Snow

All of this winter, I have taken for granted that it never snowed. It was like a continuous fall with a few days that I actually classified as "winter." And suddenly, it seems that winter is finally happening. And I don't like it. The first time I really started disliking this late winter was Saturday, when the Bottle Rocket launch was canceled because of rain. I know it's not snow, but it seems related because now it is snowing full force, and has been all night. Not to mention, the weather says there will likely be snow on Thursday and Friday, and possibly even more next weekend. Finally we have a break in school, and instead of sitting in the sunlight, the fun is going to be making snowmen. I am really ready for summer. Anyway, it was a pretty good week besides the sudden precipitation. Things were pretty packed, as usual. Having no breaks really seems to let the homework pile up. And I have an hour of piano practice every day, which obviously takes time as well. I am also really putting in an effort to finish "A Tale of Two Cities," which is not exactly living up to my expectations, because it is essentially functioning the same as "Rocket Boys" was. Like a readers block (see previous blog post). And trust me, any book that can be described that way, is a book I would typically put down, but I can't put down "A Tale of Two Cities" without failing Honors English. I had multiple other Science Olympiad events this week besides Bottle Rockets, which was canceled, including Optics, Junkyard Challenge, Towers. Junkyard Challenge this week was fun, and we worked on our "elevated slope" project. We built a paper pipe suspended by a string, where a ball could roll. It seemed like it would work really well, and it was pretty long, but we built the pipe really badly, and the balls kept getting stuck part way down the pipe. We now have a better idea, which uses the same basic idea, except it is more efficient. It uses gallon size bags for a pipe. Anyway, hopefully we can get it good enough for the state competition in a little more than a month. In Towers, I brought my nearly complete Tower, to show it to the rest of the group, but it turned out it needed a wider top, so I will have to change or rebuild it. But it really did look pretty nice. It is made of balsa, and it is 50 cm. tall. So far it weighs about 5 grams, which is pretty good. If it held all the weight, it would probably set a new record for towers that we have built so far. It is amazing to think that a 5 gram tower could hold 15 kg. But you get to find out cool stuff like this everyday with Science Olympiad. We also had an Algebra II test this week. I think I did well, but I don't know how I did yet. I hope that the snow stops soon. I am getting seriously excited for the summer.