Issue 146

Howdy readers! This is actually Whitney, my mom got called away on some unexpected business that couldn't be ignored tonight, so she asked me to post the blog. I hope you like what you see! :)

Freedom Bowl

Yesterday my team and I participated in the Freedom Bowl. It's an annual buzzer-question type competition that I've done four years in a row now. My team won silver, in the four years I've done it I've placed every time. I've gotten a gold, a bronze and now two silvers with the one I got yesterday. My team has been studying since September and we are some of the best. There is another team that we regularly go up against that is about our equal. They are the only ones that we really worry about at all. This year we were behind them by only 20 out of maybe three hundred points! Our moderator for that round was the guy who actually wrote all the questions in the first place. He said that when it was between our two teams it wasn't a contest of who knew the answer, it was a contest of who could guess what question it was that he was asking.

Stop Traffic

At my school we are very service oriented, every quarter we have a school-wide service day. Every core class devises and carries out their own service project for the community. There is always the fall-back of getting squares of fleece and tying them into blankets, but this time I was able to participate in something a lot bigger. My class, along with a couple others, participated in a flash mob. A flash mob is when you have dozens of people that all meet at a certain place at a certain time pretending to just be normal people minding their own business. Then at a signal everyone freezes in place for a certain amount of time.
I was in a flash mob for "Operation 61". Operation 61 is an organization the combats human trafficking. Most people think that slavery in America is a thing of the past, but there are actually more slaves in the U.S. now then there ever has been before. It's actually quit shocking when you learn the facts.
A group of about 130 of us (students) met at the gateway mall and froze in chained-up positions for five minutes. We did it at three different places downtown. It was awesome to be able to participate in something like that. You can find a short video about it at the Operation 61 twitter page.
Plus most of us got a nifty t-shirt that has a stop sign on it and says "Stop Traffic!". We were debating who to push into the street to see if they worked but the mentors decided that wasn't such a good idea. :)