Pity I can't turn in my blogging for homework points. . . .

I blog and Facebook too much. Not as much as many people, but I do blogging instead of homework. Right now, I'm supposed to be writing an essay on Federalists and Republicans. Bleh. I'd much prefer to be doing biochemistry. We're studying plant growth in Bio, and it is so cool! I made a plant grow underwater. ;)
I'm just here to show a few cool things. I needed a break from my centuries-old political parties.

a) Cleverbot- it's an AI program that talks to you. Very good at Harry Potter. It learns from what you say.

b) The Obama Pizza- I wonder what they thought as they ate him. Was he stuck in a fridge at all?

 

c) Harry Potter Cupcakes 

d) Last thing- Instructions on how to get from Japan to China, according to Google Maps.

It all comes back to cookies. . . .

Cookies make everything better. Mostly. I like peanut butter cookies, personally. My mum makes nice, home-made cakes and pies for everyone's birthdays, so when I go to a friend's birthday party, I get really excited when there's store-bought cake. Don't get me wrong, I love the home-made things, but sometimes, it's nice to have faux-chocolate cake (or faux-vanilla) with sugar-packed, chem-dyed, florescent icing. Haha, yes, I do eat the cake first, then the icing.
I suppose I should get working on my homework now. I really have a disliking for tests and make-up work. I missed Friday, so I get to make up two tests and take another (that I missed the prep for) on Monday. Not so fun, but oh well. I get to miss Wednesday (ortho) and Friday (speech again) this week, so I suppose it won't be too bad. I think the speech meet is even an overnight. Speaking of overnights, I think the hockey team got snowed into Gillette, along with basketball and indoor track. I miss hockey. It makes me sad to look at my breezers and realize that they're almost three inches too short now. Hopefully I'll do nordic again next year, and that's kinda like hockey. If you stretch it. A lot. A whole lot. I mean, they're both cold. Right? Be optimistic. :)

Latest Google Search: Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova
(She's a tennis player, don't ask me how to pronounce her name.)

Right. Picking up where I was about 24 hours ago. . . .

Robert Frost. He lived in the New England area, as you can probably tell from his poetry. He writes about rural things, like picking blueberries in a farmer's field. He wrote Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood. You know the one: he picked the road less traveled but he was sorry he could not travel both. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I really like it. James Herriot was a vet in Yorkshire, England. His writing (noveling) reminds me a lot of Robert Frost. James Herriot writes about all sorts of animals and care and adventures he has getting to the farms. He wrote a quartet, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, The Lord God Made Them All.

James Herriot's original veterinary clinic

I love those stories that are happy but sad and you cry and laugh all together.

New Cool Thing!
So I discovered this podcast called The Witching Hour.  It's based in Walla Walla, Washington and it is (drumroll please!) a Wizard Wrock radio station. Yes! I'm not kidding. It's free on I-Tunes and it's pretty epic. (W)Right now I'm listening to the CAPS LOCK podcast, which is all about All Caps, which is one of my favorite bands. XD, as Joyce would say.

I don't know if anyone really cares, but try working out sometime. You don't have to do anything for real long, just 15-30 minutes or so. Here's a fave:
2 min light jogging
1 min straight leg kicks
1 min 'galloping'
1 min lunges
1 min elbow dips
1 min side lunges
1 min starfish (stand up, walk out on your hands, do a pushup, walk hands back, stand up)
30 sec mountain climbers
1 min Russian twists
30 sec burpees
Recover for 1 min
1 min hip lifts
30 sec jumping forwards/backwards
1 min push ups
1 min toe touches (lie on back, stick legs in air 90⠁and reach up and touch toes)
1 min straight leg kicks
1 min modified side plank
2 min pretzel stretch
2 min standing hamstring stretch
1 min lower back stretch

It really boosts your energy and you feel good. Maybe I'm strange, but I've been on a lot of different sports teams in my life and one of my favorite feelings is hard-won victory. You hit your goal, whether it's doing a workout or beating Powell in tennis, and now you're standing en plein aire with sweat drying and your lips salty, and arms getting sore. It feels good.

Like this. BAMF.

Oh, by the way, I hate essays. I like mouthwash.

Latest Google search: James Herriot
Listening to: Witching Hour, CAPS LOCK

Robert Frost and the Suckishness of Life

For some people, life is pretty good. Actually, I'd say most people probably have a pretty good life. For others, life sucks a bit. For a few people, life really sucks. And for a couple people, life has gone beyond suckishness. I think my life is pretty good, maybe there's a tinge of suck, but for the most part, pretty good.
When we were little, we wanted to marry a European prince and live in a castle and wear ballgowns every single day. 

Maybe when we were older, we realized that might not happen, so we wanted to be famous dancers. Everyone I knew was going to be a dancer and be Clara or the Sugar Plum Fairy at some point in our dance careers. (Myself included.)

Then, we discovered competition. And, perhaps, we weren't the best. So we decided to marry Mr. Right and live in a great house and live happily ever after.

But sometimes, Mr. Right was a. . . not what we expected. So then there's the phase of I'll live all by myself and be perfectly happy. I think this is when all my friends decided we'd be elementary school teachers or veterinarians.

That was the end of elementary school and we all started to grow up. Everyone began to read Cosmogirl and Seventeen and wanted to be supermodels and look like Megan Fox. Middle school was really dramatic and OMG!! Look at my new mascara!! Look at my new Abercrombie and Fitch shirt!! High school was a lot mellower. Everyone dyed their hair and experimented with new looks. Athletics became the new in thing. Independent life is looming on the horizon. Everyone is getting down to earth and deciding on college and majors and minors and scholarships. People are finding new friends and making up or breaking up. It's complicated.
I think the best life is the simple life. I read about life in medieval England and it sounds so beautiful. People lived on a farm in a town. They farmed and had small houses and simple meals. They married a person from their town and kept farming. Even reading James Harriot, life sounds so much easier than today.
I have a few post-college goals. I want to buy a house, a little house, with my savings and no loan. I want to paint my house personally. One room will be light blue with silver keys. One will be cilantro green with swirls of slightly darker green. I'll have a bright airy room with long, gauzy curtains and mirrors. I could do my dance in there. I'll have a big garden in my yard. It'll have squash, zucchini, radishes, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, marigolds, basil, rosemary, sunflowers, raspberries, bell peppers, banana peppers, zenias, dill, parsley, snapdragons. There's going to be a flower bed on the side of the house with a white trellis and I'll grow little roses up it.

I'd like to have ivy growing up the walls too. I can't find a picture on google to show you what I want, so next time I'm in Billings I'll try to take a picture. But try to imagine:
A little red brick house with a gray roof. Dark green grass with a flourishing vegetable garden and flowerbeds blossoming with vibrant marigolds and zenias and sunflowers and snapdragons. Graceful, young maples and crab-apples and spruces. Ivy and roses climbing up part of the house, maybe a fifth to a quarter. Not a super sunny yard, half shady, half sunny. Dark chocolate wooden fence around the back yard. A border collie sleeping on the sofa you can see through the window.

LOVE. ♥

Oh, I was going to end there, but I remembered that I wanted to say that I really like Robert Frost poetry. and James Harriot. Check it out. I'll tell you more tomorrow. Check out the Witching Hour podcast too.

Guess who!

Yes! It is Maggie Smith.

Ok, haven't posted in a while. I'm sorry. I can update you now, during speech practice. I really don't want to be here (speech, I mean), 'cause I've got an awful case of spring fever. I'm not sure if I've ever wanted to go home, shovel my driveway, and shoot hoops and practice tennis serves this badly. I really want to go.
But, I have to at least pretend like I've done something, so I'll finish this before I make up an excuse to leave and go home. What do you think is the best excuse to get out of practice, any kind of practice?
a) I've got a headache. (Tried and true.)
b) I've been hypoglycemic today, and it's making me sick. (I've used this once, and it seems like the more big medical terms the better.)
c) The weather is making my spherocytosis act up. (Again with the medical terms.)
d) My dog got quilled and my dad needs me to drive the dog to the vet. (I mean I don't have a driver's license, but so what?)
e) I have a trigonometry test tomorrow, and I have to pass it. (Your coach doesn't want you ineligible.)

Yeah, I think I've used all of those, and several others. Tell me your favorites.
Spring and tennis season can't come soon enough. At least there's a dodgeball tourney tomorrow. :)
I'm hoping to get a new tennis racket for spring season, but if I can't save enough by then, I'll try to get it over the summer. Here's my racket of choice.

OHMYGOSH!!!! AAHHHH!!!! AH!AH!AH!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE WILSON N TOUR TWO NCODE IS ON SALE!!!!!!!! OHMYGOODNESS!!!! OHSWEETHOTDOGS!!!FREAKINGA!!
*cue heavenly ahhhh music*

The beautiful.

Latest Google Search: hemoglobin A1C

Pieces of pizza today: 3 cheese, 2 sausage, 1 veggie (I was at a party)

Avatar doll

I was travelling over the weekend, qnd in my spare time, I made a Na'vi knit doll. It's kinda cute if I may say so. :) Just being me, I named it. Her name is Ni'ahtu. If you want the pattern, leave your email in the comments and if you can't do that, just ask for it in the comments. Oh, here's a cool name generator in Na'vi.

Why?

Maybe my posts have been a bit darker than usual lately, but sometimes things happen that are just so.... awful. Did you hear about Gabrielle Giffords getting shot the other day? She was talking to people at a Safeway in Tuscon, Arizona when a man came and shot her through the head. After she was down, he fired on civilians. Why? He ended up killing three older people, a federL judge, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina. Why? It's one thing to go and shoot your target, but it's a whole nother thing to shoot standers-by. I'm NOT saying that it's okay to shoot people, that's horrible, NEVER DO IT, but it's even worse to kill innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong spot. A nine-year-old. She had her whole life ahead of her; why?

When you said, ‘Alice should bite Bella,' I imagined crazy Alice Longbottom launching herself at Bellatrix Lestrange

Apparently I shouldn't say I like trigonometry in front of people. It scares them....
Also, I think  I'm going to try tracking something. What to track? Any ideas? Manga characters drawn? Bike rides? Google searches?
Just to start things out right, I'll do those until some gives me a better idea.

Mangas: 8
Bike Rides: 2
Last Search: Harry Potter and Voldemort facebook statuses

Normality restored

 So school starts up again tomorrow. I'm terribly sad. I was supposed to memorize my script, but I didn't. I was supposed to memorize my poetry too, but (you guessed it!) I didn't. I suppose right now I don't really care. The 3rd-4th of January is a total downer time for me. I just look along my calender and think Oh man, five whole more months. Five! Aghh. Spring break isn't until- oh my God! We have January 17-18 off!!! YES! I love this!
Moving on to other subjects, I updated my other blog so it isn't just a pre-made Blogger design. I'm also trying out a new polling system (see below), so go look at it. If you really want to make me happy, comment about the stories, preferably on claribelhawkins.

What do you think of the new C.H. design? (Scale of 1-5)

5 4 3 2 1

I've been going through my dashboard again, and here's a link to one of my favorites. It's her end of the year post. I don't know if I can come up with a list like she did, but I can try.

January: I saw Avatar and got a little obsessed. I LOVE Avatar. It is soo cool. I suppose a lot of other people think that, but that's okay. Sigourney Weaver made my cool actresses list.


February: We had a ski race in Lander and it was my first 5K. There were so few JV girls I placed 9th. It made me so happy.

March: Ski season finished a couple days before my birthday. We had spring break at the end of the month too.

April: My friend Anna and I got to go to prom, even though we were underclassmen. Not as dancers or whatever. We served food. It was really cool and we danced behind the food table a lot. There was a really incredible chandelier rigged to the ceiling.

May: I don't really remember much about May. School got out and I went on a huge bike ride with my friend Carter. He tells me it was 22 miles. I don't know. We rode from my house to the high school, through Canal Park to the library, then through the subdivision near Olive Glenn, then down this hill he calls 'Rollercoaster' to Beck Lake, then around New Cody and Markham reservoirs, down the hill, and past Maria's house. We were planning on taking the incredibly steep pedestrian sidewalk down the next hill. (That one where you flip over if you try to ride down it. If you've driven up the hill by the road to Red Lake, you know what I'm talking about.) There was a gate across it, so we lifted our bikes over and went down the hill to Dairy Queen. We got milkshakes and ate them by that clinic overlooking Sulphur Creek. It was amazing.

June: I went to a camp in Laramie for engineering. It was really cool and I met several nice people. We helped to build a community garden in the park and I went to my first ever amusement park and drove (for the first time!) a go-cart. Some of my friends and I took one of those old-fashioned get-in-an-ancient-costume pictures. On the way back from Denver (where the amusement park was) we played the Numa-Numa song and fist-pumped the ceiling of the Suburban and rocked it (literally) down the interstate.

July: I saw the Rolfcoptour tour. It was All-Caps, Lauren Fairweather of the Moaning Myrtles, the Whomping Willows, Justin Finch-Fletchley, the Parselmouths, part of Ministry of Magic (OMG!), and FiveAwesomeGirls. It was my first concert. Like, the next day, I drove down to Denver (again) with my family and we saw a Natalie Merchant concert before flying to New York to see my extended fam. I saw my cousins, swam in Lake Erie, and saw just how green a chlorinated pool can be. We were going to watch Shaun of the Dead, but my grandmother thought it would be inappropriate. She was probably right.

August: I went to camp in Montana and saw a lot of old friends. I met a new friend from Germany and there's a video somewhere on here of me and her singing Teletubbies. I went on the annual backpacking trip and saw my first grizzly. School started again and so did tennis tryouts. Those started the week before school and we played all day and into the night. I played pretty badly, and missed varsity, but I ended up as #2 JV.

September: My tennis partner and I played #3, which is good. We ended up with a record of 14-3 I think. At finals in Gillette, we placed third in the JV girl's B flight. Yay! I tried out for drama again and landed the role of 'Page' in The Mouse That Roared.

October: The play went really well and I had people coming up to me for a while after saying 'You were that page weren't you?' I got my second ever flower for a performance. Actually, it was a rosebush, but that's even better. One of my friends made me join Speech and Debate instead of my normal Nordic Skiing. I still have mixed feelings about Speech, but I'm thinking I'll join skiing again next year. I made a Halloween costume and entered the school contest again. As you probably remember if you've been reading this, I was Galadriel from LoTR.

November: Honestly, November was a big blur. I was doing NaNoWriMo and I wrote a story called "The Athenian League." You can read about that here. I met two new people, my ML and another lady, Brenna and Suzanne. They were really amazing and I probably wouldn't have finished my No without them. And sadly, this season of PBS Mystery came to an end. That's really the only show I watch so.... yeah, I bought my favorite episodes. XD The actress (Clare Holman) who plays the pathologist (Dr. Hobson) in Lewis made my favorite actresses list. She might have topped Maggie Smith, but I've only ever seen her as Dr. Hobson and I've seen a whole load of Maggie Smith.


December: I saw HP7 and the day before it came out, my French 2 class watch the French HP trailers and read the French wikipedia page. Pretty much epic. I think I finished the Hunger Games now. That's one of the many things on my "Kristina Horner Did This, Maybe I Should" list. I went to State Drama and that was really cool. We had a new director, Whitney, and it was kinda refreshing to have her. Trevor and I could share _______ jokes with her! It was great. I saw some amazing make-ups and a lot of pretty good prosceniums. It was fun. I went to my first New Year's Eve party and Trevor brought 48 party horns. I've never heard so many horns blown at one time.