Towers and Rockets

It has been a good week. And the series of good events essentially started with an almost perfect score on my Algebra II math test, that bumped my grade up to an A. This was really great following my B in Algebra II, which I received first term. Now I have got all of my grades up to A's besides an A- in geography and a B in english. I am trying to get those ones up now, so that basically spells out memorizing lots of Shakespeare. Anyway, early this week I finished building my third Science Olympiad tower. It was made of balsa wood, and 50 cm high. It took me the entire day off to build it, but it was worth seeing it completed. It was definitely the best built of all of my towers so far, but it was still far from perfect. On Wednesday, I tested the tower after one of my other Science Olympiad events, Write it Do it. It weighed a total of 7.25 grams, which, if you don't  know metrics very well, is really light. It broke after holding about 9 kilograms, for a score of 11.2. That is not the best, but I think it is the best tower that we have made so far. Later this week, after school was finished for the weekend (which was quite a relief because it was a very full week of school,) I spent Friday finishing up my homework (primarily Algebra II) and reading "A Tale of Two Cities." No matter how much anyone loves that book, everyone has to admit it is long. Really long. Especially when it takes forever to read one page, just because you're trying to understand it. On Saturday, I finally got a chance to launch the bottle rocket that I got rained out of testing last week. It was taller than my previous best rocket, with a yellow nose cone and a blue easter egg on the top. The goal was to get it to stay up as long as possible. Though it had been snowing all day, we still decided to launch because the regional competition is next week. Luckily, it stopped snowing just before we were going to launch, but it was a bit windy, and it felt like it was snowing because of all of the snow being blown out of the trees. I launched the rocket, and it did just what it should. Going up high, then drifting down to the ground slowly. Everyone was excitedly watching the timers as the rocket fell . . . and landed in a tree. It had fallen for about 20 seconds, and probably would have been more, had it not landed in the tall tree. We were able to shake the rocket out of the tree, and after we got the rocket, I was actually thankful for the tree. It had kept the rocket virtually untouched by the snow that might have ruined. It had lived to see another launch. That was one of the best parts of the week. Anyway, it was a great week, but there is plenty more to prepare for the Science Olympiad Regional Competition next week.