Brandon Notices

I'm at my aunt's house in Bellingham for the Thanksgiving Weekend!

Yesterday, before I got here, my aunt and a few of my cousins went shopping, because after all, it was Shopping Day. Shopping Day is a pretty "recognized" holiday—the day after Thanksgiving that symbolizes the first day of the Christmas Holiday.

Actually, this year, I've recognized Thanksgiving in a different way than usual. Because people go shopping the day after Thanksgiving more than any other day I now see Thanksgiving as the feast that begins the Christmas shopping season. At least, this is how society seems to see it.

As you probably know by now, turkey contains an amino acid called tryptophan that causes drowsiness in people that eat it. Well, this is perfect for Commercial America because people go to sleep earlier after eating turkey, and wake up bright and early at 4:00 AM like my aunt and cousins did to go shopping. This is why we eat turkey.

I know it's supposed to celebrate pilgrims eating with Native Americans or something like that, but that was like a thousand years ago, and people these days just don't relate to things like that. It seems like people are more enthused about the turkey and the parade and the football games (myself: the turkey).

It's been foggy recently! VERY foggy! Let's see... it started on Thursday or Friday, and it's been foggy ever since then! The Weather Channel says that we have an air stagnation advisory; we're not supposed to burn fires in our fireplace because the fog is clogging up the fireplace and the smoke will have nowhere to go. According to weather.com, we should expect to see fog all through Tuesday.

Fog is eerie. It would have been so cool if it were lingering around during Halloween or something like that. That would have been better.

I saw the new Harry Potter movie today. It was pretty good, but I liked the last one a bit more... I don't know, I guess I just have a thing for enjoying temporal anomalies.

Yesterday, I went to Emily's surprise birthday party. I got there at 5:30, but Emily didn't arrive until about 6:20, and this was unfortunate because I was leaving by 6:30 to go to the school play, Cheaper By the Dozen with Kevin and Stephanie. Emily had time to open the present I had given her before I left. It was a gift card to Joann Craftland.

So we got in line; Stephanie's friend Abby had called her, warning that the seats were filling up fast. The line for the play was long—this was going to be a good play. As we got to the table counter, Mr. Pozzi, the play production coordinator, told Mr. Haase to hold off on selling tickets for a minute while he counted seats. As I stood there, I was afraid I could be the sitcom character who finally gets to the ticket counter only to have the SOLD OUT sign shoved up in his face. He came back and said to only sell 8 tickets left.

So Kevin, Steffi, and I got into the play. Steffi's friends had saved her a seat, but Kevin and I had to sit in chairs set on the ground to the left of the bleachers. Regardless of the sucky seats, the play was good. If anyone, I blame Mr. Haase for selling tickets to just anyone. And the school, for building such a tiny little theater. I've seen bigger.

I am officially dislikeful of Yahoo.

Why is it that whenever I visit one of Yahoo's Geocities sites, it reaches its maximum bandwidth allowance when I'm halfway through viewing one of their sites? It's like, I visit one or two pages, click a link, and suddenly, I can't view any more because I've crippled the site by forcing Yahoo to use too much bandwidth?

I think Yahoo should be less selfish. They already impose annoying ads on their users' webpages. Unfortunately for the poor companies who use that space for ads, I am more annoyed about having to close the ad than interested in seeing their product.

And what is it with AOL? I can't send anybody on AOL an email without the Internet Postmaster sending it right back to me! I think AOL is mean.

Today, I bought Mario Party 7! I've been awaiting this eagerly for months now.

Steffi, Kevin, and I played today. We were already planning on playing at Grand Canal, which is like Venice with rivers flooding the streets. At first, I was stinking, frequently losing coins to my enemies. Also, it didn't help a whole lot that we decided to skip practicing to speed things up (besides, you usually get the hang of a mini-game after the first 10 seconds), but Toad, the computer player, automatically already knew what to do, so he won many of the mini-games.

For the Last Four Turns, Bowser threw Koopa Kid Spaces all over the place. On the last turn, Stephanie landed on one. Koopa Kid evenly distributed everyone's coins. Then I landed on a Blue Space and got three Coins, and Toad landed on a Happening Space. Then I won the mini-game. Well, it turned out that I won the game with 4 Stars, 28 Coins, and everyone else tied with 1 Star, 15 Coins. What a silly ending. I've never seen a three-way tie for second.

I have, however, won by a single coin before. There's no greater feeling.

In yesterday's blog, I said that the picture of Velma searching for her glasses was the coolest thing in the school.

I apologize. It was a lie. This is still the coolest thing in the school:



Okay. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I have some more pictures to show you! This afternoon during lunch, I was in the Great Hall, so I decided to take pictures of each class's big poster hanging from the ceiling.

Once again, I apologize. This time, I'm apologizing for the blurriness of pictures again. People notice when you fill the room with a flash. They look over. Several people might ask, "Why are you taking pictures of the posters?" It's a little embarrassing to say, "It's for my blog."



Here's my class's poster, the Ninja Turtles one. It's pretty cool, ain't it? The picture of the maverick, our school mascot, on the manhole cover is an interesting choice. After looking at the poster for a minute, I'm afraid I'm rather concerned for poor Donatello's health. His left arm is so skinny near the wrist! Why, his bo staff is just as thick, if not thicker!



This is the freshmen's poster. I forget what that big poofy monster is called, but he looks like that guy from the car tires commercials, so I'll call him Michelin. By the way, the people at the bottom of the picture above aren't drawings of people running away from Michelin. They're people on the stage.



Here's the sophomores' poster, starring Mario & Friends! This time, they remembered to put the M on his cap! If you're wondering what Mario's holding, I have to admit that I was wondering the same thing. I asked Nick, and he told me that he's holding some goat cheese. You see, Goat Cheese is the class name of the sophomores.

Please don't ask me why Peach doesn't have any legs. I like the Paratroopa in the corner. The messy blue writing under the word "Super" says "Sophomores". I had to ask my sister about that one.



By far my most beloved of all the posters, the juniors' Scooby-Doo poster is perfect in almost every way. I noticed a few flaws: Shaggy doesn't have the fuzz on his face, and Velma's arm looks like a drumstick. I didn't notice the background on this poster when I took this picture, but it's by far the best background on any of the four posters.

After looking at the posters, I realized that I hadn't been to the freshmen's hallway. So I ran over there as fast as my fat little legs could carry me. I was mildly impressed.



At first, I thought it was a little lacking, but then I thought back to what our hallway looks like, and I realized this: Our senior hallway looks like crap! The freshmen's hallway is bright blue, and I like the city lights touch. There are little ghosts hanging from the ceiling that I didn't immediately notice. They're cool.



Fingerpainting? Geez, freshmen, grow up.

On my way back to class, I noticed what had happened to the directional posters located in the school:



Looks like we have some class competition! This sign points to where the E200's are. Some people have changed the 200 into 2006 or 2008 or whatever. I don't know, I thought this was at least a little interesting. Other directional posters have similar drawings on them. I like the poster that has the arrow switched around, pointing the wrong way. That made me chuckle.

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!