While trapped in our homes for the past 60 days my family took up a new hobby, kayaking. So once or twice a week we enjoy going to the park, river, or lake and just yakin’, but after a while the same old same old gets a little boring. In total we have four kayaks, two of which are extremely tippy, so this monday we brought the two tippy ones to the good ole Hay River. Now if you have ever been to this river you know that there is cow sh*t floating around in the water everywhere so you do not want to tip in. To make the day intresting we decided to play 500 but instead of kicking the ball and people catching it for points we would throw it into the water and my brothers would paddle to it and fight for the ball.

The first round was harmless….but the second one not so much. My youngest brother Tyler, took a paddle to the mouth with a hard wap after they crashed into eachother trying to grab the ball. Shortly after Tyler decided to use a fishing kayak as a paddleboard. Naturally, we tried to throw the ball at him and knock him into the poop water. Lets just say after many attempts he was hit in the back of the head and flew face first into the cow sh*t water.

Every since I can remember my grandpa has always raised bees during the summer. I am a huge fan of Bees, I think they are the prettiest animal out there and love to look at them. This summer I had the genius idea to walk down and look at them. In all my years I have done this never have I been stung, or bothered by them, but this time was different.

As I started walking through the bee area, a couple bees started to swarm me so I swated at one…. and got stung right in the side of my ring finger. As i was trying to pull the stinger out I was still getting swarmed and another bee flew into my hair. On instinct I tried to swat it out of my hair with the same hand with the stinger already in it. As soon as I put my hand in my hair the bee stung me. IN THE SAME EXACT SPOT. So now I had two stingers stung in finger (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme).

At that point I finally decided it would be a good idea to get out of there, so I took off and ran to my house. At my house my hand was already swelling up to the size of one of those medical gloves after you blow in it. I tried for 20 minutes to pull the two stingers out, and finally got them, but the hand was getting fat. I took some diphenhydramine for the swelling, and took a fat nap.

Now this is the funny part, after waking up the next day my hand still swollen, I realized I had my Miss Ridgeland pictures.You can probably already guess, but I had hands the size of Hulk for these photos. Most of my friends still think this is hilarious and like look at this pictures for the fun of it. Enjoy!!! because I sure didn’t.

Over the summer I was introduced to Cboys TV. The Cboys are from Minnesota and are YouTube famous for doing everything outdoors like snowmobiling, four wheeling, or riding dirt bike. Early this December I was at my boyfriends house watching Cboys, when we watched Jake, one of the Cboys, jump a bus on snowmobile. This planted the idea in his head that I should learn how to jump a snowmobile.

We decided to go for a ride and found ourselves at his grandfather’s house. His grandpa had plowed a snow hill that would be perfect for me to practice on. He went first and tried to explain it to be but it all sounded like gibberish. Finally, i hopped on and drove. On my first attempt at a jump I drove over the hill with hardly any speed and didn’t even get any air. My second was the exact opposite. See I was never informed that you need to stand when jumping to keep your balance, so I held the throttle all the way down while sitting and hit the snow pile. I give myself credit that I got some air on this one, but it ended up with me feet up smashing the helmet on the handle bars, snapping the visor in half. Along with that I had jammed my wrist and been thrown off the sled, just as the sled crashed into a tree in the yard.

At first I got up and was fine, nothing hurt, but shortly after I realized that my wrist hurt really bad. So the next day I went into urgent care for x-rays. After getting the scans back the Physician told me that I had a fractured radius and would have to be out of basketball for six weeks. So the fracture wouldn’t get worse, I would need a cast, and just my luck the only color they had left was ugly hot pink. The next day is when I get lucky I guess. My mom called me at school tell me that I had not actually broken my arm, and the Physician had just read the scan wrong. So after having a “broken arm” for less than 24 hours I was able to get the cast off and play in the game that night. As you can tell I am not exactly qualified to become an honorary Cboys member, and I think I will skip out on jumping any time soon.

Everyone knows that Katy Perry song California Gurls right? This summer I got to travel to California for FCCLA Nationals with three of my best friends, and spoiler alert we should stay Wisconsin Gurls. From earthquakes, sunburns, and almost drownings we discovered very quickly that we were not made for CA.

The first day we arrived and checked into our hotel, we learned that there was one room separate from advisers, an entirely different floor, and guess who was lucky enough to get the envied room keys…you guessed it ;). The room had floor to ceiling windows, a huge living space, and doubled the size of everyone else’s. Being left unsupervised gave us lots of time to do whatever we wanted. Naturally we chose to watch the movie San Andreas. If you’ve seen the movie you know that it talks about earthquakes occurring along the San Andreas fault line that borders California and Nevada. While watching the movie we decided that it would be “So Cool” to experience an earthquake.

On our last morning in Cali, we were busy packing our bags when all of a sudden I noticed the TV shaking back and forth. As I pointed it out to the others, we noticed that outside in the courtyard palm trees were swaying really bad and light poles were rocking. Here’s the idiot part, remember those floor to ceiling windows? Well we all went and stood in them. For anyone who doesn’t know, standard earthquake protocol is stay away from windows, and hide under desks or stand in doorways. As everything continued to shake we stood like idiots wondering what was happening. Once the shaking stopped an announcement came over the speakers informing us that a 6.4 magnitude earthquake had just hit southern California and we had been experiencing after shocks from almost 30 miles away. Sadly, that was the only earthquake/ aftershocks we got to experience the rest of our trip, but it was definitely one of the coolest things I have ever experienced.

I’m sure most of you are aware of the popular TV show Friends. Forever famous for the coffee house Central Perk, the friends were often found sitting drinking coffee on this famous couch. I had a similar couch experience, except we weren’t exactly drinking coffee.

The night before I left for California, we were all hanging out at Michael’s house. Out of nowhere John got the crazy idea to go pick up this couch he had seen in Michael’s mom’s garage the day before. So before I knew it John, Michael, and Jarred disappeared for 20 minutes and came back with a couch. Now that it was there we still had no idea what we were actually going to do with it, but someone had the great idea to put it in the back of John’s truck and drive around with people on it. So Grant, Issac, Michael, and I pilled on the couch as we drove around in the country on a warm summer night.

Besides not being able to breathe after john hit a certain speed, it was actually super fun, but it could be better. Ben had found a tow strap in his truck and remembered a YouTube video where they towed the couch behind the truck until the couch fell apart. We decided to try it because what else was there to do? After the couch was successfully strapped to the truck Michael and I jumped on with scrawny Grant in the middle. As John drove, you could feel pebbles and rocks flying up and hitting you in the face and hear the couch snapping as you went. We rode until the bottom literally fell apart and our butts were on the ground and the couch was completely fallen apart. Hopefully Michael’s mom didn’t need that couch again because it was never returned.

If you ask Google for the definition of wheelie, Google’s definition reads “a trick or maneuver whereby a bicycle or motorcycle is ridden for a short distance with the front wheel(s) raised off the ground”. Seems like a pretty easy concept to grasp right? That’s what I thought before ” Hang’er twelve” or “looped it”, got introduced. Some insider knowledge, Hang’er twelve means that while you are doing a wheelie the four wheeler is straight up, at 12’o clock, and looped it is when you fall off while doing a wheelie or roll your four wheeler.

Meet the God

I first met the Wheelie God, a self given name BTW, at a friends house this summer. The Wheelie God was wearing a large straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt the first time I met him. My immediate first thought was “Holy Sh**, Faith has a twin?”, only to later find out they were just siblings. The Wheelie God, more commonly known as Andrew, is one of the funniest and care free people I know.

The First Loop

When I think of the first loop I used to imagine Mario Cart racing like the Wii game, now I think of Andrew and laugh. One of the first stories that Andrew ever told me was about the time he looped a four wheeler and scrapped his ass. Early this spring, Andrew and Issac were riding double on Issac’s four wheeler. The two had been doing wheelies all day on a road outside of Almena. On this last wheelie, Issac had been driving and Andrew was in the back. Issac was in the middle of doing a wheelie when he lost control of the four wheeler and it almost went into the ditch. Before both the four wheeler and the boys went into the ditch, Andrew bailed. The road they were on was all blacktop. So try to imagine falling off and scraping your ass on blacktop going 75 miles per hour. Trust me from the cuts I’ve seen, it hurts really bad. Andrew continued his story by telling me about the aftermath of the incident. First of all a couple of his friends had to wash out his cuts on his butt with a garden hose to get all the pebbles and gravel out. Next He had to sleep on his stomach for a month and couldn’t even sit on the toilet. It wasn’t quite summer yet so when it came to school it hurt to much to sit so he had to stand in the back of the classroom all day. Andrew is finally able to laugh with the rest of us about this, but didn’t learn his lesson.

Two Scraped Elbows

During the summer my favorite activity is mowing lawn. I find the various patterns very satisfying and it’s an easy way to get a good jam session in. I even called Jennie-O once and asked if they had a job where I could just mow lawn and they told me they don’t appreciate prank calls and hung up. Since that didn’t work out I was stuck mowing my own lawn. In mid July I was outside in the middle of mowing when I got a phone call from Michael panicking because Andrew had just looped his four wheeler and cut up his arms, knee, and side. The last time Andrew had looped it, his dad was very angry so Andrew was set on the idea that this had to be kept a secret. I told him that he was an idiot for it, but somehow he managed to keep it a secret. Between John, Michael, and Mia they were able to cover the wounds as good as three sixteen years could.

The next night I saw Andrew at a tractor pull and in the middle of July he was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans just to cover his arms and legs. Since they had bandaged up his arms the previous day he had not changed his bandages or even cleaned the cut out. So being the Einsteins we are Andrew and I along with my friends Dylan and Camryn we to my car and decided we were going to clean his cuts out with the first aid kit in my car. This seems like a great idea at the time, until Andrew had to rip the bandages off. Since he had slept in them they had literally molded to his arms, so when Dylan ripped them off Andrew proceeded to yelp like a dog who just got his tail stepped on. After the band aids were off we found out that in a case of an emergency that the first aid kit would be useless because the three finger band aids and rusty scissors which probably wasn’t gonna cut it. See what I did there ;). So doing what any hicks would do, we jumped in my friends Saturn and drove to the gas station to look for some Neosporin because that stuff fixes everything. BTW Andrew has been shirtless since we ripped the band aids off because it hurt too much to have his sweatshirt on the wounds. We finally found Neosporin for $7 and proceeded to the checkout. By the time we got there I had ran into my cousin who is going to college for nursing. After seeing Andrew’s arms she offered to clean them out to avoid further infection. The five of us then proceeded to go onto Nicole’s house so Andy could get his woulds cleaned.

To set the scene Nicole, Camryn, and Dylan had never even met Andrew before this day and here we were all sitting in Nicole’s kitchen listening to Andrew bitch out Nicole as she tried cleaning and re-bandaging his arms. The Wheelie God screamed so loud that I was in tears crying of laughter. I still laugh about this day all the time and somehow the Wheelie God even managed to keep it from his dad.