Apologies for the delay. It was finals week and before that I was frantically completing pieces for my Pratt portfolio. Ah, the joys of senior year. Hopefully second semester will provide more opportunities for senioritis.

Today's exams were the remaining two of first semester: Tragedy and Chemistry. The Tragedy exam consisted of an essay (600-800 words) and a short response (300-400 words), which proved to be fairly easy. (Mrs. Gotterson practically gave us the prompts ahead of time and let us take in notes.) Chemistry was fairly alright, considering I didn't really study properly. There were a few problems that I struggled with, but I was relatively careful and... well, really, I'm just glad they're finished. Second semester, here I come!

I had Do You Remember Walter? stuck in my head during my Chemistry exam. It was infuriating.

Between exams, Monica and I filled our quarterly quota for gifts for Mrs. Gotterson. The main reason was that we won't ever have her as a teacher again, but it has become a bit of a tradition. At first, we were going to make a card and decorate some origami cranes when I had the idea to make WORLD WAR II FIGHTER CRANES based on the designs on the wings of aircrafts used in WWII. I made USAF, JAF, and DAF cranes. I was planning to have a RAF crane, but once I had finished the first three, I realized that Monica was drawing pictures of holiday icons getting a taste of their own poison: a leprechaun smooshed by a pot'o'gold, a decapitated easter bunny head in a basket of eggs, Santa getting burned in the coals meant to go to bad children, a pumpkin headed man losing candy from a hole cracked in his head, etc. (I would post the pictures that I took with my cellphone, but the printer is out for repairs. They're much cuter than they sound.)

Madoka had the fantastic idea of making the cranes into a mobile and so I fetched some string, strung them through, and, by Florence's suggestion, taped falling bombshells below each and put a mushroom cloud at the bottom. Monica decided to make her Horrible Holiday collection into a related gift and, after blowing them up on the copy machine and coloring them, taped them onto a string. We went to deliver them with Florence and Gotto was pleased. She showed Florence our old gifts (origami of a pooping dog and copulating sea lions, a hand-turkey, etc.).

Gotto told us that she had gotten a box of foil wrapped chocolates from Emily, who is generally a malicious creature. She was as surprised to receive them as we were to hear about it. There were strict instructions about which chocolates to eat when grading Emily's exam, which to eat when grading everyone else's, etc. Ate a pink wrapped one and enjoyed the chocolate very much. When she gave a green wrapped chocolate to Mr. Rhino, she was surprised to hear him sputter and spit... only to find that it was a rubber eraser. She had meticulously wrapped rubber erasers in foil so that they were identical to the real chocolates. Ridiculous. We're now members of an unofficial committee to develop a plot against Emily. Mwa ha ha ha ha.

VIDEO:
Learn To Speak Body

Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders and Learn to Phone Phony are also quite funny. For the front page, click here.