Promotion Ceremonies

Last night was the 8^th grade promotion ceremony, and it was one of the last times I'll be at PGMS or see my friends in 7^th grade for quite a while. For the past few days in school, we had been rehearsing the ceremony for a couple of hours a day. I was wearing basically the same thing as my band uniform, but with a red shirt instead of white.

Mr. Bell, the principal, told us all to arrive at 5:30 so we would have time to get ready, but we actually ended up waiting for about 45 minutes in line in front of Room 13, the home-ec room. Cody Lee stood next to me and was singing Europe's The Final Countdown for almost the whole time. After a hugely long wait, we started walking out to the front of the school. Mr. Gamble gave us carnations to hold during the ceremony.

Download MP3 | MIDI

The "promotion ensemble", consisting of 6^th and 7^th grade band and orchestra members, began playing a fanfare followed by the classic Pomp and Circumstance. We began walking down the aisles and took seats on the stage. Ally Campion, our student-body president, announced that Cindy Chu and Hsinyi Shen would be playing a piano duet, Rondo á La Turk. Lindsey Morin, who I have known since 6^th grade gave a speech entitled Moving up the Ladder and four members of our chorus, Sean McKeon, Jackie Choi, Jane Rudy, and Mariah Cosgrove sang Seasons of Love. James Thomas gave a speech entitled Don't Walk Alone and the section closed with Aaron Shi's piano solo of Numb, which I thought he played really well.

After the performances were over, Ms. Riedel began reading off names. At the name Matthew Johnson my row was instructed to get up and went off to the stage-left wing. At the name Cody Lee who was right in front of me I went up to a piece of blue tape on the stage to wait, and then I was called up. Mr. Bell shook my hand and the superintendent gave me a blank piece of paper saying Diploma of Promotion.

After everyone had received their blank pieces of paper, we threw our carnations out into the audience and processed back down the aisle while the ensemble was playing Rites of Tamburo. After saying hi to Ms. Priest, Tijmen, Yann, and assorted parents, I went over to the gym for the dance.

The first song was a slow song that we danced with our parents, who were then instructed to leave so, as the flier said, the party could begin. Other than the really annoying hip-hop and rap music, it was quite fun and went by really quickly. There was a food table with really good chips and salsa, pizza, and sushi. At the end, Michael's dad dropped me off at my house around 10:00.

The Last Day of Jazz Band

Being the last day of after-school jazz, we had a party and Michael brought the popular game Guitar Hero III and the PS2 to play on. Last week, his mom challenged Ms. Priest to a face-off in the game, so today they played two songs. Ms. Priest won on the Rolling Stones' Paint It, Black on Medium, but Darla took the victory in Hard mode on Barracuda by Heart. Afterwards, we had free time to eat chips and play the game. I versed Riley on Paint It, Black on Medium while Riley played on Expert mode (even though he had never played the song, he owns Guitar Hero II). I beat him because of this advantage, but I refused to try it on Expert, being that I have only played the game about 10 times.

Warriors: Firestar's Quest

I recently finished reading Firestar's Quest by Erin Hunter, the latest Warriors book to come out in paperback. It takes place between the first and second series of Warriors books, about seven books back from the current storyline. Firestar's Quest tells the story of the leader of ThunderClan, Firestar, as he goes off to rebuild a long-lost fifth clan, SkyClan. I thought this was one of the best books in the series. It was over twice the length of most others, and the cover was made of a shiny gold (causing odd effects in the scan at the right).

Thank You Ms. Priest

For the last three years, I've had Ms. Priest as my band director, and it has been my favorite class period almost the entire time. As an end-of-the-year "thank you" I made her a card in Photoshop, and also made more of the famous "Lemon Delight Cookies" to give to her in a gift bag.

The rat on the card is a reference to the brown rat that we spotted in the auditorium a couple of weeks ago. It has become very well known across the school, especially after the teacher trivia at the Talent Show.

A Day (not) at Great America

Today most of the 8^th grade chose to go on the trip to Great America. However I decided not to go, saving 40 dollars that would have been spent sitting around eating Dippin' Dots since I don't really enjoy going on rides at theme parks. Michael, Riley, and Matthew went to Matthew's and played Warhammer and Wii for most of the day. However, having just recieved the perfect attendence award, I thought it wouldn't be right to be absent just after recieving it (last year someone was absent the day they were going to recieve the attendance award).

I stayed at school and had quite a bizarre day. In 1^st period, English, after reading Warriors: Firestar's Quest for 20 minutes, I went over to the art room with Mrs. Rookstool since I was the only one there. Since Mrs. Terry's room is right next door, I ended up just going over there for the rest of the period, and the next period as well because that actually was in Room 33. For 3^rd period, Mr. Gamble was giving a lecture to the 6^th graders about the similarities between Rome and the Galactic Empire in Star Wars. They actually had a lot in common, such as the senate room, the conversion from a republic to an empire, and the similarities between the caesar's Praetorian guards and Emperor Palpatine's crimson guards. I listened to this until the end of the period and then went to science, where I was soon ushered off back to Mrs. Terry's room to watch a National Geographic movie on deep sea creatures.

After lunch, Mrs. DeMarco was gone at Great America so I went over to Oliver's math class where we read quietly, and in band we watched the movie August Rush until the end of the day.

A Tale of Two OS's

The first good computer I ever had was a Power Mac G4. When we moved to Pacific Grove, it kind of got put out of use. Lately, I've been trying to get it working again, and am installing some free programs like OpenOffice on it. However, OpenOffice doesn't natively run on Mac OS 10.2, so I had to install a parallel for Unix called xDarwin to make it run. It looks kind of weird, but runs great. When I get a chance, and a new ethernet cable, I'll route the DSL over to it and install Firefox so we can have internet.

Our World

Just a Photoshop'ed reminder to conserve the planet's resources.

Oceanography Excursions

Today I went sailing with the Monterey Bay Aquarium out into the bay to get the Oceanography Merit Badge. About 20 scouts from our troop went on the trip on a medium-sized sailboat docked on Fisherman's wharf. On the way to the boat on the wharf, we passed by a seagull nest on top of the restrooms.

Beginning at 10 in the morning, we sailed around the bay for three hours, completing various ocean-oriented activities. After a talk about safety, we began by discussing local marine life including the sea lion, harbor seal, and abalone. One of the crew members brought out a giant plankton net, and after trawling it behind for five minutes, we brought it up and it was filled with dark green phytoplankton. Then the naturalist taught us how to make your own net out of a nylon stocking, bottle, coat hanger, tape, and twine.

After this basic introduction, we split up into groups: 6^th graders, 7^th graders, and 5^th and 8^th graders combined. My group, the latter, first went to the rear of the boat where they had scooped up some kelp from the ocean and laid it on deck. We talked about how so many common items, like toothpaste and ice cream, are made from carrageenan, a product of kelp. Then we searched for small organisms like isopods and snails in the kelp, and viewed them in a small magnification container.



The next station was inside the cabin, where we looked at the plankton we had scooped up from the beginning of the trip. It turned out to be mostly phytoplankton, plants, but there were some zooplankton like small crab larvae and some things that oddly resembled glass shrimp. In the cabin, we discussed the differences between plankton (drifters), nekton (swimmers), and benthos (bottom dwellers). The boat was equipped with a nice refracting microscope, much like the ones we used last year studying cells in Science.

The last station was back on the deck (thankfully, out of the stuffy cabin) and we discussed the physics of oceans, including the three types of waves: wind, tidal, and seismic; and some wave terminology, ie. amplitude, frequency, wavelength, etc. We also tested the salinity of the ocean, turning out to be 38‰ (parts per thousand) saline. Toward the end, Oliver spotted his house from the boat and stopped to take a photo of it with his 12x optical zoom.

Finally, while we were getting back from the group activities, the staff somehow brought out a fish tank with 15-20 bat stars in it, a type of sea star (incorrectly called a star fish) with webbing between each "foot." The bat stars originally came in purple from the north and orange from the south, but cross-breeding produced a wide array of color combinations, including an olive-and-orange spotted one. The boat was involved in a bat star relocation project, so when the time came we were told to "gently" drop them overboard (like anyone actually did that!) before we sailed on back to shore.



As we came into the dock, we completed all of the requirements for the Oceanography merit badge, except for the 500-word essay of the trip, which also happens to be this blog post.

Croquet

I did this random drawing during Spanish class a while back while we were watching a movie.

The Yearbook Comes

We finally recieved our yearbooks, and, like always, there are a ton of errors! There's a teacher in the 6^th grade section, an 8^th grader in the 7^th grade section, and many pictures just missing. There was apparently a cover art contest (I didn't hear about it due to technical difficulties regarding the video bulletin) and Oliver won, so his artwork is on the cover. Today he recieved his $25 iTunes gift card as a prize. Despite the errors, it's still a good way to keep memories.

Along with the yearbook came the traditional awards assembly, where I got a certificate for having perfect attendance all year. We also watched a half-hour long slide show with a ton of pictures of the school year, many of which are in the yearbook. I plan on getting the photos from Mr. Huynh as soon as I can.

China Camp to Big Sur

This weekend was the 9^th annual China Camp to Big Sur backpacking trip on Memorial Day weekend. I went on this last year, but the weather was much hotter and my backpack was heavier, so it wasn't nearly as much fun as this year was. With Brian's help, I got my backpack down to 7 pounds without food or water, turning out to be under 20 with the full 3 liters of water. It also helped that I had a frameless GoLite pack which weighed less than one pound. I shared an REI QuarterDome tent with Matthew for the hike.

We left early on Saturday morning from the local Safeway parking lot at 5:30, after waking up at 4:30 and having a pancake breakfast. It was about an hour's drive to the start of the hike at China Camp in the Ventana wilderness. We soon left and hiked 7½ miles to Pine Ridge, which was planned to be our first stop for the night. However, do to predicted rain and wind, we decided to hike an extra 3½ miles to the Redwood Creek camp, some 2800 feet below in the valley. As it turned out, the rain didn't come until late the next day, but Redwood Creek turned out to be a nicer place to camp anyway.

Sunday morning was nice because we got to sleep in 'till 6:30, so I got to catch up on some much-needed sleep. This was by far the easiest day. About half way through, we came to a river crossing. Some people tried to get across dry on the rocks, resulting on a few full-body plunges into the river. I decided the easiest way across would just be to wade, and that proved successful. After drying off and eating breakfast, we continued the next couple of miles to Barlow Flats, the stop for the next night.

We arrived at Barlow Flats around 11:00, so we had a whole afternoon to relax and―at least we thought―swim in the watering hole. However, the water turned out to be so cold that all most could do was wade in about knee-deep. By about 1:00, we were all set up and ready to just do whatever we wanted, so a few of us started a fire in the fire pit from some embers left over from previous campers. After about 30 minutes, it had become a decent-sized fire, and we spent the next couple of hours sitting around it, getting wood from a nearby redwood log. After boiling water for freeze-dried Pasta Primavera that actually turned out to be quite good, we spent the evening until about 9:00 sitting by the fire before going to sleep.

This morning, the weather cleared up and got warmer, but luckily the hike was almost done. I had my first fall of the hike, but it wasn't that bad and I only got a couple of scratches. We finished the hike at the Big Sur Ranger Station about 10:30. I rode home with Matthew and on the way, we stopped to get food at the local Nepenthe restaurant.

The Spring Concert

Last night was the last band concert of the year, and it went very well. This is the concert where all the groups at the school do 2-4 songs, usually ones we have practiced almost all year. However, this year we decided to change the songs we did at the last minute. As well as For Our Heroes, a song from the festival, we played two new songs: The Great Locomotive Chase and In a Gentle Rain. The latter mainly just featured soloists with a "rain" background by snapping, and Locomotive was a depiction of a civil war train chase, as it said in the description. In jazz, we played Bruiser's Blues and Woodchopper's Ball, also decided on at the last minute.

For the finale of the concert, a group of us who have been coming in at lunch about 2 times a week performed The Empire Strikes Back Medley, a collection of Star Wars songs from Episode V. Unfortunately, Riley, who plays the 1^st clarinet part with me, was absent so I had to cover it on my own.

Lemon Delight Cookies

Last night, we made some cookies to sell at the bake sale at tonight's concert. They were very easy to make, and tasted really good with fresh lemons. Use the juice from a lemon you used for the grated peel.

Ingredients
• 4 ounces unsalted butter, chilled
• 1¼ cups sugar
• from 2 lemons:
```• 1 tbsp lemon juice
```• zest (peel grated)
• 1 large egg
• 1½ cups flour
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon salt

Preparation
• Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
• Line 3 large cookie sheets with parchment paper; set aside.
• Using an electric mixer, combine the butter, 1 cup sugar, the lemon zest and juice until fluffy.
• Mix in the egg. add the flour, baking soda and salt and combine.
• Place the remaining ¼ cup sugar in a small bowl. Roll heaping teaspoons of dough into balls, then roll in the sugar.
• Place on the prepared cookie sheets a few inches apart. Bake until golden around the edges, about 15 minutes.
• Transfer the cookie sheets to racks to cool completely.

NERF Gun Fight

After the Eagle service project, I went over to Cypress Street Park and had a NERF gun fight with Matthew and Michael. This is the absolute best park there is for these battles; it has everything, including cliffs, trails, trees, and a tennis court. We usually have way more people, but a lot of people were busy. We also played a game by throwing a tennis ball and running after each other to get it by any means possible.




I made this map of the park with labels pertaining to the game in Photoshop. I'll perfect it later, but it still gets the point across...:

Weaving Reeds

Today was Colin Fuerst's eagle project for boy scouts. We weaved mats out of reeds grown in the Carmel Valley by the river. Later on, they will be used to build authentic-style native american dwellings. The project will also get us the Indian Lore merit badge. Matthew was in a group with me, and we wove two mats together. It was really easy; you just tie each reed together with string with an overhand knot in six places along the length.

Pouncerelli

This is kind of random, but I thought I'd post this cool photo of Matthew's cat Pounce licking up catnip last time I was at his house.