Everything went pretty well… I didn’t really care much for the speeches (except for Mr. McCollum’s… he’s always funny!) but consoled myself with the fact that I was almost done. I was so proud… I didn’t trip on my robe or knock my hat off when I flipped my tassel! Still, for only 21 graduates, we have one of the longest ceremonies EVER. Blah. But now it’s all done— and I’m free!

I got the coolest graduation gift from Kasey and Kaitlin… this huge multi-back-rubber thing… they know me too well :p After I showed it to people, they came to the general consensus that I needed to try it out immediately

But I also got a pair of Bose QuietComfort2 Noise-Canceling headphones from Mom and Dad. These things are NICE. Paired with my newly purchased Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum… mmmmmm

Monday… first AP. French. I didn’t take French this year (because I can take either French or government, but not both) but I still wanted to take the AP because I figured I could at least get a 3. So I went with Jeff to the mall for an hour or so to talk some French and get warmed up. Got back about 11:30, and Dad met me at the door. He was like “Well, you’re not taking the French AP today, sorry.” It turned out that the French teacher didn’t order me one, and the office somehow forgot that I told them I wanted one. It’s all kinda fuzzy. Oh well, I get to take the makeup on the 19th.

Tuesday was Computer Science in the morning, and Stats in the afternoon, both of which were pretty easy. I would talk about them, but that might lead to the AP people coming after me and bludgeoning me in my bed. English Literature was Thursday, and Biology was today. Biology was the hardest one so far.

So we’re playing at something called the Bike Blessing (meeting of the CMA) on Sunday at 9:00, but it’s in Frontenac so we gotta leave by 6:45. So we need to practice tomorrow. Nate’s playing drums for G’n'D, so we had to move his drums back home tonight. Except it’s raining. And except he left the DOOR open to the van and then went to Steak ‘n’ Shake, leaving me with the rained-on mess. Blah, I just finished cleaning it up. It’s so depressing… so much water. I hope I got enough that it doesn’t ruin his drums.

Creator: so who are you really taking to prom?
Me: …?
Creator: lol, you cut her out of People magazine or something, she’s too pretty for you… :/

/me trundles off to make room signs.

We started at 8:00 in the morning. The Rolla people apparently thought it would be funny to have us play seven rounds in a row… until 1:00… with no breaks. Then we got until 2:30 for a lunch break… which meant that we didn’t get out of the tourney until after 5:00. Phew.

The questions were not very academic-bowl-like. Lots and lots of current events, pop culture, and sports. (Not even good current events… silly stuff like Martha Stewart :p) The format was funny too. Here’s how it worked. There were two halves of ten questions each. Each question had 30 points worth of bonus… but the bonus could be split different ways (15 – 15; 6 5′s, etc.) There was no rebounding on bonuses, which meant you HAD to get the questions.

So in the morning, we promptly started the first half of the first game by falling behind by 50 points. Just because the other team read Harry Potter and listened to 50 Cent. Good nerd bowl people don’t do these things :p. But we barely squeaked it out in the end. Of course, by this time I’m afraid that we’re doomed to lose our 36 – 0 record, because that wasn’t a very good team.

The rest of the morning surprisingly went very well. We blew past the rest of the teams as we got warmed up (we had 4 games of over 400 points apiece, and shut out one team 415 – 0). After lunch, we played the same teams, except for the #2 seed, Norwood. We hadn’t played them yet, but we were nervous, because we had heard they had scored over 500 in one game.

The championship game came and I knew we were going to have to play Norwood. Having no clue what to expect, I was understandably a bit uncertain. And in walked… Cuba, who had beaten Norwood in overtime! We had previously beaten Cuba 425 – 85. ‘Nuff said. This time we beat them even worse: 440 – 80. We walked out with the biggest trophy I’ve ever seen in my life. Lol. Good stuff. But now I’m exhausted and buzzing simultaneously after drinking 3 Mountain Dews. Buzzzzzz…

• Top one one-hundredth of one percent of all high school seniors nominated (~2,100)
• ~140 of nominees selected as Scholars
• (a) + (b) = I have no chance (lol)

So basically like the uber-leet MSA, which I DID go to. X fingers, here goes nothing, I’ll apply.

The above was all about a month ago, when I received the letter. Little did I know how much applying for this thing would involve.

Having the procrastinating nature I do, I managed to put off writing the six essays and filling out the forms (which are all online, by the way. That’s important, so keep it in mind) until this past week. In a frenetic frenzy of filling out forms, I got very little sleep (and very little accomplished) this week. But ah well. I digress. Basically, I had finished most of the essay stuff by Friday. I began to submit it to the online application, and my beautiful Mozilla PowerOyster spit back copious amounts of errors regarding ColdFusion’s inability to process my data (which makes sense, since ColdFusion is just about the worst language I can think of for database control. Bah ColdFusion.) So I e-mailed the government’s version of tech support (bah bureaucracy) and tried to get help. I received an e-mail telling me that the problem had been fixed… yeah, right. It wasn’t. After trying Internet Explorer, I got the same problem. So finally I came up to my school and used their oooolllld computers / browsers to input the data. The government must design everything for Internet Explorer 4. Sheesh.

That milestone aside, I realized that I still needed a recommender to, um, recommend me. My original letter explained that the recommender password was sent to my principal. Bad move. He gets things like that all the time and throws them away. So I had to CALL the government this time and get new passwords set up, but their computers are down so they can’t do anything. The lady promised to call me back (and did just a couple hours later) with the passwords. However, she mentioned in passing that my transcript, SAT scores, ACT scores, etc. had to be submitted by mail. Oh yeah, and they had to be received by MONDAY. It’s now Saturday @ 12:30, and FedEx stops accepting overnight delivery at 4:00. I had to round up all the documents and get them sealed and signed. Impossible, yes… unless your father happens to teach at said school. So everything worked out in the mail portion; it got sent on time. My ever-so-wonderful headmaster wrote the recommendations, and I sent everything off online with hours to spare.

Except for one thing. The government decided that they would EXTEND the deadline without telling anyone… so I could have worked on my essays some more AND saved the $16 for overnighting a letter. Bah.