I am Deliriously Happy.

Yes, very. Remember how in my last entry I mentioned how I’ve been delayed, because I’m very bad at time management? Haha, yeah. Well, I finally finished it all today. I’m officially a senior! YAY. **dances around**

That’s all. Just wanted to share my happiness. Hahaha.

THANKS, GOD.

No Classes, No Rain, No Effect on Me.

DepEd cancelled classes today, because of the storm. Really funny thing about when classes are cancelled is, there always seems to be no rain. It would be raining buckets and buckets the day before they cancel classes, but on the day itself, it’s really really dry.

Of course, none of this really matters to me. It can be snowing hail the size of mini-vans and I’d still have school. I’m home-schooled. One disadvantage to that is storm signals and holidays don’t affect me at all.

But otherwise, I think being home-schooled is okay. It’s great because since I have control over my schedule, I can get into a whole lot of things I’m interested in, like learning Japanese, and photography, and volunteering in church. Which I love.

It’s a bit hard though, being in control of your time, because it’s very tempting to slack off. I mean, if I didn’t like the stuff I had to study for a certain day, I could decide to just do one tiny part of it. Which is very bad, because then you could get delayed. Which is what’s happening to me. I’ve only just begun to learn how to prioritize things recently, when I needed to get my grades for this school year complete so I can apply for college.

My system was all wrong this year, I left all the hard subjects (math and chemistry) for last, which was a big mistake, because I’m really slow with math and chemistry, and I don’t like them much, so I did the, dividing it into little parts thing. Baaaaaad. So, I ended up cramming them all during the end of the summer.

It’s very hard to do this, so if you’re planning to be home-schooled, don’t do what I did. You’ll feel your brain turning into mush, I kid you not. And you’ll end up not being able to go out. Because school is priority.

Balance is good. And focus. Focus is good. And important. I think one reason I got behind was because I had the attention span of a two-year-old (that’s not to say all two-year-olds have short attention spans. But, you get my drift.), once it got boring, I’d end up with my head in the clouds.

Oh, and listening to music while studying does not help. Unless you’re trying to block out some other, more distracting noise, like your younger sister, who insists upon talking while studying. (I don’t blame her, really. It’s just her way of learning. And it’s not like I don’t talk to myself. I always talk to myself. Just not while I’m studying.)

The Rain and 2.0 Mega Pixel Photos.

It’s been raining non-stop today. There’s a storm, Frank, if I’m not mistaken.(When my sister told me the storm’s name was Frank, I pictured a goat in my head. ha ha ha.) My mom came into my room at 4 a.m. to tell me to close my windows because the wind was really strong. And it’s really cold.

This kind of weather makes me feel very lazy. And it’s a bit annoying, because we’ve been stuck at home. And I was all excited about today. *sigh* Oh well.

I’ve been online since I woke up, and found out service was cancelled, ( I didn’t know that could happen, by the way. Haha.) not really doing anything. At one point, though, my computer decided to cooperate, and I was able to upload pictures from my vacation in Pangasinan last April. (Insanely late, I know.)

While I was uploading those pictures, I found  these photos I shot from my phone (I didn’t have a camera with me then– this was before my mom started letting me use hers, so all my pictures were grabbed from the people I was with, and taken through my phone.) and noticed how nice the low-quality of it all made the photos look. All dreamy and lomo-ish. (I like lomography, yes.)

I shall show them to you. I like them, don’t you? :p

Picture-Taking Practice

My mom recently started letting me use her Canon 350D, and I got to make like photographer on a medical mission organized by our church.

A bunch of us from our youth group volunteered to go, and my mom, who documents most of the events of our church, told me to just take pictures. Which was no problem with me, really. I’m squeamish.

And yet I volunteer to go on a medical mission.

Haha, yeah. Anyway, I went, and took some pictures. And had an awesome time!

I had lots of fun going around and shooting away. I loved the kids. They followed me around and posed every chance they got.

I sort of ended up with more photos of what was going on everywhere except where the doctors were checking blood pressure and the dentists were pulling out teeth. (I think the fact that I couldn’t stand watching the dentists pulling out people’s teeth, much less capture those moments, had something to contribute to that, too. But I did get photos of dentists pulling teeth out and little kids crying because of the pain.)

I learned how tiring being photographer was, too. By the time we ended, my legs hurt from my moving around, my arm was sore from holding the camera up, and, I didn’t believe this was actually possible, but I couldn’t move my clicking finger at one point, probably from all my trigger-happiness.

But capturing all those moments, and just being there and helping out in general, was a lot of fun.  Or maybe “fun” isn’t the right word. But, I felt like I was able to serve God in a way, even though the photos I took weren’t used; I felt like He wanted me there, for whatever reason.  And that felt really good.

Some of my friends helped the doctors by weighing people, (I found it a bit funny how they decided to weigh the babies. The weighing scale was the kind you stepped on, and we didn’t have the one you make the baby lie down on, and what my friends decided to do was to weigh the mother carrying the baby, then weigh her without the baby, then subtract the weights. Hahaha.) and calling out for the next patients. And by just being there for whatever the doctors needed them for. Like crowd control.

My other friends helped out with the dentists, by cleaning their tools. Which, I learned just by watching them, is hard work. They had to clean out all those tongs and syringes, and other  shiny, sharp, and pointy things I don’t know what to call. Made me really glad all I had to do was take pictures.

All of us came home feeling tired, but I know we all came home real happy because of everything that happened that day, and because of all the people we met, and especially because of the God we all went there to serve.

You can look at some of the pictures I took here.