A Pet Rock — Leo's Third Blog

Third blog of the month, and I'm starting to experience the most sluggish days ever. It's like when you have a pet rock and you're taking it out for a walk. One, you don't actually know why you have a pet rock, and two, you don't know why you're walking a pet rock. You just go with the flow, which is exactly how this week went by.

Tugging the frayed strings of the rudimentary leash that I've created, we began the week with the first period of AEP. Thankfully, it was an amazingly soaked day, drenched in the showers of the heavens above. If only clouds were actually tangible, maybe I could strangle one for getting me sopping wet during the bike ride to school. Despite this, though, I'm grateful for the droplets of (probably polluted) rainwater that hailed over the school, because we did a friendly game of Scrabble!

Before the period, we good-naturedly chaffed with Haziq. As the newest addition to the class, and a former member of ESL, he was still perusing the words and struggling to memorize the remaining 19 of them as class begins (albeit I was doing the same, but I digress!), and worrying about the Wheel of Doom that was about to run him down and flatten him into a pancake. We knew that rainy days means a good day of Scrabble, so we were shaken off from our stresses and onboard the cruise of no-care ... but one of us was still stuck on his luminescent phone screen, hoping for the darkness of the waning time disappears in the midst of a second. It did.

When we were setting the Scrabble table up for the job, we forgot to tell someone that it wasn't a day of death, and to calm down. When it was announced, it was a "sigh of relief", as quoted from Meral. As the breaths of exhausted people fumigate the room, I readily sat and watched as everyone began to completely immerse themselves into the relaxation of a tiled board and antique wooden pieces that would soon be thrown around into ordered lines of words meaning who-knows-what.

Without a warm-up game, we began in pairs: Haziq and I, Shasmeen and Sayum, Meral and Naboni, and, lastly, Julia and Chloe (I definitely did not snatch that from Chloe's blog). Haziq, being new to the routine, seemed to know better than I did. I let him take the wheel and throw the words around, and I have to say, the game still has a huge grudge against me. Playing different words of incomprehensible definitions, it's probably a good idea that I take the vocabulary quizzes a little more to an extreme. The only word I think was worth its points was "brazen", and we didn't even get a lot from that. I can't even remember what placement we got, but fortunately it wasn't last.

The day after, we set out to begin the work once again! Beginning the day with two warm-up games, since we completed them swimmingly, and getting the answers "alliance" and "index" in Diffle and Wordle respectively.

Then, the hour of doom! The vocabulary quiz had me beginning first, and I started with "meticulous", having a keen eye for details. The round quickly ended, but then I was suddenly jolted in shock when I heard Ms. Disa called my name again. Expecting a word that I had trouble memorizing, I, with bated breath, asked to spin the wheel once more! The word landed on "averse", which was another simple one, meaning having opposition or a strong disliking for something.

Afterwards, we quickly learnt how to do overviews for IELTs. Simply put, it's just garnering the 2 most important information, and then jotting it down onto the first paragraph. We then completed the essay, which was the bar graph that we commenced with during the start of the year.

Once the bell rang, and we were free from AEP, my heart sunk when I realized that the week to come was full of very fun quizzes and presentations. 4 quizzes (not including the vocabulary quiz) to be exact. That pet rock was more of a pet boulder at that point, but I was able to roll it to the end of the week and complete everything there was to it!

And finally, a new week begins, and we have 2 more quizzes! What a fun first month!