Hey folks, 34 days until classes start!

This Summer has gone so fast, and it’s hard to believe that in a month I’ll be at ERAU.

I think I’m more excited about this school year and consequently the three after that than I have been about anything for awhile. Second to getting to fly helicopters every week, I think I’m looking forward to Army ROTC the most. I know it will be challenging but I really enjoy pushing myself physically, and I think it will be a great way to get to know people really well while learning some great skills. I’ve always liked backpacking/hiking/climbing, running, and shooting stuff, so it should be a good fit.

Once after spending two weeks building trails and backpacking in new mexico my crew spent the last day by getting up at 3:00am, and hiking over 7 mountains, and then making brownies 🙂 it worked out to about 32 miles, I don’t think I’ve ever slept better than I did that night, even though I was crunched up on a rock on the top of a mountain.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, we had a big family reunion, I played a couple of softball games, took a defensive driving class to dismiss a speeding ticket I got (what a way to spend a saturday) and spent almost a week at my grandma’s house with one of my cousins from Denver.

The softball team had our first big loss last week when I wasn’t there, so I guess I must not be completely useless out there. we have a couple tournament games tonight that should be fun, even though only 4 of us showed up for practice this week.

Spending a week at my grandma’s house was a really fun time, we played a lot of games, went fishing, and searched through some of the large collection of stuff my grandpa accumulated in his shed over his lifetime (he pretty much filled up a 50’X100’ steel building) He has boxes of books that were published well before 1900, several of them dating back to the early 1800’s and before, so it makes for some interesting reading.

My cousin Nate and I went up to my Uncle Gary’s Lake house one afternoon and spent a few hours out on the lake, I got some good wakeboarding time in,and Nate did some tubing, and then we just hung out for awhile.

                            
The next day we went fishing with my grandma, we were talking about it and realized it had been about 9 years since the last time the three of us had been fishing, it was kind of slow, but still fun.

Here’s Nate & Grandma with a couple Catfish and a Bass.
     

And then toward the end of the week Nate and I drove out to Lincoln, NE and I showed him around there a little and he got a few things from the university bookstore, then we got together for dinner with three of our other cousins. We didn’t have any idea how big of a deal it would be to our older relatives that family from our generation was getting together on our own without our parents or grandparents making us, they were extremely thrilled, so much so that grandma made copies of the picture we took and ended up giving a copy to each of our parents, and several other relatives.
                               Nate, Jamie, Me(Jonathan) Matt, & Dave

Now I just need to start doing some clothes shopping before I move down to Prescott, I just ripped the knee out of my favorite pair of jeans this morning 🙁

I’ll see you all soon!
PS: Aren’t we supposed to hear about roommates and all that pretty soon?

Hey guys, sorry I’ve been sitting around not writing anything in my blog recently, I have been kind of  busy for the last couple weeks with some good things and some not so fun things.

On the not awesome side, I went to Denver last week because my cousins mom died  ( in spite of what it sounds like, that’s not my aunt, because my uncle got remarried)
I really don’t mind funerals and I’ve been to quite a few, but it’s always worse when someone who’s barely over 50 just drops dead.

On a happier note things are starting to fall into place for this fall, I got my class schedule in the mail a few days ago, I have a morning flight block and I’m hoping I don’t have to fly at 5:30am too often,  I’m also going to get my class 1 medical done on July 3rd.
Another  fun thing that’s happening is that my softball team doesn’t totally suck this year, we have won the last two games and have another one tonight, so I’m really hoping we can keep this going.
Recently I’ve been resisting the urge to get a pet since I will be going to school so soon, I just really miss having animals around. I guess we still have a couple horses, but that’s not the same. Ever since I was four I’ve had at least a couple pets, some of my favorites have been…
Velcro the Hedgehog, my cat that got squished under the garage door when he was little and then recovered and became the nicest cat ever, and a lovebird I had that would spread his wings out and lay on his back on my chest while I watched movies.
My other favorite animal I’ve had, but that I can’t really call a pet, would be one of my raccoons.
A few years back a farmer I know brought a baby raccoon to us because his dog had killed the mother, so we raised it and then released him in the fall. for the last several years he’s come up every now and then and eaten the cat food.
That one’s name was Fuzzy, since then we’ve raised about 10 others. the one here is from last summer, her name is Lucy.

And while we’re on the animal photo thing, here’s one of my favorites of my sister’s old dog.

Moving on..
I just ordered A new joystick and throttle, and got a new copy of Microsoft flight simultor X, gold edition. I decided it was time to start that up again.

I remember reading a post a little while ago where someone was wondering about buying a mac or PC.  GET A MAC.
I just installed the parallels application on my macbook, you can get the software for $40 with a student discount (that’s 50% off) and it works like a dream, with parallels you can run windows easily at the same time that you are running OS X, and use any windows programs you may need (in my case pretty much just flight sim). If you get a mac, I recommend getting the iwork suite, it’s very useful.

That’s all for now, time to go finish moving my yard and getting ready for another softball game.

Hey everybody!
Summer is off to a good start, this last weekend I drove out to Omaha NE (about 5 hours away) to visit my old roommate and see him and a friend play Piano/Saxophone Jazz gig.
I ended up seeing pretty much everybody that I hung out with over this last school year so it was a very worthwhile trip, I will miss living with a crazy good jazz pianist and composer, although I’ll probably get a lot more sleep not having jam sessions in my room until 4:00am.
My other big experience of the weekend was that while I was there, I went to a sushi bar and tried some very strange things. The first thing I ordered was Uni, which is Sea urchin, and it came floating in this brown liquid, with a raw quail egg….it Turns out that even though sea urchin looks like a pickled human tongue and squishes in your mouth like caviar it’s really not that bad, but it was a nice ego boost to have the manager come over and tell me that I was one of  maybe 10 people who had ever been brave enough to order, much less finish it, honestly the raw egg was the hardest thing to get down. After that I Tried Octopus for the first time, nothing too eventful there.
Being inspired by awesome food I decided to make some sushi for a goodbye party tonight, and I think it turned out pretty well…
Nice huh?

After all that I went and had softball practice on a really muddy field, which gave me the idea that it would be fun to go mudding on some back roads, which was awesome, although I spent half an hour cleaning off Kate (My 4Runner)
Last weekend after helping out at a camp my friend Chance and I were on the way back home with these two sisters, one of them in each of our cars, and Ashley decided that she and Chance should go mudding, so about 10 minutes later I get a call asking if I have a tow rope,  Jordan and I go out and see what’s up, and manage to get stuck, and we had to call a friend with a tractor to come pull us out, Chance had his jeep in so deep that the doors wouldn’t open.
 Lesson learned…. Don’t bother trying to tow out other people who have 4wd and got stuck, it doesn’t work.

That’s all for now, later folks.