Happy Birthday Art, good bye Art and why riding your bike is fun!!

Happy Birthday!

Good Bye!

Yes, everybody wish a Happy Birthday to Artturi(I learned how to spell his name ;D), and say good bye! He left yesterday, after only beeing able to stay two weeks overhere ): . He's going to some family friends in Illinois before he takes the first plane back to Finland. His parents just want him out of this area and back home after what has happened with the chasing by the gang I told you about. His 18th Birthday was on Friday, so we kinda did a little Birthday/Good-Bye Party in the garage, but more later.

Again the update on how my school's going: Perfect! :D I'm still having a lot of fun, though it's school overall, so it's not that much fun ;P. My grades didn't really change since last week, only in Math I managed a 125 % (Extra credit problem...) on the last test, so I'm on a B now and I just checked Edline (you can check your grades online there), and somehow I managed to get a B in Physics, too (I don't know how though, because I failed the last two tests (one with 60 % ( You pass above 60 -.-) and the other one miserably , but apparently he curved them very much :D)). So now I have 5 A's and 2 B's, and since this is the last week of the quarter I don't really think it's gonna change alot anymore before the quarter ends. I'm really happy with that :)


Nothing really interesting happened over the week, besides Art coming every single day (for the two weeks he had been here he was in the garage every single night ! :D) to play pool with me. That's the reason why I will miss him, nobody to train with, so i won't get better as fast :O
So about the party :D It was fun and about 15 people showed up, even the language coordinator of the organisation, Anthony, showed up with his wife and kids. We kinda just played pool and ate the pizza they ordered no dancing or anything like at the Valentines party :D

Art's birthday cake

Some of the people there

But again, it was mostly exchange students that showed up and even if they didn't all speak in their languages I always seem kinda awkward if it's just other exchange students, just because (this may seem stupid and rude but ok ^^) I personally think I'm here to experience the American culture not the korean/spanish/brazilian/... one, though it's interesting hearing about them and so on, but I would like more american people at the parties ;D So I mostly kinda talked to Art (well he was the one the party was about ;D) and the two Americans Lauren and Andre, that were there. It was fun though and I played alot of pool again :D (The score me and Art ended: 25 games for him/23 for me). The party pretty much ended at 1 when everybody had left besides Art himself :) .

Saturday: Road Trip ! YAY! :D

On Saturday we left Crown point and went down to Indianapolis for a birthday of two of Sandy's relatives. The ride was about 2 h each way, but the temperature difference from here to there was incredible it was in the forties (about 5 ° C) an raining in Crown Point when we leaft:

Where we came from...

Butwhen we reached Indianapolis it was sunny and up in the seventies (~ 25 °C), so it really felt like summer:

Where we went...

Since it was such a good weather I decided to borrow one of the relatives' bikes and went off for a bike ride most of the afternoon. It was really good to ride a bike againa after such a long time, but the neighborhood was kinda boring, the only interesting I found was a River and later a Burger King, where I bought a milk shake :D

The fartest point from the house I biked too, a place called "Dirtworks LLC" :D

It was really fun though and after that we had dinner there (Barbecue :) ) and watched the kids open their gifts before we left for crown point at about 5:45. We came here at 8:00, but the night was far from over.

First it seemed like nobody would show up and it would be a very "boring" night, but after I had told Lou I was bored because there was nobody there suddenly the garage got crowded in a blink :O About 15-20 people, all in Little Lou's age, showed up so we had another big crowd there with more pool (Me and little Loud managed to win 3 team games in a row, YAY! :D). I went to bed at about 3 o'clock (4 o'clock new time, daylight saving started here yesterday :)).


A rather short blog entry's end.

Fat "Mardi Gras" Tuesday, Poker and more Pool than you can imagine!!

Happy March! :D I really couldn't think of a fitting beginning this time really so I decided to start with the new month, since with March I'm always 3 months here already :O


Update on school in the beginning, like always ;D: I'm doing very fine my grades for the third quarter will be: 5 A's (W. Hist/Eng 10/Morality/MusicTheory/Latin III) and 2 C's ( H. Alg 2 + Trig (yeah, unfortunately I wasn't too good in the first and third test, and the math teacher is the only one that doesn't give any grades besides the tests) + H. Physics (Yeah well, I told you so often it's that hard, but for the 4th quarter I should be able to get it up to a B at least, since I'm constantly getting better (though the topic at the moment is very hard again :/))). I think that's pretty good, since both classes I got a C are Honors (you are considered to be one grade better in normal classes) and aren't really supposed to be taken by sophomores (3 sophs in my math class and I'm the only one in my Physics class), so I'm totally happy with my grades, even more 'cause I'm not really working too hard at all ;).


Let's get to the more interesting part again, this time though it's not all on the weekend:

Art!!! ;D

Art (the new finnish exchange student now living across the street I told you last week about (actually his name is something like "artturi" (or sth. like that ;P), but it's pronounced so complicated, that nobody's able to do it, so everybody calls him Art :D)), is definately the most addicted Pool player ever :D. Beginning on Monday night, he came over every single night (besides Tuesday (look at the title to know why, or scroll down ;P)), and played Pool for at least 2 hours, so I got alot of practise this week, since he's pretty good! I even managed a combo cut bank shot (explanation : cue--->one ball--->cuts other ball(combo)--->bank--->long way --->pocket :D), I called :O. He's a very nice guy too, and he told us the temperature we're having right now (about 25-35 F (-5 - 3 ° C (approx. not calculated ;D))) is like june in Finnland :O.


So why didn't he come over on Tuesday?! We went with Sandy to her church to a Mardi Gras, also called Fat Tuesday "party" :D. If you're thinking what the heck is Mardi Gras, you're the same as I was ;D It's kinda like the "last day of karnival", since you also can dress up, but actually it's just having alot of (in this case very good ;)) food, because it's the last day before the 40 day lent before easter (I hope Germans now also know what I'm taking about, since led isn't the most common word ;D). There was alot of food and especially the dessert was very good :D. It wasn't really a party though, since it just ended up that all these more or less old people sat together and talked ;D But hey I had fun, good food and texted too much that night (50 (or more I don't know^^) texts in 2 hours are too much in my oppinion but hey I didn't text that much this week anymore so I'm doing fine ;D). But hey, I learned a lot of funny stuff (I texted like 5 or 6 people to tell me something funny ;D) in those texts, e.g: (which (I don't remember who thought me that in Germany, but some english teacher did i think ;D) btw not means example given, but comes from the latin 'exempli grati' ;P): stupid pickup lines like: "If you would be a burger at McDonalds you would be the McGorgeous" :D.

Erin and Monica (a friend of Katherine (a friend of Erin ;D))

Enough of that let's get to the weekend again :P : Friday I spent in the garage again (ofc, why do I even tell you?! ;P) and it was again a very crowded day with about 15 people! That always makes it more fun than with just the normal ones ;D. A full overview followes now:
My age: Sol, Me, Art (scroll up to read more ;P), Erin(you should know her by now^^), Andre (black guy, was in the blog last week...), Zac( n/c), Monica (friend of Katherine), Katherine(friend of Erin's ;D), Jun Hi(n/c), Lauren (in enough pictures already so no more explanations ;D ;P)!

Katherine, Me and Erin

Lauren!!!!!! :D

Older: Little Lou (Lou's son for those who forgot ;P), his friend Matt (he's in the army), Lou himself, Jeff (Drums?! :P), Andrew (a 21 year old I talked to alot, since his grandparents are from Germany so he speaks German (no we didn't talk German like Koreans would have talked Korean ;P) and wanted to know alot about Germany), and 2 guys I don't remember the names even if they bet me and Art in team game of pool ;P.

The partly German, Andrew, who also played poker on Saturday

In the front Matt, behin him Little Lou, and Zac's the one who's got the funny light thing in his face ;D (It's a straw, I don't know who did it though ;P)

The night ended at about 2 for me (I went to bed ;P), after too much Pop (Diet Mr. Thunder is nothing like real Dr. pepper btw ;D) and alot of Pool.

Saturday: Sometime in the morning we picked up Dae Sang, a Korean exchange student at Andrean (yeah but he doesn't speak Korean with koreans all the time, so he's cool ;P), who also then spent the night. The day of the big poker game I announced last time! I can just tell you at the beginning I didn't make it :P. It really was fun though and I lost with a 50/50 chance so not too much my fault ;D. We were 11 people there, I don't know all the names though the ones I know: Zac, Me, Art, Bill (Zac's stepdad), Chase (Bill's cousin), Andrew and the rest doesn't matter ;P The first place was Chase, who took 175 $, second one was Bill himself, the host, who took 75 $ and the third one just got his 25 bucks buy-in back. The game started with 2 tables and lasted from 4:30 to 10 :O. I was out at about 7:30 though ): .

After that we again went over to the garage, but that night there weren't really a lor of people, just Sol, Me, Lou, Andrew, Erin(came late), Andre(came late), Dae Sang, Jun Hi, Art and Zac and Jeff. (Yeah I know, alot of names, but I explained every single one somewhere in this post, just search for that ;P) Since Dae Sang and Zac were staying over night we stayed up till about 4 before we went to bed, but it was ok I surprisingly didn't feel tired at all today, even if I was woken at 10 o' clock.

Sunday was rather boring and since I wrote so much confusing stuff already I won't tell you anything more ;P just a random picture of the Pop /Alcohol (not by the young people, all done by the older ones :O) finished on Friday, not even all of the pops though, Lou threw half of the cans away that night :D:

The End

P.S: Everybody gogogo ask questions, since this blog is probably even more confussing than the one with the Valentines party ;D