Trek Day 3

Thankfully people had some sense to sleep in that morning. Our breakfast was a casserole of tatter tots, sausage, and eggs. We also had some bacon.
We learned as we were waiting for breakfast to cook that one of the reasons the leaders had said we weren't hiking today was because there was only one IV left, and that they probably should have used it on someone but were scared to use the last one if we were going to be hiking. We also learned that five people had gone to the hospital because of the heat. Another thing we learned was that the miracle of the clouds hadn't stopped when we reached camp.
The people at the hospital had literally watched a huge storm with tornadoes, golf ball sized hail, and pouring rain go just south and just north of us. It was as if a barricade had blocked the storm from hurting us. We had gotten the cooling clouds but had missed the mass destruction that could have happened. We truly had a miracle that I will never forget. No wonder our leaders were inspired to make the theme for the trek "Never Forget." It was supposed to mean never forget the pioneers, but it has come to mean so much more. I think we also had another miracle, that we didn't run out of IVs and only five people had to go to the hospital. It was really hot out there, and most of us were able to keep going strong. Another stake president had asked our stake president if his youth should do the trek after he had heard how bad it had been for us, but he said that if the the other stake's youth were as strong as us, they would be just fine.
We had a handcart race, and that was fun to watch. Then we broke up into companies to play games. We played a game with two sticks, a bandanna, and two buckets. First those who wanted to play made two lines facing eachother with a good distance between them. Then buckets were placed a each end, and everyone got a number. The numbering was started on opposite sides, so you weren't facing your partner. Two smooth sticks were paces parallel to the lines of people with the bandanna between them. Then someone called out a number. Those two people then raced for a stick and tried to get the bandanna to thier bucket without using thier hands. It's a rough game since there are no rules except that you can't use your hands and you ran hit the other person with the stick. It's fun though too. Then we played tug of war.
Then we settled down and had a testimony meeting. We sang an opening song, then turned the time over to the parents of my ma who were return missionaries who's mission had been to make a trek in utah. They told the story of a lady who crossed the plains by handcart and had a fur hat ties to her head with a green scarf to keep her warm. She was in the Willie or Martan company, and one of the rescuers had had a vision with her hat and scarf in it and had the impression that he was to marry the woman with these on. His friend laughed saying that none of the refugees would have something like that, but the friend was actually the one who spotted the woman first. The man and woman were later wed.
Some girls sang a song, and then my 'grandparents' told another story. A man and woman had become engaged, but decided to wait to get to Zion to marry. This was not uncommon, and many of the couples on the boat they took also planned to do this. Some got married on the boat though, but this man and woman didn't. They crosses the plains by handcart, and the man got deathly ill. When he died she wept bitterly and asked for him to be tied in a tree where wolves couldn't get him, since the ground was too hard to dig a proper grave. She used her own shawl to cover him. She later married someone else, but a hundred years later people doing the work for those who had died on the trail got special permission to seal the original man and woman together.
Many people gave thier testimonies, but one that stood out for me was the one given by the brother that had gone into shock. In his testimony he told of his gratitude of so many people doing something to help him, individually. I know the young men don't have the young women theme, but it seemed to me that he had been stuggling with Individual Worth. He also talked about how the theme of this trek to him was caring for one another. He was eighteen, and I hope this experience will help him while he is on his mission.
Another testimony that stuck out was the last one. I knew the guy, and he commented how everyone was saying that thier family was the best. Before I had thought that this was kind of silly since we were supposed to be bearing our testimonies, not arguing about who's family was the best. But this young man's comment was that we all were a family. It didn't matter the 'family' or the company, we all had bonded.
I have learned a lot of things from trek, I would love to do it again.

Pictures will come later.

Trek Day 2

The second day was the hardest. I was tired from the night before and some crazy people decided to wake up early! You just pushed a handcart through mud for three miles, you should be tired! Well, anyway we had french toast for breakfast with some yummy bacon and had a lot of time to pack up because we were the last company to leave.

Thankfully, the trail mostly wasn't muddy at all, but there were some patches. Unfortunately, it was really hot and there was almost no shade over the trail (and to think we had walked in near almost shade when it was overcast the day before!). Thankfully, we moved fast and got lots of breaks. Unfortunately, we moved fast, so we caught up with the other companies ahead of us and the breaks we had were waiting for them to move.

Toward the end of the day, one of the boys pushing the handcart behind us nearly passed out, so we stopped to help. There were only three people pushing that handcart, one a girl. They had just been working too hard, so my ma lent the boy her basketball shorts that she had had under her skirt. We sat down in the shade to wait for the boy, but when it was time to get moving again, one of my brothers couldn't get back up. He had went into shock, so we threw everything out of the handcart, put him in it, and raced to the cars that were up the trail about ten minutes walking. Of course, we ran, so it was more like five. As we ran we passed the stationary orange company that the rest of our company had caught up to, and the slowly moving green company.

They were moving slowly because this was the part where the boys left for the Mormon Battalion, so it was only girls pushing. Not that girls are slow, but three boys, a man, and and two girls running as fast as they can move a lot faster (Me and ma were running behind, we couldn't catch up). We weaved around their handcarts and beat everyone to the cars. My brother was given an IV, and put in a car. Thankfully, he didn't have to go to the hospital. Unfortunately, one of my other brothers passed out and had to sit in a car as well because of the effort to get the first brother to the cars. One of my sisters also had to sit in the car. I was sooo glad that we had time to rest. I felt pretty bad, and another one of my sisters almost had to sit in the cars. Later, one of the adults said that he almost put me in a car because I looked so bad. I'm thankful he didn't try because I might have thrown a hissy fit if I had to abandon my family. It was great just to sit and watch everyone else come in. I felt a lot better after sitting down for about 20 minutes, maybe half an hour. The bad thing was that the trail where only the women pushed the handcarts had absolutely no shade. It was grass all around, so they couldn't even stop to sit in the shade. A lot of people got dehydrated.

We buried our babies here since it was Martin's Cove, and then continued on. We kept Dakota though since our ma's daughter had made it. One other handcart family kept theirs, but that was because they said it didn't die. They loved it a lot.

One of the boys from another handcart helped us since we were so depleted in numbers. After a little while we stopped, and many of us (including me) started grumbling that orange group wasn't moving fast enough and how it needed to stop stopping. Then the leader of our company came up and said that orange company had just said a prayer, and that we should too. So we did, then started off again. By that time I was on automatic, just making myself keep going, that I didn't realize till later that the hot, blazing sun was almost immediately covered by dark clouds, and that by the time we reached the fruit stand two minutes later that the sky was completely dark. We were able to eat watermelon and oranges and get our spirits up for the last leg of the journey.

As we rolled into camp, our family members came to greet us. This experience was later compared to heaven were the saints were reunited to their loved ones. We ate a diner of chicken and rice together and had peach cobbler for dessert. Our family was reunited and safe, and that felt good.

When we had the company meeting we were informed that tomorrow we wouldn't be hiking. We were going to stay in camp since it was supposed to be even hotter the next day. I don't think I've seen teenagers that happy, not even when my high school's power went out so we got a unexpected three day weekend, and didn't have to make the day up. We all feel asleep quickly that night.

Check out Day 1 again. I've added pictures and edited the post! Pictures for day 2 will come later.

Falling and Flying

I love this song by Mindy Gledhill because it makes me feel free. To listen it click on the title, then go to the fourth song on the player at the top.


The rain loves falling on my face,
Invite my soul to take a taste,
As thunder spreads its wings into the space above me.
I tilt my head toward the sky,
And laugh out loud as cars go by,
It’s been so long since I have felt alive inside.

Now I’m free to jump,
I’m free to fall!
Free to let it roll away when I drop the ball,
I’m not ashamed,
To break down and cry,
So come on precaution take a step aside,
Cause you see it’s falling that’s teaching me to fly.

There’s a breeze that’s blowing past my door,
And it’s bringing change like I have never know before.
It used to be that when it rained it poured,
But not anymore so give me more!

Now I’m free to jump,
I’m free to fall!
Free to let it roll away when I drop the ball,
I’m not ashamed,
To break down and cry,
So come on precaution take a step aside,
Cause you see it’s falling that’s teaching me...


To be a little bolder,
So hello queen and goodbye pawn,
I’m gonna turn my cheek and shrug my shoulder,
I’m gonna till I’m going gone,

Now I’m free to jump,
I’m free to fall!
Free to let it roll away when I drop the ball,
I’m not ashamed,
To break down and cry,
So come on precaution take a step aside,
Cause you see it’s falling that’s teaching me to fly.

Trek- Day 1

Trek was a wonderful experience. It was hard, but soooo worth it. The first day we packed up at the stake center and headed to a nature preserve an hour and a half away. There, we were slit into "families." A "family" consisted of a 'ma' and 'pa,' a married couple who were in charge, and usually four 'brothers' and four 'sisters.' The number of 'brothers' and 'sisters' was different for some families, but most had four each. Then each family got a 'baby' made of a bag of beans covered with cloth and a face drawn on it. They were heavy! My 'ma's' daughter had made one of the babies, so we got that one. It was a girl named Dakota. Each baby had a real story about a baby that had crossed the plains. Then each family got a handcart and they put all their stuff in it.

We started on the trail about 10 in the morning. It was really muddy from the rain the night before and there were many pits in the trail. My family would run down the slope, then keep running till we made it over the other side. It was kinda fun, but very dirty. I wore a really bad skirt for trek that day. It folded into its self, making it really cool to swirl around in, but bad for hiking through mud in. I had to grab bunches of my skirt and tie it over my head, then tuck in muddy bunches into the back of my skirt, into the strap my canteen was on, and into the strap for my bag. I got a lot of cloth very muddy. We were told that we were going really fast and so we felt good. But then we took a wrong turn and had to sit by our handcarts for a long time for our leaders to figure out how to make things right. Finally we just turned around and went the other way, but then about ten minutes later we stopped for lunch. It was frustrating to think we had wasted all that time. But of course, I couldn't even have lunch before something went wrong. When we (my family) stopped for lunch, we got out a tarp and laid it in on the grass beside us and I got out my bucket to get a plate. And I decided to place in right in the middle of an ant pile. And I didn't realize it until about ten of them bit me at the same time on each leg. I'm so smart. At first the bites stung pretty bad, but with the mud to deal with I was able to forget them and they didn't bother me.

After lunch we started hiking again. We got a long ways before we had to stop because the mud was too bad. They also told us that if we didn't pick up the pace we wouldn't make it to camp until really late. So we forged a new trail to get to camp quicker. And we did so well we had to stop and wait for a while because we were going to get to camp too soon. It was kind of frustrating, but it was also hard to gage how fast we were going with the mud. Right after waiting, not two feet down the trail (which we couldn't see before), was a huge mud puddle, named the Puddle of Doom, or Tara's Terror. It was the only real standing water adn it was just deep enough to seep over our boots soaking our socks. (It's nicknamed Tara's Terror because on the slide show of the pictures, there was a video of Tara walking through it yelping everytime she took a step.)

At camp we put up three tents, one for the ma and pa, one for the girls and one for the boys. Then we made a dinner of chili, cornbread, and chocolate cake by dutch oven. It was good. While we were tired, we still had a lot of energy. One of the girls in my family is used to falling to sleep with her Ipod and found it hard to go to sleep, so we talked for a while until we both feel asleep.

First stop-Baby Trading Post!

My family

Mud Slide!

Yes, the mud was that deep.

The Puddle of Doom or

Tara's Terror

Summer 2009!

Sorry I haven't updated in sooo long. I've been busy w/ school and writing FanFiction. ;) I have 16 chapters and 56 reviews for Agent Cullen!!! Yeah!!!
I also have a poll on my profile about what story I should write first, so please vote! (click on the title to go to my profile)
I'm going on trek this summer and it's going to be so much fun. Trek is when teenagers reenact the pioneers crossing the plains. We will wear real pioneer clothes and will walk about 25 miles in three days. That's a lot! We will sleep in tents and make our own meals. We also have picked out a pioneer, from back then or one now, to tell about while at trek.
I'm so glad summer is here. It'll be nice to relax (and maybe actually post :)

I am

I am confidant and imaginative
I am like violet growing among roses, though to make it above the thorns, and not caring that I am different
I wonder how I come up with stories
I hear stories forming in my head
I see people and try to think of them as individuals
I want to smile and share my light
And that is how I make friends
I am confidant and imaginative

I pretend that a boy who is running from a dark past is really a king
I feel sorry for him because he thinks he is bad when he really is the one of the few fighting for good
I touch the boundaries of the imagination
But I worry that my stories won’t see the light of day
I cry when I doubt myself
I am confidante and imaginative

I understand that I am weird
I say that weird is only in your perspective, that someone thinks your weird too
I dream up ideas for my stories
I try to do my best in all I do
I hope I will always do what’s right
I am confidante and imaginative

Relax

Now that Alice in Wonderland has been over for a couple weeks it's nice to actually have time to do other things. Yesterday I was able to volunteer at a carnival that the elementary school was putting on and volunteer in the library helping label the easy reading section. It's nice to be able to do things for others and actually having time to do it. I'm hoping to post more often, and having time to do it is essential. What's kind of funny is that when I started a FanFiction story I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to post very quickly.
Also, my uncle got married on Friday. CONGRATULATIONS! My mom went for the wedding and I can't wait for her to get back Monday night.

Writing Stories

I have two more chapters of Agent Cullen up that are full of suprises. Again, cliking the title will take you to the web page. Also, now I have a profile that talks about how I make up stories. I'm posting some of it here.

I have a crazy imagination, and it tends to just go ballistic just before I go to bed or just before I wake up on my own (No alarm clock, yeah!). Now imagine what my imagination does when I'm sleeping, no restrictions, anything is possible. That's how I get some my stories. Others just pop into my head during the day, but so far anytime I get an idea it end up in the trash, but not before it creates something grand. I've just started writing down my stories, and I'm kind of scared to put a story on FanFiction because I like to change my mind. I'll come up with an idea, come up with another idea to make the first idea work, make the story, and then usually the first two ideas end up in the trash. The ideas that branch off of the first two ideas all almost always better than they are. Me and my crazy mind.
I like to write lots of different kinds of stories. Right now I have so many different ideas for stories that I'm just writing them down to come back to later. I really don't have a specified genre I want to write in, I have ideas for almost every genre. I have ideas for sci-fi, spy, mystery, music, medieval, romance, time-travel, modern-day, and mixes of them (not sci-fi-medieval, sci-fi-mystery. :P).

Thanks for reading and reviewing. :)

A Song to Sing

I love this song because it helped me one night when I had some problems and how the solution was is a song is beautiful. This song is by Hillary Weeks and in her album I'll Never Forget.

She laid there last night
All she could do was cry
As she wondered who she was
As she thought about her life

The times she had failed
And things she had done
Surely Heaven must look down
And wonder who she's become
Is there a reason why she's here
Then in the silence she heard these words

You have a song to sing
You have a story to tell
And there is a destiny that only you can fulfill
Though you are wondering
If you put your trust in Me
I'll give you a song to sing

Her eyes were closed
But she opened her heart
She had always believed
There was no part

For someone like her
With so far to go
But tonight that changed
And now she knows
For the first time in her life
She let go of the fear
So that she could hear

You have a song to sing
You have a story to tell
And there is a destiny that only you can fulfill
Though you are wondering
If you put your trust in Me
I'll give you a song to sing

Yes ther's a reason why we're here
We have a Father who cares
Who will answer our prayers

You have a song to sing
You have a story to tell
And there is a destiny that only you can fulfill
Though you are wondering
If you put your trust in Him
He'll give you a song to sing

Agent Cullen

I now have a story on FanFiction called Agent Cullen. FanFiction is where people write about a certain book. Some extend the series, and some say "what if this happened instead..." like me. Agent Cullen is a Twilight FanFiction. This is a summary of the story...
This time, when Edward get Rosalie's call in New Moon, he does answer. Instead he decides he needs to do something so his family will stop worrying. He becomes a CSI agent, and is almost happy, until one of the murder victims looks familiar.
If you click on the title it will take you straight to my story.

AiW

Happy New Year!
Alice in Wonderland (AiW) is going really well. We have two of the biggest dances pretty well down. I am one of the rock lobsters who is rowing the boat with the dodo bird in it when Alice first enters wonderland through the ocean of tears. I also get to sing a lot and have fun dancing.
I got to see some of the costumes for the play and they are really cool. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum have propeller hats and water tubes with suspenders on them. The dodo bird have a cool jacket with attacked feathers and a tail. The Queen of Hearts has a really big hat and the rest of the costume is yet to be decided. The white rabbit has a hat with rabbit ears attached and the mad hatter has a multi colored vest as only part of his costume. His hat is really tall, but a little too small for his head. He has a Cat in the Hat hat under it for when the Queen shouts, "Off with your hat!" The flowers all have bright shirts, fabric leaves to go over their hand and on their shoulders, and a hat that looks like their flower. The caterpillar's costume is basically a sleeping bag, but he gets to sing "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" and turn into a butterfly, so he's cool. There are three people playing the Cheshire cat and they are going to have brightly colored shirts with stripes that perfectly match up with the other people's stripes. The doorknobs costume is basically a helmet that is painted gold, put when he puts his head down it looks just like a doorknob.