Sport t' Sport

This is my fourth blog today and now I'm really starting to struggle for a topic. Well...my volleyball team has started up again. We actually started a new team, The Panthers, and broke off from The Patriette Lights. I really like my teammates and I love the sport but I realize I really want to play soccer. Now I really like volleyball but I'm sorry soccer is the sport. There really is no competition; It has all the best aspects of other sports: running, scoring, "accidentally" tripping people, teammates, passing, quick reflexes, and sometimes weird sign language from you coach telling you to do something strange. I'm thinking about joining a team but all the girl's teams have so many girls on them that each player doesn't get to play that much, which I really don't like. Anyway, even if I don't end up playing soccer I still got volleyball.

Five Books

OK, so this is my third blog today and I'm running out of things to write about... I got something. I know we read books for Mrs. Musick's class and quite a few but that's not really enough for me. I'm actually in another Lit. class that reads a book every two weeks; I think this week's book is Moby Dick. This week I finished five books (none of them were for my other class) and hope to finish Ben Hur by Saturday but am not counting on it. One of the books was Black Like Me (which I really liked). And the rest of them were the Tolkien series The Lord of the Rings, including the Hobbit. Now truthfully I don't really like fantasy or whatever you call the series but I was feeling really bad because I've never read any of the books and they are really famous, and because my brother has to read the Hobbit for Lightning Lit. and I wanted to have a race, which I won. Back to the point. I never realized how many different authors pulled for Tolkien in their writing. When you start reading more and more books you find that you recognized aspects of a character or setting in other books which actually helps you understand the second guys book because you can see where he got his inspiration. I just think it's interesting that the more you read the more you can understand other authors and their writing.

Stealing from Little Children

So I went on another trip this week also. I went up to Baltimore to visit my other brother Vito. Well this visit started off with my mom and I waking up at three am to catch our flight. After two flights, a delay, and the time wasted because my brother is late picking us up, we leave the airport for good that day. My brother and his wife, Jingwan, decide to take my mom and I to a parade (don't ask me why). We arrive at the parade and kids are everywhere, not kidding (haha did you see the word play...KIDding. Sorry I won't ever do that again.). They are in strollers, on the ground, laying in the grass, in the trees, on their parents (I saw one little boy ridding on his father's shoulders licking his dad's bald head). So when I get to the parade I don't feel out of place, I feel the competition. I have to compete with all these little cute kids for the candy they handout in the floats. But whatever I'm up for the challenge. I'm out there with the best of them, struggling to appear as innocent and big checked. That's when I realized I have a weapon they don't. Humiliation. If I looked as sad as I really felt for competing with these little babies the candy-hander-outers would feel so bad for the teenager who has to go to parades and sit with four years old to get candy. That's when the candy started rolling in. Best part of my trip.

CA

So unfortunately I have not been staying completely on track of my blogging so I'm down a couple and am going to have to write about four today so I'm not making any promises that they're going to be interesting in anyway. So last week I traveled to visit my brother Michael in California.

Number 1 misconception about California- It is not hot. It is not even warm.
Number 2- The sun does not always shine but the wind always blows.
Number 3- Everyone is not tan.
Number 4- You don't get to surf in a bikini. You have to wear a wet suit.
Number 5- That you shouldn't listen to your brother when he tells you it is 70 degrees and to not bring a coat.

Other than all that that it was really fun. So one the third or fourth day I was in California I decided to go for a run. The loop around my brother's campus is supposed to be 2.5 miles and I decide that going around it twice would give me just enough time to shower and get ready to go to mass at five with my brother's girlfriend's parents. So my mom and I set out and I'm running faster than usual since I don't want to be late so my mom can't keep up with me. She quits after one loop and I go on. Now I don't know if I just consumed in thinking or that I was staring at my feet but when I was supposed to turn I just kept running straight. Suddenly it hits me to start looking for the street that I need to turn down on. So I decide just to try one out and go down it for three blocks when I figure it's the wrong street and have to turn around and rerun the three blocks. I do this on about five different streets and every time I try a new one I'm getting farther and farther away for my brother's campus. After my feet begin to ache and my throat gets tired of gasping of air I decide just to turn completely around and redo everything I've and just go back the way I know. Now I'm sprinting because I think I'm going to make it back by five; I almost tripped a scat boarder guy. I run up my brother's steps, jump into some new clothes, and learn that my brother isn't going. Later I calculated that I almost ran all the way to the highway; I also learned that my mom toke me on a loop (the first loop) that was longer that 3 miles. All in all I easily ran over ten miles.