Memory

It was a hot day towards the end of school last year when our old garage door opener burnt out. We could tell it was coming as the sound the door made as it came up could only be described as shrieking. My dad went to the handy dandy Lowes store and came back with a spiffy, “Super Silent” edition. However, as he began to install it he came to the ugly realization that the track the door itself slid up was a different length on the new model that then old one. I had to help him move the entire assembly that holds the opener from the roof about three and a half feet forward. I then when inside for a couple of hours and could periodically hear curses of varying degrees of nastiness through the garage door.
After the last curses rang out, my dad dragged me outside to show me his handy work. He clicked the remote, and the door slid up, clicked again, down it went. Trouble started though when he tried to use a remote to open the other two garage doors. Somewhere along the line, he had cut the blue wire instead of the red on or something of that mysterious electronic sort. My dad, being the absolutely amazing electronic wizard that he is, stared at the problem for a good two minutes before looking to me and saying, “You fix it,” and storming of into the house. The buck now effectively passed, I tried to figure out where to start. My first sweep was purely investigative. I managed to find six wires hanging loosely where the old opener used to hang. On the back of on of the old garage door opener, I also found a box marked signal box. After jerry rigging this box onto the back of one of the garage door openers still in operation, and fiddling with those six mysterious wires, I finally discovered a combination that made the doors go up. Unfortunately, they were backwards. The left button opened the right door and the right button the left door.
The next logical step was to simply reverse the wires. However, for some reason I can’t even began to fathom, the powers that be decided that the simple reversal of the wires would fix anything. After about half and hour of frustrated fiddling, I finally figured out the pattern for the wires and got the doors working.
After successfully fixing the garage doors and making them go up and down for several minutes. I triumphantly paraded around my house singing the melody to Queen’s “We are the Champions.” As my family calls it, “The day the garage doors die,” will always be engrained in my memories.

more comments about class discussion

I think that the discussions in class in the class has been very good so far and i'm going to be sad to see them go. I'm going to be kind of worried as we get father into the class because of what Lemags has been hinting at. I'm having a little difficulty getting the five big questions thing, and the prospect of writing about them on a regular basis is somewhat daunting. So far I definitly like the class and do not mind the amount of homework at all. Compared to what the senior class that I took last year was going through at this time, I find this class' work load suprisingly easy. HOWEVER, I am not complaining and wold definitly not like to see it increase

Carlos Fuentes

The Evidence that Carlos Fuentes’ uses to describe his path to becoming a writer all come from his life experiences.
He starts his story even before he was born, in Panama. From there Fuentes is able to describe how his father’s job left him without a true feeling for his home country. This missing nationalism allowed Fuentes to get a feel for not only Mexico, but also all of Latin American and the world at large. He describes his experiences in the different countries as well as their beliefs in detail.
Carlos Fuentes’ other evidence is the impact that other writers had on his life and his writing. He name drops quite a few other famous authors, and actually writes about how the great leaders of literature affected his views of writing. Even as a young child he would read the stories of the famous authors and apply their principles to his writing.
Carlos Fuentes’ evidence about his path to becoming the writer that he is today consists of His own life story as well as how the stories of others have affected him.

Red Sky in Morning

I thought that this handout was MUCH easier to read. I also thought that our class discussion hit some interesting points. The conversation about the burden of witnessing something was particularly interesting for me because I really understood the idea that something is lost in the telling of a story. The idea that a movie about a book is twice as bad because it is farther removed from our psyche really hit a cord with me. The idea that having a story to tell is a burden really interested me. I also thought the line “she could tell a story” was an amazing way to put a generally accepted idea. The class discussion that arose form this point was also an entertaining part of class.

class so far

I think that class so far as been pretty standard for AP class. Having been through a year of Ap english already I've gotten used to the idea that I'll read a book, have ABSOLUTELY no idea what's going on, and then somehow have a deep, meaningful discussion that reveals what the section we're talknig about really means. Its interesting coming into class feeling relatively clueless, but I've found that as soon as the first topic is brought up, I always have understood more from the book than I realized.
This vocab test should be interesting because the words are actually relatively difficult and the style doesn't seem very easy either. Vocab has always been a hard part of English for me, and in 5th grade its actually the only class i've ever gotten a C in.
No matter how hard the class seems, i get by on the fact that I've gotten the best new signature ever: tinyfirefly52 (thanks lamags )