February Quiz Tournament

This quiz tournament did not go as well as the last.  I was not ready for the tournament and it turned out that nobody else on the team was as well.  Jared was the only quizzer on the all-tournament team from our church in the experienced division and rightfully so.  We lost our first quiz 100 to -45, won our second quiz, and lost our third.  We had one experienced team and one intermediate from our church.  Both teams took second.  We are putting this tournament behind us and looking forward to the next tournament.

South Dakota Trip Days 2 and 3

I did not mention in my last blog post who all came on this trip.  Those that were involved in the crime were Bro. and Sis. Dennis Sletten, Jason and Shawna Sletten and thier daughters Leesha, Taneil, Jaylynn, Germain, and Myka, Bro. and Sis. Landers and there daughter Rachel, Sis. Wendy and her two sons Preston and Garret, Guy Pearson, Clarissa Pearson, Jim and Misty Pearson and their two kids Brian and Kaya.  It was very interesting and sometimes scary.  It is fun to be out of control going down the side of a mountain with the only things to stop you are other people and trees.  Day 3 was a much better day than day 2 except what happened at the end.  There was a minor or major knee injury that happened to Taneil, we do not know yet.  Skiing actually turned out to be pretty fun and I hope that I will be able to go again sometime. 

South Dakota Trip Day 1

I am not sure if I will be posting everyday that I am down here, but I was bored so I will write this post.  We travel the seven hours plus stops down here to Spearfish, South Dakota.  We had great adventure which included someone locking their keys outside inside the car.  This person will remain anonymous.  We got in around 5:15 which is including the hour change that we gained.  Tomorrow we are going to be leaving around 7:00 in the morning to travel to somewhere around Leads which is in the Black Hills of South Dakota to ski.  This is my first time attempting to ski and very well could be my last.  I will try to write again tomorrow.

~Jonathan

Recapitulation Time

  Friday night we had our first Quiz Tournament of the year.  It turned out to be quite exciting with lots of competition.  Our church had two experienced teams and one intermediate team.  Jared and Preston were Minot and Clarissa and I were Minot two. Our intermediate team consisted of Garret, Anthony, and Guy. 

  In the experienced division all the quizzes but two were good close quizzes.  Minot 1 lost their first quiz to Bismarck 2 on question 20 and Minot 2 lost their first quiz to Bismark 2 on question 12 (or something like that) I accomplished the task of quizzing erring out that quiz.  Both teams had to move the problem was only one team from would literally be able to.  It was the battle of minds, brothers, cousins, and pride.  Minot 2 was able to pull it out.  Minot 2 moved on and quizzed Bismarck 2, I got question 19 right which sealed the quiz.  It is now Bismark 1 versus Minot 2.  I was able to quiz out on question 19 to ice the quiz.  We had to play again.  This time it would be just as close.  When question 16 rolled around I already had seven correct but our team only had a 20 point lead.  Our team called a timeout, the quiz was seemingly over because I had to many correct.  Question 16 went to Bismarck, question 17 I interrupted on accident (I was trying to hit it on the last word and get it incorrect so that they would not be able to answer it) gave the wrong information on purpose to throw them off, it almost worked.  We are now going into the thirty point questions down by thirty and both teams top quizzer with seven correct.  London, Bismarck's top quizzer, quizzed out on question 18.  There are now two question left we are down by 70 points and there is hope.  We had to let Clarissa get question 19 and then I would be able to get question 20 and force overtime.  Clarissa hit the buzzer on question 19 and would have been correct if she would have been able to remember the reference before time ran out.  I got question 20 wrong anyways.  The question was "which two word phrase ends which two consecutive verses of chapter three and begins which verse of chapter two?"  It was a very interesting question, which I now know the answer to. 

  I didn't watch the intermediate team quiz much but they did finish in first place.  I must give them a big CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

Wowser!

  You probably remember the post that I wrote around Christmas time of how bad of a storm we were receiving.  We are receiving another one of those types of storms; however, it is not as bad.  We are home bound, listening to XM radio, and feeling rather lazy.  The best news that came out of this whole ordeal was Bible Quiz Practice was canceled today.  The bad news is our Quiz Tournament is Friday.   In the picture below you can see a dark spot to the left of the house and just before the third telephone pole down, it is a car.  Some brilliant person, probably a native of Mississippi or Arkansas, thought they could make it through a snow drift.  They probably had four wheel drive and was feeling the kind of adventurous feeling you feel when you jump a clothesline.  When they were coming upon the snow drift they probably realized that the snow drift was bigger than their car, but then they remembered that they had four wheel drive.  The brilliant person probably put it in four low and took a plunge.  They are probably at home realizing that they might not be able to get their car back again until the winter in North Dakota has passed.  They got stuck yesterday before the toughest part of the storm came.  I wish this person the best of luck.

  The next picture that I am going to show is a picture of our gym door.  It has not done such a good job of keeping that snow on the outside instead of the inside.  We would fire the door but we are in the middle of winter and realize we must wait till summer before we do anything about this problem.  When summer comes we probably will forget about the whole scenario and the door we keep on making its millions.  The good news in this situation is the door is not next to the basketball hoop.

 

  One more thing that I am going to say in this long post.  Jared took today off school because of the storm, I already had the day off because I live in a free country and with my parents permission choose to go to school four days a week just like I did it when I went to a christian school in Oregon.  Jared must feel honored to be paying for school and taking days off at the same time, but if he does not go to school tomorrow then there will be a petition thrown by the home school students of this home school.  Let us all hope and pray that if this does happen the educators will grant the petition and we will once again be able to listen to XM radio and not accomplish very much work.

~Jonathan

Nothing Much

There really has not been anything of interest that has happened over the last week in a half.  Quizzing has started, school has resumed for all of the us kids, and the pace in life has started to pick up again.  Probably the most interesting thing that happened was last Saturday.  Here at our church we have a thriving bus ministry.  One of the kids on the bus after Sunday School on the 3rd had a seizure and died. Last Saturday was the funeral, he was only 10.  It was held at our church and around 200 people came.  Other than that it has been life as normal. 

Youth Retreat 09'

It was great!  Bro. Chuck Coburn from Orlando, Florida was our speaker and he did a phenomenal job.  He was a great basketball player, ping pong player, beat boxer, and, I almost forgot, great preacher.  There was a challenge issued for someone to beat him in ping pong after he pretty much beat everyone there including myself. On the last day I was able to pull of the upset.  Later on that day we played some basketball.  The big game was between the campers and the staff.  After Bro. Coburn missed a game winning three and the campers won, my Youth Retreat was awesome.   The services were awesome.  Bro. Coburn had a great testimony of how he got into the church after being recruited by the UNC baseball team.  He went on to backslide and be a drug dealer.  After getting busted and surviving a few scares he was able to get back into the church.  I am sorry that I didn't take any pictures.  My brother took a couple though, so here you are.

Happy New Years

I stayed up way past midnight, matter in fact it is 6:23 as I am starting to write this post. This fact I will not be happy about when I wake up this afternoon with half the day gone. Right now I have a couple of friends over and they have been playing video games both on the computer and on the 360. Finally given the chance to get on the computer I took advantage. As soon as I get back off the computer my friend will regain his position in playing video games for the rest of the morning. We had a good "Wash Night Service" my dad spoke on sleeping, which sounds pretty good right now.  I hope you are all enjoying your sleep.  I was at Youth Retreat between the 27th- 30th and was not able to post anything.  My friend is having withdrawals from his video game so I must end this post.  Happy New Year everyone!

Christmas 09

We had a great Christmas.  We definitely missed not having the opportunity to enjoy this Christmas with our extended family, but nonetheless it was great.  Jessica's job was waking everybody up early in the morning to open gifts.  By her standards she did a great job, she woke us all up before 10 o'clock.  After the gifts were opened we had breakfast and a few hours later dinner.  Once all that was pretty much settled in our stomachs my dad and I played a few games on one-on-one to work it all off.  Jared has been battling a little bit with his knee lately so he was not able to play.  After that we wasted the last few hours of the day and went to bed.  This was our Christmas.

A White Christmas

How many times have your heard the song that contains the words "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas"?  How many times have you said the words "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas"?  How many times have you had a white Christmas?  This is what our Christmas looked liked

You may be thinking "Whats so special about that?  You live in North Dakota."  What is so special about this is the fact that visibility is less that a quarter mile.  According to our mathematical calculations it would be around 400-800 feet.  All you see there is the church parking lot, nothing more.  Here is a picture with snow, but pretty much full visibility

Now that you can see the difference I must say that it is actually quite amazing and awesome.  This is what makes Christmas memories.  This is the opportunity to play more basketball, eat more food, and listen to more XM radio.  I totally forgot to answer the question that someone earlier asked about us being able to listen to the XM radio.  The answer after much suspense and delay is YES!  It has been a staple so for this winter.

Merry Christmas

Right now I am sleeping, or at least hope that I am sleeping.  I scheduled this post so that I could be the first to wish you Merry Christmas on the day of Christmas.  You may have woke up and a family member told you "Merry Christmas" but I still said Merry Christmas first.  I hope you all have safe and Merry Christmas.  Hopefully all of you that are out west are able to get a little bit of snow.  Perhaps this could happen on the first week after Christmas Break so you can get a few days of school.  But through all the hustling and bustling remember who made this all possible.  Remember who came to this earth and sacrificed his life so that we could have the opportunity that we have today.  MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Just a Little Something

Here is a picture of some Norwegian cookies that a lady in our church gave us.  They look very intriguing.  I have not yet tried one, but if they taste as good as they look than I hope she makes some more.

On an entirely different subject, I though you all might want to know what our entry way into our house looks like.  The only way for it to look like this was for us three boys men to go outside and freeze ourselves until we started to turn blue and then come back inside and feel the warmth upon our frozen bodies which hurt like getting poked with needles.  Nonetheless the work needed to get done and is done.  Here is the picture...

Update

Earlier today when I walked out side and took those pictures it was around 24 degrees and it felt like it was over 30, it was warm.  Now, just a couple of hours later, the temperature is 19 degrees and the wind chill has it marked down to 4.  Visibility is just over a mile, we will still be having church tonight.  In some parts of the parking lot you can actually see the blacktop, not a good thing, because the snow is getting blown around so much.  It is actually a pretty cool site to see.  Hopefully, we are not home bound the next few days.  We have a Youth Retreat starting on Sunday and we have to drive a couple of hours to get to it.  It would be a terrible thing if that was canceled.

It's Here

I am obviously not talking about Christmas for that is still a day and a half away.  I couldn't be talking about Christmas Eve because that is half a day away.  I could be talking about December 23rd, but I am not.  How about the mailman?  Well he just left a couple of seconds ago, so I could have been talking about him.  But with a logical conclusion I am not.  Has anyone seen the news headlines lately?  They probably said that snowstorms were hitting the west and the mid-west.  To all of you out west, even though North Dakota is east of you we are still in the mid-west.  Matter in fact here is a link to the article that I saw on the front page of Yahoo.  For us in North Dakota it has arrived and will keep on arriving.  It is sort of like the gift that keeps on giving.  Once the snow starts to melt then we get flood, TERRIFIC!  Or maybe I should say horrific, I don't know.  But none the less I braved the snowstorms and took a couple of pictures which may not excite you at all.  Here they are

These are deer footprints in the snow

Thank YOU!

We would like to thank you all for coming to our blog.  We would like to give an extra special thank you to Sis. Cheri Witmer for all the comments she has left.  We really do appreciate your thoughts via comments.  Thank you all for coming!

Goofin' Around

  The worst thing about Christmas Break is all the excess time that you have on your hands.  Not that I don't enjoy that fact because you sure can dispense of this time by doing bible quizzing, playing Xbox, being lazy, or possibly even playing a game with the family.  Last night we started a game of rook around 9:00 pm and got done with the same stinkin' game around mid-night.  If you looked at the score sheet you probably would have been surprised by how many times the game could have been over.  My dad and I won by scrapping for every single point possible.  On the winning hand if we would have lost another five points we would have gone set and played another hour.  But instead we were able to overcome the fact that we did not have the rook and the trump black one was captured with the rook.  This is simply Christmas Break.  Not many other times during the year would I tell you about a rook game, but this just happens to be the time.  When we finally accomplished the feat of finishing the game we looked outside and the ground was covered with a sheet of snow.  I hear that supposedly we are going to have a blizzard sometime this week before Christmas.  With the thought that we might be going to the mall pretty soon I must end this post, probably to your delight.  I have said it before and will say it again, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Christmas Party

We had our home school Christmas Party Friday and as you can see these are the pictures.  We had a great time and the fact that Christmas Break is here is really settling in very nice.

Gingerbread House

It is that time, or maybe I should say past that time of the month when all gingerbread houses need to be made.  Jessica and my mother accomplished the job last night.  This was also the night that their was a five part Johnny Dollar series, but that is a different subject.  They did a great job and I took a couple of pictures to commemorate the moment.  Here they are...

 

 

Something Interesting

Yesterday there was a surprise for us all, Jessica won a coloring contest.  We went to a restaurant called "Badlands" and Jessica entered the picture that she colored in a drawing contest.  Now she can go to "Badlands" and eat for free, one meal that is.  I do not have a picture of the picture that she colored.  Sorry!  I do have a picture of this up north and to your right though.  Everyone is making that last second phone call, getting Christmas gifts, and in the midst of all that getting a picture together.  Hope you all have a blessed Christmas - or as the stores say it "Happy Holidays"!

Christmas Program

In the midst of the cold, hustling and bustling we had our Christmas Program last Sunday.  It went great!  In the picture on the top and to the left you can see my dad and sister all dressed up for church, something I didn't do.  Due to the fact that we were having our Christmas Drama we did not have to dress up for church.  In the second picture  to your right you can see Jessica and the many other Sunday School kids performing their performance.  They did a fantastic job singing "Joy to the World" and giving us the legend of the candy cane.  I would say history but as we all should know a legend could very easily be a myth so it possibly could be inaccurate to call this the history of the candy cane.  After all the kids were done performing they thought that it would be a nice time for the youth and adults to perform their drama.  We could and probably should end this post here, but I must go on.  On the third picture to your left you can see Jared playing the role of Joseph.  Every boy has to play that role at least once in his life just to build memories it seems.  Jared did a fine job, I would expend some more time on him but I think you all know what Joseph does in every single Christmas play.  One thing that was different in this play unlike a lot of other plays was the fact that there was a lot of music (they are holding mics in the picture because they are singing).  Next, we come to the role that I played in this play.  I also was a husband, except my wife was bossy.  I am trying to sleep and she come and tells me to get up and get to work.  In the bottom left picture you see me talking with a friend about how we always are getting told to get up and get to work.  The play turned out great. It never ceases to amaze me how you can go through practice for one of those things and everyone will be goofing off and having a grand old time, but then the Saturday before the play when you have your big practice they all settle down and you are able to get it all together.  This year I had to wonder whether or not it was all gonna come together but in the end it was fantastic.

Merry Christmas everyone!

~Jonathan