A Normal Day

A normal day in Mexico is pretty simple. You sleep until around 10:30 or 11:00. Then you stumble out of bed and put on your bathing suite, then it's down to the pool for a couple hours. When you're at the pool you can either swim, or just lay there, listen to music, and get tan! Usually I lay by the pool until i get really hot, then jump in the pool, it is so refreshing! After a couple hours by the pool, it's time for the beach. Just walk across the street and you're there! On the beach you can watch all the really good surfers, take a nap and get tan, play volleyball, or play catch. Around 4:30 or 5:00 is when i go riding on the beach. I usually only ride for about 1/2 hour. I ride with my Mexican buddy, Salvador. We have races down the beach and it's a lot of fun becuase the horses go so fast! When I'm done riding i just stay on the beach and wait for sunset. Sunset is at 6:00 everyday, and it is B-E-A-U-tiful! When the sun sets, it's time for dinner. There are A TON of really good restaurants down here, and they are all really close.. and cheap! A dinner for 4 people, plus drinks, is only about $20-$25. After dinner, its back to the hotel, then you pretty much do whatever floats your boat.. you can swim, lay in the hammocks, watch a movie, go to the store, walk to the bar.. And that is pretty much a normal day in Mexico.
Oh and by the way, i sometimes do my school work in the morning before i go to the pool.

Airplane

To get to Mexico I had to take 2 airplanes and a bus. The first airplane was from Seattle to L.A. The flight went by really fast because it was only 3 hours long. Plus I slept most the way because I had to get up at 4:30 that morning, so i was really tired. When I arrived in L.A. I had to wait about an hour til my next flight to Zewatinaho, Mexico came. That plane ride went pretty fast too. By the time we arrived in Zewatinaho it was already 4:00 PM. We had to catch a taxi from the airport to the bus station. I really didn't want to take the bus because I would have to be on it for 14 hours! The bus didn't come til 7:00 PM, so I had to sit and wait for 3 hours. It seemed like forever, but finally the bus came. I hated that bus ride so much, it took SO long! Finally, 14 hours later, we arrived in Puerto Escondido, which is where I am going to be staying for the next 5 weeks. I arrived there at 8:00 AM. When I finally got to the hotel I went to sleep.

Leadership

Leadership class is my favorite class. It's tought by Mr. Terhar, our vise principle. I like leadership because you get a lot of freedom, and you get to do a lot of fun stuff! Like change the reader board, announcments in the morning, plan assemblies and dances, make posters and decorations for the school and hang them up everywhere; or you can just do whatever needs to be done. Leadership is a semester long, but i kinda wish it was year-long. And i like the people in that class, because a lot of my friends are in it.. Like Molly, Emily, Liz, Makenzie, Lacy, and Raelani. Today in leadership me and Molly made a pumpkin poster. We drew a pumpkin on a large sheet of orange paperm then drew a really scary face on it. And we splattered black paint all over it! It looked pretty creepy! We're going to glue it onto the back drop for the dance this Friday.

Cortney Rose Fredriksen :]

Cortney Fredriksen is the bomb. And she's pretty much my bestfriend, she denys it sometimes thought. Like the time i spilt gatoraid all over her. She was just kidding around though, i hope. But I've been friends with Cortney since 1st grade, but we became BESTFRIENDS the summer before 7th grade. We've done a lot of things together, and have had lots of memories with her. Some memories that i regret, but some really good, fun memories! A good memorie is when we went to Costa Rica together! (Read: Juan Carlos for more details on Costa Rica) And we're planning a trip to go to St. Martin during spring break, which is in the Bahamas. Plus we're planning on heading down to California with some other friends during the summer.

Juan Carlos

Juan Carlos is the shizz. He lives in Costa Rica, and I met him down here during Spring Break of '07. Juan Carlos was out bus driver, even though he wasn't that good at driving. This one time the bus broke down on the side of the road in the middle of no where. We stood on the road for about 3 1/2 hours, it was hot and humis, everyone was complaining, and thursty. It was horrable. But Juan Carlos didn't care. He was just smiling and laughing. Oh, and by the way, it was impossable to talk to him because he couldn't speak english, he couldn't even understand it. This other time the bus wouldn't go up a big hill when we were in the mountains, because everytime Juan Carlos tried to shift gears (the bus was a stick shift), the bus would stall, and then start rolling back down the hill. It was pretty funny because he didn't know how to shift gears. He finally got it down though, and around his 9th try he got the bus up the hill. Cortney, Sydney, Pat and I always laughed at him, he thought we were laughing with him.. But we weren't. We even gave him a nickname, Juan Carlos Del Taco. I think he liked it, even though he probally had no idea what it ment. Juan Carlos Del Taco is like the funniest mexican I've ever met.

Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci

This quarter we made clay animations about famous European explorers. My partners Justina, Layla, and I made an animation on Amerigo Vespucci, an explorer from Spain who founded America. Amerigo is also where the name “America” came from. He was an astronomer that navigated some of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. We made our animation about Amerigo’s early life, family, education, and his first voyage. Making this animation was a lot of fun because we got to make our own clay people and our own adio.

The most fun part of this project was making the clay people. Some of our people are a little wack but I think they look really cool. Another extremely fun part of the project was one particular scene, the scene when he got sick. I think that was the most fun scene to take because he was puking a lot. So it was really fun to smooch a whole bunch of colors together to make a puke color. It was a creative scene too, because we made everyone faint and the lady started puking too because she got so grossed out. Doing the adio was also a lot of fun.

The most difficult part of the project was recording the scenes. It was also really frustrating because you had to try to keep the camera really still. Another difficult part of this project was moving the clay people. Every time you moved it, you had to move it a certain amount. It was also very hard trying to keep your hand out of the background! Especially when you are trying to hold up the background paper. Another very difficult part of this project was doing the research on Amerigo. Since Amerigo is not very famous there was not a lot of information about him. Also a lot of web sites had false information on them.

The most important thing that I learned by doing this project was probably that clay animations take a lot of patients! If you are a very impatient person, then you might not want to try making a clay animation! Another important thing I learned by doing this project is that Christopher Columbus was not the first person to find America, Amerigo was. Amerigo came to America 13 months before Christopher did. Although they did not know they went to the same place until later on. One last important thing that I learned by doing this project was how to work imovie on the computer and how to import pictures and adio. Now I actually know how to do most of that stuff which is good for later on in the school year if I ever need to use that program again.

All together this one a really fun and worthwhile project. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun at the same time! Which is something that school needs. I hope that our next project we do includes clay, or something fun that we get to build. But between the research for this project, the creations of our clay people, and filming each scene, this was an amazing project. With some ups and downs. For example... Having to retake a couple scenes because they were deleted off of our camera, or not knowing how to do something. But in the end, we made an outstanding animation.

Candy

Halloween is one of the best holidays ever! I'm not just talking about the scary/ spirits killing people part. I'm talking about the candy! C-A-N-D-A-Y! Yum yum yummy. Yummy in my tummy. Yum! There is just so many different flavors, textures, sizes, colors, effects.... There's lemon heads, gum drops, candy canes, skittles, and twizzlers, and m&m's, twix, hershey's, and almond joys. Snickers, milkey ways, swedish fish, and red vines, pixie stix, sour patch kids, lollie pops, and starbursts. Charlstin chews, butterfingers, candy corn, reecies, tootsie rolls, nerds, and bit-o-honey, gummy worms, and gummy bears, milk duds, and mike and ikes. Thin mints, crunch bars, candy cigarettes, kissables, and rolos. Tootsie pops, yorks, candy apples, and gum. Gobbstoppers, pickle pie, laffy taffys, and jujus. Lindt, nips, lifesavors, smarties, and dessert mints, jelly beans, and jelly bellys, dingle berries, and whoppers, candy rocks, bazooka, carmel, and so much more..

Here's some advice: When little kids come to your door saying "trick-or-treat", make sure you atleast have one of the things listed above. Or you might wake up in the morning and notice that your house got egged, or tped... Or maybe even you car got seran-wrapped.

Have a Happy Halloween!

School...

Is not very fun. It can be at times. But locking up kids in a class room for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week is just gay! If I was society I would shorten it to 3 hours a day, 3 days a week. Just minus all the pointless stuff, like SSR. Yeah, kids would still leran to read, they just wouldn't be FORCED to do it everyday. If they really like reading that much then they are more than welcome to do it on their own time. the reason kids are tired during class is because teachers pile homework and projects on top of all the kids. I'm suprised they can still breath. So, kids go to school, go do sports, go home, stay up til midnight struggling to get everything done, go to sleep, and wake up 6 hours later. Then do it all again. It's pointless! Summer's great.

Rear Window Review

Rear Window was one of those movies that kept you at the edge of your seat! Before we watched the movie I thought it would be a dumb boring movie, because Mr. B told the class that the camera doesn’t leave the man’s apartment! But the movie ended up making you think about what would happen next. Of course whatever you thought always turned out being wrong because it was a twisted movie. You would think one thing would happen when a completely different thing happens!

One way the movie kept you at the edge of your seat was how they were always close to being caught. When all of a sudden they would get caught! And it made you think, “aw man, how are they going to get out of this one?!” But they always had a clever way to escape!

Another way this movie kept you at the edge of your seat was that the characters always did the unexpected! And they did it in a sneaky way, so you would wonder how they did that! Like when the girl goes into the murder’s house to find the ring! And the man catches her! It scared me, but when the police came she somehow already had the ring as evidence! Trippy.

One other thing that was good about this movie was how the movie was set up. The whole movie was filmed in the man’s apartment, but it didn’t seem that way because it would also film across the street. Even though the camera never went into anyone else’s apartment, I liked how you could still look into the other apartment’s through the window. It was a good set-up for this type of movie.

Over-all Rear Window was a very suspenseful movie with tons of different twists and turns. It kept your eyes glued to the screen. Even though I was at the other end of the room watching the movie, it felt like I was right up at the screen watching. I also had to turn my head a couple times because my eyes were burning. As you can tell, it was an addicting movie. One that I recommend to anyone who likes twisted, on-the-edge movies.