Lugmere & Divora

On Saturday, February 10th, me, my dad, and my brother and sister drove up to a personal favorite hiking place, The Red Hills. A.K.A Spider National Park. This place was teeming with them. Yet we come for three reasons: to enjoy nature, to catch millipedes and such, and to swim in The Swimming Hole. The Swimming Hole is a beautiful water hole created by a cascade of river water. We always come to swim in it, and somehow, it always stays full. There is always spiders though, basking on sunny rocks, until three kids come along and bash them off, shove them in glass jars, and take them home! That is exactly what we do there. I take the pictures, my sister grabs the jars, and my brother scoops them up (or puts them in his pocket) into them. We always hike up a massive mountain\hill, also. At the top, we can have a birds-eye view of the snowcapped peaks of Yosemite gleaming on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas, fields and meadows full of emerald grass and bountiful trees. There i...

Every year around early October the Modesto Library hosts an amazing craft fair with over 50 kids every year selling homemade crafts. We tried hard to do it last year, but time crept up and ran out very fast. So that was unfortunately unsuccessful. But this year, we started creating about August and kept it up until October 14th, 2017, the date of the Craft Fair. Our friends decided to do it too, and created lots of crafts each, and so did we. I created my shop--" The Hobo's Lair", and weaved potholders galore (the most unpopular too) and themed bookmarks galore (those sold fast but in slow amounts of time) and recycled t-shirt bags, (which sold like hotcakes!) My sister sold Thwaps in the "Thwap Shop", a copyrighted-(don't tell!) creature from the Wingfeather Sagas by Andrew Peterson. They are pom-pom creatures with google eyes and paper/plastic/wooden/fabric and more accessories. They sold, " Like moldy hotcakes!" she later announced, bu...

 Last Saturday, on September 16th, 2017, we dressed up in our Renaissance finery and drove out to Hollister for one of California's biggest Renaissance Faire! Our cousins met us there too. The oldest cousin dressed up as a huntress, and me and my sister as medieval maidens, my brother as a knight, and my mom as a peasant. My dad does not like to dress up at all. But his experience was heightened just as much as ours was. It took a while for the vendors to set up their booths, just as we had to wait for a long while for the gates to open. Soon a band was leading the crowds inside the Faire gates. Everywhere, there was vendors that were dressed as the Renaissance peasants, selling medieval clothing, baskets, glass mushroom lamps lit up with an LED light, turkey drumsticks, Gelato iced cream, real live swords and wooden shields and swords, and much, much, more! The Queen of England was there also, but she was an imposter, just like everybody else who was pretending to be someon...

Every year, around the middle of summer, we depart for the quiet campground of Butano, and then the noisy beach house in Santa Cruz to end up at the world-famous Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk! Our camping trip usually consists of hiking, biking, and playing! But the boardwalk is the HIT of it all! This first picture is of me, my sister, my cousin, and my uncle on the Double Shot, an 125 feet tall free fall! Wheeeee! Next, my papa always lets us get a souvenir, which this time mine was Sushi Socks from a wharf shop!  On the last day, we went to some small but mighty tide pools. We found two sea stars, one immense, one so wee, it was barely the size of your palm! So much to do, so little time to spend with cousins!    

Our yearly trip to Lake Utica, an attractive yet amazingly large lake near Arnold, always excites us as much as our trip to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Our favorite attraction, an impressive rock jutting out from the surface of the clear lake, is at the most 12 feet tall. I always feel confident to do it, but when I finish "hiking" to the top, my legs instantly turn to rubber. But I always manage to hurl myself off before I run back down.        The other half of our group is a large family that lives nearby. We always paddle our kayaks and canoes to one of the many small uninhabited islands in the lake. For the rest of the day, we talk and eat and play in the sand, and kayak to other islands to jump off certain rocks or to swim. The island is quite round, and so we often swim or kayak around it, but this time, my papa brought his stand up paddle-board, and everyone was swarming around it.                When the ...

          On a sultry Wednesday in June, we planned to go to White Pines Lake. For those of you who do not know where or what that is, it is a GORGEOUS lake in the middle of Calaveras County. My best friend's family came plus another family who was camping nearby. After everything was said and done, we whipped out the kayaks and goggles and sunscreen and started to make the most of our day at the lake. Me and my bestie rowed around the lake pretending we were lovely maidens proving our braveness in return for the hand in marriage of a young man whom we loved. We sang songs and recited poetry to each other, but the thing we noticed most was people asking us where we got our kayaks. We got them at Walmart, of course! One adorable detail to our lake day was a mother duck, with a train of ducklings swirling along behind her. One of the things that always stands out at White Pines Lake is the ROPE SWING! When we all got to the lake, one of the first things we did ...