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At lunch a bunch of girls invited Rowley over to their table so they could feed him. What really ticks me off about that is that Rowley is right-handed, and it's his left hand that's broken. So he can feed himself just fine. Tuesday I realized Rowley's injury thing is a pretty good

racket, so I decided it was time for me to have an injury of my own. I took some gauze from home, and I wrapped up my hand to make it look like it was hurt. I couldn't figure out why the girls weren't swarming me like they swarmed Rowley, but then I realized what the problem was. See, the cast is a great gimmick because everyone wants to sign their name on it. But it's not exactly easy to sign gauze with a pen. So I came up with a solution that I thought was just as good.

That idea was a total bust, too. My bandage did end up attracting attention from a couple of people, but believe me, they were not the type of people I was going for. Monday Last week we started the third quarter at school, so now I have a whole bunch of new classes.

One of the classes I signed up for is something called Independent Study. I wanted to sign up for Home Economics 2, because I was pretty good at Home Ec 1. But being good at sewing does not exactly buy you popularity points at school. Anyway, this Independent Study thing is an experiment they're trying out at our school for the first time. The idea is that the class gets assigned a project, and then you have to work on it together with no teacher in the room for the whole quarter. The catch is that when you're done, everyone in

your group gets the same grade. I found out that Ricky Fisher is in my class, which could be a big problem. Ricky's big claim to fame is that he'll pick the gum off the bottom of a desk and chew it if you pay him fifty cents. So I don't really have high hopes for our final grade. Tuesday Today we got our Independent Study assignment, and guess what it is? We have to build a robot. At first everybody kind of freaked out, because we thought we were going to have to build the robot from scratch. But Mr. Darnell told us we don't have to build an actual robot. We just need to come up with ideas for what our robot might look like and what kinds

of things it would be able to do. Then he left the room, and we were on our own. We started brainstorming right away. I wrote down a bunch of ideas on the blackboard. the robot would do my homework do the dishes make my breakfast brush my teeth Everybody was pretty impressed with my ideas, but it was easy to come up with them. All I did was write down all the things I hate doing myself. But a couple of the girls got up to the front of the room, and they had some ideas of their own. They erased my list and drew up their own plan. They wanted to invent a robot that would give you dating advice and have ten types of lip gloss on its fingertips.