Rain, Rain Go Away...

Here is a little poem that I composed myself...

Rain, rain go away,

Please don't come another day

I don't like rainy days

Rain, rain go away.

Actually, I do like the rain. However, not at six o clock in the morning in the unreasonable cold. Especially when the road is frozen over and you are trying to walk uphill to the bus stop and you're already late. Not that it happened to me this morning or anything...

This post is about

Silver!!

In the summer I LOVE the rain. Like, a lot. My favorite thing to do is to put some old clothes on and go run around in it.

Yes, that is me and
yes, I am dancing and
yes, it is raining.

In the winter it is not very welcome. It makes the snow gross and melty, and to top it off it is really, really, cold. (especially at the ungodly hour of the morning that I am required to get up at)

There is something wrong with this picture...
Photo Courtesy of Panoramio

Despite all of the obvious downsides, I actually enjoy my morning walks. (but only when an imaginary kidnapper isn't following me.) 

I love my morning walks because I get to see the stars and the silver moon.  Most days the moon is so bright that I don't even need a flashlight to walk to the bus! It is really nice to have something pretty to look at.

In case you didn't know stargazing is one of my favorite pastimes. I just think that stars are so pretty!

Aren't they just gorgeous???
Photo Courtesy of Higher Perspective

Shooting stars are, of course, my favorite. No matter how times I see it, I still don't ever get tired of them.

One time we were camping  and it was really warm out so we left the tent coverings off. My mom and I couldn't sleep so we stayed up watching the stars.

I started to wonder, if there are so many stars in the universe which ones can we see?  It turns out that this very night you can go out and see lots of famous and cool things, not just stars.

For example, tonight you can see not only many famous constellations such as the Big Dipper, but you can also see a planet! That's right tonight the planet Jupiter is visible from Utah (don't worry I looked this up).  Other cool stuff you can see includes the Andromeda Galaxy

Does this picture look familiar or is that just me??
Photo Courtesy of Wiki

Also visible are many star clusters and large stars, such as the Pleiades aka. the Seven Sisters

Seven Sisters? More like ten million!
Photo Courtesy of Starry Skies

Well this post was supposed to be about rain, that was kind of a bust. I am too lazy to change the title. And for my three readers, hopefully I inspired you to do some stargazing in the near future!

A Warrior's World

Red

I might be going to Africa this summer!
Several summers ago my parents went to Kenya to do volunteer work.

Elders of the Maasai tribe

This summer my mom is thinking about taking me there, to work in an orphanage. She started telling me about the things that they did and saw while they were there. I looked up some things to help me get a better idea of what it was going to be like. Red is a color for Kenya.




The Maasai people are a classic symbol of Africa. This is largely due to the fact that they have worked hard to keep their culture free of influence from the Western world. The Maasai warriors in particular continue to hunt and do their tribal rituals.

Maasai Warriors doing a tribal dance
Photo and information above and below courtesy of Kenya Information

The Maasai still wear tribal clothes of red cloth and many beads and pieces of jewelry. They also still perform special rituals, rites of passage, live in traditional houses, and farm and hunt their own food.

Children in front of their house

My parents got a chance to meet the Maasai people, learn about their culture, and to spend time with them while they were in Africa. 

Children in the Mission School courtyard

But red isn't only for the Maasai...

My mom worked in a school in Nakuru, Kenya, sponsored by an American organization called Kenya Partners.  There, she and a group of doctors and health care workers were able to work and spend time with kids and teachers.  

While she was there she worked with kids who have health issues, but also other stuff like anxiety.  She also spent a lot of time teaching the teachers, how to counsel and help the kids, how to recognize problems earlier, and about discipline methods that don't involve caning children. 

Squatter's Hill Preschool

Preschooler in her red school uniform

The school is home to about 700 kids, many of them orphans.  It is where I will be working if we go. It is an interesting place where the children are well cared for, happy, and grateful for all they get. There is a preschool, a grade school, and a high school at the school, and another preschool in the poor part of the city of Nakuru, called Squatter's Hill.  I get to help in the preschool, and work with the kids, while my mom is working with the teachers.  

Kenya Partners also has a health clinic I can work in if I want to.  It is where my dad worked in while he was there.  He spent his time in the clinic developing tests to see if people had diseases, then he tested methods with the patients seen there. The clinic is where the people in the community go if they are sick or hurt. It has a dirt floor except for in the exam rooms, windows but no glass, limited electricity, temporary waiting areas, and is very crowded. If I go, I won't be doing anything exciting, just checking people in, holding babies, and making them more comfortable.

The possibility of going to Kenya is really exciting. I love the idea of helping people, especially little kids.  I think I might want to do work for a service organization when I am older and I hope this trip will help me better understand what that would be like.  I actually was first inspired to go on a service trip by the movie Soul Surfer. As silly as it sounds, the part during the movie when the main character is playing with the little boy in the water and helping him trust it again after the tsunami made me realize that maybe I wanted to do something like that.

Thinking of taking on such a big journey makes me realize that I am also really quite nervous about even going.  It seems like the Maasai and the children I would be working with have lives that are so different from ours.  They are orphans and most own only their clothes and school supplies.  They don't always have a place to go when school is out and they only have a hope that with education they can have a better life.  According to my mother it is a very difficult place to go because it is hard to see that some people have so little when we have so much. It's also beautiful to see that people can thrive and be happy with what they have.

I have to admit, one of the cool things about working with Kenya Partners is that they say thank you to volunteers by taking them on a safari for their last day in Kenya.  We may go to a Maasai village and national park in the Maasai Mara, or stay in Nakuru.  I'm pretty sure I don't care where I go, because it should be amazing!  There are no "red" animals, but lots of beautiful ones like rhinos, elephants, and giraffes.

I am really hopeful that I will get to go to Kenya.  I really want to learn from the experience. I love kids more than anything. I hope that I have something to offer them too. I get to explore a new country, and new continent, and a new culture.
It will be a Red Letter Day.

Winter, Water, and Whales

Maybe I should have included this part of my trip in my last post because there was an awful lot of sand. I didn't, so here it is...


GREY

After our adventures in Death Valley my family and I drove up the coast into Oregon.  We rented a beach house in a place called Brookings. It was beautiful because the house was on the corner of a river and the ocean.

The front porch of our house

Since it is winter, most of the time we were there the landscape was quite grey and cold. When we walked down to the beach, the water was grey. When you looked at the sky, it was grey.

One day we were on a beach that was a short drive from our house. As I was looking out at the ocean I saw a large spray of water far off in the distance. For a second I thought I was going crazy, but then I saw another one. When another one came up I pointed it out to my family. Soon we realized that these were whale spouts.

This was totally worth the cold and windy walk.  We were soon off, looking for a better place to see the spouts more clearly. When we reached a parking lot on top of a cliff we stopped, only to find that it was already occupied with several people armed with binoculars and very heavy duty cameras. They told us that the whales that we were seeing were grey whales.

Watching Whales at Harris Beach State Park

We sat up there with them for hours. Whenever a whale came up everyone would cheer a little. I wish I could have taken a picture of them, but they were too far away for our camera.  However, I can describe what I saw through binoculars, because it was really incredible.

As well as a spout, the whale crests the water, so you see his back skimming the water.  If you are lucky, he jumps a little and then a tail comes flipping out of the water to splash down. This scene played out once or twice every fifteen minutes and the rest of the time we stared at the horizon, looking for more.

Breaching Whale
Photo Courtesy of Rogue River

The next day we decided to try another place that was even higher up. To get to this one you had to hike out a bit.  The whales were there again!

I received a pamphlet from one of the ladies at the first place telling me about migration patterns of whales and such.

I found that the whales can be seen on the coast of Oregon almost all year round.  They feed in Oregon and Alaska in the summer and fall. In early December the entire grey whale population goes south to Mexico and southern California.  Migration reaches its peak around the first week in January (that is when we were there).  Then around late February they start heading back up to Oregon and Alaska again.

Around another corner there seemed to be another surprise. As we were walking we heard a noise, it sounded like a strange mix of someone laughing and a dog barking.

The famous Harris Beach sea lions
Photo Courtesy of Harris Beach State Park

We looked out towards the water and couldn't see anything except for some rocks. We took out our binoculars and looked again. There was one rock that had a couple dozen things on it that looked suspiciously like logs, except they were moving. I realized that we had found the beach's famous sea lions! We walked over a hill and the sea lions were so loud that I could still hear them all of the way back to the car!

It was so cool to walk up and down the beach watching the grey whales, in the grey water, under a grey sky.

Beach at Harris State Park

Sands and Sunrises

 Sand, yes that is a color


Please bear with me while I explain what I have been up to.


On Christmas Day I flew with my family to Las Vegas and we drove to Death Valley

When we left Las Vegas we had to drive for 2 hours through a desert with no sign of civilization except for some correctional facility in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada.

Have you ever been to

Photo courtesy of MB Post

If you have then you know that it's in the middle of nothing, nowhere, surrounded by even less, but it is the color of sand... everywhere...

My footprints.. Death Valley National Park, 12/26/14

even at night...

 Mosaic Canyon., at night, 12/25/14

This post is about sand because from the moment we left the city of Las Vegas to about three hours after we left Death Valley that is all there was to see.

But it's really not that bad.  It turns out sand can be fun.  We spent a lot of time walking  in it, up it, rolling down it, and enjoying the sun rise over it.

I know it sounds kind of desolate and lonely out there but it can be gorgeous, fun, and was a really cool place to visit.

I expected the entire place to be covered in sand, it is the desert after all, however I was surprised to learn that it had more rocks and plants than sand!

We wanted to see at least some sand dunes. We decided the best time to see the dunes would be at sunrise (I don't think I agreed to this).  We trudged out of bed at 6:00 AM, in the unseasonalably and unreasonably cold morning.  Despite the early wakeup, I would recommend this to anyone.  It was incredible!

Worth it right????

I wanted to know why there weren't a lot of sand dunes. I did some research and it turns out less than one percent of the desert in Death Valley is covered in sand dunes.  There has to be a certain environment for sand dunes to form.  The recipe is sand, wind, and a place for the sand to collect.  The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes are the most popular dunes in the park and its easy to see why.  Some of the dunes rise to about 100 feet, and they run across a wide area and seem like they go on forever, with mountains on all sides.
It turns out that there are three types of dunes in the Mesquite Dunes area, (who knew more than one existed?) which is apparently and ancient lakebed.
Crescent dunes are wide and form under winds that blow from one direction.  They also move more quickly over the desert than any other dune.  We saw many crescents, but sadly, did not actually photograph one.  They were great for sledding and rolling down.

Linear dunes are the next variety. They are straight and long sand ridges that run forever in a line.  It forms as the result of wind coming from more than one direction and can extend for miles, and  were really hard to walk on without starting mini avalanches along the way.

Crossing linear dune in Death Valley

There are also star dunes. They are sand dunes with a steep side in three or more directions off of a center point.  They grow up instead of out to the sides, and tend to be tall and on the edges of the dunes.

Since I didn't know at the time that there were more than one kind of dune I didn't know what I was looking at until afterwards, so sadly I don't know what types I saw.



When we left Death Valley, I thought my sand-colored adventures were over.  I was wrong.  A few days later, my dad and I were at a music store in Fort Bragg, California.

                           He picked up a balalaika, which is a Russian instrument. We ended up buying it and a music book to go with it. Needless to say I am obsessed and it is more my instrument now than his. (I fully intend to have learned it by the time I get home.)

My new obsession
photo courtesy of Accent Music

Happy New Year and here's to sand-colored vacations!

All I Want for Christmas...

It is officially Christmas season!!!!

This is one of my favorite times of the year! I love the snow, except we don't really have any right now.

All of the snow in my yard

             
I also love how cozy sitting in my warm house feels, curling up on the couch to watch a movie with a cup of hot cocoa. This season just feels comfortable!

Unfortunately with the Christmas season also comes the stress of buying gifts for everyone.

Feeling very stressed and hermit-like

I am really having issues with this. As I am writing down a list of people I want to get gifts for, I am slowly realizing that I want to give something to more people, too many, than I thought.  Maybe I should just cut myself off from everyone and become an anti-social hermit in the woods to save a little cash and a lot of stress. I can tell you that being broke during the Christmas season is very, very stressful.
 
                         



Anyway you probably aren't reading this to listen to me complain about all of my problems, so on to the point.

This post is about...

Green, which reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite movies.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, our family goes out into the woods and cuts down a Christmas tree for my Christian mother. It might sound a little weird and boring, but it is actually really fun.
Its a long standing tradition with a schedule.  First, the parents have to stand in a line for a permit (luckily, because it's at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday).  Then we choose a day and meet up in the mountains.  Every year for as long as I can remember, we have had friends come with us.

We all go out to breakfast (except not this year we went to lunch instead). We bring hot cocoa and tea and cookies and snacks for the hike to find a tree.  We have lots of gear, like sleds, snowshoes, and a saw or two.


While the adults go find a tree to cut down, all of the children go find a place to hang out. We bring sleds and find a hill and sled and play games all day.

Last year with our Christmas tree

One family of friends that come with us are known to always get the biggest tree that we are allowed to cut down. Because Bart is very picky about his trees and always gets lost in the woods trying to find a good one, we always know it will take forever to find him, and he always needs help getting his tree back to the car.

When we were little my brother made up a song about it to the tune of "The Bear Went Over the Mountain"
 It goes a little like this:

"Bart went over the mountain,
Bart went over the mountain,
Bart went over the mountainnnnn,                          
to get the biggest tree,
to get the biggest tree
Bart went over the mountain....

You get the point (I hope)

Despite the fact that we are Jewish it has always been a really fun tradition for us.


One thing that I have learned over the years is that finding something that is green and finding a good Christmas tree are not always the same thing.

Our skinny, little, no-branch tree

My Favorite Holiday

Hey everyone!

There are lots of things around this time of year that are orange.
Leaves,
      sunsets,

Yummy!!!!!
Photo Courtesy of Pillsbury

          sweet potatoes,
               and best of all pumpkin!
                     Pumpkin pie to be exact  :)









If you know me at all you will know that my one true love and passion is food. Given this information, I bet you then can easily guess what my favorite holiday is!

Yes reader, it's Thanksgiving.

Orange is my color of tradition.  Every year for Thanksgiving we have many traditions in my family.  I can tell you who will come to town, what we will do before, during and after dinner, and what we will eat.  I know who will tell bad jokes, who will get mad, and who will leave early because they are bored.  I LOVE this holiday!

My grandparents are a central part of my orange tradition.  For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have been at my house for Thanksgiving. They come in a week early from Pennsylvania and we go on a short trip somewhere to spend time together, and then...

Holiday Decorations
Photo Courtesy of Jan Coleman

It's time to prepare.
  We spend a whole day just setting up the table and getting ready to go! My grandma and I always decorate the house and table for dinner.
Well... I am making it sound too easy. However, this activity is far from it! When we pull down the big box of decorations from the attic everyone suddenly has an opinion. It's, "Oh, put this here" or "No! not there!" It's like the sheer number of decorations overwhelms us and we each feel the need to sell our opinion to everyone else. The goes on for quite some time, and but eventually someone gets their way (usually my grandmother) and we all agree it's a beautiful table.


A new tradition this year?  I helped my mom make pumpkin pie, not just turned the mixer on, but really did most of the work kind of help!  And to the amazement of all, those pies were fabulous (Just like me! Who knew!)!  Good for dessert, then breakfast, then snack, then dessert again!

Thanksgiving day is agonizing!  The adults, led by my grandmother, cook, and cook, and cook.  I can't stand the wait, and the fact that my mouth waters all day. Then our regulars start arriving, almost always in the same order, with hugs, smiles, and lots of laughter and conversation.  We have the coolest Thanksgiving crowd at our house. Some years there are lots of extra people and some years there aren't so many. We eat food and pie and talk until nine or ten.


Orange, my new substitute for Thanksgiving, is all about is remembering the people and things in life that are important. When I was little I would always get really excited because I got to eat lots of food, see my friends, and my grandparents would come. Now I realize that while all of those things are really fun and good, the holiday is about more than that. My grandma shows her love in her cooking, my grandpa tears up every time he says prayers at Thanksgiving dinner, and always makes me think about how much he loves us.  "The Murphy family meeting"  reminds everyone at our table of all the good things that happen, not just to us, but to everyone over the year.

What is the "The Murphy family meeting"?   Well, it isn't a meeting and we are not the Murphy family.  It did not start as our family tradition, but was brought to us by one of the people that comes to our house for Thanksgiving every year. We go around the table and everyone says what the coolest thing that they did in the year. It always has made me think of all the great things that I did and how grateful I am that those things happened. By the time it's my turn, I have relived my whole year of good things, and I am very thankful.

Once in a Blue Pool...

You guessed it, this post is about blue (It also may include something about me and the sport that has taken over my life).

When I think of blue I always think of swim and when I think of swim I always think of where I started and where I have gone.  I have been a competitive swimmer since I was seven and have spent at least three days a week at the pool since I was four.  My team is like my family and the building is practically my house.

Picture of my Second home
Courtesy of Park City Swimming

It's not really about blue, it's really about me. When I was little I had really bad anxiety. Most new things scared me; it was social stuff, talking, meeting new people, being alone, big groups, etc., and I distinctly remember my first day on the "junior team" as a turning point in how I understood myself.

It was terrifying to say the least. While everyone else got into the pool for tryouts I stood there clinging to my mom tears streaming down my face. My mom left me standing at the edge of the pool and walked away, telling me I could do it.  To give her some credit my mother was really trying to let me calm myself down enough to get into the pool.

I was about to just give up and leave when one of the coaches (some of you probably know him, bald head, loud voice, yells a lot?) came over and asked what was wrong.  When I couldn't talk, he smiled and said, " Why don't you come over here with me and we can practice a little bit?" He took me over to the other side of the pool, away from everyone and told me to do a couple of laps. After I had calmed down a bit he led me back over to the group and I jumped right into the pool for the rest of tryouts.

It was a true blue moment for me and the start of something great!

Me (age 7), with a friend, and some random photobombed at practice
Photo courtesy of my mother

Swimmers are a different breed.  They are about times, cuts, technique and of course, practice.  You have to really like something a lot to do it over and over and over and over, and over again.  But those repetitions have taught me something. No matter how hard or scary something may seem there is always a way to work through it if you are willing to keep going.  When I swim I don't have to think about where I am going, I spend time working through problems or vent my emotions into the water, I just swim and when I am done I feel so much better. Which is why every time I see that blue water I get the feeling that everything will be alright. Why is pool water blue anyway?


Have you ever wondered why water is blue? Well I know that water outside is blue because it reflects the sky, but why is pool water blue? The blue color is apparently a property of water, created by white light and colored wavelengths. It shows up at a certain depth in our perception (although I was unable to figure out just how deep you have to be to see blue.

Photo Courtesy of Brinvy

The deeper water is, the bluer it gets, the opposite is also true. The thinner water is the clearer it gets. Think about the difference between the ocean and a glass of water!

Photo Made by me via PicCollage

I found out that at about one hundred to two hundred meters under the ocean, blue becomes the only color in water,  because all other color wavelengths begin to fade away and a deep, rich, blue is left.

200 meters under
(Photo Courtesy of Scuba School)

I hope you enjoy blue as much as I do (hey that rhymes!). Blue has been an important color to me for a very long time. It is also my favorite color and reminds me of all my favorite places (ocean, pool, etc.).