it was the look on their faces

Listening to Nicholas Nickleby from the other room…it’s really quite entertaining:

“Mr. Folair your trap! Shut your trap Mr. Folair!”
“The flames Mr. Folair, remember they’re hot!” “Ow.”
“Somebody forgot his spear.”
“Remember Mr. Folair, you are a savage, not a demented fairy!”
“Mr. Folair, there’s a problem with your head.”

who calls so loud?

“Should I choke?” “I think fainting might be more romantic.”


once, nobody was ashamed.


“Are you at home?”
“Yes.”
“To anybody?”
“Yes.”
“To the tax collector?”
“No.”


the Highland Fling.


“What’s come now?”
“I have.”
“What else?”
“A letter. Marked: ‘Urgent as well as Extreemly Importent.’ It’s from the Squeer’s”
“Wackford?”
“Doubtful. It’s perfumed.”
“Dear Mr. Knuckleboy Sir, My pa requests me to write to you, as the doctors are considering it doubtful whether he will ever recover the use of his legs, which prevents his holding a pen.’”


“Very well. We’ll have posters out in the morning announcing positively your last performance for tomorrow…with reengagement by popular demand for Friday. Then on Saturday we’ll have your absolutely last appearance…with the possibility of another performance to follow.”
“I must say that tonight was my absolutely positively final last performance!”


“Dear girl, take this, please!”
“But I am not crying.”
“Oh, the handkerchief’s for me. The arm’s for you.”







So, it's been a really busy…what is it, two weeks or so? Our church had their harvest festival Wednesday night, which was absolutely amazing!!!! The whole sanctuary was transformed into a Candyland board, Gramma Nut's house turned out really cute, and I ended up being Gramma Nut (which means I got to dress up but didn't have to do anything!). I didn't get sick, but I did get a leftover jar of frosting and two giant cardboard candy canes out of it. Oh yeah, and…the kids seemed to have a good time too!! And I got to test out the maze (made of PVC pipe and black plastic) twice, and didn't get lost! Ah…I really am a little kid at heart.

Sam you still have a blogger account right???? because we're all going to mutiny you if you deleted your blog and your account, you know that right? good then, we're all square.

Last weekend I had training for India, so that's why I wasn't on. But it was sooo awesome!!! We really got to know everyone on the team much better so that was great, plus learning about communicating to different cultures, and what not to do….And I have to say that Don Quixote is about the funniest book in the world, really. well….except maybe a few other ones….ha-ha.


Making houses out of wood and cardboard can actually be dangerous, believe it or not. However, have no fear, for we were cautious to the utmost degree, and the worst wound I receives was hitting myself in the head with a crowbar. Don't try this at home kids, it hurts.

Oh, and the only other really big piece of news is that Satsumas are out early, which means Christmas time is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*happy face* :) :) :) :)

:P :P :P :P :-) :-) :-) :-)

I was telling my dad at the harvest festival that if we could dance, it would be a masquerade ball. He didn't want to dance, so I danced a little by myself, but it wasn't the same. Next year on Halloween we should all get together and have a masquerade ball!!! yeah – totally!!!!!!!!

Oh I also got my SEND! magazine from GFA, and my dad got me one of their books, Road to Reality, which is probably one of the best books I've ever read and you should all get it right after you're done with Leave it to Psmith, and also two of their DVD's, Touch of Love and To Live is Christ. Both very very good, of course, and I've been very happy for the most part lately too. I clipped my cats claws this morning and emerged from the fray with no battle scars! The only bleak spot on the horizon is that Gandalf just died, and Aragorn is never returning to Cerin Amroth, and Arwen's gonna die there because her jerk of a husband is afraid of old age. But really, other than that life is good.

I can see I'm boring you, so I shall adjourn to play my Nutcracker and Christmas music now!!!
















By the way, this is a report I wrote a couple weeks ago. I'd appreciate some constructive criticism if you guys want to say anything. Thanks!

Our Last Cruise

On a cold November day in 1850, a child was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He would grow up with weak lungs, a love of travel, adventure, and the sea. He was given the name Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, a combination of his two grandfathers Robert Stevenson and Lewis Balfour. From the latter he inherited a love of writing, and though it was expected that Robert would follow the last three generations of his family and become a lighthouse engineer, after graduating from Edinburgh Academy and preparing to enter the University of Edinburgh he realized that not only did he not wish to follow that career path, but his physical endurance was not such that he could if he had wanted to.
Stevenson's father was very strict, and the two never got along well together. After taking a voyage with his father to investigate lighthouse construction, Robert finally persuaded the elder to allow him to follow an interest in literature, on the condition that he earn a degree in law to fall back upon if (or when, as his father was convinced he would) he failed in writing. Stevenson wrote a verse of poetry protesting his father's strictness after earning the law degree and nearly killing himself with study and worry. His health was permanently damaged.
From 1875-1879 Stevenson traveled, searching for a favorable climate for his lungs. He frequented France in the winters, where he met his future wife, Frances (Fanny) Osbourne, an American who was married at the time. He also made many friends – literary, dramatic and religious. This is when his writing first started to take flight, with An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, in addition to several essays and articles. Despite this period of beginnings while Stevenson was discovering and perfecting his style, his parents were unhappy with him and thought he was wasting his time –time they were paying for.
In 1879 Robert heard that Fanny was very ill in California, and against the advice of his friends he left to care for her, without informing his parents. Although he loved the voyage (where he traveled third class both to save money, and to get a better idea of how people of different social status lived), by the time he had traveled from New York to California his health was again in a compromising situation, and he was probably in a worse condition than Ms. Osbourne herself. He was required to stay with some ranchers who cared for him until healthy enough to finish the journey to San Francisco. There he lived on forty-five cents a day doing hard labor, and soon it was Fanny who was caring for him. His father cabled money when he heard about his son's condition, and in May 1880 they were married.
Stevenson was a romantic at heart as much as he was an optimist, and for their honeymoon he took his wife to an abandoned mining camp at Mount Saint Helena, which experience he published in The Silverado Squatters. Later that year he and his new wife returned to his family in Britain, where Fanny mended the differences between father and son, and there they lived happily for the next seven years. Over this period of time Stevenson made a name for himself with some of his best-known works: Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, and A Child's Garden of Verses.
At the end of this period Robert's father passed away and he considered himself at liberty to travel to a different climate in hopes to better his health. And so, he took his wife, mother and step-son to America, where they decided to winter at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Here he began The Master of Ballantrae, and spent the winter planning the sea voyage he was to take the next summer with his family to the South Pacific.
The sea air and warm climate restored his health for three happy years; he traveled to Tahiti, the Hawaiian, Gilbert, and Samoan Islands. His writing went through an excellent phase in which he completed The Master of Ballantrae, David Balfour, and The Bottle Imp, amongst others. In 1890 Stevenson bought 400 acres on Upolu, one of the Samoan Islands, and settled down. During his years here he was very concerned in local politics, helping people see the inefficiency of the European rulers appointed over the natives. He also found some time for his writing here, though he said it went through phases and at one point was very depressed, claiming that the best he could come up with was ditch water. But in 1894 he began The Weir of Hermiston and announced that is was "so good it frightens me." The thing he feared most during these years was a return of his tuberculosis – to be an invalid he considered worse than to be hanged. His wish was fulfilled: he died on December 3rd of a cerebral hemorrhage in only a few hours, after having spent seven happy and influential years in the South Pacific. He was buried by the natives on nearby Mt. Vaea, overlooking the sea, and on his tomb was inscribed the Requiem he himself had written:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me die.
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'

Robert Louis Stevenson's legacy has taken as many turns for better and for worse as his life did. In his time he was hailed as a great writer, but after his death people began to criticize his work as second-class, written for only children's and horror genres. He was condemned by authors such as Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, and completely left out of Oxford Anthology of English Literature and the first seven editions of Norton's Anthology of English Literature. It is only within the last decade that literary minds and others have begun to see him once again a visionary of his century – someone with great intellect and insight into the nature of humanity. One of Stevenson's defining factors was how much he wrote from real life, including his romanticism, his optimism, his adventuresome nature, and his concern for the peoples of the South Pacific. Today he is the 25th most translated writer – more than Dickens, Wilde and Poe.
Despite great health issues in his life, what Stevenson is probably loved for most as a man is his optimistic spirit and buoyancy. He once said of himself that "mine is a blessed life; it is too bad I can not have that one other blessing – health. But although you will be mad to hear me say so, I think it best." His philosophy of life is best summed up in his own words: "Old and young, we are all on our last cruise."