Run through the woods

”If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.”

-Fred Devito

     Today I went on a run in the woods. Recently I’ve been running a lot more, that probably has to do with me basically having the whole afternoon to do whatever. My mom took me to some new trails, she had run on them a bunch, but somehow I’ve never been on them. Almost every time my mom goes running she brings our dog Vada, but recently people started complaining about dogs being off leash, so the town made a rule that dogs have to be off leash while on the trails. This means we can’t really take Vada on a run anymore because she’s such a pain on when she runs on a leash. Today on my run I ran about 2.5 miles, the whole time we only saw one other person, who by the way had two dogs off leash. Right when I started running I noticed that the trail was really cleared out and that it wasn’t one of those trails that you had to run in the tall tick infested grass. I also thought they would be really cool trails to bike on, but the trail is covered in pine needles which would make it really slippery if you were trying to go down a hill, but that doesn’t really matter to much. At one point we dropped down next to a small river and were just about to jump over it when my mom screamed and pointed at the ground, it was the smallest water snake ever. We continued on and about three minutes later we saw probably four deer running over a hill right in front of us. I quickly ran further up the trail to see if I could get a better view of them, but by then they had ran away. The rest of our run we didn’t see any other animals or people. This run was very relaxing and helped me the calm before I got back to the house and started doing my work.

Our bike trail

”Life is like riding a bicycle, to stay balanced you must keep moving.”

-Anonymous

     Two weeks ago I wrote about the bike trail that my brother and I had built, since then we’ve changed a few things. Last time I wrote we had two rollers, a berm, a drop and a jump. Just recently we made another path after the two rollers that ends with a much bigger jump then the other one we built. I like this run much better then the other mainly because the jump is more fun to go on. There is one slight issue with the jump, right when you land you either have to hit your brakes or turn left right away. We still want to make as many different paths as we can and hopefully make an even bigger jump. This may be tough to do considering my sister and her friends made a “secret hangout” right at the start of the trail, so if we wanted to extend the trail we would have to go all the way down into our neighbors driveway. I’m still looking forward to the day quarantine ends and we can finally have our friends over so they can help us build the trail and ride the trail with us. Until that day my brother and I will keep working on the trail. I’ll give another update later. 

Quarantine 

”Staying at home everyday keeps corona away.”

-Unknown 

     We are now almost three months into quarantine, oh wait never mind we’re only three weeks in. I don’t know if you can tell or not, but I don’t like quarantine. Each day I wake up and it’s the same routine every day. I wake up go downstairs to my basement and join advisor. I sit in the same spot for the rest of the “school day” joining different zooms. I then walk upstairs to the kitchen and make myself lunch. For the next few I hours I’m either outside biking, playing soccer or basketball. I then do my homework around four so I can play Xbox with the boys at night. As you can see not the most exciting routine. Although school isn’t the cost thing to be doing at moments, I would much rather be at school and suffering through it with all of my friends right there and not right there on the screen. One thing that I am really looking forward to is the first time I’m gonna be able to see all of my friends again, I’m hoping it will be sometime over the summer, but you’ll never know based on the way things are going right now. 

Dear Martin

”The more things that you read the more thing you’ll know. The more things that you learn the more places you’ll go.” 
-Dr. Seuss

     As I sit here on my couch I think about the book I’ve read over the past few weeks. It was a type of book that I’ve never read before. It was a type of book that left you intrigued after each chapter. It was the type of book that left you thinking what if?

Getting through quarantine

”Never let your best friends get lonely...keep disturbing them.”

- Anonymous

     As I sit on my couch trying to figure out how to use zoom I see everyone in my advisor's face pop up on my iPad. It had been almost three weeks since I had last seen any of my friends in person, and although over a screen isn’t really in person I was still excited to see them. I sat on the same spot on the couch for the rest of the school day, only really moving to get food. When the day was over I thought I could get used to this. It was really nice to finally see my friends. During these boring times class has actually been nice to go to, it gives me something to do, so I’m not completely bored. Having a close group of friends has helped a lot as well, whether it’s messing around in class, playing Fortnite together or even texting through the day it’s been nice have my friends there. 

Easter Sunday

”Easter spells out beauty, the rare beauty of new life.”

-S.D. Gordon

     It’s Easter Sunday today, but it’s not. It’s not the same without the rest of my family. Every year my mom's side of the family or my dad's side of the family meet at someone’s house for Easter. It’s a lot of fun, we eat depending on who’s house it is we sometimes do a big egg hunt. But this year we woke up and went nowhere, we still continued the tradition of searching for a basket full of candy somewhere in the house. We still had an Easter lunch/dinner type thing just like every year, but it still wasn’t the same without our whole family. For us, Easter is about family and food and although we had food and family, it just wasn’t the same without the entire family. I don’t know about everyone else, but our family still does an egg hunt on Easter morning. This year we didn’t have to wake up early so we did an egg hunt at night. Egg hunts get competitive in my family, we only do it in two rooms to make it easier to find the eggs, but there are always a few eggs that none of us can find. This year all three of us were all tied up with fifteen eggs, then my mom announces that there’s one more egg, the three of us pop up and start looking everywhere we could think, eventually, my brother finds the egg, my mom hid it in the best spot possible, the last place we would ever look, behind a stack of books. Although we were able to have fun and enjoy our Easter it just wasn’t the same as the years past. 

Mountain Biking

     A few years ago my brother and I friends started to get really into biking, we would bike all over town, every now and then we would bike to and back from the Harvard general store which is about fourteen miles in total. But we mainly got into trail biking, in Littleton and Harvard there are tons of trails.

All of these trails are pretty close to where I live, so there pretty easy to access. By now we know most of the trails by memory, so we’ve started to try to go off trail to find jumps and drops. Right when the official quarantine started my brother and I started to build a trail in the woods behind our house. We started this because less then two miles from our house there are at least fifty cases at a nursing home, so I’d rather not leave my street if I don’t have to. We started by building a roller (it’s basically a quick up down to help you get speed) out of sticks and dirt, we put a layer of dirt, then stacked logs and branches and then covered then covered those in dirt. We built a berm (something that you use to help on a tight turn or to just make the turn more fun) out of dirt. And lastly we built a jump and used a branch covered in dirt as the lip of the jump. We then later made a second roller and a drop right before the jump. A few days after we started building the trails we realized that it might be on our new neighbors property, but I don’t really care if it is because we used that area before there house was even there. Nonetheless I’ve still been looking for places to continue our trail or to make a second path.

I’m really looking forward to when the whole quarantine thing ends so our friends can come over and to ride the trail and to help us add on to the trail.