CrAzy Trees and the Number 24

Thanks for following, ***Emily***!!!

TWENTY-FOUR DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS!

...so why does my countdown say 22? Good question! I have no idea. I set it to count down to December 25th...*shrug* Ah well. You get the idea.

Speaking of ideas, I've decided to do both Christmas ideas, the countdown and the daily Christmas...thing. So, something interesting about the number 24...

24: Subtracting one from any of its divisors (except 1 and 2, but including itself) yields a prime number. 24 is the largest number with this property, for to have this property a number cannot be divisible by a prime greater than three, nor can it be divisible by 9 or 16.

Kind of a "brainful", isn't it?

Now, in the spirit of preparing for Christmas, here are nine Christmas trees! Enjoy!

Serious recycling goin' on...

Hmm, she's really putting herself into her decorations...
Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!Whoa! Who came up with this??
A Christmas tree made out of CDs!
I don't even want to think about how long it took to free up all those bottles...
Colorful, earth-friendly, what's not to like?
I'm not really sure what this is...
God bless AmericaMERRY TWENTY-FOUR-DAYS-UNTIL CHRISTMAS!

P.S. I think I'm going to start doing every-other day. Tomorrow I'll just do something about the number 23, Friday I'll do a Christmas thing, and so on.

Walks, Green, and Fitting In

IT'S SUNNY!

And I fully intended to go on a walk on the trails today before lunch, but then (this is lame), I found this movie on TV that I love and just had to watch it. So much for a walk.

Oh well. Still might happen. As soon as I'm done with this post I'm going to go out on the porch and see if it's warm enough to go out in wet hair (just took a shower).

Anyway, today is EARTH DAY! I think. I'm pretty sure. If I'm wrong, tell me, but for all intents and purposes, today is Earth Day on Carpe Diem :)

I am not a tree-hugger. I can see why some people are, and it's always made me sad to see huge areas of forest be chopped down in their prime to make way for WHAT?! another WAL-MART?! Don't we have one like, I don't know, TEN MINUTES FROM HERE?!

Anyway.

I'm not an official tree-hugger, but I have some tendancies toward being one (I love the Pocahantas song "Colors of the Wind" :D). I might actually BE a tree-hugger if it weren't for all the annyoing "GO GREEN!" crud all over. (Actually, I would probably still not be a tree hugger. I like books too much. [Get it? Books. Paper. Comes from trees. Okay, sorry. That was really lame and stupid and not even funny, but at least I realize that.]) There are entire children's TV shows dedicated to GOING GREEN!! Give me a break. It's just gotten kind of annoying. I can see how once upon a time it was important to educate people about harming the environment, but we've all gotten the message by this point. See Carpe Noctem for my full rant ;) http://toseizethenight.blogspot.com/2009/04/going-green-give-america-break.html

Besides all that interesting stuff, I have a couple more things to say:

I think I'm going to have a vegetable garden this summer. It seems like a fun and productive way to get outside and do something. I like growing things, too, I just, like...never do, lol!

And thing number two: to raise money for the summer mission trip for my youth group, we're having a Parents' Night Out tonight! You drop off your kids from 5:30pm to 10:00pm and go out to dinner or whatever! Then you donate to our "cause". It's sooooooooo much fun!!! I am such a little-kid-lover, and being a seven-year-old at heart doesn't hurt either :) I love playing dogeball, giving piggy-back rides, solving litte-kid problems, being in charge (bwahahaha), and getting to show my inner little kid without being looked at funny by all the girls my age.

In other words, having an excuse to be who I actually am.

Maybe I seem like a pretty out-there, carefree, non-conformist kind of person, but actually the desire to fit in is close to my heart. I've always been labled either the weird, home-schooled writer freak or the weird girl who plays with little kids instead of hanging out with kids her OWN AGE. (By the way I have gotten a lot better at not doing that. I actually do hang out with my own friends before church now, and the little kids are more than a little ticked off about that.) Now, a lot of people still talk to me and mostly accept me, but there's always that look in their eyes and that edge in their voice that tells me they think they're doing me a favor by talking to me. Some days are worse than others. This is one reason why I love my class so much. They will always "love" me for who I am.

Sorry to go all mushy on you. I'm in a really strange mood today.

Well, it's sunny and looks warm and my hair is drier now, so I'm gonna go take that walk. In other words,

Carpe the diem :)

The Forest

I googled "beautiful," looking for a cool picture to post since I don't have anything real to say. I found this. I don't know why, but for some reason this picture is breathtaking to me. I really don't know why, but I think it's just really beautiful. There's something mysterious, mystical and almost dangerous about it. It's happy-looking, and yet if I were walking down the path, I think I'd feel sort of nervous; like someone was going to jump out at me at any second. I don't know. It's just a really intriguing picture to me.

You can kind of tell a lot from the picture, too, when you think about it. (I tend to overanalyze things just a bit :D) For one thing, we know it's summer because of all the leaves on the trees (and they don't look like evergreen trees). And we know that it hasn't rained extremely recently because there aren't any ruts in the road, and the road is dry even though it's shaded. And we know that the road is traveled most likely by cars because of the tracks and condition of the road. But we also know that it isn't in a drought because the grass and trees are flourishing, and the road isn't bone-dry, it's just not wet. Although, the quality of the light does make it seem like it might be a bit overcast. It's hard to tell with all the trees, though. It could just be that the light is so filtered that it only appears thin. Someone with more knowledge of plants and stuff could tell you what type of trees there are in the forest.

Okay. Sorry. That was really weird and random of me to do that. *shakes head* Anyway...

This little clip of the picture somehow doesn't do it justic. It was so big I had to crop it to get it to fit. Here's the link to the full picture: http://legacyofwisdom.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/beautiful-nature-la.jpg