It's Been Weird

Sorry for the long break, things have been a bit crazy.

Started my second summer class which is a snore-fest. It's a history class where we spend most of the time discussing where commas go and "coordinate adjectives".

Began working on a Harry Potter scarf. You know, just in time for hellish summer temperatures and the movie. ^_^

Built an epic lego castle- which isn't epic in a huge, or turrets sort of way, but wins in sheer fury and creative use of clear red 1x1s as blood. (KSU did something wrong with my financial aid that day)



There's this study abroad next summer to London out of Valdosta State and I'm seriously planning on going. It's six weeks and there's a class on Shakespeare and another on London as a Setting in Novels (seriously, that's the class name)- think I'll get an extension on the ticket and stay an extra week or two so I can go to Cardiff and do all the stuff I couldn't do in the two days when I was there last fall. I just spent the last two hours reading stuff for class and babbling in IRC to my friend in London (who's asleep) about all the stuff I want to see/do.

(narg. it's still bugging me. i mean, i write stuff, and i never think to myself, "gosh, i'll put the coordinate adjective here." who names these things?)

London. London. London. It's going to be awesome. Did you know I only took about three pics while I was there? Remember when I dislocated my knee in Florence? That was about two or three weeks before London so I was hobbling around by myself on these crutches and it was like a bad comedy putting a crutch aside without dropping it to get in my bag and get the camera out and take a shot. I think there's one of a "do not put your bike here" type sign in the brownstone-y type part of town I was in, the Gloucester Street Station of the Tube, and me at Platform 9 3/4. The hostel I stayed in, the first night I got there, it was about 4AM when I wandered in and when I got up to my room there were like, six bunk beds and the only bed open was on the top of one, and everyone else is asleep and I couldn't even switch the light on while I hauled myself up the ladder with the bum knee. In hindsight it's insanely funny.

Somehow international travel is much funnier than local travel. I can't think of anything particularly funny about this last trip to Florida, back in May. But I think of Italy and there's the night where we were so punch drunk happy to be heading home from Pisa that we danced in the train. Or the demonic killer cherubs painted on the wall of the hotel room in Pompeii. Or my bum knee and climbing up a bunk bed at 4AM. Or this really nice older lady I met on the Tube while I was heading to Kings Cross and she asked me what else I was going to be seeing in England and I said I wanted to go to Wales and see Cardiff and she got so angry with me she started yelling in the train and I thought she was going to punch me. (Wales is like the boonies to people in London) And she wanted to know if London wasn't good enough for me? Couldn't I just go see Oxford instead- Or was I too good for Oxford?!

Heh. Travel. It's awesome.

Things and Stuff

The last few days have been more busy and annoying than anything else. Filling out job applications has to be one of the most tedious activities ever. But hey, money.

I've got a big knitting project I really want to get started on, but I need one more yarn for it, and I don't think I'm going to give in and splurge on that until I've got money coming in.

Because of all the paperwork I've been playing with I haven't sat down and written much on my novel this week, which is really... agrivating... some days. The first few days of the event it was hack hack hack and thousands of words seemed to appear like magic and now I'm lucky if I get to sit down and open the document. There was supposed to be a write in today at the Sandy Plains Daily Grind but I don't see anyone else here (why are there so many teenagers? don't they have school? and the men in suits- go to work!) and it's been sort of hit or miss on me actually getting anything done. I'm closing on being half way to the word count, though. I just wish the novel was more done.

The new Twilight commercials look awesome. Just like the Quantum of Solace ones. I swear I saw one for Transporter 3 but it was all flashy stuff and noise- I figure as long as something blows up that movie will be alright. In Italy they were showing previews for something called Babylon AD with Vin Diesel, but I'm not seeing anything about it here.

Lego has some new Pirate sets out. They look incredibly, fantastically like the ones my friend Michael used to have when we were in elementary school. No big single wall pieces like I've seen in some of their more recent sets (like Harry Potter- especially the Hogwarts set) which make them so flimsy and pointless to build. And apparently we're going back to the good old days of an animal in every set. So far I've seen fish, a kraken (*cough cough* octopus *cough*), a monkey, OMG A MERMAID, a shark... See them all here.

Hrm.

Haven't felt much like blogging lately. I quit checking Google Analytics so I have no idea if I've any readers anymore which helped a lot with wanting to post. Haven't felt much like writing either, even though I keep opening Rome and typing a scene or so a week, I guess. It's nothing like the 10k days I'm capable of when I'm full of coffee and the words won't stop. Maybe it's the weather?

School starts this Thursday for those with Thursday classes. I'm not one of them so I start next Monday. Film 2 and Fiction Writing this summer. Hopefully it'll shake out as well as Film 1 and Field Archaeology did last summer.

Blah. Wish I had a picture of something I'd cooked I could jam right here. There's some banana bread cooling downstairs since Mom kept forgetting to eat the bananas I bought for her and they got all brown and repulsive, though they were repulsive to me while they were yellow too. It's not really photogenic, so just imagine a brown loaf full of mashed walnuts and squishy banana bits. Shudder.

Been playing Rock Band at Aryeh's house a lot. A LOT. I can't do anything but sing since I haven't got the rythem skills to play anything. And I haven't got the range for anything with a female lead, or Sting. Which means no Roxanne which is just a sign this is a cruel and unjust universe. Shouldn't we all be able to sing Roxanne? However, I can own Oasis' Don't Look Back In Anger. Aryeh's wife swore that Perfect Drug couldn't be done, and when I proved her wrong I got Chocolate Mousse Cheesecake for a reward.

Started learning to knit. So far it hasn't really gone anywhere beyond noob level scarves. I did one with alternating colors, like a Harry Potter scarf only it's navy and cream and the colors change mid row since I was trying to figure out how you'd do it right. I did this really long, narrow cream one (maybe the same color as the other scarf? the ball wasn't labeled) that looks like a "tape worm stuffed animal". I kept screwing up the ends of the rows and not knitting them back in so instead of being rectangle shaped everything I knit was a pyramid that kept going out... My friend's mom showed me what I was doing wrong, but it wasn't until about eight feet of scarf later that the nice lady at Strings and Strands showed me how you end the thing. One of the customers this weekend told me about a knitting meet up at The Whole Nine Yards, so I'm heading over there Tuesday night. The lady at Strings and Strands also showed me these blankets she'd done with several strands of yarn being used as one at once- not to make a pattern, but different colors and textures. I thought I'd try it out with this pale lemon and pale pink yarn we've got, and while I like the color effect up close it's too pale and from two feet away you've got no way to see there's two colors, but it's sort of a pale strawberry now. Nice looking, actually.

Watched the first part of "The Andromeda Strain" remake. It was scary. Now I feel really itchy. Too much scary disease stuff for me, I think.

Torchwood Lego Madness

My Torchwood DVDs arrived today. There's only about five million deleted/cut/behind the scenes/bonus features on each disc.

To celebrate Cybermen and Skeleton Warriors invaded my desk and went to war with Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, the Ninth Doctor, and Captain John Hart. ^_^




"It's like the Cybermen and Skeletor teamed up!" Gwen shouted.


The Doctor pointed to an armored man screaming in dark ages French, "We've got to save him!"


Jack pointed his trusty Webley and hoped bullets could take down fleshless monsters...


John Barrowman, Eve Myles, and Christopher Eccleston pose for promo photos.


Jack tried to explain the 21st Century isn't exactly the most swashbuckling place in the universe, but John decided he really just didn't care.


"I thought I told you no guns on the TARDIS." The Ninth Doctor snapped at him. "Don't you realize we're on Whitney's desk?" Jack pointed out, gesturing to the iPod and the fallen Skeletons. "Oh. Right. But violence doesn't solve anything."


Gwen Cooper waved, and in a welsh accent said, "Hi Charles!"


Jack Harkness. The Doctor. BFF. SRSLY.


Aaaaand, I want to give big thanks to BrickArms. Lego doesn't make little guns.

blarg

I woke up feeling rotten this morning. Or maybe it was the part where I was forced to wake up. At nine. After going to bed at four AM.

I have trouble sleeping at night, and I'm more susceptable to insomnia when I'm upset. Some of you may know why I'm having trouble sleeping, but I've got a restriction on who I talk to about that...

I still feel rotten.

I... I should probably stop starting everything with "I" too. But anyway, earlier this week I found an ad on craigstlist.com for a lego collection someone needed to get rid of, and I got the set. 26 pounds of legos. When I was little, you know, doll-playing-with age, I remember begging my mom for this new Lego set, some kind of underwater science fortress. I still remember standing in the KB Toy's at Perimiter, her asking me if that was what I really, really wanted? Didn't I want a new Barbie or something?

No. I what I wanted was this. I had to look it up online to find the name and picture, and just looking at it brought back all the memories of assembling and disassembling it. Ah, Legos. There is a set of that same kit for sale on ebay right now and I want it.

So, new collection of legos aside, since school got out things have been pretty miserable around here.

First, that whole fiasco last Friday, which I'm not supposed to talk about. I'm sure that's mostly what the insomnia is coming from. And the worst thing is, I can't be properly angry about it, because... Arg. I can't talk about it. *bangs head against wall*

And the other thing, which I can't really talk about in here either.

And the last thing, which is this costume I'm working on for a friend. She's going to the red carpet release event of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and she wanted the champagne colored dress Elizabeth wears. You know, with layers and layers of lace over satin and god knows what else, and while I do know how to sew, there are limits to what I know how to do, and how much can get done in a certain amount of time. So we settled on the Plum colored dress from the dinner with Barbossa, since there's an easy way to mod the dress I wore to the Pirate Fan Event. But my friend doesn't know how to sew, so I'm kind of coaching her... Which is a stress in and of itself, because it's a sewing machine, not a magic wand and there are certain ways to do things...

Oh, and Script Frenzy starts soon. But right now I feel too rotten to really pester anyone into doing it. So go look at it, if you want to.

I think I'm gonna go crawl back in bed now.