope my sister and her crazy friends won't bug me too much. (Just kidding.)

Hey there! You really should check out my mom's totally groovy blog!
The Nature of Things

Today (and yesterday) were the airings of the two-parter Adventures in Odyssey episode, "Connie, Parts 1 and 2". You can listen here. I like these episodes... they make me happy. :D Well... that's about it. You should listen to AIO. Really. Go. Now. Listen. NOW! Please. :) Bye!

-Me