Growing up

Jess has made another video, and I thought that it showcases just how much our plants have grown over the last few days!  That footage was just taken today, so you can catch a glimpse of Harini and I planting some black penny nemophilas that I bought for 1.89$ at Walmart.  Today we were also discussing what we should do for the mural.  Debate got pretty heated:  from what I gathered, there were firm proponents of both Lion King and fish, although I somehow doubt either will end up being the finished product.  I mostly remained uninvolved and spent the lunch hour planting those nemophilas, but it looks like I'll still get a chance to have my say seeing as we have yet to reach a consensus.  I think it will probably be fine no matter what we do, but I don't know... I can't say I'm exactly an advocate of painting the Lion King on the wall of our high school, and I don't really see what fish have to do with a garden.  But I don't have a real emotional investment one way or the other, and I'm sure it will end up looking great.  In other gardening news, under the tutelage of Ms. McBurney I've been learning quite a lot.  Our zinnias and geraniums have been growing alright, but I now realize that's kind of a miracle seeing how many things we did wrong.  Pots should be filled all the way to the brim with dirt to provide air flow and the proper amount of light, soil should be saturated with water before the seeds are planted, much smaller containers should be used for seeds, and the containers should be covered with a plastic bag until germination, just to name a few of our mistakes.  As a group, we've also been overwatering the plants a bit, and while none of mine have been affected, some of Jessica's ended up dying due to oversaturation.  I've tried to keep all that in mind while planting the nemophilas, and I think my level of gardening knowledge has come quite far in such a short amount of time.  Just looking at the photo below makes me cringe now... what was I thinking?

Did I mention that is the wrong type of dirt?

A hundred days

Wow... I'm still kind of shell shocked.  I just finished my very last entry on 750 Words, marking the final day in an unbroken chain of a hundred days, and the final word in immense sea of a hundred thousand words.  Just... well, wow.  My entry today was a goodbye letter of sorts to the site and a reflection on my experience, so maybe I'll just quote a bit of that instead of writing a whole new blog post now.

...This was an amazing experience, and it gave a lot to me.  But now this chapter is over, and it is time for the next page to begin.

You've helped me so much, seven hundred and fifty words.  You got me writing again.  I think my typing is so much better now -- not that it was too shabby before, but I can write seven hundred and fifty words faster now than I could ever have dreamed on day one.  You can tell by how long it took me to get the cheetah badge; before that I had not grown enough.  Every day I was stretched a little bit farther than I was the day before, and now see how far I can reach.

And the choices you've helped me make.  Just writing out my thoughts... helping me put them in order... you made me find the time for that, and it has been invaluable.  Just recently I came into my entry with a jumbled mind and no idea which was the path for me, but by the time I was finished, my knotted thoughts had been put to the page and I could see clearly [...] what I really wanted.  I think, even after I'm long done this challenge, whenever I have a problem I can't fathom out, here is where I'll come to solve it... And when I'm finished, after my thoughts have all been lined up straight and my nerves collected, I'll know what I should do.  And when the new page loads and I see the stats for the day, I'll see the little black icon telling me I have a streak of one.  And down below I'll see I once wrote for a hundred days, and that I once wrote a hundred thousand words, and I will smile, and remember all this time that was and that maybe someday will be again.  I enjoyed this.  I enjoyed it very much.  I feel like I can write so much more; that I can think so much more.  That I can sort out my thoughts; that writing is my sanctuary again.  Or maybe for the first time.  I thought when I began this exercise that I was refinding something I had lost, but maybe that is not true.  I've written more in these past hundred days than I likely ever had before in my life, even in the days where I was newly enamored with words and writing and all its wonders.  No, this was something new.  I was creating a new spark inside myself; setting my feet and fingers down a path untraveled.

...The last page.  I still can't believe it.  A hundred days, a hundred thousand words.  It's just incredible.  Extraordinary.  And I've been going on for so long about an adventure, a journey, an odyssey, but maybe this was my adventure all along.

It wasn't across the Earth.  It was always here, dimensionless, on this simple page of black and white.  But it was a journey through time, from 2012 to here.  A hundred days it took for me to complete it, and have I come full circle, or in a straight line?  Am I far from where I began, a stranger in a brave new world, or has my wanderlust been satiated, and I'm back home, safe in my hobbit hole?

I'm not a big believer of the cyclic school of historical thought, so I hope that it is the former.  I am a different girl than I was a hundred days ago, and a hundred days from now I will be a different girl than I am today.  That's how time works; it's one long and twisting journey, one that never stops until your final day...

Yeah, I know that got pretty hammy.  And I ramble on like that for over three thousand words.  But honestly, I was getting pretty emotional over this; I've been on 750 Words every single day since January 30th, so I guess it just kind of feels like the end of something important.  I'm really glad that I did this activity; there were days that it was my saving grace and days that I felt it was the worst thing in the world, but all in all, it was an amazing experience that helped me improve my writing and typing, engage my creative side, and reflect on all the things that would otherwise just be left jumbled up in my mind.  It's well worth a little bit of ham.

Spring has sprouted

Yesterday we stayed at school after our biology exam to work on the garden, and we got a surprisingly large amount of work done.  The new soil was finally put into the garden, I must have mixed six buckets of fertilizer (3 scoops of powder for 3 gallons of water), and we moved around a bunch of plants that we had been planning on doing for a while.  Linus was moved over a bit, Shrek the cactus was taken out of his pot and actually planted in the garden -- held up by a stylishly rustic stick.  We took Harini out of the greenhouse and planted her in the garden proper; she's looking a lot better, but compared to the vibrant green plants in the garden and the new rich, dark soil, she's looking kind of yellowish.  But she'll perk up, we're sure.  The fertilizer will help, we hope, and we're also going to spray her and the other plants next week, since Adrian and Ms. McBurney fear that they might have scales.  We also took one of the vines back to the greenhouse to cut up, place in water, and attempt to create some new plants.  Speaking of, quite a few of the things we've planted in the greenhouse have begun to sprout!  The fenugreek, the geraniums, the zinnias, the snow peas, the basil, one of the thyme plants, Jessica's black eyed susan... all of them are starting to poke their heads out of the dirt.  The pictures below were taken by Jess a few days ago, but the plants have grown even more since (particularly the fenugreek there on the left).

A pithy title about Nationals

So, here I am.  It's been a long journey to this point, and for a while I wasn't even sure I was going to make it  -- just look at my last post on the subject.  But I'm here, and I'm glad I didn't miss it.  So, how did I get around the trials and tribulations that I brought up last time?  A bit was luck:  seeing as we're in IB and our course runs all year, midterms aren't always that big a deal and we didn't end up having exams in every subject.  In English and History we're just having a work period for ongoing projects that it isn't extremely critical to attend, and in French we have an oral assessment that only lasts around fifteen minutes and cannot be prepared for, so it is not too difficult for me to make it up at a later date.  I am missing a chemistry exam on energetics and a french test, but since it's just the two I feel more confident on my ability to make them up.  My decision was also a compromise; technically, the tournament lasts until Saturday, but I'm returning Thursday evening to make my biology exam and attend math class on Friday.  On one hand, that's still quite difficult as I have to now find time to study while I'm away, but I'd say it is a better option than having to catch up on our new math unit and the biology exam while also doing the chemistry exam, the french test, and my french oral assessment, as well as whatever new material we're covering next week.  In any case, that's all housekeeping.  I suppose I should talk about the tournament.  We arrived on Sunday, and there were some formalities to take care of in the form of accreditation and opening ceremonies.  No games that day, but that was made up for in the days that followed.  Two games on Monday, a game yesterday, two today, two tomorrow... our schedule has been jam packed (although I found some time to make my bio notes after our game last night).  We haven't been doing fantastically well in terms of scores, but that is to be expected at a big tournament like this:  all the other provinces have heaps of players to choose from, and a league of AA teams battle it out all season for a chance to go to Nationals.  Since we have such a small pool of players, we don't have that luxury.  In any case, our first three games were in the opening pool, and we lost them all by the seven goal spread.  After losing in that first bracket, we were bumped down from the medal running into the consolation round.  That may sound like a bad thing, but it means that we're now playing against teams that are more our speed.  Both our games today we played neck and neck with, being tied at half and even leading at some points, but in both we ended up falling apart eventually, losing by five in the first and the full seven in the second.  Our play is improving, though, and I feel optimistic about our game tomorrow.  And what about me, personally?  I think I've been doing alright; I've definitely improved over this year, that's for sure.  In our second game, we scored two goals, and I assisted on both!  Right now I'm completely exhausted and sore all over from so much hard play over the last few days, but I'll get a good sleep and be ready to be up and at them again tomorrow.

Or, you know, I could always just take a snooze on the ice...