6:00am - woke up and got ready for my field visit (in other words, i put on fancy clothes and a wig).

6:45am - moved the car from the far parking lot to the loading dock.

6:55am - ran outside and “moved” the car to avoid getting a ticket for parking illegally in said loading dock.

7:00am - registered for spring semester classes. because i came in with zero credits (word of advice: take APs in high school! you’ll regret it if you don’t!), i register fairly late, barely before most freshmen. for this reason, i could only get into three classes that i need for my degree. that was 10 credits. you need 12 at least to be a full-time student. i was aiming for 15.

7:15am - got in the car and headed off to my field visit with four other girls from my class.

8:00am - arrived at rochester city school #9 without losing any of the cars that were following mine. a student escorted us to the library to wait for the principal.

9:05am - got talked to by the two assistant principals, after waiting in the library for an hour and fifteen minutes. considering that we’re only there until 10:30am, this was kind of disappointing.

9:10am - we paired off and another student and i went to a second grade classroom to observe. we watched them during their music time (no music room, the teacher comes to them), and we did the cha cha slide! this particular field visit made me feel like i was at work again, because we didn’t do a lot of observing — most of the time was spent giving spelling tests, keeping students quiet and on task, and escorting students about the building. but it was cool to see how an urban school works. and when i say urban, i mean urban. 99-100% minorities, and right across from the projects.

11:30am - arrived back at geneseo. i changed and ate lunch with lauren.

12:30pm - took a calc. III test. ugh. let’s not talk about that.

1:45pm - the weekend began and my insane morning was officially over.

ETA: i found two more classes to take, so i’m up to 14 credits! yay! i’ll post my schedule later.

3 things i did tonight:

(1) bummed around pittsford plaza with stabby, jon, and abby’s sister cat. we had dinner at applebees, hung out in barnes and noble, and hit up wegmans. it was a pretty swell time.

(2) saw the dark knight. expect a separate post about it tomorrow, but for now: OH MY GOD.

(3) got pulled over by a brighton cop after dropping jon off. i had no idea if i was speeding or not, because the dashboard lights don’t work anymore. so when he asked me, “do you know why i pulled you over?” i was truthfully able to answer no. turns out it’s not just my dashboard lights that don’t work — my tail-lights are out of commission too. so i got my first ticket tonight. and it wasn’t even my fault. fucking dentmobile.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIZ!

liz turned 17 today! my little sister is getting less little every day : P

i went back to the roc for her party. it was a swell time. highlights included a very delicious pizza and a trip to buckland park. please note that the trip to the park (late at night) involved me driving 15 people in the 5-person bulgemobile. that beats last night’s record!

and now i’m back in the ’seo with the dentmobile, now rightfully equipped with pink hubcaps for the week. life is good.

so, it’s sunday. i’m going to backdate this entry to friday, since this is when i will begin the epic tale that is my weekend.

okay, so on friday after i took my physics test (i don’t want to talk about that), my mom came and picked me up in the dentmobile. then she drove me back to the house, and i officially received the car for the weekend. first stop, SUNY oswego to pick up stabby. it’s an hour and a half there from my house, and two hours back to geneseo. this was the longest i had ever driven before (that syracuse trip was a close second). anyway, we stopped off at the pittsford wegmans so abby could say hi to her mom and we had dinner at macaroni grill for old time’s sake. we got to geneseo too late to see the hockey game, so we watched a movie and played scrabble, then went to bed around 1am.

the next morning i got dragged to brunch (i despise brunch, so i picked out all the grapes from the fruit salad and ate those, and had some kool-aid) with the usual crew. after brunch abby and i drove to wegmans because we needed some stuff (carrots, mainly). afterwards i gave her a tour of main street and finally went in the local record store, buzzo music. turns out they aren’t getting new cd’s anymore, instead they order them on the internet for you and you can pick them up. and i’m like, uh, why would i do that if i have the ability to order things off the internet also? so i didn’t end up buying anything, but i might go back sometime and look through the cd’s they do have (i was only looking for things on “the list”).

at 8pm we went to that musical i’m required to see for theatre 100, “pacific overtures.” it was really weird, but i don’t think it was bad. it was just bizarre. and it finished at 10:30pm. so stabby and i got right into the car and headed back to oswego. in a sudden twist of fate (this is a term abby has taken to use a lot, often in situations that do not require it), we ended up driving 15MPH on the expressway for twenty minutes, and there was zero traffic. why, you say? one word: FOG. so much fog that i couldn’t see ten feet in front of the car, but i knew it was pointless to pull over, since that fog wasn’t going anywhere. so i drove 15MPH with my emergency flashers. it was intense.

i dropped abby off two hours later at 12:30am. another two hours back and it was 2:30am, making it the longest i’ve ever driven in a car, officially.

so liz and i were driving home on elmwood after dropping her friends off at 11:30 when we noticed a huge cloud of smoke glowing in the distance (and i mean HUGE). we thought something was on fire or something. we decided to follow it, because we’re curious kids. we first assumed it was due to construction on the expressway (asphalt or something), but after driving past westfall and the 390, we saw it was beyond the trees still. so we got onto townline, and it was still behind the trees. so we got onto jefferson via winton, and drove until we were right next to it. we pulled into the parking lot and found a huge smokestack behind a construction company, and gray smoke was just pouring out. there were lights around it, hence the glowing. disappointed that it was kind of anticlimactic, we went to pull out of the parking lot when another car pulled in (remember, it’s 11:30 at night). they rolled down their window and we saw it was full of teenage boys. the driver yelled, “is that thing on fire?!” and i replied, “no, it’s just a smokestack.” then he asked me, “haha, are you stoned?” and i said, “naw, man.” i seriously said that. it was probably the funniest thing ever.

(this was reminiscent of the time my mother and i drove around for a half an hour looking for the source of some search lights we saw in the sky. my family seems to be easily amazed by the simplest things, i’m telling you.)

excuse my french, but holy fuck. this night started off so awesome, and then everything went horribly wrong.

at 5:30 i drove in the dentmobile to the new town park for the brighton recreation camp staff party. that was pretty fun, i stayed for a little less than and hour and chatted with becky, the staff from my camp, and melissa (from after school). it was pretty laid back and i had a good time. afterwards i picked up stabby and we did some “lan and stabby things,” which usually include dinner and complaining about the fact that we never know what to do (we contemplated a movie, but decided against it in the end).

then, on the way home we were listening to the radio when all of the sudden it stopped and made odd noises. then the dashboard lights flickered and then went out. and then my headlights went out too. so i pulled over at tim horton’s and turned the car off so i could call my dad. he said to try to drive home. so i hung up the phone and attempted to turn on the car again, but it wouldn’t turn over, it just made a weird noise. so i called my dad up again and he said he and my mom were on the way. after about five minutes i realized that they were probably going to the wrong tim horton’s, i forgot that there was one down the street. so i called them up again and they said they were turning around.

about 20 minutes later they called back and said that there had been a car accident and someone was dead, but they were coming. when they arrived my mom and dad were both looking pretty grim, and immediately went in side to wash up. this is when i knew that they did not only witness the accident, they helped (my mom has CPR certification, since she’s a lifeguard and a former ambulance driver, and my dad’s a firefighter). i had to give my dad one of the shirts i was wearing (since i had three on, like usual), because his shirt was in the back of his car, apparently covered in something. but they didn’t say a word about it, so i just helped my dad jump start the dentmobile, which worked (kind of) until the car was on for about a minute, and then it died. my mom said to just do it again because she knew it would make it home. so i took stabby home in the bulgemobile and my mom and dad attempted to drive the dentmobile home, but only made it to the intersection before it died.

they said to keep going, so i took stabby to her house and then drove back to the intersection. by then a tow truck was there and the dentmobile was ready to go (something about an alternator or something). we all piled into the bulgemobile to drive home. on the way home my parents explained to me what happened (after assuring me that the fact that the car broke was not my fault). a man was trying to cross the street when he was hit by a van. my parents pulled over to help, and my mom did the breathing part of CPR as another man did the compressions. she used my dad’s shirt as a mask. they said he was already dead though. i asked my mom if she was scared, and she said no. i am very proud of my parents. it’s times like these when the real heroes shine. i aspire to be like my parents, their courage is incomparable. i can’t even imagine.

so… syracuse.

(1) curls currently lives there.
(2) it’s an hour and 45 minutes away from brighton.
(3) it’s two hours and 15 minutes away if you accidently go the wrong direction of the I-90, because your navigator doesn’t understand the meaning of reading ALL of the directions (that little E was extremely important, it seems).
(4) it’s the location of funk’n waffles, the location of the patent pending show we attended.
(5) it’s a very run-down place. it’s kind of like being in the south wedge, except everywhere.
(6) there are many many ruthless solicitors EVERYWHERE. in fact, we were solicited twice within 3 minutes. curls gave in to the first guy (i was kind of scared of him, he used the n word a lot), and within a minute another one sat down at our table and gave us some story about walking really far and needing money for the bus. i actually laughed out loud at him, but curls and liz got mad at me. whatever, it was funny to me.
(7) it’s more scary than being in new york city. seriously.

on the bright side, patent pending was pretty darn awesome (so awesome i made curls burn me their cd later). afterwards we talked with the guitar player/vocalist, joe. he was hilarious. i hadn’t planned on buying merchandise, but after talking to him for five minutes, he managed to convince me to buy a black shirt with a neon pink spaceship on it. we both agreed that red would clash with my hair, and that squirrels doing karate would get old quick. lol.

this weekend i:

(1) went to my cousin steven’s 14th birthday party (happy birthday stevie!).
(2) played guitar hero for xbox, marking the first time in years that i successfully played a video game.
(3) swam in a pool for the first time since steve’s party last year (i’m not really a swimming fan).
(4) caught up on my reading (harry potter, of course).
(5) drove more than 80 miles, and none of it on the express way.
(6) rubik’s cube’d a lot (my best time is still 1 minute 30 seconds).
(7) went grocery shopping twice.
(8) played scrabble with stevie (no one wants to play with me anymore, which makes me sad a lot).
(9) did my laundry (i know, amazing!).
(10) watched both anchorman and wayne’s world, two of my most favoritest movies ever.

i would also like to mention that today i broke my 18 day streak of not watching television by indulging in a rerun of “family guy” as i ate dinner. but i would like to note that i wouldn’t have turned it on if my dad wasn’t already watching it, because i was reading the newspaper at the same time.

the other day i was at a red light in winton plaza when i looked over at the car next to me. in the driver’s seat was a man looking straight ahead and wearing that creepy burger king mask. he slowly turned and stared at me, as creepily as possible. i could not stop laughing, and neither could he (i could hear him laughing under that ridiculous mask). he kept staring straight at me until the light turned green. it was possibly the funniest, and strangest thing that’s ever happened to me whilst driving.

which reminds me, i recently re-spray painted the hubcaps of the dentmobile (see this photo my dad took of the process). i did two coats of pink this time, and i additionally did two coats of lacquer, so hopefully they won’t fade this time…

i finally bought summer shorts today at old navy. i’ve been putting it off, but my 20% off coupon expired today, so i had to go. this kind of messed with my project-doing plan, but you know (it’s not like i didn’t see that coming). i bought two pairs of snazzy plaid shorts and a skirt for banquet (also plaid, actually).

i’d like to note that i did go to eastview mall, and i didn’t get (extremely) lost getting there and back. i took good ol’ jefferson road the whole way there, since i know i can’t get lost if i don’t have to turn at all. on the way home i thought i’d give 490 a try, and it went well until i noticed i was going past where i wanted to be, so i got off at winton rd, which is by my house, but i got off at the end near east ave. so i took winton across brighton to get home. so that was kind of pointless. my mom said i probably missed the sign for 590, which i was supposed to get on.

i’d also like to note that yes, i got lost last time i went to eastview. my mom said to take 590 north (entrance at winton rd.) until i reached 490 east. i thought i got on 590 north, but it turns out i got onto 590 south, which instead turns into 390. i noticed i was west, not east, when i reached the airport. good times. NOT.

so i drove myself and liz to school today, so that was pretty much awesome. dinah and i went to wendy’s 6th period, and we took my car, to get the most use out of the situation.

and having the car meant i’d be able to drive to ments and home afterwards, but of course it’s cancelled again. and since liz was calling everyone she knew for a ride to practice, i’d thought i’d be the nice sister and drive her. on the way home to pick up her stuff for practice, liz opened my phone and saw a voicemail from becky (my boss at brighton rec), asking if i could come in since they were one staff member short and it’s wednesday (we are always at max capacity on wednesdays). so i dropped liz off and went to work. on a wednesday. it was INSANE. but that’s an extra 2.5 hours i can add onto my time sheet next week, plus i love working.

speaking of working, i’m a little confused about something. so, i get minimum wage. when i started working for brighton rec last summer, i got the then minimum wage of $6.75/hr. the counselors that were working their second summer got $7.15 and told us that you get a raise if you come back. and minimum wage went up, so i now get $7.15. but i have been informed that this won’t EVER go up. shouldn’t i be getting $7.55? but i’m not going to complain about it (in real life, i’ll obvs do it here), because i’d like to keep my job. because i have the most amazing job ever.