Mid-Winter Break

Wow. I haven't posted on my blog in a long time. I've been pretty busy since school started. I've had lots of homework and I've been doing lots of sports. Indoor soccer is almost over (I have to get up at 5:00 tomorrow for the last game) and I'm just starting school soccer and baseball. I've been working on juggling a lot recently too. I'm getting really good at juggling 5 bean bags. I think I'm going to post a video of it soon on youtube.

A few weeks ago was mid-winter break and I went skiing at Whistler in Canada. There was great snow and I had a blast. My friend Mat also happened to be there, so we skied together a couple days. When I got back from skiing I left on a bus to go to Moscow, Idaho with the Eckstein Sr. Jazz Band for a jazz competition. It was really fun and the bus ride was the best part. We watched movies and I played DS with all the other people who had them on the bus. We all played Mario Kart (I kicked everyone’s butt). We stayed in a hotel for a couple nights and in the day we went to see different jazz band and we played at different places. We won in everything we entered in. We won for the normal jazz band, the combo, and vocal jazz. It was awesome. (I found out later that our bus driver won $400 because he bet on us with the bus drivers for the other schools) The whole trip was really fun and we're going on another one to Reno after spring break.

Thanksgiving

For thanksgiving my brother Mike came from California to visit. We ate dinner with him, my other brother, my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin. It was really good. There was stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and turkey. For my brothers and I, who are vegetarians, we had this fake meat loaf, which was really good.

Mike stayed for a week and we had lots of fun. Our whole family went on a hike one day to at Rattlesnake Ridge. We also played board games a lot at night. It was my mom’s birthday the day before thanksgiving and we went out to dinner then and had yummy German Chocolate cake later. We watched the movie Wordplay, which is about crossword puzzles and that inspired my brothers and I to make a crossword puzzle for our mom’s birthday. It was actually pretty hard to make one that only had a few black spots and not one that has barely any letter connecting.

Mike left early Saturday and he left me his nice, expensive camera for filming movies. I'm almost done editing a movie that I’ve been working on with some friends and maybe I’ll put that up here soon. After I finish that, I'm going to start on another movie and I'll use my brother’s good camera. It’s to be a prequel to his Zack Jackson movies he made a few years ago.

School

I've been pretty busy lately and haven’t posted anything for a while. School started a while ago and so far it's going pretty well. I like all my teachers for the first year at Eckstein. I have a lot of homework but not too much to handle (like last year, ugg Ms. Moxley). All my teachers are nice and understanding. I'm learning a lot too. In World Geography, (I have Mr. Kenyon) we just finished learning all about the countries of South Asia. Now we are moving on to the Middle East. In Language Arts, (I have Ms. Tucker) we are reading and writing suspense stories. We also do vocabulary every week, and have tests at the end. Ms. Tucker is kind of old, but is really cool. She gives out food a lot and offers tons of extra credit, which makes it a very easy class (I have over 100%). Although it is very easy to get an A, I'm still learning. Ms. Tucker is a professional writing and has written many books. She also says she's been a writing specialist all over the country. I have a really nice Spanish teacher (Ms. Stevenson) and math teacher (Mr. Howell) too. I also have a great band teacher (Mr. E.).

I've been very busy with homework, soccer, saxophone, and lots of other stuff. I'm learning how to program in Xcode with Cocoa. My brother's friend Drew Hamlin is teaching me. It's really fun. I've also been working on a pirate movie with some of my friends. I'm almost done editing and it's really cool. It will probably be done sometime this week and we get to show it in our World Geography class. I'm going to go because I should probably be working on it right now. That and homework. I haven’t stared yet because I’ve been playing my new DS game, Brain Age, that I just got today. It’s really fun. It says my brain is 73 years old though.

Visiting My Brother in California

I just got back a couple nights ago from a trip to Palo Alto to visit my brother Mike. I got there Friday night and stayed with him in his apartment for a week. A couple days we went to Apple where he works, and ate lunch. He was taking some days off work but there were a few meetings he had to go to. When he went to the meetings, one of his friends, Drew, who is interning at Apple this summer, helped me learn how to program in Xcode. I'm already pretty good at Quartz Composer and Logo so some of the skills from those helped me understand Xcode. It was a little hard and confusing at first but now I’m getting the hang of it and its really fun.

On Monday we went to an Oakland A's baseball game and that was fun. Oakland won 7-0 and there were like 3 or 4 homeruns. There were a few people from Mike's team there, but they weren't sitting with us. We walked around and saw them all though.

On Wednesday we took the train to San Francisco. We walked around and looked at the Apple store there. It's got two stories and a glass staircase going up. We also went to go on a tour of Alcatraz but that was booked. Instead we went on a boat that went around Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge. That was cool to see Alcatraz up close. It would have been cool to actually see in Alcatraz but what we did was cool too. We took the trolley back up into town and saw Accepted at a movie theater. It was about some kids who didn't get accepted into any colleges so they had to make their own college. We both liked it and it was really funny. Afterwards we ate and went to take the train back. We missed the train so we went to a doughnut shop and a music store while we waited for the next train to come.


The next day, after leaning to program at Apple, Mike, Drew, and I went to Google for lunch. Mike knows someone named Eric who works there so we went there with him. I thought the food at Apple was pretty good, but the food at Google is amazing. They have many choices and multiple cafes to choose from. Eric's girlfriend is the nutritionist there and she makes sure everything is really healthy and has the least amount of fat, sugar, calories, etc. The food there at Google is also free. After going to Google, on our way home, Mike and I stopped by at a computer history museum. We took tour to see the evolution of computers. It was really interesting to see the old computers and how they worked. We went out to dinner later and went back home for my last day there (or what was supposed to be my last day).

The next morning we woke up early to go to the airport. Mike dropped me off at the airport a little before 9:00 and my flight left at 9:45. I went to get my boarding pass and found out that I had accidentally booked my flight for 9:45 PM! So, I called my brother and he came and picked me up for another 12 hours. We decided to go to the Winchester Mystery House, which is a huge creepy mansion. An old, rich lady, who believed there were spirits haunting here house decided to be constantly building on the house 24/7 to keep the spirits away. The house was really weird because there were things like staircases leading to the ceiling, doors that opened up into brick walls or just dropped down to the next floor, rooms that you could barley fit in, and tons of strange things like that. It was really cool to see, and funny to look at some of the stupid and pointless rooms. We went back to Mike's apartment for a while and then he took me to the airport at the correct time. Everything worked out that time and I got on and had a good flight home.

Another Trip to My Cabin

I just got back a couple of days ago from another trip to my cabin, with my parents and my cousin. The first few days they all went windsurfing in the Columbia River, but since I'm not very good at it and don't like it very much I didn't go. I've gone a couple years ago but I'm just not that interested in it anymore. While everyone else went windsurfing, I sat on the beach and watched them, played DS, listened to my iPod, read, and juggled. I wasn't that bad and it was fun to watch them.

After a couple days of windsurfing there wasn't as much wind, so we did other things. One day we went for a hike up Dog Mountain, which was a big mountain about 5 miles from our cabin right next to the Columbia River. I was a total of about 6.2 miles and took us around 4 hours to hike up and back. It was fun but very tiring. It was really hot out so that made it even worse. When we got to the bottom though we took a nice cold refreshing swim in the Columbia River.

We also went in our forest a little and went on the new zip-line my dad built. A couple days we rented movies too. One of the nights we rented Red Eye, which I really liked. We also rented Hidalgo, and Tristan and Isolde, which were pretty good. I got too pick the last movie, and I picked Benchwarmers. Everyone else hated it and thought it was really stupid but I enjoyed it and thought it was really funny.

Before the last day my cousin's parents came up there and we all went out to dinner and they spent the night. The next morning we swam out to this big rock in the Columbia River and jumped off it. It was about 20 feet high that day (It's normally higher but the tide was in). After we jumped off the rock we packed and went home.

Soccer

A couple of weeks ago, I had soccer camp from 10:00-3:00, Monday through Friday. I'm switching soccer teams this year so I did this camp with them. Our coach did the first part of the camp each day. Then, a really good soccer player named Preestwick did the rest. It was really fun but some of it was hard. We ran laps every day and also did many sets of stairs. We did lots of different drills and scrimmaging also. I think this camp helped me improve a lot.

This weekend we had a soccer tournament. All the teams are select teams so they were pretty good. We were supposed to play 3 games and the two teams (there were a total of six I think) that got the most points, based on how much they won each game by, went to a final game on Sunday. We lost our first two games 5-0. I think I we could have won our second game, but we were missing a ton of players and some got hurt, so by the second half we were down two players. We had another game that day but nobody wanted to play it because we wouldn't have very many players and our coach told us that they were one of the best teams. Our coach went to tell say we forfeit and it turned out that the other team forfeited too because their players were from a higher league. It wasn't a very successful tournament for us but it was still fun.

Messed Up Computer

My computer is not working right now. A few days before I left for my cabin it wouldn't turn on or charge. I didn't have enough time to fix it so I couldn't bring it to the Gorge. I don't know what’s wrong with it. I’m hoping to get it fixed soon.

Trip to My Cabin

Last Saturday, my friend Tim and I went on a train to my cabin in the Columbia River Gorge where my dad already was. We got there at about 3:00 and drove to our cabin and got unpacked and played on a zip line that my dad made. Then we went a couple miles down to a beach where we swam out to a big rock in the Columbia River and jumped off. We went back to our cabin and relaxed the rest of the night.

The next day we drove to a hot spring near by, and hiked for a while to a little river that we swam across to the hot springs. We only sat in it for about 10 minutes and then played in the river for the rest of the time. We had fun swimming from rock to rock and skipping rocks across the river. We went back home and relaxed again.

The next day we went on a 45 minute hike to an awesome waterfall. We jumped in the pool of water below the waterfall and it was freezing! It was very refreshing though and plus it was very hot outside. We ate lunch there and played in the creek that the waterfall flew into. It was really fun. We hiked back and picked up a movie when we were driving home. Since we don't have a DVD Player at our cabin we can't get any recent movies so we got a movie called Sahara. It was about these people trying to save people in Mali from being poisoned by the president of Mali and they were also trying to find gold that was on a ship buried there somewhere. It was pretty good.

The next morning we played on the zip line some more and watched some kitesurfing on our way to the train station on Tuesday. My friend and I played DS for part of the train ride and then I slept most of the rest of the ride home. The train was a little late but not much. I went home and sat around the rest of the evening.

DS Lite

I decided to get the new DS Lite after my other DS broke. I wasn't going to ever get one because I thought the old one was fine, but since I had to get mine fixed or get a new one I thought I might as well get the DS Lite. I like how it looks, and how it’s smaller than the old one. It's also really great how the screen is about twice a bright and the stylus is larger. The microphone is in the middle on the DS Lite which I like better so you can see both screen easy when blowing into it rather than blowing at the bottom where its harder to look at the top screen. The only thing I don’t like is that the start and select button are smaller and at the bottom of the DS. I thought it was easier when they were above the a, b, x, and y buttons.

I'm going to sell my old DS to Gamestop for $10. I think that’s a really good deal because they buy DS' in good condition for $40 and it would cost $70 for me to get it repaired by Nintendo. I bought my Lite new for $130 a couple of days ago so I could play it on my trip to my cabin in the Columbia River Gorge. I also sold Pac and Roll, Mario and Luigi Partners in Time, and Nintendogs for $44. I got an extra $10 for selling three games at a time. I'm thinking of getting Big Brain Academy or Brain Age soon.