Halloween (Old post that I refuse not to finish)

Thursday the 31st of October it was Halloween. Since we don't celebrate it in Denmark, it was my first time and it was awesome. At school it was allowed to wear costumes, which of course me and my friends took full advantage of. I was a vampire (I found cheap teeth at Safeway and a cheap dress at Walmart) and I seriously think that there should be more days where you can wear costumes to school.

After school I went home for a bit and then we went to one of Christi's friend's house for a halloween party. Seeing all those little kids in their costumes really made my night. Especially a mini Captain America and Spiderman who repeatedly tried to kill me. Their lack of wood bullets and stakes made this a hard task. I guess that's what you get for dressing up as a bad guy :-)

After the party trick-or-treated a bit with Riley and Audrey, and then I walked to safeway to meet my friends. We ended up being a much bigger group than originally, which just made it that more fun. We also went trick-or-treating, and though it was a bit awkward at first, I soon realized that it wasn't frowned upon, and joines the fun.

A tradition in Salida is the Thriller flashmob where a bunch of citizens (including my choir teacher) dress up as zombies and do a dance to the Michael Jackson song Thriller in the middle of the street. It was pretty cool.

After we finished getting candy from strangers, we went to Aaron's house to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show. Since I have only watched this alone before, watching it with other people (especially people who know all the responses and words to the songs) was pretty awesome. We sang along, Aaron's mom told when to say/do what and everbody got up to do the time warp. One of the beat things though was heckling the storyteller/crime investigator guy with neck jokes. At first we all did it, but in the end we realized that nobody could beat Adrian, and we all just listened to his great, and quite inventive, heckling :-)

This was another one of those nights where I just sat among all these people I get along with so well, and thought how happy and lucky I am to be here. It truly was a great first and last halloween.
-Malene
(I have pictures and they will be uploaded when I get on my computer again)

"We are a school district of distinction!"

On the (insert date I am no longer sure of because I am really bad at updating this blog) we had a district wide assembly in our high school gym. Up until everybody was in the bleachers, no one really knew what was going on. The teachers had just been told to make sure that their students were present, and that second hour would start late. It was referred to as “The mystery assembly”. It turned out that the entire school district had been judged to be in the top 10 or 16 % (or something like that) of Colorado school districts. To be honest, I wasn't completely paying attention, there was a lot of people saying a lot of things, but the gist is that the all the teachers are really good at teaching, and the students are either clever or good at learning. One of the speakers made each school yell out “I am a student of distinction” the teachers had to yell “I am a teacher of distinction” and then finally everybody yelled “We are a school district of distinction”. This means that if you really wanna understand the effect of the ! In the title, imagine a gym full of kids from age 3 to 18 occupying all the seats on the bleachers and the floor screaming at the top of their lungs.

I must say that this distinction of our school doesn't really come as a surprise for me. At some point before the district assembly, we had an assembly for the school. We have had a couple of those so far, every time to honor the sports. This assembly was however for the academics. By the end of each quarter honor roll is announced. There is two different “levels”. The first is when you had a GPA (Grade Point Average) of 3 -3.4 and that is called honor roll. The second is called Honor distinction roll which is when you have a GPA between 3.5 and 4.0. About ¼ of the school was on the honor roll, and got called up to the stage to get their diploma. This seemed like a lot to me, but as it turned out, it was nothing. More than half the school was on the honor distinction roll, me included. I think that it's great that so many people have good grades (A 4.0 is straight

A's) but it seems like it kinda defeats the purpose of Distinction if most people get it.
If anyone is interested (Hello, mom, dad, grandma and granddad) my grades as I'm writing this are straight A's. Don't worry, event though I don't need the credits, I still care about my grades and do my schoolwork ;D

String Quartet and poetry slam (old post I just got around to posting)

Thursday (many Thursdays ago) in choir instead of singing like normally, we went to the auditorium to watch a string quartet perform. It was eight people (Two quartets) from Colorado symphony that cam and performed for us. It was really a middle school performance, but since we are in choir we got to watch as well. They played two songs each and then a song all together. Before each song the woman explained a bit about the composer and the history of the song, and how they were different from each other, which was interesting but probably a bit too much information. The songs they played were really good and it sounded very beautiful. I was very amazed at how fast they can move their fingers!

My creative writing class and I (and some more people from the school) went to Western State university for a poetry day. We were divided up into groups with other schools, and then we went out to 4 different workshops. It was the creative writing class at the college who taught us, and they performed some of their poetry too. It was really fun and we learnt a lot about different types of writing.

The college students performing poetry

Me and Tylea got a bit creative in one of the workshops