Brandon Notices

Well, today, I worked at my dad's carpet store to hand out candy for the 22nd Annual Halloween Trick or Treat Thing.

Mostly, what I did was sit there, wait for kids to come in with their parents, and give them candy. I had a nice stack of carpet samples to sit on. It was surprising to me how many people came in, sniffed the air, and said, "Wow, it smells like carpet in here!" People, it is a carpet store! Some people never learn.

There was one little boy in glasses who kept asking me questions. The conversation went like this:
"You sell carpet?"
"No, but my dad does."
"Where is he?"
"He's that way," I gestured towards him. "He's working."
"What's your name?"
"Brandon."
"Do you sell carpet?"
"No, but my dad does."
His dad apologized to me, and pulled him out of the store.

Well, it was pretty fun, I guess, if not boring and frustrating.

It was another boring day in Mrs. Hudemann's English class. Fortunately, it was a Friday, so the classes would not be quite as long as usual. We were discussing what the ten most important parts of Act 3 of The Crucible were, when, suddenly, an ear-piercing, shrieky noise pierced our ears.

Needless to say, it startled me, but it didn't scare me like it did Mrs. Hudemann. She jumped up, her mouth gaping wide open, her hands raised up to her chest. "What is that?" she asked, as if she had never heard a fire alarm before. Indeed, it was the fire alarm. The bright white light strobed in infrequent intervals. The ear-piercing noise continued to make noise.

We walked out of the classroom, in the F200's, and walked down the stairs into the grassy thing behind the school. It was cold. Some boy in some blue shirt said stuff not important to the story. There were some seagulls on the field, I noticed, along with a few crows. Some guy whose name I don't remember told me that there was a fire in the hallways. Suddenly, I heard sirens. Wee-woo-wee-woo.

We (we, meaning the whole student body and staff) were directed to the gymnasium to await the fire. Indeed, there really was a fire. It wasn't just a fire drill, like I assumed. I found Stephanie's friend standing in the gym. She really didn't have much to say. Neither did Aaron, when I found him. He said this was all really fascinating, though. Then I found Bryan and sat down next to him.

Mr. Wallace couldn't get everybody's attention, even with a microphone. He told us that there was a fire somewhere in the building, and that "the fire department is taking care of it." Then the student body applauded and cheered.

Then Mr. Hoffman, the principal, gave us a little more information on the fire. "It was a minor fire. All that caught fire was some paper—" he got cut off by the student body's cheering. I wonder what exactly they were cheering, there. Paper?

We got sent back to first period. Back to English. The morning schedule was compressed. Everything after lunch time was normal.

The fire was on the bulletin board right outside the F100's. For some reason, even those who knew where it was had soooo much trouble explaining where it was. It was "on the bulletin board outside the F100's." Easy-peasy.

In Walking, on Tuesday, we had to do some dumb tests for some idiotic standardized fitness assessment thing where no matter how hard you try, you always get the Poor rating. Ah well. We did the long jump. I did quite well at that. We also did some sit-and-reach thing and some body fat and blood pressure things. I think I'll need to have my blood pressure rechecked at a pharmacy or something. I hope Mrs. Oard's reading was wrong. She said a noisy gym really wasn't a very good place to take such a reading. After that, we did some exhausting relay things. Weird sideways jumping stuff I'm not used to.

This is weird. I think Calculus is my favorite class now. Strange. People usually say that math is their least-favorite class. Hmmm. I bet it's the people in the class. My classmates are fun, and the teacher's pretty cool too. Yesterday, on Wednesday, Mr. Worster got the new projector system that every classroom will have by the end of the year. It's practically a camera that you aim down at paper, or a book, or something. It's hooked up to a projector that projects the camera's image onto the overhead screen. Neat! I told Mr. Worster that it can also be used as a camera; point it at people. So he did. He pointed it at the class. That image was projected onto the screen. Then he pointed it at Audrey's face, and zoomed it so that her face filled the screen. She had fun with that, sticking her tongue out, making faces. We did this stuff for fifteen to twenty minutes.

After Mr. Worster's lecture (about infinity and limits and stuff), he was walking around to see if anyone needed help with the homework. He walked behind me, and I noticed he was reading the funny document I had in the front of my binder. The document contains stupid answers contestants gave on Family Feud. He kept reading them quietly to himself, then cracking up and laughing at the dumb answer. For example, "Name something you find in a bird cage. A hamster." Or "A man's name beginning with K. Kentucky Fried Chicken." Or "The most lovable breed of dog. Kitten." There's three examples. Mr. Worster thought it was so funny that he asked if he could borrow the paper. He took it to the front of the class, and read practically the whole thing to the class! Wooo! I change this document on the front of my binder weekly, so I don't think this will be the only time this happens.

I haven't mentioned this yet, but all Wednesday and today, my legs have been VERY sore. Like the "can't walk without limping and moaning" soreness. I couldn't get up from my seat without screaming "OW OW DARN CRUD!" Actually, I'm kidding. I mean, they really are very sore, but I didn't scream when getting up. It does hurt a lot, though. Still does. I'd bet my entire stash of cigarettes that it's P.E.'s fault. Dumb sideways high jump relays. Dumb legs. Stop hurting. It's the calves, and the left ... hamstring, is it? I think it's the hamstring. On the inside side.

And that's what made P.E. today such a pain. Of course, we had more of those dumb test things to do. Today was the high-jump, sit-ups, push-ups, and squats. Squats are when you sit down, then stand up. Sit stand sit stand. Repeatedly. For a minute. I'm quite good at that, even with pain-legs. It's 86 or something. Maybe 88? We also had the dreaded 12-minute run. I only dreaded it because of my stupid hurting legs. When I was jogging the legs stiffed up like boards. They didn't want to run. So I only ran 1800 meters in the 12 minutes. Tiffany and Barbie did better than me. Stupid leg. I HATE YOU.

Granny and gramps want to take Stephanie and me to dinner place tonight. THE ROCK PIZZA CAFE. I hope it tastes better than it sounds. Rock pizza? Seriously.

Oh, and I don't smoke. Don't have cigarettes.

Great. Now my back hurts. And my butt will hurt because of those uncomfortable driving school desk chair hard crap metal seats. Great. What a painful life.

Today, before Calculus, I was bored. I noticed a yardstick on the whiteboard tray that the teacher uses to draw straight lines and junk. Well, I decided to lean the yardstick against the middle of the board with the bottom resting on the tray. Then I used a blue whiteboard marker to write "Vertical Ruler" and an arrow pointing to the ruler. Remember, I was bored. Calculus is pretty much the only class where I'll write on the board.

Class hadn't started yet; Mr. Worster hadn't entered yet. Aaron thought the Vertical Ruler thing was pretty funny. Others said it was "interesting." Nobody said anything negative about it. It looked like one guy in the classroom was going to erase the writing, but he didn't.

Mr. Worster came to class on time, like usual. He noticed the Vertical Ruler, and thought it was pretty interesting. I don't think he thought I made the Vertical Ruler at that time. He said, "I'm not used to seeing rulers like this," or something. I said, "Well, we're just so accustomed to seeing them rest horizontally—I thought I'd switch things up a little bit." Then he said, "Oh, I should have known you would do something like this."

I thought he was going to take down the Vertical Ruler, and erase the text pointing to it. He said it was a little uncomfortable working around the Vertical Ruler, and I told him that he could take it down, or perhaps move it to the other whiteboard on the other wall, but he said he wanted to leave it up just to show that he could do it.

He left it up during the entire lecture. He even said it was a little convenient because it divided the board into two sections, which was useful for the lecture he was giving (about using algebra to find limits). Audrey complained at one point that it was a little annoying to have the Vertical Ruler up, and Mr. Worster said he kinda liked it. But, just to be fair, he had the class vote on it. Audrey and two others wanted to take it down, but four people wanted to keep it up. I didn't vote. I don't remember if Mr. Worster voted or not. So the Vertical Ruler stayed up.

It stayed up for perhaps an hour and 20 minutes—throughout Worster's entire lecture. I then decided to move it to the other whiteboard. I made sure not to accidentally make it horizontal on the way. Mr. Worster switched the arrow I drew on the board to point to the new location of the Vertical Ruler. Then he said he supposed you could go the other way to get to it, but I said that would be the long way. So he redrew the original arrow, and wrote "Long Way" under it. Then he wrote "Short Cut" under his new, correct arrow.

About five minutes later, without irritation or any warning at all, the Vertical Ruler fell. It surprised me—the whiteboard it was on was right behind me, and the sound of the Vertical Ruler hitting the whiteboard tray was quite loud. So yeah. That was the end of the Vertical Ruler. Thanks for reading all this.

I stayed home sick today. I think I caught whatever it was Stephanie was complaining about.

I learn that my computer can recognize the voice. You know voice recognition? It's pretty cool. They can recognize almost anything I say. It's not perfect, though. I just need to train it a little bit more. I do that by reading paragraphs it gives me, then it figures out my speech patterns from that. It's really neat. I'm using it to write this web log right now.

Sometimes, I can just hum into the microphone, and it'll translate what I hum into nonsensical text. For example, "moon alone than a gunman that the noon and are met and never a good climber a clay clay and render an FBI Mayo."

Today, I went to Toys "R" Us for a Pokémon-related event.

Before I left, I was afraid that there would only be little kids who didn't know how to battle or do anything. I was also afraid that there would be nobody else there to battle.

So we got there at 9:30. The first 50 people to get there got a free Pokémon poster! There were only six people there. I got four posters!

Mostly, what we did was trade and battle. Some of the others also played a demo of the new trading card game, but I wasn't very interested. I never was interested in the card game.

I was more interested in trading than battling. I traded with Ace, Sparky, Lee, Brisa, Dayne, and Jeremy. (I'm certain that many of those names are not real.) I talked to Ace the most. He traded me a Gastly to keep! Jeremy was the Toys "R" Us employee who had a Game Boy that he used to trade Pokémon to us. We were all expecting a rare Pokémon like Jirachi or Celebi, but all I got from him was a Haunter (which immediately evolved into a Gengar).

Dayne was the only adult there (besides Jeremy, but it was his job to be there), and Brisa was the only girl there who had a game. Ace's sister Kaylee was there too, but she didn't have the game. She played an emulation on her computer. Sparky was Ace's friend, and he was a bit bizarre. Lee was very slow at making decisions at trading.

Something worth noting (that most of the readers here won't care about anyway) is that Ace helped me get a Ditto onto my Ruby game. Now I can breed my male Sceptile and get baby Treecko! "It doesn't matter that he's male anymore...Ditto's available for prostitution!" is a sentence that came up today.

I battled Ace twice, but he pretty much only used legendary Pokémon, and they're really hard to beat, so I lost both battles. Oh well. He had a Jirachi and a Deoxys! I want those! He wouldn't trade them.

So it was a pretty neat day. The event "officially" ended at 11:30, but most of us stayed until about 12:15.

Yesterday, Stephanie joined my walking class. You see, her schedule got all screwed up and stuff, so now she has the same walking class as I do. So now the class has at least 44 students. Yikes. That's so many people that they technically split the class into halves. Mr. Wirtz keeps the first half of the alphabet, and Mrs. Oard joined us, and she has the second half of the alphabet. Unfortunately, they used the last names, so Stephanie's in my half of the class. Regardless, the two halves of the classes will go to the same places at the same time—we'll walk together. I wish I were in Mrs. Oard's group. She's a nice ol' lady. If the same could be said for Mr. Wirtz, it would be a very awkward statement, and I still wouldn't choose to be in his class anyway.

Today was an assembly to kick off Homecoming. Stephanie told me beforehand that she was going to be in it. There was this one part when the horse mascot came running into the gym, and I saw a bunch of Stephanie-hair-colored hair sticking out the back of the head of the costume. I immediately thought "Stephanie's hair" and realized that Stephanie was in the costume. I had doubts when I saw that the person inside the costume was too short for it—the fabric on the legs was crumpled together because it was too long. Stephanie always has huge 18-inch heels or something....... anyhoo, she confirmed to me on the bus that it was in fact her who was in the horse costume. Hmmm.

Yesterday was the first day of school. I was disappointed that not many of my friends were in any of my classes or lunches or anything.

Stephanie goes to my school now. I sometimes see her before third period. It's weird that she goes to my school. It's annoying riding the bus with her. Apparently, Cory is in the same Chemistry class as Stephanie.

In American Sign Language (ASL), the teacher, Ms. Brinkley, is deaf, so we have an interpreter in the class, at least for a little while. She taught us a game called the Elephant Game. Yesterday, I got to be the pointer! Everybody said I was tricky! And I was! I was trying to be tricky! And today, I won the game!

Tomorrow, Stephanie's inviting seven people over to watch movies. Her party is lasting for nine hours. I think Stephanie's laughter meter will increase during those nine hours, and so will her voice-coarseness meter.