IT'S FINALLY DONE!!

YES!! A Grain of Sand IS FINALLY COMPLETE! After wrestling with my senile computer for months, I finally finished it. Watch it here!!! WHOOOOOOOO!!!!

Now that this is complete, I can finally begin work on the seventeen thousand other projects I have planned. Look forward to them!

An interesting presentation.

My mom's an English teacher, but not at a public school. She works at the local community college, and teaches ESL (English as a Second Language). So naturally, she works with a lot of Hispanic students, legal and illegal immigrants, teaching them English. The recent hype about "Illegal" Mexican immigrants has made her quite angry. She doesn't see any reason why they can't be treated as citizens too, and I agree with her.
So she set up a presentation at the synagogue, and got some people to speak on the topic. Last night was the night when this was happening. A total of three groups spoke. The first woman came directly from Mexico, and spoke very little English, so she had a translator with her.
She talked about how the major American banks like Bank of America that owned many major Mexican banks were making it extremely hard on people in Mexico. In the 90's the peso inflated so much that much of what Mexicans had saved in the bank was worth almost nothing. The American-owned banks, rather than helping these people through a problem like this, confiscated their property, leaving them no choice but to go to the US to find work. And they were mostly turned away at the border. This was, of course, extremely unfair and is still one of the main reasons Mexicans have to illegally immigrate to the US to find work. It's not as though they want to be here.
Two other groups spoke as well, but the first I found the most interesting. All in all, I learned quite a bit that night and I'm quite glad I went.

Bleeah

I CANT THINK OF ANYTHING TO WRITE ABOUT. My life has slowed to a repetitive crawl. Now, I don't suddenly hate school or anything, but it hasn't been getting any more interesting, that's for sure. Even Flash runs slowly on my computer now, making me, an impatient person, generally annoyed and not animating much. So production on my movies is slow too. Sloowww...

Comic Con!

I went to the Stumptown Comics Fest today. It was located near downtown Portland, in a hotel. It was basically a huge gathering of local comics artists and comic shops, selling and displaying things. There were all manner of underground comics, one-panel cartoon cards, and manga. There were a few things there that were especially interesting, such as the character Onion Head Monster. Watch the above video to get a general idea of who Onion Head Monster is. It may take a while to load, but it's worth it.
I also bought this awesome brochure that was labeled "For Your Safety". This guy was selling a bunch of them. Basically, they have a diagram on each leaf that shows two pictures of a situation: what to do and what not to do. I, of course, got the one with the ninja. The top illustration shows a ninja breaking into an office building with his sword out, with an X next to the picture. The bottom illustration, accompanied by a checkmark, shows a woman pinning a nametag on the ninja in the lobby. It's generally awesome.

Scupper me chips, it's an update

Hello all, and welcome to the Occasional Update of The Yokai's Blog. Thank you for reading.
Well, as for school, it's been alright. I enjoy school, but absolutely HATE a. getting up in the morning and b. doing homework. Most of the teachers are okay, except the math and advisory teachers, who are jerks. I'm making some friends there as well, which is nice.
Otherwise, I'm even closer to finished with "A Grain of Sand", I recently upgraded all the art in it, so the scenery looks much better now. It should be done soon. As for the clay movie, I don't know when I'm even gonna get started on that...I have so many plans for Flash...now I'm wishing I didn't spend $145 on the animation program, which isn't the greatest anyway. But "Sand" will be done soon, and it's gonna be awesome.
Speaking of movies, I've found some really awesome animations on Newgrounds. I really like Flash movies with a lot of action. Not necessarily violence, but with a lot going on. You'll see what I mean if you watch these masterpieces.

The YuYu is a truly amazing work by a retired Disney animator, with great music.

Future is a music video for a Japanese techno song. It looks 3D, but was done with just flash.

Metropolis Circuit Is like a combination of the previous two. Two people race each other through a futuristic city.


And finally, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arr! Hence the title, me hearties.

The first day of school

It was the first day of school today. Only the freshmen showed up, because since they were all new to the school this was the day to get to know the place, and familiarize themselves with the classes. I'm taking honors English and Global Studies (Whose teacher is a very witty African- American guy with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a concealed weapons license--I can only imagine what the year will be like with him), Algebra, PE, Health Ed, Spanish, Physical Science, and a video production class.
The teachers all seem nice enough, although I can't say the same for the students, who generally kept to themselves. That's probably only because not very many of them know each other, hopefully it will get better over the year. Generally, though, things look pretty good. The classes don't seem too boring, there doesn't appear to be a huge homework load, and I can find the classrooms relatively easily. I just hope I still have some free time during weekdays.
So that's how things were. Tomorrow, everyone else will show up and regular classes will start , so then I'll really get to see what high school is like.

Eclipse!

Most of you already know this, as I don't think I have any readers other than from the west coast, but there was a total lunar eclipse two days ago. It was at 2:00 am, so I didn't get much sleep, staying up until 3:30 to watch it. My mom and brother came outside to watch, as well. It took about an hour to fully cover up, and when it did, the moon turned a beautiful shade of orange. It looked like Mars was orbiting Earth or something. Although it kind of sucks, here's a picture we took:
Not much else has happened, except I got into honors classes for Parkrose High, I'll be taking honors English and Global Studies, so that's pretty cool. Usually, you need teacher recommendations from the previous year to get in, but all I had was an essay I wrote, and the accepted it! I guess I'm a genius or something :P
Oh yeah, and some random Chinese guy IM'd me the other day. He thought I was a transfer student or something. His English wasn't very good, and it took half an hour or so to get him to realize he was talking to the wrong person :)
That's all that's happened recently.

Sand and sun and all that

We went to the beach yesterday, for the day. The weather was pretty much perfect. The nice thing about Oregon beaches is that they're rarely too hot. They can certainly be too cold, but yesterday it was perfect. We were going to go to Arcadia Beach, which is one of the best in northern Oregon, with tide pools, caves, and a little stream that trickles into the ocean out of a forested mass of plants. Unfortunately, it's everyone else's favorite beach too, ad there was absolutely nowhere to park.
So we went about a mile south, and encountered a different, smaller beach. It was definitely less crowded, so we parked and walked down. There was plenty of room to put down a blanket. We hung out for a while and my mom and I started noticing something odd. A large number of pelicans were flying north. There was a steady trickle of the birds all day. Now why would pelicans be flying north in late summer? We have yet to figure it out.
Eventually, we hauled out the kite that we had bought earlier in the year. I was surprised by how well-made it was. It was a nice kite, quite a bit better than the $1.50 plastic kites we usually get. It flew quite well in the wind, and I learned how to twirl it when it started to drop, so as to keep it in the air.
As the tide went out, a stretch of dry ground opened up in front of the cliff at the north end of the beach. I decided to walk around the cliff to see if there was anything there, and there certainly was. There was a whole other beach there, slightly smaller and only accessible at low tide. A small but very wide waterfall trickled down from a huge mass of rock attached to the eastern cliffs, and proceeded to create a wide stream that emptied int the ocean.
I climbed up over the waterfall and found that the stream wound through a forested gap in the cliffs. I would have kept going but I wasn't wearing any shoes, and the rocks were starting to get pointy.
We stayed there most of the day, and spent much of the evening in Cannon Beach. This included eating at a so-so restaurant and bar, getting ice cream, me going into the most horrifying public bathroom in the state(toilet paper splattered on the walls and ceiling) and watching the sunset while it was cloudy. We started home at about 6:30. All in all, I quite enjoyed the day.

Movies

I've been getting more productive with my movies recently. I currently have two projects going. one is a Flash animation called "A grain of sand". It's about a little man with strange powers who is created out of thin air for absolutely no purpose whatsoever, and decides to explore the surrounding landscape. (the picture is a screenshot from that.)
My other movie is a claymation, the title is undecided. It's about a psychopath who wears a mango on his head and smashes houses with a giant club. Meanwhile, the local police force tries to stop him. The flash animation will be finished soon, the other will take longer.
You can see some of my older flash movies here:
The Refrigerator is one of my first flash movies, so it isn't very good. Sketchy Fight was something I tried later, focusing more on fluid animation then art quality, and Transmutation is an abstract movie about things changing shape. Enjoy! (Or don't. Maybe they suck.) :P

Cheesecake Factory

Last night we went to the Cheesecake Factory, the most ludicrously glitzy restaurant in the state. The architecture was horrifying mash of classical Italian and ancient Egyptian, if you can even imagine that, and the storefront itself was about 40 feet high. There was only one story, so about 20 feet of that was wasted space for the vaulted ceilings painted with hieroglyphs.
Amongst the 500 other people there we finally found a place to sit. It was on their patio, with a lovely view of the 700-car parking lot. We opened our menus to find them filled with ads for diamonds and spas and the like. That's right, adverts in the menus. I don't think there was a single thing there that cost under $7.00. But the only reason we'd come here in the first place was to spend a gift card my grandparents had given us, so we were good to go. I got a $10 burger, my little sister got an $8 quesadilla. My brother had a $1o pizza, etc. etc.
When my food came I was amazed to find a burger so large that, once I had out it all together, it was about 6 inches high. I sort of dislocated my jaw to take a bite or two, but when I was half done, everything just squirted out the back because of the pressure I was putting on the front of the bun. The food wasn't bad, but I came away from this experience glad that there would be no reason to ever go back there again. :)

Party on!

It's my birthday today. I'm fourteen. Cripes. I still find it hard to believe. It was pretty low-key, I didn't have a party or anything. My parents gave me an awesome T-shirt with an Asian dragon on it. The shirt is white and the dragon is red, and my grandpa said I looked like a Chinese food takeout box. It's true, ha.
I went downtown with my friend Hannah who's moving to Indiana, which sucks. She'll be gone for THREE FREAKING YEARS. We'll be 17 when we see each other again. Unfortunately, we were both too lame to think of anything to do, so we had coffee and watched "Harry Potter" and went home. It rained, too, which it hasn't done since I was born. But we went out to dinner and it was all cool.
In other news, I'm reading the final Harry Potter book. It's well written, but not really worth all the hype. Really it's just another HP book. Some people were so obsessed that they wrote an entire, 200-page book about what would happen in Book 7. Ridiculous. :P

Over the last two weeks...

Quite a bit has happened. I'm just a loser who doesn't write much...

On the 28th, I went over to Anders' house with a whole bunch of other homeschoolers to meet this guy named Travis Zariwny. His favorite phrase is "That's totally rad, man" and he works as a set designer and cameraman for various film companies, but makes movies on his own as well. He wanted to meet us and make a movie with us, which I think is totally awesome. The details aren't exactly clear, but there's no way I'm missing this.
On the 4th, we of course went to see fireworks. We went to Blue Lake county park, where they have a huge fireworks display every year. We'd gone last year as well and it was really cool, but this time there were at least six thousand people there, and the park's only so big. We had to settle for a bumpy hillside covered in blackberry vines on which to have our picnic. Better than nothing. There really was no where else to sit.
The display was nice, we watched it with some friends of ours. It got a little bit boring after a while, but I noticed something cool. The big ones are launched far enough away that there's a noticeable delay between when it goes off and when you hear it. The light hits you before the sound. It was helpful in a way, because there were some that they launched that made a very small explosion, basically a white flash followed by some sparks, but they were crazy loud. The light/sound delay gave us enough time to wince and cover our ears.
On the 5th, I went to Anders' house again, with some of his friends, to say goodbye to Travis as he is going away for a month to work on some horror movie in Hollywood. The party was held on a dock, at the Willamette river, at midnight. First time I've had a party on a dock at midnight. How awesome is that?
We slept over at his house. In the morning, we went outside and set off all of the fireworks he hadn't used. I finally let my retarded teenagerness take over for a while, and we took a bunch of little plastic soldiers and blew the crap out of them. We had too much fun. The finale was a "battle" between firework tanks. Little did I know Anders had doctored mine so that it had a large amount of extra gunpowder inside. I lit the fuse, and the tank fired off and then went up in flames. But Anders' tank shot forward while doing a barrel roll, twirled, landed upside down, and exploded spectacularly. So it was a draw. Anders took some videos, which should eventually be on Youtube.
Here are some pictures:
Lily pads at Blue Lake. There was a small pond close to where we were, and I photographed it.

Relics of our pyrotechnic massacre. The guy in front got in between between the tank battle, and had to be picked up with a stick. His legs stretched out while he was stuck to it. It's hard to see, but the one to the far right was completely unharmed, save that his gun was bent straight down. In the middle is a victim of a small fire caused by crackling balls, the puddle on the left got shredded by a ground bloom flower, and the shapeless mass in the back is six of them fused together after being melted by a snake.

So that's what happened these past two weeks. Woohoo!

Another weekend away

This time we went to Anacortes, in the San Juan Islands in northern Washington. Anacortes is a pretty cool place. It's on Fidalgo Island, the easternmost in the archipelago, and there's an oil refinery nearby. Not helping prevent air pollution, but it's cool to draw.
My aunt and uncle live there, on a hill overlooking the ferry dock. There's an amazing view. You can see the heavily forested Cypress and Decatur Islands over a couple miles of water. Here's a map to clear things up:On the second day, we went into downtown Anacortes, to the bookstore where my aunt used to work. It's got a very good selection of books for its size. I bought "Lady Friday" by Garth Nix. It's very well-written and original. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy stories. But read the other books in the series first.
On the second day, we took the ferry to Friday Harbor (Accessible only by air or water) on San Juan Island. It was a long ride, about an hour. The ferries are amazingly spacious, though, and there weren't a lot of people on board, so it was a nice ride. We rode the "Hyak". Sounds like a bad cough.
After arriving in Friday Harbor, we wandered around for a while, ate lunch in a little cafe, and I accidentally stole something. That's right. It was a little brochure that amazingly cost $3.00. I took it, believing it was free. Whoops. I realized it cost money after about half an hour, and my mom convinced me to buy it from the bookstore where it came from. I would have just returned it. That would have made the most sense, but mom wouldn't let me. Not exactly sure why...If I had returned it, I would have had enough money to buy another book. Damned sales tax. That's why I like Oregon. No sales tax!!!
I bought it, and bought a manga that I was unable to find anywhere in Portland, at a different bookstore. Then we had some ice cream that was really perfect. I visited four bookstores in 24 hours. That must be a record or something. We went back to Anacortes in the Hyak--*ahem* Excuse me.
The next day we left. The drive home is 300 miles and five hours or so, but fortunately I came prepared. I had the Knox podcast on my iPod. Knox is a genius. He's an animator that makes really funny and sometimes retarded clay animation movies, and his podcast is hilarious. I entertained myself with that for several hours.
It's really fun going up there. We haven't visited my aunt and uncle in several years, and it was nice to do it again. They live in such an awesome place.

An awesome way to spend a weekend.

My brother and I went with Anders and Molly and Lucy and their families out to Smith Rock in eastern Oregon for the weekend. I'll tell you, that is like the coolest place I've ever been. We camped near the edge of a cliff. I will say, thanks to my slightly BORING PARENTS, I have never been camping before. This was a great place to do it for the first time.
Smith Rock state park is made up almost entirely of basalt and volcano slag. At "ground level", you're already 2800 feet off the ground. Then, add another 700 feet of solid vertical rock and you're getting there. There are two main peaks, Smith Rock and Misery Ridge. (Damned pioneers, coming up with such depressing names...) They both just shoot up. Smith Rock is five hundred ft. high, and Misery Ridge is up at like seven hundred. Most of this is straight up vertical. It's so FREAKING HUGE! I was having serious perspective problems looking at the view. The hill slopes down into a valley, with a river that looks to be about a mile away and 500 feet down from the campsite. It is. Which is why it hurts your brain to then see, just beyond the river, there's a massive rock wall that you have to strain your neck to see the top of. Here's a picture.
It's a big rock climbing attraction. That was one of the reasons we went there, was to climb. Molly and Lucy's dad is 52 but he's an expert rock climber. Me? Acrophobia. We hiked up to one of the climbing walls and I could already see there was no way I was getting up on that. We were high enough up already(that's where this pic was taken) and there was so much vertical space I was starting to tip sideways. My brain was thinking, Which way is up? Every one else climbed, though. If we do this again, I'm gonna try. Conquer your fear! and all that.
There were all kinds of animals in the area as well. The campsite field was positively infested with rabbits. There were lizards everywhere, too. Vultures populated the crags near the peaks, waiting for some climber to fall off, I guess. There were also lots of deer, and a magpie perched on top of our tent at four in the morning yesterday and WOULDN'T SHUT UP. It kept on with its "AAIP! AAIP! AAIP!" And woke everyone up about six times.
It was an awesome trip. I'd write more, but it's late and all the hiking had worn me out. Enjoy the pics. Ten-four. Over.

Neighborhood Improvement!

Yesterday I went with my dad to a meeting that aimed to improve our neighborhood. It's not the nicest. It was the second of two meetings, and I didn't get to go to the first, which is annoying, because that was the one where people could comment and come up with ideas and suchlike. This one was more of a presentation of the results. I still learned some interesting things though.
The thing about this project is no one is really sure when it's going to take effect, and how long it will take. The eventual goal is to remove all the crappy bars, adult-oriented businesses and other undesirable storefronts. Along with that, people want to host more neighborhood events like a farmer's market or street fair, and also lower the crime rate and increase safety. It sounds good all in all, but once again I don't know how long it will take.

AGONIZINGLY HOT...among other things.

Wow. I haven't written anything in 18 days! Is my life that boring? :)
Anyway, today the whole family went on a walk hike thing up by Forest Park. It was nice enough. After walking for a while, we ended up by a stone building that, according to my dad's ever-helpful hiking guide, was built in the 30's as a sort of rest stop. In 1962 the roof blew off in huge storm. Now it's a decrepit four walls, with various graffiti. Originally there were bathrooms in the building, but they've been walled off with cement. I shudder to think what they look like now...there were also candle stubs and burn marks in a lot of places. Satan worship?? Who knows. Equally odd was what someone had written 0n a sign..."here there be goblins" and "become one with the sacred light" or something like that. How weird is that?
We continued along the path, running into what was supposedly the largest tree in the park and probably the entire city, come to think of it. It was a good hundred and seventy feet high, and five feet wide. For scale:
See that little man next to it? My dad. Six feet. Cripes.
After that, we encountered some random guy on the path who said "Hey, want me to take a picture of you all together?" Admittedly I thought he was trying to steal our camera. It's a nice camera, and getting a total stranger to take your picture is often something you have to beg them to do. But he didn't. He took our picture. He seemed to be in a very good mood.
By the time we got back to our car it was beginning to bake. We went to Powell's after that. I love Powell's. It's the biggest single bookstore in existence, so obviously there's a lot to look at there. I didn't have any money though :(
Still it was fun. Every time I go there I'm reminded of how freaking cool it is. Whenever I have extra money, I'll probably end up there.
That wasn't all, though. At this point, the air was reaching the point where it could melt cheese. And we were going to go help some friends move stuff so they could remodel their attic. After half an hour of this, we were all half dead. We slowly began sinking towards the floor, until most of us were lying at ground level. Then our friends decided to reward our help by taking us out to dinner. Very nice of them. My dad, for some crazed reason, felt like going home and washing dishes. Dishes! Ah, well, more food for us. I think. We went out to eat, and saw a sailing ship going by on the river. It started firing cannons, too. That pretty much wrapped up the evening, and we went home. A very long day.

Parkrose High

Yep. I may be breaking my 8-year homeschooling streak and take a stab at high school in September. i went and visited the local high school and everything seems cool there. By the way, that's the lobby in the picture. Best picture I could find.
I got there at 7:45 am (I don't think I've gotten up that early in years, heh heh). There was a freshman named Brandon there to show me around. I was "shadow" him all day and I couldn't help thinking of sneaking up behind this kid and whacking him with something heavy. They need to think of a better term. Anyways.
First was English. The teacher there seemed pretty cool, sort of laid back. He gave me a spare literature textbook to read, and while everyone else worked on a 1-page essay, I read a creepy story about a man who loves hunting more than anything else, but is so good at it no animal is anywhere near a match for him. So he hunts humans instead. The survivors of shipwrecks that wash up on his little island in the Caribbean. But eventually he makes the mistake of hunting someone who's an expert hunter himself. The man eventually shows up behind his window curtain after presumed dead, and apparently kills said creepy person-hunter. Rather grim...
After occupying most of the 1-hour English class with that, Brandon and I moved on to art. he art building is this awesome warehouse-like place, covered in paintings by the students. Cartoons, portraits, landscapes, manga, politically-oriented painitngs, you name it. The class itself was pretty cool, if a little obtuse. Something about color layering and contrast. It also didn't help that they decided to have a simulated earthquake in the middle of everything. When it came on over the intercom, there was much eye-rolling and "Oh, gawd." Fair enough. There was one kid who made some ridiculously funny joke about it, but I can't remember .
So now we were sitting under the tables. I was busy picking the gum out of my hair, Brandon was apologizing for how boring this was, and various others were listening to iPods. It was all very unenthusiastic. We eventually wasted 15 minutes after being told to go stand outside until it was "Safe to reenter the building".
After painting in the art class for 2 hours, we moved on to PE. I didn't have a uniform so I got to sit on the gym floor and be bored. The most exciting thing that happened was when I came close to being accidentally brained by a soccer ball kicked by Brandon's girlfriend. She could probably kick a ball through the gym ceiling if she wanted to.
Then there was lunch. I got my first ever sampling of cafeteria food. My options were: Greasy tater tots, greasier pizza, and cookies. I got the pizza. Yay.
The final class was Computers or Tech Literacy or whatever. This was the longest. It also kind of sucked because some annoying girl told me to get off the computer I was using. I figured there was some reason she had to be at that exact spot, so I moved, only to later be told by Brandon that she was generally annoying and just wanted to sit there because it was her favorite spot. There were plenty of other computers available, but I couldn't log in because I wasn't a student. So I was left with the funnies from today's paper. I made do with those for the next three hours.
I don't really understand the setup of that class. The teacher gave an assignment but mostly didn't care when only a few of the kids focused on it. Most were on Myspace, and the one closest to me was watching "Naruto" on Youtube. It wasn't very focused.
That was the last class. After that I said bye to Brandon and walked home. It was a pretty neat experience, though, and I think I'll enroll in September.

Crazy Weather

Man, the weather these days. Maybe it has something to do with global warming, but it's been all over the place. In Portland, "April showers bring May hailstorms". I was riding my bike to the library a couple days ago, and I started hearing plinking noises on my helmet. Five minutes later, I was hiding under a tree, soaked, probably bruised in a couple places, hoping this would only last another few minutes. I got lucky.
And now, like two days later, it's sunny, about seventy degrees, and I'm sitting on the patio, writing this post and listening to our little fountain bubbling away. What the heck. Yeah, I blame global warming, especially since it was 89 degrees in my room last night.

Definitely worth writing about!

Yes it is! We went to hear John Edwards today, 'cause he was in Portland. It was raining when we got there, and my mom an I were fighting over who got the umbrella. We ran, soaked, down the street and into the building. There must have been about 600 people there, and the room was only about 80ft. x 70ft. It was quite packed. We sat near the back, but still got a decent view.
When he came on, there was of course a lot of cheering. After things quieted down, he started talking. He had a lot to say about labor unions and what they could do (which made sense, I suppose, because all this was taking place in a union hall. Flatter your hosts).
Edwards also had an excellent college plan. If the kid is willing to work ten hours a week, then tuition and textbooks are free. Sounds great to people like me! On top of this, he said on the first day he was in office, he would close down Guantanamo. This got the biggest cheer 0f all.
I agreed with pretty much everything he said, except for one thing. He doesn't seem to be in defense of gay marriage. This is a flaw. However, the good news is he also doesn't think the government has any right to tell people who to marry. All in all, I agree, though.
On the way back we passed a warehouse with graffiti all over it. It's like the most I've ever seen in one place, so I took some pictures.

Firepit!

Yesterday we bought a firepit. Well, it was more of a fire plate, but for some reason they call it a firepit. It's a big shallow copper dish with a screen over the top to contain the sparks. We've been thinking about getting one for a while, and we finally did.
After we brought it home, I went through quite a hassle putting it together. It took far longer than it should have, but after dinner I lit it up and we had smores. Is that how you spell it? I haven't had a smore in six years. It was really nice to be able to do that. Except they were the stickiest marshmallows in existence, but otherwise it was great. I dropped a square of chocolate on the screen accidentally. Next morning, it had turned into a slug-shaped, carbonized lump of sugar.
Hmm, I haven't posted in 12 days. I need to do this more often.

This really ticks me off!

I watched a documentary last night about Hurricane Katrina. It sucked to see all those people who needed help--and no one from the US government was doing anything. Get this, the freaking Canadian Mounties came to help from Vancouver, BC before the US government even showed up! The people from FEMA and the National Guard arrived five days after the storm! The Coast Guard, however, responded quickly, and rescued many people just after the hurricane ended. But that wasn't enough. There should have been people from FEMA there helping from the start. But apparently it was too much trouble to even ship food in. It really pisses me off to hear that another country was more quick to respond than our own.

Creepy!

I was sitting in bed last night. It was late, like 1:30 am. I was reading. I glanced out the window and--I kid you not--the sky lit up. Only very briefly, slightly longer than a lightning flash. But it wasn't lightning. The first flash was bright yellow, followed immediately by red. I didn't hear any sound. This sufficiently creeped me out. I don't know, maybe I was seeing things. It was pretty late. But I'm pretty sure I saw those two flashes, yellow, red, in quick succession.

On a lighter note, check out this hilarious Flash movie. (Yes, the characters are all inanimate objects with clocks for faces. If you've visited Newgrounds a lot, you'll understand.)

The wierdest freakin' thing

Something really weird happened last afternoon. So I'm walking in a park, and I pass by this apartment complex that has a backyard connecting directly to the park. I glanced over at the kids playing in there, and continued walking. Then I heard a voice yell for me to come over. I looked back, and this girl, she can't have been more than 9 or 10, was motioning me to come over there. Uncertainly, I walked to the fence. "Yes? Wh--" she interrupted. "Do you have a girlfriend?"
I could sorta see where this was going. "No..."
"D'you want one?"
"I suppose..."
"Well there's my sister! She's smart! What d'you think?"
I looked up. There was a girl of 14 or 15 sorta peering out of an upstairs window. Like, what the heck. Her 9-year-old sister was boyfriend hunting for her?
I sort of let out a pained "Uuummmm...." These people were total strangers. I had never seen them before in my life and lived 2 miles away.
"Gimme you phone number," the 9-year-old said.
This was where it had to stop. "Ah, no thanks."
"C'mon, pleeeaaase?"
I began to walk away. "No, sorry."
And that was it. Weird, huh? I have never heard of something like that before.

Seattle

Thursday the family went to Seattle. It's not in the same state as us, but close enough we can go up for just the day. We mainly hung out at the Pike Place market. They were selling all kinds of stuff there, from jewelry to candles, fish, vegetables, paintings, you name it. I got this studded leather cuff, which was kind of a whim. Blew all my money on it too, it was $15. (truth is, I had been saving my money until I found someone selling bokuto(wooden swords). No such luck.)
There were people playing instruments, like flute, a Chinese instrument that I don't know but it sounds cool, and a bunch of of old Mexican dudes with guitars. And then there were the Fish Flingers. They were yelling various things that were either incomprehensible or in an unknown language, and throwing 10-pound salmon at each other while running their fish market. Very impressive.

We wandered around for a while, and eventually got piroshky to eat. Then we went to a cafe and got coffee and cookies and stuff,which was nice. We took everything down to a park and ate it. The Park had a nice view of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, which are pretty cool-looking, being huge, jagged, and covered in snow.
Late afternoon we went home. It was a nice way to spend a day.

A sleepover and stuff

Yesterday I went to Ander's house for a sleepover. It was cool. He has this awesome old house, a cool yard, and a trampoline. Some other friends came over too and we had a party, mainly spent attacking each other on the trampoline. Then most of them went home and a couple stayed, Molly and Lucy, cool people, at which point we began to do other things, like legos and board games. Plus we played SoulCalibur II until 2 in the morning, lol. Because of this, we didn't get up until ten am. I was woken by Molly poking me with a stick. I tried to go back to sleep, but she began to poke me in the head, and it's kind of hard to sleep with a stick being jabbed into your face.
So we got up, ate, and then rode the bus downtown. The idea was to learn how to use mass transit. We went to some cool places, and I spent $5.25 on a plate of yakisoba I didn't even eat. Eventually we took the MAX home. So that's what happened.

PWN BUSH!

Spent some more time on the roof this morning. Nice weather again.
This afternoon, I went to a rally downtown, basically to end the Iraq war and kick Bush outta office. There were like 10,000 people there, seriously. And every kind of person, too. There were hippies, punks, rappers, veterans, beatboxers, and some nudists OMG (O_o). So yeah. We spent the first hour and a half just standing around, listening to speakers and stuff like that. Met some people I haven't seen in a while, including our old neighbor, who's 17 but doesn't look a day older than 13.

After a while, we finally got started marching. Man, it was packed! We moved at a top speed of about 3 miles an hour, at best. We marched a distance that would have taken 15 minutes to walk at most, but at this pace, it took well over an hour. I peace-duded several video cameras along the way. And it was loud. Cripes, we had to shout to say anything. People were always chanting, stuff like "whaddawewant? PEEEAAACCEE! Whendawewantit? NNNOOOWWW!!!!" After probably 600 rounds of that, I figured the question had really been answered. People were carrying a banner in front of us, and people were taking pictures and stuff, so it must have said something pretty influential, but we, being behind it all the way, had no idea what the frack it said.
When it was all over, I felt like I was gonna drop on the spot, because standing for an hour and a half and then marchin at 3 mph for an hour and a half just isn't the easiest thing to do. We got on the train and went back home. I was glad I went. MORAL OF THIS POST: STOP THE F'ING WAR! AND GET OUR DUMBASS PRESIDENT OUTTA OFFICE!

Frogs? I mean, frogs?

There were frogs in our yard last night. There I am, 1 AM, reading a book with the window open cuz the weather's nice, and what do I hear but frogs! They sounded like they were having a party or something. Of course, frogs would not be unusual if you lived in the country or some suburban housing development, or something, but in Parkrose, the closest wild frog location is probably like a mile away. Wierd.
Today, the weather was nice, so I hung out on our roof and read. The living room roof is easily accessible from my bedroom window, which is just cool. I spend time there on sunny days. Well, the weather was nice. I read a book called "The Black Tatoo", It's about demons and stuff like that. It's creepy, and pretty good.
There was also a pair of bald eagles circling over our house. They were kinda high up, but I still took some pix. Here, check them out.

They're pretty rare around here, at least where we are. Cool.
I also rode my bike to the library, and upon turning onto Prescott Street, I was scoffed at by another teenager (it seems to be happening more often. See entry #2 about the wooden sword incident). He clearly thought my bike looked ridiculous, and proceeded to speed up on his bike, I guess to show he was cooler. Admittedly, my bike is a little weird looking, being assembled by a friend with lots of old parts, with odd paint colors and such, but it works beautifully. And this whackass had no room to talk. He was riding one of those supposedly cool bikes, the miniscule ones a six-year-old could ride comfortably on. Hah.

A weekend spent 150 miles away

We went to the beach this weekend. w00t! Actually, I should say, we stayed at a house near the beach. It was really windy the whole time, so we only went down to the ocean a couple times. But it was still cool. I went with my cousins and grandparents, and we pretty much lived on cookies and Juice Squeeze for two days, heh heh...
There was this old lighthouse that about half of us visited(My grandma, J and my cousin Jake all opted to stay at the house), but it was a little boring, because you couldn't go all the way to the top. The ladder was metal, it wasn't about to fall apart! Maybe an "Ascend at your own risk" sign...but no. Nonono. However, it was pretty funny when this kid came tearing down the lighthouse stairs yelling, "Oh my god, there's a ghost up there! We heard, like, screams or something!!" The proprietor went on to explain he heard an alarm to keep people from stealing stuff. The kid shut up after that.
From there, we went downtown, which was full of little souvenir shops, restaurants, and a fish-processing plant sarming with seagulls. Walking along the docks, my mom heard this sort of barking sound, and we looked down and there were a bunch of sea lions hanging out on this floating wood thingy. I am sheerly amazed by there resemblance to overstuffed sausages with faces. They sat there, barking and sleeping, completely unaware they were rapidly becoming a tourist attraction. After watching them for a while, we bought like a pound of candy and went back to the house.
We watched a total of four movies while we were there: "Flushed Away" (OK), "Ice Age 2" (lame), "Mad Hot Ballroom (not voluntarily), and "Monster House" (pretty cool, but the animation could have been better). And Jake was pretty well inseperable from his DS.
The next day we spent mainly packing, as we were only there for a weekend, but we still managed to get down to the beach for a little while, and I found this cool little tide pool that was filled with sea anemones. The surrounding rocks were covered with snails, enough so that it was pretty much impossible to avoid stepping on some. But we fed the squished snails to the anemones. Mmm...
A nice weekend. Yeah.

Another post, and a hike

I'm a lazy bastard. That's why this is my first post since january. Well. Today, I went on a little hike with my bro J and my friend Anders. There's a cool hill a mile or so from our house where you can see the whole city. But it's 600 feet high, so it's a good hike.
Anyways, us three went out. We stopped by the place known as Crap-E-Mart to buy some cheap candy, realized we had forgotten our water bottles, went back, started off again. I brought a thick wooden rod that could be used as a wooden sword just as well as a walking stick. It might have saved my life(leave you hanging...). We made various jokes and trash-talked each other while walking to the hill. What can you expect, we're teenagers.
So we got there, and walking through the forest, we found this homemade-looking dirt BMX run. From the graffiti on the trees, we deduced it was created by pig nazi biker cannibal snipers. That was our best guess.
We were walking along this little dirt trail when we found an arrow on the ground. It was made out of white powdery stuff, probably flour. J thought it was crack, but if people have crack they generally don't throw it on the ground. Anyways, it was pointing up a little side trail. It wasn't the way to the top, so I said we'd explore it on the way down.
However, as we continued along the trail, we found little piles of the same stuff. They were about the size of...um...a muffin, I suppose, and there was like one every thirty feet or so. Nearing the top of the trail, there was another arrow, pointing to another small side trail. Only wthis one had "BM" written next to it in the flour stuff. Our curiosity got the better of us and we followed it. It wound along the edge of a cliff, and finally we reached the end. There was a big boulder here, with "BC" on it in spraypaint and then covered in the floury stuff. WTF?
The little trail ended up looping back to the big one, and right at the intersection there was a floury cross, or maybe an x, in the middle of the path. We continued along the main path, which came to and end. It looped up to some big church, and from there, we followed the road up. Anders and J had been going on about what a wimp I was, but ironically, they quit, like, 200 feet from the top of the hill. They turned around, and I had to follow them.
Eventually, with me berating them the whole way ("who's the wimp now? Huh?") we made it back to the cross. Then Anders, in one of his random moments of wierdness, walked straight through the foliage and started off into the trees. J and I heard something like "Hey guys! Check this out!" We followed and found him going along what could hardly be called a trail. It hugged the edge of the cliff, but Anders said, "I think this is the quickest way down." I replied with "I'm suing you if I die," and followed him.
We scrambled along, trying not to fall off, when we finally reached a drop of a good 40 feet. It was very rocky, and Anders was already climbing down it. J and I rolled are eyes and tried to follow. In the process, J managed to drop his $5.00 water bottle. It bounced down the rocks, taking along some pebbles, and we were confronted with the classic "looking-down-a-huge-drop-with-rubble-falling-into-the-void" movie camera angle. His bottle rolled into some ivy at the bottom. Anders was already down by this time, watching J's bottle roll.
Eventually we made it down, but I almost slipped once, and my wooden sword walking stick thing probably saved my life, as I thew it out to steady myself. J found his bottle, but we had forgotten about the 60-degree slope after the cliff. We ended up sliding and bouncing all the way down, to be confronted by the first arrow we saw--pointing to the cliff behind us. It was really wierd.
The rest of the time passed without incident, but with a lot of lame immature insults. Teens can be wierd (who doesn't know this?). Speaking of teenagers, we met some of the idiots skateboarding all over the steps at the elementary school. One of them saw my stick thing and said, in this really sorta whiny voice, "hey kid, wanna swordfight? I'll poke you all over!" I rolled my eyes and told him no thanks. Seriously, don't people like that have something better to do? But the sword thing does attract attention.
Anyways, that's what happened today. Coolness.

SNOW! Yay!

So, my first post. It snowed like hell all this morning. Well, no it didn't, cuz it doesn't snow in hell. But it's very snowy outside, and it's only 28 degrees. Brrz. I went outside but it was too frigging cold so I came back in! Greetings, people. That is all for now.