midnight madness

Yes I am posting three times in one day. I promise, they're all worth reading.

I just finished my math [at 11:45 PM, very late for me]. I've got a trig quiz tomorrow...various bits of homework and extra credit stuff finished up.  I got home from the book sale [in the RAIN...it started to mist gently..@ Tragedy, what have you done...it drizzled gently all right.
ANYWAYS, I got home and dealt in a couple of emails. Then had to deal with the grant-writing situation. I'm applying for a grant for our robotics team from these folks and the dratted thing is due tomorrow. I got most of it done but we need a 'collaborating partner'. I hunted up three different local organizations....finally had success on the LAST one, at the eleventh hour. Hallelujah!  
All evening I was making phone calls and writing emails and hunting down contacts. Also chatting, which was VERY distracting. When a CERTAIN SOMEONE keeps mentioning the tick they found on their knee, and subsequently LOST somewhere in the room ['he is LURKING!'] it is hard to focus on grant-applications.

But finally success!!  At 10:30 I had an enthused conversation with the head of something-or-other outreach at OSU's program: we worked out a DEAL [she at first thought I was one of the parents, not a student. WINNAGE.]   There are BIG PLANS afoot. This could be a huge opportunity for our team to start a FIRST LEGO-league team, which I had really wanted to do but doubted I had the leadership to do.  EXCITING TIMES. I selected our collaborating program, edited a few more things, and submitted the grant app  :D  :D   It being due TOMORROW.   Classic stuff.

a non-tornado, denim skirts, and trigonometry

Am currently encamped at a homeschoolers’ hold-out in Oregon: i.e., homeschool book sale in the state capitol of Salem. 

Why do all homeschoolers dress alike? Heh...we conform just as much as public schoolers are supposed to. Just to different standards.....

 There’s always a few mothers in denim skirts...I can see a girl now who could have been me a few years ago, in denim tiered skirt [pale blue, slightly grubby] and oversized t-shirt with a horse graphic...did I mention that a majority of homeschooled girls are horse-crazy? I used to be. And long braid down the back. 

This is horrible, I sound exactly like anybody making a stereotypical statement about homeschoolers, smug in my own public-schooled psyche. 

Then there are the other homeschoolers, the ones that dress ‘hip’ in skinny jeans or black or whatever. Ergh, I used to despise them too, and now I’ve become them. 

Another van just pulled up opposite me...I am sitting in the car [mini-van], because I already browsed the books and there isn’t really anything. Workers at the sale got early access...hehe, I WORKED....brought our own books in and placed them round at the appropriate sale tables, trying to get out of much work because my wrist is almighty screwed up from The Dalles.  

Stupidity....at last week’s robotics event in The Dalles, we were setting up the field and all. There was a plethora of strong burly lads, I could very well have slacked off and said ‘Phsh, let them handle the heavy stuff’. I even had a very valid excuse: I was filming the whole thing. But NO, I must needs get in there and show off the fact that even though I probably can only lift about a third of what any lad can, I nevertheless will work just as hard as them. This resulted in my getting aforementioned wicked cuts on wrists, and in my right wrist becoming rather badly screwed up. I don’t think its sprained, it just hurts a lot when I move it from side to side.  That happens a lot in my daily life. 

Or it MAY have been the wrench-turning, which I also did a lot of [on my side on the gym floor, when our robot broke]. I can usually figure out a way to injure myself pretty badly using nothing but an allen-wrench and some lock-tite [glue that is put in screws before the final installation]. 

I have a feeling that I am going to seriously injure myself some day, merely for the admirable purpose of showing off. The ironic part is that it will almost certainly be when there is no-one else around, and I am just showing myself that ‘Oh yes I can! Watch me heft this plywood!’ and then....*crunch* *agony* *Stoicism* 

Well yes. The wrist situation. It’s happened before [namely the first week of build season, when we cannibalized last year’s robot. I was eager to show my dedication and really went at those screws. They’d been lock-tited of course...] but never for this long, it’s going on two weeks...you’d be amazed how much a right-handed person puts sideways pressure on her right wrist. Yesterday I tried to become ambidextrous in math class. The writing-with-left-hand part didn’t go so well. 

Oh! Today in math class I was told I resemble a rabbit. This sounds awful, but it really isn’t. It’s the wide-eyed bounding enthusiasm I usually have in math class. A sandy-haired rabbit.    You ever read Stargirl? Well one time I got called Stargirl, too. By my French teacher...I was walking past, in bright red robotics team shirt, with an immense bag over my shoulder, hair in two long braids, and trademaked jaunty walk....I was hailed with ‘Bonjour, Stargirl!’.  It seriously made my day. 

Also, trigonometry is officially awesome. Law of Cosines allows you to find the measures of all the angles and sides in a triangle, given only two sides and an angle....

Hmm. Seems to me I was talking about this-here book sale. And the mini-vans pouring into the parking lot. We had a tough time getting here, ran into a load of traffic on I-5 coming up but we wound up ahead of schedule, even. 

Last year we attended this same book sale. It is an episode that has gone down in our family folklore so to speak. The weather had been threatening for days...the day before it had been unusually warm, and a thunderstorm came up in the evening and drenched the place. By morning it had blown over but the atmosphere was still oppressive. We drove to Salem [about an hour] and attended the book sale. By 4 that afternoon we were packing up our unsold books when it got dark very fast. The sale is held in a church gym; I made a trip to the car with a load of books and I have never seen a cloud make the sky dark that fast. I think I remember a sickly sort of look to the light.  When it started hailing, very suddenly and very hard, most of the kids helping pack up raced to the gym doors....in a few minutes we went back to the tables, sorting through the unsold books. 

   Then came a moment of terror. A man, one of the dads I suppose, announced [over the pounding rain and hail] that there was a tornado coming down the street and we all needed to evacuate the building [which had a metal roof]. I have been terrified of tornadoes for as long as I can remember. As I like to state, there is a reason I do not live in the Midwest. Well we evacuated that building all right, across the street to the main church building. The street was covered with flowing water, still bucketing down rain. There was no sign of the tornado, I’m not sure if it ever actually touched down in Salem. We huddled inside away from the windows, very damp but not too cold because it was still far warmer than it ought to be in Oregon in June...

We were worried the power might go out [we later learned it did, in my hometown]...I had dreadful visions of being stranded in Salem with the grid down...it was not a happy thought. But soon enough the storm passed and we were let back into the gym. It was still raining a bit. 

We got home and found out next day that in fact a tornado had touched down near my hometown. In a field a few miles from our house they found a spiral pattern in the grass...although as one of my friends said, if they have to ascertain it was actually a tornado from prints in the grass, it does not really count.   It is still a local legend however...or at least I like to think so, I doubt anyone in my town remembers weather events as well as I do. 

Performance Week!

Wellwellwell it's been a while!  

I'm not dead yet.... :D

College Algebra/trig has been going well....so far it's just been 'review'  :P   But it's a good class...very small actually. The teacher is INSANE but very awesome :) and I've got a whole page of quotes from algebra...some from students but mostly Ms. Kimes  :)  It tells you something that she's got a little note on her filing cabinet: 'C___ High School,  ___ Kimes   Evil Cackle'   :D

Rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet are also going...well...ish. INTENSE.  Things got fast and furious about Tuesday of last week, with long rehearsals and lack of sleep.   Wednesday night I came home from a late rehearsal, did math, and around 10 PM I came to the realization that 'Oh crud we really should have competed for the Woodie Flowers award.'  (Robotics stuff: in honor of one of FIRST's founders, Woodie Flowers, it celebrates the mentor [robotics coach-type] who best embodies the spirit of FIRST.)  Well as usual our whole team was too busy building the robot to write an essay, and nobody actually thought of it except ME the DAY BEFORE the essay was due.   And of course I was finishing up Chairman's Award essay and stuff. 

One of our mentors has worked harder than anyone for the past 8 years or so, the team wouldn't exist without him.   Nobody from our team has ever been nominated for WF. I decided that if he can give hours of time, work practically a second job (that's what robotics is :P ) I can stay up and write an essay....

Thankfully there was a word limit, so it only took me about two hours. Writing an essay at midnight is a really exhilarating experience, as was getting up for school next day, Thursday. Rehearsal as usual.

There was a happy moment when I was curled up on the floor backstage trying to catch 40 winks when somebody shouted onstage, and I panicked, thinking it might be me needed, and sat up and banged my head on this pile of heavy metal thingees. Promptly cracked up. Later I managed to stand up directly under another hard boxy thing....fun times :)

 Friday our rehearsal started as usual at 3:30 in the afternoon. Cue-to-cue: the tech people are working on lighting. Actors say a line, stop. Wait. Wait some more. Skip to the end of the scene and wait some more.  Took hours to get through the first act. We were there til 11 Pm.   

It was also the first time run crew (shlepping sets and props and furniture) was actually working with servants (moving more shtuffs for scenes). 

As a Capulet servant, I (with 4-ish other servants) move these four potted trees on and offstage a LOT. Like after every third scene. We only started doing this in the past few days. Oh, and we're still acting in a couple scenes.  

Those confounded trees haunt my every waking thought. Before Friday's rehearsal I had been on top of things, and printed out a list of every scene and what had to be moved on stage. (We are now on the third revision of this important list.)

Run crew and fellow servants love me. There are a total of three people on run crew which is NOT enough. It got really exciting when the four trees blossomed to six, spread amongst us four servants (has to be servants because it's in the scene). 

And there's this miserable bench that I and another girl have to get on and offstage. There was one time when she wasn't there and I raced out onstage to grab it, to cheers from the techies in the audience....a great moment :) 

There was an issue getting home, so I got to hang round the theatre later than almost anybody else. My dad was working late on the robot and did not get home til 1:30 that morning. 

I dreamed all night about rehearsal, and those bloody trees! XD

Saturday proved even more interesting, with a second revision of the master-list, which has made run crew adore me :P   

 This time it was my turn to miss my cue with that blasted bench. Twice. The first time because I thought I had more time than I did, and was marshalling the troops for the next tree-moving bit. ARGH. Then I was all primed to make sure I didn't miss the next bench-scene, and took a SECOND to try and find tree-people, and BAM missed the entrance. Apologies all round, franticness. 

After about 1 pm I rushed cross-town to robotics scrimmage; big pre-competition thingee before the robot is boxed up Tuesday night. We did pretty well, except for a tip-over which resulted in something coming loose, and also the treads came off one wheel....thank goodness for epoxy! 

Stayed there til 7 when my mom came and rescued me from the deadly-dullness of standing-around-not-being-able-to-help-much (as was most of the team, it was just programming issues at that point.) 

My dad was really suffering, he couldn't help much either and was holed up trying not to fall asleep....commented that it was almost like being stuck in an airport at 1 AM.   He got home pretty early thankfully: 9:30. 

I went to bed at 8:30 and got about 12 hours of sleep...off to rehearsal at 1 this afternoon to find it had been cancelled :( I was really wanting to run through again with crew, those trees....Director was beyond enthused about my scene list and general preparedness, commented on my responsible-ness =D  which made me happy. 

no sleep

Pulled an all-nighter. Was going to go to bed at midnight (did, in fact) but then realized that I was going to be awake for a while anyways, weighed a few more considerations and went for it with a mug of coffee and Eddie.

I was forced to write in the spare bedroom above the kitchen, and in utmost secrecy, lest I fall afoul of a parent, who would doubtless insist on bed.

Got pretty chilly around 5:30. Very foggy, frosty. Not one wink of sleep did I get, but my word count is up to 24,046.

Actually am not suffering much: was able to stay awake in church. However things are striking me as way too funny and I look ghastly.

Please say hi, somebody!!