pale people, unite!

this morning i decided that i wanted to wear shorts today. so i put shorts on and looked down at my legs. you know what, i am quite pale. why is this? this is because i do not go fake tanning. and it has been winter / gross weather for the past many many months so i haven't been able to frolic around outside getting a tan. because of my paleness it is obvious that i do not go fake tanning and i have no inclination to do so.

i tried to show you a picture of fake tanning gone wrong but blogger does not want to cooperate at the moment. so i'll just link it instead. she is orange. nice tan right there. what is the point of fake tanning-- especially during the winter. everyone can tell that you have been fake tanning because you are unnatural shade of orange during the winter. all you are doing is killing yourself.

fake tanning causes skin cancer. i will not feel sorry for you if you get skin cancer because you're the one that chose to go tanning. do you know what a nice tan is? a nice tan is a whole bunch of dead, damaged skin cells. so please, continue to go off and get your wonderful tans. according to cabrito my information up there is wrong but hey you know what? that's okay. no one reads my blog. and anyone that happens to stumble upon it probably won't care that my information is not correct.

the american society is too obsessed with looks and looking "perfect." and cabrito is obsessed with his xbox. but to the american society you are accepted if and only if, or iff as my calculus teacher writes, you are thin and tan. and to them, thin is a size 0-2. if you aren't those sizes you are fat. sucks to be you. we live in such a messed up world.

i have ran out of steam with the pale people, unite! post and i have about 100 words left. embroz is watching elmo vidoes. cabrito is word counting and getting very excited about his two blog views. rbetta is fanning herself with her ap bio prep book. speaking of ap bio, we're taking our FINAL exam today and tomorrow. we have 30 days left of school. and we're taking a final. the ap test isn't until may 11th. i cannot wait for may 14th, you know why? because as of may 14th i will be done with ap tests for the year!

huh?

today is physics we were in a computer lab. as we're working on our lab some kids decide to be real cool and play some ultra sonic sounds. for the most part i couldn't hear them, they were much too high for my ears. but a lot of the class could and there would be a constant grumbling every time one went off. now i have a headache. cooool.

it's no secret that i'm very likely to ask you to repeat yourself. my hearing isn't the best. especially in the morning. and when people are mumbling. my dad also has not good hearing. he's even worse than me. he used to drive the open cab tractors around without earplugs.

bucket list?

before i die i want to travel. the whole planet. minus antartica, i don't wanna go there. it's cold there. there are penguins though; i like penguins. i want to visit the states, just kinda drive around the country side; see the sights; get lost in the hustle and bustle of downtown.

i want to cross the border and go to canada; struggle with the french/english language barrier; find the beauty of the land. to mexico and not drink the water. not going there until swine flu is no longer an issue though. the carribbean islands. swim with the dolphins. south america. i wanna go to bolivia. i wanna explore rio. climb some mountains. go to peru.

europe. stay the summer. or maybe a whole year? spain. las fallas. el prado. barcelona. france. paris. the efile tower. the city of lovee. go see some german castles. laugh silently at all the angry sounding germans. berlin, the site of the wall. italy. rome. florence. eat some good italian food. explore austria. off to england. pretend i'm british. pick up an accent. big ben. walk in the rain. drive on the wrong side of the road. sweden. visit toby for real. hahahaha.

asia. see the wall. and the rest of china. india. gandhi. experience buddhism and buddhist teachings. the flea markets. the traditions. japan. vietnam. korea. i could go on and on.

australia. the coral reefs. the outback. kangaroos. new zealand. indonesia.

i just want to explore. escape from america and see how the rest of the world lives. i want to get out of my box and broaden my horizons. the world is such a big world.

my brother

my brother has an unhealthy love for his xbox. i think he loves it more than life. it's the first thing he does as soon as he gets home and then you never see him again. even though you don't see him you know he's home because of all the yelling your hear bouncing up the stairs. yes, that is right, yelling. cabrito also has this strange obsession with the xbox and xbox live.

yes, i have played xbox before. yes, i had fun. no, i was not any good. but i don't understand why this is all some people do. my brother is addicted to his xbox. he needs his xbox like a heroin addict needs heroin. if he does not get to play his xbox he throws a fit. he is as sullen as the little kid in the candy store who can't get any candy. he pouts. he complains. so what does he decide to do? he goes to sleep. he does not know what to do with himself when he can't play xbox.

when he goes to over to a friend's house you know what they do? they play xbox in big groups. they have no concept of how to spend their time. it's all they do, stare at a TV and yell at the random kids from all over the world. they waste their lives sitting in front of a TV.

he is supposed to only play xbox for two hours after school on weeknights. do you think he follows this rule? nope, everyone else has to keep a watch on the time for him. he is incapable of making sure that he only plays for two hours. then on weekends he can play for as long as he wants. meaning he tries to play all day. and if he's not at a friend's house friday or saturday night then he's in the basement playing xbox. he will play until 11:30 or 12 at night and then come upstairs and go to bed. my parents go to sleep between 9 and 10. my dog barks every single time he comes upstairs. my parents yell at him for waking them up. yet, every week the same exact thing happens.

xbox live is over the internet, meaning when he's playing xbox the internet in the rest of the house moves impossibly slow. no one can use the internet when he's on the xbox. if we get on this is what he does. he sends you a text message. he's in the basement and i'm upstairs. if i get on the internet when he's on the xbox he sends me a text message. i have to have my parents forcibly remove him from the xbox when i have homework to do. otherwise he just keeps telling me that his game is almost done and he'll get off soon but he never does.

i never see him do any homework at all. maybe that's why he doesn't get good grades and often gets his xbox taken away from him because of bad grades.

***an update***
the xbox red ringed of death. i'm heartbroken. not. for all of you that don't know what the red ring of death is, it means that the xbox is broken. oh darn. too bad for him.

earthh :)

happy earth day! today is the day where there is actually a big focus put on helping save our planet. i don't know if i like the idea of earth day or not. now, i'm not saying that i hate the planet and do all i can to ruin it; what i'm saying is do we really need to devote a single day to focusing on saving our planet? why can't this be an every day focus? nonetheless, i do like earth day. in the spirit of earth day here's a few tips for you:

• lower your thermostat. you don't need to have it up around 80 during the winter or down around 60 during the summer. every year our air conditioner stays off until the temperature gets around 90. you have windows, open them. turn on a fan, but don't leave it on when you're not there


• reuse water bottles. avoid buying bottled water, keep one good one and reuse it.


• switch your lightbulbs to compact flourescent bulbs. opt for energy efficient appliances.


• when you're not in a room the light does not need to be on. the fan does not need to be on. unplug your outlets, especially at night. not only does this save energy but it saves you some money too


• recycle all you can. especially newspapers


• drive less. carpool to work. walk, run, jog. there's a reason america is the fattest country and it's because we eat fast food and drive everywhere. short rant coming: two houses down from me is the Bills family. two houses up and across the street are the bills' grandparents. it is common to see the big white escalade drive up the street and park in grandma's driveway. the whole family except for mr bills is fat. they have two kids, do they need an escalade? really?


• reuse your plastic bags from the grocery store. they're great doggie poop bags. they're great trash can liners. at the grocery store, pick paper bags. sure they may be an inconvience to you at the time but in the long run they're so much better


• go paperless with your paycheck. direct deposit. talk to your managers and get your paperstub switched to online only.


• shorten your showers. only do full loads of laundry. run the dishwasher when it's full. and for pete's sake turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth


• plant a tree


• instead of google, use earthle

reduce, reuse, recycle

work

my new address is 345 collins road. please come visit me. okay, that is not where i live it's just a reference to something one of my friends said to me. he told me i worked so much that i basically live there. i, of course, protested and said that i did not, but truthfully, at the time i did. now i work one to two weeknights and saturday and sunday. it's roughly 15 hours a week, 30 hours per paycheck. oh shoot, i forgot to pick up my check. i'll get that one of these days.

i like work. it's not hard work once you know what you're doing. i have worked since school started so for 8 months at the end of april. but my favorite part of work is the people i work with. when i first started i was the only one from my school that worked there. then over the holidays kate got hired and we're the two kennedy kids. my first day was a scary experience, i do not like being thrown in to situations where i know no one. but now that i have been there for eight months basically, i'm glad i knew no one when i first started. it forced me to open up and meet new people. strangely enough, i love meeting new people but it's not something i like to do. if that makes any sense. let's try this, i don't like being in a group and not knowing anyone and having to make all the awkward introductions but in the end meeting new people is one of my favorite experiences.

i have made some of the best friends i could ask for at work and if it hadn't been for work i wouldn't have known them or made friends with them. a few of them i probably wouldn't have talked to if i knew. here is one specific example, we will call him larry. larry goes to metro high school. for those of you that don't know, metro is the school where there are plenty of drug addicts, public school drop outs, pregnant teens, those who flunked out, and those who had attendance problems. i do not normally associate with people like that. i used to see that they went to metro and immediately stayed away with them. why was i so quick to place a label? because past experiences had all resulted in that label so it was easiest to lump the whole school together. meeting larry has been an eye opening experience for me. he was originally sent to metro because he never went to school when he was in the public school system. for the final trimester of his senior year, he is taking half of his classes at wash and the other half at metro. larry is nothing like the kid i expected him to be after i heard he went to metro. i'm very glad i was wrong about him, i wouldn't trade his friendship for the world.

done for the year

i am done with contest for the year! you have no idea just how good it feels. now i can kinda slack off until all state starts coming around.

i was in five events at state contest. i am extremely happy with most of them and just happy with a couple. my piccolo solo was just okay, and i'll be surprised if i got a one. i feel that it shouldn't deserve a one, i could have played it better. the duet markus kritzer and i did went well and i am pleased with how it went but we both agree that the best we ever played it was when we ran through it on friday. woodwind choir, eh i don't really care, we got a one. celtic celebration was good. really good. but my favorite performance was the very first of the day; my flute solo. i played the first movement of martinu's sonata. i am in love with how the flute and piano sound together. of all the pieces i have played before that is my favorite.

contest is a day that makes me extremely nervous. i have a nervous habit of biting/tearing at my fingernails on my pointer finger on both hands. i am proud to say that i did not bite or tear my nail once on saturday. that doens't mean that i wasn't nervous, it just means that i have a greater exercise of self control than i used to. why does contest make me nervous? i was playing pieces that i had practiced for months and was ready to play. okay, so my piccolo solo may not have been as ready as it could have been, but it was ready. the only people that were going to hear me were my parents, my lesson teacher, pianist, and a judge i didn't even know. my parents know what i sounded like when i first started playing and are subject to all the wrong notes and rhythms of practicing. my lesson teacher is the same. she hears my play for an hour every single week. she knows that i'm not perfect and little things always happen when i'm playing. my pianist also knows that i make mistakes. i know that if i mess up in front of those people they will not have that as their only image of me. they have all seen my highs and my lows. it's the judge that i have never met before that gets me. how i play in front of them is the only thing they have to know me by. i try to tell myself that i don't care at all what people think about me but you know what, i obviously do. my nerves show that. i think everyone cares just a little at least.

barack obama. shut up, spencer!

i may have my ipod in but i still hear tamara and spencer talking. so my title is one of the random phrases they've been throwing out. by my rough count i need three more blog posts with over 400 words. well then. this might get interesting. phrophase. i need some more weapons too. and shoes. more stuff from tamara and spencer.

i will describe the scene here. we are in zero hour, the 7am class. because it's thursday we are in the lab. the cave to be exact. we all thought that because we were in the lab monday and tuesday while mr ayers was gone that we wouldn't be blogging today, but guess what. we are. the three people sitting across from me are blogging, revising an essay, and watching person two reivse the essay of person three. the person sitting next to me is pretending like he's going to hit the escape key. and asking me why i'm wearing my glasses. guess what, cabrito, i can trype with your covering my eyes. i dont need to see the screen to type.

we have orchestra today during band. meaning, i don't have band! but i do have contest groups stuff to do. celtic needs to rehearse. woodwind choir is going to rehearse. the duet should probably rehearse. my solos? maybe they should too. there won't be enough time for all of that. oh well.

next topic. in 74 days cabrito is going to costa rica. he had to get all these shots so that he doesn't catch some strange costa rican disease while he's gone. i wish i could go to costa rica. actually, i really wish i was going on the spain trip. that would be fun. but, i'm staying in iowa for my summer. i will now outline the details of my summer plans. so from may 11th through somewhere around the 4th of july i will be playing softball. softball will take over my life and that's all i'm going to be doing. i'll be trying to work at old navy still because i like getting a paycheck every two weeks. after softball i will go back into the corn fields and detassel. and do some rougueing, which is basically being racist against the corn. anything that looks different i get to cut out with a shovel. around july 19th rbetta and i will be traveling to iowa state for a few days. we're going to learn about being an engineer. fun stuff. we're staying in martin. for all of you that don't know, martin is the dorm at iowa state with the suites for rooms. and then when i get home i don't know. then in august it's back to learning the marching band stuff. sad face, that means school is going to be starting soon.

really? whyyy?

my computer at home has caught a virus. real cool. i have all my work saved on that. all my music is on that. all my pictures are on that. and there's a good chance that my hard drive is going to have to be erased. not cool. i'm going to hope and wish and pray that jerry can fix my laptop without having to clear my hard drive.

the virus i have is called spyware protect 2009. it is a scam. scam, i say, it's a scam. it's telling me that i have 34 very serious threats attacking my computer and that i need to pay $50 to download this. it's also affecting my internet; every website i try to go to is secruity blocked for microsoft's reasons. so i couldn't even google this stupid spyware protect 2009 to see how to remove it from my laptop. so i called my uncle bob. he gave me the website to give to jerry so that when jerry comes on saturday he can fix my laptop.

how did i get this virus, you ask? apparently my antivirus didn't update fast enough and the sneaky little virus managed to wriggle it's way in. stupid virus, because of you i have to leave my computer shut off until jerry comes to fix it. my revised essay is on that computer. my revised essay was supposed to be turned in tomorrow. but thankfully mr ayers has changed the due date to monday.

and now onto a completely different topic-- state solo and ensemble contest.

contest is on saturday. at linn mar. city contest was here at kennedy. it was nice, i knew exactly where everything was. now i have to go to linn mar. there's a very good chance that i'm going to get lost, wandering around linn mar high school. i have two solos and three ensembles to play on saturday. at the current moment i'm only nervous for one and that's my piccolo solo. it's high and squeaky at times and it's fast with a lot of notes. i'm kinda nervous.

el cabrito is lame. first, he skipped city contest. now he's skipping state contest. he also has lost not one, but two of the originals for the woodwind choir. i do not envy him. the directors are going to kill him. you see, he's supposed to be a SECTION LEADER. he's not being very section leader-ish at the moment. okay so he wasn't a section leader this year but that didn't stop him from putting all these section leader activities on his NCYL application.

iamafan

i didn't feel like using the space bar i guess. but that's not the point of this. the point of this post is that it's major league baseball season again. of all the professional sports, baseball has the longest season. there are major league games on from april to october. 162 games in the regular season. i am a fan. one of my very first blog posts was about major league baseball if that puts the lenght of the season into perspective for you. i am a minnesota twins fan. it's a family thing. my dad, two of his brothers, and both my brothers are all twins fans.

i have seen countless baseball games on tv and been to kearnels games, but i have only been three live major league games. my first major league game was in colorado with my relatives there. i was staying with them for a little bit and they took me to a rockies game. even though the rockies lost and we left after the seventh inning i was glad to go. the other two games i have been to were both in the hubert h humphrey's metrodome up in minnesota. love. twins won both games that i have been to.

i was watching a game the other night with my dad and i started to wonder as to why the twins were my favorite team. they haven't won a world series since 1991. they're not seen as one of the major powerhouses of the baseball world. they lose their fair share of games. they have good players but their roster isn't chock full of superstars. why do i like the twins? because they're an honest team. it's easy to like the yankees; they're one of the most well known teams in baseball. they are almost always in the playoffs and have plenty of talented players. and money. the yankees have all the money. i do not like the yankees. the yankees buy all the good players and try to make themselves team superstars. they also have some steriod troubles, most recently a-rod.

one thing i don't understand, though, is the ridiculous amount of money that baseball players are paid. it's a ridiculously outrageous amount, especially the yankees players. it's not just the baseball players that get paid this outrageous amount, it's the whole entertainment industry. every professional sport, the singers, the movie stars; all of them. ridiculous amounts. how is it possible for our economy to be bad when endless amounts of money are being paid to all of these people? i don't understand it, but maybe that's because i haven't taken economics yet. the professional athletes, the professional musicians and the tv and movie actors have more money than they know what to do with. why don't they fix our troubled economy? why don't they help give the bailouts instead of increasing our federal deficit?

an update. skip it.

this post serves one purpose and one purpose only, a grade. it is required to post at least three times a week with 400 words per post. i have ran out of possibly interesting things to say so i'm going to ramble on and be done with this as soon as i get to 400 words.

i am kind of beginning to like blogging. hmm. when the blogs were first assigned i was not a fan. blogging used to bring the mental image of creepy old men who lived in the basement of their parents' house still. blogging is kind of growing on me.

when i have something to say blogging is very easy. right now i don't really have anything to say so getting to 400 words is a struggle. right now is a struggle. a struggle of pulling those non loose teeth proportions.

i have had my braces off four four years. whoa. i have gotten so used to wearing my retainers at night that it feels weird to not wear them. like last night, i was up late doing homework so i didn't want to wake my parents by going and getting them. sometimes i sleep with my contacts in. like last night, i was up late doing homework so i didn't want to go wake my parents so i just went to sleep with them in. i woke up with some blurry vision but after some intense blinking i could finally see again.

i have really bad vision. really bad. without my glasses or contacts i don't see very well up close or far away. and even with my glasses and contacts seeing slightly far away is an issue. there is a very good chance of me getting glaucoma when i'm older. my great grandma and my grandma both have it. i also have astigmatism. that's why i can't see perfectly with my glasses or contacts. for those of you that don't know what astigmatism is, it means that my eyes are shaped abnormally. so even when they give me the abnormally shaped contacts to fit my abnormally shaped eyes things still aren't always a good fit.

random acts of kindness make my day. they really just do. i have been told that i am too nice of a person and that i'm going to wind up hurt because of it. well guess what. you just gotta keep on going. don't let those debby downers get you down.

i get by with a little help from my friends :)

i can't think of a title

life is what you make it. so when you're feeling sad, just pick yourself up and keep moving forward. put one foot in front of the other and go with it. everything will get better, it's just going to take a little patience. i was talking to one of my friends this weekend and he gives surprisingly good advice. why do am i slightly surprised about this? oh you know, because he's a 19 year old drunk but whatever. anytime i'm ever stuck i know that i can just tell him what's going on and he'll have an answer for me. this is what he told me over the weekend.

life is about being happy so do what you makes you happy and be ready to deal with it the next day.

do you know what makes me happy? i'm still figuring it out myself but here's a list of some things because i'm a fan of lists.

• my friends. i love my friends with all my heart
  
• my good friends that i can tell anything to.


• ice cream.


• the comics.


• jokes on the nesper sign.


• jokes on laffy taffy wrappers.


• music.


• the simple things.
• random acts of kindness
• nice weather
• driving with the windows down

this past weekend showed me that no matter how bad things get, someone will always be there for you. i had eleven someones that i wouldn't trade for the world. we may not always get along, sure we may fight and we get on each other's nerves but they're there when i need them.

well. i have nothing left to say that relevant to that post right there but i still need about a hundred more words. so, off on a random tangent i go. because i had a list of things that make me happy i'll also include a list of things that annoy me

• little kids screaming in public and parents doing nothing about it
• bad grammar. i know i may not capitalize words, but i spell them correctly.
• the temperatures of this school, i'm freezing cold right now but i bet that in fourth hour i'll wish it wasn't so warm
• teachers making students do busy work
• teachers giving assignments and then just checking for completition only
• lab 67A. we're crammed in here like sardines and i can't help but hear the conversations around me.
• extremely loud ipods. i do not need to hear what you are listening to on your ipod.
• extremely loud subs in the parking lot. really.. is that necessary? can you wait until you're out of the parking lot?
• screamo music. what's the point if it can't be understood?
• people who kill themselves.
• people who say like all the time
• the dyed black hair, all black wardrobe, emo screamo music, and the i hate my life i'm going to kill myself people.
• stewart sankey always playing drums.

closet sized classrooms

this room is tiny.

the outside world

on friday i went to chicago. it was a very funfilled day spent with my friends. it was a field trip to go see some spanish paintings in the art institute and then go eat at cafe iberico, an authentic spanish tapas (roughly translated to appetizers) restuarant. i tried every single one of the spanish dishes they brought out, even the octopus. and i liked almost all of them. we also went to millennium park and stared at the bean for a little while. i spent about nine hours on a bus and that got to be a bit long to be sitting on a bus but we had fun. kro brought her super nice expensive artsy camera and we filled her memory card. most of the pictures are random and only have meaning when watched in continous motion like the police officers crossing the street, the random people crossing the street, spencer traveling through chicago, spencer sleeping through chicago, and other random pictures. we also drew a picture that brightened my morning. it involved spencer's bird metaphor, some decoy birds, a specific bird, a gun, and kro driving the car. but this is not the main point of this post. i'm getting there though. this is all just backstory in attempts to make my post seem less random.

chicago is so different from cedar rapids, and all of iowa in general. chicago is exciting, big, windy, bustling and shiny. the buildings downtown are huge and beautifully architectured. i could spend a whole day just wandering around downtown looking at all the buildings. getting out of cedar rapids, and iowa, even for just a day makes me realize just how small my little world is. i live in the sheltered world of north east iowa. not much goes on here. chicago is so full of life. there is a constant bustle of activity.

my sheltered life has lead to limited travel opportunities so when i do get out and see that the world is always bigger than i thought it makes me want to travel more. i want to explore the whole country. i want to leave the country and explore the world. there is so much more out there than just where we are now. i want to stay up all night in the city that never sleeps. i want to see the fallas celebration in spain. i want to see the cold beauty of russia and the sweltering deserts of africa.

somewhere i diverged from the main point that i wanted to say and now i have forgotten it. it was something along the lines of the world is so much bigger than i can even comprehend. something like that.

HENRY!!

my friend, cabrito, has a cat who looks just like that cat.

grin and bear it

i don't care anymore, i am going to complain and complain a lot. you have been warned.

i am, and have been for the past week, overwhelmed. this week just needs to end. i need a break. the homework keeps piling up and when you think that your teachers couldn't possibly put anymore more work on the ever growing pile that's threatening to tip over and bury me they find a way to add more to the pile. i'm then left to move things around and make sure that when i take something off my pile of things to do it doesn't upset the delicate balance and come tumbling down.

it gets harder and harder to wake up each morning due to the late nights. the only thing i want to do is sleep. and somehow magically make the pile of homework go away. a spring break would do nicely right about now. the two kids blogging next to me, rbetta and cabrito, are rambling on about college. cabrito is going to go to kwood so he can continue to work his wonderful job of salad bar king at hyvee. rbetta on the otherhand is going to go to kaplan. that's the online university, so she's not going anywhere except her kitchen computer. don't worry my dear readers, they're just kidding. both are extremely smart and will end up at very respective colleges, like luther and iowa state, and will probably not have to pay much at all. they're smart little whippersnappers.

cabrito is now rambling on about vista. some computer thing. and how on vista you can publish a blog post straight from microsoft word. neat stuff right there. but, really, i don't care. [these next few lines are a conversation between me and cabrito] life is stupid. you know how last year we hardly had like any homework ever? and now we have homework all the time and we have jobs? YES IT SUCKS. FML. so i was going to make a nice link for you all there but i'm the school computers and apparently that site is not school appropriate. whatever, i'll just be sneaky and find a way around it. look at that, i did it. go me.

cadavers are dead bodies. rbetta visited one yesterday. no thank you. i don't wanna see any dead bodies. or touch them. or their organs, like their hearts. not for me. cabrito is looking at gross autopsy pictures and hitting me in the arm making it very hard to type.

don't you just hate it when the stupid insert button is turned on and you don't know it. so then if you happen to decided that you want to add something to a paragraph up above you just start typing away and then realize that the more words you type, the more words go away. that makes me sad.

because laughter is the best medicine

pay no attention

well, here i am sitting here staring at my computer hoping that 400 words will just appear so i can click publish post! and go on with my night. i apoligize for the weak analogy here but blogging is like walking the dog. it's something that i enjoy but don't do near as often as i should. it's one of those things where when i just do it without thinking everything works out well. okay this analogy sucks. what i'm trying to say is, i think the fact that i have to blog is what makes it so hard. i am required to post three times a week with four hundred words per post to get a good grade. you could try to tell me that i actually don't have to do this but i don't want to fail.

hmm. city contest. bleh. it's just something you have to endure. think back to middle school, city contest was scary! what if other people outside my family listened to me as i played my solo? what if i mess up? why does my mom have to tape this? why do i have to do this? can i just pretend that i played my solo? needless to say, i got over all of that and now just look at city contest as just another day. woodwind choir, piece of cake. flute ensemble, easy as pie. duet? not bad. flute solo, pretty good. piccolo solo? didn't play it. why not, you all are anxious to know i'm sure. it wasn't all ready. parts were ready but not the whole piece. city contest rarely runs on schedule. why is this? i'll only tell you because i know you're all dying to know. because five minutes is not enough time. five minutes for playing is ample, but five minutes for playing and judging is not enough. i'm sure this all fascinating to you. i told you that you shouldn't've read this.

i have two fish. their names are tucker and jaws. i did not name them. one of my friends who names pretty much everything did. tucker is the algae sucker fish and jaws is a gold fish. they live on top of my bookcase during the winter and outside during the summer. every year without fail there are many, meaning four or five six at the most, fish in the pond and when we go to take them out at the end of summer it's just those two. i'll let you draw your own conclusions.

well, i got to four hundred words. it was a struggle that's for sure but i made it. yay me? sure. let's go with that.

sorry if you're offended.

Saving Lives

yesterday i saved up to three lives by donating some blood. my time to donate was 10:40 and i was anxiously awaiting all day. three of my friends were supposed to donate during first hour and all three came back not able to donate. el cabrito and rbetta and adam, he doesn't have a blog for me to link you to, all came back because they weren't able to donate. cabrito is a sickly child no matter what he tries to tell you. rbetta had too high of a pulse. so did adam. that made me nervous, what if my pulse was too high,i don't want to be turned away because my pulse was too high. off to math class i went, still worried that my pulse would be too high. onto physics and then finally it was 10:35 so i got all my stuff together and left. filled out my paperwork and joined the line waiting. while in line i saw my brother, he was just finishing giving blood. while waiting in line i was joined by rbetta and adam, they were going to try again. and then it was my turn to go get screened.

finger prick. this was an evil fingerprick, and it is still kinda tender. blood pressure, fine. heart rate, a okay. hemoglobin, little low so let's try again, second try was great. and then my finger didn't want to stop bleeding so instead of just a bandaid i got the cotton swab wrapped under the bandaid, rendering my right ring finger completely useless. okay cool. wait in line some more and then it is my turn to go sit on the chair and actually give blood. she didn't miss my vein and it suprisingly didn't really get hurt to get stabbed in the arm by that needle. after finishing i ate my cookie, drank my juice, grabbed another water bottle and went back to class. i started to work on my assingment and then i started to get really, really warm. uncomfortably warm. and kinda dizzy, so i got up and told my teacher that i was going to go to the nurse. apparently i was also really quite pale so she told me that i better get someone to walk to the nurses office with me. well, stumble stumble, hit a chair, run into haley and then i passed out. oops. so not only did my whole class see that, but so did all the people in the library. embarrassing.

turns out i wasn't the only one that passed out so i don't feel as embarrassed. i just had to drink and eat a lot of sugary foods for the rest of the day to keep myself standing upright. i was also not allowed to do any strenuous activity. unless i have some super rare blood type, or just one in high demand i'm probably not going to be giving blood anytime soon. but i did save up to three lives and i fufilled my SNHS servie project. happy face. : )