...Just go on and take a look inside; I promise you will find something that you probably did not expect.

What I found was not at all what I expected; in fact it made me babble like a... not-smart person, for lack of a better unfiltered term. But now that I have regained the ability to speak intelligibly, I am proud to be able to say that I won the 54th (if I know my Roman numerals) Blog of the Week, and the first one of 2008! My blog shall forever wear this banner with pride:

The emoticons will be here in a second to feed on the happiness, but I'll enjoy their company for now... After all, they were one of the main reasons I won this week. Apparently the other reason was Metroid. Now who wants to hear a speech in which I verbally demonstrate my appreciation of everyone who reads my blog and the Blog Assistants for choosing me?

... No one? Oh well, then.

In other news, I was recently signed up for TLCI (The Learning Community International, I think), a "private school" in which you basically are homeschooled by your parents and meet a few times a year with a consultant who helps you create a curriculum based on your interests. My first meeting with my consultant will be next Friday, it seems, when she'll ask me what I want to learn. I'll probably say that I want to learn Japanese, improve my writing, continue in math (since I'm doing Algebra II already in 8th grade, I really don't need to do any more math for the rest of my life, but I guess I'll at least learn a bit of calculus ), and try my hand at stop-motion animation (if anyone considers themselves "pretty good" at stop-motion, I'd love for them to notify me, becuase I have a few questions). I think this kind of thing will be fun. Perhaps not math very much, but writing and playing with Bionicle is stuff I do already on a regular basis.

On a sadder note, my brother's hamster Chestnut died last night. On the bright side, he died in his sleep from old age. His last hamster Cocoa caught wet tail from my hamster and they both died within a few days of each other. Then there's Shadow who apparently does not plan on dying anytime soon--she can go for long periods of time without food or water and she'll be at least two this summer (we don't know how old she was when we got her, but she was already an adult, so she's lived a very long time for a hamster). I have a theory that she and our 16 or 17-year old cat Misha are somehow connected to an infinite supply of life, perhaps from the sun? That means they could potentially live for the next few million years when our sun finally dies...

And finally, if any of you readers have survived the above blocks of text, I've got two new additions to my collection in the world of gaming since my last blog entry. One (not surprisingly) is a Metroid game--Metroid Prime Pinball. I haven't beaten it yet (as it seems, beating it will be insanely hard, since there's no way of saving any progress you make), but this means that the only Metroid game I'm missing is Metroid II! And the second game I got is called Mega Man Star Force. I haven't played any Mega Man games before, but the box art attracted me, I read some reviews, and I decided to get it (my brother got the same game, but the Dragon version instead of the Leo version which I got). It's a really great game, better than I expected. Next thing you know I'll be trying to get every game in the Mega Man series...

Anyway, I would just like to restate my happiness for winning again, and the best way to do so and end this blog entry is like this: