Thanks to rivenwanderer for providing an opportune moment to make an announcement. :)

In an effort to avoid Seasonal Brain Decay Disorder, I am going away for a month to the Entrada program at Calvin College. Basically it's your standard live-at-college-for-a-month-and-take-college-classes-as-a-high-school-student-so-you-can-prepare-for-college-and-incidentally-develop-an-attachment-to-this-particular-school deal. *breath*

I picked Calvin because a) it's got a cheap program, $50 application fee only if you get accepted and b) many of my teachers went to Calvin, making it easy to get recommendation letters that make use of connections. :)

I suppose this is the part where I recommend to rivenwanderer and all other poor lost high school students (or at least minority high school students who fall into the gifted range; it's hard to get invites for this kind of thing if you aren't, which is tremendously unfair but not so unfair that I won't take advantage of it) to look out for programs like this and participate in them. However, I can't really do that, since I haven't been to it yet, so I don't know whether to recommend it. But I'm betting it'll be really cool, as long as I can remember such basic things as doing my laundry at least weekly, bathing regularly, and eating three meals a day. Or at least two. Well, one at the very least. (/me is spoiled from years of living at home with pampering parents.)

My plane leaves tomorrow, so this may well be the last post I have the opportunity to make for some time, depending on how heavy the load they give me will be. If I don't show up again in the near future, expect a *really* big "Adventures With" post in a month's time. :)

Ar"okay, this really wasn't much of an answer to rivenwanderer's question, but I'm arrogant enough to think you guys would care to hear about events in my personal life"thur