Belatedly reported goal reached!

I have been writing a book that may or may not be published over the past few years. However, I kept changing the plot, so I was continuously rewriting the beginning few chapters of my story. I have finally decided on a final plotline. I had written to a certain point in the story a few months ago but decided to change some things about the story's beginning. I have now reached that point again, and this time, I am sure I can keep writing without having to change the plotline again.

Hopefully.

Anyway, if I ever publish it, I will most likely post a link on here to whoever is selling it (I will probably start with LuLu.com, mainly because it is free due to the people at Lulu printing books as they are ordered instead of printing a thousand copies, hoping they sell, and meanwhile charging the writer hundreds of dollars).

Anyway, I have some quadratic equations to factor for homework, so I'm going to go do that now. And stop typing here.

Insulin Pump Woes

I love my insulin pump. It's easy to use, convenient, runs on AAA batteries instead of nearly-impossible-to-find-in-a-store button batteries, and has a blood glucose meter attachment so that, after I check my blood sugar, it tells me how much insulin I need, if any.

However, it is annoying. I set the thing on vibrate so that, if it starts alarming me during Algebra class, it won't distract other people. But the vibration drives me nuts sometimes.

It has blood sugar testing reminders that the user of the pump can set to go off at almost any point during the day. It has reminders for if I forget to bolus for a meal, reminders if the insulin inside the pump needs to be refilled, and many other little reminder-alarm thingies. Therefore, the pump vibrates very often. And it drives me crazy fairly often. If it vibrates at me when I'm in a bad mood, I might yell at it or something. Not that the pump cares—it's a computer the size of a cell phone.

Anyway, I try to not get terribly mad at the thing because I set most of the reminders myself. I can't really complain when I told it to remind me to test for lunch.

I guess this suppression of my annoyance has sneaked its way into my dreams. I will have a dream where my pump will vibrate to remind me to test my blood glucose, and I will push "OK" to get the thing to stop vibrating. Soon after, it will vibrate with another reminder for me. I push "OK" again, slightly annoyed. It keeps vibrating reminders at me, and each time I push "OK" to get the thing to shut up, I get a little madder. I might even tell a person in the dream how annoying it is. Then, I wake up from the dream to find out that my pump has been vibrating at me, once a minute, for the past ten minutes or so. Or maybe the past hour. Then all I want to do is put the thing into the blender on high power, but I just turn it off and go back to sleep.

But it is better than an audible, siren-like alarm. My first insulin pump, while it could be set to vibrate instead of beep (or imitate an ambulance's siren), used expensive, hard-to-find-without-special-ordering batteries. Putting the settings for any pump for the thing to vibrate instead of beep makes the battery run out very quickly, so I set the pump to beep instead.

One night, I woke up to something that sounded like an alarm. It was very loud. I went out of my room, saw the smoke alarm, and assumed it must be alarming. There was no fire, so I thought that it might be malfunctioning or telling us it had a low battery or something. I knocked on my parents' door to ask them to get a ladder to turn the thing off so I could sleep or something, but my mom just told me to try to sleep and wait until morning to turn the thing off. I went back to my room, surprised that the alarm seemed to be as loud with my door closed than it was with my door open (the smoke detector was in the hallway outside of my room.) Then I realized it was my insulin pump, telling me that my infusion site was clogged.

So, vibrate has its merits...it's just annoying.

Yes!

I made it into District orchestra!
I think my score was between 165 and 175, but since I do not have what that number is out of, the number doesn't really mean anything. But hey, I'm in. I think I am going to be a second violin, but that's fine with me...to dispel a common orchestra myth, seconds are just as important as first violins, if not more important. We help create the foundation for the melody, which is usually held by the firsts.

And now I can start practicing music that I'm not absolutely sick of. I will have to play the district pieces at some point in the future to prepare for the District orchestra event (basically 2 days of school, but all orchestra, all the time! except lunch), but maybe I will have learned to like them a little more. At least now I can work on my Suzuki solos (just learning the music in the workbooks, because it's really good music, but I'm not using the Suzuki method. Which is fine with me—it works for some people, but the method my private teacher uses works for me) and my senior solo piece (unless I change my mind in the 2 and 1/2 years until I'm a senior). And my 3-octave scales, which are way cooler than the 2-octave scales they had us practicing for Districts.

Anyway, on Homestarrunner.com, they've finally released a DVD of the Shorts cartoons (except Cheat Commandos). Personally, I want all of the DVDs and a Trogdor hoodie but have none of it. Even though usually you can read the transcripts of audio commentaries and bonus toons at http://www.hrwiki.org, it just isn't the same. You also don't catch the sarcasm in the audio commentaries that way... and you can't watch the bonus emails, and...yeah. But hrwiki still is a great site. It has pretty much anything you'd want to know about Homestarrunner.com, Thoraxcorp, and Videlectrix, and interviews with the creators. It lists all the easter eggs for the toons, which is nice (I had missed the "Dangeresque on Ice" egg before I looked at the transcript for email 125, Rock Opera).

But anyway, I probably should get back to my math homework... this matrix equation doesn't really seem possible to solve in either matrix or 3-variable system of equations form, but the 3 kinds of Chinese food have to have prices, don't they?

I guess it's just as well... I'm not a huge fan of Chinese food anyway.

Drat! The spell checker on this thing still isn't working...

Rosin arm

Well, I auditioned. I think I got in. I didn't stop like I usually do while playing, I am almost certain that I did not sound shaky, and I was even able to correct a tiny intonation problem. We get results later sometime... I don't know when. But I know I did well.

By the way, if anyone out there reading this has to audition for something, eat a banana first. There's something in them that calms nerves somewhat. I am sure it helped me; when waiting out in the hallway, one can hear which exerpt of a song is being played, and when waiting outside the second audition room, I realized I had left the piece of music that has my fingerings and bowings and notes and stuff in the other audition room. They had the part taped to the stand, but it didn't have my fingerings and circles and scribbles. Praise the Lord, I had that piece memorized pretty well, so I could just look at their part and let muscle memory do the rest. A year ago, I would have panicked at that situation. I think the banana helped that, as well as experience. Although, if going to an audition, if someone tells you to relax, let me tell you now; it is almost impossible to relax in an audition or performance. Just remember how well you can play the part and basically boost your self-esteem. That, and remember that God is always with you... that was what helped me most.

Although, thanks to holding my violin under my arm the way I am supposed to, covering the bridge and strings with my elbow, I have streaks of violin bow rosin on the inside of my elbow: what I call Rosin Arm. (for you non-string players out there, it is sticky and rubbed on the bow hairs to allow the bow hairs to "grab" the strings on a violin for a cleaner, fuller sound) So I'm gonna go wash this rosin off of my arm... it's sticking my skin together. Yuck.

If you didn't understand that last paragraph, don't feel bad... it's an orchestra-specifically-violin-and-viola-thing. Heh.

Anyway, I gotta go...we're eating out at Chick Fil A or somewhere and I am being called by my parents. So, yeah. I'll post whether I got in when I get the info and feel like it.

Wow... oops

My top, absolute favorite website has not been on my sidebar for some reason. Maybe I just forgot. Anyway, please, if you have never been there, go visit http://www.homestarrunner.com. Now. Or find some time soon. It's clean, it's hilarious, and if you're bored, it's great. Just poke around. I'd suggest looking at the "characters" page first to learn who the characters are (click "eject" on the VCR for a hidden video about the "easter egg" character), and then look at the Strong Bad Emails (sbemails), which are probably one of my favorite features on the site. Then venture to the toons page, and, well, just have fun. The site's great. I've been visiting off-and-on since 8th grade, (mostly on) and I've never grown tired of it.
And now, back to math homework.

Stuff

Well, I did get blisters from ice skating, but it was fun. Next time, hopefully I'll remember to wear long, thick socks instead of thin ankle socks.

Anyway, I put up a couple new links, one to the official "Dilbert" website (Dilbert is awesome) and another to Scott Adams's blog (he created Dilbert). This does not mean that I support what he says on his blog (like his latest post on Darwinism vs. ID). It just has some funny stuff sometimes. Personally, I think young earth. If you want to debate that with the various billion-year periods and dirt layers, I point to Noah's flood—that's where the dirt levels came from. I mean, they have found entire fossilized trees sticking through what is supposed to be several million or billion years worth of dirt! I have never heard of a tree living that long. I am a Protestant Christian, and if you don't like that, sorry.

Anyway, on to math homework involving identity and inverse matricies! yay... heh

And apparently, the spell check button now spews its code instead of checking my spelling, so if I didn't spell something right, sorry.

Watch me get lots of comments about D vs ID. Yikes. At least I can delete them...

Well, I haven't posted in a while, but my AP World History homework has, for the moment, lightened up a bit. Thank goodness. Anywho, what's new...

One of my friends who starts writing story after story but never really finishes one has finally finished one. She's a really good writer, but she asked me to edit it, so I pointed out a few typos and a few places where her spell checker messed up and mentioned a few plot holes. Otherwise, the story is excellent. If she has it published and I remember, I'll put a link to one of its sellers so everyone can buy it. Or I might just put the title. We'll see.

Her working on her story has encouraged me to work on mine... so I have added a prolouge with a backstory and a few pages of the main story to my (maybe) future book. I'm not posting any details here so no moochers steal my ideas. I'm only saying that I seem to type with the mood of the story; when I was typing a scene in which the main character was being really stealthy earlier today, I was typing as quietly as possible and barely moving my fingers. During other, more exciting parts, I'm tapping away like crazy. I'm so weird.

Oh, and who could forget the auditions to get into the Senior District Orchestra? I have to audition on Monday (I don't know if I said this elsewhere in my blog, but I play violin). I hope I get in, but I have played the audition excerpts so much in the past few weeks that I am beginning to despise the pieces. So we'll see.

And hopefully I will remember to tell my math teacher that I will not be able to tutor Monday because of that... I kind of forgot that I had auditions on the 14th when I signed up to tutor... = )

And there are live performances of musicals in my future. Actually watching them instead of playing in them. Wow. I get to see Les Misérables for my birthday in December (and get out of school a little early for it... heh) and then, when the school orchestra goes on a trip to New York this spring, there is a really good chance that we will get to see Phantom of the Opera. My two favorite musicals! *does happy dance* Hopefully I won't start singing along with Les Mis...

Anyway, I need sleep. I have German first thing tomorrow morning at school, and we have a new teacher who, no offence meant, but she's really annoying, in my opinion. Although after school I have German tutoring, and my tutor is both a Christian and a friend, as well as being really a very nice person. So at least tutoring is a lot more fun and interesting than German class.

Oh, and I get to go ice skating tomorrow! One of my friends now has a job being one of the people at an ice skating rink who skates around to: a. make sure people don't do stupid things like skate against the flow or chip away at the ice with the blades and b. Help the people who either fell or were knocked down by someone doing something stupid like skating against the flow or by tripping over a pothole in the ice. So I am fairly sure she loves her job, and she asked me to join her at the ice rink tomorrow. Where, supposedly, they have wide skate sizes. Which I need, or else I end up in oversized skates or in skates that are too thin/small and give me blisters. So I might actually walk out of the place not reciting the "Why I never go ice skating" list that usually comprises of 1. no wide-sized skates and 2. I stink at ice skating (mainly because the skates are the wrong size.)

Okay, I'm going to sign off now before I start typing again.