Summer vacation is almost over!

That's right. In roughly 8 days I leave for Japan, which means my summer vacation is technically over! I mean, a 4 month trip to Japan could be considered a summer vacation, but I'll be working on a project for school and not relaxing all the time.

As far as the plans I had made for the month and a half of vacation that I had I accomplished a decent amount of what I wanted to. Here's the breakdown/postmortem (I guess) of my summer break:

>WEEK 1 (May 5th - May 9th): Planning
This week was really only 5 days, so I didn't really get much done. Obviously I put together this plan but that didn't take more than a day to do. It acted more as a "get settled in at home" few days.

>WEEK 2 (May 10th - May 16th): Pokémon
I trained some Pokémon! I planned out a team a while ago but never got around to actually making it, so that's what I did during this week. Each day, I bred and trained one Pokémon from an Egg to an Effort Ribbon. During the week I thought about the team as a whole and realized that there were some weaknesses that could have been overcome with other team options, but for the most part I stuck with my original plan. I only ended up training 5 Pokémon because of the weaknesses I noticed, but I used the extra time to raise them to level 50 (with one at level 57). Unfortunately, I did not use my team against human opponents but I started testing them in Battle Tower double battles. If you're interested in battling, I may have some spare time before I leave on the 15th. Let me know if you're interested and send me your friend code! Here's my Pokémon Platinum code: 0860-9118-0984

>WEEK 3 (May 17th - May 23rd): Portfolio
This week was devoted to renovating my website and populating it with some of my recent art. I looked at a bunch of HTML and CSS tutorials (mostly CSS) online, downloaded the 30 day trial of Dreamweaver CS 5, and went to work. Having never used CSS before and only knowing some basic HTML tags, I ran into some issues during the week. I was able to overcome most of them but I'm afraid my site still has a few bugs. I tried to keep it as simple as possible so that it would be easy to navigate and easy for me to create. I think I succeeded in general design-wise, although the colors may be a bit to vivid. I received some great suggestions by fellow WPI students, most notably Alex Schwartz and Elliot Borenstein, and from WPI professor Britt Snyder. The things I will be changing in the future are the color scheme, font, maybe the contact page (just some tweaking), and giving the site more of a focus towards what I want to do when I graduate.

>WEEK 4 (May 24th - May 30th): Play
Since Super Mario Galaxy 2 came out on the 23rd and it was mailed to me on the 24th, this week was all about collecting Power Stars in outer space. By the end of the week, I had collected the first 120 and had beaten the game. With the $20 GameStop credit I got for buying it at GameStop, I purchased No More Heroes 2 and played that for a little bit. During the night I played Psychonauts like crazy on Steam and managed to beat it the following week. I also played some Team Fortress 2 and some other games, but the week was mostly filled with SMG2 and Psychonauts.

>WEEK 5 (May 31st - June 6th): Personal
I realized at the beginning of this week that I should have make a more tangible plan for it. Leaving it open just left me hanging around and not getting much accomplished. Like I said earlier, playing Psychonauts (and NMH2) leaked into this week and I didn't end up thinking about packing as much as I would have liked. Saturday was my sister's graduation from Saugus High School, followed by a small party at the house, so we were busy preparing for that towards the end of the week. I did manage to get to the Japanese Embassy in Boston to apply for my visa, and it is expected at my door tomorrow (along with a copy of Picross 3D that I got for $0.80 from lockerz.com).

>WEEK 6 (June 7th - June 13th): Packing
This is it! The final week! I will be actually packing my bags and getting last minute stuff together/done this week. This includes going shopping for clothes and other necessities, possibly cleaning up my room a bit, and making sure I have everything I need for my 4 month stay in Osaka. Hopefully everything will go smoothly, including the actual flight. I just have to remember to fully charge my laptop, DS and DS lite, and iPod Touch for the 17 hours I'll be on a plane!