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Today we went to the beach. Not just any beach — Bob Straub beach. It’s near Pacific City. And this time, I made a sand fortress. It had a huge half-circle wall around it to protect it from the waves, a mote to slow down incoming water, a drainage ditch, a lake to drain the water into, and a pyramid-shaped two-level building in the middle.

At 9:30pm, we went to pick up my dad at the Hertz rental place. He just got back from Spain. We’re still driving; I’m writing this in the car.
This is the first time I’ve gotten to use my light-up keyboard in a Dark Vehicle. It works really well.

Sorry I haven’t been able to blog for a few days — I’ve been really busy learning C++ and Objective-C/Cocoa.

My new PowerBook G4 15″ arrived today! 1.5GHz and 512 MB DDR SDRAM — way faster than my other 500MHz Titanium. It also has an 80GB hard drive, so I don’t have to worry about running out of space for pictures when we go to France. iPhoto and Delicious Library are really fast on this. The keyboard lights up when it senses low light conditions, and the screen automatically adjusts its brightness depending on the ambient light. It also has built-in Bluetooth. And the two-finger scrolling feature on the trackpad is really nice.

Well, I’m at La Quinta hotel in Portland, 2 miles from PDX. My mom just got back from New Jersey last night, and this morning my dad left for Spain! Here’s what his website says about it:
June 8, 2005: I’ve been invited to attend the “Semana Negra Festival” in Gijon, Spain, on July 12 to 18, to launch the Spanish edition of “The Last King.” This is one of Europe’s biggest book fairs, with some 2 million visitors expected to attend. If you plan to be there, look me up.

We’re coming home sometime today. And I’ll have to swim with the Senior 2’s tonight and Sr. Preps for the rest of the week, because I can’t make it any morning practices until my dad gets back cause Isa and Marie can’t stay home alone.

I had to get up at 5:00 today (actually, I got up at 5:35 because I didn’t have the speaker plugged in properly on my iPod), even though the afternoon session wasn’t supposed to start until 12:45, because I had to be dropped off at Andrew’s house when my dad took Isa to the morning session (I was riding with Andrew), at 6:20. My mom is in New Jersey for a wedding right now, so that’s why she wouldn’t be able to take me to Andrew’s house later.
I swam the 200 free, 50 free, and 400 free today. In the 200 free, I got 2:22, which is a Sectional time by two seconds, but still a second off my best time. Kate said I need to go faster on my third 50.
I got 29.49 in my 50 free. 39 hundredths of a second off my best time. It’s bothering me that I’m 1 100th of a second off a 14 year-old Sectional time, and I just can’t get it. Oh well, I’ll get it at State.
In the 400 free, I got 5:03.91, which is just under a second faster than my old time. I asked Kate how I should swim this, and she said to do the first 200 hard and the second 200 sprint. I did, but something happened on the second 100, I think I got scared or something, and I started losing speed in the middle. My splits were 1:11, 1:16, 1:19, and 1:15 (or something). Yikes. I was just having trouble at this meet. Plus, it’s a bad pool. But hey, I don’t think anyone else got DQ’d in two events on one day, so maybe I set a record!
I can’t wait till State!

On another note, my new 15″ PowerBook G4 1.5GHz that I ordered shipped today!

Ahh! I got disqualified in two out of three events today! The meet was at Echo Hollow pool, and I swam the 200 back, 200 fly, and 800 free. I got DQ’d in the 200 backstroke for a non-continuous stroke on my first flipturn — and it wasn’t my fault. The flags were positioned inaccurately! Tori (Grimwood), got disqualified for the same thing, same wall, same turn. And Adam would have, but he just started his turn earlier so he wouldn’t get DQ’ed. But I knocked eight seconds off my old time, and I got 2:51. Kate was really happy with my time, and she said that’s the best she’s ever seen me swim it.
I got 2:51 in the 200 fly, and I got DQ’ed because my right leg was higher than my left leg in my kick! Kate liked my splits, although I was a second off my best time. I went out too fast, because everyone around me went out way too fast, and they (all but two of them), died at the end. I didn’t see the the other peoples’ times, but I saw Luke Pebley was 10 seconds off his best time (he got 3:02), even though he was more than a body-length ahead of me on the first 50.
In the 800 free, I just did plain bad. I was nine seconds off my best time, with 10:37. I don’t know what happened, but Adam (who was in the same heat as me) got 10:34, which is 18 seconds off his best time. I went out way too slow. Kate said that next time, she wants me to do it backwards, and start out sprinting and die right then instead of saving my energy. I have a problem in long distance where I always go out way too slow, and then end up sprinting at the end, but getting a bad time.

I’m swimming all freestyle at the meet tomorrow, and I have to get up at 5:00 to go to Andrew’s house at 6:15am (I’ll explain later; I’m going to bed).

I finished Thomas Quinn’s site. His book, The Lion of St. Mark, came out on July 1st, and we wanted to have the site finished by then, but there were just a few delays. He was going to pay me $350, but he insisted that it was $400 and he gave me a $100 tip because he liked the site so much, so he ended up paying me $500. And now I can buy my new PowerBook G4!

I went with Eric and his dad on another Jeep adventure today, and this time it was near Thomas Creek. It was a lot dryer this time, and we were gone longer — we ended up going over 100 miles. We got lost, even though we had three GPS’s with us, because the Garmin iQue kept telling us to take some road, which eventually ended with a locked gate (all the gates were provided by Weyerhaeuser). We probably wouldn’t have gotten lost if we had followed the track we came from on my GPS, but that’s not what we did (it wouldn’t have been an adventure if we had!). If you look at our track on the GPS, you can see all the times we turned around because of locked gates. Anyway, we got up to 3600 feet into the mountains, and there were some really cool views. There was also a really good GPS signal up there. We could see some town, I think it might have been Lyons. Here are some of the pictures:

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All the neighbors came over for our fireworks today, and they brought some too, so we had a lot. We were throwing the smaller ones in the lake after lighting them to make the water light up green and red.
If you wonder why one of the fireworks is tilted in the pictures, that’s because, uh… we felt like it!

We had a 3 hour swim practice in Corvallis today, and I think we swam 6900 meters (it wasn’t focused on distance). One of our main sets was 6×50’s drill @ 1:10, 3×200’s @ 4:00, two times. You have to do one stroke for each time through. It wasn’t too hard. The thing is, I was going to do fly for the first set and free for the second one, but after the first set, Kate liked my fly so much that she made me do fly again, so I ended up doing six 200’s fly. But she said that was the best 200 fly she ever saw me do.

You’re probably wondering about the Jeep excursion now. Well, here it is:
Eric and I went on a little Jeep ride with his dad around Silver Creek today. We were gone about three and a half hours. When we got onto the trail, we drove through every puddle and mud pit that was on our way (and even some that weren’t on our way), and we got covered with mud, because we had the roof and windows down. I don’t think there was a single road with a sign that said “no cars”, “road ends”, or “falling trees” that we didn’t try to go through anyway. According to the GPS’s, the highest we got in the mountains was about 2300 feet above sea level. Near the end, we wanted to go through one last puddle before hitting the road, so he floored it through the puddle and water came down on us from all directions, including above! The 3 GPS’s that we brought were covered with water, our seats had puddles in them, our food was soaked, and we looked like we had just gotten out of a (muddy) bath. Luckily, two of the GPS’s were waterproof. Mine is a Magellan eXplorist 300, Eric’s is a Garmin Rhino, and Eric’s dad’s is a Garmin iQue.
Sorry I don’t have any pictures — we forgot to bring the camera!

We all wore our shirts in the pool today. Erica didn’t bring a suit to practice because she couldn’t find it, so Kate was going to make her swim in her clothes, which means everyone else has to have “an article of clothing” on too. So we used our shirts. Mine acted like a parachute, Adam’s was a parachute, and Andrew’s was made for a 5 year old.

Andrew, Sammi and I had to do a 2000 for time today, because we didn’t get a best time when we swam it two days ago. I got 24:25, which is 18 seconds faster than my best time, and Andrew got 24:34, which is 3 seconds faster than his old time. Sammi got pulled out by Kate about halfway through because she thought she wasn’t doing well enough.
We have swim practice in Corvallis from 7:00 to 10:00am tomorrow. Three hours — I’m scared.