These past two weeks have been very exciting, but I've been so busy and tired to even blog about them as of yet - but I'm about to fix that. I'll start with two weeks ago, when we, like most of the country, got a ton of snow. On Tuesday night we were supposed to get up to 15 inches of snow and have high winds, especially in the early morning. We were about as certain that we were getting a snow day as one can be, and they didn't let us down. Actually, they canceled school the night before - before it even really began snowing - at around 7 PM, which is pretty early. We knew about it early enough that we decided to eat dinner in front of the TV and watch some episodes of the first season of Chuck, which we had rented from the library. It was nice to just relax. I was going to finish my homework that night, but I decided that I could finish it the next day, seeing as we had the day off. Well, Wednesday came, and it didn't exactly live up to the expectations. Yes, we did get about 9 inches, but that isn't anywhere close to the 15 inches that was predicted. It was enough, though, that we had to spend an hour or so digging ourselves out - and that was before breakfast. Then Wednesday night came, and we found out that school was closed on Thursday, as well. I guess the snowplows didn't reach all the subdivisions yet. Unfortunately, those two snow days were spent working on Science Olympiad (I had to pare down a 160 page word document that I had been emailed to about 50 or less pages), so I didn't actually spend that much time outside.
That Saturday was our first Science Olympiad Invitational. The school were it took place is about 2.5 hours away, so we decided that instead of getting up super early, we would stay the night on Friday. We were supposed to leave around 7 PM, but we didn't actually leave until about 9:30-ish. There was just so much stuff that we had to finish, including this percussion instrument that I play for the event Sounds of Music (it's like a piano keyboard that strikes different lengths of pipe). Interestingly enough, the hotel that we were staying at, there was another team from Wisconsin staying, who actually came in first place at the invitational. They were all in the breakfast room/entrance when we arrived and at breakfast the next morning, so I made sure I didn't 'fraternize with the enemy'. The actual event was exciting, if busy. Our team got in 8th place, and I got 6th in Anatomy and 3rd in Ecology. My other two events (Optics/Sounds of Music) I didn't do so well. In fact, I didn't even finish the test for Optics - we had to guess on the last 20 or so questions in about 2 minutes. We decided to stay the night on Saturday, as well, and go see this exhibit at the Grand Rapids Art Museum on Princess Diana. On Saturday night, we bought ice cream from the Meijers next to our hotel and ate it and watched The Princess Bride in our hotel room. I was so tired I fell asleep halfway through. The exhibit was pretty interesting, although there were kind of long lines. I especially liked that they had her wedding dress on display, and man is it long!!! It has like a 25 foot train or something like that. That's it for that weekend.
This past week has been relatively uninteresting, except for the fact that I had to work on my Industrial Revolution history project on the light bulb - that took a lot of work, as well as homework in honors and another project in French (a news report in French). By Friday, I was exhausted, not to mention feeling sick. I actually lost my voice Friday evening, and have been sick since. It was not fun waking up at 5:20 in the morning yesterday for our second Science Olympiad Invitation. At this one, there were 44 teams competing - which is as big as the state competition. A couple of the schools were the top schools in the state and the country, and we still managed to get 8th place, which is pretty cool. I did pretty well in my events; 4th in Optics (we actually got 5 mm away from the target in the laser shoot - way better than our previous 8 cm), 5th in Sounds of Music and Ecology, and 11th in Anatomy. By the end of the day, we were all tired, and got ice cream instead of eating dinner. Today I've been catching up on all the homework I didn't get to do yesterday, and that's pretty much it. Our next Science Olympiad competition is Regionals, which is in about a month. Until my next exciting adventure!!
