Oh man school starts tomorrow and my floor still looks like an explosion because I never picked up the papers from last year. They are EVERYWHERE. And I’m not done with summer reading, nor did I read many of the non-school books that I was planning to read this summer. I also still don’t know if I’m getting a job (score is really bad at calling people back) or taking another Spanish class. I haven’t run in 4 days because my leg hurts. My braces broke and I still need to call the orthodontist. I need to get a blue pencil case with a zipper that works but I keep forgetting about that. I never made a scrapbook of my Puerto Rico pictures. I didn’t keep in touch with any of the people I met this summer, from Puerto Rico or the Boston thing, even though we all promised we would be best friends and visit all the time. I was supposed to go down to Alabama to see one of the girls but that didn’t happen. I meant to do a ton of back-to-school shopping…oops. I WANTED TO GET A TAN!! But somehow my skin never changed color and there are no days left to go to the beach. Should I continue? I also wanted to have the Spanish club completely set up but Ms. Kean is still just trying to get it approved by Mr. Gwin. I haven’t done a thing about the Red and Black, and don’t know if I’m supposed to. My schedule remains screwed up but I can’t deal with it right now. I wanted to go hiking with my friends and invite everybody up to New Hampshire and go to a bunch of fun places like Rockport or Gloucester and Six Flags. I was supposed to stop by Dive Winnipesaukee last weekend to get my scuba logbook signed and give the guy my address so that he can send me my advanced certification card. But I didn’t. I wanted to practice waterskiing more, but I kind of forgot how to do it. My piano teacher still awaits my call about when I can take lessons this year, because I forgot to make it at the usual time in early August. The house isn’t ready for the Spanish girl coming tomorrow. I did not do PSAT practice or visit many colleges. I didn’t sleep enough. I didn’t exercise enough. I didn’t learn enough. I didn’t have enough fun. I didn’t do enough. Not YET!!

SO PLEASE CAN’T WE JUST HAVE A FEW MORE WEEKS!!?!?!
Now I am desperate.

Well, I haven’t written in this thing for a little while now.  I actually spent a long time writing a xanga one day, until the trusty Windows millenium edition computer froze once again.  It was a good dude in its day but right now I wouldn’t object to a computer that can actually function for more than 20 minutes at a time.  I did manage to save the xanga when I realized the computer was on its way to freezing, though.  But I never actually got around to posting it…although I guess I still could if I get enough people to vote “aye!”

 

–one second, the mail came—

 

OMG YAYYYY!!!!!  My retirement plan quarterly statement just arrived and I am now the proud owner of 64 cents!!!  IT STARTED WITH ONLY 62!!!!  Do you know what this means to me.  I am a rich man.  I am a changed man.  I shall now sit down at a feast of bounty and dine with the gods whilst the slaves wipe my feet with a silken cloth.  No seriously, what possessed Star Market to make a retirement plan for me with only 62 cents in it?  Or for that matter a 401 k with any amount of money since I was 15 years old when I worked there, now I’m 16, and I am not quite in the retirement stage yet!!  The best thing is that they actually tell me how the 62 (well, now 64) cents is divided up in the “asset allocation” section.  My “investments” are allocated among the asset classes in this exact manner: stocks 69%, bonds 22%, short-term 9%.  Can you even take 69% of 64 cents?  Apparently.  Or maybe I just misunderstood the whole asset allocation section, which is really likely since I’m not so smart with that type of thing.  But all other things aside, I do still have some hope that by the time I’m 99, those measly 64 cents will be like….

 

 

…Mucho chavo baby!!!!

 

Okay, I really don’t care that much about any of this, but I didn’t know what I was going to write about and then the mail came and I figured I may as well go off on a rant about my personal finances.

 

Now for some normal stuff.

 

Let’s see, the week after I got home from Puerto Rico wasn’t very eventful.  Or wait, I guess it’s been two and a half weeks now, so the first week and a half wasn’t much of anything.  I tried to get back into running and fell asleep every night to the boring-ness of Emma.  I also got to see everybody which felt weird even though a month isn’t really such a long time. So anyway…on Friday after I got back it was Tessa’s birthday party and then we went up to Dartmouth for sophomore family weekend.  That was pretty fun…my sister and her friends took us to go tubing in the “rapids” of a river, except it was pretty dried up and the current kind of died, so we ended up kicking/arm-paddling down it for over 4 hours!  Sunday we hung out, then drove back home to Winchester.  I ran and played tennis with my little brother that night, so I felt like a true athletic person for once.  The next week didn’t really have a purpose.  I did driving observation (6 fun-filled hours!) with Katie and got to swim in her new pool a couple of times!  Emma became simply a bad memory as I finally made it to the last page and started Regeneration, which was actually pretty good. 

 

The next weekend I went up to New Hampshire and went hiking on Saturday and scuba diving on Sunday.  We went down to 50 feet where the water was a measly 42 degrees.  I died.  Everybody else brought along their hard-core hoods and gloves and booties, and they were mostly 30-something guys and a couple of college girls who actually knew what they were doing.  As for me, I hadn’t gone in over a year and I was down there freezing and panicking in my little farmer-john wetsuit!  Once I came back up I started thinking about how the Titanic people died after 30 minutes in the ocean, and their water was only about 9 degrees colder.  But maybe that’s sort of an extreme way to think about it :-/.  In any case, it was pretty fun or at least a good experience.

 

 

BUT COLD!!!!!

 

So this week–meaning from Monday until yesterday–I signed up to do a “volunteering thing in Boston” (which is how I describe it to anybody who asks) with a bunch of other teenagers.  I randomly got an email from BostonCares, the organization that planned it, and decided that I might as well show up.  Hey it was free and otherwise I’d just be bored all day.  But now that it’s over I’m really glad that I did it.  We volunteered at a different place every day for four days, which was cool and all.  But the best part was meeting the other kids.  A lot of them came right from Boston and it was really interesting to talk to them and hear stories about their schools/families/lives.  Some of them did NOT want to be there but some of them were really nice…and then some of them decided to pretend for the entire week that this guy had a crush on me and wanted to “holler at me”, so every time I came within 10 feet they started laughing and telling me I should get his number.    One of them knew this “scarily skinny runner guy” from WHS and we finally figured out that it was Chris Negron! 

 

So the one other thing that volunteering was good for was actually getting to know my way around Boston.  I got lost various times because I kept trying to walk places instead of take the T.  Nevertheless, I did use the subway every day to get to the volunteer sites and this little guy…

 

 

…is now my twin brother. 

 

I guess that looking back, the most interesting time was when I tried to walk from Brigham and Women’s hospital to North Station–only about 4 miles.  Except that I rather ended up at South Station instead of North Station, and then I got really confused and the whole thing took 2 1/2 hours of randomly speed-walking around the city and cutting through a couple of construction sites.  Oh yeah, and I also got lost the day before while trying to meet Tessa, Adam, and Anne for a Red Sox game!  SOMEHOW I ended up in Chinatown.  I was just walking down the street when all of the people became Asian and all the restaurants became sushi/who knows what they sold because it was in symbols I didn’t understand.  I literally exclaimed out loud, “I’m in Chinatown!!?!”  (Later I found out that Chinatown isn’t actually very out-of-the-way, but at the time I just did not get it).  But I did find Tessa and Adam and Anne and the game was really fun!  Except for the mess that became of our soft-serve ice cream.  Oh, and the Sox won and I discovered that Pedro Martinez, Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Lowe, and a bunch of other people apparently don’t exist anymore. 

 

I think that I’ve used up enough of everybody’s time by writing down every detail of my life.  Plus I’ve gone way over the computer’s standard 20-minute limit and I can feel it preparing to crash just before I can post this xanga.  Entonces, hasta pronto!

I’m back!

Everything feels so incredibly weird right now. First of all, I’ve been awake for over 36 hours because nobody went to sleep last night. We played water polo from like 2:30-4 AM in the morning and it was wicked intense man. Then we just stayed up the rest of the night before leaving around 6:30 AM to drive to the San Juan airport. It was completely sad to leave, although some people were crying and I wasn’t anywhere near that stage. It’s just so weird that after spending sooo much time with this group of 18 people for four weeks straight, suddenly all of my good friends are off in Alabama and California and Missouri….and here I am in Boston. Right now I feel like I was in Puerto Rico for years or something. Sometimes I got really homesick knowing that I was so far from my family and friends, but now I’m like opposite homesick. Plus, the other thing that’s weird is that during the trip we were staying in a little bunk room, then in tents in the rainforest, and for the two week homestay I was in a pretty tiny house. And so being back here is just like way too big. And finally I feel like it ended too quickly because I hadn’t even learned much Spanish yet, and there were some people that I was still getting to know. And also I really wanted to buy presents for you people but there was never a time!!!! Aargh I need to go back for another few nights. But anyway….those are my thoughts on Puerto Rico. I have pictures and stuff if you want to know more. So right now, aside from being sad I REALLY WANT TO SEE EVERYBODY!!!!! I missed people so much!!! But tonight I don’t think I can do anything but die on the couch, so I’ll call you tomorrow! Hasta luego!

HI!!!!!!!!

I’m with my homestay family and I have about 5 minutes to use the internet!!  wow it feels like decades since I’ve typed anything.  Things are pretty cool here.  I’m sorry but I have no idea how to send mail so you probably won’t get a letter, but you can read this instead.  My family is really nice and they have a cute 2 year old girl.  But most of the day I’m with the group of American kids.  For the first week we stayed in a house that was kind of in the jungle and worked in a pretty poor community, then we went to the rainforest to build stuff for this rainforest conservation place.  We stayed in tents and did stuff like mixing cement, laying brick, and building water trenches.  It constantly rained and every single thing was covered in mud no matter where you went.  Then we took the ferry to Vieques.  It is really nice here, just pretty and cool.  Tomorrow we get to build a septic tank for somebody!!  Haha that sounds gross but thankfully there are no septics for the tank so it’s not that gross.  Anyway….I’m sort of homesick but not really.  I MISS YOU PEOPLE!!!!  Here’s a question for anyone reading this who doesn’t drink/do drugs/have sex every single night of their lives: are we the weirdos or is everybody here??  (I mean the Americankids, not my family).  It’s not like they’re allowed to do that stuff here but they constantly talk about it.  It gets kind of old but I guess I’m just a loser .  Oh well.  Anyway I’ll see you in exactly 14 days if you’re home….ADIOS!!!

Christine Donnelly/PR-LI


C/O Malcolm Negron


Calle B, C-2, URB Guarico


Vega Baja, Puerto Rico 00693



 


What a weird address.  But PLEASE write to me and I promise I’m going to write back to everybody!!!    I am sooo excited and nervous, have I said that already?  Well, I still have a completely overwhelming amount of packing left to do so I really don’t have time, especially because I’m getting up at like 4:30 tomorrow.  So if I don’t talk to you again…I’ll miss everybody a lot, I really hope to hear from you, and have fun in all the crazy places you’re going to (or here in lovely Winchester).  Hopefully I’ll come back with a tan, a better ability to speak Spanish, new amigos, annd some cool Puerto Rican souvenirs for people!  (If we ever actually go to a place where there’s shopping).  And hopefully not with malaria. 


Well…


BYE!!!!  ADIOS!!!!!  HASTA LUEGO!!!! AU REVIOR!!! 


Oh yes, I just had to add that I got a 100 on my permit test (What do you do at a red light?  Are you allowed to drive if your liscense is suspended? etc.  VERY challenging).  Muahaha, too bad the test says absolutely nothing about how I’ll do out on the roads.  All I can say is, if you see me coming then get away as quickly as you can.  The world is now a more dangerous place!!


This time I’m really leaving.


—goodbye kisses—

Hi people!  It’s summer!



I’ll start things off with a frozen drink.  They always look so good in pictures-some day I’ll actually have to try one.


So, I’m not really sad at all about sophomore year being over.  Let’s see, I guess I’ve been sort of sad every year since the end of fifth grade.  In fifth grade it was because elementary school was ending.  Sixth grade I just had a good time and made a lot of new friends, so I was kind of sad to leave.  Seventh grade I really liked being on the small team, and I knew that the next year I wouldn’t have a lot of friends in my classes.  Eighth grade I got all depressed about the end of middle school (haha who knows why).  Then ninth grade was just so intense that when it ended I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.  I felt like I had done so much work that year (staying up till 5 AM before the history final…spending two hours per night on disgusting kurhajetz…dying the night before geometry tests), and I was looking forward to summer soo much while the year was happening but then it was done and suddenly I knew I would miss *Lester*, Kurhajetz, and even Manoogs!  But then along came sophomore year, and it was like….???  Easy!  I felt like as the year went along I kind of stopped studying for tests and working hard, but it didn’t change anything.  Finals weekend/week wasn’t even that bad this year and I still did fine on everything.  And I didn’t have any teachers that were really great or really bad.  So now that it’s over it’s just like…yeah…whatever it wasn’t even that hard, or that terrible, or that good, so I don’t really care. 


BUT.


I AM SO EXCITED FOR PUERTO RICO!!!!!



Here is a lovely map.  See the island called Vieques off the uh…east coast? (I still have to do Never Eat Sour Worms to remember east vs. west.  Which is usually fine except for the social studies test in sixth grade when I wrote worms instead of west…eh).  But anyway, Vieques is where I’ll be staying for most of the trip.  I’m going with a group of kids, and everybody gets placed with a Puerto Rican family in a not-very-developed town where we work on building houses and stuff like that.  There’s also some hiking involved, and then for a couple days we’re staying in the rainforest in this preservation place where we help to…preserve the rainforest?  I really have no idea about that part, hopefully I won’t get eaten by a jaguar.  It’s going to be sooo cool though.  It’s around the same cost as a month of summer camp except that…you’re in Puerto Rico!  Here are a couple pictures I found:





Sorry about the really weird captions…I don’t know how to get rid of them!


Everybody I know is going to have such an awesome time this summer though…Las Vegas, Arizona (2 people are going there I think!), Hawaii, Paris, Scandinavia, Brown (as in the university), insane running camp, Cape Cod, New Hampshire…


Antartica, Cameroon, Bangladesh, remote Inuit reservation…


Islamabad…


And all those other goods places!


I’ll probably see most people soon!

Here is my really weird story of english class.


So, there I was in English class.  Was I doing stuff?  Of course not!  Tessa and I were writing a weird story that involved camels, Myra, and many other stange things/people.  Then, I decided to get out my student planner to see if there was still this weird picture of two people looking at a sunset which I drew at the beginning of the year.  However, I soon realized my student planner was completely disgusting and covered in old, wet apple juice (well, I guess you’d assume that apple juice is wet).  But that’s not all.  Down the side it had all of this disgusting blackness stuck to the pages.  I was like, “hmm, what is that disgusting blackness stuck to the pages of my darling assignment planner thing?”  Then I realized: uh oh, I have a very bad feeling that there are one or two really old, really moldy lunches sitting at the bottom of my backpack.  And maybe they finally got sick of just sitting there, so they…they…they…OH. NO.  I braced myself and pulled out a mass of soaking wet crap from the bowels of my backpack.  Sure enough, upon closer inspection I discovered that there was an old juicebox which had sprouted significant leaks, very brown apple remnants covered in black polka dots (which proved to be the source of the nastyness of my student planner), and…last but not least…some absolutely revolting green chesse.   MOLDY CHEESE IS SO DISGUSTING!!  I honestly don’t understand people who eat blue cheese as a hobby.  But anyway.  So naturally I freaked out and screamed (well, a me-style scream) and ran to the trash can to throw away the grossness.  So that wouldn’t be too bad on its own.


But, alas, the worst was yet to come.


“Uh, why is your butt all wet?”


This is what some girls asked me as I made my way back to my seat.  Surprised, I tried to keep myself from actually feeling my butt to see if it was really wet, which would have looked extremely weird.  To tell you the truth, it had felt a little…wet…during history.  But I figured it was just the coldness of the chair (you know how coldness can sometimes feel wet?).  Because it’s not like I have a sweaty butt, and I totally got over wetting my pants like, months ago.  So I thought that it was just, what would you call it, a sensory illusion?  BUT NO!!!!  Tessa confirmed that my entire butt was, indeed, quite wet.  First I tried to tie a short-sleeved shirt around my waist, but you can imagine how stupid that looked.  The only other thing I had was a pair of red pants. And it is very hard to decide which is weirder: having red gym pants tied around your waist, or being very wet, let’s just say, underneath your waist?  Thankfully, the trusty Tessa walked behind me as I went out of English and headed to the bathroom.  But it’s not like there was anything I could do about it in the bathroom, so I just sort of came back.


That was when I reached for my backpack again and discovered that the whole back of it was soaking.  AHA!  A connection!  So it turned out that I had impaled the wetness upon myself, by not drinking my stupid juice when I had the chance weeks ago (and from the state of the cheese, I’m willing to say that it was possibly months).  It turns out that the juice struck numerous things today: my student planner, my butt, my Latin notebook, and my chemistry textbook, to name a few.  But because I am an idiot, I put the backpack back on and walked down the hallway.  This only re-liquified my shorts and made for more wetness comments in Latin!  Not to mention, it seriously felt like I had had a little *accident*


But never fear, this story does have a moral.  I will give it to you in pictures:


    


 


+


 



 


=



 


You have been warned.

Hello chunks!


Doesn’t it seem like this year has already ended and now we’re just in some strange waiting period between school and summer?  I mean I haven’t done any homework assignments in like 3 weeks, except for the occasional history stuff which takes an hour at the most.  And it seems like everything’s just done already, especially because track ended.  .  Maybe it’s weird but I really miss it!  I hate going home after school at like 2:30 and sitting around saying “yeah, sooo here I am houseticle….”  And then it gets really awkward between you and the house, and it’s like okay, we are spending way too much time together.  So I guess I’m still just trying to go running every day and get home as late as I can.  Even though I’m slow as ever, I’m actually starting to really like going on runs (wow, after 4 whole seasons of track)!  Soo anyway, I know there’s still finals and everything, but after that this summer should be very cool.  For the first month I’m living with a host family in Puerto Rico.  Scary but also awesome…maybe I’ll come back extremely loud or fluent or something?  WHO KNOWS!  The second half I’ll probably get a job…that wasn’t too hard last summer.


 


Well, I’m supposed to be at a “Star Wars marathon” right now according to my secretary Frank, but seriously nobody likes Frank anyway. 


Common cuts of beef.


Here is Frank.  What a complete moron huh?



And the lovely Frankette.


Ahh and by the way nobody likes Star Wars either!  Well actually, I sort of do, and it can be pretty entertaining but NOT FOR ELEVEN HOURS!!


Today we went walking around Spot Pond and then went to Friendly’s, and last night was the track party!


Yeah…I couldn’t decide where to put that sentence so I decided to just throw it in at the end there.  See     you     later.

There’s a really weird guy with heart shaped boxers and red hair marching back and forth across the computer screen.  Does anybody else see him?


 


This week is completely busy, but here I am at the computer doing nothing.  I didn’t even get home today until a little over an hour ago, and now I’ve just been, well, sitting here reading the xanga of a very special man….aand…that’s all I guess.  Today was lovely.  I woke up in a singing mood, so I quickly pulled out the 3rd grade French tape and BLASTED “Ou est le mayor” for my whole family’s enjoyment.  It is an extremely catchy song if you haven’t heard it, but it was like 6:30 so I’m not sure that everybody really appreciated it.  Anyway, at school we played volleyball in gym, found out about Ms. Letterie’s scandalous college years, did a 25-second presentation of our English project, sat in Spanish doing nada, watched our Latin teacher get really angry, and got very embarrassed in math!  Yeah, so that’s what we did.  Actually that is what I did.  In track we ran to Sandy Beach and kind of swam.  After that came piano, more stuff, language stuff, more stuff, special man, and we have reached the present people.  So I guess that is all.  BYE!


P.S. I swear I’m not hallucinating, that guy is actually there and it’s really kind of weird.