Last Year, my brother moved home from college. While he was gone, he got a dog. Her name is Stormy. She is a German Shepherd Dog or GSD for short. She is purebred which means she is fully german shepherd and not mixed with any other dog breed. 
 When she arrived, it was spring, so she was an outside dog. But when winter came, we felt bad, and she became an inside dog.  One disadvantage of her being an inside dog is, she has a lot of hair, and she sheds a lot. 

It was really nice to have Stormy here during quarantine. I basically made her my PE class. I took her for walks and bike rides. She likes to play frisbee, and she like me to throw the ball and she brings it back.
Stormy is one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen. She knows the words ball, walk, get it-get it, go for ride, go for walk, down, up, kitty, chick-chick, out, potty, lay down, no, and whats that.

She even attended my first day of online school.

She got so smart, she could do my homework.

Recently, I discovered she likes to chase my nerf darts. Like, she is obsessed. It a game we call 'get it, get it'. Anytime she finds a nerf bullet, or sees a nerf gun, she starts whining, or she will stare at the gun until someone finally launches a bullet for her to go get and bring back. 

My brother is moving out tomorrow.  Stormy is going to move with him. It is really sad to see her leave, but we are going to have a nerf battle tonight before she leaves., and I'll still get to visit her when I go see my brother, and of course I will see her when he comes here to the beach. 

Last year, when we went into quarantine, my parents decided we needed chickens. When you grow your own chickens and feed them organic scraps, they lay organic eggs. My family likes organic food because the chemicals sprayed on produce, and the chemicals fed to animals can be absorbed into what we eat. Farm fresh eggs also make baked stuff like cakes, or cookies, better. 

We didn't have any chickens, but my Papa does, and so does our friend Liz. We got the eggs from her, and incubated them. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch so we put a date on them in pencil. One day after they were supposed to hatch, we woke up and there they were.  We put them in one of my moms plants, until they got big enough to go outside. 

The little chicks were super cute.  We hatched six eggs, and three of them were roosters. You cant tell when they are little, which sucks, because you don't know which ones are roosters until you already have a favorite. We cant have roosters because we live in the city and the crowing would bother our neighbors. We had to get rid of the three roosters. 

After the hens got bigger, we had to build a hen house. My brother had a new top for his jeep delivered. It came on a big pallet. We repurposed the pallet, added some glass from some windows that had been replaced, and made a chicken house we can see through. Its kind of like an ant farm. 
I helped build the chicken coop with my dad. 

The chickens we hatched are called Cochens. Theyre different because they have seven toes instead of three, and they have big fluffy poofs on the top of their heads. They also lay much smaller eggs. We also got four red hens. They're called Sexlink chickens. They were genetically designed to lay big eggs. Their eggs are really big. 

I'm going to try to post a video of the chickens taking a bath.  Do you think it is an invasion of privacy if I take pictures of them in the bath house? 

When I posted the last blog a year ago, it was right after I got home from Costa Rica. I had no idea that it would be the last time things felt 'normal', and I haven't been back down since.

After we got home, we got really sick. First me, then my dad, then my mom, then everyone in the house. My mom said it made sense because we went through three international airports to get home, and lots of people travel at Christmas time, so we probably caught something from them. The news was talking about a terrible flu virus going around, but we were fine after about a week, so I didn't think it was the Corona virus. But now I'm not so sure.
It wasn't a big deal at school or anything until March. Then they decided to close everything down. They told us it would only be two weeks so it didn't seem like a big deal. But then, it was for longer, and longer .Then we didn't go back to school at all. It sucked that we didn't get to go get the stuff from our lockers.

They decided it would be better to have distance learning. Learning on computers. I was kind of used to this because when we went down to our other house, I would do homeschool and send my work in on a computer. But this was way different. I thought it was cool that I could see my classmates online, and see my teachers.

When they decided to have us do it again in September it seemed different than before. Like this time, they were going to make people do their work. It has been really hard having to relearn how they want things done every term, In first term it was easy for me, and I got straight A's. But it was harder for other kids so they changed it. Now, its harder for me.

I like learning at home. I can choose the room I do my work in, and I can dress up, or not. I can work at my own pace, and I don't have to waste time at recess. I feel like a lot of the school day is wasted on stuff that I'm not learning from. I like that can take my dog for a walk and that it counts as P.E. so I don't have to do P.E. at school and then come home to walk the dog.
I like that I can have my pajamas on at home school and no one knows. When we were at school, lots of people judged other people on what they clothes they wore. None of that matters in distance learning. Also there aren't as many people distracting me either. Before, I got in trouble a lot for being 'distracted'. I do still get distracted, but its by different classmates now.

It sounds like in person school will be opening up again soon. I am going to stay on remote learning because we are trying to go back to Costa Rica to check on the farm. I cant wait to go back.