Well, today is August 18th, and that means that for me, today is the first day of my senior year. The first day of my last year in high school. The first day of my last year where I will get a free, quality education unless some sort of unlikely education reform system is adopted offering a free post-K-12 education system. As the quotation goes, today is the first day of the rest of my life. (Actually, I have no idea who said that quote, so bonus points for the first person who correctly identifies it in the comments.) And so, the same way I did last year and the year before that, it’s time for me to review my summer break here on my blog as I prepare to set foot into the year ahead.

Spoiler: I didn’t actually write this full blog post the very morning before I head off to my first day; I wrote all of this the night before when I had time and scheduled the post for this morning.

On the last day of school, after my last final, I biked over to the library with my laptop, borrowed their wifi, and wrote a blog post looking back at my junior year and laying out a few goals for the summer. Of course, I didn’t have very many goals listed on account of my brain was too busy preparing for my trip-filled month of June and wasn’t quite ready to think about July/August yet. But, as I did at the end of last summer, so will I do again.

• China Tour, June 3-13 — Yes, I went with members of my school’s band, orchestra, and choir (over 200 people in total) on a ten-day tour of Beijing, China, which I briefly summarized on my blog and which was covered much better on the official tour blog. It was certainly an interesting trip that showed me a whole new side of China that I hadn’t known about before, and a “ding-ding-hao” (or “good”) side at that. However, to the other folks on the tour that told our local media that it was the trip of a lifetime, I have to respectfully disagree; Sojourn to the Past easily trumped it, hands down.
• Boys State, June 21-28 — There may have been a few odd quirks that I had to live with while I was there, but overall, I definitely enjoyed the experience and was able to put my many abilities into good use while I was there. I blogged a lengthy review of Boys State shortly after coming back, so I’ll let that speak for itself.
• Summer Reading — Well, I’m close, but I’m not quite done yet. For English, I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and for AP Government, I read unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (editors of FactCheck.org) and I’m about halfway through Hardball by Chris Matthews, which actually is more interesting and much less partisan than I thought it would be. I’ll have tests on all three of those sometime very soon (hopefully/likely not on the first day of school), and I promise to be finished with all of those by then.
• Clean my room! — Ah, this is likely one of those eternal tasks that will never quite get done. However, this summer I approached this task in stages along with my brother, and have been able to clean up and better-organize the landfill that was my desk, clean up the huge stack of junk that had been the shelf next to my brother’s computer desk, get some frames/certificates hung up (that job has been waiting to be done for over a year and I just got it done this past Friday), and get a accordion-style filing case to keep all my college applications stuff in order. There’s certainly still some more work to be done before my room can be considered “neat and tidy” (oh, that will be the day), but there has certainly been some improvement made.
• New Podcast — Didn’t happen. Not sure if it will happen, since getting a podcast started up and churning along is quite a lot of work. I’d personally be more interested in joining someone else’s podcast as a contributor or something like that, or even doing something along those lines as a blogger. I got a part on MacFocus Magazine as a contributor, but that seems to have stalled and I’m not sure what’s going to happen to it. In the meantime, I’ll certainly continue to focus my energies on this blog and on phpBB Weekly, which continues to run strong.
• Get Some Photos Online — This goal could also be subtitled “Make That $25 That I Spend Every Year On a Flickr Pro Account Actually Worth Something,” and is a goal which is in progress. My Flickr photostream now has my photos from Sojourn and from WordCamp 2008 on there; I still need to get China Tour and Boys State photos up (which takes quite awhile, believe it or not) and I’ll be all up-to-date.
• Spend Some More Time with Family — Oh yeah, I definitely accomplished this goal–this is what summer is truly all about. Just for this one goal, I wish I could have at least one more week.

I also did some other things this summer as well. On the event-attending front, I attended a Yale University information session in East Palo Alto on June 19th, a State PTA board meeting in Los Angeles on July 10-12 (where I got to meet the three new student board members joining myself and Joey this year), the SocialMediaCamp in San Francisco on July 15th, helped hand out leaflets at my local Caltrain station early on July 18th, performed with my parents (we have a harp/flute/cello trio) at a local event on July 19th, attempted to attend a Town Hall Meeting held by Jackie Speier on July 19th (except that Samtrans screwed up that goal for me), attended a town hall even on education held by California’s Secretary of Education, Dr. David Long in San Jose on July 31st, went to a reunion of Sojourn of the Past triptakers on August 9th, and attended WordCamp 2008 on August 16th.

This summer, phpBB Weekly covered Londonvasion 2008 with a lot of exciting live coverage, and I launched a blog named Londonvasion Central to cover the event. Webmacster87.info also participated in Liz Strauss’ Blog-to Show event, and I also worked on recategorizing my blog as well.

After returning from my trips, I set my main goal for the summer to be working to get myself better organized, both on my computer and in my real life. My real life mostly consisted of organizing my room, as I described above, but on my computer, I cleaned up my e-mail and adopted Inbox Zero, and I’ve also been really working on better integrating OmniFocus into my life–once school starts, we’ll see how well I do at getting these to satisfy my needs as I find myself busy with lots of volunteer and meeting commitments, college applications/essays, and crazy things like that.

I blogged a bit last week about how my class load looks this year, and interestingly enough, it looks like it will be a lot lighter than it’s been thus far. (In fact, I’m almost worried that it’s a bit too light, now that I’ve lost my CSM Math class. I’m just feeling a little bit uneasy about it.) Out of my seven classes, only four of them will significant academic classes–the other three will be Orchestra, Leadership, and a teacher aide period, which will likely not have much homework. That means I’ll see some more open space in my schedule, but on the flip side, this year will be a year filled with college applications, college essays, letters-of-recommendation-seeking, financial aid forms to fill out, etc., as well as some amount of increase in how much volunteering I’ll be doing and how many meetings I’m slated to be attending. I’m also got some more ambitions for my online hobbies, as I hope to add some more energy into my blog, into phpBB Weekly, as well as working on a possible new project or two with my friend Lorelle VanFossen that she and I were discussing a bit this past weekend.

For me, freshman year was significant for making my (in some ways, painful) transition into high school mode. Sophomore year was significant for being a year in which I had to deal with a lot of changes, hardships, and crises in the things that I was involved in. Junior year was significant for being a year in which I enjoyed and took advantage of many unique experiences–experiences which in some cases were “once in a lifetime.” Senior year is now upon me, a year in which I will, above all else, be striving to chart a course for the rest of my life and explore new frontiers (cue Star Trek music).

Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m ready to go out and make the most of it.

Tags: 2008, goals, Personal, review, School, senior, summer