Hi Again

It's been a long time since I last wrote and I apologize for that. It's been a crazy past couple of weeks with all kinds of school work, piano, etc. Well, my dad is doing great! He went to see the Pune Zoo and found that the tiger, if he really wanted to, could jump out over the railing. Pretty scary! He's lost a bit of weight, but he is healthy.

Life's been good. Yesterday was the Church Christmas party and, with my mom in charge, I didn't really get to spend the time with my family. It was fun though, chatting with friends and relaxing.

Thursday was a bit of a stressful day for me, not for anything really bad, though. In Science class, we had to build a mini roller coaster out of flexible pipe and tape. My group was doing great; the day before, we had practiced building the thing and were confident in our "Frostbite" (the name for our awesome coaster). However, we only had 30 minutes to build on presentation day, so we were a bit rushed. We were making great time when, suddenly, the marble wouldn't finish into the cup placed at the end. We kept at it, but by minute 29, we were pretty frantic. Why? If the marble made it through the roller coaster, you made an A; if it fell off, you received an F for the project. We responded in different ways: I was pacing the floor trying to think of a solution, one of the team members actually started praying, and everyone was a mess as we saw the teacher walk slowly towards are project. Finally, D-Andre said, "Put a piece of tape right there!" We were pretty game for anything, so we did as he said. We dropped the marble, Suzy, at the starting point and after 2 seconds, the marble landed safely in the cup. We tried again: it worked again. We were so happy, that when the teacher walked up to grade us, we were dancing together. My grade? 100! In my opinion, our roller coaster was the best after all that hard work; it displayed a paper tunnel, flags showing where inertia was overcome, where the speed changed, etc, and little signs saying things like, "Please enjoy your ride" and "Please exist to the left" (I was rushed so I wrote 'exist' instead of 'exit'). I was very proud of my group; we worked well together.

So that pretty much sums up the past week, fretting over little school projects, papers, and benchmarks. How was your week, Be Happy readers?