String Theory

No, this doesn’t have much to do with quantum physics. Rather, there is a string strung across my neighborhood. We noticed it on Saturday and saw that it went over my house and behind it as far as we could see. We walked around the block, to the other side of the ravine behind my house and found it high above the trees and the power lines. A few blocks farther north we found its end. It’s a greenish string, probably nylon, and it was fairly tight. The end we found was tangled in some bushes along the road, in front of someone’s house.

We decided to search for the other end so we started hiking up the street again. Nearly ten blocks from the end we lost track of the string as it was getting dark. Thus we gave up the search. Yesterday my dad and I set out to find the rest of the string so we went south to the last place I had seen it, and found it again easily. We went another few blocks south before we lost it again due to lack of light.

Today after work my dad set out to find the other end of this string. He plotted its position on a map and set out to find the rest of it. He finally found the other end nearly a mile from our house near an old school. The weird part was that it was pulled tight, was strung above everything, and was so thin. I wouldn’t have expected a string that thin to be able to be that long. Our best theory is that it was once attached to a small kite that broke, but I don’t know who would attach more than a mile of string to a kite, considering it isn’t usually windy enough around here for kite flying.

School was the same old thing. I had my Managerial Economics midterm today, which wasn’t too bad. It might have been even easier if I’d actually read the textbook, but that’s usually a waste of time. The rest of the day was pretty boring and I could not stay focused in class. I think there’s only 6 weeks left and I’m thankful for that. I have two more midterms this week though, and I’m probably going to have to study for at least one of them.

Saturday was the World Bible Quiz Evergreen tournament. There were 12 teams form several different denominations competing. Our team by far had the biggest disadvantage as our rules are the most dissimilar from the WBQA rules. And we use hand-pad buzzers in our quizzing while every other league uses seat pads, another disadvantage for us. So naturally getting anything above last place would be an accomplishment. We quizzed 7 rounds before lunch which put us in 9th place. After lunch was a single elimination tournament. We competed against the 10th and 11th place teams and beat them without much problem. Somehow we managed to win the next two rounds which put us into the semi-finals. We were losing most of that round as well, but managed to tie for first place, which we took in overtime to win by 20 points. That put us into the final round. We lost that round pretty horribly like 10 to 200 to 120 or something like that. Oh well, I was going to be happy with anything better than last place. But my teammates abandoned me right after that last round was over since they wanted to go to a concert. Therefore Brenda and I were the only ones left from our team to go up and receive our trophy and medals. It was pretty funny.

I got no running in on Saturday, and on Sunday my legs were still sore from the seatpad quizzing. And I was pretty exhausted so I didn’t run then either. I guess two days in a row is my worst so far and I have no intention of making it three in a row so I’m going to go for a jog in a little while. Wow, that’s about a full page of text, so I’m quitting now.