Unfortunately, if I restrict my reports to weekly events, you would be graced with a five-page entry the coming Saturday. Thus, I have decided to change my summer “weekly” reports into sporadic reports to be posted at my discretion. The past few days have been full of so many noteworthy events, however, that I feel the need to document them at the present rather than in the future, before they escape my mind. Speaking of escaping my mind, I still need to write those entries about Intel ISEF before -they- escape my mind.
01) Summer projects with siblings
Last Saturday, after a few rounds of badminton in the backyard in the 90-degree weather, my siblings and I locked ourselves in my brother’s room to discuss several summer “projects” that we wanted to tackle as a last-minute bonding effort before I have to leave for college:
- Form a weekly book club
- Organize a Tamagotchi group hatch
- Write and perform a play (our current candidate is an adaptation of Cinderella)
- Start science fair projects (I’ll be playing the role of mentor pro temp)
02) Project VISI.NET
A few days ago, some girls on SnM voiced their opinion that they felt “invisible” and ignored within the community, and that there were too many “cliques”. Now, while I -still- don’t understand at all where everyone’s getting these erroneous impressions from, I guess I was still obliged to do something to help the situation, and thus, Project VISI.NET was born (VISI.NET stands for “visible network”, as opposed to “invisible”). It’s basically a joint Q&A blog between the participants; to prevent superfluous copy/pasting, I’ll direct you to the VISI.NET about page if you’d like more details.
03) B&N trip
Later on Saturday, I and my siblings went to Barnes & Noble to spend some of the gift cards that we had received over the years. I got one for graduation, so I splurged by buying a PHP Phrasebook and Linux Phrasebook. I also wanted to pick up another astrophysics book or two, but my mother kept on persistently reminding me that I was late to a party, so eventually I had to discard the Ruby Phrasebook, Python Phrasebook, and a few scientific books about string theory, quantum phenomena, and star matter so that I could head out for the…
04) Scifair party!
For once, it wasn’t as big of a nerdfest as I thought, haha. Several of the seniors weren’t able to attend (Tanner was off “curing cancer”, Amy was out of town, and Nora was.. somewhere) but most of us were there. I was the second-to-last person to arrive, so we just stood around and ate and talked about college. Later, John, Collin, Garrett, and Jessica went off to play spades as I and Michael spectated. They also played Euchre, which, upon observation, is not that difficult to understand as I initially thought! We then ate dinner and sat around talking some more before Mrs. Mann distributed gifts to each of us in turn. The gifts (which were mainly gag gifts, haha) all had some relation to our projects in some way. I ended up receiving a Baby Einstein DVD with a microphone and lots of granola bars. (My project was on music and mind enhancement, and I’m known for addictively eating granola bars during state science fair). After that, we just sat around talking, and people departed one by one until around 11:00, when I was the only member left. Michael and Andrew and I sat around talking a bit, and my father finally came to pick me up at 11:30.
05) A few words of wisdom
To close this entry, I’d like to share 50 tidbits of wisdom from the amazing Ben Jones…