Happy 15th Birthday to my best friend, Noah Hall! Now I’m going to write as if I’m speaking directly to him for some reason. We’ve had some amazing adventures together, and I look forward to having more in the future. We’ve also built a lot of things together (some turning out good, some turning out… really weird… like that sled we made in July 😛 ), and those times are some of the best memories I have.
Thanks for always adventuring and exploring with me. There’s been so many fun times when we just did random stuff that turned out to be fun, like when we crawled underneath your house just to see what was under there, when we build a fort in the rain on your front porch, or even more recently, when we attempted to build the pinball machine!
Building the pinball machine!
I also think your love for adventure is awesome. It’s so cool that we both got the chance to travel the country and see things most kids don’t ever get to see. I’m grateful for your friendship, and can’t wait to see you again (COME UP TO COLORADO). Happy 15th!
I am experiencing a severe lack of ideas of what to write about right now, so I thought to myself “What’s an extremely general topic that I could write a few paragraphs about?”. And this is what I thought up.
Music is a pretty significant part of my life. Not just playing an instrument (although I do love to play keyboard as often as I can), but listening to different songs, and each one of their different rhythms and sounds. On a typical day in the car, traveling around the country and driving for more than 4 hours, I can easily listen to music for most of the ride, which somehow helps pass the time, even though I’ve listened to those songs multiple hundreds of times.
Another reason I like music is because it can help me focus. When I’m gearing up for competitions, similar to probably most every other athlete on the planet, it helps me get in the zone. Whether it’s snowboarding or track (It doesn’t really help that much to gear up for tennis :P), music never fails to psych me up (Unless it’s something like Beethoven’s Symphony #9, which I actually listened to the first minute or so of before a competition just because I accidentally clicked on it. It didn’t help). I even was listening to music for a couple of my slopestyle runs last snowboarding season, which totally helped me focus on the tricks I was throwing (although it was a pain to setup right before I dropped).
I do love playing the keyboard, and I’m attempting to learn to play some of my favorite songs by ear. I’m close to being able to do it, and I can identify the key of each song if I try for a while, and can pick out the right hand melody if I practice for a few minutes, but still can’t instantly hear and play or even nail the individual left hand notes of the bass/background beat, resorting to mostly chords. But that’ll all come in time.
So that was my completely arbitrary entry on a random topic that I picked simply because I was listening to music at the time of writing. Hopefully you enjoyed those possibly parenthetical paragraphs, and I’ll be writing again shortly.
We just got back from our summer travels, and it’s been amazing. I haven’t been posting lately, because I was working on writing a post on school reflections, but I revised it so many times I forgot about publishing it… And that was all I was writing about. Anyways, why talk about school now, when I can talk about all our travels?
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been in many states, including Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, (Regular) Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. It’s been a rush, and we’ve packed so much into the time since we left Breck that I’m having trouble remembering everything that we’ve done.
After school ended (I passed all my final exams with almost straight 4’s, ending up with a cumulative GPA of 4.15, with a 4.14 from first semester, and a 4.16 from second semester), we stayed another week in Breck to pack up and get ready for our summer travels. In an unexpected move, we decided to go snowboarding for one last day (in JUNE!) on the hill, so we unpacked all our snowboarding gear (I had packed up and taken apart all our boards), and went out to Arapahoe Basin to snowboard. After a fun day of shredding in the spring slush (and a bit of rain), we headed home and repacked all of our snowboarding gear.
Not much happened between then and when we left, but we did go and visit our friends the Burdick’s (who we know from Team Summit) for a day after Isaac’s final lacrosse tournament. We had a ton of fun with our friend JR, and took his longboards out on the streets and bombed down the streets around his neighborhood.
Well, that was one of the last days before we took off, and when we took off, we were gone. We drove fifteen hours spread over two days on our way down to Austin, TX to see our friends, passing through New Mexico and spending a night in Amarillo. After getting to Austin, we met up with some of our friends at Dick Nichols Park, and then I proceeded to go and hang out with my friend Sage for the rest of the night.
The next day, we went to a trampoline park with all of our friends from Austin, and basically jumped around for a while, before going out to eat with all of them and returning to our old neighborhood for a few minutes before our departure to Dallas.
All of our friends we hung out with in Austin!
We stayed at our grandparent’s house in Dallas for a few days, seeing our cousins again for the first time in a while, and, on our last day in Dallas, went to watch Cars 3 on opening night.
One of my favorite parts of our trip was our stay with our best friends the Halls in Flint, TX, and I had a ton of fun with my friend Noah, building a wooden pinball machine and jumping into their pond at midnight. We stayed for two nights, then left to see our other grandparents in Louisiana.
After we left Louisiana, our trip really began. We decided to change our Florida plans and go to Nashville, TN instead to see our relatives and surprise our cousin Oz for his birthday. It was great being back in Nashville again, and it was awesome to see our cousins after not having seen them for a while. We traveled through Kentucky to Virginia after that, and stayed with a lot of our parent’s college friends, who were all hospitable and fun to be around. Isaac even did a Nike Lacrosse camp in Roanoke, VA!
Isaac after his Nike Lacrosse camp
We made a decision to stay in Washington, DC for a while, and it is definitely one of my favorite cities. All the museums, works of art, and government buildings are so close together, it’s easy to just walk, run, or bike around anywhere! We saw some amazing places and things around the city, such as the Declaration of Independence, the Lincoln Memorial, and even got to watch the 4th of July fireworks over the Washington Monument. On the 4th of July, we rented bikes and rode down the streets of DC (the streets being closed for Independence Day), and then watched the fireworks from the Mall.
Visiting the Capitol in DC!At the Lincoln Memorial!
After DC, we headed to Chicago, IL, but not before passing through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. We saw a couple of friends in Pittsburgh, and played chess in a city square. Once we got to Chicago, we only stayed two days, but in that time, we walked alongside the river, biked around the city, visited the huge LEGO and Nike stores, and did the typical tourist thing, going to see Cloud Gate/The Bean.
One of our only photos including all five of us
After our short time in Chicago, we left to Champaign, IL for a Nike Tennis Camp. The camp was a week long, and we got in a lot of match play against many different players. It was a fun diversion from our trip, and awesome to just play tennis all day. When we left Champaign after the tennis camp, I realized that our trip was coming to an end. We passed through Kansas City, MO, and Mom and Dad went to see Steve Martin do a comedy show.
From there, we drove through Kansas, where we drove through a huge storm and saw some tornado-looking clouds (luckily, tornadoes didn’t touch down in the part where we were).
And now we’re back in Summit County, where we’re enjoying a month of fun before school starts. I’ve been running every day to prep for Cross Country season, so hopefully I’ll be ready by the time that starts. I’ve been procrastinating publishing this blog post for so long (exactly one month to the day), but it’s finally done! So, thanks for reading!
8 days. 8 days until the end of the school year. It seems so close… Yet there’s one big hurdle standing in the way – Finals. I have three of them – in English, math, and science. I took my AP Computer Science exam last Friday, and I think I did well. As for the other three, I need to do well on most of them if I want to finish with a 4.16 GPA. I’m not worried about my math and science finals so much as my English final, but I’ll need to still put in a decent amount of studying for math and science (English is just a class presentation rather than a written final).
I’m already looking ahead to the summer, and looking at our travel plans, I can tell it will most definitely be one of the best summers of my life. We plan to travel to Texas, then scale the east coast before coming back to Colorado in August.
It seems as though the school year has gone on forever, but in actuality it’s only been 9 months. I’ve gotten my morning routine down, waking up at 6 AM, packing my school bag, eating breakfast, and occasionally doing the dishes. Although I wake up at 6 on most days, that doesn’t mean I can’t sleep in. On weekends/holidays I’ve slept in as late as 11:30. It’ll be nice to have summer vacation and not have to wake up that early.
I’m still counting down the days, as I have since school began (On the first day of school, I was like “Only 284 more days of school left!”). I’ll be writing another blog post after school ends reflecting on the past school year, so hopefully that one can make up for this one and its sub-par content (in my opinion).
