Tomorrow is the last day of school before winter break and I am busy trying to finish the first draft of my ancestor report and after tomorrow I will have more time to post stories to the blog. Someone suggested to me (I think it was Gretchens friend Beth) that I take more pictures with a camera because it will help to illustrate my recent stories, but I told her about how my writing teacher suggested that I put only a few (like I have) so that I learn to illustrate stories using words so that readers can create the story in their head. Mr. grady said that a great writer has to learn how to "create a vivid" story by including details and "illustrative" words rather than too many pictures which limit the readers imagination. He said that it is ok to include pictures of certain characters so that it helps "spark" the readers imagination, like in newspaper stories, or to use occasional colorful illustrations, like the one of my Grandpas hat, but pictures can also mislead people by giving too little account of a story that only words can fully give. A picture is only a very short period of time (less than one second) and sometimes stories happen over many minutes, hours, days or even years. An example of what he is saying can be found by just picking up a book and looking at the cover. Some books have a photo or a drawing on the cover and some do not, but the ones that do, like "The Big Sky" by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.(the picture above), help the reader to start to imagine what the story could look like, but it is up to the reader to make up the rest. I also told Beth that I have trouble with cameras because they always break when I touch them. I brought home a video camera from school recently to videotape the house, the horses, and hopefully to sneak a shot of grandpa and when I turned it on the camera went "haywire" (a word I heard on the Wallace and Gromit movie which was great). "Haywire" means "erratic; out of control, from the use of hay-baling wire in makeshift repairs". "her imagination had gone haywire" is another example of its use (besides with the video camera). Grandpa said that it was because I pointed it at his face, but I said it was because I touched it or maybe because I discovered that I had put the tape in backwards, either way, I forgot to mention it to Miss Cataline, the equipment officer. I guess that cameras and I don't get along and I decided to take Mr. Gradys advice and stick to writing.

The first part of my ancestor report talks about Grandpa and how he legally changed his name to Bigsky after moving to California and being "disowned" by my grandparents. "Disown" means "refuse to acknowledge or maintain any connection with" and its use is "Howard's rich family had disowned him because of his marriage." (Thats two words for today for those keeping score) He was inspired by the book that I mentioned earlier, "the Big Sky" by A.B. Guthrie and he read it on the train ride out to California. It was written in 1947 and the main character is named Boone Caudill. I asked Grandpa why he didn't change his name to Caudill or Boone and he said that he wanted to keep his same initials since he liked being called "JB" in high school and he didn't like Boone because it was too much like Daniel Boone. I found an old copy at the library and plan to read it during the winter break. Mr. Grady talked about another book written a long time ago called "Don Quixote" (he had to write it down for me) and about how similar it is to some of the old westerns like "the Big Sky" even though it was written over 40o years earlier. He said that it is difficult to read and it is 1000 pages long so he said to wait till high school to read it. "O-K" I said as if I was about to try to read 1000 pages of anything and said that I will try to remember it, but seeing the initials DQ made me think of Dairy Queen so then I talked him into taking the whole class out for ice cream to celebrate a great semester. He agreed and before long I was eating a banana split blizzard and ate more red cherries than anyone and was feeling sick when Mr. Grady said "be careful what you do around other journalists before your eating frenzy winds up in the next Red Hill Reporter". "I'll remember that also", i said and I wiped my face and we went back to school.