Experiment

I am going to experiment with something new: I am going to pray. This may seem somewhat awkward because I do not hold belief in any gods or supernatural forces. However, I do feel that if I were to share my troubles with an imaginary friend, I would feel much less stress. Basically, I am trying to use one of the benefits of religion without being religious.

Science Olympiad

On Saturday April 2, the 2005 Wisconsin State Science Olympiad was held at UW-Stout near Menominee, WI, which is about a four hour drive from Neenah. I participated in five events and built the tower for the tower building event. My schedule went as follows:

9:00-10:00........Astronomy
10:05-11:05.......Forestry
11:10-12:10........Chemistry Lab
12:15-1:15..........Physics Lab
1:20-2:20...........Chemical ID

Astronomy consisted of a test of Astronomical knowledge that could be taken with the aid of any materials, including a laptop. My partner and I, however, did not bring any materials, giving us the sense that we were not going to do very well. We finished the test to the best of our ability and left.

Forestry consisted of identifying samples of various trees from a multiple choice list (including none of the above) using an tree guide that was given to all teams a few months ago. My partner and I did a fairly good job finding the species and its habitat and economic uses and we were the only ones who had the slightest idea of how to do the tiebreaker round of our group (Given the number of teams, events are separated into groups; there is a Forestry event during each of the time slots available to different teams. This is true of the other events as well). We thought we had done a fairly good job and had a medal-worthy performance.

After Forestry, I learned that the tower had not supported all 15 kg of weight. However, I had thought that the scoring was solely based upon efficiency, so I thought it would medal anyway.

My third event, Chemistry Lab, went quite nicely. The lab and test centered around oxidation-reduction reactions. To conserve time, I worked on balancing an oxidation-reduction reaction, given as part 1, while she put together a galvonic cell, given as part 2. We worked together on the questions of part 2 and part 3, which had to do with electron orbitals and Lewis structures. After completing the event, we were quite confident in our performance.

I had the same partner for Physics Lab as I did for Astronomy. This event centered around optics, and more specifically, prisms and different wavelegnths of light. It consisted almost completely of mathematical calculations, some of which we found to be difficult because we were rusty on some formulas. We came out thinking that we did a bit worse on it than we did on the Astronomy test.

The final event was a disaster. Last year, my partner and I had gotten second place, which had been my only medal, in Quantitative Analysis, which was now Chemical ID. Hoping for a repeat performance, I was put into this event again, with a different partner, as my partner from last year had graduated. However, the mistake we made was not to plan for the event. I memorized the solubility rules to refresh my knowledge of which ionic compounds would react and which ones wouldn't. However, last year we made did reactions and made a flow chart to memorize before the event. Such planning did not take place this time. Another setback was the fact that we had to use five pipets for ten chemicals, which meant that we needed to clean them after using them each time instead of an excess of disposable pipets that quickened the process. The entire situation left me in the dark with not enough time to turn on the light. So, I finished the second part of the lab and guessed what every single compound was, probably not getting a single one right.

We left UW-Stout immediately as to get home at a reasonable hour, meaning that we missed the awards. We ate at Pizza Hut and arrived home at 8:00 pm. Just today, I found out the results:

We won second place in Chemistry Lab, barely losing in a tiebreaker
We won third place in Forestry
We won third place in both Astronomy and Physics Lab, much to my partner's and my suprise.
Not surprisingly, we tied for tenth in the Chemical ID event out of eleven possible places
We won third place in Geocaching, forth place in Practical Data Gathering, and fifth place in Robot Ramble, in none of which did I participate.
The Tower was tied for ninth place with all the others that failed to carry the full load.
The team was ninth out of thirty-eight overall.

The results were pleasantly suprising to me.

I has also recieved my last two college letters while I was gone. From Williams I recieved an expected rejection. However, from University of Chicago, I recieved a letter very similar to Grinnell's, which told me that I was on an unranked waiting list. This means that I will enroll at Lawrence but work to earn admittance to both University of Chicago and Grinnell. Of the schools, I most favor Univeristy of Chicago.

A trip to Sheboygan and Milwaukee

Yesterday night, my family and I left for Sheboygan, where my maternal grandfather lives. We stayed the night at his house and talked to him and ate with him. We left this morning and headed south to Milwaukee.

In Milwaukee, we toured the Milwaukee Public Museum, looking over many of the exhibits that we had seen in times before: the geology exhibits, the rainforest exhibit, the butterfly exhibit, the insect exhibit, and the botany exhibit. Afterward we quickly toured the gift shop, not buying anything, and then headed to the IMAX theater, where we had bought tickets for the show about lions of the Kalahari, which I enjoyed. We then headed back home.

Upon arriving, I recieved my first letter of rejection from a college: Carleton. This had been my first choice of college up until now, but as I have not been accepted, I guess I will set my plans elsewhere. It is not a total loss: I have already been accepted at Lawrence University in Appleton, which is a fine college with a conservatory of music where I could continue playing my horn for concerts. As well, there are still three other colleges from which I have yet to recieve letters. Perhaps the responses I recieve will be better from these colleges.

The first day of Spring Break

Today was the first day of Spring Break, but it wasn't very exciting. I attended a "Sportsman's Breakfast" even for my Venturing Crew at a local conservative church. Somehow thinking it to be some sort of charity event last night, I decided to come. I found it to be incredibly boring. We set up a table with climbing gear and a kayak to the side, with a labtop playing a slide show on the table to the left of the climbing gear. There were also other stands from various venders: a scuba diving organization, a paintball group, a boating group, a bike shop, an outdoor's shop, and an archery group among others. The breakfast was attended mainly by men and their sons. Besides the two girls at our stand, I saw one other female in the room (which was a gymnasium) out of about a hundred or more.

I arrived around 6:50 and we set up around 7:15. People started filtering in at 7:50. Breakfast was at 9:00 and an evangelistic speaker who preached that Jesus was a "man's man" spoke at 10:15. The whole thing was rather boring and ridiculous and I was glad to leave. When I got home, I worked on a tower for the Science Olympiad competition at UW-Stout on April 2. I completed my first one last night, but I am trying a different design and comparing the two.

Tonight, my family and I watched The Incredibles, which I thought was a pretty good movie.

Spring Break at last!

Today was the last school day before Spring Break. Unfortunately, it was not an easy day. Upon arriving at school today, I found that many kids were carrying around posters with various music sayings on them. This could only mean one thing: I had forgotten completely about my assignment for band due today. The assignment was to either write an essay or make a poster with a theme chosen from a list of four. As I didn't have the materials to make a poster, I wrote an essay on the "Music is Contagious" theme. Beyond my band assignment, I also had to finish my Chemistry homework. Luckily I got everything done, but it was certainly stressful. However, looking on the bright side, today will make spring break even more of a relief.

An orchestra concert and an acceptance letter

Today's school day was fairly normal. In European History class, we took part in our "termfest" competition, where the class is divided into two teams that each send up one player at a time to guess what term our teacher is describing. Each competition the list of terms grows with the terms from the current unit. Today's match was a decisive 25-10 victory for the seniors over the sophomores and the one junior of the class. In Spanish, we reviewed vocabulary, learned some idioms, and took some AP practice tests. In Human Biology, we learned about muscle and neural tissue. In Band we sight read a few new pieces that we may or may not play at our next concert. Finally, in chemistry we finished up our lab by weighing the precipitate, which had more or less dried (in my case, it was less).

When I got home, though, I found that I had recieved a letter in the mail. I opened it and found that I had been accepted to Lawrence University. They said that They really liked my essay and that I would be recieving a $5000 a year merit scholarship on top of need-based aid, should I decide to attend Lawrence. I will decide once I recieve letters of acceptance or decline from a few other colleges and take a final tour of those to which I have been accepted.

I then watched a wrestling match of my brother, Kit. He seems to be an unlikely wrestler, as he is quite a bit smaller than most middle schoolers. However, he was able to get a pin on his opponent in the first match, but he lost the second match. This was the first wrestling match that I have seen, but I must admit that I was a bit bored watching middle schoolers wrestle, which was probably not helped by the fact that I am a bit tired from missing some sleep.

After the match, I had a bit of supper and got ready for the String Festival, which is the all-city orchestra concert. The concert starts with fifth graders playing violin in the Suzuki style. The sixth graders were the first actual orchestra. Each group played two or three pieces. As this concert was really an event for the parents's sakes, I found it to be a bit boring and was half asleep by the time the eighth graders had finished. However, I was ready to play when we started with Pirates of the Caribbean followed by Lord of the Dance. The music was actually pretty fun, despite the lack of melody in the third horn part and past experiences from Symphony.

A day of chemistry

Today was truly a day of chemistry for me. After a late wake-up and an emergency ride to school from my neighbor across the street, I took the ACS "US National Chemistry Olympiad" test, which ran from 8:00 to 9:50. I had participated in the same contest in 2003 as a sophomore who had just completed "Chem-Study", our school's first level advanced chemistry course. I did very well that time; I and my fellow classmate, Toby Heyn, scored first and second respectively in the region out of both first and second year chemistry students. Feeling pretty good, we progressed to the next round, where we found that many of the questions pertained to areas of chemistry that we had not yet studied.

However, this time around, I found myself at the disadvantage of not having taken Chem-Study for two whole years. While I have started Advanced Chemistry, which is actually a UW-Oshkosh General Chemistry course, we are only a week and a half into the material, which is complete review. However, as I took the test, I found that I remembered many of the concepts, though some were still a little fuzzy. Even with my disadvantage, I think I did fairly well; perhaps even well enough to progress to the next round.

After the test, I worked on a bit of homework for my Human Biology class. When the bell signifying the end of second period rang, my schedule went back to normal. I had lunch with a friend of mine from Cross Country, and while eating I worked on filling in some of the preparatory information for today's Advanced Chemistry lab, the first real lab of the class. I went through Human Biology and Band (though today was a Symphony practice day for a concert tomorrow).

The Lab proved to be quite long. It involved the gravimetric determination of phosphorous levels in common gardin fertilizers. This meant that we had to dissolved the fertilizer in water, which we ran through a filter to remove chunks. Then, we added aqueous magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) and and aqueous ammonia (NH3) to the mixture to form a hydrated magnesium ammonium phosphate (MgNH4PO4) precipitate, which we let sit for about fifteen minutes. After that fifteen minutes was up, we then had to filter out the precipitate. Unfortunately, there were only enough resources so that one person of every two could filter at a time. Of my lab partner and I, she went first. Even more unfortuante for me was the fact that the filtration at our station was one of the slowest, meaning some groups had had two sets of precipitate filtered by the time my partner was finished. This meant that I was the last to leave, and I left at 5:15, over two hours after school was over, and over and hour after the predicted finishing time for the lab. None the less, I got my preciptate filtered and I was able to catch a ride with my mother home.