Week 8 (More School Extracurriculars)

 It's officially been two months since I started this thing and there have almost been half a thousand views on this website. It's been pretty wild since school started and I'm pretty surprised I still have stuff to say since I never really saw my life as exciting before compared to other people, and frankly I still do sometimes. But I think that since I'm doing so many extracurriculars this year, I have more to talk about in that regard with events coming in left and right every week. I guess I'll just start listing out everything I have that's worth mentioning with extracurriculars. 

Starting with Science Olympiad, our Palatine event rosters have been released. I'm doing the Wright Stuff, Gravity Vehicle, and It's About Time events. Wright Stuff is about building a plane out of wood materials and glue powered by a would up rubber band. You get points from building the plane within the correct dimensions, testing the plane, and having it fly the longest at the competitions. The thing that makes it hard is that the dimensions we fly the plane in are relatively small so we have to make the tail (back of the plane) angled so that it turns around mid-flight. We also have to find the right balance between rubber band weight and amount of power used to turn the propeller at the front of the plane. There also has to be a sort of equilibrium of weight on the plane so it doesn't fly straight up and crash down to the ground or just go straight down. This is my first year doing Gravity Vehicle, but from what I understand you have to slide a vehicle down a ramp and calculate how much you need to stop the vehicle to get it close to a target area. It's really hard because you need good quality materials to make it and it's hard to calculate how much you need to make it stop. Finally, for It's About Time, you have to make a device that can keep track of time without any electronic devices. It's hard because you have to be very specific, especially with trying to make everything constant. 

Next, regarding music, I've made ILMEA! ILMEA is the Illinois Music Educators Association which is basically a big music festival where the best players in a certain area play in a concert. So far I've only made it into the district level but soon the results for state will come out and I really hope I get in. For EYSO (Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra), we have an orchestra coming up where we're playing a part of a symphony and a couple other cool pieces. The theme of this year is flipped and negative space, where we see how the silence in each piece creates an impact.

There are a lot of other extracurriculars that I'm in, but I feel like these are the most notable right now. So far I don't feel that swamped with them right now, but I know that deadlines are approaching and that I need to get ready for them soon. I feel like my academics are taking heavy priority right now so I'm not even really thinking about extracurriculars, but I really hope that I can do more later. It's really late when I'm writing this right now so I'll leave it off here. I hope everyone is doing well right now and thanks for coming again!

-Charlie