Nutshelling My Summer

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't posted in a while. By now, I'm around a month into the school year, and man, junior year is difficult.
Buuuut before I get into that, I gotta tell you about the totally rad stuff that happened over the summer. I meant to make individual posts, but I'm too good at procrastinating, so I'll give you a big recap now.

After we left Maine, my family went down to our beach house in Avalon. Because I'm a humongous nerd, I brought my Wii U with me, and hooked it up to the television so I could play there. This was also the first week of my first job, over at a local five-and-ten near the beach, which my dad pretty much made me get.

Don't get me wrong, though. It wasn't miserable. It's just I haven't really had a lot of experience with that kind of work, except for the community service my school does every month. Even that's just two and a half hours, but at the end, I always feel bored out of my skull and physically spent from all that standing up. I've just always considered myself more of an intellectual than am manual labor kind of person, not to mention I'm as thin as a twig.

I had like a 5-hour shift from noon to five, so I could chill and play video games all morning and be back in time for dinner. For a normal person, it was pretty simple stuff, pretty easy, but it still burned me out entirely. I got into the habit of taking naps after work, so I always came to dinner looking kind of scruffy.
My coworkers were very friendly and helpful, and the manager was always willing to answer any questions I had. Mostly what I was doing was sorting shelves and putting price tags on items, and sometimes I would direct lost customers. I made pretty good money, but honestly, I've never cared much for money unless I have a specific purchase in mind.
I think my favorite part was this sign they had in the back room, with funny customer questions and comments. I liked it so much, I took a picture of it. Check it out!

After we got back from that first week in Avalon, I started going to this cool camp called Catylator. It's an engineering camp, and coincidentally it was located at my school, so I was sort of the experienced guy. It was advertised as engineering for teens, but as it turns out, everyone else there was a middle schooler. They were still pretty cool people though.
I was hoping to spend my time there working on my Game Boy Player project (which I'll elaborate more on once I get the Kickstarter up), but I didn't really get the chance. But they had a few 3D printers there, which was AWESOME. For those of you who don't know what a 3D printer is, it's a machine that can take digital 3D models and turn them into physical objects. For the first week I was there, I focused mainly on making a case for my iPod, which didn't turn out too well, because the plastic kept deforming. But it was fun.

After that week, I went off to a 3-week engineering program in Rhode Island. It was organized by Johns Hopkins, and it was held at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. It was really fun. I got to sleep in a dorm, and I made a lot of friends in my dorm, all who were taking engineering. For the most part, I hung out with these two, Nathaniel and Jackie. They were dating, and friends at the same time, which I thought was pretty impressive. They were really cool people, and we had a lot of fun. At the beginning of the program, they jumped into all of this physics stuff, and I was totally and completely lost, not having taken physics yet. Once we got into the structural engineering part, I got the hang of the whole "Newton's Third Law" thing, but I still have no idea what an "ohm" is.

In the program, I got to build a BATTLING ROBOT with Popsicle sticks, string, and hot glue, using pressurized syringes to move it. I teamed up with my friend, David, who as of now is one of the only people taller than me. We built this AWESOME robot which I named Marcus, and I had the great idea to add grip by covering the bottom in hot glue. It worked really well, but we never actually finished it by the time the battles came around. I took it home so I could complete it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

At the end of the first week, they held a dance. Though I'm not the most outgoing person, I usually like dances, but I knew that after Maine, I was really pushing my dance quota. Nonetheless, I went out there, and I had a lot of fun. I danced all night.

One day the following week, my RA Josh, who's pretty cool, signed me and a bunch of the most unlikely people to the Rap Battles activity. Before it was my turn to go up and rap, I planned something out real swiftly. I'm in the habit of saying "potato" a lot, something I picked up from my teacher Robin and my classmate John back at school. So I decided to make a rap around that. The effects were unexpected and very satisfying.

So that got me some street cred with the homies. Later in the week, we made a plan to reenact it and have me do it to Josh, and that went pretty well. In the colloquial, I "rekt everything."
At the end of the week, though, I started to not feel too great. By the middle of the day I didn't even have the energy to get out of bed, where I had gone to rest. Eventually, I got taken to the nurse's office, where I stayed for the duration of my stay. On the second day in the infirmary, I got taken to an urgent care to get looked at, and they said I might have some sort of a stomach flu. And then I puked. So they called an ambulance, and I got to go to the hospital, which would be fine, but they tried to stick a needle in me. I know it was for my own good, but I absolutely hate needles. I can't stand them. I finally got through it when they did it while I was looking for Waldo. I never did find him. While I watched the third Jurassic Park movie, they ran some tests, which I can only assume were inconclusive, as I continued to be sick when we left. The next day, I got really sick, so they took me back to the ER. They didn't stick a needle in me this time, but they figured out I had pneumonia, and while I wasn't going to die or anything, I couldn't stay at Roger Williams. So the next day was my last there, and all the guys from my dorm pitched in and made me a really big goodbye card. It was really sweet.

They even put in my emblem.

After that, my dad came and picked me up, and we went back home. It was at the airport that I discovered the only thing better than my favorite brand of gummy bears-- a sour version of my favorite brand of gummy bears.

The next week, I went back to the Catylator camp for another week, and I had a great idea. Every year, my school has a Super Smash Bros tournament (see 
The 5th Annual School Smash Bros. Thanksgiving Tournament), and since I'm hosting it this year, I decided to make a trophy for it. and might I say, it turned out pretty awesome.

The same week, I got a DRONE!!! It was a quadracopter, and I could control it with my iPod. It was really awesome to fly it around, at least until it broke. But hey, it was fun while it lasted.

After that, I went back to Avalon for a few days, and then it was school.

 I've always been better at socializing with younger kids or people older than me, rather than kids my age. And it didn't really hit me until then how many of my friends had left with the rest of the senior class. Zachary, Rachel, Eva, and Danielle, to name a few.
To put it lightly, it really bummed me out. The senior class was really the heart and soul of the school. There are more people there now, but it feels a whole lot emptier without them. And I think that sort of affected my schoolwork at the beginning of the year. but I know they'll be back for Thanksgiving at the...

My birthday also passed soon after the start of the year. It wasn't all that big a deal as it used to be. I threw a party, but only Alex came and it was really hard to have a big party with only two people. But at the end, I got a large Fanta Icee, and it was delicious, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. I'm sixteen now, but a wise man once said, "The truth is we never really grow up. We just masquerade as adults because that's what we're expected to do." I think that's very true, and I've always live by this philosophy-- "Age is mandatory, but maturity is optional." Life can age me all it wants, but on the inside, I'll still be the ten-year-old I always have been. And that's a good thing.

Also, these have no relevance to anything whatsoever, but here's some pictures of my dog trying to stick her head out the car window.