Nicole's Blog

Thanksgiving is here again and once again we are making a list of whatn we are thankful for. Here is my top ten list of things that I am thankful for:

1. I am thankful for my family especially my sisters who are three of my best friends and advisors.

2. I am thankful for my friends who are blonde and silly and never leave a dull moment.

3.  I am thankful for working  heaters because it is terrible when it is broken and it is cold outside which results in the house being 30 degrees.:(

4. As unusal as this sounds I am thankful for my job at the  hospital because it beats working at a dairy in the cold.  :)

5.  I am thankful for being able to get together with family during Thanksgiving and Christmas and getting to eat amazing food. :p

6.  I am thankful that I am able to go to a Christian school and church without  out worrying about being persecuted or harassed.

7. I am thankful that I have made it to senior year, but not as thankful that I have to try to figure out what I want to do the rest of my life.

8. I am thankful for my nephews who make me laugh everytime I talk to them.

9. I am thankful for hot chocolate which tastes great after tubing or skiing.

10.  I am thankful that I am able to ski and get to go to black hills during Christmas break.

My parents are in their fifties, and think that everything should be the same as when they were growing up. For example, they think that it isn’t a necessity to have a cell phone when you are a teenage or the internet. I finally got them convinced to let me get a cellphone, but I can’t convince them to get the internet.

They don’t understand that today everything we do in school has something to do with use of the internet.My dad is always telling me to look my homework up in the dictionary, but it is so outdated that my paper is very unaccurate. I would be lost if my sister didn’t live a few miles from my house. I am always at her house doing homework which really sucks because it is hard to concentrate there with my nephews talking to me the whole time.

I have had my aunts, my cousins, and  my siblings try to help me convince my parents that internet has become in some ways a neccessity for todays world. They stand fast in their position that they never had to have it growing up, so it can’t be that important. How do you convince someone that something that wasn’t a neccessity for them

is a neccessity for you?

A digital footprint is what a person will see if they would search for a person on the internet. It shows what qualities and characteristics a person has and what they have on the internet for the world to see. For example a digital footprint could be someone’s blog or their facebook.  There is positive footprints and negative footprints. Employers can use these to check up on their employees.

When I searched my name on the internet, it came up with my name on the honor roll and my name on my church bulletin for nursery. These I would say are positive digital footprints. I have a facebook account, but I rarely write my feelings on it because I am not a person who really likes to show feelings for the world to see. I would rather have a private conversation. The only time I comment on facebook is on people’s pictures, and it usually is good comments. i have this blog, of course, which shows a little more about what I think about, as scary as that is. I don;t reallly use this blog for anything other than school work. It is difficult to get on the internet because I don’t have access to the internet at home.

I think that it is very scary giving personal information over the internet or the phone. You have no idea who you are giving your information to. In today’s world so many people are stealing others identities that we can’t be so trusting of strangers. If it an official site then I think that it is okay to give them some information, but never more than they need to know.

In college comp. we are learning how to use words that are commonly mistaken correctly. Such words like accept and except, among and between, dessert and desert, etc..Our assignment is to make up a paragraph using as many of them correctly as we can. This story is very exxagerated and very boring.

When I woke up in the morning and the sun was shining, I thought for sure it was going to be a good day. I never imagined spending it in the office of my principal. Here I am though making my descent to sit in a chair between the teacher and the principal.  My conscience had tried to warn me when I threw the dessert in the cafeteria that it would not go down in peace. As I look at the two people sitting next to me, I take deep  breaths. The looks that they send me make me wish that I was not consious. They tell me that I have to rethink my principles.

 In my mind I go to a place that is farther away then my home. My mind has led me to the desert to escape their looks. It is here that I have fewer troubles. The only problem is that I am thirsty and there is less water to be found. It’s here that I realize that my shoe is loose and full of pebbles. I  take the shoe off and lay it on a rock nearby. I wander off through a valley and lose my shoe. i feel that without my shoe I am no longer decently dressed to wander in the desert. I make a thorough check of my surroundings. I wonder where my piece of the cake has gone. As I lie down on the sand and realize that in my daydream I have troubles too.

 I come back out of my daydream and back to reality. The principal is clicking lead out of his pencil. The effect of being in his office is causing me to go crazy. The teacher sets the piece of cake that I had thrown in front of me.  I tell her that I am not sure whose it is. She said this is your cake. You’re the one responsible for the mess. I feel bad except I remember it is her fault because she was the one who made me sit among three of my worst enemies.

Today was suppose to be a happy day because it isn’t every day that I don’t have to wear my everyday clothes , and I got to wear my new sweater. I already know that I will be punished for my illicit behavior. I wonder who’s going to decide my punishment. I have my apologies all ready for the principal. He comes out of his office looking very stern this affects the may I  breathe. He tells me that I am going to have to accept my punishment very humbly. He says, “We’re going to make you clean the cafeteria which is a disaster.” His comment elicits inward groans from me. They were going to call my parents, but decided against it so that helped.  They’re very gracious is what they tell me, but I don’t really see that as gracious.   I further my complaint by saying that others should have to help, but they threaten me with more work if I complain.

When I woke up in the morning and the sun was shining, I thought for sure it was going to be a good day.

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I work with disabled children through Hope Haven. It is a great experience. Everytime that I work with a disabled child I learn how to gain more patience for things.

 My sister and I  worked with a Down Syndrome boy and a boy who suffered from mental retardation and autism. I laughed and had fun the time that I spent with the two. The down syndrome boy  was appreciative of everything. He did not feel that he had to have anything, but was content with whatever he was given. He was very gently and kind.

The little boy who suffered from mental retardation and autism was a little harder to handle. He liked to wander around and did not care if he was with other kids or not. He at first kept wandering away from me, but to him I was a complete stranger so I could see why he would not stick close to me. After we had spent the entire morning together, he warmed up and would continue to come up to me and give me a hug. When it was time for him to leave, he wanted me to come with him. He went from not having a care of who I was to wanting me to be by him whereever he went.

Disabled people do not judge people. They are very accepting and friendly. I will not say that they do not ever become aggressive, but for the most part they are calm and gentle. They are content with what they are given and who they are. It seems funny, but I think there is a lot that we can learn from them. We can learn that life is not so much about ourselves and that we do not always have to have what is best, but should be more grateful for the gifts that we are given.

     On October 2, 2009 my friends and I were given the chance to help pack food to go to feed my starving children. It was a really neat experience. The best thing was we got to get out of school.

The people who were the running the organization told us stories and showed us how the food that got packaged affected the children who had nothing to eat.  They said that in poor countries there are people who mix a little flour with mud and bake it and that is what they eat to try to get rid of their hunger pains. People would even buy these mud cakes for a pretty high price. I could never image eating or buying something like that.

The organization leaders showed us a picture of child whom they had given their meals to. He had started off skin and bones and a few weeks after he had been on their meal plan he started to look healthy again. The hair that he had lost started to grow back and his skin started to turn a healthy color. It was an amazing transformation.

The meals that they package only cost 17 cent. To us these meals didn’t really look that appetizing, but to someone who had been eating dirt it was like a five star dinner.  It was a lot of fun to package the food, and it was for a great cause.

On an article found  on the website,

 http://http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002152271_plagiarism16m.html, it talks about how high school students nowadays use more and more plagiarism. The teachers find that students try to get away with plagiarism just because they find it a challenge to see if they can get away with it or if they will get caught. It is more a game to them, and then there are other students, who use it because they feel that they really do need to in  order to get good grades.

Sometimes when doing research I have a hard time not plagiarizing. It is way easier to just copy and paste then to have to think of something on my own. I usually just want to get a paper done and that would be a really quick way of getting it done. It is hard to rearrange someone elses’s ideas into mine own without losing the whole meaning of the sentence.  I won’t say that I am not guilty of plagiarizing.

I think that is neat that the teachers have a program that can tell if  there  is plagiarizing in the paper. I still don’t think that it would stop people from plagiarizing. If someone wants to cheat, they still will find ways to get around the rules to gain what they want. It’s cool how they are able to create all these programs.

I love movies, but I think that all movies have the same story line. U can always guess what is going to happen at the end in romantic movies the guy and girl always end up falling in love with each other and in action movies the bad guys always get caught by the good guys. I wonder what movies will be about in the future because they are going to run out of ideas that won’t be similar to movies already out. Is it going to all be science fiction because they can make those be whatever they think of?

Hey comments are cool. I totally don’t care if you diss my grammar because I already know that I am horrible at it. Hopefully then I can get a little bit better and won’t have to worry about my mom correcting me all the time.

I joined the blogging challenge because it was a requirement for my class, College Composition. I am very lost right with blogging and don’t really know what is the difference between the commenting section and the better bloggers section. I would like to become a better blogger; I guess. The honest truth is I don’t know how much I will use blogging after I am done with College Composition. I hope that if the activities are things that we have to write about, they will be easy topics and not topics that we have to research on.  My goal is to become a better blogger, writer, and be able to make my page a little bit more creative.