It's Raining Ice, Hallelujah?

Well, it was about 12:30 one afternoon and I was going to lunch with my friend, when my phone buzzed once long, once short, and once long again. I looked down and saw that Dave Masa had sent me a facebook message with a video attached: "Dad challenges Deepak Patel, Ben Grass, Joseph Grass, Meirra and Shayla Birath". "Nooooooooooooooooo", I screamed as I looked up at the ceiling of my (ok fine, technically it's my dad's) car. I had been challenged to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. "Crudmuffins", I thought. I believed that I would be able to avoid the challenge after my best friend didn't nominate me. After lunch I returned to work, and after work took the challenge. Now, I write this welcome back post whilst feeling the aftermath of a fairly substantial quantity of ice falling on my neck. But anyhow, welcome back everybody! Thank you all for waiting as Meirra, Josh, and I all had busy years and have neglected out posts (get it). We are back! 

Well it’s almost the end of summer, so let me tell you all what I’ve been up to. I’ve had a pretty busy summer. Around February I decided to start a business making apps with a few friends. Originally, we had no ideas, no focus, no direction, but I am happy to report that now we actually have work! People who have somehow heard of us (classmates, friends of friends, and friends of the "Quiznos Guy"), ask us to make apps for the iPhone and/or Android phones. We got our start after my father was talking to the Owner of our local Quiznos and told him that I was making apps, later he contacted me with a job. So far we have made 3 applications for iPhones and Android Phones and have more in the pipeline. All 3 of those are still in testing and not published yet. 

Meirra hasn't really been up to much this summer. From what I have heard from her she has been working fulltime at her school and hasn't traveled much at all. Well, other than spending a week at the beach in Wilmington and sliding down some waterfalls in the mountains. Boring summer right? To her, this is refreshing after being on the move so much in previous summers. Other than that she says that her summer has been pretty uneventful, but in a good way, so I suppose that this is a good thing?

Josh here. For me, this summer was quite unlike past summers because I had a full-time job. Fortunately, I was able to delay starting the job until the beginning of July, which meant that I had time for a week of sailing in San Diego with my dad's family. After that, I spent most of July and August working, occasionally making trips up to San Luis Obispo to see friends during weekends. Currently, I'm taking flying lessons, and I hope to have my Private Pilot Certificate by December. I look forward to seeing everyone during the Christmas vacation.

One of the reasons we never got the blog out in the last year is because we were disorganized and had no ideas. So for the coming few months we already have a general plan on what we are going to do. We are, at some point in the future, going to cover Shayla's trip to Europe, and do some more interviews. Remember about two years ago when we interviewed all of the kids? Well we are planning to do that again, and we might even do another post in which we interview all the dadas and dadimas out there!

As for the ice bucket challenge, it is really fun and I am sure that over the next few days, many of you will be challenged, and I encourage you to try it yourself. Don't forget to donate if you can because it is a very good cause and even though pouring ice water on yourself is fun and raises awareness, no progress is made unless money is donated to the ALS Association. You can make donations at http://www.alsa.org/ if you would like to. I will post some videos of people in the family doing their challenges here so you all can get a good look at what is going on!
Before we finish up, we have some updates that aren't quite breaking-news-type items seeing as they’re months old now. Congratulations to Kaushal for accepting a job offer with Booz Allen Hamilton. Booz Allen Hamilton is a fairly well known "management consulting" firm, who are contracted mostly by the government. It has been ranked as a very good place to work, and a very prestigious and high quality company. It has also been mixed up in an incident lately (okay a while ago). For all of you who are familiar with the whole Edward Snowden leak? Well, Edward Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen. Interesting, no? Luckily, Booz Allen was cleared of any wrongdoing or blame for the incident by the Air Force. Hopefully, Kaushal enjoys his first job, and I wish him the best of luck in his career. Congratulations to him!

All in all, I am very excited that we are re-launching the blog. I am also very excited that in the next day or so Josh will be dumping ice water on himself. It's hard for me to decide which of those two is better. Just kidding, I am more excited about the blog. Even though we haven't been good with consistently writing these posts, we absolutely love to do it, and  hope you enjoy them. 

Other than making apps I have been touring colleges. Now that I am a rising senior in high school  I have to apply to colleges in the fall and early winter (holy cow). But more on that later, a future post will outline my college plans for all of you. I've also spent a lot of time playing baseball. Like a ton of time. I kinda forgot about that because it was all early in the summer, before the week of the beach house. But I pretty much had a game a day for about a month spanning from the middle of June to the late July. It was really fun and I enjoyed getting a chance to play! But really most of my time has been spent working on apps. It is really fun and because of it my summer has gone by really fast. So those are my updates! Thank you for reading this, and as always feel free to comment or send your suggestions! 

Me Doing the Ice Bucket Challenge

Joe, Meirra, and I at a Party This August