Summer Preparations

Well, it's a little early to be thinking about summer, but that's just what I'm doing. From Chicago I will fly directly to Slovenia to visit with my family there for something like 10 days. It's one of the shortest trips I will ever take there. Usually I go with one of my parents for about 3 weeks. This year I'll be all alone. I'm looking forward to seeing the little ones again and talking to my relatives again.

When I get back to Portland I have a little less than a week to adjust to the time difference (not a problem for the early morning student, though) and then I'm off to my 9-5 job as a software tester. This will be my 4th consecutive summer working for Elemental Technologies, and I couldn't be happier. I hear they moved offices right after my spring break, so this will be my first time in the new office space.

My plans for personal time this summer is a bit ambitious. I am going to try and finally take the time to become adequate as a Python programmer in preparation for my honors computer science class next fall. The class uses Haskell but I have reasons for starting with Python. And I'm told that once you learn one language it becomes easier to learn others. I just hope that what they say is true.

My other major goal is to become stronger. My baseball season was mostly spent on the bench or warming up pitchers in the bullpen. During fall ball I could rely on my changeup to get the rusty batters out. During our winter practices it was clear that as the batters warmed up, my pitching was not going to be enough. So it is perfectly understandable that I rode the pine, er, aluminum, all spring. But I did get much more flexible over the course of the season, and slightly stronger. On our final day of practice we had an inner-sqaud practice game. Though I couldn't get anyone to swing and miss at anything, I was locating pitches much better than I had in the fall and my new pitch, a frisbee-slider (yeah, I would prefer if it dropped some, but what can I do?) worked well enough to get me back to my high school formula. My formula for getting batters out in high school was simple: I threw just hard enough that they couldn't make solid contact with my fastball but slow enough that they could actually hit it. I had an average curveball and a good changeup. If I threw the ball in the strike zone I could count on 2 things. (1) It would be a strike and (2) if they hit it the ball wouldn't go anywhere. I averaged something absurd at 10.6 pitches per inning. I threw to contact and they couldn't hit it. With my stuff at our last practice I followed this exact approach, except I was a little more careful with my pitch placement. I feel like if I get stronger and more flexible I have a serious chance at getting into games next year.

Finally, my personal goal to end all personal goals: I want to do a video series of me nuzlocke running every pokemon generation. For those of you not familiar with how the nuzlocke challenge works, the rules are simple:
1. If a pokemon faints it is considered dead. You can never use it again. No ifs, ands, or buts.
2. You can only catch the first pokemon you encounter in an area. If it flees or faints, tough.
3. You are strongly encouraged to nickname your pokemon in order to build stronger bonds with them.
I've already started setting up my pokemon yellow for recording. I might try my hand at drawings so I could make a comic or something but I imagine it would only turn into stick figures (which might still be cool, I guess). Anyway, my summer would be: Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, Emerald randomizer, and Platinum. I doubt I can get all the way to the end, but I really want to get through as many of these as I can.

Anyways, just 2 more weeks of school! Everybody get pumped!