Daily Procrastination - Day 20 with a Twist

Hello, my now eight to ten readers! With ten more days of November heading straight for my face, I have most definitely made an enemy during NaNoWriMo - procrastination, oh no! Today, I'll be sharing my different types of procrastination.. If you can't tell, I've divided mine into my six periods every day of school - enjoy!

1.) The Sit-ups
Oh dear, not the sit-ups! If you try hard enough, you can get what you need to get done, done; but boy does it hurt! After very breath, you really want to stop. I go through this in P.E., thus the nickname of sit-ups. I go through this with blogging when I'm making scheduled posts, like I have back home on Travels, and I especially face this during word sprints.

2.) Yes, More Sentences (or in my case, Words)
With no offense to my English teacher intended (Hello!), I sometimes get really sick of having to measure my papers in sentences because of all my words written. In the case of my novel, I get really stuck when I press enter for dialogue and I get half of the words in twice the amount of page normally used. Sometimes, I want to change the scale just for a few minutes so I can feel like I'm doing something productive. In class, I feel like this with my sentences and with my pages in NaNo. Most of my procrastination comes from complaining about it, see.

3.) Over-sanding
My favorite "doing" class of the day is Tech Ed - for a while I've been a thinker and now I can actually make stuff! However, my greatest nemesis lies somewhere in either my wood or the belt sanders, because it's always me who sands down too far. I try to manicure it to the pristine point, but then over-sand by maybe a sixteenth of an inch, and I have to start the part over. It really stinks! I go through this when I start editing (now don't try to hurt me for that, I'm an editor at heart) my novel and I'm suddenly pretty far below. I waste a lot of time doing this.

4.) Yes, Another Workbook Page to Color In
For the love of semicolons, I'm in the __ grade already, I don't need to color in another page! That's what I keep thinking when I am faced with though plotting moment and just want to wing it. However, I almost always get a fact wrong and have to write the scene over again. THAT'S a lot of fun, that is. However, those workbook pages get me a fair amount of homework credit, so I do them. In the case of my novel, all the character sheets will pay off. Still, I don't really want to do them...

5.) Don't Forget Your Homework!
At school, I try to get all of my homework done in the few minutes before the class ends. However, many of the labs in science take a long time for me to complete, so I don't get my homework done. This is like trying to write on the school's computers in the morning, or when I get a chance to work after I finish drafting for Tech Ed. If I don't get the words done, I then have more to do when I get home, which is a pain if I have extracurricular activities. Then again, the computers at school are so hard to type on and the odt doesn't convert into a doc or docx. Why waste time when I could waste more?

6.) And Now, It All Piles Up!
When I get to math at the end of the day, I'm not only bombarded with equations and algorithms, but I'm also confronted with the workbook pages and the homework and the sentences. The toughest part about procrastination is that it piles up into something impossible to manage.

Well, I really should start making sure that my Thanksgiving post for Travels is ready-to-go...and (oops!) start writing one for DeidreDev's!

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Dei
33,850 words

Victor, the Unexpected Strongbridge

To start things off, the above picture is a doodle that I made about three minutes ago of myself. I drew it with a blue pen, so I didn't shade in skin complexion or anything of the like, besides the trench coat and my hair. I really love cartooning, and this sketch is one of my best yet! (My hair in the pic is pinned up with a clip, which is how it looks like when I can't find a hairtie to pull it into a bun.)

This half of a bridge that you see above is what might have gotten me an A on my tech ed project this week. The challenge was to build a bridge about five inches tall and ten inches wide, using 4.5 sticks of 13.5 inches for each side. My partner was a very smart boy named Bryce, and we worked with my TI-84  Plus calculator and started working on it. As a rule, I'm not an expert craftsman, and have only had a few months experience in the woodshop, a bit less than everyone else. However, that didn't let me down - Bryce and I spent the next week measuring, cutting, sanding, filing, gluing, chiseling, and clamping our bridge together. In the end, it was a pretty nice lopsided mess. We had only glued the center beams the day before testing, and one of them was loose before there was any weight put on it. However, this was a good chance to laugh and smile, so I fetched a stool and recorded the entire class's weigh-ins with my phone. I can't post any because of faces in it, but it was a blast - people were betting on which bridge was the strongest (guess who was in last that day) and how much each one would hold (our best guess was 130 lbs). 

I think Bryce and I were the sixth in line. I kneeled on the stool next to my friend Arianna, and we giggled as each bridge got weighed, put pressure on, and broke apart after a series of satisfying crackles from the glue. It was funny until it was our turn.

"Go, Bryce, go!" One classmate chanted, jeering as our bridge was placed on the tester. 

"Good job, Dei, three pounds and counting!" I giggled and waited for the cracks. There were none. The crowd went silent.
One hundred pounds. "It's still going!" Cried someone in the crowd.
"Oh my, God!" I nearly screeched. Our bridge was still in one piece, and only little crackles were being made. I knew that getting my hands all gluey was worth it.
Two hundred.
Three. Three-fifty. Bryce stared at me, gaping, then back at the bridge.
"Oh my, God!!" I yelled into my phone as the crowd grew louder.
Four-twenty.
"We have a new record!"
Four-thirty, four forty-five. A sickening crack resounded, and I saw a freshly glued beam fall out of place.
"Everybody stand back." The teacher said calmly. I kept my phone up but ducked on my stool, as he added five more pounds, and the bridge split.

In conclusion, nobody beat 450 lbs in the third period. Bryce and I hurried back to our seats and glued the beam back on, hooting and hollering at our victory. I took half of the bridge home, and named it Unexpected Victor, after my calculator (and its unexpected knowledge) and our win.

Check back soon for the beginning of NaNoWriMo!

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Why must we live in the past, when we are the future?

D.S. Devereaux