Cumulative Summer and Back to School Update
This is basically going to be a cumulative update of my summer and the first week or so of school :) Dunno who actually reads this, but I'll try to make it interesting.
Well.... This has been one of the more mundane summer vacations of my high school career.
June + July was pretty boring, I really didn't do much. Now that I think of it, I really wasted all that time. That sucks.
Anyways, early august my two cousins from Taiwan came to visit. Two of them, 康成, or Kevin and 康胤, or Colin, 24 and 23 (Actually not too sure, since ages in Taiwan are a little weird because in the culture they count you as being one year old right when you come out of the womb). They're architect majors at a college in Taiwan, the older one is entering his first year of grad school this year. I'm really glad they came actually. They're really cool and really fun to be around, and I got to spend like three weeks without using much English at all. I feel like my spoken Chinese really improved, and my vocabulary is a lot bigger now.
Along with them I also got to meet two other students from Taiwan named Wendy and Terry. They were doing a live-in program while studying English, and my mother happened to know their host, so we ended up all meeting and doing a lot of stuff together.
We took my cousins sightseeing all over the place, starting with Copley/Boston Common and moving on to places like Rockport, Good Harbor, etc. We spent a lot of time at the beach actually (Stupid frigid cold water). We actually found some architecture school on Newbury St and went inside to look at the models and stuff.... which were really not too great. Makes me laugh when I think about how much better the models my cousins make are :).
The weekend of August 20 (I think) we took a trip up to New Hampshire. Crammed eight people, my family(4), Kevin+Colin, and Henry and Cynthia, my cousins on my mom's side. Kevin and Colin are on my dad's side, by the way. We took this trip last year as well, my mother has a friend who rents out a house to people, so we rented it for the weekend and headed down there. On the way we stopped at a few places like the Lost River Gorge, which is like a boardwalk through this gorge with caves you can climb through (Beware the Lemon Squeeze!). The second day we hiked up Mount Webster, a mountain in the area next to a beautiful pond. The area itself is really beautiful, because theres a road in the middle of the mountain and really not much else there. Really peaceful and tranquil.
The third day rain spoiled our plans to go to a beach in Ogunquit, and we ended up getting stuck in traffic and basically had a long LONG LONG car ride home. If you thought that was bad enough, the next morning at seven Kevin, Colin, Wendy, Terry and I got on a three day tour to DC, NY and Philly by bus. As usual with tour buses, it was a lot of bus riding. The sights weren't too much because I'd already seen most of it, and I had pretty vivid recollections of the places when we got there. Anyways, it was still fun, because the people I went with were really cool, and we played cards at night which was fun. They also taught me to play bridge, which was fun.
Let's see... We did a lot of other stuff together before they went back to Taiwan, but one of the things I remember the most was the night we made sushi. The sushi was delicious (duh), but afterwards we played Big Two (card game for you un-asian people :P) where the loser of each game had to eat the amount of wasabi that the winner put on a cracker. It was really funny even though it hurt like crazy :) I was sick before that and I wasn't sick anymore after it.... heh.
Oh, one last thing was going to see Snakes on a Plane! The movie was goofy, but it was really funny because Wendy got scared shitless, and she had to get on a plane back to Taiwan that weekend.
Eventually they left, and peace and quiet was nice but it was still one of the funnest things I've done in a while :)
So a few days later and a crap load of physics and psych homework later school started, as we all know (fun fun fun). My schedule is somewhat like this... [edit] Bookston called me right as I was typing his name into this update....creepy [/edit]
1/2 Journalism with Eudenbach
2/1 AP Statistics with Bookston
3 AP Computer Science with Morgenbesser (basically an independent study though)
4 AP Psychology with Tobin (yay!)
5/6 Study
6/5 AP Physics with Duranceau
G7 AP Calculus BC Independent Study
Overall I really like my classes, they're interesting and oddly enough I have absolutely no new teachers this year. I already knew all of the teachers and stuff.
Let's see... XC Website is up http://www.arlingtonxc.com, which I finished recently. It actually didn't take too long since it's simple and clean, and I'm working on the lack of content as I make a Flash Photoviewer along with a Java program to generate XML Files for flash (which is basically done, yay!). Considering I barely ran over the summer and missed a week of practice I'm satisfied with my times in XC at the moment. I ran 13:36 for the 2 mile relay and 18:53 for the race against Everett, which sucked because it was in pouring rain >_>.
Moving on to other things, I really like going to places that are sparsely populated such as mountains and oceans and such. It's really quite peaceful and I really think the ocean is mighty beautiful :) After High School I'm thinking of biking somewhere far away, or just biking to see how far I can go.
I'm done for now I suppose, and you can expect a photo update to follow this soon :)
I just remembered this actually, and theres one more thing I wanna put in this update. Tomorrow is the first day of my Go class at my old Chinese school! It should be a rather interesting experiment and I have a pretty good syllabus for at least the first day lined up. It's gonna be interesting though, the age differences in the class are many. The ages of my eleven students are 5, 6, 6, 6, 10, 10,11, 12, 12,15, 15, so managing the class is gonna be pretty goshdarn interesting. I'll update after it tomorrow to let y'all know how it goes :)
-Thomas
PS. I've never written an entry this long before. EVER.
Well.... This has been one of the more mundane summer vacations of my high school career.
June + July was pretty boring, I really didn't do much. Now that I think of it, I really wasted all that time. That sucks.
Anyways, early august my two cousins from Taiwan came to visit. Two of them, 康成, or Kevin and 康胤, or Colin, 24 and 23 (Actually not too sure, since ages in Taiwan are a little weird because in the culture they count you as being one year old right when you come out of the womb). They're architect majors at a college in Taiwan, the older one is entering his first year of grad school this year. I'm really glad they came actually. They're really cool and really fun to be around, and I got to spend like three weeks without using much English at all. I feel like my spoken Chinese really improved, and my vocabulary is a lot bigger now.
Along with them I also got to meet two other students from Taiwan named Wendy and Terry. They were doing a live-in program while studying English, and my mother happened to know their host, so we ended up all meeting and doing a lot of stuff together.
We took my cousins sightseeing all over the place, starting with Copley/Boston Common and moving on to places like Rockport, Good Harbor, etc. We spent a lot of time at the beach actually (Stupid frigid cold water). We actually found some architecture school on Newbury St and went inside to look at the models and stuff.... which were really not too great. Makes me laugh when I think about how much better the models my cousins make are :).
The weekend of August 20 (I think) we took a trip up to New Hampshire. Crammed eight people, my family(4), Kevin+Colin, and Henry and Cynthia, my cousins on my mom's side. Kevin and Colin are on my dad's side, by the way. We took this trip last year as well, my mother has a friend who rents out a house to people, so we rented it for the weekend and headed down there. On the way we stopped at a few places like the Lost River Gorge, which is like a boardwalk through this gorge with caves you can climb through (Beware the Lemon Squeeze!). The second day we hiked up Mount Webster, a mountain in the area next to a beautiful pond. The area itself is really beautiful, because theres a road in the middle of the mountain and really not much else there. Really peaceful and tranquil.
The third day rain spoiled our plans to go to a beach in Ogunquit, and we ended up getting stuck in traffic and basically had a long LONG LONG car ride home. If you thought that was bad enough, the next morning at seven Kevin, Colin, Wendy, Terry and I got on a three day tour to DC, NY and Philly by bus. As usual with tour buses, it was a lot of bus riding. The sights weren't too much because I'd already seen most of it, and I had pretty vivid recollections of the places when we got there. Anyways, it was still fun, because the people I went with were really cool, and we played cards at night which was fun. They also taught me to play bridge, which was fun.
Let's see... We did a lot of other stuff together before they went back to Taiwan, but one of the things I remember the most was the night we made sushi. The sushi was delicious (duh), but afterwards we played Big Two (card game for you un-asian people :P) where the loser of each game had to eat the amount of wasabi that the winner put on a cracker. It was really funny even though it hurt like crazy :) I was sick before that and I wasn't sick anymore after it.... heh.
Oh, one last thing was going to see Snakes on a Plane! The movie was goofy, but it was really funny because Wendy got scared shitless, and she had to get on a plane back to Taiwan that weekend.
Eventually they left, and peace and quiet was nice but it was still one of the funnest things I've done in a while :)
So a few days later and a crap load of physics and psych homework later school started, as we all know (fun fun fun). My schedule is somewhat like this... [edit] Bookston called me right as I was typing his name into this update....creepy [/edit]
1/2 Journalism with Eudenbach
2/1 AP Statistics with Bookston
3 AP Computer Science with Morgenbesser (basically an independent study though)
4 AP Psychology with Tobin (yay!)
5/6 Study
6/5 AP Physics with Duranceau
G7 AP Calculus BC Independent Study
Overall I really like my classes, they're interesting and oddly enough I have absolutely no new teachers this year. I already knew all of the teachers and stuff.
Let's see... XC Website is up http://www.arlingtonxc.com, which I finished recently. It actually didn't take too long since it's simple and clean, and I'm working on the lack of content as I make a Flash Photoviewer along with a Java program to generate XML Files for flash (which is basically done, yay!). Considering I barely ran over the summer and missed a week of practice I'm satisfied with my times in XC at the moment. I ran 13:36 for the 2 mile relay and 18:53 for the race against Everett, which sucked because it was in pouring rain >_>.
Moving on to other things, I really like going to places that are sparsely populated such as mountains and oceans and such. It's really quite peaceful and I really think the ocean is mighty beautiful :) After High School I'm thinking of biking somewhere far away, or just biking to see how far I can go.
I'm done for now I suppose, and you can expect a photo update to follow this soon :)
I just remembered this actually, and theres one more thing I wanna put in this update. Tomorrow is the first day of my Go class at my old Chinese school! It should be a rather interesting experiment and I have a pretty good syllabus for at least the first day lined up. It's gonna be interesting though, the age differences in the class are many. The ages of my eleven students are 5, 6, 6, 6, 10, 10,11, 12, 12,15, 15, so managing the class is gonna be pretty goshdarn interesting. I'll update after it tomorrow to let y'all know how it goes :)
-Thomas
PS. I've never written an entry this long before. EVER.