Calvin Cupcake!

As per our family tradition, on "Fat Tuesday" we made and decorated cupcakes. It has always been a good time for family as well as a fun, tasty activity sporting everyone's artistic talents. The creativity seems to escalate, and this year I brought it to a new level of delicate precision.I'm glad we had enough yellow gel! I had to use a toothpick more than once to draw it into the frizzy style Calvin wears because it would spread out gradually. The head, eyes, and mouth are chocolate frosting carefully laid with toothpicks, the eyes swirled into the vanilla background. The tongue and nose are sprinkles. It took some time, but I think I nailed it pretty well (although there's some chocolate sticking up from the border on the bottom-right -- I seriously don't remember that problem outside of the picture. Maybe my dad took it at an angle just different enough from the perspective at which I worked....).

There's So Much Going On!

I was recently thinking about getting a job, but do I really have time for anything more?

This week I had my first two golf lessons. I will be having them every Tuesday and Thursday for a few more weeks. Why am I taking golf? I don't really know. My mom signed me up for it along with my siblings. I'll admit I need more physical activity, and maybe golf would be ideal for me since I'm not generally an active, hyperventilative sports person. Still, I'm not really interested in golf, although everyone says I'll grow to love it... Do some addictions begin with reluctance?

Philosophy and chemistry are going well, and I'm managing to keep up with math and Spanish. Not much to say here.

The computer's internet safety system decided to start blocking blogger because an offensive blog had been updated recently and was thus being linked to from the sign-in page. This prevented me from blogging for a few days, and it was quite frustrating because I couldn't figure out what it was blocking until I had my dad look at it a little while ago.

Last but not least, Mega Man 9 has finally been released! The Blue Bomber's first game since the Playstation is a downloadable title for the Wii (and other internet systems, I believe, such as the Xbox 360) and is designed to be like an NES Mega Man. I got around to downloading it today, and my first impression is: WOW, COOL, GREAT, YES! (retarded, I know.) The graphics are pretty much identical to an NES title; the music and sound have the same, awesome "low" quality of the originals (complete with sound cancellation); and the gameplay is just like it always was! You cannot slide or charge your weapon, but for the really old-school MM fans like me, that's no problem. The only bit I've seen yet that was never present in any form in the NES games (although I haven't seen much yet -- my mom kicked me off after forty minutes) is the lab; you can take screws to Roll and Auto in exchange for items, like in MM7, although there are especially cool, useful, and fun ones this time around. In addition to the regular game, there are some extras and mini-games to unlock, a whole bunch of challenges to fulfill, and a downloader for any add-ons that may be released in the future. Creating Mega Man 9 in the first-generation style is definitely the smartest move Capcom has ever made, and MM9 itself may become the greatest in the series.

So, with all that on my plate, I'll be pretty busy for a while! MM9 is going to steal as much of my free time as my mom allows, although I need to finish Wily's Fortress in a Rockman 2 hack so that I can write a post on it and another like it. That said, I'll probably finish the hack and review the two hacks first, enabling undivided interest in the new title. Between that and my mom, I'm likely to be the last person to beat MM9, but when I do I'll still review it, 'cuz I love the classics, and this is a brand-new classic.

Oh yeah -- the "Something Man" boss names tradition has finally been broken. There are 8 Robot Masters, but one of them is notably different from any other -- it's a she. Yup. Splash Woman. = ) She's a hostile mermaid. Reminds me a bit too much of Leviathan from Mega Man Zero, actually, but I'll let that slide. Besides, she was built by Dr. Light, not Dr. Wily (Ooooohhh.....!? I won't mention the storyline yet because I only know the beginning).

Busy Week

I haven't posted for almost a week, as it was such a busy one. On the weekend we went to a parish festival and had more fun than the average day at King's Island (of course, we are not huge roller coaster fans). On top of the games and the food, there were some pretty good rides, the biggest thriller of which was the "Typhoon," consisting of four or five tripods that spun and rotated around the center like an eggbeater swing set. It was rather fun until the arms of the tripods went out almost completely horizontal. The favorite answer to the question "How was it?" was "Once is enough." Sometimes even I don't care when sentences don't grammatically correspond.

This morning my mom took two of my siblings up to see McCain and Palin at their Ohio stop. I was exhausted from the weekend and still had chemistry to do today, so I opted to stay home and get more sleep. They told me when they got back that they had to stand around in the rain for almost two hours to get through security, and when McCain and Palin came out they were not close enough to get a good view. Then, on the way back to the car, they found the roads closed off because the van transporting the candidates was going to drive off through that area. So, after all they went through to be there, three of my family members got to see McCain and Palin from four feet away as they drove by, and McCain even pointed at my sister's homemade signs!

And besides all that, I've been busy working on chemistry and playing a game to make a blog post (coming soon!), so it seems much longer than a week ago that I began "A Homeschooler's Pensieve."