CHANGE

Author's Note: In this essay I tried to work on how change not only affects you but everyone around you. Also I tried to work on my transitions between paragraphs to give it a better flow to the paper.

Your left all alone in a city where everyone is turning mad and you have to fend for yourself and your two younger sisters, you would be scared. Which is what happened to Alex in Susan Beth Pfeffer’s book The Dead and the Gone. Now and then life throws you curve balls and you have to catch them and run with all you’ve got and on the way you may change.

 Change is a big thing that different people experience in different ways. Slow change is easier to adapt to than fast change. Leisurely change consists of something along the lines of you take something and slowly change it to something you like. In this book slow change happened not as present as fast change but it was still there. The main characters realized that their parents were never coming back. That was hard to adjust to at first and then the realized that they had to live with it and move on. Occasionally things like this may happen and you have to move on and deal with the consequences.

Even though slow change is hard to deal with fast change sometimes hits really hard and you almost don’t know what to do. Alex, the main character, was hit hard like this when he realized that he had to keep himself alive and his two younger sisters. Even imaging this would be hard, on how this could even happen. Often in the way; that you have to roll with the punches and not let anyone or anything get in your way.

Even though slow and sudden change is hard to deal with personal change hits home in this book. This is because the main character Alex changed so much from the beginning of the book. Even though in the beginning he was just a normal 17 year old with a job and a family. But then when his parents disappeared he kind of took on the parent role of his two sisters. It was really hard to connect with this book though because I have never been put in a situation like that. I’m the youngest in my family and have no siblings.

This book showed me how change affects the lives of not just you but everyone around you. You can just be stubborn, and want everything but you have to give a little to get. That is a hard lesson to learn because when you want something you want it and then when you can’t have it you don’t want anyone to say or do anything to you. So sometimes when you catch that ball and run with it you still have to remember the curve ball was thrown at you first before you got to where you are now.

GENERATIONS

Author’s Note: I wrote this piece to tell people that every chance you get to spend with your family you should appreciate and this is because not everyone has a family like mine that is together all the time every day. Some families are small and live in different states and sometimes even countries. So when you get to talk to them you need to treat it like it’s the best thing ever.

Everyone knows of things that happened before they were born and are still going on now. Like Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving dinner. Their family has been doing it since before they were born and now are still doing it. Well my family has just that, yes we celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving. But the biggest thing I think we do is Hunting season which always falls right over Thanksgiving. My family has been doing this since at least 1975. There were 25 people who hunted, and then there was my grandma and aunt and a bunch of other people. When I was born a couple of people stopped hunting because they became too old. Others just stopped hunting with us because they started to move a little slower and didn’t want to hunt with us if they couldn’t do as much as they used to. The saddest part though was a couple of people died and then obviously could not hunt any more. Now we’re down to 8 people. It’s still a lot of fun because all the people who used to hunt with us still come around every year for hunting season. My favorite part of hunting season is that when someone does get a deer and not like we’re trophy hunters we just like the meat in are freezer. But when someone gets a really nice deer you’ve got to take pictures and we hand out trophies. We have three of them BIG BUCK, SMALLEST DEER, and HEAVIEST DEER. It’s the favorite part when someone gets to put the trophy up on their mantle all year long and hope that it stays there till the next year.  I look forward to hunting season every year I get out of school for two days and I get to relax up north with my family and friends. So appreciate every chance you get with your family at your annual events. My families is really strange I know but I love it for what it is and I love them for what they are and nothing can ever change that.  

FAMILY

Author’s Note: I decided to write this paragraph on a song that has a very funny story in are family. In this piece I wanted to work on my goal of developing a variety of methods to begin sentences and paragraphs. 

Have you ever heard a song that just made you start laughing every time you heard it because you have so much in common with parts of the song? Well in my family there’s this country song by Jason Aldean called my Big Green Tractor. Some of the lyrics are really funny and it’s not just because the song is so weird there’s a little bit more to it. We have tractors up north on are farm, one of them is blue and this was the only one we had before we heard this song. We were sitting at the kitchen table up north playing cards, and this song came on over the radio. We all stopped talking at a random time and just heard on my big green tractor. It was so funny and we all started to laugh. We only have a blue tractor right now but we still think it’s funny. Now that we have this song in our heads all the time when we are up north we will catch each other while were splitting wood or cutting down trees and start laughing really hard. So that’s pretty much it we like to have fun and laugh at each other we can always have fun like that. But the best part is we do everything together. As a family and we need to help each other not trying to do the hard jobs of cutting wood and splitting wood and keeping our land up there running alone.

DIFFERENCES

Author’s Note: I wrote this paragraph on the point of view of different people on the same thing. I have never done this before and was trying very hard to make you see the point of view of different people. Also in the paragraph I wanted to work on my goal of developing a variety of sentences beginnings. 

Some people see things one way and others see things different. I decided that I was going to test this out and see just what other people thought of this picture, this is what I found. My aunt told me that see thought that this was a picture of the woods. She told me excatally what the picture was and told me what she saw. Then I asked my dad and he said it reminded him of when his family and him went up north every year the week over his birthday. This picture reminds me of my familys land up north in fall, while were out in the woods on the four-wheelers for our last time out there till spring. I thought this was very interesting on how many different people see just one simple picture in many different ways on what it reminds them of. If you looked at this picture what would you get out of it? What would your parents get out of it? What would other family members get out of it? It just depends on what you see, if you have a deep imagination you could make a lot out of this. But, if you see everything in the laterally sense than your not going to get as much out of it. Don’t try to see things in ways everyone else does, do things your own way.

SUCCEEDING IN LIFE

Author’s Note: I picked this quote be Albert Einstein because I had put it on my blog a couple of months ago and decided that I should write what I really think about it. I’m not the greatest at interpreting things into what I really think of them. So that is what I’m working on and I’m also trying to reach one of my goals of increasing my use of complex vocabulary.

“IF A IS A SUCCESS IN LIFE, THEN A EQUALS X PLUS Y PLUS Z. WORK IS X; Y IS PLAY; AND Z IS KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT.” ~ ALBERT EINSTEIN

This quote means a lot to me there is a lot of different meanings to it in different ways. I’m going to break it down and tell you what each individualized part means to me. “IF A IS A SUCCESS IN LIFE” this means that if a certain thing means that you succeed reach for that goal and reach for the others but try harder towards this one. “THEN A EQUALS X PLUS Y PLUS Z” this means that just because that one thing makes you successful it’s not the only thing there are many other parts to it. “WORK IS X” you have to work hard in order to succeed and not just say I’m going to this when I grow up you still need to work for it. “Y IS PLAY” you still have to be a kid and play. “AND Z IS KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT” this means that even though you still have the skill level you need to make sure not to push the wrong buttons on anyone. So keep your mouth shut unless it is something really important to make something better. This quote by Albert Einstein means all of these things to me, and is pretty much what I think for myself. So be a success in life but keep your mouth shut when you know you should.

POINT OF VIEW

Author’s Note: I’m writing this creative writing piece in perspective of a gift I received or bought for Christmas. I’m going to work on putting my commas in the right places.

Packers, have you ever seen a better season. Well I didn’t get to see any of it on TV, but the people who came into the store would always talk around me about how well the Packers were doing. I never thought I would get bought and taking home to be worn by someone, and then one day I was. Some girls’ mom came into the store looking for anything Packers. Then she stumbled upon me. I knew what Christmas presents were and that Christmas was on its way. I knew this because people were always talking about it. So once my new owner purchased me I was wrapped up and put under a tree. I was so excited and couldn’t wait until someone opened me. Once Christmas day came I was really excited when her and her family got home from their Christmas somewhere else they started opening up all the gifts. I was one of the last couple to be opened and when she ripped off the paper and started to open the lid of the box: she started screaming. I was so happy that she was so excited to see me. She put me on right away and didn’t take me off till she went to bed that night. I was so excited to have a new home and an owner that I will always keep warm. Merry Christmas!

VACATIONS

Author's Note: I wrote this piece about my vacation every weekend up to our house in the middle of nowhere and some of the things my whole family and I enjoy doing together and individually.

Most people would say that the best vacation they ever went on was to some place warm like Florida or California.  But I pretty much go on a vacation every weekend, or at least that’s what I call it. My mom owns a house up in the middle of nowhere literally. It’s a little town in the middle of Wisconsin called Knowlton. Only on some maps can you find it. I love it up there because every time we go we do something totally different you can say oh we’re going to do this but it never works that way. My cousins and I like to go four-wheeling during the spring, summer and fall. My aunt and mom like to help my grandma out with her flowers and garden. I hate doing that. My dad and uncle like to hang out in my grandpa’s garage, where he used to be all the time, and build cool stuff and help with fixing things around the farm, I love to help them. Are land got harvested a year or so ago and so we will go out with the four wheelers and the tractor and pull branches and trees out and have a huge bonfire. My cousins and I when were out on the four-wheeler’s we always have to go out on cliff trail which is where the river runs through are land and throw Kow-a-Bunga sticks: which are huge sticks that you throw root end first over the cliff, and then scream Kow-a-Bunga: it’s so funny and a lot of fun. We love just going up there and being outside. We have 120 acres to do whatever we want and yes sometimes we say we’re board or have nothing else to do but you can just look outside and know exactly what you can do. I wish that I lived there at times but sometimes it’s just nice to come home, but the north is my life and that’s where I’m from and will never have a complaint that I would ever want to go anywhere else I think the rest of my family would agree.