NOTE: this is a super super super long post, since I’m blogging both about today AND about MONDAY…so yall betta read ALL of it, yes yes??!!!....and leave comments in the tagboard please!!!

I just realized that I still have to blog about ROPES!!..haha ok so on Monday, GTM went to clements for high ROPES (chen cynthia prita nish currie travis shaz nick katie karen linda kyle ann me mrs. Spain) , where u climb on the poles and stuff…we introduced ourselves all over again (this time chen didn’t say that he was from china!!...lol), and went over basic rules and instructions about what we were gonna do…THEN the fun begins: the attack of the harnesses!!!..we had to all wear harnesses cuz that’s the only way that we could be belayed from the ground and assured (hopefully) that we wouldn’t suddenly come crashing down to the ground while 20 feet or so above the ground…but anyways, the harnesses are designed to fit around ur waist, hips and legs – thus making it EXTREMELY (and I do mean extremely) uncomfortable for the guys..hehehehe…ok yall the Thursday BEFORE ROPES, mrs. Spain had specifically told the guys to wear THICK pants (like jeans) and no thin khaki pants/shorts, cuz umm..the harnesses might kinda hurt….hahah well nevertheless I think the guys were in pain half the time…wooo I’m glad I’m not a guy…=P..oh yea and we had to wear these funky helmets too, that made us look like construction ppl…and then right when we were walking out of the t-shack wearing our helmets and beautiful harnesses, the dismissal bell for first period at Clements rang, meaning that a whole bunch of clements ppl got to see us wearing us oh-so-stylish attire….hahah…we finally got out to the course, and our first assignment was to climb up a ladder, up a pole (with iron staples in it), walk across a really skinny log, kick another log (it was supposed to represent an obstacle in life), and then get lowered back down by the rope, all safe, supposedly….chen was the first one to go, GO CHEN!!!...he scrambled up that pole like a monkey and then made it safely across (both arms free from the rope!)…woohoo I think we all cheered like crazy when he came back down, since he was the first one to go…lol….i was kinda disappointed when it was my turn tho, the pole had seemed higher than it actually was…phooey…hehe yes I love heights….most ppl eventually went up the pole and made it all the way across....ann’s comment when she saw the log was priceless, “it…it’s ROUND!!!!” (yes ann, logs ARE round..lol)…and then when we get lowered from the pole down to the ground, we’re supposed to keep our hands on the rope so that we don’t flop all over the place….nish, thinking that he’s superman or something, puts his arms out to the side (like superman) instead, and he ended up curling all way around the log UPSIDE-DOWN and ended up looking like spiderman instead…HAHA…but he got down safe tho!!!....

lunch time was quite interesting….at first the clements ppl who wanted to buy lunch inside (steve and Cynthia) were afraid that they’d have to walk inside the building wearing the dreaded harnesses but that issue was nicely solved instead….hmm I don’t actually remember what went on at lunch, except that prita had really yummy apple bread, and that i finally realized that the name of chen’s church is not JIHAD Bible Church, but JIHRA Bible Church…haha sorrie, chen, it just sounded really similar (oh…side note here: “chen” and “steve” are actually both one person…ok that didn’t make sense…what I mean to say is that the two names refer to one person, I just use the two names interchangeably, I have no idea why..haah ..of course, if you want to make it more complicated, you can argue that “chen”, “steve” and “sid” are all one person too…LOL…ask me about that later if ur curious)

after lunch we went out to do the second activity, which was to climb up the same pole but to a higher level, step out on a platform, and then jump off and swing across a cable to the other side (where there is another pole), swing back halfway across the cable and get lowered down another stepladder….by this time it had stopped raining so yay!!...THIS activity was even worse for the poor guys in the monstrous harnesses, since when you jump off the platform, ur basically hanging in ur harness by the end of a rope…and then gravity pulls down..dun dun dunnnnn….lol so these were the reactions of some of the guys (as I remember it) when they came swinging down the cable:

chen: *terrified look*
nish: ouch…ouch….ow ow ow oWWW!!!
shaz: *high-pitched squeal* OWW!!!!!
kyle: ooohh my goodness……..
and travis, the best of all: GIMME SOME SLACK!!! GIMME SOME SLACK!!!!!!

HAHAH…that was absolutely classic..and then after shaz safely dismounted, me and chen walked back with shaz to make sure he was all rite:

me: hey shaz, u alrite?
shaz: *still walking funny* yea…I think….well..no more kids for me
chen and me: …MORE??!!
shaz: uhh..i mean no kids…I mean…ah, never mind

lol….yea yea, we know, shaz was a little..uh “busy” when he went to Europe this winter break…hahah j/k j/k…..however, at this point I need to give the hugest CONGRATULATIONS in the world to ms. PRITA KUMAR!!!!!!!...well prita has a fear of heights, which is nothing to be ashamed about at all…on the first activity, she dind’t even plan to go up the ladder at first, but she did!..and she went five steps up the pole too!!..YESSS!!!!...that was awesome, she’s so brave..^_^…but the BEST part comes on the second activity…for the second activity, you have to climb even HIGHER than the first one….and she did it!!..she climbed the ENTIRE pole!!!..and then she even came down the cable too!!..maaan it was terrific…we were cheering like mad for her when she reached the top and when she came down…it was totally amazing!!...prita we’re sooo incredibly proud of you!!!!..^_^

and in the second activity, where after the person swings down on the cable, we had to bring a ladder up to the cable to lower the person down to the ground, so the person would get lowered down on one side of the ladder while another person went up the other side to unhook the person from the cable …well, the person who unhooked us was another ROPES instructor (fergot his name) who was kinda..well..BIG..in a horizontal way….. …anyways, whenever someone goes up a ladder, there needs to be one person holding the sides of the ladder from either side, and also one person behind the person going up or down the ladder to “spot” the person on the ladder (ie, be ready to catch them if they fall)….. one time I was standing there holding the sides of the ladder, and mr. big guy says “hey, I need a spotter”…so I see steve standing off kinda in the distance not doing anything:
me: hey chen, spot him
chen: *looks over* him?
me: yea..?
chen: *look of extreme terror comes over face as he realizes the size of the person he’s supposed to be spotting*

hahahah of course that sets me off laughing like crazy, and chen starts laughing too (and no, he never did spot the poor guy)…darn it I think the guy figured out what was going on…I felt bad for him, cuz he was really nice too….then afterwards, chen comes up to me:

chen: u see, that would have been pointless because if I had been spotting him and if he had fallen, TWO people would have died instead of one
me: *keels over laughing* OMG that is going in my blog….

Ok well that concludes my crazy adventures at ROPES I think….i totally loved it, and I’d do it, or anything like that, again in a heartbeat (TED, we need to go ROCKCLIMBING!!..^_^)

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Today (Friday) was pretty crazy too…first off in English we had to sit through much ado about nothing again…that play is so jacked up..shakespeare like reuses his own plots or something, and then adds in some crude sex jokes too….yes, indeed, Shakespeare does have a dirty mind ….everything we read is about that topic…last year especially…..that’s all we read about last year …Scarlet Letter, The Awakening (a rather pointless chick flick novel that we nevertheless had to seriously analyze), and Great Gatsby…not to mention dear ol’ Tess from this year too…seriously, even last year Mrs. Guest even told us that that’s what those books were about…really, u’d think that ppl would have better stuff to write about than sex…anyways I’m going off topic… oh and before that we talked about Gulliver’s Travels as well…I got distracted and ended up listening to tanner tell me about his dream in which he saw a dinosaur and strangled it..HAHA…that was interesting…which reminds me, I had a very very interesting dream last nite too about a person…it was very very odd….iuno…oh well ..

Bio was even crazier…we got to play with fruit flies today!!! Fruit fries, flute fries, flute flies, fruit flies….ray niral kristin david and me were at a lab table together, and it was funny how we were all so mesmorized looking at the flies flying around in the tube…ray and me spent 5 minutes wondering why we didn’t see any flies with white eyes in the tube until mrs. Westman finally came over and told us that our tube was supposed to be all red-eyed because it was labeled so on the side ..haah we felt smart after that…then we had to put the flies to sleep in the tube and take them out to separate them into males and females…lol it was hilarious watching the flies get knocked out..there was this netting inside the tube that most of the flies were walking around on, and as they quickly fell asleep, we were watching this one fly that looked kinda..uh..drunk..??..and there was also a gooey thing at the bottom of the tube for the larvae, but the flies werent’ supposed to get stuck in the goo…nevertheless as we diligently watched the genius flies, several of them fell asleep and plunged head first into the goo…HAHA..well, I guess we lost those flies….trying to get the flies out of the tube and into the Petri dish was another matter….niral refused to touch the flies and immediately volunteered to make a new tube for the flies, kristin followed suit, david was the smart one and volunteered to hold the microscope cord (hhaha..huh..??),and ray pushed the tube and the dishes towards me…lol…the first few flies came out pretty easily cuz ray tapped the tube several times and a whole bunch dropped out…the ones in the mesh were harder to get out, and I think ray gave a couple of the flies several concussions by hitting the tube with his finger.. and then I tried using the brushes (we had 5 brushes) but it still didn’t work..so ray says to me “come on steph, you’re asian, you know what to do!!”…hahah and somehow I knew exactly what he was talking about…I took two more of the brushes, turned them upside down and used the handles as chopsticks to drag out the mesh...=P..woohoo it worked!!..i hope that the next class knows that the handles of those two brushed are dirty so that they don’t go picking them up by the handle….but they prolly had no way of knowing..hehe.. ohwell!..lol j/k….separating the flies into male and female was a little harder…but it wasn’t that bad cuz we figured out that the males had black butts and the females had white butts…so while niral looked through microscope to help us identify the genders of the ones that we were unsure about, we were trying to adjust the position of the flies so that he could see it..ray was using his brush to push the flies around, but for a long time all niral could see was the brush and no flies:

niral: I see brush..i see brush…i see brush…i see brush..i see br- OH MY GOD!!!!

LOL..that was classic, cuz he was SOO surprised when the fly finally came up on the screen (“it looks like some nasty cockroach!”)..

Ok enough about bio now, moving on to Spanish….hmm all we did was take a quiz on Sor Juana and then take notes afterwards..the quiz was freakin hard….no one knew how Sor Juana died, so uh, we all put different answers..lol..i was talking to sridevi afterwards, and we decided that we shoudla put something like “ella fue atropellada enfrente de la Sagrada Familia en España”..HAHAAHA…ah, good memories of Gaudí and Spanish IV….and johann and apoorva were singing that one song and now it’s stuck in my head (“baila baila baila baila baila sin pararrrrrrrrrrrr!)…

And eco!!..nothign really happened today in eco altho I still freakin love that class…or more the people in that class….our little corner of the classroom – colin troy currie sky heather dustin frank….i love you guys!!!...^_^…..sky was doing some scary Gollum impression that I saw out of the corner of my eye and decided not to turn around to see exactly what he was doing…lol…he’s ditching our class next week!!..just cuz he doesn’t wanna do the work..>_<…colin THINKS that I’m gullible and told me that he was gonna grow his hair out to his chin….hmm…interesting….and after the lecture was over, he took my blue fuzz ball off my backpack…double >_<..!!...i LIKED that fuzz ball too!!!..and when I tried to run away he yanked me back again…grrrr..


haha so concludes my crazy post