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Hey-a! I'm briefly on the computer here at my Engineering camp, and it has been so amazingly fun so far! ^_^ I've loved it!
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Written afterwards:


Ahoy there!

So, I had tons and tons and tons of fun at my Engineering camp, it was like, amazingly fun and I really wish that I didn't have to leave, it was, well, awesome. I'm gonna start at the beginning and embelish as I please, so if you want to read, then go ahead! ^_^

So, Monday, it was the first day of camp and I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning to go into work with my dad so that he could drop me off at the camp, I didn't end up getting to sleep that night until about 1:30 so in easy simple terms I was tired and didn't really want to get up that early for much of anything, but I did because I was responsible for staying up so late. The camp by the way was at a college campus and we stayed in the dorms there for four nights and five days, I didn't have my computer with me, or much of a way to get online, so that's why I haven't really seen much of y'all in a while, smile .

So, I go into work with my dad and hang out there bored for a while until about 8:20 and then he drives me over to the college and drops me off at about 8:45. So, I drop off my huge heavy bag in a room downstairs in the main ITLL (Integrated Technology Learning Lab, but it's often just called the ITL) building that we were in for almost all of the camp. Then I went upstairs to wait for the morning and beginning greetings and stuff of the camp. There were kids from lots of different schools there, but the main schools that made up the kids at the camp (if that makes any sense to you, it makes complete sense to me, and to be honest with you I'm typing this all out so that I can remember it forever) were from my school and another school DSST, then there were kids from several other schools, but no more than 2 or 3 from any of the other schools. My school had 11 people (1 who went home early sick sad ) and we had the most people. I think DSST had nine if I remember correctly. OH! I can count! I have a program thing of how many people were there, it doesn't tell what schools, but it tells how many people! One sec! wink By my count there are 33! And for that to make sense you gotta understand that the last few days I've been trying to count how many people were playing cards and failing at it pretty hardcore, hehe.

So, we came in for morning greetings and stuff and we were all in our little circles of the people that we knew, my school making a huge circle, DSST making a smaller circle and the other kids gathered around themselves, hehe. We met a kid from DSST who was (and I just figured out that it was the same person, at the time I didn't really pay attention, lol) one of the main people who varied from DSST and hung out with kids from our school all week, and we all saw that he had a name tag and so we all freak out and say "NAME TAGS!?" all excited and everything, lol. We ask where the name tags are and then boom, we're off and gone to get the nametags as fast as we can, lol. (In this process we ditched the nice DSST person, lol, didn't realize it at the time though) After we got the nametags we were told to sit down, so still pretty segregated, we sat down at the tables in one of the big lab rooms and listened to them explain stuff about the camp to us. After all that boring listening, hehe, we went outside to do some simple team-building exercises, they were really fun, and much as I hate them, I have to admit that they were really good at helping to break the ice with people! ^_^

After the team-building stuff we came back in and were organized into our groups that we worked with for the entire week, and I've gotta say right now that I absolutely love, love, loved my group, I couldn't have asked for a better group even if I didn't know that at the time on Monday. My group consisted completely of people that I know no one who went to the camp will know, lol. Kenton, another kid from my school and then three DSST kids, Blaire, Nathan and Nate. I luffles my group and Blare and Nathan are my good buddies now! ^_^ At least I like to think so. We got into our groups and then got the assignment that we were going to be working on for the rest of the week, we were going to be building robospiders! Whoo! XD The robo spiders were made out of legos and had to climb up a 10 foot PBC pipe and then stop at the top using a sensor. We had to add a weight of at least 100 grams to the robot and it had to carry it's power source, it also wasn't allowed to have anything that clamped to the top of the pole, so no grappling hook contraption (hehe, didn't stop Nathan from building one when we were basicalling in the "screw everything, we give up" mood yesterday. It was an entertaining try, but it didn't even work, lol.) So, that was the project in a nutshell, they gave us the lego kits and then threw us out into the waters of creation, lol. Immediately my team started slowly getting to know each other, we talked for a little while, but mostly just dove right into the building of the robot with very little planning, XD. That was probably a bad thing, but it was still fun, we didn't really plan anything for our robot to be honest, we just tore it apart when something didn't work and then started over. And trust me, we did a heck of a TON of tearing apart and rebuilding, we made at least 15 different robots and in the end we couldn't come up with one that worked. Wah! T-T We had a few hours to build on Monday and then we got to go to our dorm rooms, that was fun, lol, it was a really long walk with pretty heavy bags, lol.

We got to the dorm rooms and I met my room-mate Ana, she was really nice and we really connected and got along well, I'm going to miss her and we're definitely going to have to keep in touch. After dropping our things off in the dorm we all went to have lunch, we were still pretty segregated into our school groups, and I don't think Blaire or Nathan ate with us on the first day. After lunch we went to make boats! Yay! ^_^ We made boats out of milk jugs and duct tape and three wooden sticks, it was soooo much fun! Lol, Nathan put on someone's bikini top so we called him Bikini Man for the rest of the week, hehe. Or rather he was known as Bikini Man as well as Nathan, lol. Our boat worked rather well, we went for a great triangle design that worked quite well, we came in second place by only a few seconds I think, and we actually had someone riding on our boat unlike all of the rest of the boats, so yeah. wink After the pool activities most of us went to the gym to play something. Emma and I played volleyball, just peppering and passing it back and forth, we looked for a net and didn't find one until it was too late last night, and let me tell you we were both extrememly pissed that we found the courts in a pretty obvious place that neither of us would have ever thought to have looked, Drat! So Emma and I passed a volleyball and the other kids from our school played basketball behind us. And, lol, Lauren got a black eye! xDD Kurt was playing with her and he accidently hit her in the eye trying to steal the ball or something and he ended up giving her a black eye, lol, it makes for a pretty awesome story, lol. After the rec center time we all went back to the dorms and played cards. I'm fairly certain that by this time Nathan and Blaire had both integrated into our circle of awesome people and we had a fun time playing spoons with stolen spoons from the dining hall, lol. I think we took 10 or so spoons and we were supposed to have returned them this morning, but we forgot and I'm not really sure what happened to them....lol. It was lots of fun and really crazy, lots of people and action, ^_^.

Then we had to go to bed and I got to know my room-mate, we talked for a little while after lights out and got to know each other, I was really glad to have her to talk to. ^_^

Tuesday morning dawned bright and early, I got up and went to eat breakfast with everybody, (if I ever say everybody I'm usually referring to the kids from my school and our adoptee DSST kids Blaire and Nathan, hehe.) and after that we headed back to the ITL lab to work some more on our Robospiders. We spent several hours on that and I can't remember us doing anything else in the morning...nup...nothing is coming to mind. Then we went to eat lunch and came back to work some more. Our robo spider was coming along okay, but it wasn't really anything spectacular. Oh! I know what we did! We learned how to make circuts and use the lazer cutter in the morning and then continued working on our projects in the afternoon! That was how that worked! :3 Yup! Hmmm, what happened Tuesday night....uhm...there was something...I think Tuesday was game night, I'm fairly certain! Yesh! Tuesday night we played cards and board games and such and had a Guitar Hero game set up that people could play as well. I played Jenga and Uno and watched a game of cash, ^_^. After the game night we headed back to the dorms again and played cards some more with our awesome group back in the corner we played cash and I pretty much owned, lol. The people who were trouncing everyone else before me and Blaire came in as awesome partners lost to us almost every round, hehe. Then it was bed time again and I talked to Ana some more, we talked a little about Eclispse, but we were both kind of tired and went to sleep without talking too much.

Wednesday morning was a little later, I slept in a little and went to breakfast later with my room-mate Ana after my "group" had already eatten and returned to the dorms. Ana and I ate and then came back and met everyone out in front of the dorms later, at the set time that was the same all week. Then everyone (everyone, everyone, lol, this is fun for me to type up) headed out to the ITL lab to work some more on our project. Blaire and Nate made some more of our AWESOMELY awesome belt-buckle sensor designs for our group. TCS! YESH! ^_^ The Color Slinky was the name of our group, we were organized by the picture that we had on our name tags and the picture on our nametags was a purple slinky: I'mma add a picture later, gotta find my adapter. So we named out selves "The Color Slinky", a play on "The color purple" hehe. But, we made awesome sensor things that we're turning into belt buckles with transformers on them and the letters "TCS" on them, I'll take a picture to try and show you, it's pretty awesome. ^_^ The team wanted the name to be a little more BA, hehe. So we've changed the name to "The Cool S---" XD So, yeah, hehe. Awesome. We worked on the robospiders for most of the morning and sorta got a working design, it carried the weight all the way up and everything, but it was going really, really slow so we tried to change it, and well...everything kinda went downhill from there...T-T Our bot never worked the same again, not even when we reverted back to the bot that worked the first time. *sigh* We went and soddered up our circuit, and for all non-engineering peeps, soddering is a way to attach wires together using special metal wire that you melt using a really hot metal "pencil" that melts the metal to connect the wires together so they can coduct energy through each other. We worked on that for a while and then tested the car, so the soddering was before the testing of the car up the 10 foot TBC pipe. After our work time on Wednesday we went on a tour of the campus and went to several labs to learn different things about the campus. We went to a biological lab where they were making...now I can't remember the word...arrg...well they were making some kind of cell that could be used to re-create muscles and things that are damaged or something in humans, it was pretty interesting and cool, and it was definitely a lot of hard work in the process, prolly not my thing, but it would be interesting to look into. The second lab that we went to after that was an aerospace thing, they were working on unmanned flying aircrafts (UFA's) which is a pretty interesting concept to keep up with, not the kind of thing for me, but still cool. The third and last lab that we went to was for a racecar! ^_^ It was pretty cool. It was a car that was built almost completely from scrap (only the tires, suspension, motor (a motorcycle motor) and steering wheel were bought, and the sensors that were almost $400,000 collectively, wow! that were borrowed) everything else was assembled by the team. It was a pretty awesome looking car and I really wanted to drive it, hehe. I know that I wouldn't be good at constructing a car, but I could try to do something like that to learn more about making cars, and of course to get the chance to drive it, hehe, always a plus, wink After the lab tours we ate dinner and then we had a movie night. We watched Transformers, a movie that I've only seen like 4-5 times already, lol, and I just finally got to see the ending of it, xD, it was entertaining. After the movie we hung around until about 10:00 or so and then we got to go back to the dorm. Oh! And I finally lost my last tooth! Yesh, I know, I'm 16 and I really, really, really should have lost all of my teeth already, but I finally just lost the last one on Wednesday at about 9:56pm or so. After the movie we went and talked in the hallway for a while before playing cards for a while after that. It 'twas awesome! ^_^ I know I'm saying that a lot, but I really had a lot of fun.

Thursday morning was a late morning again, I ate breakfast by myself and my room-mate joined me a little later. Then that morning we worked some more on our project, but by that point in time we were basically just very frustrated with our project and not wanting to work. We called this our "F--- this" time and we just messed around building whatever we wanted and most of these things had nothing to do with building a functional robo spider. Most of Thursday was spent being very angry with our non-functional car and just being generally angry with life, lol. Thursday after lunch we worked for a little while longer during which time we tried to rebuild the only robo spider model that actually worked for us, but it wasn't as good as it was the first time that we had it, and it still ran really slow. After our work time we left to go on a tour of a tea manufacturing place, and it was interesting, but I don't really like tea, so the whole tea part didn't really interest me. But I learned that you can't put green tea and black tea in the same room as any other kind of tea otherwise it'll take the flavor of that other kind of tea, wow! And then we went into the peppermint room and WHOA! Peppermint is intense in smell! O_O Whoa! I didn't even go in all of the way and I was overwhelmed, hehe. After the tour we went to a sub place and ate sandwiches there, differed from the dorm food. It was fun at the sub shop and on the way back in the van we got into having a fun political conversation about the elections and politics in general, it was really fun, I love having political debates and this was one of the few times that I was able to have a good one, even though people kept getting distracted away from the topic, sad I want to keep talking politics with people again! T-T And! When we got back we found a party room! xD That's what we called it, it was a huge room that was very spacious and we were able to party in it! ^_^ We went down there and originally they had only extended the time that we had to be in our rooms by, by 30 mins, until 11:30, but we ended up staying down there until about midnight, hehe. It was awesome. We played Texas Hold 'em, and it was so fun! I've got a really good poker face, so it was impossible for anyone to read what cards I had off of my face, but the people I was playing with other than Carlos (one of the RA's who played with us and was actually pretty good, but tried to play too hardcore and lost to people who didn't know what they were doing, xD) and Nathan didn't really know what they were doing and didn't have all that great of poker faces. So I was able to tell pretty well what kind of cards they had, and since I was only playing for fun I let myself lose, hehe. After we finished play Texas Hold 'em we played Cash and that was fun, I didn't play too well, but it was still really fun. We had to stop playing cash at midnight and that made me sad, because that was the last time that I got to play cards, sad I really wanted to get another fun game in. After that we went to bed and my room mate was already asleep so we didn't end up talking, but before we went to play cards Ana and I really got to talking about stuff, and it was nice. ^_^

This morning I got up early and went to go and eat with everyone else, yay me! XD After breakfast we worked on our car, but by this time we were basically done with everything that we could really do with our robo spider so we basically just messed around and stuff today. And like I said before we tested our bot and then it died right before we got to use it, so we failed. Everyone was having pretty sad luck with their cars today, but the only difference for us was that we've been having the same bad luck all week, lol. Uhm...I actually think that's all I've really got to say! XD I'm really going to miss Blaire and Nathan and I'm going to have to try and go to see them this Tuesday when we're going to hang out, and if not then the 13th! ^_^ I can't wait! They're awesome! ^_^

I'll post pictures and stuffs later, yay! ^_^