#caslife

The difference, that I am going to make in my community with my Dog Bark CAS project, is that the owners will have well behaved, healthy and agile dogs. They will be confident in their dogs and the dogs will be confident in themselves, making them both happier. The difference that I am going to make in my community with my Extra Math Classes CAS project, is that the people in my class will have a higher proficiency in Mathematics, making their confidence grow, and making them more likely to pass IB and get accepted into a good university as Math is important.

At the moment, I am being lazy about my Dog Bark project, I have contacted Shari, but I haven’t checked local stores, which I must do and will do this week. I need to get the prices, I need to get budget, I need to get everything done, and I need to get the presentation and model made. For my Extra Math Classes project, I have communicated with Profe Luis, and he is figuring it out with Profe Carlos, hopefully I will be able to start this week, if not the I’d like to start next week, as my classmates need all the help they can get.

My process for doing my Dog Bark since the beginning is the following: Finding out what I want to do, finding space, talking with Mr. Abel, getting my Feasibility study made and signed, checking the area, talking with Shari, and now I must find costs for materials. The obstacles are not knowing where I can get the materials, and their cost, and how to use the materials to build the equipment, but I am going to get through them by doing my research, contacting Shari, checking Comaco and other stores, and doing it fast. My process for the Extra Math Classes is as follows: seeing that my class is struggling severely with Math, talking with Ms. Amy about it, talking with Profe Luis about it, I haven’t heard from Profe Luis yet, but I’m hoping to talk with him on Monday or Tuesday. The obstacles are that I haven’t taught a large group yet, so I will need to learn from what I have seen so far, and experience, we also need to figure out how we are going to alternate me and Profe Carlos or if we are going to be at the same time on one day.

My impossible thing is getting a 4 in Spanish.

This week, I sent an email to Mr. Abel, asking about who cut the grass so that I could communicate with them about continuing to cut it after I transform the area into a dog training park, he gave me contact information which I will contact once it is clear that I can use the area. I also contacted Shari, asking about where she got some of the materials to create her training equipment and how she took care of it. She hasn’t responded yet, but hopefully, she does so soon as the information is valuable, and if she doesn’t respond for a while longer I will contact here again via WhatsApp, to make sure she got the email. I think that I communicated effectively in some aspects, like asking what I needed to ask, but I could have been more effective by maybe using a different media. The communication with Mr. Abel led to a rise in confidence, and happiness and the communication with Shari will lead to a rise in knowledge and knowing what to do next. 

Last week, I felt very discouraged when checking out the area where I wanted to make the dog park, because it was all grown over, and there was just a little patch of land in the middle where there was no grass. But this week, the entire plot was cut, and it looked incredible and it brought my spirits up. 

My plan for CAS for the New School Year is:

1. I have to make a suitable presentation for the owners of the land next to the school where Mr. Abel said I could make the dog park.                                          2. I need to make a design                                                                                      3. I know where to put it because I checked the place out with Shari                    4. I need to figure out the Liability Issues, but I think that that can be done by placing a sign on the entrance explaining all the rules and responsibilities of the owner over the dog                                                                                                5. Once I have done this and gotten an approval from you, Ms. Amy, from Mr. Abel, and from Shari, then I will take it to the neighbors to try to persuade them into lending me the land

I also need to figure out a precise budget, the most expensive thing will be the fence, everything else that I will need, the cement, the materials needed to make the equipment, will be cheap as getting cement is cheap and the materials that I will be using will mostly be leftover construction equipment that I buy + materials from Comaco that I can buy cheaply.

Then I also need to figure out the maintenance, I will obviously take care of it if I finish it in time, but I need to figure out who is going to take care of it afterwards, I need to install places where poop bags will be dispensed, I think that I’ll just hang a couple poop bag covers with poop bags in them, there will also need to be a trash can, and I think that it would be a good idea to put a tip jar in there as well.

Due to the fact that during the rainy season it gets very wet and muddy, I will make a trail that can be followed, I’m not planning on covering the whole place in cement, no. I am going to use planks or something like that to make a trail around the whole dog park. If they want to use it they can, if they don’t want to they don’t have to.

The most labor-intensive part of this whole project is going to be digging the holes for the fence posts, I think that the best idea would be to dig it up during rainy season, as the ground is wet and easy to dig up, then somehow ensure that it doesn’t fill up with dirt, and during dry season, when the cement will dry quickly, I’ll add the cement and fence poles. I also need to add a protection against snakes, I’m thinking like a slab of wood that I put next to the bottom of the fence to stop snakes from slithering under but I’m going to have to do more research.

In Slovakia, we recently bought our neighbors land and house, because they died, and their kids didn’t want it, so, my dad bought it, thinking that if we tear that house down, and build a new one, my brother and I can be neighbors. But the problem is that that house has been unoccupied for years, and even when the couple did live there, they were so old that and the land so big that they didn’t have enough strength to pull out all the weeds and take care of the land, so when my parents bought it, my mom decided that she was going to clean the place up, and that is what we did. During Easter Vacation, we helped my mom organize the bricks, because for some reason the family had enough bricks to build a small house. The problem is that most of them were broken, so my brother and I had to go through the pile, looking for whole ones that we then made stacks of the whole ones and the broken ones. We also pulled out a lot of weeds and trash that was in the land, and my mom planted a plant that stops weeds from growing, the only problem was that it didn’t work.

So this year, we went back and pulled out all the weeds again. Then a tractor came and tilled the soil, and then my brother and I went and picked up all the trash again, there were rocks, plastic, metal and a lot of bones, like enough bones for a small graveyard, and they were big bones too, so either the family buried their farm animals and dogs there, or it was the hunting ground for some small predator like a cat or dog. This time, the plant works and the weeds have no chance of making a return, probably.

Another thing that my parents bought is this huge field, on which my mom used to go play when she was little, it used to be her grandmother’s but she sold it to some random guy that took no care of it, and the forest started creeping back in. There were trees everywhere, no grass just mud, and the fence that surrounded the property was really messed up. Also, there used to be a farm there, but it was in ruins. So the guy decided to sell it and when my mom found out she had to buy it, because that’s where her childhood happened, only problem was that there was a lot of work to be done, in an effort to make it look good, the guy cut all the trees, leaving stumps that had to be removed, a lot of rocks (big and small) that had to be moved and lumps of concrete that had to be thrown out. A lot of this was done during Easter Vacation and last Summer Vacation, but it’s a big place and we had to work on it this Summer Vacation and we will continue to work on it in the near and far future.

So this Summer Vacation, a lot was done, while we were gone there were several strong storms that made trees from the forest around Walden (that is what I shall be calling the field from now on), and since they were on our property and they were taking up space, the gardeners that take care of the occasional thing there cut them up and let them dry. Now we have like 4-5 big piles of wood, and my mom’s parents use a heater powered by wood, which it burns. Then we also had to burn a large pile of branches that we have gathered over the years and were just taking up space. So they needed to be burned but we couldn’t burn them outright due to the fear of causing a forest fire, so we had to slowly take them to the ruined farm (which was demolished completely because it the whole place was caved and it looked like the roof would fall and crush anybody that was underneath so a tractor took down everything but one wall in which there was a hive of wild bees so the tractor dude had to run away to avoid getting stung). We had to water the fruit trees that my mom planted, we had to move boulders.

I started swimming a lot here in Slovakia.

We have a pool in our backyard, and it’s pretty awesome; it starts shallow so that the little kids can have fun and then gets deeper until it’s 2 meters deep so as to allow diving into the pool without fear of injury.

Pools need to be taken care of, the filtration system needs to be washed, the ph needs to be lowered so that algae can’t form, and chlorine needs to be added to keep the water safe to swim in.

This summer, the care of the pool fell into my brother’s and my hands, and because Miki was gone every weekend and that’s when we cleaned the filtration system and added the chemicals, I did all the work.

And since I was taking care of our pool I thought “I may as well use it to the fullest.”

And so I swam almost every day, usually twice.

I did flips, I did dives, I swam laps, I just relaxed.

As the summer went on, I saw differences; my flips became more on point, my dives became more flawless, and I struggled less with swimming laps.

In the beginning, when I tried to do a front backflip, I failed, but soon, as I practiced, I could do it more and more often.

At first, my dives, were bad, I hit my legs or I slammed my head into the water, but then my dives got more fluid, and I could even jump from one end to the other without a single swimming stroke.

The first time that I tried to do several laps, I struggled, but soon, I could do more laps with ease.