Break Summary: Thursday Dec. 10 to Sunday Dec. 13

1.     Break Summary: Thursday Dec. 10 to Tuesday Dec. 13

a.     The beginning of break is awesome. I do a lot of reading, just lying on the couch in unabashed comfort and allowing myself to fall into a book without feeling like I have to set a mental exit timer.

b.     On Thursday, we go to Current Events, where Dad sets up a debate on immigration policy catalyzed by the recent incarceration of a construction worker he knew. The participation level is great. One of my buddies got very excited about the possibility of US world domination through draining the populations of other countries whose citizens want to immigrate to the US (if immigration barriers were removed). These empty countries, he hypothesized, would then be bought up by the US and be aggregated therein. Dad’s stance, that competition between countries would result in unpopular countries emulating popular countries, was more reasonable but less epic.

c.      When we get home, I decide to take a walk/run in the dark. I walk down McLeod, run across a busy intersection, then turn onto a trail. I have to activate the camera flash on my phone to serve as a flashlight. I keep my head on a 360 degree swivel, but no potential phone thieves or other malefactors appear. I get off the trail and keep going, eventually using my phone map to navigate to Birchwood Park. It’s neat standing in the grassy expanse under the moonlight. I head back home a different way.

d.     I eat a snack, then do some more reading. We eat dinner at Westside Pizza. I do more reading, then we watch an episode of Once. I read with Dad, then go to bed.

e.     Friday morning we head to the Sportsplex for soccer. I play some 2on2 with Jonathan, Joseph, and Noah, then the coach shows up and we play some more games, this being the last day of soccer before the break. Then we scrimmage. The field is clogged with players. Our team can’t get the ball through the depth-filled enemy defense—lots of pretty good players make it difficult to move forward. We lose, but the game is still fun.

f.      Afterwards we eat lunch at home.

g.     Then we go to the Christmas Party. I revel in our traditional sport: indoor bouncy-ball Flyers-Up! Then we transition to the sleigh races and then to dodgeball.

h.     Afterwards, the teens head outside to talk. I oscillate between outside and inside. I get in some good Banana Dueling with Darmon.

i.       We return home briefly before heading to Joseph and Noah’s house. We eat pizza and talk. William comes over, and I chat with him. We play a little Halo.

j.       Return home, read with Dad, and hit the hay.

k.     Saturday is bagels, then boffing. Joseph comes and holds his own against the regulars. We get some CTF in.

l.       Return home, read through a stack of articles.

m.   Go to the Nutcracker.

                                                 i.   My homeschooler friend who has been doing ballet for 15 years received the Top Performer of 2014 award for her dedication and hard work.

                                               ii.  The Irish Dance homeschoolers do a complex Irish dance in the opening ballroom scene.

                               iii. My Notable friend has a leading role as one of the fairies. She leads a dance surrounded by a ring of fairy minions that tower over her by almost a foot on average.

n.     Afterwards we go to the dessert place next to Pure Bliss. I get some good conversation in. 

o.     Head home, read with Dad, go to bed.

p.     Sunday I meet a friend in the morning at the Bagelry. We eat cream cheese bagels, then walk towards Fairhaven. We make it to Boulevard Park before turning around. We talk about everything, from his Running Start classes at Skagit College, to his Gladium video game plans, to our reading lists. I try to convince him to take more in-person classes rather than taking some of his classes online, since he would meet some interesting people in his programming classes.

q.     I return home and eat lunch and work on this log and read. I chat with Mom and Dad.

r.      Eat dinner. After dinner, I find this Mathematica tutorial I wanted to do and work through it. I have a blast. Finally learn how to use it the way it’s supposed to be used. Very neat tool.

s.      Watch an episode of Korra with family. Read with Dad.

t.      Monday I work through more Mathematica, read more articles. One interesting article details how to use the browser’s web inspector to look at HTML and extract raw data. Read a graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book  that I find lying on the coffee table.

u.     Then I meet another friend at the public market at 2. We play cards and talk about his trip and my experiences, then take a walk that ends up at the library. I gather more books for the trip. I pop in on the library game night and meet some of Ian’s friends there. They have Just Dance set up, which is pretty neat.

v.     I head to the dance studio, where my cousins pick me up. I hang at their house, talk and work on pizza.

w.    Head back home, do more reading. Watch part of this hilarious crazy movie called Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

x.     Read with Dad.

y.     Tuesday I wake up early for an orthodontist appointment. Because my permanent retainer wire broke while I was at the UW, they needed to put braces back in for a short time.

z.      Returned home, ate lunch, packed, read.

aa.  Headed to my cousins' and worked on this log while others painted ceramics and drew shirts. 

bb. Returned home, finished packing, headed out to Seattle. Visited our friend in the Children’s Hospital, then went straight to the airport.

cc.   Breezed through checking and security, grabbed Qdoba burritos, and boarded.

dd. Uneventful flight to Denver. I finished Asimov’s Caves of Steel. From Denver airport, took a shuttle to a hotel, where we slept for all of four hours.

ee.  Woke up at an ungodly hour, the unpleasantness of which was quite ameliorated by the surprisingly robust Quality Inn breakfast. We ate eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy, and waffles. Then we hurried out to the shuttle, which took us back to the airport,

ff.    Where we boarded a plane for Omaha. We arrived in Omaha and drove to Sioux City with Grandpa.

gg.  Despite the exhaustion that we all felt, it was lunch hour. We conversed and ate sandwiches. Then my aunt and my cousin L came over, and we chatted some more. Finally, my cousins Q and R showed up. When L had to leave for choir practice and Q for swim practice, I settled down to work on my PropBot program. With a data structure that allowed easy comparison of different PropBot states so I wouldn’t expend effort exploring the result of a state I’d already explored, my program ran in under the programming competition time limit. But there were more optimizations left to be made. I realized that if I wasn’t making input-dependent optimizations, I could just cache the results of my exploration and use these on all input. This strategy would only be effective, in turn, if the recursive exploration and not the minimum distance search was the most expensive part of the program. I resolved to time the program’s execution further to see where I needed to optimize.

hh. Afterwards, I lay down on an easy chair and listened to conversation.

ii.     After I got up, I got suckered into a game of Peanut Butter with Izzy and Rosie. Izzy had discovered an effective strategy and was pwning us methodically.

jj.   Our uncle C showed up with the cousins in tow and we ate Grandma’s delicious Pasta in a Pot for dinner. Q and L had to leave right away to study for finals. We talked and ate for a while. After Pasta in a Pot came the renowned chocolate sheet cake. Grandpa edified us on a few of the subjects he’d been reading about for a while.

kk.  I went down and whacked a ping-pong ball against the wall in the cavernous, nearly soundproof basement while singing at the top of my lungs. Oddly satisfying.

ll.     Then we watched Seinfeld.

mm.               Word is putting a tab here. Why, Word??

nn. I got set up in an upstairs room, wrote this log, and went to bed.