Texas

On Sunday January 24^th my grandfather on my Dad’s side died from a heart attack.

So Tuesday the 26^th we flew to Amarillo, Texas for the funeral. They had it the next day. Almost all of our relatives on my Dad’s side were there except for my uncle and two of my cousin’s. We haven’t seen them in five years so it was a very bittersweet experience because we were happy to see everybody but not under the circumstances. We stayed in our grandmother’s house while we were there. I had a cold while we were there so I could not eat any sweets. My poor grandma.

Grandma Carolyn's dog, Dudley.

(Lol) I love the pig's eyes.

Face off. :D

Food?

At meal times he comes and begs for food. Grandma said that they did not teach him, that he did it when they first got him.

It started snowing Thursday. At first it was sleet, then it turned into snow.

Very long icicles.

When it stopped snowing there was ten inches of snow on the ground. The storm moved across the entire country to the east coast so a lot of people got snow. In the afternoon we went to my great-grandma’s house with our cousins and played in the snow. We had a snowball fight that was very fun. I threw a snowball so hard that I accidentally gave one of my cousins a big bruise (oops). Then we made a snowman.

My cousin Gracy.

"It's cold".

That's better.

The snowman that they built.

. My great-grandma likes to paint and do needle-point.

One needle-point.

One of the paintings.

From the left to right: my dad's sister April, my dad, and my dad's brother Jimmy (he wasn't there).

After that we went to my great-uncle’s house with my cousins.

My Great Aunt- Dana and my Great-Uncle Billy Krause. Uncle Billy has his own buisness. He does landscape installation(pools, trees) and landscape maintenance. He also LOVES the color red. Here is evidence.

The Krause family.

Back row left to right: Cousin Casey (wasn't there), Cousin William (he was there I just don't have any pictures of him for some reason), Uncle Billy, Aunt Dana, and Cousin Katherine. Cousin Katherine, William, and Casey are actually my dad's cousins because Uncle Billy is my dad's uncle. So I think that makes them my second cousin but I am not positively sure.

They have three yorkis total. This one is Kat's.

This is a scale of how big they are compared to my hand. 8-O

From left to right: Aunt April, Cousin Lesli, and Cousin Katherine (we call her Kat).

I love this picture :) .

Gracy (notice her improvised belt made out of ribbon).

Cousin Lesli is Aunt April's daughter, Gracy is Cousin Lesli's daughter. She was so sweet. She was shy the first night but after that she would always give you lots of hugs :) .

Anna and Thomas playing Mario Kart on the Krause's Wii.

If you noticed that little girl by Aunt Dana, she was her niece.

All of the us in red. Uncle Billy gave us all Krause hoodies. And he gave everybody red shoes. He has a TON of red shoes. If they see a pair of red shoes he buys them. He has such a big collection of red shoes that he has been in the newspaper before.

One day there was geese on a partially frozen pond that was close by. So we went and got some bread so we could feed them. Two came over, then the rest came but the first two were very fierce and chased them off. Here is a video.

We were supposed to fly out of Texas Friday but it kept getting delayed because of all the snow so we ended up flying out on Monday. But all of the activities that we were supposed to go to at home got canceled anyway. I was not upset when our flight got canceled because that meant we got to spend more time with our family. On Sunday we decided to go to a church that dad used to go to. It was really big. The sermon was good to hear after not going to church for awhile. Sunday night we went to eat dinner at the Big Texan home of the free 72oz steak. The catch is you have to eat it all in an hour. They had a store at the front with all sorts of stuff from cowboy hats to rattle snake wallets. In the back they had a live rattle snake with all sort of rattle snake accessories like pocket knife sheaths, wallets, belts, heads, and whole baby rattle snakes (dead).The pocket knife sheaths.Wallets (expensive 8-0 )
Key chain heads. If you look closely you can see the venom on their fangs (shudder, "creepy").The live one.They had all sorts of animals: moose, deer, and bears.

For dinner I ordered one of my favorite foods: ribs (yum yum:) ). They were very good, they were swimming in barbecue sauce which was not necessary because when you would pick one up your hand would get covered in sauce. After dinner we got in a giant chair that they had in the back.

Since our departure time kept getting delayed we said goodbye quite a few times thinking we were leaving the next day. But we finally flew out Monday. We flew from Amarillo to Dallas in a little under an hour. Then from Dallas to Norfolk in about four hours. But in took roughly an hour to drive from Norfolk to our house.

Here are some pictures of the clouds that I took when we were in the airplane. During take off and landings you are not allowed to use any electronics because the frequency messes up the navigational instruments. But you can use them ounce you are at cruising altitude so I took some pictures.

I think it is pretty cool because it was very dark and overcast below but when we got above the clouds it was sunny.Here is a picture that I took where I used the sunset mode that gives the picture warm colors.

Before we went home we picked up the dogs from the kennel.



--In memory of grandpa.

--Philip

Christmas

Tomorrow we are leaving for New Jersey to spend Christmas with our relatives. We will be leaving Thursday morning after loading up the car and taking Neo to the kennel and will be returning Tuesday. We are taking Lily to New Jersey with us and my Aunt is bringing her dog whose name is Lily also. My aunt is also bringing her Wii and we are bringing our Xbox so we are going to have some competitions at setting new records. This year when we went to the beach she brought the Wii and we were trying to break each others records.
All three of us kids have finished our speeches for speech class. So on the three to four hour drive to New Jersey we are going to start memorizing our speeches.

So till Tuesday,
--Philip

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

The Thursday before this past one (the 10th I think) Peanut our gerbil died. We have had her for about three years. Anna buried her somewhere in the woods. Now we only have one gerbil left. But I am pretty sure we are not going to get another one because we have 46 chicken and ducks to take care of.

This Friday, the same day it started snowing we lost two of our younger chicks. One was a chick that our hen hatched and the other was a Welsummer rooster.She was a Speckled Sussex (brown with speckles) mixed with a Buff Orpington (golden).

The rooster on the right with the smaller comb is the one who was eaten. But since we had 10 roosters which is way too many for us we were going to eat him anyway.

After dark dad and Anna went to lock up the coop when they discovered that two of the chickens were missing. After looking around for a while our dog Neo found the carcasses. The heads were missing on both of them and some of the guts were eaten on one. We think either a raccoon or a possum got both of them. But next time if I see something is eating our flock then I shall proceed to shoot it with my air rifles.

--Philip

A movie and snow!

This past Friday (the 18th) we went and saw Avatar in the theater. The reason we went is because dad got free movie tickets from his work place. So Dad, Anna, and I went and saw the new movie Avatar (Thomas did not feel like going). We chose to watch it in 3D which was pretty cool. The movie itself was pretty good and the graphics were absolutely stunning. It took a while for me to realize that everything except for the human parts was done on a computer.
After the movie we brought home some pizza. But at about four or five o'clock it started to snow. And it kept on snowing all day Saturday also. The snow built up to about a foot high everywhere: on the deck, on the cars, on the coop, and even in the woods it was a foot high. It built up so much on the coop sombody would have to go out there every couple of hours to knock off the snow because we were afraid that the coop roof would collapse since it is only made of PVC pipe.

The cars

Lily had to "swim" in the snow.

The snow was up to your knees and was very tiring to walk in.

Sadly the snow was too powdery to make snowmen or have snowball fights :( . But my dad and I still were able to have a snowball fight, but technically it was a shovel fight. We were shoveling the steps when we started heaving shovel fulls of snow at each other :p .

Well that is all for now,
--Philip

Summary

A lot of things have happened in the past couple months and we've been pretty busy so I am trying to put everything in a nutshell in this post. Every Tuesday I have science class. The teacher used to teach physics but now he is teaching me and two other kids science. He give us quite a bit of homework on top of my regular schoolwork so that keeps me busy. Another thing that keeps all three of us kids busy is debate/speech class. We posted about it last year when Thomas was doing it but now Anna is also doing it. This year's topic is on water pollution. I shall once again try to "summarize" debate the best I can. In debate there are two teams: an Affirmative and a Negative. The Affirmative team basically tries convince the judge that the status quo(way things are now) needs to be changed. And the Negative team tries to convince the judge that the status quo does not need to be changed. There are many more details but this is basically what debate is.

I am not in the same class as Anna and Thomas. I am in the junior varsity class with kids twelve years of age and under. The junior varsity class does not debate. Instead I am participating in Impromptu and apologetic speeches. Impromptu is basically a improvised speech where you get a quote or topic, two minutes to organize your thoughts, and five minutes to give your speech. Apologetics is a speech defending the christian faith. It is almost the complete opposite from Impromptu time-wise. It is a prepared speech instead of an improvised one. There are four or five different topics to chose from. I chose "what makes Christianity different from other religions". The whole speech can be eight minutes long. After I finish writing my speech I then have to memorize all of it(yikes! 8-O). I almost forgot to say this but Anna and Thomas' class does all of the other events too. So as you can see we have a lot of stuff to do.

Alright now I shall try and catch you up on the happenings at Lockwood Woods. First off the same week we got our stumps removed mom had her birthday and we got a wood burning stove. Now I could tell you all about mom's birthday but this post is called "Summary" so I am just going to "summarize" it. We went out to eat, opened presents, and ate cake and ice cream (yum yum).
Now a wood burning stove has always been on our to do list so we finally got it. And it is wonderful we are enjoying heating our home without having to use our expensive propane. Okay moving along. I do not know if I am going in order but we planted grass in our clearing now that we got the stumps out. BeforeAfter


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Sunshine


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We found this praying mantis on our door one day. For the past two or three years we have hatched praying mantis egg sacs. We would buy two or three egg sacs off of Ebay (go figure) each containing hundreds of babies. We would release them outside hoping that they would grow up and eat all the pesky bugs that munched on our garden. We would keep ten or so for ourselves inside. But this year we didn't want to have to take care of them so we just put the egg sacs outside and hoped for the best. So I guess this proves that they hatched. The above picture is an adult Asian mantis.
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On November 7 we went hiking on the Appalachian trail with our friends the Middletons from church.
I will post pictures from our trip some other time but for now here is one picture of a waterfall.(click on so it will "blow up")
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On November 13 Thomas turned 18! He was just recovering from being sick though. That day we had debate and speech class. So after debate we ate dinner at Chipotle. They have really big buritos that are as my uncle put it "like eating footballs". We were starving after eating a light lunch so we were able to scarf down the whole thing. After dinner we went home and opened presents, we did not however eat cake right away after eating those big burritos.

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The ducks and chickens are doing fine. The chickens are slowing down a little bit in production since it is getting cold. We only get nine or ten chicken eggs per day. But the ducks are still going strong at five or six a day. A chicken egg on the left and a duck egg on the right(notice the huge difference).

We sell our eggs at dad's work place and Lavender Fields Farm. We are just keeping up with the demand between dad's work and Lavender Fields.
Here are the Welsummers and the Americana getting bigger.Here are the Light Brahmas. They are going to be bigger then all the others in our menagerie of chickens.

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One day Thomas came into the house with a turtle that he had found somewhere in the yard. After showing everybody he put it back outside.

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For Thanksgiving we just stayed home. We cooked a turkey, made mashed potatoes, yams, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. After we gorged ourselves we laid back and watched the Dallas Cowboys play.
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On December 1st Dad had his birthday. For dinner he chose the restaurant at Bass Pro Shops. It was really neat because as you were eating you could watch fish swimming around. The food was pretty good, we ordered calamari(squid) as an appetizer and dad got some Alligator that we all tried. It was good except that it was really spicy. After dinner we did the usual cake, ice cream, and presents.

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A couple of weeks ago we bought a buggy. We saw one for sale one day driving to church. So on the way back we stopped by and the nice lady told us about it and let Dad drive it while I sat in the passenger seat. Long story short, we have a buggy and we love driving it on our dirt road and drive way. Now instead of riding my bike I can just take the buggy.
It's top speed is 38 mph.

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A couple of weeks ago we got some two or three inches of snow that lasted two days. But yesterday(18th) we got a foot of snow! I will get some pictures later.


--Philip :)

Victory!

After countless hours of building, and years of collecting sets and parts I have finally gotten something back.

The datacard

The contest was to create a new vehicle set in the HALO universe.

Proof it fits a minifig (a requirement for the contest), the nose is similar to one of my previous projects.

I hadn't built much leading up to the contest and was experiencing symptoms of what we call "builders block." However after seeing the prize for first place I found it much easier to build-incentive is a powerful thing.

The bottom of the craft, with the missile bay closed

Third place received some very well made decals, and some custom made weapons from brickarms (THE place to go for accurate lego weapons).

The bay doors open and the missiles rotate inside the missile bay

Second place got the same decals already applied on a minifig, and some more brickarms.

3-point thrust vectoring allows maneuvering in space

And first place received the same customized minifig as second place, even more brickarms, and finally the new HALO videogame.
Suffice it to say I did some extensive research, before I started building (I like to keep it as real as possible) and eventually settled on building a jet for reasons explained in the backstory farther down. I got some excellent input from many people and finally ended up with the winning entry out of 48 other vehicles.
After hearing the many reports of pelicans crashing and getting shot down, the UNSC employed a new fighter to fulfill the role of escort.
This fighter was cheaper and smaller than the Longsword fighter bomber, and took some of the work load off the over-worked Longswords and allowed them to focus more on bombing.
A thrust vectoring engine provides the Wasp with excellent maneuverability in vacuum as well as atmosphere.
Designed and armed to be an escort, the Wasp is also capable of performing quick attacks on enemy targets, unleashing salvos of missiles and machine gun fire.

Thomas