Brandon Notices

Yessirree, it's Homecoming Week at school! The school's theme this year is Heroes and Villains, and each class has its own theme. The hallways have meticulously been decorated by the ASB to reflect each class's theme. My class's theme this year is Ninja Turtles, and coincidentally, the hallway where I hang out before school is the seniors' Ninja Turtles decorated area. I brought my digital camera to take pictures!



I profusely apologize for the extreme blurriness of this picture. It's a little embarrassing and awkward to use a flash because everyone looks over at you to see what's going on. Besides, if I had used the flash, you wouldn't be able to see the awesome green glow. They had set up overhead projectors with green butcher paper over them to cause the entire hallway to glow green! This did not last very long at all.

The place was supposed to be decorated like the sewers, but the idea was executed poorly. Solid-colored brown butcher paper was tacked onto the walls with graffiti spray-painted on the walls.



At first, it wasn't apparent to me why 06 was scratched out by Michaelangelo (because we're the class of '06) until it hit me that Oh Six is the freshmen name. Oh, I knew this would come back to bite us in the butt. Oh, another thing, the Turtles wouldn't spray paint graffiti all over the place, especially after all those PSAs they did back in the '90s.



The most awesome thing in the hallway was the Senior Pizza. Each of us got our own pepperoni! The names are handwritten—that must have taken a lot of work. Can you find my name?



There were several "questionable" decorations in the hallway, as well. For instance, look at the above picture. Can you figure out what that is? It's on the floor across the entire hallway. It took me a long time to realize what it is. It's supposed to be murky brown sewer water running down through the middle of the sewer. This brown paper was kicked up off of the floor by passing students by the end of 1st period.



Another decoration that wasn't instantly clear as to its purpose. It's supposed to be a pipe running through the sewer. I think it would probably have been better if the pipe had reached the ceiling. A pipe like this would spew sewer water all over the floor and you'd step in it.

The juniors' class theme is Scooby-Doo. Their names are on little tombstones stapled to the wall.



They made a really nice poster of the Scooby-Doo gang... we seniors didn't get any nice original artwork or paintings in our hallway. The poster is nice and colorful—don't ask me why Daphne or Fred have green mouths. Maybe they ate apple-flavored Tootsie Pops.



This is currently the coolest thing in the school, and I hope it never comes down. Velma dropped her glasses! She'll be crawling around for those glasses all week long!



Nice rendition of a Mario platform game for the sophomores. Their theme, of course, is "Mario & Friends". It's weird, I've never ever heard the game or characters referred to as "Mario & Friends", but I suppose it works. I don't understand the huge significance of the yellow ! switches in the poster above, but the vine was an excellent touch. It was a great addition.



This painting of Mario makes me giggly. He looks soooo excited! One extreme error is that Mario's mustache is supposed to be black, but it's not that bad. Even worse, however, is that MARIO'S HAT DOESN'T HAVE AN M ON IT. Bummer.

I haven't gotten around to seeing the freshmen's Ghostbusters decorations (I never go over to that hallway), but I'll go check them out tomorrow morning. If it's impressive at all, I might display pictures on here.

Short but big thunderstorm today. The rain was falling really really hard—the Weather Channel's Doppler radar had this huge red blob headed across Lynnwood. The thunder was very loud, and my poor kitty cat was horrified. He was crouching on the ground, and I picked him up, and he was so tense! Poor kitty.

So much weather stuff going on. Weather's getting a bad rep. Let's see... Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, and now Otis is planning on striking Arizona. An article on James' blog had me thinking about how everybody's gotten a turn with bad weather, and it should be our turn next. Earthquakes make me nauseous. I don't know, I guess all disasters are bad. I feel kinda bad for the people living in my SimCities. There were times when numerous volcanoes would rise from the earth, several UFOs would invade the city, lightning would strike five times per second all over the place, and fire would just spread from out of nowhere. Earthquakes would roar five times a minute, and four or five tornadoes would tear up the city at a time. The population would drop to zero, and every building not destroyed in the disaster would get abandoned. What a rough day for my Sims.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was, once again, preempted for a wonderfully boring baseball game. This is the second time in this season's run that this has happend, and we're only four episodes into it. At this rate, I'll have no idea what's happening half the time.

Ah, that reminds me. Our class's theme for homecoming at Meadowdale High School this year is Ninja Turtles. How fun! The freshmen have Ghostbusters, the sophomores have Super Mario, and the juniors got stuck with Scooby-Doo. During the assembly, the girl demonstrating what to wear during class theme day was dressed up as a turtle, spinning a nunchuck above this head; this surprised a lot of people. Two girls sitting behind me yanked out their Student Handbooks and pointed out to everyone sitting around that it distinctly says no "nun-chu-ka sticks." So the ASB's example might inadvertantly lead seniors to bring weapons to school. Don't let some guy poke your eye with a sai!

Every year, the seniors at my school get to choose the name for the incoming freshmen. Well, this year, it was finally our turn to nominate and vote on names for the freshmen!

I hope that "O Six" or "'06" doesn't win. That would be annoying and besides, it's a weak name. Not very clever at all. And they're the class of '09, anyway. We're Oh Six—it's what we yell at assemblies! If this wins, then once we're off to college, they'll be stuck with this weird number that doesn't relate to anyone. I also hope that the class isn't named the "Heinemans" or the "Goldburgs" (both named after students at school) because I've never heard of those people anyway and what honor do they deserve??!?

There was one name on the ballot which I thought would be pretty funny to give to the freshmen. I don't remember it, but I'll try to write it. "Meegle Oogle Boogle Roogle Leegle Teegle". Ah well, it was something like that. It would be so great for them to have to remember their class name, and for the administrators to say "Would the 'Roogie Noogle Poogle Foogle Boogie Woogie' class please head to the auditorium?"

My senior class name is the "Squirts". The juniors are the "Squealers", and the sophomores are "Goat Cheese". Oh, you know what? Another name nominated for the freshmen was "Goat Cheese II". There's no merit in the name and I certainly hope it doesn't win.

I jumped off of the treadmill yesterday and ran into the dining room, and somehow accidentally slammed my right knee into the edge of the surface of the table. So, if you noticed me limping around school today, it's because my knee hurts. I don't think it's broken; indeed, I think it's feeling much better now. Who knows, perhaps it'll be fully healed by tomorrow.

So, I've been watching The Weather Channel a bit recently. Looks like our decent weather is about to take a turn for the worse. The forecast predicts rain every day for the next week. That stinks. Hopefully, those more distant days' predictions are less accurate, but I could see in the clouds today that they're ready to rain all over us.

My next-door neighbors' black lab puppy, Mandy, has been getting into so much mischief lately! For some reason, her leash always gets let go, or she jumps over her little kennel, and runs into Harold's yard, which is on the other side of my house. Harold hates dogs in his yard, and I sometimes hear him yelling "GO! SHOO! GO, DOG!" through my bedroom window, even when it's shut. I'm fine with Mandy in our yard as long as she doesn't poop in our grass like all the neighbor dogs did all the time years ago.

Jesse, the youngest child, had Mandy on a leash, and was trying to teach her to "sit" and "come" when I walked out to get the mail, but Mandy wasn't listening to him. I had remembered something I had recently read, which said that unlike humans, who think of everybody as equals, dogs think of themselves in two categories: "leader" and "follower". I told Jesse that if he doesn't make Mandy think he's the leader, she won't obey him, and will instead think that she's the boss of him!

So I was at the blood center today, signing one of the donors up for her next appointment, when she said, "Uh oh." I looked up to see that her bandage was leaking. Blood was dripping onto the counter and floor. In these cases, I'm not supposed to touch the blood; rather, I'm supposed to call a technician over. So Lisa told the donor to go lie back down so she and Wendy could put another bandage on her, then Lisa cleaned up the mess... I thought you might like to know what goes on at the blood center.

I tried cream soda for the first time today after buying it from Safeway. They're currently remodeling, moving all their merchandise and stuff. Mom's annoyed, saying that you shouldn't fix something if it isn't broken, but I think it'll work out to be okay. The produce department is now apparently in the middle of the store... I'm a little peeved that the pop and chips are currently on opposite ends of the store, but I hope they'll move them closer together. Hurry and go to the store now, go as far to the right of the store as possible. It's totally empty! Check it out!

Also, in case you haven't noticed, a Spirit Halloween store has opened next to the mall, not far from Red Robin. I went in to see if they had any Halloween music CDs, and I was really disappointed to discover that the store this year sucks compared to last year. Last year, there was a dark, moody atmosphere, Halloween music was playing, and you could hear all kinds of haunted sounds. This year, in the smaller store, there are mostly costumes (instead of decorations), and they hang from undecorated pegboard. Maybe they plan on furthering their decorations or selection as we get closer to Halloween, but I doubt it.

My sister went to music camp today, and my mom went with her, so they aren't here. Before they left, Mom gave me a coupon for Chevy's, and told me that Dad and I could go to Chevy's for dinner. "Okay, probably." Then, a few hours later, my cousin Kevin IM'd me and said that he wanted to treat Dad and me to dinner, coincidentally at Chevy's. I told him he could use our coupon, and so we went to Chevy's tonight.

Now, this wasn't any ordinary coupon. This was a Mexican Poker coupon. The idea was that the coupon came with two tiny pictures of cards. We could take these cards to Chevy's, and compare them with three other cards posted there to make up our poker hand. Our hand determined the type of discount we would get.

The cards we had were the six of diamonds and the ace of hearts. Kevin pointed out to me before we left that we already automatically had the Ace High, so we knew we couldn't lose. Then we arrived at Chevy's and eagerly ran to the poster to see what the other three cards of the hand were. And one of the other cards was an ace! This means that everybody won at least the Ace High. But we had a Pair. That was worth $5 off!

I ordered a steak quesadilla, but they brought so many chips with so much salsa before my quesadilla arrived that I got full mostly on delicious chips and couldn't finish my quesadilla. Then, after the meal, the waiter seemed disappointed that we didn't want dessert. If they didn't fill us on chips, maybe we'd order dessert.

I guess the moral of the story is this: You can't eat both chips and dessert.

Today, Kevin and I saw The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We went to the new Lowe's theater next to Alderwood Mall. It's a neat story, if I may say so myself (which I may). Despite the exhaustingly unnecessary mountain of stairs that you have to walk up to enter the theater (or you could take the escalator), it's a nice theater. Big! After getting my ticket, and waiting for Kevin to get his, we went to Theater Nine. Stadium seating! It's nice because (a) you don't have to worry about not seeing over people's heads, and (b) you're more level with the screen, reducing cranenecking.

The movie itself was pretty good. I was expecting that it would be annoying to watch because the original story would seem to be pretty hard to translate into a Hollywood video, but they did it pretty well. While I was pretty upset about Zaphod's second head, there were several points in the movie that were really funny.

One hilarious moment in the movie is when the camera zooms out from the earth just prior to its destruction. It's funny, but describing it would ruin it if anyone reading this were to see the movie, so I'll just say "don't walk away while the earth is blowing up."

I liked the So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish song so much (and several other songs) that I had to buy the soundtrack at Fred Meyer. So that's interesting.

When the credits started, most of the audience left, but Kevin, several other people, and I stayed, and it's a good thing we did, because there was the Careless Talk animated guide entry and although it wasn't nearly as funny as the animation in the BBC mini-series, it was worth seeing.

On our way out, the ushers were handing out Juicy Fruit to those of us who had stayed. Whoopie yay! I will keep it to remind myself of today (along with my ticket stub...I usually don't throw those away).

For these last two weeks, the freshmen and sophomores have been taking standardized tests during the first class of the day. For the rest of us, that means that we've got blocks of classes where most of the class is sometimes missing.

Last Tuesday, most of the class in Chemistry was taking the test, and people were testing in our chemistry classroom, so we juniors and seniors went to a different classroom where we had practically two hours of free time. I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy during most of those two hours.

Last Wednesday, Ms. Hudemann was proctoring the testing, so we had to move to a different classroom and Mr. Cook was supposed to be subbing for us, but the bell had rung and he wasn't showing up. Many people in the class kept saying that we all should leave, but nobody was doing anything. Eventually, a few people left, and one person apparently went to tell Mr. Hoffman, the Principal, that we had no teacher, so then Mr. Cook came and my group worked.

Last Thursday, we had two hours of History. Sigh. A pretty normal class since it's a junior class and nobody was testing, except it was two hours long. And last Friday, two hours of ASL. Ms. Brinkley didn't have anything planned, so we did nothing. I learned how to play a card game called 13 that didn't seem to make any sense at all.

Oh, and last Friday, it was remarkably hot in Mr. Worster's classroom, and somebody asked Worster if we could go outside and do our work there. Yoon wanted a place with shade, though, so Mr. Worster sent Rachel and me to go scout out a nice place with shade. Unfortunately, as it was just around noon, there weren't really any shadows around, so we sat on the concrete steps on the hill and I got a sunburn.

Mr. Worster and I were talking about Kansas or something and I brought up the Topikachu (Topeka was the site for a big Pokémon event, Topeka + Pikachu) thing and then we started talking about Pokémon, and how his son wanted cards, so he had asked his students to donate Pokémon cards and he got a bunch and yadda yadda. My point is that he got me playing Pokémon again and I beat Pokémon FireRed and I had already beaten Pokémon Ruby so I merged my two Pokémon teams together to create one really diverse team!

On Monday, in Calculus class, Mr. Worster thought our brains would get fried doing math homework for two hours straight or something, so we watched a movie called Stand and Deliver. It was a good movie.

Today, we had two hours of Creative Writing class, and it was a good thing we had the extra amount of time because Ms. Shaw wanted to keep watching Good Morning America because Bruce Springsteen was going to be on and she wanted to see him, but after a while, she decided to start teaching once she realized how much time she was wasting.