Holy Crap

I'm...happy.

It's Downhill From Here

'Cos today was probably the zenith of my entire life. More later? Yeah, I'll battle the laziness.

A couple minutes later: Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. It was definitely up there, though. Hells yes.

Lefty

On Wednesday I played my first tennis match. I play doubles with this awesome left-handed kid. Sadly, we lost our match, but one of our guys absolutely destroyed his opponent in doubles. We were playing the school's Varsity team, which makes my loss even easier to accept.

I've got a concert tonight. I'll be playing "One, Two, Ready, Swing." It's not a great song. The bass line is a nice blues, though.

I have another tennis match tomorrow. There's currently a 70% chance of rain, so it might get cancelled.

A New Type Board

This is really pretty awesome: TYPEDRAWiNG. You type something, then draw with it. Here's my first attempt: The DNA of a question.

Cooool.

I Like It

I've just been listening to Moby's new album Hotel, and it's good stuff. If techno's your thing or you know you like Moby, you oughta give it a try.

Good Days

Friday and Saturday were good days for me. To recap:

Friday was good because it was raining. That meant we didn't have tennis practice. I like tennis, and I enjoy playing, but I hadn't been feeling like it at the time.

Saturday was especially good. Jazz ensemble didn't meet, except for the improv group, which I am not a part of. Latin was cancelled because my teacher's a track coach and he had to go to a meet. Combined with my standard free period, I only had one class! On Saturday. Ah well, better than three or four.

That afternoon was good too. I found a copy of Star Fox for the SNES, and I bought it for under $3 at a pawnshop. It's a fun game. Star Fox 64 was pretty heavily based off it.

The same pawnshop had an acoustic bass, which was awesome, but my dad and I both agreed it was about $50 over-priced. Hopefully that price might go down and I'll get to it before someone else does.

The day stayed good after that. I went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at the People's Light Theatre Company with Gabo, Alix and her sister Violet, and a friend of theirs. We had dinner before the play, so I got to have dinner with four fine young ladies. I need to do that more often.

The play itself was good. The guy who played Puck was spectacular. I just read the book, too (I wrote an in-class essay on it today), which sort of enhanced it, I guess.

A good day all around.

Happy Earth Day

In Bio class, after we took a quiz, we got trash bags and plastic gloves and went around the campus picking up trash. One kid found a track jersey for the city's team.

Man, there are a lot of jerks throwing trash where it shouldn't be thrown (i.e. into the grass). I'd like to see someone design road-side robots to throw it right back.

Winds of Change

When I woke up this morning I had Burt Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now Is Love" stuck in my head. I can't really explain that.

Because I know my discussion of the current weather conditions holds you all enthralled, I'll continue with it. Today it dropped to 52°F (11°C). Why is the weather so schizophrenic?

The drop in temperature is worse than you'd think for me. See, the male students had a dress-down day because we more of us had donated blood, so I came in wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. I thought it'd be suitable, based on yesterday. But no. It had to get cold.

Ranking

Tennis was exhaustive today. We started at 1:30 and played challenge matches the whole time. A challenge match allows someone of a lower ranking in the team to challenge someone of a higher ranking; if they win, they move up.

I'm ranked at about tenth in our fourteen-player team, but I passed at the chance to play number nine, partly because I knew I wouldn't win, and partly because I was hoping that somehow I wouldn't have to play (yeah right).

Number eleven, though, challenged me. That ticked me off a bit. Long story short, I managed to defend my rung on the ladder, winning eight games to six after about fifty minutes or so of play. I started losing more games as I got too tired and hot to hit the ball properly. I would have probably lost if we had played much longer.

Also, if it hadn't been so hot out I might have done better. It's currently 82°F (28°C) out, and there was no shade on the court. I did bring a twenty-four ounce thing of water out, which is an improvement over previous practices, when I didn't bring any. The water did become lukewarm, but it still felt like a godsend.

It's messed up. A couple days ago all of the flowers were in full bloom and the grass was green and lush; now the flowers are wilting and the grass is dying from the heat. Spring lasted for maybe a week.

That Afternoon

I had an all right time at Ben's, except that when we played a mini-campaign in D&D he was being an ass as a DM. Aside from that it was good.

We ended up spending the night at Gus' house. We played some GTA: San Andreas (fun) and I watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico. (It was only me 'cos the rest were asleep.) It was surprisingly good.

I got more sleep than I ever tend to during sleep-overs, a sustainable seven hours.

I drew on Ben's face with archival-quality permanent pens but I think he drooled while asleep and dissolved it.

This Afternoon

I'm going over to Ben's house. I'm going to be messing around with him and Gus, so don't expect any additional posts today.

I would like to mention, though, that I've installed BlogTorrent on my server, so now you can upload to contrapants.org as well as download anything already uploaded. I put Count Monkula up there just to get things started.

If any of you don't already have BitTorrent installed, all I can ask is: What's wrong with you?

If They Say So

So, my school's giving us a "long weekend." I still have school today, a Saturday may I remind you, but I don't have school on Monday. That means my total weekend is two days.

Right, a long weekend. Of course, I did get three and a half weeks for Spring Break, so I shouldn't complain.

I need this weekend, though. For rest and such; I'm actually getting tired before ten o' clock. Unusual.

More Excuses

Sorry the posts are drying up. I'm actually (gasp!) focusing on school and the related work. Also, I'm on the boys' thirds tennis team, and practice can go late.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of thirds, it goes like this: There's the Varsity team, then the Junior Varsity team, and then there's thirds. I was surprised I made it, really. I'm not an athletic kind of guy.

The sad thing is, this is really the first time in my life I've done a competitive sport. At least it's one I'm kind of good at, though.

New Name, Same Content

Although I'm not sure what I mean by content.

Yeah, the name is different, nothing much else, though. Maybe it'll even change again. I couldn't say.

Zzzz

My school gave us a sleep-in day, and because I've got first period free, I don't have to be at school until 9:50. I'm going to get there a li'l earlier than that, though.

Shout-outs

Happy birthday, Beazle.

Er, that's my dad, for those who don't know.

"Beazle" is short for "Beazley."

It's also my friend Caitlin's birthday, so happy birthday, Caitlin. Dunno if she reads this or not, but whatever.

Downtime

Finally, ContraPants is back up. I've got no idea what happened to FatCow, but their site had been down too. Between Blogger's outages and this recent... thing, I'm pretty friggin' irritated.

The Day Reptile-Man Came to Town

Yesterday we had Reptile-Man come to our Biology 1 class. It was awesome. We passed around a ball python and got to be draped in an albino python. Fortunately I don't have any fear of reptiles beyond the normal fear of anything that could very well cause me harm.

Geckos are cool. So are iguanas. It's funny how much they look like dinosaurs.

I hope we never get an Arthropod-Man to present. I hate all of them, except for maybe horse-shoe crabs.

Bear with Me

You may have noticed that things seem a little weird, URL-wise. Well, if not actually weird, then unusual. I'm trying to revive SomewhatPants, but things are acting strange.

This is why my blog address is now contrapants.org/blog/. You don't need to bother changing any links you might have, as I have a redirect up from the previous Blog*Spot address.

Just be patient, and hopefully I'll get these kinks worked out before long.

The Legend of Ski King

When my dad was a kid growing up in Delaware, his family would go to Delaware Bay. Once, while he was there, he witnessed the beginning of a legend.

The legend of that ubiquitous character, Ski King.

On the dock near the beach where my dad and his family were setting up was an individual on water skis, holding a tow line.

The tow line went to a reasonably flashy motorboat, which had been adapted for urban tastes. The guy on the dock, though, was just standing there, holding the tow line.

The man in the motorboat turned the ignition. He turned back to the figure on the dock, and called out,

“Is you ready, Ski King?”

Back on the dock, Ski King shouted back those fateful words,

“Make it happen, captain!”

The motor boat took off, dragging Ski King off his feet and face-first into the mud.

And so, the legend was born.