Poor Snowwy

I'm so tired. I haven't felt this drained since before AP exams. Hell, it's been so long that I've forgotten how it feels. On Saturday, I had my birthday party at the Spectrum and saw Pirates 2 and walked around a couple of hours afterwards. I got Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones with a gift card I've had since Christmas 2004. o_o I've been wanting to read that book forever. It was good, I want to see Miyazaki's movie now. I know it'll be different, but I still expect it to be good. It's a very good story, and I like all the characters. I can tolerate movies made from books after I watched the two Romeo and Juliet movies Garrity showed in 9th grade if I think about the story and what's essential in it to a film, which is a very different medium.

Pirates 2 was entertaining...but not great. I read some critics of the first one back when it first came out, and some people made good points--some parts of Pirates 1 were pointless, especially the duel between Jack Sparrow and the guy who took the Black Pearl. (I cannot think of his name right now. The guy with the monkey and apples.) It was pointless because neither of them could die, thus, neither one could win. Despite that flaw though, it was still a good film. I think Pirates 2 had a lot more pointlessness in it that you just couldn't look over as much. I think the incorporation of the kraken and Davy Jones was good, although I didn't really like his character. They should've explained what a kraken was though; I don't think most people got it. It's a legendary creature, like a phonix (is that spelled right?), and it dwells in the oceans. It eats sailors. That's really all I know, and I only know from reading stuff. Also, the whole deal with Davy Jones' heart and all is pretty farfetched, and I don't get how Norrington got it in the end, but oh well. An explaination would just make it more tiresome. Plus, I don't see why they had to name Davy Jones' ship the Flying Dutchman. The legend of the Flying Dutchman is totally different. All in all, it was alright. It's just because they didn't get some of the legendary stuff right that bugs me. People should read more.

Last night, Snow got an infection. She somehow got herself a wound a week or so ago, and yesterday, somehow, it opened up and started bleeding. I only noticed at about 10 at night. My parents came, and after I caught her, they looked at the wound and noticed there was a lump in it. They were planning to take her to a vet today to get her surgery for it to be removed, but that scared the heck out of me. Then, I got even more scared when my dad started trying to get the lump in the wound out himself. I had to hold Snow while my mom kept her calm by petting her. Dad squeezed around the wound until the lump came out, and it turned out to be a bug. It was still alive. I freaked out, of course. After Dad got that got, he continued to squeeze out the other infectious stuff in her wound. Then they put antibiotics on it and my mom and I had to make a cone for her head so that she wouldn't lick it. We stayed up past midnight doing this. Finally, after we had Snow settled, my parents decided not to let her out of her cage until the wound heals completely. Poor Snowwy.

I tutored Rachel this morning. She hates learning. I was honestly too tired from dealing with Snow last night to be too strict. She has a lot of trouble with negatives and retaining information. She does it right only when I make her. I have to work on being a lot harder and her if she's going to learn anything. I guess I'm glad I learned how to pay attention for long periods of times and how to organinzing my mind when I was littler. A lot of it just came from reading.

My SAT class is going pretty well. I like it more than I thought I would. I don't mind learning new words and strategic thinking. It's really just organinzing my mind more. So far, I think I can handle the essay part of the test the best, and that just comes from reading a lot and from all the training from Corbett to think, organize, and write essays damn fast. Other stuff I really do have to work on, but I think I can do it. It's not hard to learn new words, especially if I think of them in ways that I know already. I'm having trouble with grammar, though. That will just take more practice and spotting the errors. Sentence corrections I'm okay on. Even if I don't understand why something should be repharased as the answer is, I can kind of feel which answer simply sounds the most correct. Reading comprehension is kind of rocky for me though. Normally, I'd read a passage before I answer any of the questions, but I've realized it's pointless to do that if I can answer them without reading the whole thing. So I have to work on deciding what I should read an what I don't have to, which isn't easy to decide. I'm too used to reading whole passages rather than parts, I think. Math, I haven't worked on much. I dread doing algebra 2 and geometry review, but as long as I think of it in a way that relates to language, I think I can deal. Graphs are really quite poetic, you know.

I am exhausted, but I can't go to sleep yet. It's only 8:23.

Oh yeah, I read Tamora Pierce's The Will of the Empress. It's pretty good. I wonder if there will be other Circle of Magic books coming out; it kind of seems like that one was pretty resolving. I'll check her website.