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. :)