I did it! I finished my spanish orals! I came out alive! I survived! I was so nervous when I first go to spanish, I was just kind of babbling aimlessly about how I was totally going to fail. I was second to go, and when my teacher called me up, I picked two of the four categories at random. I chose school, as opposed to holidays, which was definitely the way to go. All I had to do was complain about school (en espanol, of course..), which I’ve had plenty of practice at! I wasn’t totally sure what I was going to say, so in my five minutes to prepare I brainstormed a few ideas and eventually opted to riskily make up complaints as I went along. I complained that our school didn’t offer Japanese, that kids smoked during lunch in the bathrooms, that students should be able to eat during class, and that requiring us to have I.D.s (starting next semester!) was a violation of our freedom of expression. I was stumbled over every couple of words, trying to figure out what tense I should be talking in (the subjunctive most of the time) and if I conjugated that word right. I’m not sure if I got a good grade, but the teacher was sure encouraging. After ever sentence I belted out she would exclaim, “Si, Si! Excellente! Continue..” I’m just glad it’s over, so I can go on to ponder and worry about……the rest of my finals! I still have exams in biology, nsl, english, math and spanish starting a week from Monday. I haven’t thought that much about them other than that I want to do really well. And, I can now think about the possibilities of the new cell phone we got! It’s a tiny Nokia one, but it has free long distance, which means I can call Carrie and maybe Maki and Ross and for once they won’t be wasting their phone cards to hear my endless chatter. >.< Plus tonight my grandfather and me are off to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which everyone has said is good. This greymatter script seems to be working quite well — I’ve updated all of the pages now so that the links are correct, uploaded a page that links from /journal.cgi?next=last to here, and all I have to do now is add a link to the greymatter site and put the code for my counter in.