Journal #50 - Faith

Faith is an important part of the lives of everyone. Everyone deals with it, whether you are an avid church goer, or if you put your faith into something else. A majority of people put faith into something at some point in time. There are many times when you have to put your faith into other people. Times like these could happen when you are working on a project in a group of people and each person has to work on the different part of the project. Each person has to do their part of the project otherwise the project will fail. But the only way these projects will work is if each person puts their faith in the other people to get the project done. Faith is an important aspect to people's lives because everyone needs to believe in something. It is human nature to put their faith into things because there are many things that there are no explainations for. Such questions are like why are we here on this earth? What is our purpose? These questions do not have any specific answers beside what the bible tells us, or whatever other religions believe in. But we are not seeing these things with our eyes happening. We have to trust what is in the bible and what we read. We have to put our faith into things because we can not see everything with our won two eyes. A good synonym for faith is trust, because when we put our faith into something, we are trusting the being to get the job done. Or in religion's case we our trusting our God to take care of us and give us the strength to go about our daily buisness. I put my fatih in God and he delivers by protecting me each day. I think that by putting our faith in things, it is a good way of coping with all of the stresses that we deal with on a daily buissness. This puts stress onto other things instead of feeling that we have to do everything ourselves.

Journal #49 - Family

I spend a lot of time with my family because they are important to me. Until I could drive, I spent a lot of time doing things with my family such as playing games with them and going out to eat with them. Ever since my brother has gone to college, we have done even less stuff together. My brother, Andrew, goes to college up at Augustana in Rock Island. My dad is an accountant for RSM Mcgladrey and my mother is an RN at Memorial Medical Center. My favorite times of the year is in fact the holiday season because of all of my cousins that I get to see. We usually meet up at my aunt or uncles house down in St. Louis or in Chicago. We usually have amazing meals because everyone in my family has been trained to cook like my grandma. We celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter together. In all three of these holidays we always have huge feasts. I have many cousins, but I am the youngest on my mom's side and the the second youngest on my dad's side. I have cousins that are 33, 30, 28, 29, 35, 26, and 19. Those are on my mom's side. Then on my dad's side I only have cousins that are 20, 16, and 25. They live up in Chicago. I have always been far away from the ages of my cousins, so I can not relate to many of them. One of my cousins is a sucessful Anesthesiologist and he is married to a doctor. When he was a high schooler, he was also an all state golfer. I also have a cousin that is currently attending Truman State College in Missouri. The cousins on my dad's side include a graduate of Virginia, a current student at Dennison College where he plays tennis, and a high schooler that is a very good volleyball player. My extended family is very close because we get to see each other many times throughout the year. We even take a special vacation every year down to the Ozarks with my mom's side of the family. We spend time on the lake and we also get to use their boat. My family has given me a lot of great times.

Journal #48 - Spring Break

My spring break was a random assortment of activities. It always goes way too fast, yet somehow I feek ready to be back at school. On the first day of spring break I decided to embark on my first golf round of the year. I went with Quenten Hooker to Piper Glen Golf Course and we played the back nine. I ended up playing a lot better than expected for not playing since Sectionals in October, but I still made some stupid mistakes. I was hitting my driver quite well for only hitting one fairway. My irons were average, and my putting was very good for having such a long time off. Then next day of spring break was a track invitational at Greenville. I ended up running the open 400 in 53.3 seconds, which was good enough for 3rd place. I was satisfied with this time because this was my first open 400 race of the year and 53.3 already ties my best time for last season. I am excited to continue the season this week. Last thursday was another meet at rochester. This was a very important meet because we broke the school record in the 4x800 meter relay. This was our first and only time running it, we put a team together just to see if we could beat the record. On the days that I did not have meets, i decided to play some ultimate sports with my friends. My friends and I played basketball, ultimate tennis, and a new game that we created called sky ball. What we did was the game was like ultimate ball played in middle school. But instead of a dodgeball, we used a sky ball, which can be found in a sporting goods store. Instead of throwing the ball you have to bounce the ball once to your teammate. You try and score the ball in a goal by bouncing it in. It was a very fun game, but it was dark when we played it so it was kind of difficult. I also had to work on homework during spring break.

Job Shadowing Experience

During my day at a workplace, I went to a private engineering firm by the name of Hampton, Lenzini, and Renwick, Inc. This was an interesting place to go because of my interest in engineering. I personally learned a lot during this experience because I got to talk to real engineers about real job sites. I did not just follow one person all day though. What I did was I met with my contact at 8 AM in his office. Then what we did was we met each other and talked about random stuff to get to know each other. After the initial meeting of him, what my person did, Steve Megginson, was showed me around their office. It was a somewhat small office, considering it only fit about 15 people to work in it. After I was shown around the place, we sat down in his office and he went through the basics of the trade. He showed me some different types of jobs that he has done as well as he enlightened me about the joys of his job. This person got to travel around a lot to job sites and he got to inspect bridges. I forgot to say that this person was a bridge specialist. We talked for about two hours about what he did and he also showed me other things like how they had to promote themselves because they are a private firm. He talked about how it is important to be very good at the technical side of the buisness, but if you do not learn to communicate your ideas to other people then you will not be a very sucessful engineer. After we talked for a long time. He took me over to another engineer to talk to. He was a different specialist, he was a forensic engineer. I had never heard of forensic engineers before and I think that his job sounds really cool. He is like a detective trying to figure out what went wrong in an engineering blunder. The ironic part about this person is that he turned out to be the dad of a person that I compete against for track. So we had a little more to talk about than just engineering. This man talked about a few different scenarios that he had to figure out, and it was fun because he tried to involve us in the discussion rather than just telling us how he did it. He then talked about the trusses on bridges for a little while and we moved on to the next person. Then next guy that we talked to was a hydrolics guy. He did all of the figuring for where a river or creek would move so that it would not erode the supports of a bridge. After talking to all of these people, I noticed that all of these people worked as a team to make sure that their bridges were safe and that their bridges worked efficiently. They all talked about the different stages of the engineering process as well as the buisness aspect of working with budgets. I found out yesterday that there is a lot more that goes into the engineering field than just pluging in numbers to equations. I learned about the buisness side of the trade, and I think it sounds like a good job to have.

Journal #46 - Favortie Car

Well I have to say that my favorite car is obviously the 1997 Toyota Camry. I am not much of a car guy, so you can already begin to tell that I have no idea what I am talking about when I talk about cars. But this is the current car that I have and it is also the first car that I have ever had. I have taken care of it thus far, the only dent on the car coming from my brother backing into someone else's car a few years ago (this car used to be my brother's before he got a new car). My car may not look like much, but it is in very good shape for its age and it has served me well. It is black and looks just like any other car. I have a sweet steerring wheel cover for my steering wheel that says University of Illinois on it. I also have University of Illinois license plates on, thanks to my dad. I can hit zero to sixty in about a minute and a half and sometimes when I have to drive uphill, it doesn't make it up the hill. Just kidding about the last sentence, because my car actually works quite well. Thus far it has not broken down on me nor has a tired blown out. The worst thing that has happened to my car so far is having the sun roof stuck halfway opened, which was fixed with the love and support of my family. We were all worried deeply for my car, but it made it through the surgery bby the mechanics. He has been safetly driving around for the last six months injury free, except for that grinding noise in the trunk. I'm pretty sure that it is just the boogie man who moved from my closet to my car, but there is no way to know for sure. One time, I was driving my car to a friends house where there was a huge pothole on the side of the road. I accidentally took the turn too sharp and my tire went straight down into a three foot drop. Luckily my car is industructable and survived without a scratch, but that definately gave me a bit of a scare.

Journal #45 - Experience on American Literature Site

SO far we have not done very much on the site, but i have already learned how to make a site on google. Thus far, my team members have been wonderful. They created the whole site without me while I was gone to WYSE. They got a lot done without me here, and I am glad that I was assigned these two beautiful girls. Asside from the brown nosing, I think that this website is a good and different look to a project. It is good to get some experience with technology in our ever changing enviroment. It is also important that we reach into ourselves to find some creativity and see what we can get out. This project is combining our knowledge, credebility, and our creativiy all into one piece. We just completed a civil war project in our history classes in which people created a web page filled with our information. That project has helped me with some of my experiences thus far on the American Lierature Sites Project. I think that the only problem with this project is the fact that everything is online. I like being able to use my brain for a project instead of looking up all of my information. But that part will come when we analyze some of the Dickinson poems. I think that this project is going to help me with some of my computer skills as well as teach me a way to create a web page. I like working in partners as well, because it seems like it takes some of the pressure off of you individually. It can feel overwhelming when you have a lot of work to get done on a project and no one can help you with it. In the real world, people work in teams anyways, so we might as well go ahead and get used to this concept by working on projects together. I think that this project will help me with my team working skills.

Journal #44 - Animal Imagery

Once upon a time, there lived a young caterpillar. He felt as furry as fuzzy wuzzy the bear and he was a great crawler. He is the best crawler in the land and he could beat anyone in a race. He tops out at a whopping .1 mile per hour. This little caterpillar wiggles and writhes to the speed of light. He passes the other little caterpillars with ease and everyone looks up to him. All of the little caterpillars gossip about how great this young being can be. This little caterpillar had to face the fastest leaf looking bug in the area though. It is unfortunate that the leafy bugs are naturally faster than the caterpillars, but our little friend wants to be the first caterpillar to upset a leafy bug. They were challenged to a race, and the leafy bug was pulling ahead. The bug had long legs that carried through the race. He was going so fast to the point where he tripped and fell. The crowd was going wild as the caterpillar started to catch up after the bugs fall. The bugs moral was broken. The caterpillar was going so fast that he was seeing sounds and hearing colors. This little guy started to believe that he could actually beat the leafy bug. Then finally, with a final dive across the finish line, the leafy bug exploded into a giant firey ball of flame. As this spontaneous combustion started, the caterpillar crossed the finish line to defeat the leafy bug. The crowd gave the caterpillar a standing ovation as they welcomed their new champion. The race was over and the crowd was chanting for a speach. The caterpillar gave a heartwarming speach that encouraged all of the other bugs to try their hardest. The bugs all rallied around the caterpillar and they hoisted him into the air. This was a magical time and I am proud to say that I witnessed it.