(no subject)

[nibot]

Well, we're done with the first real week of school (and our last such week in svusd, too) as of this weekend and so far it's been pretty darn good.

I have PE, AP Chemistry, AP Biology, and Humanities, and I get out of school (er, my classes. I seldome leave school this early) at 12:16pm. PE is actually okay as Mr. Johnson seems pretty good. Of course Chemistry is great, although we're all a bit upset that Mr. Saterlee, the teacher many of us had for honors chemistry has abandoned us. However, in the end it works out because Mr. Fukuda is just great ("what color is the sky in your world?") as well. We did a lab on paper chromatography on thursday and friday which was pretty fun ("the chemicals taste great") and, in true SPLORG style, was well documented with The Digital Camera. Still, one has to miss Mr. S's great stories. Biology is funny because Mr. Carlson teaches it and I had him for regular biology in nineth grade.. it's great to have him again as a teacher, complete with the Water Song and the dancing ("pow") hydrogen atoms.

Humanities is the one block class at MVHS and it takes the place of honors history and english for 91 or so lucky Seniors. The class is pretty unique and I suppose it's the "loose cannon" of MVHS as the Humanities class gets to do a lot of stuff that no one else does. The class takes up two normal periods (~2 hours) which is divided up into humanities classes everyday. For instance, on thursday I spent the first hour with Philosophy class 1 with Mr. Chris and the second hour with Civics with Mr. Minier. Friday, the first half was spent in socratic seminar's amoung the three teachers divided be alphabet (for me) and the second in groups working on projects. It's pretty neat. Philosophy is excellent; we shall see about Civics.

Anyhow, both John and I are done with classes at the beginning of lunch (12:16) which is wonderful. Those people who weren't enlightened enough to get Economics over with during the summer or who don't have a first period class must return after lunch (Ehhem steve and stephanie). We thought that we would be leaving school and terrorizing the neighborhood at this point but so far we've been working with the computers, the network, and the teachers until 4 or 5pm, which is rather exhausting but productive. The process of leaving our last period class and walking to the parkinglot can take fourty minutes or more depending upon how many teachers with computer problems see us make our escape. (getting "I forgot my password" calls in Chemistry on the first day of school is interesting.) Still, we get to have a leisurely lunch and sometimes even watch Thunder Cats (a cartoon from our youth) on the Cartoon Network on the big screen television at Burger King.

I did lots of interesting things during the summer, the most recent of which was to build a potato cannon with John which you've probably all heard about.

Eric and I visted an Apiary a couple weeks ago. Eric developed an interest in bees watching something on the Discovery channel and the next day he looked up bee-people in the phonebook and called me.. (there's initiative for you) Our latest project is now to setup a bee colony somewhere. We were going to do it on the Ag farm at school since it had been done before and they had equipment we could use, but we've since reconsidered and my backyard is looking better and better.

Sarah Egley, Jason Finley, Robert Mooring, Lilly Kim, and I are national merit scholar semifinalists. Three of us (Sarah, Robert, me) were in the same sixth grade class and three of us (Sarah, Jason, me) are assoicated with Splorg. Amazing?

The floppy drive on my computer is accessing spasmodically without reason. This is strange.

Yesterday I got my driver's license! It was a fairly complicated process since when I got to the DMV in San Clemente they said I needed a "certificate of completion of driver's education" instead of the "certificate of enrollment in driver's education" which I had. A couple phone calls initiated chaos at MVHS and got the needed document faxed to me at the DMV. [the abbreviated version is that we [John and I] called Steve out of Mr. Wiemann's sixth period Economics AP class and he got the document signed by Mr Ried, the drivers ed teacher, and went down to the office where he interrupted a meeting with Mr. Chong (vice principal) and Mr. Donoff (tech coordinator) and collectively they managed to fax the said document, and after many more phone calls, confirm it. anyways, thank you to everyone involved.] We also caught and reported some guy cheating on his written test at the DMV. He was flipping through the little booklet you're supposed to study from while taking the test. They took it away from him and gave him a new test which proceeded to fail. So much for this "under the penalty of perjury" thing. I passed the driving test after briefly forgetting which way was left, but it wasn't too bad actually.

After a bit of driving around and errands we (John and I) went by MVHS to pick up Tony and Kris where we also bumped into Sarah and Steve and did the ritualistic driving around on campus. We relocated as a group to Location Alpha and Sarah soon followed since John had taken her Oboe. For the next couple hours we performed various errands for the purpose of driving around.. in my dad's nice car at this point, with all the nifty features that nice cars have like stereos and sunroofs. Upon returning home, however, I had to relinquish the keys to this wonderful vehicle.

Ack. my CD is skipping. (in my cd-rom drive nonetheless) I think I need to buy a cd player...

Anyway, we successfully determined that we "would like to do something" (a phrase heard often) so we consulted Ye Olde EdwardsCinema Ad in the newspaper and decided upon "The Full Monte." This is a British film that seems to be making it here in the land of dumb movies with lots of special effects. Last week it was only in the Theatres here that traditionally show foreign films and films released awhile back. This week it is playing in the famed Palace Stadium (ie tremendously huge screen and lots and lots of stadium seating) at our home away from home, Edwards 21 Megaplex in the Irvine Spectrum. Many of our teachers (to preserve their tenure they shall remain nameless) had said that they loved it and afaik it got two thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert, so it sounded good. However, we failed to convince Sarah that seeing rated-R movies when you're 18 is not taboo, but Camille agreed to come so that was just great, and we were off and I drove which was neat. (aren't run-on sentences, fragments, and gramatically-unintelligible sequences of words great? mr. Chris would hate this) The movie lived up to its expectations and was quite good..it was probably worth it if only for the Brittish slang alone. After this we made a guest appearance at the school dance and continued our nocturnal escapades until about midnight. In summary: it's just great.

movies.. I liked Conspiracy Theory as well, but Event Horizon was just disturbing, and Contact was great the first time, but the third time it was slightly predictable, and Spawn is a good kid's movie I suppose, and Shine isn't exactly uplifting as the box said, although maybe it is at the end.

Now to clean my room, the pool filter, and work on that humanities project that most of us would rather not do...

Some quotes for the era, however escoteric they may be: "form it in the phrase of a question!" "I used ubiquitous in a word!" "it's so crazy, it's all free!" "nerd buddies!" and the best of all: "WHAT COLOR IS THE SKY IN YOUR WORLD?" from Mr. Fukuda.

Tobin