Monday, July 23, 2007

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

Friday, July 6, 2007

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!