A Shocking Day and Night

Today is 10/10/10. That doesn’t happen everyday. I woke up early, even though it was a b-day and I start at 10:45, because I was teaching piano to two kids at 8:30. I was introduced to my victims: Aldin and Genavieve Smith. Their mother, Amy Smith, was very nice and understanding. The kids took turns, I taught one while the other did work with Amy. Within the next hour we were done, and the family made their way to deck 5 for the kid’s school time. This was truly a great experience. It was the first time I was endowing my knowledge about piano upon someone else. Alvin and Genavieve were very playful so it was sometimes difficult to hold their attention. However they were very energetic and excited to learn piano. I had to learn how to keep their interest: “Do you want to learn the black notes? Well first we need to learn the white notes.” I spent today just teaching them the notes and making sure that they knew the location of the notes relative to one another. In short, I am really looking forward to teaching these kids. It makes me better appreciate Vira aunti’s hard work to teach me piano. I went to classes, which went as normal: comedy a lot of fun, history uninteresting. I kept getting hit by socks of humans, which was really annoying, because I pretty much never got a chance to tag anyone. I made an interesting observation: It was like we (the zombies) were being hunted instead of us hunting them (the humans). At 2, I went down to tutor Kelly. She was shy again, and I had to help her memorize the periodic table (wow, at this age?) and do math. It really is not a lot of fun to tutor someone who is not very engaging or seemingly interested. I later went to Ben’s room, where we were bored and started a Planet Earth episode. David Attenborough is so awesome and his voice is the animal show equivalent of Morgan Freeman’s voice for Hollywood movies. Halfway through, Megan and her friends came by to attack Ben (and me since I was there anyway). After an insane fiasco, involving me taking the hits for Ben (since I answered the door and got hit first), and Megan stealing Ben’s laptop to draw him out, we were stunned. Around 6, I got ready for my Family Dinner, and headed to Classroom 9 for Extended Family Dinner at 6:45. The food was a great change: amazing tomato soup, salad, ice cream, and a main dish which I don’t really remember but was good. Pat introduced us to a friend of hers, Karen, and we all talked about our experiences since last meeting and our life goals. Pat is a great person and she is very thoughtful, nice, and caring. At the end of the dinner, she gave us letter openers, mine having a zebra top and design (apparently every time she has seen me I have been wearing something colorful with a nice design, so this seemed appropriate for me). At 8, I had to leave dinner early to go to my Macroecon group’s project meeting with Allard. She cleared a lot of questions we had, and everything was made a lot simpler than we had imagined it to be (didn’t actually have to turn in a written report till end of classes). After we dispersed, I joined Alan, Amy, Bria, and Hannah and tried to draw. Of course this failed because Drew came by. Although he had been converted to a zombie, he was till pelting us with socks just for fun. Drew is such a playful guy. I later headed back to my room with Aaron to watch a movie together. We settled upon Wall-E and were about to begin it when we noticed flashes outside my window. Lightning! We immediately left for the 7th deck where we found a huge number of people (including Jacob and everyone) out in the rain enjoying the storm. This was by far one of the most ridiculous and insane lightning storms I have ever experienced. The lighting was going off every 10-15 seconds all around us, forcing us to keep our heads moving in all directions. At first the storm was really cool, but after a short while, it just became insane. There was lighting going on at very close proximity to the ship. There were a number of lightning bolts that were so close to the ship that we actually could see the bolt forming striking the water a short distance away, and dissipating. And the thunder after these bolts was absolutely mind-blasting. We enjoyed the storm for around 20 minutes, everyone screaming and cheering to the views and sounds of the lightning, it was a unbelievable experience. Eventually, once the lightning started getting really close, the LLC’s had to force us inside, or at least under the cover of the 7th deck pool. At this point the storm began to ironically calm down, the lighting was still frequent, but not as much as before. And the storm seemed to be moving on towards a different direction. After waiting another 30 minutes or so, I headed back to my room again. There I began watching “The Hurt Locker” with Nick before falling asleep halfway. Today was quite a sizzling day.
-Nimish
October 10, 2010