Off To Essex Today!

Hey,

Today's my last day I'll be able to blog until...Er, August 24th, I think. Today we're going up to Essex, where I used to live. It only takes about two hours to get there. Where we're staying now is basically borderline south-east and south-west of England, and Essex is still south-east. We'll probably end up getting there so amazingly late though as my mother takes forever and a day to pack. The place we're staying is so pretty. It's a little one-story house on a farm. There's a big field behind the house, too, which I can enjoy unlike anywhere in the US because of the stupid mosquito's. And the farm has a dog, which runs around outside. <3

Since it's summer, I have the liberty of being able to talk about what I'm doing and not appear quite as boring, yes? Yes?!

Okay, Friday we went to a zoo around here(Around here meaning a couple of hours away). I decided to do my really pathetic habit of taking several pictures of each and every animal, nearly all of them blurry, to "capture the moment" even though it's not like it's my last time to go to a zoo or anything. The weather was so nice that day -- Most of the weather's been pretty on-and-off around here, but it was rather busy. Considering nearly everyone there was a mother with a baby, I felt sort of out of place. I also felt pretty sick of bumping into push chairs and hearing screaming in the "Please Be quiet; Nervous Animals" sections. And, I got unnecessarily annoyed with my sister as I normally do it zoos because she takes too long. You look for the animal, you find it, you look at the animal, then if it's doing anything interesting which it probably isn't you keep looking, if it isn't you keep on walking. You don't stay for ten minutes hoping you'll see young offspring doing something adorable! But, it was still fun, and I got a cool wooden lizard painted with the African-style colored dots on.

On Saturday we were supposed to go on a picnic with a couple of my mom's school friends. I'm guessing you know how boring it can be when parents get talking about "the good old days", right(To be fair I'm already talking about my "good old days"!)? It started raining so we ended up eating at one of the friend's houses. Their family is one of those old-fashioned, traditional, somewhat up-tight families, which is basically the dictionary definition of exactly what my family isn't. I remember being four or five years old and going there for the first time, and being creeped out by the hundreds of old portraits, but of course I'm over that now. The parents talked for a few hours about high school, Bruce Springsteen, and many weird and questionably "random" things in between. I was expecting to be sent away with the friend's daughter, a year older than me, which considering I barely know her would be the most awkward thing in the world. I'm so glad that didn't happen.

Yesterday we got to go see our grandparents for a bit, and later go rowing. That was really fun. But me and my sister had one oar each and my stroke was a lot stronger so we kept drifting to the left and bumping into people, but lots of people were doing that so it wasn't too bad. And I got ice cream. Cookies and cream, yum. <3

I heard Paparazzi, Lady GaGa's most recent single, and admittedly I quite like it, even if Lady GaGa is an "Expensive hooker" as a YouTube comment put it. That's what most singers are these days, it seems. It was the only song in the fifteen or twenty songs in the Top 40 countdown I liked(Yes, I did listen to it, for once!). I think I'm gonna get The Fame when I'm back in the US. Of course I could get it sooner but I don't think my mom or dad would be too impressed by the idea of disco sticks and such. See, I'm trying not to make a huge flippin' deal out of this music!

Also, I finished A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain yesterday. I'd got my head around the language, and did enjoy it. Even though the character was really pretentious and annoying, he was witty. I'll talk more about it some time.

Gotta go pack now because I left it way too late. I'll probably be able to CBox occasionally at friend's houses. I'll let you guys in on the summer excitement when I can.

Bye! <3

Blogging Time, Yo

Hey guys,





To put a long, complicated story short, we now have a laptop here until Monday--A pretty good one, too. It was finally set up yesterday evening, and of course, I rushed straight to blogger! Well, it was second on third on my list at any rate.





So, how has everyone been as of late? That's something I don't talk about very often here, huh? I'm very self-absorbed, as you'll certainly have noticed, in particular when I'm rambling here.



As for me I'm still enjoying being in England and things.



In particular if you want to know what I've been doing , Saturday me, my mom, and my sister went to a nature reserve in town. I don't like nature reserves without the aid of my iPod, which I luckily remembered, so that was alright. It was partly forest, partly fields, and partly a small pond which made it slightly interesting. At one point I stormed into a special "Please Be Quiet" bird-viewing place, loudly saying "Do you like Blur?" to my mother. The birds heard me, too, though I never found out their opinions on the band.

On Sunday my mom went to see her two BFFs she's known since school. When I say BFFs, I do mean exactly that! They're constantly e-mailing, calling, and texting each other now. They'll be twittering within a few years. I stayed at my grandparents watching the swimming, and got very bored, before finally going home.

Monday we went to what I think is the oldest ancient Roman structure in England. It's a palace, not a villa like most, from an early date of the Roman occupation. We watched a short video, then went around the garden, then went around a small museum about it. I don't like ancient Roman history much, but the museum made every description of every aspect of the building really boring, other than getting to see actual jewelry and tools from the time. Then we went through a large building built over the remains, and looked at a few mosaics. A few were so amazingly well kept, and one only had one small patch missing. My sister spent some time in the children's area that every museum seems to have. But my highlight from the visit was there--There was a small pole where the kids are supposed to stick sticky-notes onto describing why they liked the museum. This consisted of scribbles, many "it was fun because it was fun", a few "I hated It it's so boring an old", a few notes from those 'children' describing how they've loved the place since their first visit in the 70s, and one which simply said "The Romans didn't discover America. Ha."!

Tuesday we went on another nature walk this time around a different pond. It doesn't take long to walk around there, but my sister took an up hill, longer route to find pheasant feathers. While they would surely help out my nonexistent collection in the hopes of creating my own Brandon jacket, it was tiring, and I fell when running down the hill, in front of a family with two young boys, who probably wouldn't have done so. Thank you very much, grip less old Converse.

And Wednesday revolved around one of those rare family-related things that's a bit too personal to blog about. But because of it, we got to have breakfast at McDonalds, which is a first for me. Me and my sister annoyed all the business people having coffee and reading the newspaper by having our drinks declare war on each other(Yes, I know what you're thinking. And, no, I'm surprisingly not a four-year-old boy), went to the beach briefly(Not 'going to the beach' as in the summery bathing suits, ice cream, getting a tan sort of way, but in the English, cold, wet, disappointed it isn't warmer even though it never is, sort of way), and drove around several streets all with the first word being 'Hammy'. In the afternoon we went to my grandparent's town. I got A Snow Patrol album, as I simply can't go into HMV without coming out with some CD or another. There was a small fair near the coast, so I played hook-the-duck ads got a big plastic beach ball. I put the small rope not intended to put around your wrist, um, twisted and stuck around my wrist, and got some funny looks while apparently hugging a beach ball in Marks And Spencers(Somewhat expensive grocery store).

And today a guy came around in the morning to look at the boiler, I obsessed over being able to use Facebook, and in the afternoon we went to a bird place in town. My mom was chosen to have an eagle fly over to her hand in the display which went on for far to long, between birds flying away and not returning for fifteen minutes.



And that's about all there is to it. It's Thursday which of course means MOCK THE WEEK/NEVERMIND THE BUZZCOCKS NIGHT on BBC 2, the absolute highlight of my life. The TV before seven o'clock here is getting rather boring for me at the moment, but I guess it's alright. At night there's always various comedy panel shows, or Dragons Den, or Gorden Ramsay, or a decent documentary, or something, which keeps me addicted. As for music, I've been listening to Snow Patrol, Lily Allen, Noah And The Whale, Blur, and I've now admitted to sort of liking P(!?)ATD's "I Write Sins, Not Tragedies'. I wonder what my parents think when they've heard "Haven't you people ever heard of closing the goddamn door?" a thousand times when I'm online.

PS, the (!?) wasn't a mistake.



Gotta go now, the television awaits. I'm in a oddly weird writing mood, I'm almost happy with what I've said! Must be all the Mark Twain I'm forced to read(Yeah, right). Comment, CBOX, and such xD



Bye,

Nothing Can Go Wrong When The World Smells Of Grass Cuttings xD

Hello blog-readers,

We had the grass-cutter, or whatever I'm supposed to call him, 'round today. Now everything smells like grass cuttings. I love that smell. It kinda encouraged me to take some pointless pictures of my back yard. I'd show them to you, but my camera is being difficult. DX

Today during homeroom I told Adele I wouldn't blog today, I'd blog tomorrow when I actually had something to write about(Celebration Of Learning). She told me that I'd then hype it all up and type about it in one paragraph. This isn't far from the truth I suppose. So, here I am blogging instead of enjoying the above wonders of nature today. And, I don't know if I'll blog tomorrow, even if there is a paragraph worth of stuff to talk about.

I decided to be spontaneous. From now on, I'm going to post with labels. Crazy, right?

Ah, where to begin today. I had Enrichment first period. I basically read Harry Potter(Instead of Looking For Alaska, which I've now deemed inappropriate for reading in school) some more in the learning-assistant teacher's room. The teacher kept trying to start up a conversation with me. She'd been doing this a lot ever since yesterday when she read my completed poetry book and told me I had talent. I had never talked to her before that. Partly because I think she's a dominating know-it-all, and because I typically look down on the role of learning-assistant. I mean, every one's complaining about *gasp* THE ECONOMY at the moment. My school's already cut Art down to two weeks per year, we're losing 6th grade Latin next year(I think, or the year after) and I heard we're losing our librarian, too. But in my eyes those are all twice as important as an f-ing Learning-assistant teacher. It's really silly.

I had a double-period block of Science for 2nd and 3rd. We worked on researching the pond-water organism, animal, and plant we found when we went out to our school pond last week. I had to wait twenty minutes because the computers weren't working...Well, the third one worked. I have a particular fondness of all things microscopic so it was a good assignment, other than the fact I had to do Nematodes. They're really nothing more than microscopic worms. I looked a little into Water Bears. Now those are interesting if not rather disturbing to me. Want to know something else? I'm also slightly scared of biting, blood sucking(Or what could look like that) insects and microscopic insects. Ah, I'm so weird.

Spanish was a fun class, kinda. We had to sing a song. One that was rather too fast for any 7th grade Spanish kid to speak, let alone sing. We were split into groups of four to sing in front of everyone. Where the heck was she coming from when she did that? Stuff like that doesn't make people sing any louder. But it was fun to hear some of the popular guys screaming their lungs out to the song, and adding in some non-Spanish babbling from time to time. One guy even got a guitar from the music room--Probably more to escape Spanish than to play along to the song--which, considering it was very out of tune, was hilarious.

After lunch I had health. We got to go outside, and we did the ol' "Passive, aggressive, assertive behaviors" routine. And, guess what, we even did skits! How much more of an uncreative activity could you think of, seriously? Once again, the popular guys make classes like Health and Spanish worth going to. There was one when these two people were either drunk or high(Hard to tell, really) and then go "Unicorn!!" and run and crash into the largest guy in my class. And, where these two guys were going out, and (Of course) the one who was twice the height as the other played the girl.

We got to finish with a double class of Social studies. We're doing yet more last-minute work for the celebration we have tomorrow. We were put into groups to make posters. Mine was on the Byzantine Empire. Tomorrow we have to quiz our parents on the matter. I'd warned my mother of this. without my help, she could go two ways; "I'm an idiot", or "I'm English and therefore highly intelligent, especially on all things European". Both ways I'd love to avoid if I can. In the 2nd half some people, not me luckily, got to scrape of the blue tape on the floor, that had been put down three or four months ago for a Geography activity. My teacher found out the most effective way of doing so was scraping with the erasers from the "Flea Market Pencils" she got for 25 cents last summer, that don't sharpen. It all got insane as it usually does with last period classes. While clearing up someone had left a picture of Jesus on the floor...And, well, I thought the whole "JEEEESUS ON THE FLOOR, SOMEONE PICK UP JEEEESUS OF THE FLOOR" act was rather amusing. As much as I complain about my school, there have been so many funny memories over the year.

Speaking of basically everything said I don't believe I've talked about the Celebration of Learning yet, have I? It's something my school does every year. Parents come in to see all the marvelous things we'd done. It's pretty much all done in the week or so before the event of course. Tomorrow we're doing some poetry reading, parent-quizzing, showing our tri-folds in math, and I have no idea what in Science. And then we get to watch a slide show in the auditorium, and then the Walk-a-thon my grade's done, then we get to eat hot dogs and such. I don't know what in the afternoon. Probably watching a movie or something. Whatever happens, it's better than last year which was standing by my Science project for two hours, walking a mile behind everyone else, and not being able to eat amazing food because my teeth were enduring braces-pain at the time.

A couple other points worth making...

I have been banned from AnimalCrossingCommunity.com. Just to let you know. Well, I don't know if it's a perma-ban. I got a violation point added to my account for something I did--And got reported for previously--Over a month ago. Something's gone clearly wrong, and now I'm banned. But, you might want to send a PT to SoulNotSoldier. *winks*

Music's been up-and-down. I'm annoyed at Fuse for not properly updating their Top Ten Alternative Countdown yet. Posting the same thing but with a load of interviews does not make it any enjoyable...Well, Brandon was actually mentioned in an MGMT interview. God, just update it. I've been listening to The Script, Kasabian, and MGMT for the past few days. I want that Kasabian album, the new one. And I also found out Arctic Monkeys have a new album out in August.

See ya,