SOL 31- A Long Road

          I have completed this challenge three times. 63 posts. That is a lot of writing and posting. Each year and challenge has been different, but I'm glad I have completed every one of them. I have definitely gotten a lot better at writing, but my poetry is still pretty crappy. At least I know where commas go now. I am relieved to be done with the challenge this year. In the past, it has integrated itself into my life and daily routine. This year I have found it overwhelming and tiresome. I think that is because of the amount of other things I have had to do like spring units and such. That is the one major downside to moving the dates. Overall, it has been fun. Now, as was my first finale post, 31 words/phrases that will be said upon challenge completion:

Yay!
Whoopee!
Hurrah!
Finally!
I'm over it!
Yea!
Hip Hip Hooray!
Success!
Yaaaaassssss!
I did it!
Is there Starbucks this year?
Yipee!
Victory is ours!
Yay, no more promptlessness!
Inconceivable!
Congratulations!
Good job!
Thank god!
I would have dropped out soon enough after this...
Take that, parents who don't think I can commit to anything!
Third time is the charm.
Woohoo!
Huzza!
Three cheers!
Does posting super short things really count?
I thought it would never end!
OMG!
I could go a few more months.
Never again!
Woohoo!
Woot woot.

SOL 30- Pinnated Grouse

          Pinnated Grouse are the best. They are also known as prairie chickens, but I call them the large lemon neck birds. Basically, they are large brown birds with lemons in their necks and neon eyebrows. Did I mention that their ears are two inches tall? Yeah, they are pretty dang amazing.

This is a pretty famous Audobon painting of the pinnated grouse.

          While I would not say that they are my favorite animal, I would definitely say that they are pretty high up on that list. Geese are still the winners. Grouse tend to be pretty weird as a whole species, but I love pinnated grouse because they are still really weird but are the most normal out of the bunch. Sadly, many of the grouse populations are really struggling because of chemicals used in farming and contamination into nature. They are also eaten by hawk. They are pretty large, maxing out at two feet in length.
          Most other grouse are VERY weird. Take the greater sage grouse, for example. It has neon green eyebrows and a massive, spikey tail. All grouse are a part of the same family and, boy let me tell you, it is one weird family. Pretty much all of the males have large throat pocket things while all of the females look super normal. All of the different species gather in large flocks, meaning that there are sometimes massive groupings of these weird birds. Can you imagine how hard the females must judge the males? Like dang, your eyebrow game needs to be on fleek.
          This post may seem out of the blue, but I recently had to draw a pinnated grouse for a book I wrote. It is a full page illustration of a male, so it looks very strange. Luckily enough for me, I can just tell anyone that asks about it that that is what it actually looks like and that the bird is just really weird. Honestly, sometimes I wish humans had something like a lemon neck that was just a really weird trait carried for no reason. I think it would be hilarious if everyone of one sex had to walk around with a bulging neon yellow neck. Anyways, this was a long rambling slice about my love of the pinnated grouse.

SOL 29- Birds

          Technically this post is late. It was still written and posted on May 30, so I don't care. Basically, I had a crap ton of work in the past few days, the Alumni Induction Dinner came up, and I didn't end up blogging. Regardless, I will not fail this challenge on day 29 the third year I am doing the challenge. Now, birds.

Fowl,
very hard to draw.
Feathery,
Please not a macaw.
Challenging,
yet simple,
Drawing avians so rough.
Bird after bird,
I slowly work through the book,
finishing (not really),
I give it a final look.

          Basically, I am having to illustrate many pages in a field guide to worldwide birds that I wrote. There are 20 different birds, and so far I am done with five: an emu, a nene, an emperor penguin, a blue peacock, and a pinnated grouse. Some of those are pictured below. They have to be highly realistic, so each one takes forever. Anyways, enjoy the crappy poem.

SOL 28- Count Down

10- The number of hours I have had to spend on homework this weekend. This number has been drastically rounded down, but, in the end, I needed something to fit the number ten spot.

9- The number of years I have spent at Logan. It may seem like a lot, and it is. It has been along wild journey.

8- Around eight years ago I started to be able to fully read on my own. Now, I can write, read, and comprehend "quality" pieces of writing like this slice!

7- The original length of my continuation speech in minutes. I did not think that I had that much to say, but, this just goes to show you, it is a lot easier to write something way too long on accident than to be short intentionally.

6- I have been on six AS overnights: the Sand Dunes, California, Sustainable Settings, New Orleans, Sustainable Settings, and Hawaii. I went to Sustainable Settings twice in a row. All of these trips have come with their own memories and adventures, although I have to say my favorite was New Orleans with Hawaii at a close second.

5- I was five when I started at Logan. It has certainly been filled with twists and turns. When I first started, I was full of hope, joy, and hugs. Many things have changed. Especially the hug part.

4- We have approximately four, I don't know when the challenge ends, slices left to write for the challenge. I am very ready for it to be over as I have many other things to worry about without having to constantly think about writing about myself for half an hour everyday.

3- Three real class days of math are left, and boy am I excited to get through them. Technically math appreciation day is a math day, but I do not count throwing water balloons at my teachers a real mathematical class period. In that time, however, I still have to give a presentation after completing a poster and than take a nearly impossible test.

2- Currently, there are two pans of quesillo, Venezuelan flan, in my oven. They are for a Spanish presentation tomorrow, and I also made a crap ton of cheese rolls this afternoon for the same thing.

1- The number of Expos I have left at Logan. It is crazy to think that I have made it this far. I feel like I have been at Logan forever so it is crazy to think that I am this close to my last year being over.

0- The number of craps I have left to give about many things. It is very near to the end of the year, and my supply is running dangerously low. I am fed up with a lot of things, so hopefully I can survive.

This is kind of just a random list of things about me, but, hey, at least it is a decent length slice with a lot of information about me.

SOL 27- Guinea Pig

All my pig does is eat, sleep, and drink,

He also loves to squeak.

When I walk up to his cage he may shrink,

And loudly start to shriek, when I reach inside, he will cause a stink.

I have a guinea pig named Bamboo and he is a tiny, introverted, squeaky furball. He is fun to have, pet, and love on, but he can be aggressive and a lot of work. When I first got him, he was a tiny baby, so it has been really cool to raise him from a tiny little furball to a large, fluffy guinea pig. Seeing this growth was really cool as he started as a small bean and is now a large pickle (approximately, you get my metaphor). He now frolics around and squeaks until he gets fresh vegetables. he is kind of needy, not going to lie. He was originally bought to be the best friend of another guinea pig. Sadly, my other guinea pig passed away, so he is alone. He is happy, though. I may get another some day, but, for now, he is a sleepy, furry, alone pig.

SOL 26- Plants

          Plants are horrendously expensive. Today, my family went plant shopping for vegetables, herbs, and flowers to plant in our backyard. We got carrots, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, citronella, thyme, mint, basil, peonies, etc. We always plant a ton of plants, end up with way too many zucchinis to do anything with, and then, in the end, let all of the plants die off. This year, we decided to get, and focus on, herbs. We are trying to actually use what we grow this year and what better way to do that than plant a bunch of plants that you use microscopic portions of each time you cook with them? In all seriousness, I love gardening in the summer because you can actually eat what you produce. The best time is late summer because everything is fresh and blooming, ready to be eaten.
          On a different note, I hate annuals. You pay three dollars for a pack, they bloom for two months, and then they die. The next year the cycle repeats itself. I have always understood buying perennials, because they come back every year. I guess I understand buying annuals for their beauty and appeal, but, at the same time, it is kind of obnoxious that the world is in such a vicious cycle. I know that I can not blame the plants for the way they live, but it would be really nice if they could just all become perennials so people would not have to make quite as many yearly Home Depot trips.
          Planting, on the other hand, is one of my favorite parts  of the entire process of gardening. It is so cool to me to be able to take a group of plant smashed together in  plastic rectangles and rearrange them into freestanding, aesthetically pleasing garden arrangements. It is a very enjoyable art form. It is actually really interesting to look into how certain plants do next to each other and what the overall life cycle looks like. The worst part of gardening is the upkeep. It would be so much easier if you could just plant a plant and let it grow and bloom on its own. Sadly, you have to water it everyday, make sure it gets the right amount of sun, yada, yada. This is a massive pain if you are the kind of person, like myself, who prefers to plant something and let nature take its course. I already have too much to worry about in terms of homework without having watering a garden on top of that. Anyhow, I really like gardening and the entire process of livening up sad looking, tightly packed flowers.

SOL 25- Trifolds

          Throughout my time at Logan, I have made four trifolds. Lets just say there has been a lot of progress in the quality department. The first trifold was made when I was studying Native Americans in Upper IS. At the beginning of my unit, I had visited a Native American art gallery. One of my other focuses was the Sand Creek Massacre. Who else but me would try to combine murals with a massacre? Basically, I had way too little information on massacres and the modern white man's affect on Native American populations, so I decided to do a large scale painting of the Sand Creek Massacre site based on the paintings I had seen previously that year. It was about the quality you would expect from someone who had barely ever used a paintbrush and thought they would paint the next Mona Lisa. It was rough and, honestly, a little bit not OK in hindsight as a little white boy was turning a horrific massacre site into an art project.
        The next year, I made a trifold on Feng Shui and Taoism in architecture. There were three main sections, one for each section of the trifold. They each had a decent amount of information, but in the end it was just a way to look like I had done more for my unit overall. I color coded each section so they would be obviously separate instead of mounting the entire trifold consistently. In the end, I got marked off on my rubrics for my color coordination. I was mad. I asked the teacher, and they said that it was too diverse. Since then, I have stuck to monochromatic or single colored mounting on my displays. Never again will I get such a low score because someone's taste differs from mine.
          The first trifold I made this year displayed a collection of pressed plants I made. This was a pretty empty trifold because the main focus was the six miscellaneous species. This is probably one of the most polished trifolds I have done. There was not any mounting or illustrating involved, so things were already better. This project took a long time just because of the entire plant pressing process. I really liked this project because I left it pretty blank. I really liked this because the majority of my projects are super cramped.
          My last trifold at Logan was just finished this afternoon. It is on the history and evolution of birds. It has a crap ton of illustrations, mounted paragraphs, and it is rather full. I never intend to create as much as I always do for this kind of project, so this trifold ended up really full. After approximately three hours of mounting, I was able to assemble everything together. It worked out well, in my opinion. Compared to my first crappy mural centered trifold, I think I have gotten a lot better. My spring unit this year is birds, so the entire evolution bit is quite important. The trifold does a good job of tying my entire display together. Don't worry, I color coded all of my mounting with my books and mobile, so I wont get marked off for that.