sebastianL

Life Story

This summer we went to story land and we had to leave at 6:00am to get there at 9:30am. It was a long drive and on the way there I saw one of my dream vehicles a Edsel. It was a 1958 Edsel Pacer but they wanted $9,000 for it (my other dream car is a 1967, 1968 or a 1969 mustang fastback). Then we stopped at Dunkin Donuts then we wnt to Story Land. We where at Story Land all day until 5:30pm and we got back home at 10:00pm. It was a long day and the next day my dad and I went to Greene to get my dads dream vehicle a 1972 ford F-100, the reason its his dream vehicle is because that's the year he was born, and he likes fords so do I we have gone and looked at a lot of other old vehicles. 

My dad and I have hauled in a bunch of junk vehicles to the scrap yard. That's how I make most of my money we usually get around $80 a ton for vehicles. Its easy to get them ready we just take out the radiator, all the wire we can, all the tires, rip out the gas tank by cutting the lines and brackets, and we usually take a miners hammer the one with a point at the end and poke a whole in the transmission. Then we drain the engine fluid. Then we take it in the next morning. The other way I make money is by helping dad at the cut wood at the sawmill. Sometimes we make picnic tables it takes 14 2x6's and a 2x4 we usually make them out of hemlock usually 8 feet long and we even sand them down and they are really heavy and really strong. It takes 3 of us to put them on the truck we help load them and we will deliver for some extra money. We can make cedar ones to they are lighter but still rugged they cost a little more because the cedar logs cost more.

So far this summer we got 18 chickens and 1 pig the pig is gonna be bacon this winter. The chickens we are going to keep for eggs unless we get too many roosters, and now we are up to 21. Next spring we are gonna get a calf. We have to keep them a year and a half so it will be able to be beef in the fall, and by getting it in the spring we only need to keep threw one winter. Then that's all we are gonna to for wildlife but we had to do a lot clearing for the chicken coupe and the pig pen.

I have played a lot of golf this year for like 7 weeks we had practice or a game ever day of the week not weekends though. We lost all 10 games and didn't qualify for the states but I had fun and even improved a little hopefully we win a couple of games.

If you ask me I say summer vacation is way to short, it only seemed like it was a month, one of my favorite things was seeing the 1958 Edsel Pacer. They are a unique vehicle and the automatic didn't have the lever on the side of the steering wheel. Instead there were push buttons on the steering wheel I thought that was really neat, and they were only made for three years 1958, 1959 and 1960 the 1960 had a completely different look than the other two years I would rather have an old vehicle than a new one just because they are a lot better, like if you rolled a shopping cart that was empty in to a old vehicle and a new one the new one would get a dent and the old one wouldn't because there is a lot less metal in the new vechiles, a cool thing about some of the older vehicles is some didn't come with seat belts so if you got one road ready you wouldn't need a seat belt because the vehicle came from the factory without a seat belt so you could get pulled over and not get a fine for not wearing a seatbelt i thought that pretty neat

   By: Sebastian Leeman 

Coal

        The book Coal is about coal and some of the stuff it talks about is the UMW (United Mine Workers), something I found interesting was that there were mules that they had down in the coalmines, some of them didn't see sun or grass for years. At the beginning of the book it said that the Romans used some of the coal and polished it to make it into jewelry because it coal was easy to form; the genre is non-fiction; the theme is if you work hard it can pay off; the insight is that if you work hard it can pay off, because working in a coal mine is very hard work, but if you can work hard it can be rewarding. There are just a few bad things about working in a coal mine. That is they're dangerous because they can blow up or collapse and you get all sooty.

        The narrator helps develop the theme with saying that there was a mountain that had a lot of coal toward the top. So the workers had to use wagons and wheelbarrows to move the coal down the mountain. Then they loaded the coal on flat bottom boats. There wasn't any people around so the coal had to be transported away. There was 5 of these boats and 3 of them crashed, the first boat made it threw fine but the second one that made it had a hard time, because they hit something that put a hole in the bottom of the boat. So they used their clothes to fix the hole after they made it back they gave up going back. Just because it wasn't worth it. Then couple years went by two brothers got a group of men together to go back to that mountain where all the coal was They reinforced there boats and came out profitable and the theme is working hard can pay off and it did.

        I have show a connection between the theme from this summer. I set a goal to get 800 dollars before the summer ended and I did. I had to do a lot of work and I had to clean a lot of brush. Right now I am working and I need to clean more brush and stack and split some fire wood and my pay has been going up I usually work 3 or 4 hours straight and my pay has be increasing by 50 cents each time and I started at $6.50.

        This was a slow book. It wasn't really interesting to me because all it talked about the whole time was the history of coal and how much it sucked to be a coal miner. No one was really excited to be a coal miner. People did it because they needed money and in the 19^th century coal was the most used method of energy so if you were a coal miner you did get an OK amount of money because the demand was so high; this book is defiantly true it's a historical book that's 304 pages all about coal so if you want to learn about coal this is the book for you.