Brandon Notices

Today, we had a fire drill. I had been expecting it all day—Steffi had told me about it this morning. Ms. Thomas also knew about it, and told us at the beginning of AP Chem that we'd be having the fire drill during her class. As the clock ticked closer and closer to 10:15, we grew anxious because whee! the fire alarms would begin going off. I was bracing myself, expecting the loud, ear-piercing wail of the alarm, but when it started, I really didn't think it was very loud.

We all stepped outside; it was pretty cold out. Of course, I was prepared and had my coat on. Several people were excited because it was snowing a tiny bit. A girl standing nearby was trying to catch the snow in her mouth.

After the fire drill, we all went inside, and my class continued working on our assignment. Many of us were distracted, however, by the increase of the rate of falling snow. It wasn't long before it was a lot of snow falling! Ms. Thomas grew increasingly frustrated with the class's distraction.

During lunch, I bought a bag of Baked Cheetos from the vending machines. They're good, but not as good as Baked Doritos. Also during lunch, there were a lot of people standing outside in the snow, because yay, snow.

After lunch was Astronomy, and the class had a hard time concentrating. People asked Mr. Landon if we could study snow, or perhaps go outside and have a field study (perhaps "examine" the sky today).

Sure, Monday was pretty cold. M.J. McDermott promised us snow, so of course, everyone was hyped up about the expected snow day that Tuesday was to bring, right?

No. One person who was not hyped up was me. I didn't want to get my hopes up. It always happens. You stay up all night, hoping it will snow and that school will be cancelled for the day. Then you wake up the next morning, dash to the window, tear through the blinds, and you're Extremely Depressed to find that the ground is completely snowless. Or even worse, when there's like an inch or two on the ground, then you turn on the TV but your school's name doesn't appear on the school closure list. So you drudge along to school, wishing that you'd rather be home eating cinnamon sticks or whatever it is you do on snow days. It's not that I didn't want it to snow—snow is good—it's that I was choosing to not believe the weather forecasts and expect normal weather for today so as to not get my hopes up. I didn't want to get let down by sunny weather.

On Monday, everyone at school was giddy, jumping up and down with excitement in anticipation that school would be closed today. After all, practically every news station was predicting at least three days of snowfall, with an inch or two accumulation Tuesday morning. People were psyched! In ASL, Jasmine kept telling me how excited she was about the snow. When Ms. Hess asked her to close the blinds because the sunlight was in her eyes, Jasmine opened the window to check if the temperature was cold enough to snow. Ms. Hess signed to her that NO, it's not going to snow!

On MySpace, the eagerness for snow was all that people were posting bulletins about. Megan posted a bulletin trying to persuade readers to do a little snow dance, like a rain dance, to encourage the clouds to make snow. She and I exchanged messages about how I was trying not to get excited about the possibility of snow, and she said I needed to be more optimistic. I told her how I felt better off being pessimistic.

So of course, it started snowing last night. I didn't notice until Kevin sent me an instant message about it.

This morning, when I arose, I ran to the window and was disappointed to see that there was no snow on the ground. I suppose it's just as well—last winter, it didn't snow until January 7th. And it was a Friday night, so it's not like there was any chance of school closure anyway.

I guess no matter how hard you try not to hope for anything, you always feel let down.

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.