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Thursday, February 27, 2014

Amber: A Girl Living in the Time of Slavery

#throwbacktime !!!!!

So here is a story I wrote when I was in second grade about slavery. At the time, everybody (meaning, teachers, parents...) really liked the slaves' working song I composed within it (only lyrics, duh, not including the actual melody, which it has none.) Now, I still can't understand what is so special about it........?

Here it is!

Note: I'm sorry that Amber's last name may be offensive to some (like, oh, her last name labels her, too). I was very young at the time of writing this... also, I do think that the word Black is in some surnames so it's not specifically targeted at Amber's race.

xxx

Amber: A Girl Living in the Time of Slavery


Once, in the time of slavery, there lived a girl named Amber Blacker. She was a slave living on a plantation in a little tiny shack in Georgia.

Amber was separated from her baby sister, Anne, and from her hard working, loving sister, Sofi. Amber could not imagine life without her parents. Everyday Amber walked long distances to get water from the well and bring it to her master.

Her best friend was Becah Magres. Becah had been brought from Africa recently. Her Granny was still in Africa. Becah missed her very much. “I hardly knew her,” she said. “My Momma used to say Granny was the one who helped us all.”

One day, Amber was picking cotton on the plantation, when Becah started singing. When slaves sang, their songs had secret messages:

When will the horses come, one by one? Let’s hope they will come soon. Here they come. Here they come. The carriages they pull. The Freedom Land, the freedom Land, is where they will go to.

She understood this message: the horses and carriage are like trains. The Freedom Land is Canada. All of the slaves Amber knew escaped to Canada.


One day on August 19th, Becah, Amber, and their families escaped on the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman. They were scared, but they did not talk. They would get caught if they did. "The first stop is Lulu’s house”, muttered Harriet under her breath. They hid in Lulu’s garden. Her garden was full of weeds so no one could see them.

During the night, they ran to Dunkin’s Barn. Dunkin had seven barrels-- perfect!! Each person hid in a barrel. Then Dunkin put the barrels in a wagon and drove them to their next stop. Day after day, night after night, they ran and hid. Finally, they reached Canada!!

They cheered for joy. ” I must go now,” said Harriet. “Be good and I’ll get your sisters,” she told Amber. Amber smiled. Harriet always kept her promise. Exactly a month later, Harriet brought Anne and Sofi to Canada and they all lived happily ever after.

xx

Oh yeah, and I got a new signature!~ <3

Monday, February 3, 2014

Writer!

Hi y’all! Today I’m using Writer to compose this post! That’s pretty exciting, but some (maybe most?) of you guys don’t know what Writer is.

Well, the official name is Windows Live Writer, and it comes with the Windows Live Essentials pack (free! yay!). I found out about it when I was downloading Windows Live Movie Maker, which is also part of the Essentials pack. Anyway, this program immediately caught my eye. It’s like offline composing, and it’ll publish to your blog for you, and it’s a nice, easy to use interface, and it doesn’t have orange (!!!!!!) and also it lets you edit with your blog template (except for Google fonts like mine; more on that later).

The one thing that I absolutely cannot stand about Writer is the font problem, which of course could probably (in theory) be solved by downloading your default blog font from dafont.com or some other font library to your computer. Because my blog font, “Coming Soon,” is a Google font, it isn’t available on my PC (as of now). Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, because usually when composing in the Blogger window it shows your words in Times New Roman, and you see the final product in the Preview screen, or else after you’ve published the post. But, in the preview screen of Writer, it also shows everything in TNR. I have a gently and slowly decreasing hate for TNR, but it’s nevertheless still there.

So, sorry for my rant about fonts (some people don’t care, but I do not belong to that category of people). And, if you would, you can check out Writer online. It’s had no problems (thus far, which is like the time it took me to write this post Winking smile )

Oh, speaking of emoticons: Writer is great for this stuff! It provides you with emoticons while blogging. When I was trying to type ( d ) (without the spaces, duh) it turned into this: Martini glass, and when I was trying to type ( f ) it turned into the lovely Red rose.

So I would definitely recommend Writer to those of you in the blogosphere reading this. Thanks for reading and please leave a comment~! <3 thank you, it would make my day Open-mouthed smile

Note: I am not in any way affiliated with Windows or any of its partners. The opinions expressed in this blog post are my own.