A Day With Alex

Today I went to my friend Alex's house and we had a ton of fun. We went to Ellerton Lake (where I sometimes dive) with her dog and her parents. On the way, I went really dizzy and felt sick so I moved to the front seat... where I was then sick. It wasn't very nice :( . But after that I felt fine. Me and Alex went in the play area (we tied the dog's lead to the fireman's pole and he was running in circles) and we were being so crazy! I've got lots of it on camera! After we'd been at the lake for a bit, we went back to Alex's house and we played on her iPad, then we decided to make a cake. We couldn't decide what recipe to do so we just chucked lots of stuff in a bowl, whisked it then slopped in on a tray and baked it. We only added the egg when we'd already poured half of the mixture but still... XD it was fun! While it baked, we played some tunes on the piano and when it was ready, we ate it (it wasn't particularly tasty) and watched The Hunger Games. Sadly, I had to go for my Rookie Lifeguard lesson. It was soooo hard!! We had to do 16 lengths in 12 minutes. Easy... until you do it in pyjamas!!!! I only did 13 of them, unfortunately :( . But the rest was fun, we did more work with the towbags, which are always fun :P. How fun. Also, I've lately become obsessed with this fairly old book called Stone Cold. Put it this way: it's so old, that Yugoslavia still existed when it was written! We are reading it at school in English, but we read it as a class soooo slow that I read ahead and I've almost finished it. It's quite a scary book, and some parts kina disturb me a bit, but it's good. So yeah... the end! ;)

Nakai Update

It now appears that the incident that caused Nakai to lose a dinner-plate-sized chunk of his chin was maybe not after he hit himself off the side of the pool after all, and perhaps that Keet and Ikaika were responsible. PETA are saying that it was a collision between Nakai, Keet and Ikaika. But what does PETA actually know?!?! I hate them, and once again, as they always do, they're taking advantage of a poor orca's misfortune and exploiting it as part of their 'boycott SeaWorld' propaganda. Another awful thing I would like to point out is that the chunk of flesh Nakai lost was big enough that the trainers went down and retrieved it after the show :( . Either way, I hope that this will all become clear soon and that our little Nakai gets better quickly.

2 Orca Captured: One Dead, One to be Sold

I recently found out that in August, 2 killer whales were captured in the Sea of Okhotsk, Russia by Sochi Dolphinarium in Adler. One is mostly likely dead, but the other was transported to the Sochi Dolphinarium and later a dolphinarium called the TINRO centre at Vladivostok, where the owners may be possibly selling him to an aquarium abroad. It has also been revealed that the old owner of Sochi Dolphinarium tried to capture killer whales in the Sea Okhotsk in August, and succeeded. However, these killer whales escaped, thank God.

This brings me on to the subject of where our little orca friend may be going next. SeaWorld would never take in a captured orca, so I doubt the whale will be going to SeaWorld or Loro Parque. I also doubt that Marineland Antibes would import a wild-caught killer whale. So that leaves the following options:

• Miami Seaquarium- Please no, it'll be a tragedy if the orca comes here. Their conditions are terrible and the pool is tiny but there is a chance as Tokitae is getting old now.
• MarineLand Ontario- At least Kiska will have company, but MarineLand doesn't take very good care of their orcas, or any of their animals really, but at least the pool is quite big.
• Mundo Marino- It's another small pool, all the way in Argentina, with only Kshamenk for company. Doesn't look likely.
• Kamogawa Sea World- Their pool is small and quite crammed, so chances of this happening are slim.
• Port of Nagoya- Probably the best marine park fro the orca to go to. A nice big pool complex and other orcas to swim with. It could happen.
• The new park in Romania- It could be possible that the killer whale will be sold to the new park planned to open in Romania. If the details about it are correct, the orca pool with be a 30m-deep basin. Sounds good to me.

 Whether the killer whale goes to any of these places or another dolphinarium or not is unsure. Of course, it would be best to release it back into the wild. However, that is NOT going to be happening sadly... :(

Nakai Gets Hurt During "Shamu Rocks"

11-year-old Nakai is suffering from horrendous injuries after an incident that took place during Shamu Rocks on 20th September. Although I'm not sure what happened, it seems that it had something to do with the pool walls and Keet and Ikaika. It sounds to me like maybe Keet and Ike were raking poor Nakai and he rammed into the wall. Either way, poor Nakai has now got a huge chunk of flesh missing from his chin. It's so bad you can actually see the bone! He's now in the medical pool, where he is getting antibiotics. He's also interacting with some of the other whales too and the trainers are happy with how the wound is healing. Basically, an incident occurred during Shamu Rocks on 20th September involving Keet, Ikaika and Nakai. Afterwards, Nakai fled to the back pools, but the trainers continued the show with the other whales, unaware at how badly injured he was. Only when they called him over did they realize he had a chunk of his chin missing. Hopefully, Nakai will get better, but there is a chance he will end up like Splash, another killer whale who rammed into the wall while having a seizure. Afterwards, he had all of his front teeth removed and could no longer shut his mouth. But fingers crossed that Nakai will be alright...

Here's a link to the article (WARNING: contains awful images of the wounds)
http://blog.seattlepi.com/candacewhiting/2012/09/27/seaworld-orca-management-leads-to-horrendous-injury-of-young-orca-whale/

The Average Thursday

Nothing much happened today, other than we watched videos about ghosts in science (don't ask...) and videos filmed with thermal cameras. Then, I was told that I had a place on the WW1 trip to France/Belgium. Woo!!! I had my keyboard lesson after school, which went very well indeed. :) Always good when you're doing your Grade 1 exam at the end of November! I'm nervous about it, really. I've just finished my trigonometry homework and got 57%. The first half was easy and I got 100% on that, but the second part was much harder and I couldn't figure out how to do it. So my day has been ghost videos, music and trigonometry. And thinking of the killer whales, as always! ;)

Cooking, and Tilikum Ill?

It has finally stopped raining now! :D It's great, and today at school in DT I cooked some pasta sauce that contained some tomatoes, onion, garlic, chicken, mushrooms and some other stuff too. Amazingly, nothing went wrong, which is a first in DT as something always seems to go wrong. The worst part was spending 20 minutes of my life scraping fat off raw chicken fillets but... my chicken is now fat-free! ;) So yeah... the sauce is actually really nice!

In sadder news, it seems that something has happened to Tilikum at SeaWorld. He hasn't performed for several months and it seems that he is ill a lot. I really hope nothing bad happens, but I think that he's maybe getting worse...

More Rain

It hasn't stopped raining yet! It's still going. Is it EVER going to stop!?!?!? All the motorways are flooded and everything and I couldn't even get to my swimming lesson on the other side of town because the river than runs through town seems to have burst and now there's tonnes of traffic!!!! Ahhh it's horrible!! So I'm stuck here at home instead. We had extended form time this morning too because some of our teachers couldn't get into school because of the weather and traffic. So I drew a picture of Trua. <3 On the bright side, I put my name down for the France/Belgium trip so hopefully I'm going to that. Fingers crossed! ;) Also, I'm thinking of changing my blog a bit (not a lot though) because the font that this is written in isn't really easy to read and my image at the top doesn't really show off my Photoshop skills, does it? I'll think about it.

Good Ol' British Weather

It has rained non-stop today. I just walked home through it all with Alice and Olivia and I was so soaked that when I got changed out of my uniform, I needed a towel to get dry. Seriously bad weather. :( Apart from that, it's been a fun day! Our RE teacher, Miss Brown, was plotting against one of the maths teachers after he pulled the labels of her tins of soup which, unbeknown to him, were for our Harvest Festival. XD It was funny. I also played a bit of water polo this morning before school and it was a fun match. I was a defender as always and I did some amazing defending today.So that is my day. It is still raining. It is blowing a gale out there. But I am nice and warm and dry. :)

Just Me And The Dolphins + Adventures in the Park

If you would like to read all about my work towards becoming a trainer, you can visit my new blog, called Just Me And The Dolphins. You can visit it here:

www.justmeandthedolphins.blogspot.com

Today, I took Gizmo to the South Park and straight away, he was chasing after the squirrels. :P It was amusing, until I had to run through a bush and low tree branches to keep hold of the lead. I didn't appreciate that at all. :/ He also growled at a few geese and some other dogs (Gizmo's like that :P) and sniffed around. There were loads of squirrels though, which wasn't good news for me... Either way, we had a fun day at the park. :) And that is my day.

No Russia Trip For Me

I'm disappointed that my mum said I wasn't allowed to go to Russia with school because you stay with a Russian family and my mum doesn't like that idea. :'( So it looks like I'll be going to... France... again. Maybe with a bit of Belgium too if I go on the WW1 trip, which is the one most my friends are planning on going on. Oh well, we'll see.

Hello :)

Hello again. Today was fairly decent day at school. Swimming in the morning before school started, playing netball at lunchtime and so on. Nice weather too, even though it was quite cold :( . We got the school trips booklets today too! Wooooo! I'm excited to announce that I might be going to Russia for 11 days in April with school, which will be A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. Either that or France, where you can go canoeing, rock climbing and kayaking for 10 days. Or France and Belgium to look at the WW1 battlefields (I'm quite interested in WW1 and stuff like that, but I think that one might be a wee bit depressing). Either way, looks like I'm going to somewhere exciting next year. And in 2 years time, when I'm in Year 10, I might be able to go to China too! :D It's a lot to look forward to, but sadly no SeaWorld... :(

Anomaly!

Well today I've spend a lot of time on Blender 2.63 (this new version is soooo much better than 2.49 was) and I was thinking "what could I make?". I decided in the end to make an anomaly from Primeval, because they are so beautiful and amazing. So, with a little help from a YouTube user called PrimordialSeries, I have created my own little anomaly. This is what the original looks like:

 

And this is a still from the little animation I made:

OK it's far for perfect but it's good. :) I'll post a link to the video once it's finished uploading because at the moment, there's still 22 mins before it finishes uploading.  :/

Feeling Better Now :)

Over the last few days, since Tuesday, I've been ill and I've been off school. Now, I'm finally getting better!! :D All I've done for the past few days is sleep, lounge on the sofa and watch lots of Primeval in my room, but now it's finally stopping and I feel lots better. That's all I have to say :)

Just Stuff

It was my birthday five days ago so now I'm 13! :D I don't really have much else to say as nothing has really happened since. I had a good birthday though. Back at school now (I started the day before my birthday) and I've already got a lot of homework. I wish one of them was editing a video or making a Photoshop image or something like that, but sadly it's all boring stuff. As for my YouTube stuff, my latest video is "~Korake Ti Znam~" which I made on Windows Movie Maker so it's not great, but it's quite nice and calming. Not a clue what the songs about because, as you might have guessed, it's not sung in English. It is sung is Bosnian. I can't speak much Bosnian, so yeah... not a clue what it's about. The song's nice enough though.

It's raining, which sucks because that means summer's probably over! D: Oh well... have a good day everyone!!

Sea Life Scarborough, New Video, Primeval and My Birthday

I really need to catch up because a lot happened over the last couple of days and I haven't written about it! Oh no! :o Anyway, on Friday, I went to to Scarborough to the Sea Life Centre and got to see lots of seals, penguins, otters, sharks, turtles, fish and more. No dolphins, sadly. :'( My favourite couple of moments had to be when a sea turtle swam over my head, the adorable rescued baby seals, feeding the fish and Michael, the amazing hyper-active seal, who kept sliding over the rocks. Soon, Michael will be back in the ocean, so I'll never get to see him again :'(. I took tonnes of videos and my dad took some photos, so I'll post them sometime. (yes, along with the photos from surfing, Flamingoland and everything else. I haven't forgotten).

Also, after a morning of hardcore video editing, I created this music video to Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "The Mountain", which is a remix of In The Hall Of The Mountain King. Woop. Here it is:

Love it! Also, this is kinda random, but this morning I was watching Primeval (my all-time favourite TV program where these mysterious time holes called 'anomalies' appear and let creatures from the past and future into modern day) and it wasn't one of the later episodes, it was only series 3, episode 3. It started off quite cute with these ADORABLE little prehistorical dinosaur things running around a hospital. Fortunately, they didn't eat people. (that makes a change: it's one of the few episodes where no one is killed or injured by a creature :o !! ) Then it got quite bad when Helen (this evil person) blows up the Anomaly Research Centre and shoots Nick Cutter, my favourite character! Noooooooooooo!! It was really sad when he was just laid in these smoking ruins of the ARC telling Connor to keep everything going and then dying. :'( I was crying my eyes out, which is the first time in Primeval!

More happier stuff now. Today's the day of my birthday party! Yay! I'm going ice skating with my friends so that should be fun, coz I'm a fairly good skater.


Oh and also, I went into London on Tuesday and Wednesday. I visited to Harry Potter studios (OMG it was amazing) and went shopping the next day. So I'll post pictures of them too.