-_- Summer -_-

Only a few more weeks. It seems much longer than that, but I assure you it's only a few more weeks till summer. This school yeah has been amazing. It's been full of making new friends, experiencing new things, and more. Everyday was something new. There were new jokes, the latest "drama", and things like Mr. PC (which was a blast to compete in). This year was defiantly the best out of my past four years at PC. It's full of more memories than the past three years combined. I just hope that senior can live up to its expectations.

-_-_Allergies_-_-

This week, I know that I wasn't the only one feeling the effects of allergy season. This sickness inducing season just began recently, and over a coarse of one week, I've noticed people dropping left and right like flies, including my self. Today, our theology class only had nine or ten people. So many people have had to stay home just because of allergy attacks, and other illnesses brought on through allergy season. Surviving this season is a challenge, but something we do annually. Let's just hope we continue our tradition of surviving allergy season.

-_-Immenhausen Jens-_-

It's almost been two weeks since we started project "Immenhausen Jens". This is a short film that counts as our German III midterm. Our group, containing Collin White, Adam  Carpenter, Daniel Carpenter, Thomas Rasmussen, and myself, has put countless hours writing scrips, translating scripts to German, planning out shots, getting permission to shoot in certain places, and more. Yesterday marked day one of shooting the film. We were able to film all the scenes that needed to be shot in the "evil headquarters", or in this case, PCHS. It was full of several amazing shots, angles, and bit of dialog, but also with tons of hilarious bloopers. No movie would be complete without a blooper reel at the end. Tomorrow, we'll head over to Mariners Museum for the next few "action packed" scenes. Sunday will be the finishing day, filming any filler shots or transition scenes, editing, and rendering. For all movie makers out there, you know the pain of rendering a video. It requires nothing but the push of a button, and almost eleven hours of your time. So, heading into this weekend, both my group and I are expecting to make this German rendition of Indiana Jones both a complete film, and a complete masterpiece!

-_-_Recovery_-_-

Over the past week, my family has been having to deal with a rather hard loss. On March 1st, at  7:05PM, my grandmother passed away. Trying to recover this loss is probably the hardest thing to do in all my high school years. After she passed, the next few days I felt like doing nothing at all. No work was turned in, information studied, I didn't even want to talk to anyone for the next few days. Immediately I fell behind in just about every class. When I found out about this, or my parents did first (THAN I found out), I realized that not only was I throwing away my education, but that I was ruining my future life. My parents and I have now come up with a plan to get me back on track. Slowly but surely, I will be back on my feet, but I have to keep my eyes on my work and on nothing else.

-_-_This week_-_-

This week has defiantly had it's ups and downs, ups being the surprise twelve out of twelve on a quiz in our finance class, and downs being poor grades on a quiz or homework. There is only one this that stands out the most this week. That would be  the upcoming waffle party. I have always been caught eating in class, but now I'm actually allowed to eat in class. Last time I had a "party" at school, two teachers were fired, not even kidding. It was at my old grade school. To celebrate Christmas, two teachers had a Christmas party and handed out food, drinks, and the whole class was spent watching movies. This was the reason why the new principle fire the two teachers. She said "They had been using class time in noneducational ways", when in reality, they were just showing a couple of pre-teenagers Christmas spirit.

I know this isn't like any of my normal blogs, but the whole party things just brought back memories that I thought had to be shared.

-_-_ Common Problems in Virginia's Market _-_-

Trading occurs daily in Virginia. Everything from clothing and toiletry's, to natural resources that are crucial to our survival. Problem go by unnoticed here however; problems like miscalculation, and missing information, but some of these problems don't go unnoticed. The State Corporation Commission’s Bureau of Insurance has identified hundred of these slip's and misses and listed them in the Document below. These problems occur in just about every industry in the state, including the automobile industry.One of the biggest problems in this economy would be failing to document individual risk premium modifications. This document should always be available, and kept current. If it's kept secretive or not documented at all, than how will that individual be able to access it? He/She won't be able to. How this problem can be solved is far beyond my comprehension, but more about this and the hundreds of other problems with the market of Virginia can be found at :   https://www.scc.virginia.gov/boi/co/mkt_conduct/pc_prob.pdf

-_-_Unemployment Rate of Virginia_-_-

Being a resident of Virginia myself, it has come to my attention that the difficulty level of getting a steady job has risen. I'm not only saying this because I've had a very hard time trying to find myself a job, but because Virginia's economic problems make the unemployment rate more visible than ever before. According the the Virginia Employment Commission, the unemployment rate of Virginia has past the seven percent mark during February of 2009 making this the highest its been since 1992. Now being February of 2014, that number could have risen to almost double of what it was in 2009. In my opinion, I don't think that our local and state government are doing enough to lower this number. In fact, I think that they argue over the situation more than they try to resolve it. 

More about this problem can be found at the following article: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/01/AR2009040103813.html