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Friday, May 15, 2015

It's the Last Day of School! (Plus: My Year in Review)


Next week, I'll have my graduation ceremony, and then I'll be done with eighth grade and on to high school. It's so odd... I feel like we just started school. Almost like my life is flashing before my eyes. Like one day I'll blink and I'll be 82 years old with twenty five cats and a parakeet named Polly.

Since exams are over and there isn't anything to do, I spent four hours playing poker with my friends.

Yes, four hours. It was great.

(We didn't bet actual money, don't worry.)

(If we had, I would be bankrupt by now. To put it simply, I did not win.)

So what has eighth grade been like? I think it was pretty good, overall. I liked all my classes, though I struggled in Geometry (I'm more of an algebra person. Proofs? Not my strongest suit). Theatre was probably one of my favourite classes, although my teacher is TOTALLY obsessed with Elvis. I mean, we spent an entire class period talking about the King of Rock and Roll, and I know SO many facts about this guy now that I didn't know before. Not sure if this is a good thing...?

For our final exam, I did a scene from Waiting for Godot, the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, with a partner. It's a really, really weird play. I loved acting every second of it.

I made new friends, which is never a bad thing.

I went camping with Girl Scouts... twice. The first time we stayed in air conditioned cabins where the biggest sacrifice we had to make was a lack of wi-fi (which somehow I survived). The second time we were roughing it, and at night we could hear coyotes howling right outside our tent. Fairly terrifying. Extremely cool.

I read an amazing book called The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender which was, as the title suggests, both strange and beautiful.

I ate the best Thai food I've ever had in my life.

I wasted an absurd amount of time on Pinterest.

I learned how to play three different card games, and have overall played about 16 hours of each (which might be an exaggeration, but not much of one).

I wrote a book, which was a very stressful but very new experience. I'll definitely be doing NaNoWriMo again next year (and you should too!)

So that's my year in review, pretty much. No real adventures, but lots of new experiences. And, as Albert Einstein says, "The only source of knowledge is experience."

Love, Emily

Monday, May 11, 2015

Did You Think You Had Seen the Last of Me?

I'm back!

Wow, it's been awhile, hasn't it? I'm sorry to say that when I stopped writing on this blog because of the business of NaNoWriMo, I totally fell out of the routine and just never really got back on track. But here I am again. :)

School is drawing to a close, and both teachers and students are starting to wind down. Exams start this week, and next week I have only two days, which are devoted to the graduation of the eighth graders, so basically everyone's suffering from an extreme case of summer fever wherein very little work is done and lots of movies are watched.

Well, everyone's winding down except for my geometry teacher, who assigned us 160 problems to do over the weekend. I somehow managed to get them all finished, miraculously, but I was seeing equations in my dreams afterwards. Oh, and speaking of things I did over the weekend...



AGE OF ULTRON!!!

Let me tell you, I had sky-high expectations for the new Avengers movie, and thankfully, they were met. I won't spoil anything here, but it was fantastic, even better than the last one in my opinion, and Hawkeye was a larger character, and the two new characters grew on me quickly. Ultron was a great villain, and the "there are no strings on me" scene was legitimately haunting.

*explodes from geeky happiness*

Who else saw this movie? What did you think? I'd love to know!

I'm definitely going to post more from now on, and I'd like to extend apologies to June from weezasjournal.blogspot.com. You commented on my very last post in November, nominating me for an award, and I'm so sorry that I never responded. Like I said, I completely fell out of routine, and the embarrassing truth is that I haven't looked at this blog since November. Sorry!