Playing in the Snow
Posted on November, 20 at 9:22 am
Tonight is Achievement Night! Tonight is also the Office…you see my dilemma?
So on with the snow, yesterday in my Data Management class, literally half the class was away at a math competition (the class only has four kids), so Mr. Casella cancelled class for the other two and we could catch up on some other stuff. I went down to the library and did some math work, some bio, and then we (myself, Lorraine, and our friend Matt) noticed it was snowing out side, and decided that if we had 15 minutes until our next class, we should spend them playing in the snow. So we went outside and not really sure what we would do, since we couldn’t really go far because of our next class, but we didn’t want to just stand outside in the snow…so we went to the river, and I just started running through the snow like an airplane, kind of trying to dodge the falling flakes, and Matt and Lorraine copied. Then we ran through the trees, well they did, not me, too many pricklies. Lorraine made a snow man while Matt and I had a snow ball fight, and then eventually Lorraine joined in. We heard the first bell ring, but before walking back we made snow angels. Now, Matt is like over 6 feet tall, so our angels looked like midget angels compared to his, but I think the effect was still there, and it was definitely on my jeans. We walked into English a little bit more damp than when we’d left, a little bit more red, but a whole lot more satisfied.
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*lease*Let it Snow!
Posted on November, 19 at 9:30 am
So I got a nosebleed at 6:30 this morning, which is conveniently when my alarm goes off and I am supposed to get up, though I rarely ever do make it out of bed before 7:15. But yeah, not so much fun.
In other news, it snowed last night! And it stayed! And its wonderful! Last night I accompanied Tony to fix a flat tire (came out of chem last night only to realize the van’s tire was flat - again) and he told me I could stay in the car so I wouldn’t be cold. So I sat in the car (we borrowed George’s, which has an excellent heater) all nice and toasty, yearning for that cold stuff outside. No one had walked on it at the school parking lot, and I wanted so badly to be the first one…to lay in it and make snow angels. I realized this would not be the best idea because I was not wearing proper snow angel attire, but I did eventually get out and walk around a bit. This morning it was my pleasure to dust the snow off the car, despite my wet hair and no gloves. Right now, snow just feels like promise. Like it’s God promising me things will change…snow brings so many possibilities…you can look at snow and see all the fun you’ll have with it, whereas looking at grass not so much. You can still have fun with grass, just not in the same way. Plus, its a definite sign Christmas is around the corner, which means family is right around the corner. Anyway, I want it to keep on snowing!
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Max Factor
Posted on November, 18 at 9:18 am
Well, after the craziness of yesterday morning, today’s quiet pace is a little comforting…however, I do have to be at Calculus early today for the second half of a test, so I should probably, in the words of Mr. Lankin, mobilize max factor.
Aside from my calculus test, I also have the second half of my biology test. Yesterday, some kids had four tests total in one day. I guess that that happens every now and then. Students get teachers to push aside tests and stuff and they end up all happening on the same day. Usually we are smarter than this, but unfortunately our maneuvering worked against us this time.
Achievement Night is this Thursday, which aside from playing at with the band, I think I’m getting Honour Roll at. Last Achievement Night also…See, I don’t do this at school, because I figure they would all just find me incredibly depressing, so I save it all for here =D. But yeah, I can’t believe its already November, the Christmas concert is two weeks away, Thanksgiving is one…this year is already flying by, but it still feels like I’ve been at it for forever! That’s IB for you…
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Cafe Leche
Posted on November, 14 at 10:01 am
My Spanish class is taking a trip to Tim Horton’s (Timmy Ho’s!)…for no real Spanish reason, just that the class only has 6 people, and that can make class a little boring sometimes, so we need to shake it up every now and then. A few weeks ago, it was particularly cold and miserable (rainy, not snowy, still waiting for that to happen), and someone suggested that we go to Tim’s on the next Friday that we had class (we have it day 1, out of a day 1/day 2 system). The next Friday came and Mrs. Talarico was sick, so we postponed it until today. I’ve been really excited about it all week, it seems to make the week go by much faster. Although my excitement was quelled by my fear of the biology test I face at the end of the day. Anyway, we are bringing our Spanish stuff because apparently, we’re going to be doing our Spanish work, despite being at Tim Horton’s. Lame!
Watched the Office last night (obviously, its what I mark my week around) and there were some good things, some not so good things, some sad things. But I leave you with the clip of Pam returning to Scranton and the contented sighs returning to people everywhere…
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Night of 1000 Dinners
Posted on November, 13 at 9:27 am
I realized last night before I fell asleep, that last night was most likely my last Night of 1000 Dinners. It’s strange, how you can only do something once a year for four years, and yet it feels so hard to say good bye to it. ‘Night of 1000 Dinners’, despite not knowing what it really meant until this week, is in my vocabulary…it means black and white dressed servers, teacher pie toss, ice cream with mango pulp, beef on a bun, set-up after school, clean-up until 9…
Well, I guess we saved the best for last then. Last night was awesome! Instead of buying a ticket to pie your (least) favourite teacher, we held a silent auction to bid to pie a teacher with a real pie. Mr. Lankin (chem) told our class that we could get bonus marks on two conditions: 1. Someone from our class pied Amanda and 2. No one from our class pied him. So our class was really fighting to pie Amanda, but Mr. Jones (bio) also wanted to pie her, and he kept raising the stakes, even though he promised me he wouldn’t go higher than $20. We pooled our money together, and got some help from Mr. Lankin, and we were able to outbid Mr. Jones at $42. I only donated $1, but I like to think I helped out with my enthusiasm. On top of that, we pooled $26 to pie Mr. Jones. When the pie time came, we each took a handful of the lemon meringue and shoved it all over poor Mr. Jones’ face. In the ears, up the nose, through the hair. It was awesome. Amanda’s time came, and she had a similar experience, but I was nice to her and helped her down off the stage because she couldn’t see without her glasses. She may be frightening, but hey, we’re still friends! The Student Service workers pooled $150 during the live auction to pie the new principal, Mr. Seymour. That was intense. They let the kiddies at him. I hadn’t really met him before that, so hopefully he doesn’t remember me only from last night.
On top of all of the excitement, the food was super good last night. I goofed around with my buddies, pied a few people, had a really good time. One for the books…
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Miles to Go
Posted on November, 12 at 9:29 am
We got a bit of a late start here this morning…that usually accompanies a late end…a silly little math project kept me up formatting and what not, there wasn’t even time for the Office, but of course facebook is more easily accessible, so I was still distracted plenty…
Yesterday for TOK, an old IB student came in to talk. She was from the second Churchill IB class, and I’m in the eighth, which I don’t think makes her that old, but she and Mrs. Jones kept calling her ancient. She was advocating some program that really favours IB kids, and that she is starting in January. It was for political science or something, which lets be real, I’m not doing, that a different child, but I really appreciated someone coming in after doing full IB and talking about how it affected her life after high school. I think the kids in my class really needed to hear that IB has some benefits, even in Canada, because most of the kids talk badly about dear IB, and while I have also on occasion, mostly I appreciate IB environment so much that I wouldn’t care what happened after high school. Plus, she was still very IB, in that IB way, tight with Jonesy, so I’m hoping that I too will not lose my IB way, since I happen to like it very much.
I found out that she started Night of 1000 Dinners, like got it going at the school, so I finally found out what it means! Apparently its like globalness and whatnot so like thousands of people around the world eat dinner on the same night and raise money for charity and its awesome. It’s also tonight, which when you combine it with band in the afternoon, and calculus in the morning, its looking to be a looong day ahead of me.
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Where Poppies Grow
Posted on November, 11 at 9:14 am
Whoo, I am tired this morning…Mommy joked that pretty soon we’ll have to enforce a "No Office after 11" rule, I think we might be closer to the non-joking aspects of it. But I only watched it so late because at 10, I was helping little kidlets with their homework. Yes, I saw the first glimpses of future IB student Emily, who stayed up late and talked about getting up early to work on an essay due today. That’s the way we do it sister!
Well, today is Remembrance/Veterans Day, depending on which side of the border you live on. I feel like we didn’t really prepare for it this year…I seem to recall last year where poppies were in my life for much more than a weekend, so much so that we had perfected the whole pin thing and found a way so it didn’t prick us. But, once again this year, I am disappointed that I am not going to any of the ceremonies…No teacher has ever taken my class to one, which is a bummer, because I’d like to think I’m the kind of audience member they would want. I have been thinking a lot about Granddaddy lately, partly because of Veterans day, but also because of that layout Mommy posted to facebook…also because we watched a video on the polio virus yesterday in biology and Mr. Jones started tearing up because his dad had polio. Anyway, Granddaddy made it pretty easy to be proud of him. Today I am proud of Granddaddy, of my Opa, of Tony’s Dad, of anyone who was willing to fight for their country. I think we need more people like them.
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Geo-what-ing?
Posted on November, 10 at 9:20 am
Ahh…Monday, we meet again.
On Friday, there was joint youth group thing, where we could either play sports or go geo-caching…so, obviously, I went to sports. Just kidding! Haha…start off the day with a joke, eh? No, I went geo-caching with Erik and Emily. It’s not really that popular, so just us three and one other wickedly cool kid named Graham went with the three leaders who were leading it. At first, I was just like "oh, I’ll go to geo-caching only because I can’t go to sports", but I learned a lot about it and now I think its really cool. This weekend lots of people have asked me what "geo-caching" is, and I never really know how to explain it, but trusty Wikipedia says that it "is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world."
It’s really awesome because it happens all over the world. There are these things called ‘travel bugs’ which have serial numbers, and you place them into the cache, and then log it on to the website, and you can track where it goes. One of the leaders on Friday told us that when he was in Florida doing a cache, he found a bug that was trying to get to all 50 states. We joked about how hard it would be to get to Alaska or Hawaii, but then I started thinking…how cool would it be if you lived in some dinky town and then checked on your bug one day and it was half way around the world?
Anyway, it was really hard to find some of them, but we found 4 total, and we walked in a really large circle (our feet hurt quite a bit, us inexperienced geo cachers). The third one we found had all these glow in the dark spiders in it, and I took one to remember my geo caching experience, but then at the fourth one (which I found, and am very proud of myself for) it was too small to have any trinkets in, but I noticed that my new spider was tiny enough, so I dropped it in, in the true spirit of geo caching.
One day when I’m not so IB, it would be fun to see some other caches in T-Bay, or some in Minnesota.
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Should I Title This Post With A Question?
Posted on November, 7 at 9:28 am
Well my meeting with mommy and Mrs Jones went fine yesterday…we talked a pretty long time, but it wasn’t all about me…Obama crept in there, other random tidbits, I resisted the urge to talk about American Idol (which BTW is premiering Jan 13th or something like that)…and so I’m registered to write the something like 6 hardest exams of my life as I know it, come May 2009. So close, and yet so far away.
My Youth Group leaders Nik and Dana had a baby boy yesterday, and last night at choir Pastor Al and Sandy were talking about it. Praise the Lord that’s good news, we had been waiting a while. Choir is going good…I have to miss three weeks due to band and holidays (the choir director and I were wondering why the school did not realize that I’m American and thus not arrange concerts on both end weeks of Thanksgiving) but Kelsea was cool with it. We might get together alone and work on some stuff. We did this really cool thing where we stood in a circle and sang our parts, because for this one song there is a section where we all have four different parts and rhythms, so its uber hard…but it was awesome. I stood next to Pastor Al and the tenors, who were next to the bass (I’m a soprano) and they are so low its incredible.
Let me start this paragraph by saying that last night, the Office rocked. Mommy has enforced a new rule:stop doing my homework at 10. This is so I don’t resort to my grade 9 and 10 habit of starting my homework at 10, and thus being up till who knows when, or not finishing it at all. Now, I finish my homework before 10 and have time to do whatever I want (mommy suggested reading a book for fun, haha no brain space for that in IB) so I’ve been re-watching old seasons of the Office. Mostly season 4 (last season), but now I’m starting season 2. Well last nights Office was soo good I didn’t need to go down and watch one more, because I’ve started to start thinking about the Office towards the end of the school day and counting down the hours till 10, but last night I was good to go. Mommy is displeased with the current direction of some of the romantic relationships, but I was just so happy to see Jim and Pam actually talking to each other instead of about each other, that I will take it.
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Meetings and such
Posted on November, 6 at 9:53 am
Well I gotta mobilize…I am catching the bus today, which means I’m on an actual schedule….
Today at 4 Mommy and I have a meeting with Mrs. Jones, to discuss my progress as an IB student (or something like that). Even though the exams aren’t till May, she has to register us in November, which is, hey! its this month! But since the exams cost like a buttload, they want to make sure that all of their students are prepared and competent enough or something to take them. So she’s been having all these meetings, and I am proud to say that I am not last, although I am for sure not first. I waited quite a bit to schedule the appointment…I just don’t like the idea of sitting in a room and talking about me. But what I like even less is the idea of them talking about me, without me…so I’ll go. Anyway, we also had to get a referral form signed by our teachers saying we could handle the exams, and I finally got it signed by my calculus teacher, who wrote only this "Doing well!" Those two words made my day…
Watched a good video Mommy showed me…you should check out her blog when she posts it.
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