Well, this is me, Matthew Shriner and this page is about my personal life. You can read more about my business life on the Teen Entrepreneur page.
The girl in the pictures with me is my 11 year old sister, Amber. She likes to talk too much but she's okay. I'm thirteen years old and I live in a really little town in Idaho called Parma. It's on the Oregon border and not too far from Boise. If you ever want to go on vacation to a place that has tons of great stuff to do and see, come visit Idaho! Honestly, it's an amazing state.
The pictures show some of the fun stuff I've been doing. North of Boise is McCall, Idaho where we went sledding with Dad when it was only 6 degrees! There was about 18 inches of snow and boy did my dog Buddy sleep well that night! Every year at the end of January, McCall hosts an awesome ice sculpure contest that you might want to check out.
Just across the border of Idaho, near Baker City, Oregon, is the Oregon Trails Musuem. It's an awesome interpretive center where you really feel like you are one of the pioneers going west. I couldn't believe how small those covered wagons actually were - not like in the movies!
One of my favorite towns is in northern Idaho on the Montana border. It is named Wallace and you can tour one of it's famous silver mines. And if you go there, take your bike and go on the Route of the Hiawatha Trail. It's the most awesome experience. It's a 14 mile section of railroad track that has something like 9 trestles and 7 tunnels. You have to have a headlight to go through them and one of them is a mile long!
Anyway, I'm in 7th grade at Parma Middle School where Mrs. Peggy Sharkey just received the Idaho Principal of the Year award. I really like math a lot and I'm in the Mathcounts Program. I also really like to play chess but the only one I can find to play with me is one of my best friends, James. My other good friend is Cody and he's the one who loves to play video games. We're all super good (although I'm the best) but I don't have nearly as much time to play since I started my business.
I went fly fishing once, last summer, and I can hardly wait to go again. When the weather warms up, I'm going out for a day of guided fly fishing with a company called Dreams on the Fly. They've even got big wigs flying in from corporations on the east coast! I'm SUPER excited about it and I will definitly put up some pictures and tell you about it.
I am really into tennis. I'm super good at soccer, but there isn't a team around here, so I've been playing a lot of tennis. I'm pretty good. I also really like playing with the yo-yo. People don't realize how cool it is until they try it.
My Grandma and Grandpa Hugh love to go camping. They have a really little trailer that they chose because they like to go on roads where you can't get big ones. We get to see and do and learn so much when we're traveling. Did you hear about all the terrible fires in Idaho this last summer? Well, we went right past one of them and stopped in a rest area for lunch. It was really smoky, but I got to be practically right under a helicopter that was sucking up water to spread on the fires and the pilot waved at me.
After we'd been biking on the Hiawatha Trail, I felt like Buddy trying to leap through the snow in McCall. I was OUT!
I have a Russian high desert tortoise named Bisquit. He spends most of the warm weather outside, but when I put him in his cage he tries to climb out. Sometimes he even hangs from the top! Nobody believes me so I'm putting his picture here. He smiled for the camera!
I'm really lucky because each summer there is a group of PhD's who come to the Boise State Agricultural Extension Center here in Parma to do experiments about nemotodes and other weird stuff that's really important for the sustainability of America's crops. Anyway, they come from around the world like India, New Guinea, South Africa, Pakistan and other neat places. And they love to play tennis! So almost every evening during the summer I get to play with them. I'm in the middle in the red shirt. (Red & black are the Parma School colors.)
Well, I guess that's it for now. I'm going to be updating this section every few weeks as I do stuff so my customers can keep up with what I'm doing. I hope that maybe some other teens will be inspired to want to start their own business after checking out my website. I'd really like to hear from people about what they think of my website and my business and what I'm doing, and I'm open to suggestions, too!
I hope everyone is going to have a really good New Year!
Matthew