THREE posts in the space of ONE! WhAt A dEaL!

For today's post, we have many special features, including skewed timelines, uninteresting anecdotes, crude scribbles, monochromatic geek tees, and so much more!

We'll start off the trip with the mildly interesting anecdotes concerning things that have happened in my life the past few months.

Mildly interesting thing #1

     I had to go to high school orientation on the 3rd. The welcome presentation was more than a little bit lackluster, in which the principal attempted to read meaningless quotes from the Internet through a coughing fit. Then we separated into groups with name tags to be led around the school, which is huge by my standards. So I wandered around with my fellow freshmen, none of whom I particularly liked and all of whom were being so loud that I couldn't hear the tour guides so I still don't know where any of my classes are. I had cut my nails specially in case anyone I don't like needed to Dealt With.

*deranged cackling*

After all that I found Brianna in the slew of nerds I get along ok with and she gave me a hug. She could count as a friend, I suppose, cause I go stand next to her when I feel awkward. (I have no classes with her, as I recently discovered. I also discovered it's perfectly fine to stand and be awkward by yourself.) Her hair is kind of a pink, flopped-over Mohawk now. It's sort of cool.

UPDATE: school has started now and brianna's hair looks like this:

Brianna's hair changes colours a lot. Here are some of the others I've seen:

This is her "mermaid hair"

This may or may not be original Brianna hair.

A bit more interesting thing from the same day:
     Dad and mom and I went to the grocery store. Usually there's nothing interesting about this, but today dad and I remembered the Old Spice shelf in the soap section. Old Spice is incredibly fun to mock. Here was the display on that day:

My manhood smelleth of swag.

Aside from swagger, we've also seen hawkridge, bear glove, and the elusive wolfthorn.
None of these sound like something I would want to rub on my body, or even could rub on my body, considering the intangible concept swagger.
I suppose you have no right to call yourself a man until you have washed yourself with bear gloves and smell strongly of thorny wolves.

Please tell me im not the only one to be amused by this.


Mildly interesting thing #2
     I went to Seattle, and Rylan went with me. Here is what she did over the weekend

got ready for an adventure armed with a sweater borrowed from andie,

ate too much candy,

played piano for a bit,

and watched the rain. Nothing extremely exciting, but it was an enjoyable weekend nonetheless.

We ate at a place called the Wing Dome, which (you'll never guess) has chicken wings. Oddly enough, I haven't ever tried a chicken wing before, so that was interesting for me. The spicyness scale goes from 1 to 7, and we got ours at level 3, which was a pleasant amount of kick, the same level of spicy that happens when I squirt the perfect amount of Sriracha sauce on something. I also had a turkey sandwich, but I was too full of wings to eat all of it, so when the fireball candies came at the end of the meal, Barrett and I made art...ish... with the turkey, straw paper, avocados, and the fireball. We called it Christmas turkey.

The straw paper looks like a santa hat!

After that we went down to the Ballard locks. I did not find them even mildly interesting because moving boats up and down is a slow process, but the salmon ladder on the other side of the locks was cool. That whole time, Barrett was interpretive dancing her way through the park, just like dad and I had to bother Tracy on Whidbey island. We should form an interpretive dance team.

it kinda looks like i'm kinking poor Barrett in the head.

Sub thing:
     Now that I think about it, I do the silly Bother Tracy thing partly because I like bothering people, partly because it makes dad laugh, and the rest of it is showing off for Elijah. (Eli is Tracy's kid.) We used to be good friends, and I even got him to sing about belly buttons once. But the his parents got divorced : (  , and he as been feeling like the sad face emoticon I just typed for quite some time now. Every so often I check to see if his sense of humor has returned.

It hasn't.

Returning to previous mildly interesting thing in Seattle.
     Back at Barrett's house, it began to thunder and rain. I sat at the dining table and drew some yarn.

that is some mighty fine yarn if I do say so myself.

Eventually Beckett joined me and drew some dinosaurs. He loves dinosaurs.

In the evening I migrated downstairs to listen to Pearl Jam, and Barrett and I had some conversations that surpass all this post hitherto in awesomeness factor. THEY INCLUDED:

• how I should stop shaving my armpits and let the hair grow into long, braided ropes, which I could use to tie in a turban on top of my head, make a loop for going on ziplines, or tie them to an RV and sort of water ski behind it.
• in which Barrett picks her nose, shows it to me, and says "I wish these gumdrops were covered in sugar." in a British accent.
• "Darth Vader is sad. Chewie disliked him on Facebook."
• "I'm scared of natural disasters... like daddy farting and killing the world."
• I had mentioned that my dad doesn't have eyebrows. She said that the potion to cure him of his eyebrow paucity failed horribly and gave him an invisible unibrow.

And those were the most brilliant conversations I've had with a 5th grader in a long time. Then again, I don't get to hang out with many 5th graders. if you thought none of those were funny, CONGRATULATIONS! you are normal.

The next day (it was a sleepover) we went rock climbing! Remember when I said that I don't sports? I forgot to mention rock climbing. It is very fun. And good for my weakling noodle arms. At the rock gym in Seattle with Barrett we did mostly bouldering, just scrambling around the low walls with no ropes or anything. If we wanted to climb up high, there was another room with ropes and we had to put on harnesses so uncle Ken could belay us. I had been to a different rock gym at the beginning of summer, and they let you auto belay without taking a class first. You just clip yourself in and climb while the device at the top takes up the slack and if you fall it lets you down slowly. Being on belay using a person at the bottom is harder.

 (the one in Tacoma with the lovely auto belay+me in my standard uniform of a monochromatic geek shirt and basketball shorts)

Random interruption:

The blueberry with T-rex arms has now invaded my dad's bike helmet.

ALRIGHTY

School has started for me. I have been in high school for one and a half weeks! (actually, 2 and a half, by the time I published this.) It is not fun. I'll tell you more about that once we get done admiring my shirts.

I have enough monochromatic geek shirts to last a whole week!

By monochromatic, I am referring to the background colour, not the graphic.

This one is just so punny. From FireAnt tees on Etsy

(get it? get it? get it? a group of crows is called a murder!)

This one GLOWS IN THE DARK!!! From David and Goliath.

Because it's weird and epic and I dig that. From GoodyTwoSleeves

This is my favorite shirt ever. It's a lovely oxymoron and I get a lot of compliments (which isn't necessarily a good thing, because compliments are like this:

Monty Python and The Holy Grail. the knights that go NI!

bring us a shrubbery

Also from FireAnt tees, I think

My other Goodie Two Sleeves purchase

And to conclude our monochromatic geek tees appreciation, we have my lovely old star wars shirt.

I could write a lot about high school and how that's going, but i really don't want too. Here is the basic version:

• Mr. Rush (favorite teacher ever!) is not the librarian at the high school. He was going to move from the middle to high school with us, but that wound up not happening so there are a lot of sad freshmen.
• There are lots of stairs and windy hallways. It's easy to get lost. (that's windy with a long "i" sound, mind you. There is no actual wind.)
• I can't stand the lunchroom. Instead I go to the library and read with my pb&j sandwich. They say no eating in the library, but I've found that if you are very quiet and unobtrusive about disobeying the rules, people will turn a blind eye. Also, the library is upstairs, with windows overlooking the lunchroom. Looking down on all those people is a rather interesting detached feeling. Not that that's uncommon. I feel like I spend most of my time looking down on everyone like peasants and then remembering that the only reason that is happening is not because I'm awesome, but because I don't people well. Some would consider it a sad analogy, but at least it's more comfortable than trying to pretend to have moderately close friends and eating my lunch in the din of the lunchroom.
• i have a teacher who makes a zebra face when he can't remember something. he bares his teeth and flaps his arms around. Most of the class just stares at him wondering if he's going to turn out to be a cool teacher or just an oddball.
• biology is nowhere near as exciting as 7th grade life science with Mrs. M.     Biology at the high school is taught by an old fart.
• Eight (probably more now, it's been another week) days of art class and we have only spent two of them drawing. or arting in general.
• The pep assemblies are AN HOUR LONG. On the day of football* games we have pep assemblies in which you sit in the bleachers and watch the leadership kids try to eat doughnuts without using their hands. Yes. this is definitely helping my academics. I could not possibly achieve my dreams if I didn't know what it was like to have my butt hurt for an hour watching a select group of extroverts fart around for an hour.

Mmm hmm yes.

My attitude is excellent.

*Normally when I think of Washington, I think: trees! rain! mountains! coffee! hipsters??

But in reality it's SEAHAWKS SEAHAWKS OH MY FREAKING GOD SEAHAWKS!

I am disgusted by the diehard football fans.

FOR ONE THING they insist on every last person being excited about seahawks seahawks seahawks. One time we wasted several hours of school time to go have a parade. It was the stupidest thing ever. (it was, however, a prime opportunity to use my This Is Dumb stickers, if you will remember that.)

FOR ANOTHER THING most of the people in my town's happiness depends on the sportsball winning winning winning. It must be very sad to have all your hopes and dreams invested in a corporate entity. At Fred Meyer Dad and I saw a car decorated all saehawksy and -no im not kidding about this- it had "dreams really do come true!" painted on the side.

people are interesting.

Here is some tumblr stuff that is more excellent than my attitude.

(normally I would just pin them, but I don't know how to pin entire posts from tumblr. Is that even a thing you can do?)

HOW MANY OF YOU?

BILL BILL BILL BILL

science ruuules

Rumbleroar wouldn't let this happen.

: )

I need pockets like I need air to breathe.

If you want to summon the spirit of Gwen, be sure to leave out some books.

Vampire experts, is this true? 

Word.

Word again.

And here's some Lilly and Tomatoes, if that's what you need right now.

This is incredibly funny.

ALSO I HAVE SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT TO TELL YOU THAT MAY REQUIRE YOUR PARTICIPATION.

Instead of doing the button thing on my sidebar, I want to make a page of all you folks and write something nice about each of you. It was going ok because I have you all sorted out according to why you're awesome in my head, but I discovered that putting why each of you is unique into 2 sentences is rather difficult. 

So what I'm asking you to do is advertise yourselves a bit. Tell me in the comments why you are special because transforming my thoughts to words is hard, but I could probably do it if you gave me a little push.

What are you skilled at?

What is your content?

Seriously anything helps. Those are only two of a plethora of categories.

Pleeeaaaassee tell me anything that makes you special, even if you just have a really pretty blog.

If you have really low self esteem and cant think of anything you're good at, it's a good idea to be facetiously arrogant and bullshmidt your way though this one. It's better than nothing.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION! 

TAKE THIS CHANCE AND RUN WITH IT!