Camp Update: Young Teen 1

 

Due to lack of time and energy, I'm once again gonna do bullet points for most of this post. But first off this was with middle schoolers mostly 8th graders. We went by the name of "Cow tipping Connor's group" we had a fist bump thing with it too. Yeah we were pretty awesome! Ok now to the bullet points.

• My group made me dance up front on the stage every day, it was very fun but tiring since I break dance.
• I had a mob of girls come after me after I convinced my campers to join me in splashing them in the lake....then they came in a thunderous wave of chick power. I was hanging on to a boue until I managed to catch their leader Jen (another counselor) and use her as a meat shield till it was time for buddy check!
• The previous week a few of my campers had crushes on the lifeguards, so I made sure to tell the lifeguards to keep their seductive powers away from my boys.
• One of my campers was extremely homesick resulting in extreme pain in the gut. It was a very scary ordeal.
• While working the buddy board (kids have to check in before swimming) I made the kids "roar like a shark" I had about 4 kids going till someone realized that sharks don't roar....but I told them that lake sharks roar. :P
• During archery I did some commentary on my camper's shooting. It included comments such as "oh another shot to the dirt.....to blind the bear! Great idea!" and many other odd things.
• In small groups I talked about lust. First 10 minutes they kept saying "Can we change the subject?". Next hour, endless questions.

Senior Teen Camp

So this summer I'm a camp counselor at Somerset Beach Campground (SBC) and this past week I had my first group of guys. First off, these guys were amazing and I'm very fortunate to have been their counselor this past week, though I am very tired and glad for some rest. Here are some bullet points from this past week.

We won "The Grammies" which is a competition where each group lip sings a song of their choice with only a few hours to practice. We did "The Circle of Life" from lion king, I was Rafique (however you spell that). I had so much fun with it and so did my boys.

I started up a belly smack competition in the lake. There were probably 10 guys (most of which were in my cabin) and 5 girls involved. It was probably one of the most fun things I've been involved with....it was also among the dumbest. I found some nice bruises from the belly smackers over the next few days.

One of my campers joined the family of God. He had left God for about 6 months before coming back to him, but he wasn't sure if God would forgive him....but soon after learning that he was forgiven he recommitted his life to Christ.

There were a couple of girls purpling (AKA flirting) with one of my boys. So to break it up I did what I do best...talk about poop! I went on with how the pizza place "Bino's" always gave some one hardcore diareha. Needless to say, it worked!

Having so much fun at camp!

CFW: day 1

The first day of summer, began the first day of Chapter Focus Week. Chapter focus week, or CFW, is a retreat with intervarsity (Christian group) which is a great place to get closer to both your friends and God. My "Chapter" was UofM Dearborn. Along with Dearborn, there was also UofM Flint, Oakland University, and Oakland CC. The 4 hour drive up to Timber Wolf Lake (located in Lake city) was rather uneventful, It was spent by making trucks blow their horns.

After arriving to campus, we found out how incredibly amazing this place it was. It had a huge field which called out to all of us guys, within about 10 minutes of getting to our cabin, we were throwing the football around. Very quickly we had close to 10 guys and we made teams to play a game of 2 hand touch.

Unfortunately we picked a fairly narrow field and it seemed like the only way to get separation was by going up field. I was also being covered by a mammoth of a man in Graham, who is 6-9 and 270 lbs. On top of all of that he also has a good grip on route running! I was pretty much held in check that game except for occasional exceptions like an interception and short catches.

After enjoying a great game of football, me and a couple of the guys decided to go to the gym and play some volleyball. With only 4 people early on, it was definitely lacking in some fun. We were just about to stop when UofM Flint arrived and all wanted to play volleyball. We were probably playing for about an hour and a half when my friend Sean came up to me and looked pretty serious. Sean said "Connor, can we talk off to the sidelines?" Since Sean and I were bunking together, I figured that he must be talking about something related to that. I told him that whatever the problem was we could work it out after the game. That's when Sean is like "No really dude, I need to tell you something". Finally I decided to walk off to the side and find out what was so important.

Then Sean said the words "You ripped your pants", without looking I asked "where at?" and then Sean said the worst thing he could've said, "near the groin". I then realized that my thighs were getting more of a breeze than they normally are used to. I quickly ran to my cabin to find my last pair of pants.

After ripping my pants, nothing of much entertainment happened for the rest of the day. As I laid in bed that night I knew this was going to be a great week despite the sacrafice of my pants.

The Intervarsity Freshmen

This year I've met quite a few people in college, but my closest friends are my fellow freshmen in Intervarsity. We've planned hangouts, text bombs, a Superbowl party and movie nights. I'm probably going to be talking about them often so I figure I'll introduce you to them. Oh and since playing mafia is kind of our thing I'm also going to mention some mafia facts.

First off the guys:
Zach, is a biomedical engineer major who like me is a gym rat, and despite his hectic schedule is finding time to workout 4 days a week. He's a very fashionable guy (in a masculine way) who I can totally picture as a successful engineer in the future.

Sean, is a pre med major who definitely is very serious about school. He's a whole lot of fun though and can always find time to play some mafia and support me in my killing sprees (during mafia of course). Sean and Po give me my polical power in mafia when we have to vote to kill someone. They usually just vote with me.

Josiah (Po) is a biomedical engineering major who I've posted about in the Halloween party post. He's 6-4 and rocking the fowe hawk which we have renamed the "pohawk". I have almost an identical schedule to him and we're always joking around. We already have a list of funny quotes. Po and Sean have my proclaimed as their leader of mafia.

Drew is a CIS major who unlike most of the previously listed guys is an introvert. He schedules a lot of our group hangouts. While he's very mellow at times, he will occasionally go nuts. He has some pretty great one liners. Drew has some pretty whicked deception skills when it comes to mafia.

Anthony is a computer engineering major who is always happy and brightens up everyone's day. He's one of those people who's laugh is contagious. At the freshmen hangout we were playing picto phone and I ended up changing his "Michael Jackson doing the thriller" to "A pagan priest sacrificing 3 people"

David is a very quiet guy. I actually don't know his major, but he's got some serious drawing skills. He also is good at mafia, he shows very little emotion so I can never tell whether he's the mafia or just a towns person. I'm always scared of him in mafia.

Elisha is a business major and is the guy who seems to have the worst things happen to him. He has had a few unintentional seductive winks at some girls due to some of the worst timing. He's probably the most innocent of the guys because he doesn't even talk about poop. Elisha is also a wizard at spotting out the mafia.
Now for the girls: (let's see if you notice a similarity between them)

Amy is a teaching major and a quieter girl but probably among the nicest people I know. She along with Drew help organize events. She has this nasty habit of dying early in mafia, so of course the one game I decide not to use my political power to kill her off she kills me as the mafia.

Bethany is a teaching major who is the leader of my small group. Bethany among with Amy are the only people who I feel sorry killing off in mafia due to their angelic personality. Bethany is extremely nice and a bit on the quieter side.

Katie is yet another teaching major. I met Katie relatively recently, but she's a bunch of fun. She has started several rivalries among the guys in mafia. Therefore she's usually killed off pretty fast. Whenever there's a dispute between two people and the town can't decide who to kill...they default to killing Katie.

Hayley is guess what? yes a teaching major, she doesn't quite understand the awesomeness in mafia and it requires me to unleash the puppy dog eyes to make her play. At the Superbowl party a nerf gun fight broke out and she was left without a gun...so I used her as a meat shield and as she got pelted by the darts I was safe! :)

Sam is a history....teaching major so yeah not too much of a surprise there. Sam is probably the most outgoing of the girls. She is almost as obsessed with Michigan football as I am, but she doesn't have a blog with a Michigan football banner at the top does she? Sam doesn't like mafia which is a major blow to her coolness. Sam is a goofball.

That's the core of the Intervarsity Freshmen for you! If you ever want to know the characters from my "College Chronicles" then they're probably involved in one way or another.

Michigan Football Blogs

When I first started this blog I wrote only about Michigan football. I soon found out that it's way more fun to write about my life events and sufferings. This post is primarily for my dad who wants to know about which Michigan football blogs I like best. So I shall rate the blogs 1-10, 10 being unbeatable.

First off here are the blogs I'll be rating.
http://bighouseblog.com/
http://touchthebanner.blogspot.com/
http://mgoblog.com/
http://mgorecruit.blogspot.com/
http://thisismichiganfootball.blogspot.com/

Rate of Posting

Bighouseblog: 8
The bighouseblog gives a new post every weekday. For the most part I'm satisfied with the rate of posts. It's just that he usually doesn't post multiple times if something during the day happens.

TouchtheBanner:10
TouchtheBanner is the most consistent blog out of the bunch. There's usually 2 or 3 posts a day.

Mgoblog: 9.5
Mgoblog posts everyday, but it covers so much of a variety of information, most of it isn't interesting to me.

MgoRecruit: 6
MgoRecruit is a football recruiting blog, so there usually isn't as much information out there. There's about 2-4 posts a week, and some of them tend to be shorter posts.

ThisIsMichiganFootball: 6.5
The rate at which this blog posts is almost identical to MgoRecruit, except the posts are longer so I give it a slight edge.

Michigan football (non-recruiting) Content

BighouseBlog: 8
Bighouseblog gets a good amount of content out there, but its usually nothing I haven't read before.

TouchtheBanner: 9.5
TouchtheBanner has great analysis and does a series of "game awards" that he give Michigan football players for each game.

MgoBlog: 9.5
Great stuff I absolutely love the amount of information, but sometimes they post a bunch of charts about efficiency which I find really boring.

MgoRecruit: 1
Like I said, strictly a recruiting sight.

ThisIsMichiganFootball: ?
This is relatively new blog and I hadn't discovered it until a few weeks ago.

Michigan Football Recruiting Content

BighouseBlog: 7
The Bighouseblog is just a good all around blog.

TouchTheBanner: 10
This is where TouchtheBanner is the best. They create UNBEATABLE diagnosing of high school athletes.

MgoBlog: 9.5
Ace is their recruit ninja and he's great and is always posting interviews and keeping updated on recruiting with Wednesday recruiting posts.

MgoRecruit: 9
Great info, just not as consistent as I'd like.

ThisIsMichiganFootball: 10
They post interviews with high profile recruits a few times a week! While they don't post as often as touch the banner, they sure give some great quality.

Overall, I love all of these blogs. I only evaluated the best of them. My favorite is Touch the banner. And even though Big house blog came in lowest rated, I still thoroughly enjoy it.

Bathroom stories of Bryant Middle School

Writing the post about unwritten bathroom rules made me think about some experiences in my life, particularly in my years at Bryant middle school.

At Bryant there were 5 urinals in the largest bathroom in the school. It was said that if you peed in the one that was in the order of the day of the week, (ex the one on the left would be Monday, the 2nd from the left would be Tuesday) then you'd have good luck for the day. If you were really a daredevil with a full bladder, then you'd attempt to pee in every urinal in one stream. This would be the equivalent to a whole week of good luck. It was not an uncommon sight to see a boy shuffling across the urinals.

When I was in middle school and people started implementing these motion censored toilets, I didn't know what they were. I thought they were little cameras trying to watch me do my business. I foiled the perverts plot though by covering my hand over the "camera" while I was going to the bathroom.

Another thing those middle schoolers did was go to the bathroom everywhere EXCEPT the toilet or urinal. Waste baskets often had more people pooping in them than the toilets!

One last story was probably the most deranged out of all of them. Some guys decided they wanted to see if they could all poop in one toilet and not flush to see how high it got. These guys managed to get it over the toilet seat!

I really feel sorry for the janitors at that school.

The Unwritten Rules: of the Men's Bathroom

I've been thinking about what to post here lately with me being on winter break and nothing exciting happening lately and unfortunately for you this is what first popped into my head. I decided to write down the rules that every man knows when entering the wasteland known as the men's bathroom. Violation of these rules results in losing one's "man card"

1. All conversation ends upon entering the domain to focus on his "duty". It's surprisingly a very strange sound when you hear guys violating this rule.

2. If possible avoid taking a urinal next to someone. It's just wrong.

3. Beware urinals that either don't have shields or are faulty and reflex your pee back at you. You want shields because you don't trust anyone in the men's bathroom and I don't think I have to explain the last one.

4. What sounds happen in the bathroom....stay in the bathroom. If you have to laugh then walk out and enjoy a hardy laugh. This rule is necessary when one has the runs.

5. Pick the farthest stall from the door. It has a 26% chance of not being full of other guys poop and pee contrary to the .03% of the first stall.

College Chronicles: No Shave November

As a male college student, you face a choice when the month of November comes around. To shave or not to shave. Not shaving means that you get to bond with your fellow men as you all develop your own patchy fur on your face. On the other hand, if you do shave, unless your face is just that ugly, the girls are going to be more attracted to you. At the beginning of November, I was interested in swooning a girl and I felt the best way to do that was by shaving. My lab group, Alex L, Alex N, and Alessandro all did no shave November. It was really interesting because both Alex N and Alessandro grow really fast beards, while Alex L....lets say had the face of a 5th grader.

Since both Alexs would get frustrated when they thought they were called but it was the other Alex, we decided to call Alex L "patches" over no shave November. Alex L could barely grow sideburns and had probably a combined 8 moustache hairs and 3 chin hairs. I once didn't shave for 3 days during no shave November, and I had more facial hair than Alex after 21 days. Sure Alex didn't like it... but since we were all bigger than him, he had to put up with it anyways.

Looking back, I wish I did no shave November, but heck I still have next year! Hopefully by then blond beards will be in style! Oh and for the record, I can grow a nice beard. I'm not "Patches 2.0"!

College Chronicles: The Story of a Nun

This past week my calc 2 professor decided to give us a quiz everyday for a couple of weeks, and we have classes every weekday except for thursday. On Friday I was excited to finally have a break from the stress and go home and take a nap as soon as classes were done. Right before I went home though I wanted to workout. As I was working out I got a text from my friend Nia, saying that she'll be at school for a speech, and she asked me if I wanted to come along. Since Nia is becoming one of my best friends I decided to meet up with her at the speech.

I met up with Nia, we found a place to sit and then I found out who was going to be speaking...a nun. Now for some reason even the word nun makes me laugh uncontrolably, and unfortnately that word was used often throughout the speech. I'm not going to go into detail about what the speech was about, but it was about how she talked to people before they had the death penalty. Anyways throughout the speech I had a hard time to prevent from bursting out laughing whenever she said the word nun.

Afterwards I hungout with Nia for a little bit and it was a great way to start off my weekend!

College Chronicles: Halloween Party

Last week Intervarsity (Christian club) had a Halloween party. Unfortunately I happened to have 2 exams the very next day, but I was still able to dance for an hour. At the beginning there were only 10 girls dancing and no brave boys dancing. I decided to be a man and live up to my gangsta dancer name flailing spider monkey! The girls had created a circle as I was arriving which was perfect, because as soon as I arrived I jumped in the center and started break dancing, soon everyone was saying the classic "Ohhhhh!" which confirmed their astonishment at these amazing dance moves that I preformed. Soon other people started break dancing, and my friend Sam claims that I was out danced by several people, but she's just a hater.

My friend and fellow freshmen, Josiah, and I, were really lighting up the dance floor. Me with my flailing arms and a variety of fist pump styles, and Josiah being 6-4 used his lanky legs to do the two step. Sam still thinks my dance moves are the definition of white boy dancing. God gave me the ability to wow people with dance, so I shall flaunt my God given gift!

The College Chronicles

Hey guys, don't worry, my crazy life didn't get the best of me in the end. Still very much alive. I've been adjusting to college life at the University of Michigan....of Dearborn. I'm majoring in Industrial engineering and have been focusing on my classes for the past few months. Let me tell you about some of my college adventures.

The day before classes I went to this voluntary event called convocation, it's basically a lame ceremony where the speak at you for a few hours, but you still can meet new classmates. It started at 9 in the morning so most people were still sleepy, but thankfully I'm skilled in the art of giving the illusion that I'm a morning person. We were split into groups for icebreakers, and your group name was among "the things you need to survive college" I was group cellphone.

So when I see my group. I rally the troops with a moving speech that can be summarized as "Okay guys, I have no idea what games we're going to be doing....but whatever it is we're gonna win!" Unfortunately we played little games among our group so we weren't able to beat other groups, but one game we played did stick out to me.

We were in a circle with one person in the center and that person had to point to someone and say one out of about 5 set things (dog, elephant, bunny, jello, and cow) when they said their object then the person who was pointed at had to act with the 2 people beside them that animal or object. They had to do it before the person in the center counted to 10. The worst one was cow where the person in the center stuck out their hands with their thumbs down and the people next to them had to milk their thumbs! It was kind of an unwritten rule that they wouldn't use the dreaded cow on anyone, but soon I was in the center.

I only used the cow, and I would count really slowly so I was able to stay in the center and make everyone do the cow. It was so funny watching people's facial expression as they had to milk a strangers thumbs. Despite torturing group cellphone with my cow obsession, 3 members of it are now really good friends of mine and I see everyday at school.

I met a bunch of people through group cellphone and was quickly making a name of myself. Right after lunch I met a girl named Nia who is a transfer student from school craft. We hit it off pretty well and I'm so glad because we ended up sitting next to each other during the ceremony which consisted of an hour and a half of professor blahblity blah blah. We entertained each other by making faces at each other and simulate various actions like slitting our wrists, shooting out head, and other various ways of suicide to end our suffering.

I honestly thought this was going to be the biggest waste of time going to the convocation, but it helped me meet several of my friends including Marisa, Sara, Alfred, and Nia. In my next post I'll tell you about my engineering friends and some other adventures we have.

Summer highlights

- Kentucky Hiking Trip: Unfortunately most of this trip wasn't funny story filled, it was more group bonding with people. There was a battle between me and the plant life. The trail had a bunch of overgrown branches doming over it, so I decided to break them out of the way...until I came to the part of the trail where the branches were enter twined with thorns! I quickly became a pacifist and loved nature...until the thorns passed, and I was shredding branches once again.

Then plant warfare came up with a new weapon whose sinister name was "stinging nettles"! These plants had thousands of little razors causing a very painful walk through part of the trails. Now you may think the plants had beaten me... oh are you wrong! Next time I had to pee, I paid a little visit to those stinging nettles. Victory is mine!

- Family Camp 2011: I was the 8th grade and younger, heart throb. I executed several assaults via super soaker. I have another post with much more details on this trip on the way.

- Anna, Emily H, and Emily M took me with them to the mall where they spent an hour at forever 21. I thought I was a goner. Now in my defense, I was hanging out with Anna before going to the mall and I went for their company not for forever 21! When we got back to the church (where we met up) a bunch of guys from youth group were playing basketball in the parking lot. They were pretty shocked that I went to forever 21.

- Last week it was crazy hot so I got a few of the guys together and we drove to girls from youth group houses and attacked them via super soakers and waterballoons. It was a complete success. We got Joy, Michaela, Emily h, Sarah, and Anna

Senior Boat Trip!

A couple of my friends from youth group and I, won an afternoon on the Michalak’s (Church friends) Boat during the auction dinner in April. The day finally arrived, and it was fantastic weather, super hot and humid. There was a maximum of 8 people who could come on the boat trip it was me, Donnie, Travis, Chad, Jared, Anna, Emily H, and Emily M. We chose 8 of the core members of our youth group all of them graduating seniors.

Since the heat was intense, the first thing we did was jump into the water. They had this floaty which was just big enough for all 8 of us to squeeze onto. Half of it had this mesh, which was awesome because we could get wet while still being lazy teenagers! After our crazy splashing ended and we started to relax…they brought out squirt guns.

The chaos recommenced. Soon Emily M jumped on this floaty chair and decided to soak us. After several minutes of water warfare, I was planning on swimming to Emily’s chair and capsizing it. Right before I was about to initiate the attack Emily said “Hey! I’m not tied up to the boat anymore!” her floaty was untied and she was drifting farther away. And just like that, I went from attacker to liberator.

I brought Emily back to the boat, but that whole situation gave Travis an idea. He untied the big floaty with Donnie and Emily H still in it. As they tried to return back to the boat, we assaulted them via squirt guns. It probably took them a half hour to get back to the boat.

This is the way the after noon seemed to go. We would be together as a group for a while, and then the girls would be tired of the crazy rough guys and go somewhere else on the boat or in the water. We guys would then do something completely stupid and nearly break our necks like play “King of the floaty”. But after awhile of being idiots, we would miss the girls, so we’d go wherever they were and we were together…until the girls got sick of us.

One of these moments while we were together, Jared and Donnie were wrestling each other on the big floaty when the mesh broke! We were then trying to stay out of too much trouble, when the cops came! At first we thought it was because of us because the girls were laying out on the bow of the boat, and Wayne (the owner of the boat) said that it might be illegal but that we could do it anyways. The cop came because of registration stuff so it wasn’t us.

Considering the fact that we had many opportunities, we didn’t really flip the girls into the water often. But near the end of our trip, we did have fun doing that. We had just been soaking each other with squirt guns and were resting on the floaty when I realized that I had Emily M to my left, Anna to my right, and Emily H partly on me due to the lack of space. It didn’t take much encouragement to throw Emily H in the hole where the mesh was supposed to be.

Poor Emily M, she totally saw that I was going on a flipping rampage and that she was my next victim. There wasn’t anything she could do and with a flip of her feet she was in. Turning to my 3rd and final prey, I was about to get Anna when she said “No Connor! I’ll just go in by mysel…. *SPLOOSH!*” I didn’t let her finish that sentence. Oops.

I had a BLAST during that trip. I’m glad we had that day since we’re all going to college in the fall and everyone is going away except for Anna and I. I’m really going to miss these guys.

(I hope to put up some actual pictures of us, I just have to wait for Emily M to put them up on FB)
EDIT: got them up!

Grad parties

With my senior year ending soon graduation parties are just around the corner. Infact I have one for 3 days in a row starting today. I haven't gone to too many grad parties in my lifetime, probably about 5 or 6 but that should change this year since my youthgroup alone has 13 or 14 graduates this year. Today I have Michael Kulaga's grad party, he's an old buddy of mine from the golden days of DFMC. He, Michael Bratt, and I made the "Michael club". Ironically I was the leader of the Michael club, but that was changed fast by accepting the club name of "Michael C".

We also invited Ryan Dennison to join so together we had Michael B,C,D and K. We caused havok among the elementary aged girls in the church who were Joy, Hannah, and Brooke. We would harrass them with whatever idea our 5th grade selves could think of! At somerset beach camp we would have massive sexist battles where we "Michaels" always triomphed!

Michael Kulaga moved away the summer inbetween 5th and 6th grade, and Ryan's family decided to change churches, but Michael Bratt and I never stopped attacking the girls! Anyway with the grad parties starting soon it means that summer and pool parties are right around the corner!

Ninja strike!

Yesterday I had freshman orientation at UofM Dearborn. For the most part it was very boring and I just wanted to get home. I did get to meet a whole lot of new people though like 3 Michaels, 2 Alexes, Sierrah, Shannon, Aaron, Pat, Joe, Brian, Rachel, Allie, and Anitra. Meeting fellow classmates was actually pretty fun. Playing ninja with them was better!

I hadn't even thought of playing ninja until some of our leaders decided to play ninja as an icebreaker. I had a blast slaying enemy ninjas left and right! Unfortunately we weren't able to play it too long because we had to continue on our tour of campus.

Right after lunch I started up another game of ninja and was able to recruit about 7 other people to play. I used my sickly (I was really sick) squid style of attack and just slaughtered the other players! I was getting double kills in most of the games and only lost once in 10 games.

Wake up call!

Mother nature once again threw a powerful blow to my dwindling pride. Yesterday I had just waken up when I looked outside. I saw a parking cop about to give us a ticket for parking in the street on trash day. Without thinking I bolted outside to the cop to try to keep from getting a ticket! It must've been a funny sight for the cop to see a sleepy teenager with bed head and just wearing basketball shorts, running in the freezing pouring rain, to keep from getting a ticket!

Yeah it was raining buckets outside and about 50 degrees! I didn't get the ticket, but I really was sick of all this rain we'd been getting. I have noticed though that all of these events have happened when I was shirtless...

Mother Nature Kicking My Butt!

Yesterday I was mowing one of my client's lawns, and since he doesn't have much money I give him a great deal. I add more pressure to myself by letting his lawn grow for 2 weeks so he only has to pay half as often as everyone else. His grass is extremely long, especially this certain patch which tempts me to use a machete instead of a lawn mower.

Right before I went to work my mom told me that we were going to get a storm in about 45 minutes so I have to hurry up. Normally mowing a lawn in 45 minutes is a piece of cake, but not this one since it was so long. I had just finished the jungle patch in his backyard when it started to sprinkle. I thought, "Ok you have 5 more minutes just try to get as much done as possible." Then suddenly this fierce wind starts up and it was so strong that it even scared me a little bit. I remained calm and thought "It's ok, it's not raining hard, you have another minute or two"

Then as if God wanted to show me that I was a stupid teenager, he then smited me with a great heavenly thunderbolt!... Ok I wasn't struck by lightning, but right what happened was that I was instantly consumed by this massive storm! I grabbed my mower and started booking it for home.

Fortunately my house was just on the other side of the block. If you were driving by me at that moment you would see a shirtless dude tearing across the sidewalk, yelling at the top of his lungs, pushing a lawn mower, and keeping up his shorts with his other hand!

By the time I got home I was completely drenched. My family and neighbors had a good laugh though.

Lobster boy!

On Saturday I was working for 4 hours in the blazing sun, and my back got burned REALLY bad. I was supposed to move these big bushes from the front yard to the back. I also had to get rid of these smaller bushes with prickles all over them. I knew I was going to get burned, and with this lack of sun lately, I figured to make the most of the sun. I put on SPF 4 sunscreen... yeah when my mom suggested it, she didn't know I was going to be working for 4 straight hours in the sun. I personally think 1 SPF per hour is plenty!

At least I'll be a nice bronze...eventually!

Summer Plans: Lifeguard Hiking trip

I've had a quiet week so I decided to share with you some of the plans that I have for this summer. The first major event that is going to take place this summer is the summer trip for Lifeguards (my youth group).

We're going hiking in Kentucky with this organization called leader-treks. We're going be split into 2 groups of about 15 and go on 2 separate paths. We'll be only with our group of 15 people for most of the trip. There are pros and cons with only being with half of the group for most of the week.

Pros: You're almost forced to bond with the members of your group with that small of a number for a long like that. You will have such great memories and inside jokes with that group.

Cons: You don't have much of a chance to bond with anyone in the other group. The youth group as a whole has 2 different sets of inside jokes.

I'm totally syked for this trip. I love nothing more than having to test my physical abilities in a group effort. I plan on being a work horse for my group and helping out the people who are struggling under the workload. We'll be carrying 30 pound backpacks and hiking 4-6 miles a day. I want to be conditioned enough to be able to carry someone else's backpack for them, at least for a portion of the trip.

We'll be going hardcore hiking, no rest rooms, bathe in the river/lake, and eat crappy dehydrated food! The poop situation is "bury it or carry it" I wonder how many guys are going to end up carrying it...

Everyone in the group is going to have a chance to be the leader of everyone and will plot out the path for everyone else. The leader won't get any help from the guides, and have complete control of our path. Leader treks is about producing leaders and improving you spiritually as well.

I'm sure some of the freshmen are going to have a harder time being the "leader" over all of the Seniors and upperclassmen, so I'll try to show them that I back up their decision 100%.

Super Smash Bros

My siblings, Hunter (age 13), Sienna (age 15), and I have become Super smash bros addicts. We just really enjoy the idea of beating the snot out of each other and nothing beats the feeling of sending your sibling's character flying across the screen. When we were little, we would physically punch/slap/maim each other during arguments. Now that I have a vast size advantage 215 lbs to about 140 lbs, we decide to take it out in mindless virtual violence. At least that's how it first started.

When we first were playing it was just Hunter and I. After a while Sienna decided she wanted to join in the fun and despite not liking video games, we all had a blast. Sienna's strategy is simple, just stand off to the side and watch Hunter and I beat the crap out of each other, then when we have less lives she comes in and tries to make an alliance with one of us.

Now sometimes these alliances work out successfully, other times there's back stabbing, and Sienna doesn't like treachery. If you betray the alliance before Sienna does, you usually get either a punch (in my case, to the face) or a nipple cripple. So half the time while we're playing we have mini fights between us.

Funny how we resolve to physical fights if Donkey Kong (me) decides to betray Zelda (Sienna) by beating her with a banana. You gotta love my family.