Locomotive No. 844

Here in our humble town of Delta the famous "Living Legend" Locomotive No. 844 came to visit. Though the train was only stopping in Delta because the workers had to 'dope the rods', a numerous amount of people gathered to see the steam engine.
It was exciting to see the crowds of people, parents and their kids, to be a part of this steaming history. I personally got to have a chat with the conductor himself. Jim Coker.
Coker has been working on the railroad for more than 36 years now and really enjoys his job. You could tell by the way he talked and laughed with the kids that his favorite part of the job was seeing all the smiling faces in the crowd. He went on to tell me that whenever they take No. 844 anywhere there is always a crowd gathered when they stop to see one of Union Pacific's only steam engines left.

Sweet Sweet History

Here I am sitting on a computer at the Family History Center in little old Delta looking up family history. Tonight, for young women's, we all drove down from Oak City to look up our Ancestors and see if we could do any temple work on them.
Last time we were here my mother and I didn't have any luck at all. I get being technologically impaired from my mother. (Don't believe me read the blog before this one...though that time wasn't my fault) Computers just don't seem to get along with us. But this time we were determined to get some work done and find our ancestors.
Rose Marie, an expert at family history, search, and temple work came with our ward, and boy did she help. My mom and I found all sorts of names and work we get to do. Now I usually keep religion out of my blog, just because there are enough blogs about religion out there, but I have to say, I hope I can bring these names to the temple with my family and get them done. I want my family to feel the amazing feeling that I felt when I went with Rose's family and did names she had looked up.
I was dating Joseph Travis (Rose's son), and one of the things that I most remember about being with him was going to the temple with his family and doing baptisms for names that Rose had found on new.familysearch.org. It was an amazing experience. The feeling you get when you do the names you've found is so much different. So much more amazing and reverent. More than anything else, that is the biggest thing that has ever built my testimony, and I am very grateful that I got the experience to go.

There goes my computer...

Yesterday afternoon a storm came through my little town of Oak City. Nothing big we thought, just some lightning, some rain. Well turns out we thought wrong.

Upon walking into our house we smelled burning electrical, and found that random things in our house won't work. Well let me take that back, random electronics in our house won't work. Such as my tv in my room, random outlets around our house, a phone line is down, and oh yeah, I forgot to mention, our home computer is fried. Yeah, what an awesome day right?

So now my dad is taking our computer tower up north to get it fixed. Or replaced. Whichever one needs to happen. Oh well, at least it wasn't my fault this time...

Fast Times at Delta High

    Only in my small High School would it be acceptable for a teacher to wrestle a student to the floor as proper punishment. I remember the first day I went to school down here in good old Delta High, that was the day I learned that our school is based off of Wrestling. Mostly because we'd taken state almost every year since 1993. As I walked into English I sat in the back avoiding contact with people as if they were aliens. It was there that a freshman guy challenged our teacher. And right at the front of the class room is where my teacher wrestled him to the ground and sat on him.

    Now to my Junior year, this year there was a teacher, my math teacher (who ironically is brothers with the English teacher that wrestled this kid), who told me there isn't much a teacher can do now days to get fired. Really only three things actually.

-Steal money from the school.

-Kill a kid.
-Or get one pregnant.

    Yep, this is my High School. Not to mention that our school was built based on plans for a California school. We built a school designed for California in Utah. Hello. I want to know who on earth thought that was smart.

    Welcome to the fast times at Delta High.

5 Good Reporting Strategies

Over the past few weeks I have learned many things that helps to be a reporter, and since this blog was inspired by my Journalism I might as well write them.

#1. Don't ever be late for an interview.
              Luckily I didn't learn this the hard way. I am never late for appointments that I have set up. But I learned this little fun fact because as I was waiting in an office for an appointment I set up I was listening to someone being chewed out for being late. Glad that wasn't me.

#2. Be smarter than the person your interviewing.
             Often people will try to hide information or dirty facts from you if your digging at a good story. Its your right to know these things. The peoples right. Go in with information. Protect your right to know.

#3. Don't trust everything your told.
             Check up on what people tell you. Being a reporter people tend to automatically not like you. So they'll withhold information, or make a story into something its not.

#4. Go into an appointment with questions prepared.
              It makes you feel stupid if you have to admit your not quite sure what to ask.

#5. Record everything you can.
              People will often deny something they said and blame you for writing. Make sure you have proof that they said what they said.

Until next time my faithful readers!

Some quotes to live by :)

I'm kind of a quote Junkie. I'll sit and look up quotes on the Internet for hours. A absolutely love quotes. I have a big quote book that I read all the time. Its one of my favorite books. These are the ones in my journal. Enjoy!

Key to Happiness: Eliminate the things that make you unhappy.

Remember at any given moment, there are a thousand things you can love.

"If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me, and just forget the world?"

Whats meant to be will always find a way.

Live out Loud.

Nobody really cares if your miserable, so you might as well be happy.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

Remember: a team of professionals built the Titanic. But a lone armature built the Ark.

Scars are tattoos with better stories.

From the Book:
The World According to Seamus Harper
Ch. 12, para. 8, verse 3
"The Universe hates you, deal with it."

Stand for something or you'll fall for anything.

Always do the things that scares you.

Those who say it can't be done, should get out of the way of those who are already doing it.

Never grow a wishbone daughter where your backbone outta be.

Be the best of whatever you are.

The courses of true love never did run smooth.

Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

"Don't be stupid." -Oaks

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

They might not need me, but they might;
I'll let my head be just in sight;
A smile as small as mine might be
precisely their necessity.
     -Emily Dickinson

A woman's heart is a deep sea of secrets.

The more freedom you give someone, the more they come back to you. When the rich wage war its the poor who die.

Just material things.

Its not the weight of the world that matters, its how you carry it.

Duck, Duck, DUCK!

When I was younger, my parents got ducks.

See, as a kid, my dad grew up with a duck and a cat. The duck and cat grew up together, so they wouldn't hurt each other. They'd sleep together and protect each other. So my dad wanted a duck for me. Because if you only get one duck, then it attaches itself to a human, and thinks itself to be human.

Our first duck was brilliant, it would lay in your arms, come to you, play with you, you could even watch T.V. with it! Then we moved, and the people who bought our house wanted to keep our duck. Which we agreed to seeing as we didn't exactly have a place to keep him at our new house yet.

So a year went by and we got a new duck. One of those white ones that looks like that Aflac duck. And this one carries none of the brilliance our other duck had.

This thing just never learns, and lucky me its decided to attach itself it my side. See, a duck is like most birds, it will attach to one person and one person only. Our last duck picked my dad, but for some reason this time, I'm the lucky winner.

This stupid duck will walk right in between your feet and try to bite at your feet and legs. And you can't walk normally because you don't want to step in the dumb thing so your all trying to be considerate and it gets in your way even more. So now my whole family is used to just running to where we need to go in the yard because then it can't keep up with us and get under our feet.

Unless it is really in a mood that day.

See, one day, I thought I'd be smart and run away from the porch to the garden and run past the duck, then it wouldn't touch me. Oh no, that didn't work, that thing was determined to get me. As I'm running that crazy duck starts flapping its wings so it can run faster to catch me and it lands on the back of my legs tripping me, and taking us both down with the dumb thing on top of me! I swear next thanksgiving I'm going to replace that Turkey with duck...

My Experience in the Court Room

Now those that know me were probably chuckling to themselves and thinking, what did she do this time, well I'm happy to inform you that I was not in that court room because of something I had done. I was just there with my boss Shellie, and another newly hired girl named Ashley, reporting on the happenings of District Court.

Court was quite intriguing. Though I can't disclose what happened exactly I can tell you that I defiantly learned a lot while I was there.

But there was one really odd thing that I can tell you about. Here I am, sitting in court, my boss on one side of me and my co worker on the other, all three of us taking notes, and the door opens. In walks in my three guy friends, Kohl, Jarom, and Joseph. They just come struttin in and sit down in the crowd of the cour room. (keep in mind this is public court, anyone can come)

When the Judge called for a break I went over to them and asked what on earth they were doing here. You see, my bishop works in the court house. I'd been working with him all day. And when we took a lunch break my bishop went to a Chinese restaurant, to which the guys had traveled all the way to Fillmore to eat at, and bishop told them they should stop by. And well, being the boys they are of course they did.

Anyways, so we're on break, and a friend of Shellie's asked if we wanted a tour of the jail. (We meaning me Shellie and Ashley) Of course we said yes, then this guy asked if the guys wanted to come along.

So all in all it was a good day, I learned about court, got to see my friends, went on a tour with them and my boss and co worker (who are both completely awesome by the way), and came home to meet my Mentor, Jane Beckwith. Who is teaching me about Journalism and is also teaching my partner in crime K.P. about photography. Yep, that's a good day to me.

Welcome to the War

The Lion watches out for his pride.

That's what a very dear friend once told me.

I was reading in a book, called The Passage, by Justin Cronin. A paragraph stands out to me that I don't think I will ever forget. It goes something like this in Chapter five, page 84:

The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves...

Later, in the same paragraph it says:

-all the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to some body's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million manic cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

I've got to give it to Cronin, those are some true, and deep words. Its amazing what the public doesn't know. What we, as uninformed people let slip past us as myth and half truths. When really the truth is right in front of us.

There is a War going on right beneath our noses. Wither you see it or not. Well, that's your decision.

Welcome to the War, Americas war, be it poverty, gangs, domestic violence, or whatever cause you stand for. There is always a war for it.

So welcome to it America.

Becoming a Reporter

All my life I've wanted to write.

I'd given up on that a long time ago, thinking that writing wasn't for me. I never had time to finish or even get through the first five or six chapters of my books.

Then Junior year I took a class at my high school called Yearbook. I had heard that you can do some Journalism writing in that class and I figured it would help me gain a better knowledge of how to write. Boy was I in for a surprise.

See, I'm not the normal high school student. Whenever a teacher would say the word 'report' and other students would groan I would sit up straighter in my chair ready to tackle whatever topic the teacher assigned. So when the Yearbook teacher asked me to write an article I completely threw myself into the project. Especially since I knew that this would be in the local newspaper, the Chronicle Progress.

When my teacher saw the work I had done he started asking me to write more. Of which I was happy to comply. Soon I was writing three to five articles a week. I loved it, and my teacher talked of making me head reporter of the school. I agreed to that as well, and in the process started my own club. See I needed help writing all these articles, and people kept telling me they were willing. So I made posters and put out announcements about the F.R.A. (Future Reporters of America) And my writers came running.

Things were great for a while, I had eight writers. All happy to take the assignments I gave them each week. But then fourth quarter rolled around and things got busy.

No one had the time to write anymore and now it was back to me. So my teacher and I distributed out who would write what article by who was on what team. It seemed that my club had diminished.

Next year, my teachers and fellow faculty members made sure that my club will have its own class time. Which means that I get to distribute out who will write what among the school activities.

Then summer rolled around, and I had been talking with the Chronicle about a job. They were training me and told me I was exactly what they were looking for.

I wasn't sure if they'd still take me on when I went to the office. But they were happy to hear from me and still wanted me there. So now I go out and find whatever story I can dig up and I get exposure and experience. Two things I was surly lacking.

I absolutely love the experiences being a writer (both good and bad) and I hope to keep doing it. As a close writer friend once said to me, "Its not being published that matters, its doing what you love."

My 10 Biggest Pet Peeves

So I was watching Julian Smith's '25 Things I Hate About Facebook' on www.youtube.com, and I got an idea to do this. (Mostly because nothing worth writing about has really happened)

Lets see...

#1. When I'm trying to have a serious/business conversation with someone and they will NOT stop texting. Is it really that important? I mean come on.

#2. When you go to open a door, but its locked. Ya, does that only bug me? I mean, your walking, you shift your weight so you can open this door but no, you just end up running into it because its locked.

#3. People that you don't know, but seem to adore you. We all have someone in our life that follows us around like a little puppy dog and thinks we are the most amazing thing that happened on this earth, and usually they're really creepy and smell really bad.. Ya..

#4. Those people who send you like eight texts if you don't reply. Really? I swear there should be a limit as to how many texts you can send someone until they reply.

#5. Old people on Facebook that add you as a friend and are all like 'hey! lets talk! I've got a family and I'm 37. Who are you?' ..that's just creepy.

#6. When your at a gas station and the nozzle hose is so twisted up, you pratically have to fight it to get the nozzle into your car so you can pump gas. That stupid nozzle hose always seems to beat me..

#7. People who give you compliment after compliment, and just keep going like that's all you want to hear. Its nice to be told something sweet every-once-in-a-while but that much? Come on now, it belittles us both.

#8. When guys have those testosterone fights. You know, when one guys says, 'oh ya, went skiing yesterday' and another guy just has to pipe and and be all like 'dude you don't know skiing until you go with my family' and it just keeps elevating from there. If I had any interest in that guy before, its probably gone by then.

#9. Wind. Enough said.

#10. Last but not least, when your having a bad day, and you tell someone to leave you alone, and they just have to poke and pry and be all, 'Ooo, is someone having a bad day?' and then they just keep doing whatever it is they were doing to make you even angrier. Ya, that's when the devil on my shoulder is screaming into my ear, 'The world could use one less annoying person...'

Well now you know, ten things that annoys me. They aren't in any particular order. And these aren't the only things that annoy me, but they're what come to mind first.

Thanks for reading!

OCM

Let me introduce you to the little city I live in. Well, it isn't really even a city, more like a town. Its called Oak City. Its an amazing little place.

See, people here are different, the feeling here is different. I don't know how to explain it other than if you live here for a year you'll feel it.

I did most of my growing up here in Oak City. And no I didn't move here at an early age or anything, but something about this place changes you, makes you grow, makes you see who you are.

I love this town, with a passion.

Now for the best part, the people.

Welcome to O.C.M. The Oak City Mafia, trust me, its not at all as threatening as it sounds. Its just a group of guys that hang out and do fun crazy stuff, a group of which I have become a part of.

They taught me a lot, although they may not know it, and I'm not sure how to tell them, but they're the funnest to hang out with.

You see, these guys, they don't see me as a girl, which is to say they don't see me as someone they can hit on and take on a date. Which I love. And some of you are probably thinkin 'What??' but I do love it. They consider me a friend, someone who you can hang with and BS with. I'm one of the guys. No worrying about making an impression, none of those stupid little games guys and girls seem to have to constantly play, its just me and the guys doing something a little crazy, a little fun, and a little stupid.

They taught me that you really can just kick back and enjoy life. Sometimes you just need to pour gas on a couch, light that sucker on fire, and watch the sun set behind it with a couple of buds.

My talk with Mike Rumsowers on his Walk For Christ

Around ten thirty this morning, my editor called me in and in a rushed voice told me that a man who was walking across America and happened to be at Lyndel. She wondered if I could hurry over there with a photographer I work with and interview him.

On my way over, my editor called me and told me that he was carrying with him a Cross attached to a fifty pound hand cart. The first thing that crossed my mind was 'And here I was having a normal day, I guess I need my daily dose of crazy.'

As I started talking with Mike I realized that he was actually a very normal man set out on a calling. A calling he believes came from Christ. He had a dream of him walking across the Golden Gates Bridge with a cross. After the dream had recurred several times and many talks with his Reverend, they both decided that this was his ministry to Christ. So he packed up and flew out to the Golden Gates Bridge and is walking from there to Missouri. He is currently in Utah.

He plans to take highway 6 all the way up to 189 over to 40, and 40 over to 36, on the other side of Colorado. His kids are waiting for him at his home in Missouri.

Now, you must understand, I am not one to believe in such grand callings as this, but this guy had some amazing stories. He told me, ‘I’ve had experiences where people were spitting, throwing beer cans at me. I’ve had people pull guns on me. I’ve seen beautiful blessings where people came right to the foot of the cross and gave their lives to Christ right along side of the road.’

He is trying to fulfill a mission, a show of visual faith to the people of the world. He wants people to understand that he is not Christ, nor is he trying to be. But he wants to bring as many people he can to the light, and believes this is the way he was called to do it.

Now I've met my fair share of crazy people, but this guy, he didn't give off the crazy person vibe. He was happy, easy to talk to, willing to share his stories. He told me of stories where he has let people carry the cross with him, told me of how he talked to people, how he did all he could to ease their broken hearts. His mission (go to thewalkforchrist.com if you want to learn more about it) was a strong one, and although thought of as crazy by most, it is endearing and impressive.

God speed to Mike. Maybe he's right after all.

Dear Blogger's,

Well, this is my first time blogging. My editor reminded me and a photographer I work with to start a blog because it gives us 'exposure'. So here I am. I am I new reporter, working for the Millard County Chronicle Progress. If you'd like to look us up our web sight is: millardccp.com

I hope to be in Journalism wherever I move to. I've always loved writing, its always come naturally to me, I first thought my calling was books. I was proven wrong when I got no where with books and my teacher in Yearbook class put me in charge of the Journalism club. Which I later officially became head of making my mark in school as School Reporter, (nifty title right?), and starting a club called F.R.A. (Future Reporters of America).

As I was working with the willing writers in my school I also started working with the local newspaper, The Chronicle Progress. When summer came around I decided it was high time I started really putting my portfolio together to be a Journalist.

-Danielle Erickson