Goodbye and Hello

“Bye Dad.” I said. “I’ll miss you.”   “I will miss you too, son.” He said. In all the time I had known him, I had never seen tears in his eyes until that night. He was flying out very early the next morning to start his new job in California. The evening’s preparations for his flight and our indefinite separation kept us busy and the sadness at bay.

Me and my dad.

            The days following my dad’s departure to California weren’t too bad, although I never got used to him not walking through the door around 5 o’clock for supper.  I missed my dad. He was my best friend and playmate, he was my teacher and he was fun to be around. Friends from church invited us over and some of the neighborhood kids came almost daily to play with us, not knowing when our last Lego battle or Nerf war would be. I did not want to believe that leaving was real.  I didn’t want to go to a strange, new place and then be expected to live there and enjoy it. If I thought ahead to the day when I had to say good-bye to my companions, I would get very sad.  I played ultimate Frisbee and attended Wednesday night youth group and hung out with my neighborhood buddies as usual to keep things feeling the same. Surrounding myself with my friends and my family made me feel happy, but when I was alone, I couldn’t help but wonder, “What will that day be like when we have to leave?” Keeping busy kept the feelings of denial and sadness from creeping in.

We were also busy repairing the house to make it look nice so we could sell it and move out to be with my dad.  The house was about as clean and neat as it could be considering that the floor of the entry way and most of the hallway had been ripped up, and the whole house smelled of plaster and paint with buckets stacked up and put out of the way. Bare cement sat there, cold and hard and uneven, with no carpet over it, but it was always swept and tidy. That was a skill my mom had. Even when we made a huge mess with putty on the floor, or dust from taking apart the frames of the doors, she always managed to clean it up so things wouldn’t look as cluttered. There was so much to do, too much for my Mom to do alone. Some men at our church, called the Barnabas Builders, found out that my family would be moving to California soon and that our house needed to get finished before we could move. For the next 6 weeks they came over on the weekends and replaced doors, painted cabinets, put in a new bathtub, sink and toilet in one bathroom, laid new tile in the shower and on the floor and fixed all of the kitchen drawers. The work crew also removed the ugliest cooking stove hood in the world! A man from the crew took it and said “This is exactly what I need! This would make the best solar oven!” So he took it home, and I never saw it again and my mom was very relieved that it was gone for good. My dad came and visited a couple of times and he would paint day and night to help get the house ready to sell and to hasten his family’s relocation to California.

            After six weeks of work, the house that I had been in since I was 3 looked brand new. It had new carpet, new texture on all of the walls and ceiling and new paint. A wood floor covered the cement slab from the front door, through the kitchen and all the way to back door.  The room that I shared with my two younger brothers finally had a door on it. I could not believe how much the house changed in 6 weeks.

Soon after we had gotten our carpet put in, our 16 year old cat had to be put down. He had failing kidneys and would not have made the trip. I was sad because I was beginning to say goodbye to my friends. I still wanted him to stick around since he could still jump and play and run pretty well for a three legged cat. He was such a sweet cat and a regular part of my life. Our two other younger cats would make the trip just fine and provide comic relief in the days to come.

By mid-September, our house was on the market.  We would get calls right in the middle of meals sometimes about someone wanting to take a look at the house. One day the call came that started the dominoes falling towards our moving out of the house and leaving the great state of Texas and all that I had ever known.

My dad came and helped take things apart in preparation for the move. When the movers came, they took all of our belongings, including our 65 VW beetle. The house I had known for most of my life was empty. I got a strange feeling every time I went into the house after that. I felt like it should still be ours, and yet it felt as though I was intruding or it wasn’t part of my life any more. It was like saying goodbye to another one of my familiar friends.

Many of our friends in Texas helped us pass the time.

In the nine days that followed, we lived in a hotel room and it was very boring.   I got a cold and felt terrible.  Friends invited us over one last time to say goodbye, but I couldn’t go. I didn’t want to miss my last night of AWANA or my last time at Wednesday night youth group. I recovered just in time for our flight on November 16.  Along with my mom, my brothers and my 2 cats, I boarded an MD-80 bound for Sacramento and I said goodbye to a city that I called home my whole life.  I was sad, but I couldn’t help but laugh when my cat started yowling loud enough to be heard over the jet’s engines. I saw Lake Tahoe for the first time and my mom said that we wouldn’t be living that far from it. I started to hope that I would like California after all. When we landed, I felt like everything was too bright for one o’clock in the afternoon, but then I remembered that we were on Pacific Standard Time now, so I was so tired the first day.

We stayed in another hotel room for two days while we waited for our stuff to arrive. The house we were going to stay in was a two story house, so I was pretty excited since I had never lived in a house with stairs. Our cats enjoyed

Hot cocoa after snow tubing

chasing each other through the house, upstairs and down, and we called the racket they made, “Cat Thunder.” When our belongings arrived, it took some time to unpack it all. We spent the whole next day cutting open boxes and putting their contents away. When we were done, there was the biggest pile of paper I had ever seen in our living room. A pile so big, it was taller than Joshua!  We didn’t know how to get rid of it all, but some friends from our new church came and helped us fold all of those sheets of paper so we could take it to a recycling center.

We finally started to settle in, but I couldn’t help but feel like it wouldn’t be the same. I enjoyed the nicer weather in California more than the unstable climate in Texas, but I missed my friends and my favorite activities and places to be. Then we started to explore places that we had only read about. We went up into the Sierra’s the first weekend we were in California, and we enjoyed being in the fresh, cold mountain air. My hopes increased that I might really like living in a new place.

I quickly started doing activities that I enjoyed in Texas, such as biking and

Belt promotion in Karate

playing sports at the park. I have some new favorite past-times too such as karate and yo-yo club. I miss my friends very much, but I also enjoy being with my new friends here in California. I have learned how to make friends with new people and to cope with different situations.  Adjustments have become easier than when I first moved to California. Hope has ignited where doubt once ruled. Now my home is here in California. We enjoy being so close to the mountains and the endless recreation they offer during every season.  This move has changed me for the good. It will never be exactly the same when I visit Texas and I still feel a tug to go back and visit my friends, but California is my home and I look forward to growing up here.

--Jonathan Todd

To Bee or Not to Bee

It was a bright and clear day, just right for swimming. I was in my grandma’s backyard swimming in a kiddie pool with my cousins Myca and Huckleberry. Myca got out of the pool to get an ice cream sandwich and Huckleberry and I realized that there was a dead bee floating where Myca had been sitting.

            “I wonder if that is a bee or a hornet,” Huckleberry said to me. I said, “It looks like a bee because it has yellow and black stripes.” She said, “I wonder if the bee is dead or not? Why don’t you touch it to see if it is dead or alive.”

            “Y-OUCH!” is what I said when I touched the bee. It felt like an iron, white-hot needle that pierced my skin. The bee had stung me between my index finger and my thumb. My hand began to feel numb with the pain.

            I got out of the pool and went to show my hand to my dad. The stinger was still in my hand. My dad said, ”It looks like you have a bee sting.” My dad told my uncle about the sting and my Uncle Mike went inside got a hole punch and scraped out the stinger from the side.

            I learned that day never to take a dare from my cousin Huckleberry. I also learned not to touch a dead bee because they can still sting. I learned from my uncle that it is best to scrape the stinger out rather than squish all of the venom into the puncture using tweezers.

--Jacob Todd

Wonderful Water!

Water has fascinating properties, which is one of the reasons water is so mysterious. Here are a few properties of water.

adheisve and cohesive nature of water

Water is cohesive and adhesive. Which means water sticks to itself, cohesion, and to other things, adhesion. For example when there is a drop of water that is at the end of a faucet it will stick to the faucet until it eventually falls. The water sticks to the faucet because it is adhesive. Adhesion affects you when you sweat. If the sweat did not stick to you, it would fall to the ground and you would not be cooled off as the sweat evaporates. Water's cohesive property explains why water balls up. The reason water balls up is that the molecules stick to other water molecules. If water was not cohesive the drops of water would collapse!

water strider

Surface tension is the reason water has adhesive and cohesive properties. Surface tension is why  water striders scuttle across ponds and do not sink. Water molecules are made of three atoms: one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The oxygen atom is negatively charged and the hydrogen atoms are positively charged. This difference in the charge of the water molecules means that water molecules are attracted to each other so they stick together. Negative charges are attracted to positive charges and they fit together like a puzzle. The surface tension of water is broken when you take a bath. The weight of your body in the water causes it to break apart. If it didn't, you would be on top of the water!

water dissolving substances

Water has another property. It can dissolve substances. When water dissolves substances it breaks them down into little pieces that spread throughout the water. When water dissolves a solid, the dissolved particles do not turn into a liquid. They just get broken down into tiny pieces. Water's ability to dissolve affects you right now because the water in your blood dissolves nutrients your body needs and they get transported to wherever the sugars, proteins, vitamins and minerals need to go to make your body healthy.

Those are only a few facts about the amazing substance, water.

--Jacob Todd

The Photometer

Summertime recalls many fond memories of our years in Texas. I was not working in the summer and we were able to spend a lot of time with our young children.  The summer days would get hot in Texas, so we had routines to keep out of the heat with our active children. We had to get outside, though, or our house would have been a wreck from their boundless energy. On a typical day we would get up early and go for a bike ride to a nearby park. We tried to get out before it would get too hot, but we stayed on roads that did not have heavy traffic.

In the afternoons we would go to the local pool, where they recently added a splash park. The park was fun and a welcome relief from the heat when it got over 100 degrees. The facility itself had three different pools that each of our boys spent some time in. The large indoor pool was great for swimming laps, playing water basketball, and for diving into the pool. The small kiddy pool was not used for very long on any days we used it, especially by Joshua, for reasons I will soon explain. Being shallow, it often had toddlers and young children exploring its depths and squealing in delight as they played with the waterfall. When the pool was not busy we enjoyed crawling around pretending to be some type of pool alligator. Or we would launch ourselves from the edge of the small pool to play tag or to dive after the colorful diving sticks that we brought along. By far, however, it was the large outdoor pool where we spent most of our time.

In this large pool we played, each day, a favorite game, learned how to swim, explored underwater, and often just made up new games. When the children each turned about 3 they all really enjoyed jumping from the edge of the pool to Jami and I. Joshua, I noted, seemed to cherish this activity the most.  In fact, if it weren’t for a quirky response to the Sun that Joshua had, I don’t think our outstretched arms could have kept up with him. (To support this I site an instance on the 4^th of July, where Joshua as a toddler jumped so much while Arnold Marquez was holding him that Arnold’s arms gave out!) Fortunately for us, Joshua had a specific set of conditions in which he was able to jump. And if those conditions persisted, Joshua was unstoppable.  

Joshua could detect how much light the Sun was producing. He seemed to have a built in photometer, sensing how much thermal energy was present based on how bright the light was. When the Sun was bright and full, Joshua quickly perched himself on the edge of the pool, ready to gaily jump into the water. Should a stray cloud appear to cover the Sun, Joshua clenched his long arms around his chest, clenched his teeth and sprouted goose bumps. With great reluctance, but impressive speed, he would get out of the pool to wrap himself in his oversized towel, looking very much like a disgruntled mummy with plush terry-clothe wrapping. (This behavior explains why Joshua was not inclined to spend much time in the small pool. It had too much shade.)

But, once the cloud moved on, Joshua would cast aside his towel and once again throw his strong, lithe body into the pool.  To Joshua, this was what summer was all about.

A Toy's Tumble... and Back Up Again

Rubber bands are surprisingly strong. When you try and drop something that is attached to a rubber band, it doesn’t fall very far.

Last spring we did an experiment where we attached a toy to a chain of rubber bands. Then we dropped the toy off the kitchen counter. We also recorded the distance that the toy dropped. At the end we used an equation (y = mx + b) to help us figure out how many rubber bands we would need to add to drop the toy down an 18 foot stairwell so that the toy would fall down but bounce up just before it hit the ground.

At the beginning of the experiment we had just 1 rubber band attached to the toy. We held onto the end of the rubber band while we dropped the toy off of our kitchen counter. We recorded the distance that the toy dropped and then added more and more rubber bands until the toy almost hit the kitchen floor, being sure to record the distance each time. From this data we were able to create a graph on our calculator.

The equation y = mx + b describes a linear relationship. In this equation each letter means something. “Y” is the distance dropped by the toy, "m" is the rate that the toy dropped per rubber band, "x" is the number of rubber bands we used, and "b" is a constant that adds distance that comes from the toy’s length and weight.

When we used 2 rubber bands, for instance, the toy dropped about 26 cm.  6 rubber bands nearly tripled that distance to allow the toy to drop to 90 cm. The rubber bans, then, added an average of about 14.5 cm to the  distance to allow the toy to drop to 90 cm. The rubber d istance that the toy dropped. This pattern is considered  linear because when you graph the data it makes a line.  I bet you did not know that rubber bands could involve  math? From this math I was able to safely drop the toy be used by scientists to determine how far away an  down the stairwell. Next time I will describe how a linear relationship can  earthquake is.

--Jonathan Taylor

Joshua Chamberlain: Growing In Passion

Joshua is a delight. He is eager to join any venture that he feels will be fun. He jumps in always with a smile, much laughter, and with energy that is contagious to all who are around. His boundless passion motivates him and encourages others. 

Joshua has passion for many things, especially those things that require him to act kinesthetically. He is stronger and quicker than one might think for his small size. He can also throw a ball further and harder than I was able to at his age. And he can often be tireless when chasing his brothers on a field, all while keeping that grin of his and an eager laugh. 

He is adept with most any object that is thrown in sports, a trait he uses to his advantage when he plays dodge ball. He was given a mountain bike for Christmas. With the characteristic persistence that I’ve seen him use in sports, he has ridden his new bike endlessly around our street to practice changing gears, mastering bursts of speed and pulling tight turns. 

Passion is also what motivated him as a toddler to jump to Jami and I in the water, swim to the side, climb out, and repeat this sequence over and over again while squealing with laughter at all the fun he was having. And this passion fueled him one cold afternoon when we took him snow tubing last month. Though the conditions were colder than any he had ever felt, Joshua kept trudging along so he could experience the repeated thrill of sliding downhill.

Passion is powerful. It can cause us to become more disciplined as we pursue those things that interest us. When we experience success our drive serves to cause us to excel still more. If our efforts continue to yield fruit a cycle is produced where the motivation becomes intrinsic and the continued pursuit is personally rewarding. I am glad to see that Joshua is passionate. Nothing great in life is accomplished without passion.

Our First Fall

We arrived in California in the fall. These are some cool things we did in the mountains at that time. The mountains of California were so cold that I had to wear a hat, a coat, and gloves. And where I went it was so high my ears popped. The mountains had thick, soft snow on them. I had hot cocoa on the mountain, which tasted really good.

I also made snowballs. Two were perfectly spherical. I threw them into a lake and they shattered like glass.  Later my brothers and I ambushed my dad with many more snowballs. Jonathan made an especially hard snowball that he nailed my dad with.

California has been cold so far so I have to wear pants and a long sleeve shirt every day. When we go biking we have to wear coats because the air is cold when we go fast. In the morning and at night it’s really cold. But the afternoons are usually nice. There was nice weather when we went to my Uncle James’ house for Thanksgiving. We played soccer out in a field with my cousin Trey. It was cloudy but the weather was just right to play in.

The fall colors in California are very pretty. The three prettiest colors are yellow, red, and orange. Some trees have really intense colors but others have milder ones. The leaves come in a bunch of different shapes like hearts, stars, and pointy clubs. The shapes and colors are like a burst of fireworks.

--Jacob Ryan