Summer is over now!

Yes yes, sad title. But I'm excited for this school year! I've got alot of amazing classes, and I've got a ton of amazing classes. My biggest class this year is Inklings. It's with a branch of Biola Youth, so really it's a college prep class. We're doing a ton of reading and writing. Last week we read and precised Mere Christianity. (The first two books in Mere Christianity, anyway. We're reading the rest of it this week.) The precis had to be at least forty-five lines long, and max was seventy five. I outlined every chapter, so mine just made it by, at seventy five lines. (Size ten font.)This week homeworks EASY! We just have to read the rest of Mere Christianity! I don't think I'm gonna have another week this easy again. Lol. When we're IN class, (Once a week) we discuss what we read. Last couple weeks we've been reading and discussing genesis. The first week we were only discussing the first two chapters. You would not BELIEVE how many discussions came up on just those two chapters! Everything from water being infinite, just like God, (In Chapter One, verse Two, it says "And the spirit of God was there, hovering above the waters." Our conclusion was that he created the actual earth (Just a lump with some water on it) in verse one, "In the beginning the earth was formless and void.") to a conspiracy theory that Eve wanted to eat the fruit, so that it would say WOMAN instead of MAN in the bible. (We had been talking about chapter one, verse twenty seven, where it says "God created him. Male and female, he created them both.") And we talked about faith in God, and we had to defend our faith using ONLY those two chapters. Man, I kept wanting to bring up other scriptures that would back it up, but that wasn't allowed! I really love that class, though. I love this class because the tutor, rather than just teaching us, she provokes our thoughts, and makes us think more about the subject, so WE come up with the answer through discussion.

We also have Logic, another Biola youth program. It's not nearly as intense as Inklings, though. Same tutor, same classroom, same day, just after lunch break. We discuss Formal logic, rather than material logic. (Formal logic deals with the FORM of an argument; material logic deals with what's in an argument.) Homeworks simple for this class. No writing, just reading. We're reading the logic handbook, and then turning in the exercises at the end of the week. The exercises are SOO easy, and they're open book, so really, they're just to let the tutor know that we are in fact, reading the book. In the first class, the tutor (I should tell you her name, so I don't have to keep refering to her as, "The Tutor." Her name's Miss Romero.) asked us for things that we don't see as being real, but some people believe in. So, someone brought up Santa Claus. (BTW...Here's a vid they showed us at CBCC, I thought it was HILARIOUS! http://youtube.com/watch?v=pUFgeFTPRnw) So, we discussed why we didn't believe in Santa! We had to go much deeper than "Because it's illogical." We actually went into all of the parents who put the presents there, rather than some magical being, we went into ALL of the impossibility's for him to be real. We took a poll to see how many people had believed in Santa when they were younger. There's about twenty people there, and not one of their parents ever told them that Santa was real. Our reasoning behind that, is, if they lied to us about Santa, could they be lying about Jesus? That's why MY parents never told me about Santa, anyway. They always told me (Yes, even as a five year old) That Santa was a way to replace the real meaning of Christmas. They also pointed out that the word SANTA is SATAN all mixed up. SOO, that discussion was quite interesting. Oh, and BTW, in both of my Biola classes, we are not allowed to call people by their first names. It's hard! I'm always like, "as Stev...er, Mr. Page pointed out," or, "Just like Jazm...er, Miss Sahakian said," and some of the people there have hard last names. There's one girl with the last name Moughtederi. (I think that's correct spelling...) Anyway, Logics tons of fun too!

I'm also in Mock Trial. I LOVE it! I've been cast as a witness! (BTW, if any of you don't know what Mock Trial is, say so in comments, and I'll change my post to explain.) Right now, with the case we're working on right now, I am "Detective Cameron Singh." We always pronounce the "H" because we think it's so out of place there. The case is people vs. Tanner. Supposedly (I think she's not-guilty) Loren Tanner (Eighteen years ago) abused her daughter, Virginia to the point of death. Sam (Lorens husband) and Loren both say that she slipped on the staircase and fell on her head. (She died by a hemorrhage at the back of her head.)Now, (Eighteen years later) Devon Tanner, they're son, is saying that he remembers that day differently. He remembers that Loren was yelling and Virginia was screaming in the upstairs bedroom, and that he heard a bump on the floor and quiet. Then Loren came down with a bloody Virginia in her hands, and Sam took Virginia to the hospital. While Sam was gone, Loren took the rug that had been upstairs, as well as some other things that had gotten bloody, and buried them in a bag in the yard. So now, eighteen years later, Devon calls in the heroic Detective SingH, (That's ME!!) and I find that instead of there being bloodstains under the floorboards on the staircase, there's blood in the bedroom. I also found other things, but we don't need to go that in depth. Oh, but you should know, I found the bag with bloody linens in it. So, the daring detective then arrested Loren Tanner. NOW, why I think she's innocent. (Or, at least, not guilty. BIG difference. Innocent, is PROVEN not guilty. Not guilty is just there's not enough evidence on the prosecution for her to be guilty.) Devon was only five years old at the time of Virginia's death. How many of you can remember any certain day (Yes, even a tragic one) THAT vividly? Also, Loren came to her pastor, a year after Virginia's death, and told him that she didn't fall on the staircase. She had Sam had been disciplining her, and Virginia was sulking. Loren reached out to comfort her, and Virginia pulled away and fell off the bed and hit her head on the back of the desk. Now, why would Loren change her story a year after the incident? She wasn't being put on trial or anything. Also, Devon said that he remembers being abused by Loren when he was young. But after Sam died, he was never bullied again. Now, isn't it possible that he SWITCHED the parents in his memories? That it had always been SAM abusing him, so as soon as Sam was gone, there was never any abuse! Anyway, that's my two cents. It's hilarious, the whole prosecution side thinks that she's not guilty. The whole defense side thinks she's totally guilty. Meetings are fun. Since I'm a witness, we do mostly drama exercises. (It is acting, after all!) And also, we're getting comfortable under pressure, and in front of alot of people. (We're going to be in courtrooms, after all!) In January, we're going on a road trip to Sacramento! YAY! We're going to be scrimmaging other teams on the way up and down. I think we're seeing the governor or something there?? Haha, I don't even know what we're doing! Lol. OH! And Blitz is our mascot!! Haha.

I'm also in five different clubs. Generation Joshua, (I'm the Chaplain) World Affairs, (Treasurer) Performing Arts, Aviation, and Service. GenJ is SOO much fun! Our Chapters name is P.R.A.Y. I forget what it stands for. I liked K.O.P.S better...Kids On Political Spree. Lol. Okay, so I have to tell you a story. Being the chaplain, I pray and read a bible verse before and after every meeting. So, what I didn't realize was, that everyone was looking at me to pray. I had forgotten I was supposed to pray, and I didn't know everyone was looking at me. My cellphone rang, and knowing it was my mom telling me she was here, I had to answer it. (Or else, in the car mom would have been yelling at me for not answering my phone. ) SO, I answered it and everyone was quite, listening. I was saying, Ya, I'll be right out. Everyone started bursting out laughing. I looked up and realized everyone was watching. Lol, it was funny.

Kasey

Vacation

Photobucket Album

Here's an album of pics. Click on it to see all of them. I think you have to log in to see them. The guest password is jkilm.

Washington and Oregon trip!!

Hey guys! I just got back from an AWESOME vacation! Cannon Beach is absolutely and one hundred percent my favorite place for vacationing. And it is SO beautiful there! Anyway, we went to Washington first, to visit friends and family up there. (I was born and raised there until I was twelve) I brought along Harley, a VERY mature thirteen month old male black lab puppy in training, seeing as Blitz is way to young to come on this sort of expidition. I could not believe how perfect this guy was! I spent one of my days up there at a friends house. She lives on ten acres and has two cows and five horses...GREAT experience for Harley. Harley got to be off leash around them, since he is so well behaved. After some close watching with him, and teaching him to stay out of the paddock and fields where the cows were, we went swimming in their huge, slimy, freezing pond. Harley loved it, and I loved it! It is so huge, and I am surprised it is not classified as a lake. We took out an overturned Kayak, and took turns balancing and trying to knock the other person off. (They have nine kids in their family, BTW...Four of their own, five adopted.) Another day we spent with another family who has five acres, and since there were no skittish animals, I let Harley go crazy with a frizbee. We played Carmen SanDiego, the BESTEST game ever invented. This family's land was mostly forest, with trails that they had carved out for their quads and dirt bikes. Carmen SanDiego is where three people go and hide with a walkie talkie, and the rest of the people have another walkie talkie looking for the three people. Through the walkie talkies, three clues are given. It's a TON of fun...It'd be alot more fun to get like thirty or forty people playing all over the island, with one team of three people hiding, and then seperate the rest of the people into teams, and first team to find the hiding team wins. That'd be awesome!!

Anyway, on to the SECOND part of our vacation. We then drove down to northern Oregon, to Cannon Beach Christian Conference Center. I have been going there every year since I was a year old, and I LOVE it. They serve two meals a day, breakfast and dinner, and they are so big that you don't even need lunch. After breakfast and dinner, are the morning and evening sessions. For the s, that's chapel. For the kids, that's whatever age group they're in. They have nursery, ones and twos, fours and fives, kids klub, kids klub 2, mid kids, and youth. I started in the ones and twos, and this year was my first year in youth. It was absolutely amazing. Our study this year was on defending our faith. The purpose was so that instead of just believing what we hear about Christianity, and our faith being our parents instead of our own, we were testing our faith. We did things like play devils advocate in a creation vs. evolution debate. One half of the class were creationists, and the other half were to be evolutionists, and we (I was on the evolutionists side) tried to come up with everything we knew about evolution, and argue it against creation. Basically what they were doing all week was giving us things that the average athiest would throw at us, and then showing us what was wrong with their claim, what could be right about it, and then showing us the Christian half of it. They never told us, "Christianity is right. Believe in it!" But they did show us so we could see for ourselves and decide for ourselves whether it is right or not.

In between sessions there was free time. Hanging out in the rec center, skim boarding at the beach, (We were advised not to go into the waves because the rip tide had been so bad lately.) going for walks to Haystack Rock, the landmark of Cannon Beach, (About a mile walk...I did it every day with Harley.) going downtown to a bunch of cute shops they have there, and also just hanging out in the coach house with friends. (And believe me...You make PLENTY of friends when you go to CBCC.) At first, I didn't bring Harley with me to session because I was told they had never had a dog in the kids sessions...They had only had them in the sessions. Their biggest worry was that he would be a distraction. At the end of the first session I asked my leader about it. He told me that I'd have to go to the other leader, who's basically his boss. She said I'd have to go to Becky, her boss. She told me that I'd have to go to either Jenny or Jeff, the people who are in charge of the entire conference. I went to Jeff, since I know him better, and he told me that I could give Harley a test run, and if he did fine, and the kids did fine, then he could stay in there. Of course he was perfect, and the kids only were distracted by him at the end and beginning, since during class I put him in the corner and FORGOT about him. (he's THAT good.) Soon he became the youth mascot, and one of the leaders was always asking to sit next to "The Snuggle Muffin." She said it's awesome to have him in there because they don't normally get to have muffins in class. Lol. In the mornings, we had games after class, and in the evening, before class. All of the games we play are a BLAST. One game we were split into four groups, and our leader stood in the middle with his hands out. The other leader told us to bring a certain thing to him, and the first team to give that thing to him would get four points, the second three points, and so on. Some of the things listed was a cell phone with the text "i like cheese" in it, a belt, a room key, etc. It was a huge blast. At the end when we tallied the results, my team won. (I was the runner, who ran the things to Joey, the leader.) Another game was we sat in a circle, going boy g irl boy g irl, and then two boys and two g irls stood in the middle of the circle. When the whistle blew, you had to run to the opposite gender (Sitting in the circle) and pull him/her up and sit in his/her place. At the end of one minute, whoever had the least amount of their gender in the middle won. (For example, if there were three s and one boy in the middle at the end, the boys won.) It was a BLAST, and everyone was running as FAST as the could.

SIDENOTE!!!

Okay, so Blogger WAS being stupid and not letting me post pictures, but now it is, but NOW I can't get onto MY computer that has all the pictures on it. I hate technology sometimes. NO! I take it back. I love technology. OH! And it won't let me type the word g irl! So, when you see it typed like that, I'm just trying to avoid the fixer thingy. Pictures should come as soon as I get my computer set up again. (We were rearranging rooms, and my new room doesn't have an internet hookup...it should take a while.)

CHEA Convention

Hey guys! So, the annual CHEA conventioin was this weekend. (Stands for Christian Home Educators Association.) I swapped Blitz for an older dog (Marlo) because there're so many people there. This was my first year going. My parents went last year, but us kids stayed home. It was a BLAST! They have a thing for teens called "teen-track." It was very cool. Most of it was lectures on the politics of history, and how Christianity reflected off of that. After the first lecture, we broke for lunch, and then the leader split us up into two political parties. One half of the room (Of about five hundred kids, aged eleven-eighteen.) was Anti-Federalist, and the other half was Federalist. I ended up being an Anti-Federalist. Go figure. Then we broke up into seperate caucuses, (Of about twenty kids each.) and we elected on person to represent us as a presidential candidate. We then discussed different points we should make. (Three were to be serious, two to be stupid/silly.) We elected Amanda Lee as our candidate. Two of our points were...1, we are Pro-Life. 2, Barney should be our national mascot. I can't for the life of me remember the other three though! Arg. Our motto was, "I love you, you love me, let's all vote for Amanda Lee!" Our name was "The Purple Dinosaurs." (That's what you get for having a bunch of teens in charge of your country!) Amanda then went up with all the other presidential candidates and introduced herself, what caucus she stood for, and some of the changes she would make if she were elected president. Sadly, she didn't win. Some of the other presentations were quite entertaining...One person suggested we have slave monkeys to do all our work...Another suggested that HighSchool Musical (The VERY stupid Disney movie) be banned....and yet another suggested we make the white house a different color. (You would not BELIEVE the huge diversity that caused!) Someone else pointed out that he was "pro-chocolate." When he asked if anyone liked chocolate, ALL five hundred of us answered in unison-NO! It was perfect, as if we'd all rehearsed. Anyway, after the preliminary election, you could start a third party if you had ten thousand dollars (Of GenJ bucks, of course.) and also, thirty signatures. I helped start a third party, with Steven Page as our candidate. Some of our ideas were...Giving starbucks cards to all students with a 3.0 GPA or above, and making a national homeschool day, on March 14th, and call it "Pi Day," (Get it?? March fourteenth would be 3/14, and Pi is 3.14. MY idea!) Some of the things we could do for campaigning (Mostly to the parents, because parents were voting as well.) were buy Poster Board, (With GenJ bucks) COMMERCIALS, (A power point.) and index cards for handouts. We did pretty good! After all the campaigning, we had a candidates debate. First, the leader (Founder of GenJ) would ask a certain candidate a question about one of his motives. Then that person would be given thirty seconds to answer to that, and then whatever candidate wanted to could basically throw his idea back into his face. There was a huge debate over the slave-monkey idea. Most of the candidates brought up the point that we could not communicate with the monkeys...Another brought up that the reason we have chores, is to teach responsibility, and if we had slave monkeys to help out...Well, we'd just grow up to be a bunch of unresponsible adults. Another person brought up that the monkeys would of course, have disposal, and it's not very likely they'd clean it up themselves, so we'd just have more work. Anyway, that part was interesting, because it encouraged alot more people to really re-think who they were going to vote for. Then, came the ballots. There was a huge rush to get over to the tables, and with a very tired out puppy-in-training, I wasn't exactly the first one there. Steven ended up coming in third of the election, out of nine, which I thought was quite good. Anthony, (Now known as "Mr. President") was obviously going to win. There were several times that people started chanting his name, and got almost the whole place to cheer for him. And when you went out and about, there was a million of teenagers saying "VOTE FOR ANTHONY! DON'T YOU WANT MONKEYS TO DO YOUR WORK??" It was quite amusing.

In between sessions, we did campaigning work, and also there was the exhibit hall, with a ton of curriculum for sale. So, now we're home with QUITE a few goodies for fall. We're starting Torrey in the fall, so we got alot of the books required for that class. We ran into the Hoekendorfs, raisers of Marlo's sister, Maui. So, they were happy to see Marlo and ask about how she's getting along. From what I've seen, Maui's much more likely to make it as a guide than Marlo. Marlo's a HUGE sweetheart, but she's got more of a personality for a good pet than for a guide. Oh! And another thing. She's obsessed with those laser lights. Apparently, her puppy raisers let her play with one before they knew not to. They were selling those lights at CHEA, so EVERYONE had one, and obviously, when they saw a dog, they thought, "Hey! Dogs love to chase these things, so let's point it at her!" so, she was a challenge, to say the least, but after a while she was so tired out from all the screaming teenagers and shopping, that she did farely well.

All in all, it was a GREAT weekend, and I can't wait to go back next year!

Frusturating Day.

Well, yesterday didn't go so well. Blitz kept trying to get into food, (Something we REALLY need to work on.) and then my two little brothers fought ALL day, and Blitz wasn't listening to anything I said, and then I made a BIG mistake. I took my two little brothers and Blitz to all go see a movie. While Blitz was trying to eat all the popcorn and wouldn't lay down, my two brothers weren't listening to me, and they were climbing all over the seats. But then my older brother helped us walk home, so I could focus on Blitz and his AWFUL heeling, and Brooklin could focus on the boys.

Then I had Biology. That was great though! I didn't bring Blitz, so I could just focus on the microscope. Then after Biology, I went to Mindy Sharps house for Alisa's obedience class. Blitz was the worst I've ever seen him! He kept lunging at the other puppies, and wouldn't listen to me, and just all around . At the end of the night, I swapped him for Marlo, an older puppy, because I am going to CHEA on thursday, and that'd be way to stressful for a seventeen week old. It'd almost be like taking him to Disneyland!

So, I have NO idea if Blitz's behavior has improved, but I do think that it was just a bad day. Meanwhile, I have Marlo, the devil puppy. She's alot more hyper than what I'm spoiled with with Blitz. I'm thinking she's probably at the same level as Jaylie was, so I guess she's not THAT bad, but still, when you're used to the perfect puppy Blitz, any dog is hard to have!

So, guess I'm making one for me too!

(Me with two (Of five) of my sibs.)

Hey guys! I thought it'd be fun to make a blog for myself, since Blitz seems to love his so much. We're still sharing an account, but I really don't see a problem with that! Lol. So, I'll be posting in here from MY perspective of what happens in my life. I will have some posts in here about Blitz, (Of course!) but they will be from my perspective. (Of course again!) This is gonna be fun!