Rock Climbing

“Leo,” my counselor yelled, I knew it was my turn to do the rock climbing. I was really excited but terrified at the same time. I meandered over to where I got ready. It all felt like slow motion. Trying to keep my cool, I slipped my harness on; looking at the gigantic thing I had to climb up, I started to reconsider. As my counselors hooked me in, I knew I wasn’t getting out of it.

I was ready to go physically, but mentally not so much. I wobbled my way to the beginning of the climb and started up at a snail’s pace. Inching up the mountain I realized it wasn’t very hard. I started to go a little bit faster and then faster. Now racing up the mountain I hit the hardest part. I slowed to compensate for the burning in my legs, arms and the increasing difficulty of the mountain. Going up this part was like being blindfolded. You couldn’t see anything past your forehead.
Feeling around for holes that I could grasp on to, I wasn’t finding any and I lost all hope in reaching the top, but then I brushed the bottom of a hole. It was just out of reach. I tried to push as hard as possible and stretch as far as humanly possible, but it wasn’t working. I thought about what I had to do, and it was scaring me.

I started to get ready to do it; I wasn’t giving myself time to think so I couldn’t back down. In slow motion again, I crouched down and lunged up to the hole. At first I saw it, and didn’t know what to do. Then I realized it was the hole so I blasted my arms out with all of my force to grab the hole. I was flailing to grab the hole, I almost did but I missed. Landing back in the position I was in before, I tried it again. This time I reacted quicker and got my hands into the hole.

I was extremely tired, but I managed to get up and touch the carabineers at the top. I haven’t been afraid of heights since. I have also done that mountain for the past four years, without a problem.

Sound is art

A clacking sound is in the distance, it gets faster and faster. Then it stopped suddenly like a bird hitting a wall. A dirt dropping noise drowned out the clacking when it came back. A wobbling sound came into the mix. The combination made we want to cover my ears. It all slowly stopped and the clacking again. The murmur grew to a roar; it was like a demon being chopped in half. Overlapping all of the other sounds there was a scrapping; it made your spine cringe. The screeching of chalk on a whiteboard made everything else drown out. Everything came back into play like a big soup of all the leftovers. Joggers slowly dismissed the rest, soon it was only joggers. They passed and the clacking noise was back. Along with the clacking noise there was the kicking of dirt.

The Locker Problem

The Locker Problem
Leo Troast
10/02/09
The pattern for the problem is Open, Closed, Closed, Open, Closed, Closed, Closed, Closed, Open, Closed, Closed, Closed, Closed, Closed, Closed, Open. It is this because only the perfect squares are open, this is because it has an odd amount of factors Ex – 16 (Perfect square) Factors = 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 compared to 18 (imperfect square) Factors = 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 18. this means that for a perfect square an odd amount of numbers go into it so that means it will be (referring to 16) opened then closed, opened, closed, then opened again. They will stay open because once that last factor comes through to open it then the numbers will have gotten bigger then it so it wont be touched. 31 out of the 1000 are open because there are 31 perfect squares from 1-1000. 969 are closed because those are all the numbers that are not perfect squares from 1-1000.