If you aim low, you will almost always succeed.

Interstate 80 (I-80 from now on) is a marvelous highway. It goes all the way from the George Washington Bridge (in New York / New Jersey) to California, and covers significant territory in between. I-80 also is one of the most common routes to the Pocono Mountains from New York. Fortunately, this super-highway was practically empty on Thursday morning, like it usually is at that time of day.

This trip was a bit different to me, because after I got dressed and picked up my gear for the day, I was able to hit the slopes right away (which is exactly what I did). I don’t know whether this particular set of steps was efficient or not, but either way it would have taken some time to get all ready:

1. Fill out rental form, pick up boots, and try them on.
2. Go down to changing room, change, come back up.
3. Get the rest of the gear.
4. Find a locker, take out and put away various things.
5. Hit the slopes!

I started off on Camelback’s Coolmoor beginner trail with a few warm-up runs, and then went over to The Birches and The Meadows. This was the majority of my excitement for the day, which included a few runs with my friends.

I learned a bit more about controlling speed, which is essential on any trail other than the bunny slopes. I figured out an inefficient but effective way to get absolute control over how fast I’m going. With this technique, one ski is at an angle, with the other ski pointing straight down the hill and positioned slightly behind the angled ski. With the application of pressure on the tilted ski, you directly control your speed, but if you want to go faster, the straight ski allows it to happen.

This trick helped me make it down trails in one piece, but it came with an at-first unexpected side effect. It takes a lot of effort to keep the downhill ski in position, most of which I concentrated on my right knee, and I ended up with a bit of aching in that leg as well as the knee for the rest of the day. Stupidly, I didn’t take a lesson this trip (anytime I saw a ski school instructor, they were working with someone, and when I managed to find any other employee, it was for something else), so I didn’t officially learn anything new. I still feel a bit depressed about this mistake.

By the time lunch rolled around, I was really out of it. I ate somewhat slowly, constantly sighing at my level of “wiped out-ness”. Skiing, with or without made up techniques, is really a tiring sport, using muscle groups one never knew existed. Add the adrenaline rushes (after just avoiding falls) to the mix, and you’ve got one exhausted skier.

I didn’t do a whole lot after lunch. I sat around in the lodge, talking with my principal, and staring at the nice scenery outside the windows. I did manage to make two or three more runs later on, but they were kind of bad. My knee was about to crumble (not literally), and I felt like I could fall asleep while watching the trees go by on The Meadows.

For dinner, my class set up for a barbecue in the farthest parking lot. We had hot dogs and burgers, with pickles and soda on the side. I did enjoy this, even with the finger-freezing winds present at the time. We ate the food basically straight of the grill, decreasing the total time it spent in cold air, and helping to make sure we were able to get back home on the van with the rest of the school (I think my principal would have left without us if I didn’t have the key to the van, which I had used earlier to get something).

After this trip, I really thanked myself for buying my Smith Universal Helmet Helper, which currently is a bit difficult to find. If it wasn’t for the five dollar piece of plastic that extends a goggle strap, my eyes would have been stressed out too.

Lessons for next trip: Do more, and stick with the group. For the former part of that statement, I mean that I want to try even more trails, and take a good lesson, and for the latter, I am saying that I should stay with my friends most of the time. But for any trip, the main goal is simple: Have fun!

I’ve tried several methods for keeping myself organized and on track. I began with Devin’s weekly scheduler, in hopes of being able to remember to do everything that I plot out on it. After that failed, I set up my own spreadsheet, with three periods for each day (morning, school, and evening; on Saturday, school is replaced with daytime). This was extremely poor, receiving just one or two entries. I knew that I was seriously failing to keep myself heading straight.

Then came David Seah. His Printable CEO™ series looked like a viable solution. I browsed around his site for a while, looking at his forms and other articles (I have to say, he’s a beautiful writer). Last week, I took a deep look at his Task Progress Tracker Form. It’s mainly built for designers and other freelancers who work on individual projects, but I found that by filling in the project name box with “my Life / School”, I can use it for my own purposes.

A day later, I put it to the test. After getting hold of my most recent report card, my dad told me that I am going to be putting in at least an hour of effort toward my studies every night (yeah right). I happened to have some social studies homework due the next day, so I sat down with the textbook, papers and the form Approximately every fifteen minutes (as prescribed by the form), I filled in another bubble indicating that amount of time was spent on the particular task.

I’m still slacking off a bit now, but I feel like things are rolling now. I think this plan will need a week or two to settle in, at which point I will report back. Maybe i should try some of the other PCEO forms.

Going in to the exam room, I was not nervous, but I wasn’t feeling too confident. I kept on thinking to myself that I’m basically screwed. I don’t know whether it was my fault (for not studying) or the Board of Regents’ fault (for making a hard test), but the test was difficult indeed. There were questions on some topics that weren’t asked before, and they omitted certain topics that they usually include. What killed me most was the trig question in Part IV, even after attempting to use the phrase “SohCohToa” (which is highly regarded as the key to success in trig).

In the end, I did get a decent score of 86 (including a slight curve that is likely to be added to soon), which was derived from my raw score of 63. I’m not depressed that I got that grade, and I line up somewhere in the middle of my class’s range (minimum was 83 and maximum was 97 I think).

So now I have three more Regents to take, namely the Hebrew, Chemistry and Global History exams. My mom just got me the book called High Marks: Regents Chemistry Made Easy which is one of the best books available for the purpose. We are also looking for a suitable review book for the Hebrew Regents (if you know about one, please leave a comment below). Hopefully I’ll do very well on these tests.

And to continue the Bus Week spirit (read about Day One and Day Two), I took the Q46 home from school today. I got Queens Village Depot’s RTS #8999 and took it from Lake success (all the way at the very first stop) to my stop. I have recorded the segment of the trip from Little Neck Parkway to near the Grand Central Parkway.

Right now I’m officially on vacation, but because of some bad scheduling that has been around for years, we are taking the Math A Regents exam right smack dab in the middle of the break (which is short enough already). Fortunately, I’m not that bad at math, and the exam is based on elementary material, so I should get a nice score.

I plan on holding my first ever bus day tomorrow (Tuesday), when I will ride on several routes that use MTA Bus’ new hybrids. More specifically, I will attempt to ride on the Q10 and Q60, both out of John F. Kennedy Depot (formerly Green Bus Lines, one of the private lines of NYC, until this year). Hopefully the recordings that I make of these buses will come out well.

This is one busy week for a vacation week. Bus Day 2007, second Regents exam, and more sleep. Too bad it only lasts until Sunday.

Things went downhill at about 7:20 in the morning, when my van showed up. Almost everyone in the house was awake at the time, except the old man (not that old, but “middle age” is one of his most hated phrases). I guess the commotion stirred up by my brothers and mother woke him up. Anyways, when he saw me still lying bed like the lazy teenager that I am, he started telling me in a rather harsh voice that there would be no computer for the day, and probably another threat that I don’t remember.

Later in the morning, my principal called to remind us that there was school that day. Nice guy that he is, I think he would realize that if I’m not there, I am sick of school. I would also like to thank my school for all the annoyances that I suffered on Monday, the main reason being that there was an extended day of school (last year we began at 8:00, while this year, we began at 7:40, and believe me, and extra 20 minutes or so of extra sleep makes a difference, especially considering that I stayed up to watch the ball drop).

I ended up watching TV most of the day. I forgot what I watched in the morning, but I remember watching a Biggest Loser marathon on Bravo for most of the afternoon and until about 10:30 at night. More fun at this point! I didn’t want to go to bed at this point, but my dad called me up, and I was very hesitant. I went up to my room, and basically started crying (proves that teenagers have emotions too, unlike some adults). For the rest of the week, I didn’t want to talk to him at all, and on Friday, I expressed that in words, saying it to his face.

Let the family wars begin.

In computers, the teacher is just making us type up a long list of Excel glossary defenitions. It’s long, boring, and (you wouldn’t know) painful work (thanks to the stellar ergonomics in my school’s lab, which is really just a classroom where we use the laptops). I’d like to actually learn to write formulas and to use all the features of Excel, or even do real programming (not TI-83 simple stuff – I mean like Java or even VB.Net or something).

I’ve began to look into college stuff. My math teacher (who is really awesome in terms of social and academic capabilities) let me borrow a copy of US News that had rankings of the top schools. I read a  bunch of things on preparing in high school, financial aid, and other subjects in that topic.
Otherwise, not much going on. Life is almost like a script. How’s that for a metaphor?