A few weeks ago I got a Samsung camera, it was £79.97 but had a £10 discount, for some reason. I got it mainly for taking videos to put on here and Youtube. Tomorrow is my 11th birthday!!! (the 27th of November) And tonight I am going out to my friend's house with my mum to a "Pampered Chef" thing, with kitchen neccestitys for sale! I can't wait to see my best friends.
The other day we all went for an afternoon walk, and there was lotsss of flooding!! We all eventualy got soaked, and by the time I got back to the car, but feet felt numb, as I was wearing canvas white (but are now gray, ) and water soaked in easily.
This is what mostly all the paths were like...It was not very deep at all, only roughly about 2 inches.
This is the lake. :)
You know what little brothers are like, and this is what my cute little (nearly 2 yr old) brother has been doing.
then the freezer bags, I doen't know how he managed to get it!!!
And I was helping my in the kitchen and I heard this rustling in the bathroom and then, what a waste of freezer bags!!!
I also promised my good blogger friend (ALadyBug) a photo of my new budgie, Tommy.
The other day (Wensday, I think) mum and my other siblings went for a walk at Peatland's Park, a place with acres of bog land, and lots of ducks! Here are some photos - enjoy!
Some fungi
My littlest brother!
Here is a dragonfly that landed on a bogland sign post.
This is part of the bogland walk, you can't see much of the boggy parts in this photo.
We also fed the ducks some left-over crusts - fun!
NOTE: it is easier to comment on this post if you go here: CIRCLE C RANCH
Do you know what a roundup is? Well, the simple definition is: an activity where you gather up the livestock (either cattle or horses) so you can brand them, count them, and sell them. In this post, I'll talk about branding the new calves.
On the Circle C, the cattle are usually rounded up in the spring, so the new calves can get branded. Ouch! First off, the ranch hands have to separate all those babies from their mothers. The calves don't like it much (and neither do the mama cows). There is so much noise you can't think straight. Cows mooing, calves bellowing. But it's exciting.
Once the calves for that day have been sorted out, the ranch hands rope the calves (their back legs) and drag them to the fire. Yep, a fire is going out in the open. Once the calf is being held down good and tight, a ranch hand takes the branding iron (a metal rod with our ranch's brand on the end: A "C" with a circle around it), makes sure it's good and hot from sitting in the fire, and then pushes the hot iron into the calf's backside.
It smells terrible, but it doesn't hurt the calf as much as I used to think. They've got thick hides.
Then, quick as a wink, that little calf is let up, and off he races--you wouldn't know he'd even been branded--back to his mama. But how he can tell which cow is HIS mother I've not figured out yet. When there are hundreds and hundreds of cows standing around bawling, they all look alike to me.
So, why go to all this trouble once--or maybe even twice--a year? A burned mark in the cow's hide is the only way to tell who it belongs to. There aren't any fences way out on the thousands of acres of rangeland, and sometimes all the ranchers' cattle get mixed in together. But that's OK. Come fall roundup, the ranchers sort everybody's cattle out and give them back.
Branding also discourages rustlers from being too brave. If somebody is caught with a cow, one look at the brand will let the sheriff know who the cow really belongs to. This also works well with horses. And since horse-stealing is a hanging offense, it keeps most horse thieves either honest or very, very careful about which horses they try to steal.
Here is a sample of some different types of branding irons and the "mark" they made when burned into livestock:
Okay, this is not my birthday, it is my brothers'! He is 13 years old today. It is actually quite funny, the way my two older brothers and my dads birthdays work out. Today is Monday, which is Caleb's b-day. Then Ariels b-day is exactly a week after his one! AJ will be 15. And dads b-day is in October, too!
If you would like to say happy birthday to him, he has a blog (that he hardly goes on anymore!) you can leave a comment. He is on my friends list, his username is cucmber.
I found this on the internet while researching Dime Novels of the 19th century. Poor "Johnny" has been the subject of many debates the last couple of centuries. [note the date of the article}
WHAT DOES JOHNNY READ? (from The Little Corporal, January 1872, p. 34)
"Oh, every thing," says his father, proudly. "Johnny is a perfect book-worm, and we just have to drive him away from his book."
Sorry to hear it, master Johnny; a live boy has no business to be a book-worm. It is no more a sign of a smart boy to be a great reader than it is of a strong man to be a great eater. One may read too much as well as eat too much, and the brain as well as the stomach be loaded with undigested food that is only an injury to it. It is not what you eat, but what you digest, that makes you strong. It is not the food in your stomach, but the food taken up by the wonderful machinery of your body and made over into blood, and bone, and nerve, and sinew, that keeps up the daily growth of your body and builds you up into a man. And just so the food which you give your mind must be taken up and worked over, and become part of the mind itself, or it is good for nothing. If it has no nutrition in it, nothing to make new thoughts and new ideas, if it can not give something to the mind, or waken something in it, then it is chaff, rubbish, poison, any thing but food. Half a dozen lines of the right sort, read in the right way, are worth volumes of trash, or even of good sense carelessly read and then forgotten.
Do n't throw away your books, Johnny, but learn to go through them as the miner goes through his panful of sand and quartz, watching for the gleam of gold, and carefully picking out the precious bits.
And we should like to say to Johnny's father and mother, do not rest satisfied while your boy "reads every thing." It is a direful day for you if you have neglected to direct and cultivate his taste until he has come to be a mere devourer of the stories of wild, improbable adventure and exciting fiction, which is poured out like a flood for the destruction of our boys; but even yet you can do something to counteract the evil if you are willing to work for it--by taking your child with you into the fields of art, of history, and of science, which may be made as charming to the unfolding mind as the regions of romance.
I love to read Dime Novels! For one thing, they are full of excitement, Indian scalpings, captured settlers, adventurers, and all-around colorful places. The trouble is, most teachers and parents (like my mother) think Dime Novels are trashy. They don't contribute at all to kids' literary skills, so it's hard to get away with reading one. (Even though I tried to tell her that all sorts of adults and famous people read Dime novels . . . . like President Lincoln).
Mostly, my mother would prefer I read books like Robinson Crusoe and Little Women. I don't have anything against reading about a fellow marooned on a desert island, but he doesn't have anybody to talk to until his man Friday comes along. And I liked Little Women the first time I read it, but one time is definitely enough. (I told Mother that Louisa May Alcott wrote dime novels, but I don't think she believed me. But it's true!)
When I found one of Mitch's dime novels lying around, I snatched it up right away! I mean, with a title like Crack Skull Bob and an Indian fight on the cover, how can you go wrong? I sweet-talked Mitch into letting me read it, and when Mother saw me curled up on the settee, she just shook her head and sighed. I guess that means I can keep reading it. And a good thing, too! I was just getting to the part where the Indian was getting ready to scalp the settler, and I would have died if Mother had taken it away.
They call these paperback books "Dime Novels" because they cost a dime to buy. Mitch has a whole slew of them--he likes to read these kinds of books. Justin, he doesn't read anything but his law books and the newspaper. Chad . . . well, I don't think he likes to read at all. But Melinda and I? We both like Dime Novels.
But Mitch warned me not to ever, ever, ever take it to school. The schoolmaster will snatch it right out of my hands and tear it up in front of me. Then I'll probably get stuck writing a thousand sentences about only reading books that improve my mind. I want to read books that improve my imagination!
If you want to learn more about the famous Dime Novels of the late 1800s and early 1900s, go here: DIME NOVELS
Tomorrow is my 11th birthday!!! (the 27th of November) 
And tonight I am going out to my friend's house with my mum to a "Pampered Chef" thing, with kitchen neccestitys for sale! I can't wait to see my best friends. 
) and water soaked in easily. 
I love to read Dime Novels! For one thing, they are full of excitement, Indian scalpings, captured settlers, adventurers, and all-around colorful places. The trouble is, most teachers and parents (like my mother) think Dime Novels are trashy. They don't contribute at all to kids' literary skills, so it's hard to get away with reading one. (Even though I tried to tell her that all sorts of adults and famous people read Dime novels . . . . like President Lincoln).