China and the Summer

Nobody else wants to post about their exciting summers, so I am back. Welcome to my presence!

Today I am going to discuss Internet control in China and its effect on the international scene.

Ever since the beginning of the Internet, China's government has taken strides to censor sensitive content from the Internet. And now I will stop talking about the topic. I just wanted to see who my most diligent readers were and if they really cared about my writing enough to keep reading. If you are still proceeding at this point, good for you! Either you saw the pictures below and knew something worthwhile was coming, or I will have to draw out the educational content for a longer paragraph next time. ;)

Believe it or not, that is the topic of my eleven-page research paper for International Relations, and I just finished the first draft this morning. My class ends in another week, but the paper is due Monday. And that has been my life this week. That should be my life right now, but I am obviously procrastinating further progress. I decided it is the weekend and I am sick of thinking about international issues.

Now on to more exciting things: a visual recap of this summer's events!

Father/Son Camp-out 2013 at the Fellowship Center. They really "rough" it. This is supper.

Baseball

Splitting wood

Father's Day

Jesse's gifts (He is the only one who cares enough to give Dad gifts. Thankfully we have at least one compassionate child in this family.) 

Dad's new toy from Mom. You can see her nervous anticipation of Dad's reaction in this picture. Obviously everyone else was pretty enthralled.  

Lanz Construction came and replaced the door in the basement!

The boys sat watching in their pajamas and Jesse ate his Fruit Loops in a lovely location.

Billy got his braces off at the beginning of this month! He was pretty excited. :) These are the after and before pictures. Although his teeth look great, I think the rest of him saw more change over the two years.

Justin has been mixing up and freezing cookie dough balls lately. He always wonders why he puts four dozen balls in the freezer and there are only one dozen remaining when he takes them out to bake them. I don't wonder.

Mom's awesome Fourth of July strawberry creations. They are even tastier than they look! :)

Strawberries, white almond bark, and blue sugar sprinkles.

BREAKING NEWS!! Alyssa came back for an overnight visit on July 4th! It was so exciting to have here with us, if only for a short time! :)

MORE EXCITEMENT!! The Steffen Clan (age 20 and under) came for the Fourth!

Other Awkward Family Photos

The forces inside my head must be so strong that they pull in everyone else's heads when they get too close.

Jesse was just showing Mom the height of his newest Lego tower. Nobody is quite sure what was going through Stephanie's head.

Enough about my head. What's this?
Flexibility stunt gone wrong.

And distorted heads on twisted bodies pretty much covers life through today, unless you wish to delve into a fascinating discussion on Internet regulation in China. I will spare you the misery. Have a good weekend!

We Packed Our Bāgs and Headed Nôrth

By Billy

On the weekend of Thursday, June 27th to Sunday, June 30th, a group of AC brothers traveled up to Lake Minnewaska near Morris, Minnesota for one cool weekend. But really, it was kind of windy, and that along with the water made for a cool combination.

It all started when we left at 7:00 on Thursday morning, we being Nolan and Derek from Ohio, Quinn and Ethan from Illinois, and Jaydon, Caleb, and myself from here. Although we didn't break the all-time record of 5 and a half hours for the drive, we did make good time. We stopped at the Mall of America on the way up and enjoyed the Amazing Mirror Maze, a SpongeBob SquarePants coaster, and the sights of the massive mall. Some might consider it odd that we didn't actually do any shopping at the mall, but we thought nothing of it. We got to the cabin on the laaaaake (as we learned to pronounce it up there) just in time for supper. We also had a bonfire where we were able to have nice conversations over the important things in life. However, when we got back to the cabin, we found some of the not so nice things of life when we entered the cabin only to find it infested by gnats and other small bugs. So, we spent the rest of the night spraying Raid and sweeping up flies.

L-R: Reed, Quinn, Ross, Jared, Me, Nolan, Drew, Mason, Jaydon, Caleb, Ethan, Tristan, Derek

On Friday, "we" with the addition of Ross from Morris, MN did some skiing, wake boarding, and tubing on the laaaaake. That night, Drew, Tristan, and Mason from Morris arrived, as well as Jared and Reed from here. We enjoyed a calm sunset boat ride, some quartet singing, and Mason's muskrat story around the campfire.

Saturday morning we went to Elk Lake Historic Preserve to shoot clays. If it was a game of golf, I won...but since the point is to get the highest score, I didn't really do very well. The rest of the day was spent on the laaaaake again, and most everyone was able to get up on water skies this year. We had two boats so the last part of the afternoon was spent Ultimate Tubing. One boat made waves and the other boat yanked, flung, and jarred the man on the tube. Other than one incident involving a 7-foot jump, we all were able to survive the Ultimate Tubing. That night we went out to eat at Duffy's, which was very delectable and filled me up well. That night, we went back to Morris and spent the night at some homes of the local brothers.

On Sunday, we went to church at Morris North in the morning and Morris in the afternoon. It was sad to have to depart after such a wonderful weekend, but sometime we had to get back to the real world. To me, it was an encouraging weekend and very enjoyable spending time with brothers in Christ and I am looking forward to doing it again next year!

How to Install a Shelf

I, Jonathan, would like to take a quick moment to recognize my second post. I have never gotten around to posting but now I have an exciting news story to post. I put up shelves in the laundry room.

It all started out with a problem. I had a very big problem. My clothes shelf was downstairs in my bedroom. This made it very inconvenient for me to do many tasks. Mom was always getting after me to put my clothes away. I never wanted to for two very good reasons. One, I did not want to have to go all the way downstairs to put my clothes away. At my laziness level that is an incredibly difficult task to complete. The other issue was that my closet down stairs only had a hanger bar. Putting shirts and pants on hangers is also very hard for me to do. I must have lacked the practice growing up. There were also a few other minor problems. Due to the fact that I hated putting my clothes away, the laundry room was filled with baskets of Billy's and my clothes, just waiting to be put away. Another one was that if there was company at our house and my clothes were put away, I would have to walk through the kitchen, downstairs, through the basement and into my room half naked with only underwear on. This could eventually become an embarrassing thing to do. Also, Mom did not like the way it was arranged in there at all. It was time for change.

After reviewing these problems, I decided what I wanted was a place to store clothes upstairs, within my walking capabilities, and to have shelves instead of hangers. This would make putting clothes away very fun because I would not have to walk very far, and I could just take the pile of folded clothes and put them on the shelf. More importantly, it would also make it so Mom could easily put my clothes away. I drew up the laundry room area we wanted to change, and told Mom to look for shelves and cabinets and draw what she wanted. She hunted down the shelves at Lowe's and found what she wanted. She drew up what it would look like and gave me a cost estimate. I proposed this cost estimate to Dad. He thought my idea was great, but I should wait. Finally he gave me the go ahead. I was ready to start!

For the first half week I did nothing except look at it and think of how great putting my clothes away would be. I did not have time to start on it, because I had to prepare Little League fields every day, lift on some days, go to baseball practices and games, and sleep. I simply did not have time. One day, though, I found I was ready for baseball and still had 45 minutes until I had to leave. I took out the electric drill and started ripping everything up. Well actually it was more like I took out each screw one by one of the original cabinet and counter. In that 45 minutes I was able to take out the cabinet. Justin helped a little. He really only helped carry the old cabinet and counter downstairs though. Mom was very excited and took about 15 pictures of the first day.

I would have worn a shirt if I had known Mom was taking pictures.

Here is what it looked like without the cabinet.

After that she said, "Why not take out the counter now too?" At that time I had only 10 minutes till I left and thought probably not. But I was just like, "Why not try?" I really am a positive guy, aren't I? Well I ended up discovering it would not come out and left for my game with a bag a Doritos left over from Billy's graduation party. After the game, I came home and discovered some magnificent news. Mom had found out the counter top would not come out because it was somehow attached to the adjacent cabinets, which you can see on the right in the pictures above. While I was gone, Mom busted into the cabinets and completely unattached the counter. I could finally take it out!

Justin and I had a difficult time getting the counter out of the laundry room. With some scratched wall and chipped wood we finally managed to get it out.

Here is another picture mom took after the counter was removed.

We took it out and it is now downstairs doing nothing. Now the hard part was to come. The cleaning. It was very messy back in the area we had removed stuff from. I let Mom do all of this stuff. I simply could not tolerate the weird looking things back there. One of the odder things was a big brown stain under where the filing cabinet used to be. I just stayed away from that area until Mom had finished. Finally it was clean. In other news, Mom and Dad went shopping with the boys and came home with a completely different cabinet than what was planned. Mom just was like, "Well we decided to switch things a little." Really though, it was completely different than the original plan. 

After cleaning, there were unpainted spots and screw holes on the wall. Mom was disgusted. She decided a paint job would be perfect. Yet another thing to add into the plan that was not there already. She put the tape up and put the primer on. I painted it the color she chose and was ready to start installing the shelves that night. I did a great job on the paint by the way. I am very sorry because Mom's excitement must have dropped and she did not take any more pictures after the one above until the whole project was done. In more news, Mom found a better new shelving unit than the one her and Dad had bought and completely changed the project again. I actually am pretty glad though because it was ten times easier.

So that night Dad and I installed the top bar that would support the bracket holders that would be vertical which would support the brackets which would support the shelves which would support my clothes. After much confusion as to where the studs were, we finally got it up. There was only one extra drilled hole after that night. We looked over our job we did and said in unison, "We did a good job."

Early the next morning I started to install the bracket holders which would support the brackets which would support the shelves which would support my clothes. Mom woke me up at 10:30, much to my dismay and stated that she would like the shelves up by today. I went to work installing the bracket holders. It was pretty easy. I just did what Dad said to do, put three screws in each bracket holder and make sure they are level. I did a decent job with only a few mistakes. Two of those mistakes were because of confusion on where the studs were. I just put and extra screw in those bracket holders. The other mistake was more major. On one of the bracket holders, I never checked to make sure it was level and I'm sure you can figure out what happened because of that. Mom saw it and was like, "Is that one bracket holder level?" I looked at her and just looked at the bracket and back at her and just kind of smiled. I went to work at fixing it. Ten minutes later, it was fixed. Mom was out shopping so I just tried to install the shelves by myself. Big mistake! I got them all in, but it was extremely hard to do. After they were in, I stepped back and thought of how much easier it would be to put clothes away. 

I left for a baseball game, which resulted in a loss, and found clothes on the shelf. I was so happy to see it in use. We tried to take some professionally looking pictures of us enjoying it but I think that it would look better if I did not wear an old looking Arizona Diamondbacks shirt that we got when I was in kindergarten.

Billy is all smiles as he puts his sweat shirts away.

Justin and I enjoy putting our clothes on the shelves also. You can also notice the new paint job in this one.

Billy selects a tie from the belt and tie rack that we got to install with the shelves.

This is just a picture that Stephanie made me pose for.

So this is the result of what happens if you want to not do as much work. As you probably noticed, Mom and Dad did a lot to help with this project. Justin and Jesse also carried old cabinets and trim very well also. Now I can get clothes on without having to walk through the entire house after a shower and I don't have to hang my clothes up. Better yet, Mom can just put my clothes away for me very conveniently! I am happily elated and exhilarated.

Jesse's Artwork

This is Jesse and I like drawing pictures. For Christmas I got an easel that I can draw on. Today I am going to show you all of my pictures. 

This is me drawing in my art studio.

This is a picture of a horse.

This is a picture of the Mediapolis Elementary School.

These are Truffula trees off Cat in the Hat.

This is a flag with two stars.

This is a red heart.

These are two trees on the beach.

This is the outdoors.

This is me painting a picture of myself outside.

Candles Make Everything Official

Yesterday was my last teenage birthday. I searched all over the Internet for something exciting about turning nineteen, but quite honestly, the only noteworthy thing to say about it is that I am preparing to finish my teenage life. Therefore, I chose to allow the day to pass in silent melancholy as I realized I was simply one year closer to being old.

I really liked being eighteen, but since I have to go through nineteen to get to twenty, I might as well take care of the task while I am still a teenager.

If you must know, the worst thing about turning nineteen is that the number 19 is a prime number, and I really dislike prime numbers because they are super boring.

I assume you all want to hear the story of my nineteenth birthday. Well, maybe not, but I will tell it anyway. You see, I do not typically get birthday celebrations because my birthday is in June, which is everyone's busy month and my birthday tends to be forgotten. This year was going to be different.

Billy planned to leave Thursday morning for Minnesota, so he suggested that we celebrate Wednesday night. A week before, he learned that four single brothers were going to stay over on Wednesday night so we pushed the party up to suppertime before they arrived.

On my way home from work on Wednesday, I got a call from my mother.

"I just realized Travis has a game tonight at L&M. I have to drive him there so we won't be home for supper. Billy is going to go out to eat with his company, Jonathan has a game, and Justin was going to go to it. Your birthday supper is on the stove with directions on how to bake it. We will have your cake after church."

By method of deduction, that left Dad, Jesse, and me to enjoy my birthday meal together.

Jonathan's game got cancelled, so that brought him and Justin back into the picture. And then Billy decided to stay and eat quick before leaving. All right, everyone except two of my family members were here for the birthday meal. It was all good.

But wait. Did you say birthday cake after church? Yes. Didn't you say Billy was going to have friends after church? Oh...right.

Insert: Awkward.

I refused to celebrate my birthday that night. We had ice cream cake for a snack and did not call it birthday cake. The Kit-Kat cake was quite beautiful and tasty, though! Mom did a great job on it. :)

The concerned family felt like my birthday did not get a proper celebration (although an improper celebration would have been fine with me), so Mom made another ice cream cake and we had the official celebration Friday night after all the boys got home from their games. This time, it was really official. I even got to wear the birthday hat.

I was glad for the enthusiasm my family shared during the milestone.

My second amazing cake: this time with candles! ;)

In all, it was a fantastic day. I am so thankful to have a family who loves me enough to recognize the occasion (twice, in fact). It is also great to have a mother who is awesome at making ice cream cakes, among other talents.

Furthermore, I am quite pleased about turning nineteen. My new year's resolution when I turned eighteen was to get another year older, and I think the goal was accomplished quite nicely. It has truly been a wonderful year and I have been so blessed!

I hope you all have a good weekend!