Yay, it’s Winter Break! Happy Holidays! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas! Happy Boxing Day! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! Yay, I’m back to school tomorrow!

There you go, there’s all of the posts that I probably would have made over the past two and a half weeks if I had had time. And then some. But man, this winter break has been very very busy for me, and I think that I may need a winter break from this winter break.

My finals took place on December 17-19–quite a bit earlier than in previous years. However, I also had a bit more to study and prepare for than I have had before, plus I had some work to catch up on for Law & Society that necessitated me to go hunting for a video all the way down in Menlo Park. (But I must say, Menlo Park’s library is really nice; much nicer, in my opinion, than our oversized Main Library here in San Mateo.) As such, I broke with tradition and did not pick one of my finals days to do my traditional after-school shopping trip to Hillsdale Shopping Center and downtown San Mateo–something that I’ve traditionally done every year since 2001.

But finals did end and with it came the end of the semester. Boy must I have been relieved because I went to bed that night and slept for eleven hours and was almost late for phpBB Weekly the next day! And that’s actually how I ended up spending my first few days of Winter Break–actually having a chance to relax and spend some time with my family. My parents and I took our harp/flute/cello trio out to Central Park for the fourth year in a row, playing daily Sunday-Wednesday for about two hours per day. We were lucky that the weathermen were so totally wrong–they were calling for the stormiest days of the year then, and instead we had some of the best weather we could ask for given that it was the dog days of winter.

Christmas was also quite pleasant. I was very surprised to see that my parents gave me a cell phone, something that I wasn’t particularly hankering after, but it’ll probably come in more useful when I head off to college. (Wait, it’s 2009? I’m heading off to college THIS year? Oh my gosh… But I digress.) It’s one of these fancy-designed phones, the Sanyo Katana LX from CREDO Mobile, and unlike past failed cell phones I’ve had, my parents put me on a service plan for it instead of a pay-as-you-go thingy. We’ll see how that goes. About the only other thing I got of particular significance was a cribbage set, which is great because now I’ll be able to play cribbage the proper way with a pegboard, instead of just doing tally marks like I’ve done before. (Cribbage is a fun card game involving some math, some luck, and a lot of obscure rules, which is just the way I like it. No, I’m not being sarcastic, I really do love cribbage.) Oh, and I got an iTunes gift card and a Jamba Juice gift card, and some clothes.

What was interesting was that during winter break–actually a day or two before Christmas–a local reporter from the San Mateo County Times called me up saying that he was doing a story on seniors finishing college apps over the winter break. (He has my phone number from some school board story or something that I was involved in a year or two ago.) Anyway, he interviewed me, though I didn’t think I was much help since I was still in “relaxation mode” before Christmas and not in apps mode yet, and then asked if he could send a photographer to my house to take a picture of me filling out my apps. Well, I had to explain to him that they’re all done on the internet now, but a photographer came to my house on Friday, December 26th (Boxing Day, my second-favorite obscure holiday of the year) and took some pictures of me filling out stuff on the Common App website, etc. And so it was that in the Monday, December 29th issue of the San Mateo County Times, this article with my photo in it appeared on the front page of the Local section with my picture in it (and another picture with a close-up of my laptop on the Common App website).

It’s actually kind of funny that of all of the quotes he picked, he had to pick the one where I said, “I guess I should be stressed, but I’m not.” By the time Monday rolled around, that was no longer true. I mean, I have been working on my apps bit by bit since July, quite frankly, and the only parts I had left to tackle were the individual supplements to the Common App that each school had, and those supplements involved one or more short answer (or in a few cases, long/essay-answer) questions to respond to, and man, those take time! And so it was that on Monday, Tuesday, and the first half of Wednesday that week was spent by me doing virtually nothing but finishing those supplements and getting those apps submitted on Wednesday. I didn’t even step outside of my house for three days.

Incidentally, because I know that people are going to ask, these are the ten schools I’m applying to in alphabetical order: American University (Washington, DC), Brown University (Providence, RI), Elon University (Elon, NC), Emory University (Atlanta, GA), Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), Stanford University (Stanford, CA), Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY), Tufts University (Medford, MA), Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO), and Yale University (New Haven, CT). I don’t really have any strong preferences among these… yet.

I did quite a bit of work with phpBB Weekly over the break as well. Almost immediately after I celebrated the submission of all ten of my college apps, I hopped right down to work recording clips and editing together the Best of 2008 clipshow for phpBB Weekly. Between doing that on Wednesday afternoon-evening and then Thursday morning, I got phpBB Weekly #092 released, and it came out pretty darned good if I do say so myself. In addition, throughout the break I worked hard on a new version of the phpBB Weekly website, which I then moved in and launched last Friday. It also looks pretty good, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Finally, this past weekend and today have been spent by me catching up on PTA stuff and preparing things that I need to finish by my next State PTA board meeting in San Diego this Thursday-Saturday. I’ll probably try to keep working on them throughout this week around finishing homework. And today, I did go to school to help out during a Leadership class work day–as one of the Club Commissioners, I helped out with getting our new Clubs Bulletin Board together so that it would be ready in time for the first day back at school tomorrow.

That’s pretty much what my life has been for the past two and a half weeks. The first part of Winter Break was a very nice opportunity to simmer down and catch up, but since Christmas ended, I’ve probably been as busy as I am during the regular school year, if not more so. And sadly, I haven’t really had time to blog, which is why I’m desperately trying to make up for it here in this blog post.

Nevertheless, 2009 is here, and soon I have the opportunity to make a blog post looking back at the year 2008, a very momentous year for me that will hold many, many fond memories. Buried deep down within the new year comes the realization that this is the year that I will graduate from high school and go to college, that this is the year that I will turn 18 and become an adult (at least legally), that this is the year that I will leave the home that I have lived in for over seventeen years and go to live in a dorm, very likely out of my home state of California. Thoughts of life after high school now intrude my mind daily, and they are very intimidating thoughts. Fortunately, I still have one more semester: eighteen more weeks of high school life to keep me occupied until then, and they will be very busy weeks at that. I’ll be blogging about some of the exciting activities and travels that I’ll be doing starting very soon.

Well, that’s more than enough for one all-encompassing blog post. Winter Break is over, and my last semester at high school is now upon me. I’m already ready to hit the ground running.

Tags: 2009, activites, article, cell phone, Christmas, college, college apps, Common Application, cribbage, essays, gifts, holidays, Leadership, new year, newspaper, Personal, phpBB Weekly, picture, San Mateo County Times, supplements, winter break