Barnes and Nobles again

Recently, I've been starting to go back to Barnes + Nobles in order to waste some time. I did that a lot during summer, but when school started again their wasn't much time. The last two weekends, we have had three-day weekends. Last Monday, I spent most of the afternoon at a Barnes and Nobles store. I spent 5 hours reading a single book, which was actually pretty good. That day was pretty fun and it is why we came again today. Unfortunately, I wasted about 2 hours trying to look for a book. I simply paced around. When I found a book that I was interested in reading I never finished before we had to leave. Now, there are going to be no more three day weekends so I won't be coming back for a while.

Library E-Books

For a pretty long while now, I've been checking out E-books at the library to read on my Kindle. This started about 4 months ago, when I first got the kindle, I read a book which talked about "assets". Anyways, while I was reading a review on the book, someone who didn't like the book quipped that their greatest 'asset' is my library card. My dad agreed with that statement. Later that day, I wanted to buy a book, instead my dad told me that the public library not only has books to check out, but E-books, video games, movies - all sorts of stuff. We didn't even have to go to the library! All we had to do was check it out through the library's website. I looked through the E-book collection for about 15 minutes before finding the book Maximum Ride and it was very convenient. Those 15 minutes answered most of my questions about the system. I initially wondered why anyone would buy books with such a convenient lending system (you could say the same for physical books except that there is a wait-list), to solve this problem, there are only a certain number of copies available to check out, popular books have about 10 something people waiting. When the lend time is two weeks, it takes a couple of months to get one book. I read a bunch of less popular books that I don't find in a bookstore or the library, before finally reading a book I had holded since I was first introduced to the library E-book selection. Now, every-once in a while when I get bored, I look through the catalog of "Available Now" books, select one, and 30 seconds later, start to read.

Not much

Today I did spent a pretty long time away from home. In the morning, I did some of my math homework before leaving at 10 for a class, as usual. Unlike most weekends, today I went to two other places. At 2 o'clock, I left to take a short math test, which was over in 30 minutes. Following that, I spent a very boring hour at the library doing math problems. Each problem took me about five minutes, but it was very satisfying to do so many of them. I'd been doing those math problems for about two weeks now, and they aren't much harder than they were when I first started, but I get really really lazy. Whenever I got stuck, I looked at the clock, then at my dad (who was reading magazines) to try to pass some time, because I knew that once it was 4 o'clock I could zip out and go to the next place we were planning to go. I got stuck a lot. Today I was also frequently hiccuping, which made it difficult to focus. After 30 minutes, I took a short break. When it was about 4:05 my dad took us to our next destination. There, I spent 45 minutes before going home.   

Skip-A-Day

Yesterday I forgot to write a blog. I don't really know what to say about that, except that I should probably write one today or risk getting in trouble. I kinda don't really have much else to say, so I guess I will write what comes to mind. As stated before, I kinda just want to have between 8-9 sentences. So I will keep writing extremely random and boring stuff until I reach that point. At this point, I would have my old lazy blog length. Whenever I do write blog, I always feel like my day was very boring. It really wasn't though. I guess it was rather normal... Yet it felt pretty long. I just don't remember much.

Quality Blog

One of the things I was supposed to do in exchange for the video game was to write a quality blog. I hadn't written blog for over two months. When I first started, I wrote about the hiking trip I had done the day before. Then I took an easy route and spent 11 days writing about my 9 days of vacation. Then I ran out of ideas. Yesterday, I wrote it on the video game that I convinced my dad to buy which is the reason I have started writing again. Of course, there is really no set definition for quality, and that means that I tend to go for the standard of "better than my old lazy blogs" which were five to six sentences long. I want to try and beat that. If I asked my dad back in the day, he would tell me that the length doesn't matter as much as the "quality" of my writing and that I shouldn't treat writing blog like a task I want to get done. Maybe it would be better to judge it based on how long it took me to think about it and write it (This patch of words took about 7 minutes total, 2 minutes for typing, and 5 minutes to think of stuff to write) ... Anyways, the point is after coming back to writing blog again, I hope I won't go back to lazy five sentence blogs anytime soon.

Okay, correction, my mom just came up and told me that this current post is too short. Great. I also recall writing some stories, but I don't like writing them anymore, because of how detailed the first section is compared to the 6-7 sentences I use for the last part. However, my mom actually liked when I wrote stories.  This is a list of the labels I've used: (Activity, Book Report, BORING, chinese, Discovery, Fable, fiction, funny, Game, joke, Journal, Letter, Lily, Long Journal, Main Idea, miscellaneous, placeholder, Play, Poem, Pretend, rhyme, Round Story, Science fiction, Song lyrics, Story, Tongue Twister.)  I used to do a lot of things. I don't remember the last time I did a story, much less all the other things.  Anyways, I also thought about something else, perhaps I should instead judge the quality of my blogs not by how long it took to write it, but how long it takes to read it. In that case, this blog can be read in under 3 minutes. Soooooo... Fail.

The game I got

Two days after coming home from vacation, I came home and wanted to get a video game (Not a free one). The result was a rather interesting experience that I think rather positively of. In the beginning I directly asked, that didn't work very well. After begging for a while, the next day, I convinced my dad to the point that he told me that he would buy a video game for me if I wrote a "proposal" to convince him to do it. He meant proposal in the context of a proposal for funding for research. In other words, I needed to write a letter with reasons that he should buy the game for me. It was like writing an argumentative paper (with respect) and preemptively discussing various counter arguments. After about 2 hours, I showed it to my mom, and she said that she would buy it for me. Then I showed it to my dad (who's opinion actually mattered), first, I ran away, not wanting to hear his response, when I came back, he did a little research of his own before accepting. The experience as a whole taught me of the importance of being able to write effectively and convincingly. For future issues, if I want, I can always attempt to write another proposal.

Part 9

The ninth day was the last day of vacation. After eating breakfast, we went to one museum about route 66. After a few souvenirs, many pictures, and one long video, we were ready to leave at 10. We crossed the California border around noon. I spent most of the car ride reading. We ate at a familiar place (The Panda Express at Barstow). After that, it was a quick 2 hour drive back home. With stops and all, we got home at around 4:30. It took a while to unpack, but after that, vacation was basically over. 

Part 8

The next day was our first day on the way home. We woke up from Gallup, NM at 7. When we finished breakfast, it was 9. We drove one hour to Petrified Forest National Park. Before we got there, we stopped at a store in Navajo Nation for some ice cream. We spent a long time at Petrified forest, from ten to about 5. Along the way, we did the junior ranger and one hiking trail. After that, we ate at another Mexican food restaurant in a nearby town. It again took us until 7. The day ended after we arrived at the hotel in Kingman at about 11.

The great skiing fiasco (Part 7)

After waking up, it was 7 o'clock, which was actually pretty late, because we wanted to go skiing that day. After eating breakfast, wasting time, and getting lost, we arrived at the skiing area at 10 o'clock. Renting the equipment took two hours, and we only started skiing at 12:30. Afterwards, I tried to learn how to ski by eavesdropping on the lessons (which cost money). It took about two hours before I could reliably stop myself. I still had no confidence in myself, which meant that I didn't do much for another hour. I only skied down the full bunny slope twice. After that, we took a picture of the sunset, and started heading for our hotel at around 6 o'clock. After that, was the moment of our winter vacation that I remember the most. I had muscle spasms. After losing control of my left thumb twice I asked my dad what was going on. He said it was most likely due to the fact that I had not eaten any salt the entire day. Luckily, my mom had packed some sausages, and I ate half of a sausage. At 6:45 we arrived at a Thai food diner in Albuquerque. We finished eating at 8:45. Then, it was a 3 hour drive to our hotel in Gallup, NM. We arrived at 11 and, for the second time, went to sleep after midnight (at least we booked the hotel though). 

Wasting a Day (Part 6)

After not going to sleep until 1:00 AM the last night, we still managed to wake up at 7:30. After a one hour breakfast, we decided to extend our stay at our current hotel, because we just really wanted to go skiing. At 9 we explored the city of Los Alamos which had a "national historic park." We also visited the atomic bomb museum (paraphrasing). By 11:30 we were finally heading to Santa Fe, which was what we were planning to do that day. Though we arrived at about 12:15, it took us nearly 45 minutes to find some place to park. We ended up parking at the New Mexico Department of Veterans Affairs, and my mom gave the parking meter fees for three hours of parking. We waited for 30 minutes at a random Mexican food dine-in restaurant, before going to the Georgia O'Keefe museum at 2:00. We also went to the Native American art museum, a large cathedral, and the New Mexico state capitol before arriving back at our parking spot 15 minutes early. There we contemplated going to the movie theater again. However, we eventually decided against it. My dad remarked that we had nothing planned for today - but we still wanted to stay in Santa Fe an extra day? We ate at a grocery store Deli next to our hotel. That took until 6 o'clock. When we got back to the hotel, my sisters realized that this hotel had a heated pool, and they went swimming. I just played video games (after booking the hotel of course). We slept rather early that day (before 11 at least).

Revisiting missed opportunities (Part 5)

The fifth day of my family's vacation was spent at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which was in Texas, but only an hour drive away from the city of Carlsbad (New Mexico) where we spent the night. We stopped and got out of the heated car many times to take pictures in the sub-freezing temperatures. Once at the sign declaring "Welcome to Texas" and twice at the two signs informing us of our entry into the National Park. We immediately went into the visitor center, where my sisters and I were forced into doing Junior Ranger. This was by far the most difficult junior ranger program I had to do in the whole vacation. It took us 90 minutes to do it. Afterwards, we decided to do a very short 0.6 mile hike, because there apparently was not much to the park besides hiking (We were ill-prepared for the longer hikes).  I took many pictures of the frosty desert, making sure to capture a Prickly-Pear in the background to remind my future self that, yes, this is an actual desert. At noon, the fog finally cleared and we could see the park's namesake Guadalupe Mountains ... right as we were planning to leave. So, after a few photos we headed towards our hotel. At 2 we ate at a subway in El Paso. Then arrived back at White Sands National Monument at 4:15, because we were determined to revisit it. It was open, but would be closing at 5, and much to the relief of my sisters and I, we didn't have time for Junior Ranger, and instead headed into the monument, sleds in tow to sled in the white sand dunes. While the entrance is blocked out at 5 o'clock, once you get in, you don't have to get out until 6 o'clock (sunset). So, we enjoyed about 45 minutes of sledding down sand dunes, before leaving. We quickly ate in the nearby town of Alamogordo before speeding (metaphorically) to our hotel in Los Alamos. We arrived at 11:30, and I might've been asleep for part of the 4 hour slog. It was so late that we didn't have time to book the next day's hotel, and instead opted to procrastinate until the morning to do so (we still found time to mess around until about 1 o'clock). 

Part 4 (Points for an original title)

The next day was, in my opinion, the best day of my entire vacation. After an unfilling breakfast where I mostly ate toast w/ butter. We left to go to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The day before, we had already visited most of the park, except for the visitor center and the actual caverns, which were located 700 feet below the surface. We went down through an elevator reading all the signs and taking plenty of pictures (the cavern was lit up by artificial light). After seeing the main attraction, we walked out through the "natural entrance", which was a sloped one mile trail out of the cave's natural entrance. By the time we were finished, it was almost 2 o'clock. We ate a very overpriced meal at the gift shop, drove a scenic route, and did the junior ranger program. We didn't leave until sunset (which was approximately 5). After that, my dad decided it was too early to go to the hotel, but too late to go to the other national park we were planning to go to. Instead, we watched a movie. The movie was from 7-9 so we ate dinner first. By 9:30 we were all at the hotel and did some research on our next destination before going to sleep for the night. 

Vacation Pt. 3

The next day, was Christmas Day, which means that next to nothing was open. After breakfast at the hotel, we left to go to White Sands National Monument. Unfortunately, the one hour drive was wasted, because it was not open on Christmas. In desperation, we parked our car and walked around the gate, but we were caught before we got very far. So, at 10 we had already left for our hotel. We also couldn't find any place to eat lunch and ended up eating lunch at 2 o'clock at a Sonic in Artesia, which was one of the few stores open on Christmas. Later on, we arrived at our hotel, but decided to visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which we originally planned to visit on the 26th. Unlike White Sands, the road wasn't blocked so you could still drive in and visit. However, the visitor center and their main attraction - the underground caverns were closed for Christmas. Because of this, we visited the national park again the next day. At 7 we returned to our hotel in Carlsbad, spent one hour eating dinner, then planned the next day's activities in the hotel.

My Vacation Pt.2

The next day everyone woke up at 6:30, but we watched TV until 7:30. After that, we quickly ate breakfast, before checking-out of the hotel and beginning the next day's journey. Our first destination was a place we literally just found out about yesterday, one of Arizona's three national parks - Saguaro National Park, which apparently was full of Saguaro Cacti. We arrived at 10 and basically just drove around, took photos, and occasionally stopped to read the signs. At 12 we did a short hike, and by 1 we had left. After that, it was a quick visit to the local supermarket and In-N-Out for lunch. Right after that, we refilled on gas, then left for a 5 hour drive to Las Cruces, NM. On the way, I finished up my math homework. When we got there, we ate Mexican food for dinner, which also filled me up. This is mostly because of how large the portions were and the fact that they had free chips w/ salsa sitting on the table. At the hotel, we booked the next day's hotel, and I slept a bit earlier than the day before.

Long vacation Pt. 1

Winter break has been going on for quite sometime now. Yet, it feels like it has just begun. This is mostly because I went on a week-long vacation, and presently don't really remember much of it. If I think about it, I can remember many of the details, but, when I'm not attempting to recall the details, I just am not aware of the fact that I've already used up the majority of my two weeks off. I think the reason for this is because I haven't done anything remotely similar to what I did during vacation, and thus only truly remember yesterday and today - the days I spent home from vacation. Anyways, if I think hard I can probably get about 80% of the details right.

We left for New Mexico on Saturday morning. On my family vacations, we normally end up leaving later than we originally plan to. Our plans took a second hit when we agreed to go a different route than we had originally planned. Under the new plan, we drove south to San Diego. I remember doing my math homework while occasionally asking my dad questions on problems I needed help on. Our first stop was to refill the gas tank at San Diego. It was also the first time my sisters and I washed the car (which we failed at doing). Following that, we sped along the freeway heading towards Arizona. We stopped for lunch at noon in the city of El Centro, CA. My mom and sisters went with me to eat KFC, while my dad decided to stay in the car and eat some of the food we had brought from home. After that, I was stuck doing my math homework in the car until about sunset (which because of daylight-savings time was about 5:30). I still hadn't finished though, there were some really annoying problems that I must've pondered for more than an hour. We mainly passed through desert and such, the other major stop was on the border town of Yuma, AZ, which was where my mom took over the steering wheel from my dad. At about 7 in local time, we had arrived at our destination - Tucson, AZ. While Tucson is only 8 hours away from our house, bathroom breaks and meals took up about two hours. We ate dinner in Tucson at a local Italian restaurant. It took about 90 minutes and most of my stomach (my dad had to help me finish). At about 9 we finished eating and headed to the hotel. We, being last minute planners, booked the next day's hotel at today's hotel. We decided our next destination was Las Cruces, NM and we would spend the morning at Saguaro National Park. Afterwards, I played Learn To Fly 3 until about 11 before going to sleep for the night.

Going Hiking (again)

Today I hiked with my family and my friend Kevin's family to celebrate the new year.  However, this 3 mile hike didn't feel like a hike at all for two main reasons. The first was how easy the trail was. It was flat and straightforward, with not very many extreme slopes. The second reason was the fact that I was talking while walking. Kevin was hiking with me, and we talked about school, video games, and life on the internet. Earlier in the day, I was dreading the hike, but it turns out that time really flies when you are doing something you want to do. The second part of our new year excursion was eating out at a restaurant for the new year. I mostly ate with my own family. Due to the fact that we are learning about nutrition and health in science class, I forced myself to choke down vegetables with the rest of my meal. I had already been doing that for a while, but this time, I absolutely hated the taste of the vegetables (specifically steamed lettuce). My sister later remarked that I was the only one in the family who ended up eating it (it was that bad). I finished eating early, and then I talked with Kevin for a while. After that, everyone headed up to the local bakery to eat dessert. I went home with a full belly and basically forgot the hike in the morning.