Happy Halloween

This past week was quite eventful with the combination of spirit week, my birthday, and Halloween.

The first day of spirit week was nerd day. I wore a t-shirt with the numbers of pi shaped into the letter pi while everyone else wore suspenders and glasses without lenses. The second day was decade day. I went as the 60's and wore corduroy bell-bottoms that were striped dark green, orange, and brown with a Beatles shirt. Halfway through the day I changed into a blue skirt suit I bought at Goodwill for my Halloween costume. A lot of people went as the 80's. Third day was mix-match day. I didn't do anything for this except not brush my hair in the morning. Meanwhile people went all out with different shoes and layering shorts over pants. A lot of people looked they did for decades day. Thursday was character day. I had no set character in mind but I went as someone out of character as me. I wore a short dress with fishnets and heels. By the end of the day my feet were killing me.

Finally it was spirit day. Freshmen wore white, sophomores wore yellow, juniors wore red, and seniors wore black. Throughout the day you could see girls applying eye black with black eyeliner or writing their graduation year with red lipstick. We dismissed two hours early to attend the pep rally in the stadium. There were floats by the separate classes, different sports and clubs walking with banners, and performances from the cheerleaders, poms team, and marching band. There was beauty pageant between the teachers where male teachers dressed as women and vice versa. There was also a battle between the classes, where the freshmen won against the seniors in the tug-of-war because the seniors celebrated a bit too early so they ran from the rope cheering while the freshmen kept pulling. Although in the end the seniors still won the most spirited.

On Sunday it was my birthday. It wasn't the best birthday I've had since I was suffering through a combination of a bad reaction to something and a sunburn on my face. The day started with a treasure hunt to find my first present, which was My Little Pony toy. Later I got the most awesome sweatshirt ever with a man carrying a Victrola on the back of it. My grandparents came over and gave me a steamboat necklace and a ring of mine they fixed. My mom made lasagna and blueberry pie and I opened more presents. I got a pair of headphones, a new mp3 player, and a card I can insert into it so it will have more space.

On Monday I went to my friend's house after school and put together the final touches of my costume. I was a Pan Am stewardess, and had the blue skirt suit and the heels I bought from Goodwill, nylons I borrowed from my mom, white gloves that were my great-grandmother's, and a paper hat and wings that I printed off of the internet. I even had "Persian Melon", the official lipstick of Pan Am. My friends were the witch from Left4Dead, a lumberjack, a nurse, a soldier, and a creepy jester. After trick-or-treating I tried to watch The Blair Witch Project, but had to stop it once the people heard noises in the woods.

October

October is by far my favorite month. The colors of the leaves changing and crispness of the air that signals the coming of winter is sublime. The other day my dad ordered firewood, which means we'll use our fireplace soon. Here's a list of somethings I love about October

Sweaters

Lately I've been getting into sweaters: pullovers, cardigans, knit tunics. And fall weather is perfect for sweaters. The air has a hint of frost, but not too much that I want to a huge coat.

Corn mazes

I've been trying to get my friends in a corn maze for the past week. Corn mazes are the perfect autumn activity. the more complicated the better. I especially love the maze that are on farms with other activities, such as hay rides, pumpkin patches, and farm stores. I tried to go to a corn maze last week to ring in the season, but it rained too much. I went last night with friends where we got lost and celebrated with apple cider afterwards.

Pumpkin carving

I have fond memories of going through pumpkin patches, choosing the perfect pumpkin (round, but not too short), and being elbow-deep in said pumpkin's guts. I've bent a few knives in my time trying to cut the perfect jack-o-lantern face. And when all the carving was done, my dad would take the pumpkin seeds and toast them in the oven. Although this year there probably won't be any carving going on because of the cost of a perfect pumpkin, my dad bought a small pumpkin yesterday for a pie.

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Although not the most appropriate movie, I've been watching this movie every year for as long as I could remember. Hopefully one day I'll get to watch it one day in a theater with other fans. I'm planning on seeing it at a local amphitheater, although I don't know the level of participation they accept there.

Spirit Week

At my school, spirit week is actually pretty fun. There's mix-match day, hat day, character day (which is basically like Halloween), and other cool themed days. It ends on the Friday of the homecoming with a pep rally.

Halloween

The only day a year where you can dress however you want and get free candy from strangers. I always love the hour before my friends and I start trick-or-treating because getting ready is always so much fun. I'm a little worried because Halloween is on a Monday, but hopefully people will feel generous this year.

My birthday!

This will be my sweet 16, the day before Halloween. I'm going to celebrate it in the classiest way I can by going to a tea room with friends. Although my celebration choice may seem sophisticated, I absolutely refuse to grow up.

County Fair

Words cannot express how much I love my county fair. I love the 4H building. I love the free pens they give you in the commercial building. I love the flower arrangement contest. I love the produce contest. I love the cages full of bunnies and chickens; the pens of pigs, cows, sheep, and goats. I love the man who plays folk songs and has a rack full of hats. I love the man who talks about reptiles with a monotone voice. I love the one room schoolhouse. I love the carnival rides held together by duct tape. I love the beauty queen named after a certain chemical found in tobacco. It's like everything I love about my county put in one place.

It's been a tradition that schools close on the Friday of the weekend of the fair, because Friday is the day that school kids get in free. Unfortunately with the two hurricanes that hit us this month, our school has used up 3 snow days because of flooding and power outages. They canceled fair day this year, which, according to my chemistry teacher, is the first time they've done that in a loooooong time.

My friends and I were talking about what day to go to the fair and one of them said he wasn't going because he doesn't like the fair. In a rush, I basically spouted everything I said in the first paragraph really fast. I hear kids complaining about having to go to school on Fair day but then turn around and say they don't like the county fair. Personally, I don't see how you couldn't love the fair. When I go away to college, what I worry most about is if I'll be able to go to the fair. I definitely won't take it for granted.

New School Year

So the new school year started on Tuesday last week (due to not having power on Monday), and I feel like I had a productive summer. I had my first second earthquake and a nice hurricane that never even turned off our power. I went on trips to upstate New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. I went to a training camp for environmental activists and tested dissolved oxygen in the Mattawoman Creek for DNR. I went to a baby shower, I went to a funeral, I hung out with friends. I even managed to squeeze in two college tours.

This year I got all the classes I wanted. This year at my school they're really pushing doing activities during lunch so they issued ID cards that you scan and one of the administrators said that if she never saw your name scanned in she'd hunt you down and choose something for you to do. Thankfully I won't have that problem this year because my first meeting for the National Honor Society this year is tomorrow.

For my spring break my parents and I are planning a trip to Germany and Poland. We're going to visit my cousin Hallie who's studying in Berlin, and then go to Krakow where I can tour Auschwitz and go to the hometown of my great-grandmother who I'm named after. I'll have to miss at least two days of school but I'm assuming (and hoping) that my teachers will be forgiving of an international trip.

The Tudors

Some of my favorite blogs are about one of my most favorite topics: The Tudors. And I'm not talking about that historically inaccurate show on Showtime. I'm talking about England's most infamous family. And the one Tudor that I am most enamored with is Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII's second wife and mother of Elizabeth I.

The only thing I love more than Tudor fact is Tudor fiction. I own seven novels on Anne Boleyn, plus every book Philippa Gregory has written on the Tudors and "The Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII" by the renowned David Starkey. I think that the reason I like them so much is they're like fiction, but it all really happened!

The first time I read about the Tudors was in sixth grade when I borrowed "Doomed Queen Anne" by Carolyn Meyer from the library. After reading it I thought it was the most amazing story until one day I found out it all happened.

Anne Boleyn, a nothing in the court of England, was the sister of Mary Boleyn, who was the mistress of King Henry VIII until he tired of her. The king was famous for having many mistresses while still married to Queen Katherine. While the king was so worried about not having a son (all he had was princess Mary), Anne Boleyn beguiled the king and held his affection for six years while he worked out his divorce and separating from the pope to lead his own church, even without being his mistress.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon ended soon after they got married, for Anne had a daughter Elizabeth (who we all know now was one of the greatest monarchs of England). She had three miscarriages after her and the marriage only lasted three years. The king was ready to get rid of Anne, so he had someone devise a plot. Anne was accused of having carnal knowledge of six men, including her brother, which is treason. She was arrested and beheaded. The king went on to have four more wives after her.

I still can't put my finger on why Anne Boleyn intrigues me so, but I think she was a strong woman, who wasn't afraid to risk anything to be powerful and spoke her mind. She was very intelligent and got an education most women didn't get back then. Unfortunately a strong-willed woman is what the king wanted in a mistress, not a wife, and Anne wasn't able to have children after her Elizabeth.

As I creeped out of my room this afternoon, I had today's Washington Post shoved in my face by my dad. On page A9 was the news we all secretly knew was going to happen but never wanted to think about: Borders closing.

NEW YORK — In a story on July 19, The Associated Press, relying on a company statement, reported erroneously that Borders was expected to ask a federal bankruptcy court to allow it to be sold to liquidators. Borders plans to ask the court to appoint liquidation firms to conduct going-out-of business sales. They will not buy any assets of Borders.

To me and my friends, Borders was way more than a book store. Every Friday after school we would go and discuss colleges, what happened during the week, new hairstyles we were considering, and just joke around until it closed at 10pm.

As my dad said, bookstores are for books you didn't know you wanted. I doubt I would've bought a book on double standards between men and women or a one where the revolutionary war had been fought with dragons had I been perusing Amazon. And I'm glad I found those books, especially the many college books I looked in at Borders. You can't just look through books in an online store, but at Borders my friends and I would gather them and bring them to our table in the café and point out interesting ones and talk about what we liked about them. When we went through a bridal gown phase, we would get wedding magazines and share the dresses we loved and laughed at the ridiculous looking ones.

After we ate lunch at a restaurant today we walked to the grocery store, passing an empty storefront that used to be a Blockbuster. My dad said people don't use DVD's anymore since they get everything off the internet. Although I admit there have been times when my sister and I or my mom and I have huddled around a monitor to watch a missed episode of Glee, watching things on a TV is just better. One day after a rough week at school, my friend came to my house with a DVD of the seventh Harry Potter movie and microwavable popcorn, which kind of goes along with my ramble in the second paragraph. It's all about sharing. My friends lend their books all the time. I don't know of anybody who would give away their Kindle willingly, but you already know what I think of Kindles.

All in all, I think the situation that's going on is ridiculous, since it seems people would rather stay in their houses than venture out into the world to get a book or a film. It's either that or people aren't reading anymore, which is worse. When my Borders closes, there will be no bookstore in the county. I would have to go to Baltimore to get my fix in the Barnes & Noble (which I hear is going down too).

Steamboatin'

For the past 12 days I was on the Erie Canal in New York on my grandparent's steamboat. I was with my grandparents, my sister Andelle, my cousin Hallie, and my aunt Innes. It took us two days to get to Little Falls, which was the first stop for the Great International Steamboat Flotilla. Little Falls was a cute but dead town, which was what I found in common with Canajoharie and Amsterdam, which were two other towns we stopped in along the way to our destination.

Our final destination was Waterford, where they had a weekend full of activities planned for us. We got there on Wednesday, and Thursday was our chill day. Hallie, Andelle and I noticed that other boats had wooden signs that they had on the dock, either for show or to hold their place. Earlier that week a lockmaster gave us Erie Canal coloring books so Hallie bought crayons in Schenectady and we used the crayons and colored on two by fours that we got off our boat. We made one for our boat and for two other boats whose owners we're friends with. Then we started making them anonymously for boats that didn't have any. Soon people who already had signs gave us some of their wood to make them signs on, and two people said they would varnish theirs.

On Friday we called my mom and told her to go to a website that had a live feed of a camera that pointed towards our boat. We all waved to the camera and even pulled in some other steamboating friends. We also had a "parade", where the boats went a few miles down the river and followed behind an old tugboat called the Urger, which dates back to 1901. When we got back to the docks, we had pizza and wings in the visitor center. My grandmother, Hallie, Andelle and I (my aunt left on a train in Amsterdam) were wearing matching French sailor shirts, which impressed everybody. We also got free t-shirts of the Sayonara, whose captain basically commanded the entire trip. For Saturday we got food vouchers to pay for our meals.

On Saturday there were vendors selling just about anything on the docks. The was a lot of people walking around, checking out the boats. The steamboaters congregated in this one area under a shady tree with small fold up tables and lawn chairs. The adults drank gin and tonic while my cousin, my sister, and I played cards. This one boat was firing a cannon and we got to take turns firing it. At night we sat on the boat and watched the fireworks across the water.

On Sunday there was a farmer's market, where my sister bought berries and a strawberry rhubarb pie with the remaining food vouchers. We steamed down to a lock where we parked the trailer in the pouring rain and we were on our way. Two days later we were home where I am now.