Five Things Every Liberty Student Can Relate to

Whether you're a student at Liberty University or have only heard of the school, there are a few things that most students here understand all too well. Read on to learn a few of them.

1. Waking up to the glorious sounds of construction 
You don't need to set an alarm before your 8:15 class. You already have an alarm system, thanks to ear-splitting dump trucks, thunderous bulldozers, and other lovely equipment beginning at o'dark hundred every morning.

On a related note, it's important to never expect to own any light-color shoes while on campus. Instead, a shoe color I highly recommend is an elegant Red Mud Brown. As an added benefit, shoes in this color will always stay the same color, no matter how rainy and muddy it may be outside. You always want your shoes to help you put your best foot forward.

7 Things Your Lifeguard Wants You to Know

With summer in full-swing now, most of you have probably been swimming at your local pool to cool off! After lifeguarding at a large water park for two years and working as a lead staff member this third season, I've learned a few things along the way that I think every responsible (and especially irresponsible) swimmer should know this summer.


1.) Not all lifeguards just sit around all day doing nothing. The water park I work at keeps us on our feet all day. We're required to walk back and forth at most of the lifeguard stands rather than sitting so we can properly see the water. This meant I sometimes walked over 13 miles in one day during a twelve or thirteen hour shift!

Adventures in Fabric

The great thing about being home from college for almost a month is that I've finally had time to get some quilting done without homework, deadlines, and other things getting in the way. I've been working on a full-size quilt for my bed, and now, after nearly six and a half years, I'm thrilled to announce.... I'm still working on it. There's nothing quite like sitting under a quilt on a cold day with a hot cup of tea, while your cat pounces on your feet and anything else underneath the quilt. But that's for another blog post...

I made this quilted bag recently as a Christmas present
for a friend. Quilted bags are a great way to use up all those old fabric scraps you might have sitting around from other projects. They're also a fun way to practice or learn how to hand quilt, if you don't already know how. Here

The Twelve Days of Christmas (College Edition)

Hello and welcome back to my blog! As some of you may have noticed, I haven't posted on my blog in some time. Hopefully this post will help explain why...Without further ado, allow me to present you with my College Edition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas".

Delray Beach pt 3

We had enough decent weather for Esther and I to film our latest movie from Van Tuyl Productions, "The Hunt". (For other movies from Van Tuyl Productions, click here).

6/9/16

We had a few days where it was lovely weather for ducks, and whaddya know but one did show up and start swimming around the pool. At first, it looked like he only had one leg, but it turned out he actually had the usual two.

Things That Go on in a Thousand Mile Car Trip

     Greetings, fellow Earth-dwellers. You've probably been wondering what I've been up to since my last post (was it really back in November that I last posted...?). Well, one thing my family and I did recently was to take a vacation to Delray Beach, Florida! 

     Our new minivan was much easier to pack than our old car had been. (I had a lot more stuff than you see here when my parents picked me up from college earlier this month though.)

Yes, that's a lot of stuff... 5/31/16

Adventures (and bruises) on Ice

After the skating. All photo credits: my mom ('cause I was too busy falling down to take pictures)

Yesterday, I went ice skating for the first time ever, and I am left wondering... How in the world do figure skaters manage to go around on one ice skate all the time? I certainly had enough trouble staying up on my two feet. At least I don't have a peg leg like a pirate. I can't imagine what peg-legged pirates do when they go ice skating.

Welcome Week at Liberty: A Freshman's Perspective

Hello everyone! As most of you probably know, I've been at college ever since Thursday. Since so many of you have been pestering me for a blog entry (*cough cough*), here it is, written as a daily account of my adventures here at Liberty University.

1,000 Things to Do on a 1,000 Mile Car Trip

     My family and I just got back from a two-week vacation to Delray Beach, Florida! We had so much fun there, this is going to be the first of several posts about our time there.

     It's a 1,000 miles from here to Delray, and as many of you know, we drive it in two days. So what do Esther and I do for a thousand miles in the backseat? 

     Read on to find out.

What Happens When You Ask Rachel to Bake a Giant Cake

     I baked a cake yesterday. Not just any cake, but my graduation cake. And not just any graduation cake, but a 12x18 cake, the biggest thing I've ever baked in my life!  (12x18 inches that is, not feet. I got covered in enough batter just from this one!)
     When one is baking a foot and a half long cake, proper greasing of the pan beforehand is vital. It is equally important to cover the pan well with a fine layer of flour. As a side note, when I had finished, I too was well-greased and covered with a fine layer of flour.

This is what happens when you give the camera to your sister and tell her to take some nice photos.

Next, the eggs. All ten of them. Cracking two eggs at a time certainly helps it go faster. As an added benefit, it also adds that nice crunch to the cake, so important for one's daily calcium intake.

 How do you mix up three boxes of cake mix at once?
Just like this! I hope you like cake batter, because when you do this, you're certainly going to get a lot all over the place.



The biggest bowl of cake batter I've ever seen for the biggest cake I've ever baked...

When you mix up three boxes of cake mix my way, you end up splatting the batter on yourself and the counters (but mostly on yourself).

Licking off the spatula just a little bit too eagerly. I get excited about cake batter, ok?

I told her to look normal and pretend I wasn't even taking pictures.

The sad thing is, this is normal...

 After gallons of batter all over the kitchen, you may be wondering how the cake turned out. Well, see for yourself!

Yes, this is actually the only good picture I have of the cake. It was late at night...

It's amazing how hilarious baking a giant cake can be. Of course, when you've had as much sugar as Esther and I did, everything seems hilarious!

The Thrill of Breakfast

   If you're like my sister, you most likely love cooking and experimenting with new recipes. Sometimes, it probably seems like you're cooking up a new experiment every day, from homemade bread to homemade yogurt to homemade cheese that more than slightly resembles a brain (yeah, that’s kind of a long story...)

     But not everyone is like my sister.

     If you are like me, you don’t really like cooking. Oh, you like eating all right. In fact, you might like it just a little too much. So much, in fact, that despite your distaste for cooking, you find yourself in the kitchen every morning, searching for something delicious to have for breakfast.

     For me, smoothies are one of my most favorite things to have for breakfast, as well as other breakfast foods. They're quite easy to make, and they taste so good. There are literally hundreds of different ways to make them, and thousands of possible ingredients.

     We always seem to have various old food sitting around our house, and smoothies are a great way to use up that old cranberry sauce that’s been sitting in the fridge for 6 months. (Let’s just say we have had some very interesting smoothies in the past.) I have this basic recipe that I like to be creative with:

Sprouts and flax seed. What could be better

• Some liquid (I usually use milk, but you could use any nut milk, fruit juice, ect.)
• The “base”. I usually use some fruit like strawberries, blueberries, peaches, ect. This time, I also threw in some sprouts to get some vegetables in. Yes, this was one of those more interesting-tasting smoothies.
• “Seasoning”: cinnamon, vanilla extract, pumpkin pie spice, ect. I also love putting in about a tablespoon of flax seed. It’s surprising how much your smoothie thickens up when you add a bit of flax seed.
• “Extras”: old applesauce; that last bit of yogurt nobody wants; leftover codfish. (Then again, even the taste of a smoothie is no match for the aroma of leftover codfish)

   Well, I hope you have enjoyed this post about breakfast, one of my favorite meals of the day (my other favorite meals of the day are lunch and dinner.) Happy smoothie making!

Do you like cooking or not? What is your favorite food to make?

A Dangerous Ride

Snow.

      For some people, a feeling of dread settles over them at the mere thought of winter, with its freezing cold temperatures, and snow, and ice. But for other people, the word sends a thrill of excitement racing through their entire body. Even if the winter is filled with a hundred snow storms, these people still love the last snowstorm just as much as the very first one of the season. I am one of those people.

     Let me tell you why.
     Sledding is one of the most fun winter sports in the world. Last Friday, at our friends' farm, I experienced a few short hours of sledding, real sledding, for the first time in my life.

     Esther and I brought the Flexible Flyer sleds that belonged to our parents, and our friends brought round saucer sleds and surf board sleds. I decided to go down the hill on the Flexible Flyer first because it seemed like a fairly undangerous option for my first ride down a hill of this size. 

     Now I know why they call it a “flyer”. The first bump sent me flying down the hill and landing in a snow-covered heap (with an evil-looking sled rattling down after me).

     I didn't use the Flexible Flyer too much after that.

This is what happens when you try to sled down the hill on a rusty Flexible Flyer. (I'm the one in the teal coat who just fell off the sled.)

     Racing down the hill on the sleds was so much fun, we didn't even think about the long walk back to the top. Of course, we thought about it a lot when we had to trudge back up! The hill was so long and so steep, we had to rest many times before we got to the summit. Of course, the snow made it a million times harder –every footstep we took was sucked up by about 6 inches of snow. 

 

    Those flying saucer sleds were something else. As soon as you took your hands off the ground at the top of the slope, all the way down to the bottom, you spun, around and around and around and around (are you dizzy yet? Because I sure was!) 

     Sometimes the saucer dumped you off right in the middle of the slope and you kept right on sliding. 

 Sometimes you hit a bump and did a complete somersault, like me. 

  Or sometimes, you happened to hit someone pulling up a snow tube on a leash, and you, your boots, the sled, your socks, and your gloves went flying in all different directions, like Esther.

Tragically, there is no photo of Esther's near death experience
involving the snow tube on a leash, so you'll just have to look
at this picture of me instead.

     Although summer will always be my favorite season of the year, I love winter. I an sure I will always remember this first time sledding on such a huge hill as one of the most thrilling (and possibly dangerous) experiences of this winter.

A story I wrote for my Spanish class

I wrote this story for my Spanish class and I decided to translate it to English so my family could read it. My sister said I should post it here too. Here it is:

    It was a dark and stormy night when we were born, my brother and sister and I. We lived on a small farm in West Virginia and as we grew we spent many long hours playing on that farm.

     It was another dark and stormy night when we found that our parents had been killed. We were still very young and a woman came to the house and took us to a special orphanage. We drove a very long time before we arrived at our destination in the city.

   I was in the orphanage for perhaps a month or two. There were others there to, some of whom we became friends with. Every so often, someone who was interested in adopting would come and choose one of us to adopt. One day an elderly woman and her daughter came to the orphanage and brought me to the elderly woman’s house. I never saw my brother or sister again.

     I still remember the first time I met the elderly woman’s husband and family. The woman’s daughter brought her family over and they were so happy to meet me. I enjoyed meeting them as well but it was good to be alone in my room after the daughter and her family had left.

     I spent several months with the elderly woman and her husband. I played with the daughter’s children when they visited and we became good friends. But one day, things didn't seem quite right. People were hurrying around and they told me to stay out of the way. Then I was sent to my room.

     Several hours later, the daughter of the elderly woman came and took me to her house. I knew I would be living there from now on because she took all my things with us.

     I got a very small room in my new home since there were four others living there as well. They also had a cat, who I enjoyed chasing around the house although he didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as I did.

     I liked my life in my new home. My family all loved me. The elderly woman and her husband came to visit me several times a month but their visits gradually became further and further apart until the husband’s visits ceased altogether. The elderly woman still came until about a year ago when her visits ceased as well. Nobody told me but I suspect they died.

      It’s been four years now since I moved to my new home. I am now five years old. Of course, that’s middle age for a cat. In human years I would be about 37 years old. 

How to set the table in Australia

Do you ever get tired of seeing half-filled glasses of water on the table, especially when they're all right side up? Learn how they do it in Australia!

1.) Cover the top of a glass of water with a thick piece of paper.

2.) Hold it in place and quickly flip the glass upside down and set it on the table.

3.) Very slowly remove the paper. Done!

How to set the table in Australia

How to make a dead leg

Dead legs are one of those rare decorations that go well with just about anything. They look great sticking out from a desk, a dumpster, a car, or whatever you want.

     To make a dead leg, stuff an old sock with paper. Cut off a pant leg and cover the sock with it. Stick it in a shoe. Duct tape the whole thing together. 

 Done. 

Dead legs are one of those rare decorations that go anywhere.

The Returning Tennis Ball Trick

You (holding a tennis ball): “I am going to throw this ordinary tennis ball very hard. Just as you would expect, it will leave my hand with great speed. But then, in mid air, it will stop, reverse direction, and then return directly to my hand!”

     Smile mysteriously, wind up with great effort…and throw it straight up into the air.

New computer mouse exercise program!

Did you know that you have to exercise your computer mouse every year? This can be a very expensive and time-consuming thing to do. But it is easy to do with my new mouse exercise program. Just drag the lowercase "g" to the uppercase "W" below:

Wow, you will believe anything