Category: Random Thingamjigs

In science class, we had a whole unit that was based around DNA and genetics. I had only learned the basics of genetics in grade 9, so I was expecting to go into a lot more depth. While we learned about everything we were told what our end project was going to be, and that was if a pair of Identical male twins met a pair of identical female twins, and they both married and had kids, would they look the same? I’m hoping you understood that, as I am not sure how to explain that without talking to somebody in person. So what we did is learn about how genetics are split up between parents. That was the main focus of this unit, we learned about genotypes, phenotypes, and a bunch of other really big words that mean important things in science. I could explain all of this but I made a video that goes into detail on the whole unit.

The podcast was supposed to explain everything about genetics as if it were to somebody who had never learned about it ever, and still answer the question.  We also had to incorporate some comedy of some sort to make it interesting. That is what apple bottom jeans is played at one part. I think that the podcast turned out well as it displayed my learning throughout the unit.

Anyways I thought that I leaned quite a lot from this unit as I show in this mindmap.

 

In school we had a mint project in Health and Career. We had to create a keynote presentation that explained 10 things that we carry everyday to make ourselves succesful, mental and physical. Keynote is basically a version of PowerPoint, but it was made specifically for Apple. It was originally used just by the people form Apple but they decided to put it on to apple products such as iPads and iPhones. Our class had not used keynote before, so this assignment mainly focused on recognizing what we carry every day and our keynote skills. At the beginning it was all a mad scramble to find out how to use keynote. After just playing with it for a little bit you get the hang of it and it becomes a lot easier than you thought it would be. I was very overwhelmed, but I ended up doing a pretty decent job for my first time.

Personally I have never been comfortable with public speaking I have always gotten really stressed out and wanted to just not show up to school so I wouldn’t have to do it. In the end though I just figure out a way to get through it and just finish it. The funny thing about presentations is that when you think you’re done your not… you still have to deal with questions. To be completley hones that is the hardest part if people have lots of questions because you can’t prepare for that as well as the actuall presentation. Presentations are kind of onnoying because until you finish them they are always hanging over you head, but they don’t happen very often which is nice. When they do happen though I just say to myself, “What can you do when you live in a shoe.” FYI I don’t actually live in a shoe its a figure of speech.

This is how I feel in class sometimes, but then I realize I acutally havt to do the assignment or presentation, and that face turns into a stressed face.

Once I am finally done I feel so much better and I can finally relax, but wait I have more assignments to do, eh.

In Health and carreer my teacher decided that an assignment should be to make a portrait of ourselves. The catch is that we had use all the foods we eat to create it. I’m not a picky eater so I had tons of selection. I actually had a harder time deciding what foods would fit best rather than what foods I could use. I decided that I should be honest with myself and put a bunch of foods that aren’t exactly healthy. I put in a mix of healthy and unhealthy. At first it looked like a blob and like it needed a lot of work. After a while I had gone through a couple ideas of each part I finally found the right combination to make a food shaped body. My food choices aren’t necessarily the best, but it turns out a lot of foods that are bad for you work for body parts. To be honest I should cut down on my sugar and deep fried food intake.

These two memes explain me quite a bit. I’m now trying to be more disciplined. I feel that this photo also explains my eating habits quite a bit as well.

I have a chicken wing for a head, tomatoes for eyes, apples for ears, banana for a mouth, pickles for eyebrows, french fries for ears, protein powder for a torso/neck, celery for arms and hands, mars bar and snickers bar for legs, and fuzzy peaches for feet. After I wrote that I realized that is a quite a bit of different types of foods. Part of the assignment was to reflect on these videos we were told to watch. The first video I watched was about how much meat we eat compared to how much we actually need, it also talked about foods being shipped opposed to local foods. I thought that its pretty horrible how people are shipping foods from so far away for basics. It is also horrible how much livestock is killed each year and we don’t even need to eat that much meat. We are only supposed to eat .5 pound of beef each day and that’s how much on average an american eats a day. The second focuses on obesity and hungry people in this world. There are 1 billion hungry people and 1 billion obese people, to me that doesn’t sound right. The person who was talking was focused on feeding people in countries that didn’t have very much food. Just thinking about it makes me think of how good I have it living in such a nice place with all of the privelages I have.

That’s what my food body looks like what would yours, eh.

The title as you can see is quite odd. In math class we did this assignment that had to relate to our humanities unit. We had to create a monster that wasn’t very tall but had to be able to stand up. The unit that we were learning about involved finding the surface area and the volume and things like that. We learned about the math and figured out how to figure out the surface area and volume of multiple shapes stacked on top of each other, an example is like a cylinder on top of a square, and then being told to figure out what the surface area and volume of those to shapes combined together is. We were then told by our teacher make a “monster”  out of everyday materials that we could find.

 

I built mine using random stuff that I just found wherever I could, I used a lot of duct tape, the arms and legs were toilet paper rolls, the torso was made out of a pop can, and the head was a ball of styrofoam. I told you it was a bunch of random crap. Some people went out and bought specific parts for it, I just found stuff around my house that would work.  We then ended up using it in our frankenstuffie unit. That is how I made a monster, eh.

 

You might know that I have job, its definitely not very glorious, but I like it. My job is dishwashing for a restaurant for a place called Northlands, its a golf club and a restaurant so most of our business comes in the summer. During the school year I only work Fridays, but when it gets to the Summer I sometimes get working around 3 or 4 days but sometimes 5. I enjoy working where I work because of the people I work with. My boss has known me since I was a baby because I have been going there with my family for a very long time. I get paid minimum wage and get a free meal every time I work. It’s only a short bike ride away from my house so it’s not hard to get to. The shifts I work are either 12pm to 5pm or 5pm to closing, sometimes its 3pm to closing. Closing hours can range from when its really slow which is around 8pm all the way to a big party which is like after 11pm. The longest I have worked is one time in the summer when the other dishwasher cancelled last second so I had to take his shift and do my shift as well, plus there was a really big party going on I worked from 12pm to about 11:30. One of the best parts about my job is the head chef likes to go paint balling, and last year he took me and he won a paintball gun in a raffle an gave it to me because his paintball guns were a lot better. After the day of paintballin was done we both had our share of welts, I had one that I got like 30 seconds in to the match right in the forehead just above my mask.

That is the gun I got.

We also did a secret santa a couple months back, and I got my co-worker a Shirt with my face on it saying favourite dishwasher. Every body thought it was hilarious.

My jobs great, eh.

A couple months ago my class went to Seattle to learn about the crazy ones of the world, which was inspired by Apples commercial about the crazy ones.

That was the basis for that project and we had to make a video on what makes our person or group of people crazy. My group was focused on the 12th man of the Seattle Seahawks. Its insane what they did, they made it so that the Seahawks had an insane record at home which was something like 28-2 and still counting. The 12th man almost makes it impossible to call a play for the other team. We also went on a duck tour and went to the MOPAP which used to be the EMP.

A couple weeks back we went to Florida to learn about a different project. The best part is that we got to go to Disney World the whole time.

The project topic was what draws us to imaginary worlds. For this project we had to make a video about a ride in Disney World. The ride I chose was Expedtion Everest in the Animal Kingom.  To show what we learned we all made a video. Here is my finished product.

That video is how we were supposed to do the project. We were limited to around 5 minutes because our teacher wanted us to keep the video from being boringly long. I thought that everything in my video went very well and I awensered the question well.

Another thing we did while we were in Florida, was go surfing at Cocoa Beach. I did pretty well I wasnt great but I wasnt bad, some people were able to try and do tricks like hand stands on the board. We did that for probably close to three hours. I think that all of us had a good time.

Proof that I wasn’t the only happy one.

While this whole thing was going on we had vans that were assigned to us. My van had names for all of the other ones, Beluga, Orca/Killer Whale, and the Sea Pen. We had a couple names for our van including the Manatee, which was an inside joke, about one of the people in the van.

Another thing that we did while we were down there was go to Kennedy Space Center. While we were their we got to do this Zero gravity trainer thing which was a harness next to ladder and a weight holding you up. It was cool but the harness kinda put pressure on not that nice of places. Another simulator we did was this G-force spinny thing that spun you in multiple directions at one time. The coolest thing though was the simulator of launching a rocket and landing one with people in part of a rocket and people at mission control. We all had a job and a script. My job was something called flight director which gave me more power than the president, I liked that quite a bit.

The last thing we did was go on a Airboat tour which was really cool because we saw lots of gators. The airboat was insanely loud and with a massive engine so all of us had to wear ear protection. Apparently the gators on the land if we got close enough to them they could get into the boat with ease. Some of the gators were small but others were quite big. After we were done with the tour we got to eat there. I had a Chicken Caesar Salad Rap but my teacher ordered some gator bites. Which were really good, they tasted like a chewy version of chicken.

That is basically everything that we have done on field trips this year, and on those field trips I had a good time, eh.

 

 

In science class we got to do a lab, with copper. We created copper by putting aluminum foil in copper chloride, which turned it into copper by having the aluminum break down into rust basically. After that we had to put it in water and let it setttle, and then we would dump the water out but keep the copper at the bottom of the beaker, and we would repeat that multiple times. After about six times cleaning it with the water we put hydrochloric acid in with the water to clean it. Finally we put it in a bunsen burner and it burned green. Here is footage of the lab.

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Sorry don’t know why it looks like that.

In class we learned about wonder, which is a very broad topic with lots of questions. For this assignment we had to make a mind map, write a paragraph and answer 4 questions from an article we read.

This is what I did for that.

Down the Rabbit Hole, January 3
This perspective is very interesting almost like your coming out of a rabbit hole or a bug upside down on the ground underneath, a tree and the grass and the flowers. Everything surrounding it almost like it is a picture from the ground the camera is the ground in a little space where there isn’t anything above just to the side.

Lying on the ground
Staring up at the blue sky
What will happen next

Prinz Article

1.Prinz loved the, as he experienced wonder there, while on the other and his parents thought it was pointless and was just a random act.

2. The first is widening of the eyes, the second is the suspension in your breath, and the third and final one is the swelling of the heart
3. Wonder to Francis Bacon was a broken knowledge and a mystified incomprehension that science was able to cure.
4. I can’t think of a specific moment when I personally feel wonder but whenever I think about why the universe came to be, which is quite often by the way, I feel great wonder, curiosity and a little bit of confusion just because how vast the universe. Once I get to an answer I ask why, and I wonder if anything is possible. Everything that you think has an answer doesn’t really have an answer if you keep asking why because it basically makes it like an endless tunnel. The questions are endless and I don’t think that its for us to have answer to every question I have, that is why I have wonder to that subject, because everything is endless.
Jan 5 2017   On this day we used made up words to write sentences.

One time I had swigpill, and I said “filthsome”, it was just swatchscollop.

Swigpill and Swatchscollop=Disgusting food and Filthsome=Yuck
Then we made up our own words, and with a partner we swapped words and made a sentence.

Huuts-a-bootsa- adjective

I cam upon a Sliptimhoum and it was slowly sliding across the ground. The Sliptimhoum was massive with its big shell, and very heavy.

Here we wrote about

To use a made up word in a sentence it feels very weird, and off. It is also hilarious at the same time because it is complete nonsense. You feel kind of confused as if your language has changed without you knowing. It is a very odd feeling, it would be very odd for a whole language was made up that you had to speak.

How is Imagination influenced by the world?

If we don’t know something we usually try to make up an answer that could be possible.

How is Imagination influenced by language?
Language defines what is around you while simultaneously filling the void in knowledge you may have in that subject.

 

So on Wednesday all the grade 9’s got to go to work with there parents or somebody else. I went with my stepbrother to Richmond Auto Body North Vancouver(A.K.A. R.A.B.). If you want to know more about this place click Eh, just about everything u need to know about that place is on that link. Anyways I chose to go with my stepbrother because if I went with my Dad I would have to probably clean up the mess he makes in somebody’s backyard, because he is a landscaper, and I dont like doing that, and if I went with my Mom I would be bored at a office probably spinning in one of those chairs all day long. With my brothers job at least he works with cars which I like. Speaking of cars there were these two cool cars that were there, one was a really old Jaguar XJS V12,

That Jaguar is only have as cool as this car. 

This is an older BMW I’m thinking approximately a late 1980’s to 1990 BMW M5 maybe M3, with all of the weight reduction possible and a roll cage and a bucket seat. My brother had to drive it like just a couple of metres to get it out of the way and it was awkward for him to get out of the car because of the roll cage, and he said “People say they want a roll cage, no they dont because it’s pretty hard to get out of the car.”  That was probably the coolest thing I saw while I was there.

The other thing that I got to do was go into the paint booth which is where they paint cars/parts of cars. The guy who was working in the paint booth told me basically what he had to do. It’s something like a three coat proccess, u put a coat of paint on it, wait ten minutes until its mostly dry. You then do that again, then once its mostly dry you put the clear coat on it which makes it look shiny, he wouldnt let me in the paint booth while he was putting on the clear coat becuase it is insanely bad for you to ingest, so for that he needed a mask. Oh and the paint is insanely expensive. These little paint things that you pour, are no bigger then a pop can and there like $50 bucks and a good size can is like a couple hundred dollars. 

One of the cool things that my brother gets to do is weld. Right now there is a recall for BMW’s on there baby seat clip thingy, you know the thing that you attach the car seat to in the car, and becuase R.A.B. is a certified BMW autobody most of there cars are BMW’s so my brother has done so many of them that he’s starting to get bored with them because he’s done it so many times. He gave me his old welding mask to borrow becasuse its worse than looking at the sun, it was pretty cool because the metal melted down into a puddle that you could faintly see because of the mask, the welding tool he was using was transfering electricity to the end of it which was making it really hot which caused the metal to melt which makes it so my brother can reshape the metal.

Here’s another thing that happened a transformer from the sixties blew up outside. No, not a transformer that can change shape I’m talking about the ones that give you electricity it was still pretty cool a giant 12000 volt chunk came off.

One of my brothers co-workers owns a Alfa Romeo with a V8 in it and it does brunouts in 3rd gear, if you don’t know what that means here are the simple terms, small ish car + big engine = it go fast. Another guy has a 500 horsepower mustang that also goes very fast, and is a very cool car.

Thats basically everything that happened I just did homework the rest of the time.

I personally think that my take your child to work day is one of the best, don’t you think so eh!

 

 

 

I had a great summer and the thing about saying “had” means that I have to go back to school… yah I have to go back to school which is a bit of a bummer. I knew that it would happen but not so fast😥😭😭😭😭😭😪.  Okay, got that out of my system let’s talk about the awesome memories.

Let’s start with my job. Throughout the summer I worked up at a golf course/ restaurant called “Northlands Golf Course”. I work as a dishwasher, it may sound like it’s a crappy job but I don’t mind it and I like the people I work with which makes up for some of the grunt work I do. I worked a lot of shifts this summer and I worked five days a week and one double shift after I got back from Whistler.

Whistler was awesome because my brothers also came which was a lot of fun. We went bike riding three of the days which was pretty cool because, I got to all of the lakes and swam in most of them.  We also went golfing with other family members and family friends which was a lot of fun, even though I’m not that great at golfing.

Most of the summer I stayed at home. The worst about being at home was, my parents made me do… math, that was definitely the worst part about my summer, my dad said it was necessary because my brain was mush. I worked some more although I did go down to deep cove and jumped off the peer once.

I didn’t go on many trips this summer because I am going on more this year like on October 5  I am going to New York, and then in the spring I am going to Asia, so at least I’ve got a lot of things to look forward to this school year.