Week 1 Nature Descriptive Attempt

Around our house is a swath of trees. I have looked out upon those trees for all of my life, and walked out amongst them and the many items in the woods often, as I always will.

As I enter the woods, the chicken coop is there. The chickens are always entertaining to watch. There are many jewel weed plants around the pen, and sometimes I will get some jewel weed seeds for them, which they enjoy greatly.

Once into the woods, there is a path through the trees, and up to the compost pile. That is where my mother puts everything compostable, and that is also where she gets soil for her garden. I don't go there too often. Nothing interesting except for dozens of flies buzzing about.

Crossing through the woods, there is a pit in the ground, usually full of mud. Occasionally, in the really wet time of the year, there will be some water in it, but often, it is a hole filled with mud, that understandably is rather interesting to step into.

Following the path the other way along, I pass through ferns and pine needles on the soil, to a large rock. It has a flat top, and has always been rather nice to sit on. Right next to it is a fallen down pine tree, which acts as a cave with the branches shielding it. The top, where the branches were doubled back over each other, was solid enough to prevent most rain through. As time passed, the branches rather thinned out, leaving it more as a rain director than a blocker.

Up towards the back of our property is a tree. In falling down, it had landed on another log which was already on the ground. The result of that was that the log extended out into the air, a good ways off the ground at one end. At the other end were the roots, still half stuck in the ground with the rest of the roots sticking high up into the air. My sister and I would try walking across the log, attempting to balance all the way down it without falling off.

A well worn path leads twisting between trees, over many roots exposed to the surface, and down to a stream. The stream is very small, especially compared to what most people would consider as one. It is part of the Penobscot river and at its beginnings in first emerging from the ground, having traveled a long ways underground, it filled a large pool. Then it overflowed, and headed down through our woods, widening slightly as it went, starting off at only about six inches wide. It went back underground occasionally, then back up, then widened into a veritable stream of several yards across. Except in the melt season, the stream is very thin, or gone altogether, but some places in the wet season can be probably a foot deep and several yards across. It leads to the stone wall that marks the boundary of our property, and carries underneath it into our neighbor's yard.

Right in front of the rock wall, is a large tree. A small branch or tree, about six inches wide, is resting upon one of its branches several feet off the ground. That branch extends across the water, reaching the bank on the other side. My sister and I would often walk across this thick beam. She would always say that each year as we got older, it would break, but it is still holding firm even now.

As are the rest of the woods.

This is your intro to me, even if you think I already know you... (Elongated)

Being homeschooled is of assistance in many respects. I would not have learned near as much going through the public school system as I did learning myself. Being homeschooled allowed me to proceed at my own pace. If I already knew something, I could just skip it, or speed through it, and focus on the things that I needed work on. Also, instead of a classroom of thirty people, there was just myself and my sister. Which made for much more individual learning, and quicker through things. At a school, they probably would not have let me do preschool, kindergarten, and first grade all in one year. That gave me a head start.

I also took part in a math contest called MMSETS (Maine Mathematical Science and Engineering Talent Search), and I won my grade a few times, getting to work on fascinating math problems a lot, as well as getting to assist teaching at a junior engineering class, and meeting very interesting people along the way.

Sports were my major occupation besides homework, and as a result of having better coaches, I ended up playing baseball the most. In basketball, I did very well in the post, scoring the most points of anyone on either of the three teams for our town. But the coach of the all star team started his son who could not do anything, and did not like me, so he barely played me at all. The baseball coaches I had played everyone fairly, and actually tried to help the players improve their abilities.

I made three all star teams through little league, finishing fourth in the state once. Then, in Junior League, we reached the state championship game. In Senior League, we finished it off finally by winning the state tournament and heading to the regional tournament.

I also continued playing baseball into college. It is wonderful to have good coaches. These ones are the first coaches I have ever had that actually consider fielding important. That is why I started the majority of the season in the outfield. Most coaches at the little league level are managers, not coaches. These coaches on the college team actually try to teach and improve the players on the team. It is most definitely my favorite team that I have played on in any sport, considering that I started when I was eight.

I was 14 by the time I reached tenth grade, and I decided that I didn't really need to keep doing much more of this, so I started applying for college when I was fourteen. I was accepted and started classes just after I turned fifteen. I have enjoyed college greatly, starting off slow, with six credits in my first semester, then ten, then thirteen, then seventeen. For a while I had not really decided what I wanted to do, so I just took general courses and courses that I am interested in.

One field that always interested me was math. I have taken a math class every semester, and was taking Calculus II when I was sixteen. This will be my first semester without a math class, as Calculus III was cancelled.

I discovered a GIS class at one point. Geographic Information Systems fascinates me, with its manipulation of maps and data. The teacher was highly enthusiastic, and made the subject more interesting just because of how excited he was about it. He had wanted to teach GIS at EMCC for a while, but the software had been too expensive. He got a grant finally, and I was in at the first semester, and was in all of his classes, working on mapping Frenchman Bay for the MDI Biological Lab and the Frenchman Bay Conservancy  in many respects, including mapping eelgrass change. Our class's poster on Frenchman Bay Eelgrass won a statewide GIS poster competition, beating out several other posters from other colleges.

English is the other thing which I have always liked. Reading is something that I have been devout about forever. I did not have as much experience with writing, but I enjoyed that as well. After a little difficulty with the accuplacer's english part, the writeplacer, I got into English 101 because of doing well on the essay part of the SATs.

I have taken an english class every semester since then, and this is the first semester I will take two english classes. The one thing I think that the semester lacks is time to read, so, I figured that if I took a class where reading books was required, then that would take care of it for me. So I am taking online True Crime this semester.

In terms of what I would like to do next, I want to pursue something in English and GIS. Online GIS programs are available at the University of Maine at Machias, so my idea would be to take those there, and at the same time to be getting a degree in English someplace else. Where that someplace else would be, I am not sure, but English and GIS are two things that I love to do, so what better to try to pursue than those?

This is your intro to me, even if you think I already know you...

Being homeschooled is of assistance in many respects. I would not have learned near as much going through the public school system as I did learning myself. At a school, they probably would not have let me do preschool, kindergarten, and first grade all in one year. That gave me a head start.

Sports were my major occupation besides homework, and as a result of having better coaches, I ended up playing baseball the most.

I made three all star teams through little league, finishing fourth in the state once. Then, in Junior League, we reached the state championship game. In Senior League, we finished it off finally by winning the state tournament and heading to the regional tournament.

I also continued playing baseball into college. It is wonderful to have good coaches. These ones are the first coaches I have ever had that actually consider fielding important. That is why I started the majority of the season in the outfield. Most coaches at the little league level are managers, not coaches. These coaches on the college team actually try to teach and improve the players on the team. It is most definitely my favorite team that I have played on in any sport, considering that I started when I was eight.

I was 14 by the time I reached tenth grade, and I decided that I didn't really need to keep doing much more of this, so I started applying for college when I was fourteen. I was accepted and started classes just after I turned fifteen. I have enjoyed college greatly, starting off slow, with six credits in my first semester, then ten, then thirteen, then seventeen. For a while I had not really decided what I wanted to do, so I just took general courses and courses that I am interested in.

One field that always interested me was math. I have taken a math class every semester, and was taking Calculus II when I was sixteen. This will be my first semester without a math class, as Calculus III was cancelled.

I discovered a GIS class at one point. Geographic Information Systems fascinates me, with its manipulation of maps and data. The teacher was highly enthusiastic, and made the subject more interesting just because of how excited he was about it.

English is the other thing which I have always liked. Reading is something that I have been devout about forever. I did not have as much experience with writing, but I enjoyed that as well. After a little difficulty with the accuplacer's english part, the writeplacer, I got into English 101 because of doing well on the essay part of the SATs.

I have taken an english class every semester since then, and this is the first semester I will take two english classes. The one thing I think that the semester lacks is time to read, so, I figured that if I took a class where reading books was required, then that would take care of it for me. So I am taking online True Crime this semester.

In terms of what I would like to do next, I want to pursue something in English and GIS. Online GIS programs are available at the University of Maine at Machias, so my idea would be to take those there, and at the same time to be getting a degree in English someplace else. Where that someplace else would be, I am not sure, but English and GIS are two things that I love to do, so what better to try to pursue than those?