Frankenstein

So far I have read around thirty pages in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and I have to say ehhhhhhh. I am just waiting for it to get to the part with the mad scientist and the making of a monster and have no clue on how these letters to Margaret have anything to do with it. I wouldn't say that I am bored with the text, because while I am reading it I am not suffering, it’s just whatever. I would still prefer to be reading something else, but for it being a school book it isn’t that bad. I just want it to start relating to the story of Frankenstein I have heard of, I hope that is somewhat what this book is about, otherwise I might become bored with this text. I will admit that I am one of those people that always thought that Frankenstein was the monster, not the scientist. Whoops. Hopefully by the time I am finished with this book I will have this problem solved.  Another thing I find great about this book is that it is only around two hundred pages. To me that is nothing, I could easily read that in a day, so that makes me happy that we will finish this book in no time. I will continue to post as I continue to read this book, so maybe my thoughts will change, who knows. I hope they will turn more positive than ehhhh.

And it Begins

Ever since the Christmas music has been turned on at work last week I have been craving for it to be after Thanksgiving. That way I have a legitimate reason to decorate my whole house and bake a kagillion gingerbread cookies without being one of those people that don’t wait until Thanksgiving to prepare for Christmas. Not to mention that we have also started practicing our Christmas music for our winter concert in the Reno Pops Orchestra, that is definitely not helping my inner Christmas demons. They have also decorated my work and are now asking for people to take shifts to be an elf. I definitely am taking one of those shifts, so now I am going to be Santa’s elf for a day. I never thought i would get to do that, I think it is going to be so much fun! Not to mention I get paid for doing practically nothing for seven hours. So I have been surrounded with Christmas non-stop for over one week and just need it be this Thursday so I can succumbed to my inner Christmas demons and go crazy with decorations, cookies and of course Christmas music! The only issue is I have no clue when we are going to get our Christmas tree, so I guess I will just have to do without it for a while, but i can assure your that this won’t stop me from doing everything else in the meantime.

Talent Show

The Talent Show is beginning to become a huge pain this year. We have like six or more practices, which to me are completely useless and they all happen from 2:30 to 3:30. I have off campus so this really sucks. Not to mention I work most of the time and it makes me not have anytime to eat before I have to leave for work, so i am now starving while at work. For the practices all we do is do our part and then leave. I really don’t see the point, I have no clue what I am gaining for attending these practices; if they weren't mandatory I would only attend about half of them. Now they are wanting us to wear our outfits for the show for about three of these practices. This I really think is lame, I should only have to wear it once. Right now I don’t even have a clue what I am wearing and I have to wear it tomorrow. All I am doing is playing the violin, how should I dress up for that? I am indecisive on whether I should wear something fancy or wear something fun. I guess I will decide that later. I really don’t wanna be complaining, but I find most of these things to be completely unnecessary and more of a burden on me. Luckily I’m not working any 4-9 shifts otherwise I would have to miss some of the practices, which I think would disqualify me.

I think I Died...

Let me start off by saying I am a VERY PUNCTUAL person, if I am on time I feel late. I carry the motto that it is better to be an hour early than one minute late. I absolutely despise the feeling of being tardy. So last Tuesday was quite the shocker to me.

Monday night I went to bed at my usual time, around ten o'clock pm, not too late and not too early. Being the punctual self I am, I set about five alarms on my phone and one alarm on my alarm clock, just to be safe. I wake up around five forty five am every day I have school, so it's always pitch black when I wake up. So you can say I was quite surprised when I woke up the next morning and realized that it was way too bright in my room to be five forty five in the morning. Leaping out of bed I stared at my phone wondering what was happening. Maybe it was Monday today? I glanced at my phone. Nope. It definitely was Tuesday and did my clock say 11 o'clock!!!? Crap. I looked at all of my alarms and they were still set, so they had gone off and I must have in a dazed state turned them off. I still can't remember doing anything like that. I decided it wasn't worth going to school for only an hour, so I was able to enjoy a four day weekend, while it felt great, it also felt extremely weird to be home while everyone else was still at school. I couldn't stop thinking about how I didn't wake up, that never happens to me. I decided the only explanation for my odd behavior was that I must have died when I hit my pillow. How else could I have slept through all of my alarms and the bright sun?

All in the Name of Science!!

While reading my book for AP Biology, Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, I learned that science can be kind of crazy. These scientists were doing the most insane experiments! The main focus on this book was how similar fish are to mammals and how mammals ultimately evolved from fish. They mainly did experiments on embryos, or more specifically shark embryos, even though they did experiment on others as well. They would inject these shark embryos with various chemicals to see if they could solve the mystery behind development and what purpose genes served in it. In doing so they were able to mutate these embryos to extract the reaction they desired. They discovered how one gene that forms a specific part of the body (such as a limb or fin) when moved around, would form a duplicate of what it would have originally formed. That means some of these sharks grew up having duplicate fins.

I have to say what horrified me the most is their experiments on fly's and mice. The pictures they put in my head seemed like something that could only be created out of a horror story. In this case they were working specifically on eyes, and what did they discover? Well, they found out that they can mess with the DNA or genes and form eyes whenever they wanted. Need an extra eye? They knew how to make that possible, even to the extent of making a fly eye appear in the place of a mouse's eye. That's right. Mice had fly eyes and fly's had mice eyes. Freaky, right? While this book is very interesting, I can say that it has scarred me a few times.

Thank You, Not THANKS

My job takes everything pretty seriously. They are very strict on having the customers being treated with the best care as if they are all our bosses. This makes it so there are a lot of rules and regulations based on customer care. The majority of these rules are pretty common, say "hello" and "goodbye" to every customer that walks in, even if they buy nothing, make small talk so the customer doesn't feel awkward, and of course ask if they need help and assist them if they do. One - and this one is a serious one - is something I never heard of until I started working. It is saying "thank you" instead of "thanks" to all of our customers, if we don't we can get in a lot of trouble if we are caught. If we say "thanks" to a secret shopper (people disguised as customers to grade how efficient their cashiers are working) our store leader will be fined $1,000. So yeah, he would probably be pissed if he learned that he got fined due to one of us saying "thanks". I think we could get fired for that. So now every time I hear someone say "thanks" or I say it myself I freak out. I think I am going to get in major trouble until I realize that I am just at school and freaked out for nothing. So my job is definitely improving my speech.

My Blog

Okay, my blog is doing strange things to me. I know I am weird, blogging about my blog but just go along with it. If you scroll through my blog posts I am sure you will be able to discover one of my issues. Some of my color fonts change. That’s because every time I tried to publish those posts they would only show a title and in order to reveal my actual post you had to highlight over the words with your mouse cursor, so i changed the color and font type and voilà! My post appeared, I don't know why it only does it to some of my posts. Why not all of them? The next thing it is doing is when I am writing a post and decide I want to make a correction, it will delete words as I’m typing new ones, so now I go on Google Docs and type up my post (as I am doing now), then I copy and paste it in so I can publish it. Lastly, it is underlining several of my words and turning them into links when I finally publish my post. I have yet to figure out why and how to fix it. So yeah, my blog is kinda crazy… It is making me try too hard to make a single post. I am curious though, am I the only one having this blogging problem? And why me then? I think my blog might be rebelling against me, I just don’t know why… yet.

Catching Up

I think I am finally starting to catch up on the life I took a vacation from for a week. I think I should be gracious that it seemed as if I missed a slow school week, but I still got a lot of work that I have to get done. Everyday I have been doing hours of homework and all I need to do now is finish a few essays for English, I don’t know where I am going to be able to find the time to do them since I won’t get home until like ten pm tonight, but I will have to try. I think the hardest thing about catching up is having more than going to school on my schedule everyday. I have to work and go do my extracurricular activities like FFA and play the violin, so it’s hard enough getting all my school work done even when I don’t miss an entire week. I just can not wait until I can give myself a sigh of relief when I am all caught up. I would like a day of free time and sleeping in, so I am soooo happy that we don’t go to school on Monday, even if I do work it will be nice to be able to sleep in and not have to worry about school. I hate the feeling of having missing work, so as soon as I can turn everything in I will be super happy and relieved.

Nationals

Okay, let me start off by saying that the National FFA Convention was a blast! I competed in Farm Business Management or FBM and got a bronze for individual and a bronze for the team activity. That was my first time even competing in FBM, so I would say that this trip was a success, especially since I was able to do a ton of touristy things while in Louisville, Kentucky. Not only was I competing in FBM, but also in the Hall of States, which is pretty much a booth set up by my partner and I that represents Nevada Agriculture. We didn't win that, but it gave our teacher a good idea on how it can be improved on for next year. Now the touristy things we were able to do included going to Churchill downs and seeing all the horses training, going to the Louisville Slugger Museum where we were able to take a tour of how the bats are made, going to a Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular, an arboretum and a haunted Corn Maze (which was the most terrifying thing of my life). Even when we were just at our Hotel it was fun, due to everyone hanging out in our Hotel room until practically Midnight every night. It was an awesome week if you don’t include how little sleep I got and how it was a bit humid there, let’s just say that my hair didn't like it when I straightened it, because it just wanted to get wavy.

Technicalities

Well, remember that blog post I made about one month ago about my future predictions on Hamlet? Well it turns out I wasn't completely off. Goooooo me! Okay, I will admit that I may have gotten a few of the details wrong, like how everyone dies, but at least I was right about everyone dying… well everyone except for Horatio. But lets see what I got right. Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet die, there is a sword fight and poison involved. I think that is a pretty good considering that this is the only time i have read Hamlet. Now, I was wrong about how they died… except Claudius does get stabbed by Hamlet, just not exactly how I thought he would. I was also wrong about when in the play this would all take place, I thought it would happen during Hamlet’s reenactment play of his father’s death, but it happened when he was fencing with Laertes. Minor technicalities, right? I can say I was surprised that Ophelia, Laertes and Polonius were involved, I thought their characters would not play a serious role in Hamlet’s death, yet Laertes was the one who stabbed Hamlet to death due to Ophelia dying which ultimately was caused by Polonius’ death. Crazy how everything adds up, if Hamlet hadn't killed Polonius he could have never died… well maybe. He did have a hit placed on his head from Claudius, but that’s another minor technicality. Overall I really did enjoy Hamlet, especially compared to Shakespeare's other play *cough* Romeo and Juliet *cough*.