Adventures in bus riding

Ha, tricked you! You didn't think I was going to write today, did you? Well, once again, here we are. So all of Utah is up on smoke these days. It's raining ash and smells like a mass barbecue outside. All these fires lately reminded me of when I was on this field trip when I was a little kid. I was probably in first or second grade or something, and we went somewhere. Ok, as you can tell, the details are fuzzy. It was sometime in my childhood somewhere in California on a bus. That's the important part, the bus. So we were on this bus coming home from a field trip. And in good California fashion, there was a wild fire a blazin in the middle of the city, right next to the free way. It must have just started or something because there weren't fire trucks there yet. But I remember it pretty well, we were changing freeways on the bus, and we were just about to go under an overpass when all of a sudden it stood in front of us, flaring its nostrils, beating its chest, and baring its teeth. It was a California wildfire... It was actually on both sides of the freeway, but it wasn't too big. But as an 8 year old, or however old I was, it was pretty epic and scary to be driving into and through a fire. I imagine it looked something like on the end of Return of the Jedi when the Millennium Falcon shoots out of the exploding death star, our huge yellow bus going 40 miles an hour next to these little flames on the side of the freeway.

So we were turning the corner to get onto the other freeway when all of a sudden we see flames on both sides of the road we were on. So the bus driver, knowing how to deal with children in sensitive situations such as these, yelled out, "Everyone, sit down and shut up!" This of course set the entire bus in a uproar, and hoard of screaming, yelling, crying children on the bus. I remember everyone screaming really loud like we were driving through the jaws of Hell, but I remained silent. Yay, I uttered not a word. Silence, it's my form of being brave. I guess that's it, the end of that story. But now that we're talking bus talk, I just remembered the time that Matt got me to tell on myself for reading the bad words that were written on the back of a bus seat. It was a phrase with the f and b words in it. I said it right as Matt walked onto the bus, and he looked shocked. Which was funny, because we both swore a lot at the time (I was 8, Matt was 10. We learned most of these words from older kids and bus graffiti). I didn't think to just threaten to tell on him for always swearing, and for even having gotten caught for writing bad words on the bus earlier that year. But Matt told me that if I told my mom that I swore, I'd get less punishment than if he told on me. Turns out he had no intention of telling on me, he just wanted to see if I'd tell on myself, which I did. Cleaver little kid... He was right though, there was no punishment.


I put that picture up today so that you know that yes, we are in full swing of filming for our video, and, yes, I still have that confused air about me.