Wow...today is May 16th, and tomorrow is my last school day of sophomore year. No, it's not quite summertime, since next week is finals, but it's pretty darn close. I'm very excited. There are so many awesome things I'm going to do this summer! I can't wait! One of my best friends, Annie and I are going to start a babysitting thing at the Bow Mar beach, we think. A parent drop-off babysitting service at the lake where they just pay per kid. It's not that difficult to entertain children at the beach, and we can handle a lot of kids at once. It'll help me pay my bills; plus, it will just be fun! Next, we have tennis. Whoo hoo! I love tennis, and I love coach Mike. I think he's the best coach I've ever had. He loves what he does so much also, the passion of tennis is just contagious. Too bad Annie can't play this year, tho. She tore her ACL in soccer...what a drag. She's recovering very well, but she won't be able to play any tennis this year. I'll miss her. But I still love tennis, and it'll be great. Also...my cousin, Brian is getting married in Carmel, California. We're all heading out to Cali for a couple of weeks for the wedding. It's gonna be so awesome. I haven't seen my cousins out in Cali for...let's see...since I was...nine? Seven years or so. It'll be an interesting experience. Next, I'll actually have time to do stuff with friends now! I've been doing sooooo much homework lately, it's been insane. I guess it's my fault for taking eight classes, LOL. But I think it's worth it, because I really like the classes I'm taking. Well, not the required ones...the ones I DECIDED to take. Like Microbiology. You know how many classes you take in highschool where you don't know a pinhead more when you walk out than you knew when you walked in, and all you do is busy-work the entire semester? I've had more classes like that than classes that haven't been like that. Microbiology wasn't like that at all. I learned so much, I feel like I know a world more after that class. Mr. Soderberg is a very good teacher, and I feel I will benefit from his class forever and ever and ever! I also am considering a career in microbiology of some sort because I loved it so much. Epidemiolody would be great...we did a lot of stuff that also dealt with the decions doctors make. We did enough gram stains to be able to do them in our sleep, and I know that doctors do that all the time to diagnose certain diseases for their patients. So I am considering being a doctor also. Anyway, way to get off of a tangent there! LOL. To finish off what is going to be great about this summer, two weeks before school starts, Maike Schoeps-Engler will be coming to live with us for a year! She's going to go to school with me, and it's going to be a blast! She's from Dusseldorf, Germany, and we've been friends since we were five or six. Her sister, Ulrike, was my au pair for a year. She came to visit, and even though I didn't speak German, and she didn't speak English, we found our own ways to communicate...usually with our hands. And then she came and spent three weeks with us the summer b4 eighth grade. She spoke really good English then, and I spoke very little German. They dont' offer German at school, so I don't really have a chance to learn it that way. All the German I learn is reliant upon my drive and my available time. Not good odds there, LOL. I'm a procrastinator enough with the things I have to do. But the following year, I headed out to Germany for three weeks, and it was a blast. A different experience altogether. The culture there is so much different than here. I got to see what it was really like to live in Germany, because I lived in a regular household with a German family. Oh...and her parents don't speak English. So I had to learn enough German to get me by when I was alone with them. It wasn't that much, but I at least learned how to communicate myself, and understand what they were saying. I must say, though, that I can still speak and understand German better than I can after a year of French. I do know maybe ten times as much French as I know German, but a lot of the French I learned is not French I'd actually use, and I didn't get enough exposure to actual natives speaking French. When you learn a language in a country, you learn it so much faster, and you learn the things you would actually use and need when forced to speak that language. In a French classroom, you only learn what some people have decided you need to know, which is often meaninglessly conjugating a ton of verbs before learning to say "It's cold. Too hot. Where is the bathroom?" Simple stuff like that is what you need, not how to say "My friend is very aimiable." Or "I am brown-haired, short, and happy." When do people actually walk up to someone and say stuff like that? And even when people do, you need to know more of the language to get to that point in a conversation! Anyway, so Maike's coming to America for a year. I'll learn more German. She'll basically master English. And we're gonna have so much fun, I can't even begin to tell you! Summer is going to be awesome! Yahoo!