Senior Projects

Hi everyone! I am posting early so I can have a rest day tomorrow. (Just kidding. I never take a break. Don’t be like me, please.)

This week something really “exciting” happened. We suspected that there is a mole in our team. One night, when I was posting our daily schedule, we found out that someone changed our Instagram password. We stayed up until three in the morning tracking who they are and continued the next day. This emergency taught us the importance of security and that being cautious is sometimes just as important as trusting our teammates.

Since our founder is gone, I have taken over some tasks from the manager because she currently has a lot on her plate. I have been posting a daily schedule for every team and communicating with other directors more frequently. I made a table system to keep track of whose posts are published because someone accidentally deleted a post that has the same cover as another post.

We recorded a podcast episode about cancel culture (well, we recorded twice because we weren’t our best selves the first time). How is it effective? How is it harmful? What about free speech? Can we separate a person and their works? Watch our second episode on COVID-19 and racism here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK2myWMsI2E.

We reached out to our instructors from Kenyon and they donated and advertised for us on social media. I couldn’t believe that I am still in touch with so many wonderful people from Kenyon. As I gained more experience in critical writing, I also rethought how to make a living as a writer and explored new career possibilities in the literary field.

I am in the process of getting a new I-20 (which an international student needs to stay in the U.S.). I have been emailing with the international advisor at Kenyon.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Ocean

Hi everyone! I finally got some pages done. I’ve got two pages fully completed. The first page took a while, but the second page I got done much quicker. I think I can do at least two or three pages per week based on how fast I got the second page done.

They’re actually pretty tiring to make. I was pretty tired after I finished the second page, but it’s also super satisfying once they’re finished. I did have to do a lot of work on deciding my process on the first page. I had to decide on the size of the brush (I found a larger brush worked better), a color scheme (I went with mostly cool colors) and just little stylistic things like how I would draw eyes and hands.

I’m having a lot of fun finally getting this story written! Here’s the first two pages!

Last week, I was able to watch 10 videos as I had been in the previous weeks. However, my schedule is becoming a bit more out of whack. I did end up working from Monday to Saturday, some days I did more than others. I was able to pretty much finish up the notebook, however there was a few more pages than I thought, and ended up being down 4 pages front to back. Some of the videos also didn’t give me as many notes as others of course which also contributed to me being a few pages short. 

I did manage to fill the note book yesterday though. I started working for this week yesterday, so to make up for it, I will at least work until Saturday this week (which I have done some other weeks anyway despite generally having a 5 day work week.) I didn’t work Monday due to having some problems going on that day.

Working on math (because I’m in 1818 and we have to work all 4 quarters for this particular credit) has also been getting in the way.

As for week 5, the 10 videos I were able to watch were all from Gross Cutting Room again. I’ll list them here:

• Cervical Cone Dissection
• Orchiectomy Specimen
• Cystic Ovary and Fallopian Tube Dissection
• Uterus Dissection
• Abdominal Panniculectomy Specimen
• Tonsillectomy Specimen
• Finger Amputation Specimen
• Toe Amputation Dissection
• Skin Excision Dissection
• Lung Lobectomy Dissection

All of the videos are dissections, however sometimes the video just says specimen and not dissection, however they all are dissections. 

I’m glad the notebook is full. This week and next short week, I will be using a small notebook that has a few notes from my time in the OR in it and nothing more. 

I have been blessed.
Unfortunately I did not pass my math placement test that I was working on. Thankfully I can take it again.
Today I had a very exciting day at Grace’s Place in Washington, MO. I organized diapers and other stuff with my new buddy, Summer. We took inventory as well. Thankfully I didn’t lose count of too many things! I think this experience has shown me the practical side running an organization.
I wore a bandana on my face and used gloves, which I think is pretty important at this time.
I have recently been learning to ripstick some.

Cheers!

I just remembered that I haven’t done one of these is about 2 weeks. I apologize. I have continued my worked at the pantry 9-12 on Mondays Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I have also been working Wednesdays Thursdays and Sundays from 1-8:30ish. I have stopped making masks because, after finishing off the first batch and starting a new one, I realized that it took way too long for me to make 24. It was too time consuming and I was barely getting any out to people. Now I am opting for a new research paper. I have started research on medical masks and I plan on going back as far as I can in history to see how everything has differed. As strange as it may sound, I may have found a connection between theater masks and medical masks, however I need to keep digging in order to confirm my theory.

For a couple of weeks, I have been banned from baking because I was just making too much, but that ban has been lifted thankfully. I have a classic chocolate chip cookie recipe that I have been struggling to make consistent. I can’t seem to figure out where exactly I have been going wrong, but it may be the way I have been mixing the butter and sugars together. So, if anyone wants some chocolate chip cookies in the next couple weeks, I will be more than happy to yeet them to your front door.

I did lots of baking and I tried out a couple of new recipes! I’m not very good at cooking, but I’m hoping to get better. I also decided to do a full cleanup of the kitchen. The kitchen in the house is very tiny, and my mom and I barely have any cabinet space for food. All of the cabinets are taken up by appliances, Tupperware, pots, and other kitchen items, so our food has to be put on the counter. With my mom’s help, we cleared some room in the cabinets, cleaned everything up inside, and now we have our counters free of food! I cleaned the floors, the stove, and the fridge as well.

This week I also started my intermittent fasting! There are many types, but fasting is a set time for eating and a time for fasting. I did a lot of research before I started to see which type of fasting was best for me. One type is a 5:2 method where you eat regularly for 5 days and then for 2 days, you eat 500 calories. I’m doing the 16/8 method. I have a specific time window when I can eat, so my time window is from 11 am-7 pm every day. I can’t eat anything before 11 and I can’t eat anything after 7. I’m doing this so I don’t overeat in quarantine and to hopefully lose a little weight before I go to college. So far it’s going well!

During the past two weeks I learned a lot about the basic responsibilities of being an adult in this society, especially the tedious but necessary tasks. I researched about car insurances, learned how to apply for and manage credit and debit cards, and even looked into house ownership and mortgage since my mother wants to buy a house in the United States. I think I am not alone on dreading those things about adulthood, but they are inevitable parts of life and I am glad to start early. I also made lots of calls and slowly learned to manage my phone anxiety.

My Incandescent teams had a meeting every day this week except Wednesday. Our executive board committee is planning a summer mentorship program for the elementary and middle school students, which is very exciting! I had some discussions with the founder of The Incandescent and my team, and we are so delighted for the opportunity to amplify diverse voices of the youth. The bad news is our founder and chief executive director Ariel has an emergency and won’t be available in the next two weeks, which made things a little chaotic. But Ariel chose us as directors/managers for a reason and I trust everyone on the board to operate things as usual while she is on a temporary leave.

We recorded a podcast episode about social media and (modern) loneliness. Check out our podcast on our blog and on Youtube! My friend Anjali did most of the editing and she is awesome.

Blog link: https://www.theincandescentreview.org/blog

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZoGAxiaVs&feature=emb_title

I wrote a blog post about how this pandemic is affecting LGBTQ+ youth. I read another book. I did my first watercoloring in a while. We had some interesting discussions on the history blog. A lot has happened in my personal life this week, and I am grateful for all the healthy distractions.

This week, I finally got started on the pages for the comic. I spent most on the writing part, which came in the form of planning out and sketching my first ten or so pages. I think this might be my favorite part of the process. It’s just simple sketches that might not even look like anything. The purpose of this is to get a feel of how the comic will look and how it will flow from panel to panel.

There is a trend in web comics to not use panels, or to only use single uniform panels. This is mostly because of where people post web comics, and fitting it into the form of posting. I however, decided not to do this. I’m using panels like you typically would in a graphic novel. This is a choice I made for the delivery of my story. I find that style of panels to be more interesting to read and to write, and it gives you the ability to convey things in a way you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

I got two pages done this week, though they were just the cover for the comic, and the cover for the Prologue. Here are those:

I supposed this is also me telling you what the title of my comic will be: Three Crowns. I might have mentioned before that this is a story I’ve had for a long time, so I already knew what the title would be.

Another thing I did to prepare for this was to read Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. It was incredibly helpful, and has made me much more aware of how I can use my art, panels, and colors to deliver the story better. I’d recommend it even if you aren’t very interested in comics, because it’s pretty fascinating the way he talks about how images and words have been used throughout human history. It is a bit of a hard read though, I had to reread some parts a few times to understand it fully.

Finally here’s some of the basic sketches I did for the first four pages. They might be a bit incomprehensible, but they’ll help me when I start to do the line-art.

Next week I’ll have at least one completed page to share, and I hope to get faster as I go!

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a little late!

I started the week up at Lake Ozark helping my uncle get the wood for the construction we’re doing on the dock. We’re thinking we will start construction on week six, but we aren’t sure yet since it will it depend on the weather. While we were up there we did a bunch of yard work, and I decided to review the boating course I took a while ago. It’s been so long since I’ve seen the material that I thought I should take a refresher course. My uncle is buying wave runners, so I thought I would review the laws and things to remember when driving a pwc before I get out on them. The boating course is one of the most thorough driving courses out there. It goes through things that everyone needs to know like laws on the water, but it has every other topic about boating as well, so technically I now know how to operate a sailboat if needed. It took me a very long time to complete. I was able to get out on the boat and drive it around for a while, which was so peaceful. This week I delivered Ellie’s birthday present to her (don’t worry we stood 6 feet apart.) I made her a scarf with a super fun ombre yarn. The rest of the week was more yard work and house organizing. My mom is getting custom made blinds for the house, so I had to do lots of measuring as well.

Last week and this week I was supposed to shadow Chelsey Freymuth, the Site Administrator and the Member Specialist, at Larry Hughes Basketball Academy. With her, I would’ve been doing: daily customer service phone calls, executing marketing plans and strategies, planning sporting events for the business, making sales to new members, learning techniques for those sales, and overall administrative duties for their sports company. Sadly, due to these circumstances, we couldn’t make this opportunity happen. I was the most excited for this site because I am close with Chelsey and I am a big supporter of the company’s mission. 

As some of you know, Coach Chelsey worked at Fulton as an Assistant Basketball Coach our sophomore year. During junior year’s basketball season, I sought to better my skills on the court; to do that, I had to put in time, energy, and sweat off the court. At the time, Larry Hughes Skills and Drills sessions happened at a variety of schools like CBC and SLUH because their new facility wasn’t built yet- that’s a lot of driving. I started going once a week; once a week turned into twice a week… and it paid off, other teams started to notice that I was becoming a “threat.” After the Fulton basketball season was over, I tried out for Larry Hughes’s U16 team and I ended up making their U17 team- a team for older, more experienced players- which surprised me because I had never been on a team where you had to try out like people at public schools do. Each day I walked into that gym, Coach Chelsey would run over to me with a huge grin breaking out on her face and encapsulate me in a hug. 

So, what have I been doing? I upcycled this year’s Basketball Team hoodie by cropping it, cutting off the elastic band below the hoodie pocket, and sewing the band to the bottom of the cropped hoodie for a clean, finished look. I applied to St. Louis Community College to take a free, online summer course in Spanish that would have transferred perfectly to Arizona State University, the college I will be attending next year- however, it would be cheaper for me to look at classes at St. Charles Community College. I still recommend you guys taking a look into it if you live in St. Louis County, it might be something to keep your mind sharp over the summer and give you a little taste of what college may be like (https://www.stlcc.edu/admissions/take-one-on-us.aspx).

Lastly, I just recently applied to Lion’s Choice and had my first ever job interview- it was very scary because I have never had to have a job interview because my previous employers already knew who I was. It was like a conversation and at the end of it, I was offered a position! As requested by my parents, I will not start work until COVID-19 has simmered down. So, this week I have another upcycling project where I will be turning American Eagle black skinny jeans- that I was going to donate but they’re not accepting donations at this time– into mom jeans by adding the adidas stripes from an old pair of leggings to the sides of the jeans… Wish me luck!