Note: I would've finished this story (or group of stories) last night, but continuing my year of mishaps, misadventures, and just overall bad luck, another gnarly storm rolled through last night and knocked out our power and wifi for about 20 minutes. I don't have cell service out here in Elizabeth, Colorado, so I couldn't do much but wait out the storm with my half brother's dad and siblings. I was in the basement the whole time, but not because I was even aware of potential weather. It's just much quieter, cooler, closer to the wifi router, and a floor below the party animals. I thought someone was messing with the breaker box when the power went out, because I heard a series of clicks that was actually hail hitting the basement windows, and I was on my way to yell at whoever was messing with it. But when I reached the foot of the basement stairs, I heard Hannah (my half brother's half sister who is 15) and Ryder's girlfriend panicking as they ran down the basement stairs with their phones, and they almost ran me over. They're both city girls from the Canadian mountains. They're not used to the wide open plains, or the storms that blow through. I grabbed them both and told them to shush it, calm it, and we'd be just fine, and they surprisingly listened. But Ryder's girlfriend gets pretty clingy when she gets scared, and refused to let go of me until Ryder joined us downstairs. She's got claws for nails, which she only dug deeper into my arm the more I tried to get away. When the wifi came back on, my laptop had logged me out, thus logging me out of everything else, and I lost a lot of work. Anyways, I'll rewrite the stories as I remember them.

They're stories my family (more specifically, my dad's side in Minnesota) have all told me. I wish I took more pictures of the pictures in the family albums while I was at the farm, but I didn't. Interestingly enough, I was in the middle of writing about a storm that turned my uncle Wes into the most religious man in the family, when the power went out and killed my wifi. Fun times....