Senior Projects

Thursday, 4/18:

I started out my Thursday working at the Key Bistro until 2:00. It was a pretty slow day at the restaurant, so I spent most of my time working on writing stuff and reading in “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. There was a really cute little girl and her mom that came in. Ugh, she was like the perfect child, she had blonde hair and blue eyes and was very smiley. I am currently writing a “Freaks & Geeks” episode where the two title female characters and best friends have a fight that could end their life long friendship completely. The fight is really petty and it’s about who the best One Direction band member is, which then leads them to bring up other things they dislike about the other. Since their just being really annoying, their boyfriends decide to break up with them and will only get back together if they make up and are friends again, which eventually happens, when they unite over their shared hatred for Zayne Malik who left and ultimately broke up One Direction. The rest of my day I worked as a desk greeter with VEX and then helped out greeting people and handing out flyers at the evening program. When I got assigned to float around galleries, there was an issue with a suspicious man, he was not dangerous, but we did call security for them to handle the issue.

Friday, 4/19:

I spent my first part of the day at the Kids Clubhouse for storytelling. Afterward, I had a meeting with Julie to figure out the logistics of when I will lead storytelling. I will be leading it on May 7th, and I am very excited! After that, I just helped out VEX again for the rest of the day. During my free time at the desk I planned out what I will be doing for storytime. Working at the Kids Clubhouse and with VEX are probably my favorite jobs, but there’s nothing that I really dislike, which is good! After my shift ended, I hiked over to the Padgoda area in Forest Park, which was very nice, before I headed out for the evening! Next week, I will be helping out Hannah Geisz at South City Community School with a Shakespeare production. I think it will be nice to do something a bit different than the History Museum. I must admit, I am a little nervous because sometimes theater people scare me, but Hannah is really nice, so it should all be good! I think it will be fun, and although I won’t be majoring or minoring in theater in college, I would like to definitely dabble in it, especially since Webster has a really good program for it! I am also very exited for prom tomorrow, and I am dusting off my boogie shoes!

Besides working at Bamboo Equity on Wednesday, this week I shadowed my uncle, who owns three Cleaning Authority franchises. This was interesting to see because I had never known how franchises were run. He explained to me what he does on a day-to-day basis. His main job is ensuring that the franchises are running smoothly and nothing is going wrong, which entails many Zoom meetings. His other job is to figure out how to expand the company. Currently, he is creating a TCA+, which will cost more, but cleaners will clean harder-to-reach areas that are normally not cleaned. We both worked on a few things to get that launched in a few weeks. We wrote down instructions for the cleaners on how to do everything. Currently, his business is worth around 8 million, but he wants to make it worth 25 million in 5 years. His plan for that is to create multiple mobile businesses. The first that he will create after TCA+ is launched is a meal prep business where a personal chef will come to your house and cook a few meals.

The Cleaning Authority charges franchises a lot of money for marketing, and what franchise owners are paying is not worth the number of customers they get from it. It is believed that Corporate is charging franchises way too much, so many TCA franchises are suing Corporate for charging too much. I needed to write down a list of people who found out about TCA through the marketing that Corporate did.

Not much to report this time. I have today off because they need me at an open house on Sunday. Yesterday I spent most of the day looking for new properties and cleaning out the house we’re renting out.

This week has been a lot of the same stuff. Lots of inventory, checking the counts and money, and ensuring everything comes out how it should. There was an incident at one of the stores while I was there and I had to call the cops. That was not fun to deal with but I handled everything calmly. To quickly sum it all up, there was a customer who was not being appropriate to a female coworker.

I’ve had three DC meetings, we had hands-on meetings. Hands-on meetings are a classic Doc debrief. In those meetings, people bring up concerns. One of the concerns that was brought up is whether or not we will have enough supporters in favor of the bill, so for the rest of the week/end we are coming up with GOT(B) – Get out the Bill strategies. This past week we also had to rewrite the bill because of certain requirements and we would receive more support from the right side senators.

All right, this was my first week at crisis nursery! As you know, I was previously at the Saint Albans Country Club for the past three weeks. I really enjoyed it, and the staff missed me! I didn’t realize I was supposed to be doing two posts instead of one big one, so from now on, I will have two parts! Anyway, I spent Monday through Wednesday. I am still getting 30 hours a week, so don’t worry, but because it is an hour’s drive there and back each day and not in the safest area, my parents are having me do longer days instead of shorter days, but Monday through Friday. So, back to my experience, after I got over my fear of being in an unfamiliar area, I started to get more comfortable; it is also in the parking lot of a hospital with police officers camping out there every day all day, so that made me feel a whole lot safer. Stay tuned for part two to hear about my experience on my first week at the crisis nursery! 

I have mentioned some in other blog posts, but something else I have been doing on my senior project is in my free time I have been spending a lot of time working on various writing projects and reading. Since it’s a pretty big part of how I spend my time when I am not working and since I think it’s pretty cool, I thought I would make a separate post sharing what I have been doing. The main book I am reading, right now, is “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. “The Road” basically follows the journey of a boy and his father in a post apocalyptic U.S. Cormac McCarthy is a really big deal in the writing world and his other really well known books are, “Blood Meridian,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “All the Pretty Horses,” which is coincidentally the book that David Treuer mentioned Toni Morrison reading and that she remarked that “it is the closest thing you can get to a perfect novel.” I am reading “The Road,” due to some trouble I got into in the final week of classes to get some extra credit for English. I have a short essay to write for it and then wrote about 5 other short essays on various poems. One of the poems is actually where I ended up getting my senior quote from! I don’t mind reading it though because it is pretty interesting and I have wanted to read some of McCarthy’s stuff for a while since my brother and David Hardcastle read and really like “Blood Meridian” this past summer. “The Road” is written in a really cool ambiguous style that adds to the overall eerie feel of the book. It’s written very simplistically so I think even a person who doesn’t like to read like Coen or Mr. Mitchell may enjoy this book! Although, it may be a bit too scary for Coen…

Outside of that I have got some other books I want to get through, which include “Pride and Prejudice,” “Madame Bovary,” “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” (the second installment in the “My Heart is a Chainsaw,” trilogy), “The Three Body Problem,” and “Clear Title” which are only a few among a very long TBR (to be read) list. Mrs. Bryan also provided me with some reading and podcast material that I want to look into!

In terms of personal writing, I have been trying to upload 1-3 times a week on my Substack blog. I mostly write about pop culture stuff that interests me. Fictionally, I have been working on my “Freaks & Geeks” reboot, which is just a lot of fun. I started writing this in the last few weeks of regular classes and I have about 30 episodes planned with about 6 fully written. The show pays homage to teen shows and movies I really like, and then also serves to poke fun at the more outlandish teen shows and movies like “She’s All That,” “Riverdale,” and “Euphoria”. It relies on a lot of “Family Guy” esque cut aways and some of the more outlandish and self aware meta comedies I like such as “The Office,” “Girls 5 Eva,” “Not Another Teen Movie,” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”. The other major personal project I have been doing is copying my journal entries from middle and highschool into a google doc, which I plan to submit to the University of Iowa short story contest. I also am trying to convince my brother to submit his horror anthology series to it, but I have yet to see if he will agree. I am honestly considering submitting his work for him, under his name obviously, I ain’t no thief! This does seem mildly unethical, but it’s also how my mom got a full ride art school scholarship to Fontbonne University because her highschool art teacher submitted her work to a contest without her knowing. I am also considering pursuing another history research paper esque topic to research because I really enjoy doing that. Yes, I know I am a nerd. The topic idea I have is based on a JSTOR article I saw and it would be about the idiotic best friend duo in films and my examples would be Bill and Ted and Evan and Seth from “Superbad,” but I want to get a few more and I am not sure if I want to make it specifically about male characters or include female duos to compare it to.

Sorry, for the long post, this has just been brewing over the past 4 weeks and I didn’t want to break it up! Please do not give me another RJM or sue me!

These first few days I slowed down a little and spent my time so far adding the database back into my python server through the SQL language and then getting that data from my back end to my front end javascript and eventually printing it on a table on my main webpage. These processes for me have always been confusing because connecting from the back end of the application to the front end requires two different languages so balancing the two and not mixing them together has gotten more and more confusing for me as my code has become more complex. After I completed this last step to my project I spent my Wednesday morning looking into angular Javascript and how to use that for a front end and will continue working on this and looking into it. Lastly, completing this project meant I went through most of the syllabus they had planned for me and now I can begin working on the actual project of theirs. The team lead and I had a talk with some other administrator people and since the project is technically UC I will be able to start helping out with it. This is very exciting for me and I hope to do well and make an impact on this team.

Yesterday I went to the Federal Courthouse – Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse. EJ’s wife works in an office at the courthouse where she reviews cases and determines if they should continue forward or not. She has also held multiple clerkships for judges in the courthouse. Yesterday, we went to what was originally supposed to be a Motion Hearing but what turned into a change of plea. The defendant was a 64 year old African American man that held 32 counts, some of which were robbery charges, others including death threats and concealing and firing a weapon (held by a criminal) furthering a criminal act. His first name is James, his education stopped in fourth grade, he takes medication for PTSD, depression, and anxiety, and he has held various labor jobs throughout his life. The Motion Hearing was going to be arguing whether the use of DNA found at the site of one of the robberies was valid to use as evidence at the upcoming trial. But, I guess the defendant’s lawyers spoke to him about the likelihood of the trial going their way, and decided to change his not guilty plea to guilty. The judge went over all of the rights the defendant was giving up by pleading guilty, made sure nobody persuaded him into changin his plea, repeated the testimony against him, and ultimately accepted his guilty plea to 12 of the 32 counts. His sentencing will be held in July after the judge looks more into the information regarding his case, as well as the standard for prison-time his crimes hold. The judge did however say that he will face at least 10 years for 2 counts each, consecutively. And because he’s already in his sixties, that alone is essentially a life sentence. The main thing that intrigued me was how kind the judge was to him even though he is a criminal facing very bad crimes.

Experiencing a little bit of burnout this week… Unfortunately the offer we placed on the house I found wasn’t high enough so that fell through but I’ve found another one that might be decent. These meetings are really starting to get to me though… I think I should also be taking more pictures lol

Today, I visited Bamboo Equity Partners, a commercial real estate investment firm. I was supposed to shadow Alice, the principal/managing director, but she had to leave town due to a business issue. When I first got there, Dacey, Alice’s assistant, showed me around the building. Bamboo is also connected with Intelica, which specializes in brokerage, property management, multifamily, valuations, and occupier services. Dacey explained to me a little about what their company does, and then I shadowed a few people at the company. First, I shadowed Rob. If there is a building that may be a possible buy, then he will get all of the numbers, which tells Bamboo how much money the building will make in the future. Then he writes up a report about it for someone else to decide if it is a good investment or not. Then I went back with Dacey and sat in an events meeting. Here, they discussed different events that they put on for the company, like a barbecue. This was not what I was interested in, but I was able to see the culture of the company, and I really liked it. I then shadowed Tod, and he explained to me the different types of things that the company invests in. They invest in plots of land, and they build commercial buildings, then they rent the rooms out to companies, or it is a multifamily home, and they rent it out to families, or they buy bad commercial buildings and fix them and sell them in the future, or they buy good building for a good price and resell them. I was not able to shadow two financial people because they were on a lunch meeting, and I wasn’t able to meet with Alice Dacey said that it would be very good for me to meet them, so we are going to plan a day when I can go back and meet everyone.

This is one of the building that they remodeled:

This is a building that they took down and built a new commercial building: