off to pamplona
well not really in fact. i was just bored here this afternoon and i decided to get my cat to "bullfight" with me. it was working too! see i made the muleta out of a wooden stick i found (which is normally used for closing the curtains) and a red handkerchief which was the cape part. and i used this string as a lure to get her to charge the cape and it was quite interesting at first until we ran out of space in the living room and my cat kept chasing the string around and nearly climbed up my leg.

now i don't want to mortally injure my cat so i think i'll leave out the part with the banderillos and the pics and the part where i go in for the death kill. hey if you're wondering where i learned all this stuff, i learned it in the book i read by ernest hemingway called the dangerous summer. yeah it was all pretty cool and it took me only like 2 weeks to read (i took it slowly, only 1 chapter a day because i am lazy lol).

lately, i got to thinking about cleaning up my room. see i saw this ad in a magazine for this totally cool futon bed/couch thing and i really want it for my room but my room is like a warzone. i mean i haven't cleaned it out in like 7 years (yes, sadly that's a true statement). so i am going to totally re-do my room and paint it and everything and i'm gonna have a desk and a laptop in it and all and i'm gonna put that futon bed/couch thing right by where my other bed is (only i'm gonna chuck my other bed out the freakin window lol).

so this is going to be my new year's resolution for next year. only i just realized that that was my resolution for this year and the year before that! so second semester, i will start (if not sooner) because first semester has the hardest subjects and with field band and all and work, it will be hard to find time. but i am definitely going to pursue this to the end and i'll post pictures too!

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life is a beach
i figured i'd tell you this one:

we had a blast that entire time we were down there for the 2 weeks. everyday we'd head down to the beach around 10:30-11:00 am and then stay down there till like about 3:30pm. so we were usually down for like 4-5 hours and such.

well during that period of time, a person sure can see a lot of weird stuff down there on the beach. occasionally we'd see a few dolphins and whatnot and other times i would see rays jumping out of the water doing backflops which was really neat. and then there were the funny things that we'd see too. like watching other people's umbrella's blowing over and collapsing and this other thing. these two women were out in the ocean a fair distance with an inner tube. and also there was a strong wind from the south that day and the current was moving south to north.

i'll tell ya, if you let go of that inner tube for a split second, it will be up the beach faster than you can say "aw crap there goes my inner tube". and that's exactly what happened to these two ladies and one of them let go while the other one was swimming along side and the wind and the current took it upstream so fast, you wouldn't believe it. and i watched and that big inner tube just drifted to the north and out to sea until it was just a tiny speck on the horizon. and then it just was gone. some story huh?

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the dangerous summer (part 2)

well i'm back and i managed to make it home in one piece. here's a picture for your thoughts. it's of the ferry boat on the way home from ocracoke island. we always make the trip down there while we're on the outer banks. our visit was very nice because they have this awesome coffee shop/bookstore. and we also visited this neat craft store back on howard street that's was cool. i bought a new coffee mug there. the ferry was nice on the way home. it's always nice taking the evening ferry home because you can watch the sun setting.

we had a great time and i'll post a few things up here once and a while about what happened because it would take to long to tell in one entry. i finished my book (the dangerous summer, by ernest hemingway) while i was down at the beach. it was pretty good. and i also bought the catcher in the rye which is my favorite book that i would've liked to have owned and well now i do. i bought it from that coffee shop/bookstore down in ocracoke. ocracoke is the bomb.

the trip wasn't as tiring as i thought it would be but it took around 11 hours until we reached salvo. then on the way back we decided to rest at a motel. driving another 11-12 hours after a 2 week vacation wouldn't be easy anyway. it always seems longer coming back. so that's it for now and band camp starts in a few weeks!

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the dangerous summer (that book by ernest hemingway silly)
well i've just finished packing most of my stuff. all that remains is some of my clothing that's still drying and my toiletry items that i'll pack tomorrow. that van we have sure does have a lot of room. sure the windstar had all that plushy goodness but not as much room as the 1992 plymouth voyager. it is pretty classy. or was. i should say it was pretty classy back in 1992! lol. and it actually smells okay and not like dogs or anything. see we're borrowing from a close friend of ours (for FREE...yippeee!) and while we're away, he's taking the windstar and checking it out and trying to fix it (NOT for free.....awwww but hey i think it's a fair trade).

well my dear friend teresa is going off to africa for the next 6 months and i am really gonna miss her! gosh she was always so cheerful and always seemed to brighten my day no matter how incredibly crappy and stupid it was. take care teresa! and travel safely! she leaves on the 13th i think and is flying 7 hours to amsterdam, then a 2 hour wait and then another 8 hours down to cameroon. gosh what jet lag. i'm not sure if i could even handle all of that lol. i haven't even flown in a plane in 15 years so i forget what it is like. someday though, i will fly again.

well today wasn't too eventful. i went to the library around 1:45 to pick up a book to read while i'm on vacation and i chose "the dangerous summer" by ernest hemingway who is one of my favorite authors. it looked pretty good so i'd figure i'd take that out when i get bored. so yeah. and then after that, around like 3:30, i decided to finish the rest of the mowing and then went to the pool. and while i was at the pool, we got into a quite a ferocious game of handball and now the heel of my hand and my wrist is sort of swelled up and turning purple. lol gosh. see handball is just like baseball except you use your hand to hit this rubber ball. i guess i hit that ball one to many times on the wrist. ouch. and then i swam some laps and returned home around 6:00 to finish the rest of the mowing and packing.

and now i have to go to bed at 10:30 tonight and i just got done cleaning the turtle tank one last time. and that sure was a blast well not really. and i just talked on the phone with laura for the last time so that was a pleasant conversation we had. i'll miss everyone while i'm away! and yes i'll be kind to the manatees and all the wildlife, marcia, don't worry! lol. and maybe my parents.

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1st rehearsal
well tonight was the first rehearsal for the marching bands at school. it went from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm and it went pretty well. i am now an official member of field band! oh boy you know what that means :D. of course...you guessed it... band camp! that begins on like august 9 and runs to the end of that week. that's 8:00 am to 4:00 pm of pure band goodness in a jar. it's gonna be tough but somehow i'm gonna manage to pull this off while still maintaining a 4.0 on the report card. whew! hard work, here we come.

i've been dogsitting the past few days for that lovely chocolate lab named jager who's just a great big bundle of energy. he's only like 4 years old anyways but he sure can pull me down the street! and it better be worth the $60 to pick up his poop with a plastic bag and stuff. ewwwww.

i've updated the main page! finally, geez. and i think i'll keep updating it every month so that everyone stays up to date. wait a second...everyone? who actually visits my site and cares? oh yeah that's right, just me. oh well. at least i can try to promote it now as much as possible. i'm gonna try to increase traffic levels. i had 35 people visit my webpage yesterday which is pretty good for me (the most being 345 people in one day!). hopefully more and more come. but i need to think of something interesting to actually make people want to visit. hmmmm.

in a few days, i leave for the beach. what a great time i'll hopefully have. i want to catch a large fish and take it to laura's house. and i hope the weather is alright down there for some good body boarding. maybe i'll get my nerve up to try surviving sometime. at least now i can swim well enough to do that. there's a ship wreck off of our beach so maybe i'll swim out to that but who knows what sort of marine wild life could be dwelling there. spooky stuff i bet. i need to burn a good cd for the trip being that we'll be on the road for 10 straight hours. oh boy what fun that will be...not. hopefully, we won't all drive each other crazy by the time we get there.

we leave on saturday probably around 7:30 am or earlier and we expect to arrive around maybe 5:00 pm or 6:00 pm that night. gosh it'll be a long haul. i pray that our van (with its failing transmission) can take that abuse. god only knows. this vacation will take up two of those band rehearsals but that shouldn't be a problem because the most important is the band camp which happens way after we come home. in fact, it's after old homeweek. and there's a big parade and pageants and all sorts of good old home cooking to celebrate the founding of this lovely little white bread, trailer trash, redkneck valley town we call greencastle. jesus christ, there's more culture on our tennis shoes here (haha). well anyways, i'll be in that parade so yeah.

boy this sure is a long message but i suppose i'll give you the scoop on what the entire field band thing is. you see, this year we'll be wearing army fatigues which mr. forney only does every 6 years. and the piece of music we'll be playing is called "miss saigon" (which i believe is a broadway musical) so everything, uniforms and all, go with the music. we played it earlier tonight at rehearsal for the first time and boy did it suck. royally. but there's always room to improve i mean who says that we should play it absolutely perfectly the first time? of course that's impossible. but it's quite an interesting piece and i bet it'll be even more interesting playing it while moving around in formation.

i think it's about time to cut it short since i'm getting carried away with this message. so keep checking up here in the next few days, i'll try to keep it up to date.

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500
it's been quite a while since my last message so i guess i'll get people caught up here. i took swimming lessons the past 2 weeks and the last day is tomorrow. i had to swim the 500 today (4 laps of front crawl, 4 laps of back crawl, 2 laps of breast stroke, 2 laps of sidestroke, 2 laps of butterfly, and 4 laps of whatever we wanted) which is done continuously and that was very tiring. and then we had to do a survival float for 5 minutes and float on our backs for 5 minutes. and then after 45 minutes of lessons, it was off to work from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.

and that was pretty ordinary as usual. nothing new to report really. last thursday i got a shirt to wear that says i'm a staff member. so that's neat. i work thursdays now from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and again on saturdays for the usual 9:00 am to 3:00 pm session. and then after that, around 3:00pm, i went to the pool.

but before today, a lot has happened since the last day of school. the week after school let out, on thursday, i went over to kristin's to hang out and swim and stuff with justin and laura. that was a blast. and then i believe the week after that, on friday night, there was a pool party across the street at moss springs. kristin went along with me and we had a fun time but there was hardly anyone there! in the meantime, laura was away on a cruise. anyways, the following monday (which was the monday of this week) i went back to kristin's house with justin and laura and we had a great time as well. so that's just the main events of the past few weeks.

well today another cruical decision has been made. i have completely changed my mind about field band and i want to join now, i just pray it isn't too late! i mean all of a sudden, i want a challenge. the challenge i have set upon myself is to join field band, surivive band camp, maintain a straight 4.0 on my report card this coming year, and enjoy it. on top of that will be mountains of homework and school projects because i have the harder subjects the first semester and that's when field band takes place. oh lord. lol. i will be pushing myself to the max if i do this. but in spite of all the obstacles, i really hope i can sign up!

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school's out
yesterday was the last day of school. wow this year has gone so fast! it's incredible how time flies. yesterday, i skipped all my classes to go and hang down in the band room with all the other people and we had such a great time just chillin and stuff. i took a bunch of hilarious pictures which i'll just have to put on the website here. (speaking of, i still have to finish the trip ones, i'll probably get around to that next week lol).

and i suppose you want to know how monday's and tuesday's finals went. well they went pretty well in fact. i had my english final tuesday which was easier than i thought it would be and i had the gym final on wednesday. it all went pretty well. and after the graduation ceremony yesterday, justin, laura, kristin, and laura (yes there's another laura whom we shall call laura number two) went over to laura number one's house. we had a blast just hangin around and playing violent games of air hockey. ouch.

we (laura #1, justin, laura #2, and i) went for this long walk after school to just walk around and stuff. this lady gave us $20 to spend on a pizza but we spent it on graduation flowers for her granddaughter. the grandmother couldn't go to the ceremony because she had to stay home with her husband because he was sick. what a nice thing for us to do! we felt really good about it.

dave showed up at the graduation ceremony but didn't play in the band with us because he was still recovering from his ruptured appendix. that incident happened on nearly an entire week before the graduation and he was still feeling pretty bad. hopefully he'll get well soon.

well after last night's hanging out with friends at laura #1's house i had to catch a ride home at around 11pm because i had to get up early for work today. what fun lol. today wasn't that bad. i got to take orders for people and that was pretty neat. i think i'll cut it short here because i have to send an email.

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ps: i am going to the blues fest tomorrow down south in hagerstown and that'll be a blast. i think i'll go see harry potter on monday or something. oh and what a disappointment for poor smarty jones!!! aww man i feel really bad for him. such huge potential and such an upset. i really thought there was going to be another triple crown winner this year. but don't worry smarty, stay cool!

Dinkles... the world's greatest marching shoes...
oh boy another extraspectacular day. lol not really. yesterday was just another yard work day. i called laura up and we talked a while. and late last night, jaws was on so i decided to watch the end of that and i was an hour late in getting to bed which wasn't the greatest.

i had to get up this morning at 7:30 am because it was memorial day and there was a parade to march in. it was also raining out which made everything worse. the parade was cancelled so all we had to do was play at this ceremony that was held in our auditorium. nothing very eventful there either. we had to wear our blue pants and these white shirts with the band logo on them and these white shoes called 'dinkles'. they are about the queerest looking shoes in the entire world. they're somewhat comfortable at least but they look really really gay. lol. no one really likes them but it's what we have and i suppose we should all be thankful for that.

and then afterwards, i went down to the vfw for a free lunch. it was alright. just your basic vfw food. so that was about it. i'm still searching for this label maker thing which i need desperately to make a label for a notebook with. i have no idea where it is. don't you just hate that? i mean you use this stupid label maker thing (which is shaped like a puppy's head and the label comes out through its mouth) like only a year ago and you put it somewhere because you figure you won't need it ever again. and you try to remember where you put it. but then you'll come across it while your looking for something else you've managed to lose and you put the label maker thing away somewhere else because you don't need it. but then here comes the time when i need the label maker and it's no where to be found! i always lose things in this house. maybe i'll get lost one of these days.

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that will be $9 sir... out of $10?.... okay $1 is your change..$9 and $1 is $10 have a good day
yeah so that's what was saying to the customers down at the coffee roasters all day from 9am to 3pm. boy there was quite a rush in like the last half hour and there were like a million people wanting coffee.

but hey i bet your wondering about finals. well friday i had the american history final. i wrote these two awesome essays. we'll just have to see what happens. and i also presented my holocaust project on "the devil's arithmetic" (which is a good book by the way) and that went very well. i drew these two great drawings. i think it's one of the better displays that i have done during my school years. hopefully, the rest will be as good or even better than that one.

it's getting kind of late here. man it's been an entire week since i watched schindler's list. i could watch that move again it was so good, such a compelling and powerful story. i think everyone should watch it sometime in their lifetimes.

well after the final in history, we had like an entire hour left to mess around "quietly" so we arm wrestled and listened to our cd players. i have weak arms so i'm not to great at arm wrestling but listening to music was good fun. dom let me listen to this strange german music stuff. like german disco-trippy music. it was....erm....very.....unique.

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the first day of finals
i suppose you're wondering how my day went? lol. it was the first day of finals (4 more days to go) and we had to take it in the power tech room which was not air conditioned. so it got a bit stuffy in there. at least he had a few fans going and that was a big help. the finals were for periods 1/2 which meant that i took my fcs, power tech, and art finals. the art one was probably the easiest along with the power tech one. but the fcs one was probably more difficult and i'm afraid i didn't do as well on that one than the others.

we had a like a half hour left over (we were in power tech for finals from 8:00 am to 11:00 am) so matt and i went to the back of the room to test paper airplanes. that was fun even though all my crazy designs are never aerodynamic in any sense of the word. there was also this huge, hairy black spider and matt killed it with his shoe. man that thing looked pretty poisonous to me! lol.

after that we went to our advisement period for an hour until lunch. advisement wasn't very productive. i think we were supposed to be studying but we did everything but that. just signed yearbooks and whatnot. and then it was off to lunch. nothing much just sat with a bunch of different people than i usually did. i sat with david, laura, and a bunch of others. it was fun.

you know tomorrow is my american history final. oh joy lol. i studied for it and it took like an hour but i seem to know everything on the review list so that's just dandy. i'm sure i'll do alright tomorrow. and also i'm playing for my band final to bring my grade up on it. i got an 86 on the final (with "the curve" which is something that i don't understand lol) and playing helps bring it up. so all i have to do is play 3 scales and sight-read something. and it's possible that i could bring it up to an 'a'. that would be good because i don't want my gpa to go down from it's 3.9876 (practically a 4.0 except i got a 'b' on the stupid math final earlier in the year). and i am going to work my butt off next year. i am taking a lot of stuff. i have so much stuff to do, i don't have time for gym class so i'm taking that after school. wow. so that's all for now. i will leave another message tomorrow.

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