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Can you have a mental hobby? Maybe a more fitting word for the actions passed down to me from my family would be a value set, or an interest. My dad’s “hobby” is caring about the environment, and my mom’s is caring about waste. I don’t mean to make it sound like my parents think about the environment for fun, but they have integrated their beliefs into our daily lives so thoroughly that I have internalized and adopted the same standards into my daily life too. The values that my parents hold have more than a mental effect on me, because our family has taken many steps to implement those morals and do our best to change the impact that we have on the environment. My earliest memory of my mom teaching me how to become less wasteful was at the dinner table. She has a rule that we each serve ourselves, and therefore must finish the food on our plates, which creates less waste because the leftover food can be stored and eaten again at a later day. I still to this day feel ashamed when I was...

Prompt: What have you and your family accomplished together? During the Spring of 2021, my family made the decision to destroy our house. Okay, not really, but we did adopt a puppy which is pretty much the equivalent. We already had a dog at the time, Coco, and we got her when she was 2 years old and already mostly housetrained. So we didn’t have any experience raising a puppy, and naively thought it wouldn’t be much harder than our experience with Coco. I take credit for the idea of getting a puppy, but when we met Maverick for the first time, we all fell in love with him. And yes, the name Maverick is very fitting.   My dad likes to say that when we got Maverick, we made every mistake that we could have made, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. I think that one of the hardest parts of raising a puppy is feeling like you’re constantly playing a game of whack-a-mole. Every time we fix one problem another one is sure to crop up, and it can be pretty overwhelming to trai...