another day

Here's the poem I wrote today

Well, classes today were fairly straightforward. I scrambled to complete the little assignment where I had to find the political parties of German and write down their leaders and so forth. Then I came up with a couple sentences to talk to my German teacher about to see what she thought about grammaticality judgements on them. She said that she's going to make a copy of a big list of seperable prefix verbs for me to look at and try to mix together to make some sentences. It's nice that she's willing to help me with getting data and stuff for that paper.

Because I think I'm pretty competent at drawing syntactic trees, instead of copying them down in my syntax class today, I wrote another poem. I'm going to look for one of those 4x6 black books at the university bookstore tomorrow. I've been writing in the one that mother has appropriated, and then ripping the pages out. I'd really rather have my own book to write in.

After that class, I went to the library and utterly failed to find anything about Pennsylvania German phonology. I found a couple books that mentioned that crazy dialect, but they were (a) written in German and (b) not about phonology. The ones that had transcriptions of words didn't have the words in non-transcribed format, and the ones that had the data in non-transcribed format didn't have any transcriptions. So that was basically useless.

I ended up getting a book that I probably won't end up using at all. It's about standard German metrical structure. That's not what my paper is going to be about, but I thought that I should at least take something out of the library. Then I came home and napped for a few hours, had some crazy dreams, and then some potato soup.

I was having some trouble figuring out what time of day it was when I woke up from my nap, and I was worried that I'd slept all the way through the night, and sometimes I was confused and couldn't remember where I was when I woke up. It was rather odd. At any rate, after that mother and I went up to Staples where we failed to find a little 4x6 book for me to write in, and then after coming home I found one paper on the internet about Pennsylvania German phonology. The data is random, scattered about through the paper, and I still don't have any idea for a topic in the slightest. Furthermore, I need another source to write the proposal. This does not bode well for our hero. That's why I'm writing a weblog entry right now.

In other news, I'm currently on "day two" of not smoking. It's miserable. And I want a hug.

Oh, and I've taken down the link to my webcam because I can't seem to convince the server to start up anymore.

Update: I love somethingawful! Here's what they have to say in today's update:

Girls are really soft but totally crazy.

It's a fact. Girls are really soft and smell like flowers, but are also nuttier than three dollar bill that is also made out of peanuts.

Updated at 8:37 AM, April 1, 2004

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status.mood(rather stressed out);
status.music(0);

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star wars wooo

Here's what we do in class when we aren't paying attention.

Well, I've got a couple surprises for you today. First off, a few weeks back Tasnuva and I started drawing pictures and so forth during our child language acquisition class. This sheet was written on the back of my fifth quiz in that class, and it's the first one (of three) that we made. It's also, by far, the best. Yes, it's mostly about that Care girl, but I assume she doesn't even know that this weblog even exists, and I doubt any of her friends know about it either. So I'm pretty safe on that end. Furthermore, she's already married, so it's not like I'd be ruining my chances of dating her with this either. My writing is the stuff in bold blue, and Tasnuva's is the fine black stuff.

Today I woke up with my alarm and assembled my stuff to go to school. Father had taken the dog to the vet for preparation for whatever medical procedures they were planning on doing to him. Apparently they just ended up doing some expensive blood tests and had him under general anesthetic and on IV fluids and so forth. They apparently do a complimentary nail trimming while they're at it. Hah.

So I filled my backpack with whatever crap I needed for school (a lot of textbooks that I didn't end up using, basically) and headed off. I've put about a hundred kilometers on that motorcycle on the last five dollars worth of gas that I've poured into it. I don't even know whether that's good or not, but I'd assume it isn't bad.

Because it was such a nice day out, there were tons of motorbikes parked up at campus when I got there, so I had to go use the secondary parking location, which is somewhat larger anyhow. It's all of thirty feet away from my primary spot, and it's still free, and it's still better than any paid parking spots on campus. So: ha ha ha!

I went to my Optimality Theory phonology class this morning (which is the first time I've been to it in a month) and discovered that I have a paper proposal due this Thursday. That's probably pretty good to know. I planned on going to the library later in the day to see what sort of stuff I could track down for the imaginary topic that I've got. I'm thinking of looking at either syllable or metrical foot structure in Pennsylvania German. I always have to check to see whether I've spelled that correctly, and I'm always surprised to discover that I have. Regardless, I'm pretty sure there won't be any information about that topic, but whatever.

After that class, Mandy tricked me into sitting outside with her for a bit. Miserable horrible "nice" day it was. It was too sunny and too hot, and after I'd finished copying out the requirements for the paper proposal, I went inside, with a pounding headache and a lot of dizzyness. I hate being outside. And there were ants and flies and everything. Miserable outdoors.

Well, there was nobody in the atrium, and I waited for a while there, and nobody showed up. So eventually I decided that I was pretty tired, and I didn't really want to go look for data in the library. Instead I just went to the student center, pushed some of the chair-things together at the North end of student center, and ended up napping, off and on, for about two hours. At the end of this period, I went and bought some steamed rice (all that I could afford to eat) and then started making my way to my child language acquisition class.

On the way, I discovered Adil, and he accompanied me to that classroom, and I made him feel better about how he wasn't the only one who was just randomly discovering things that were due, luckily shortly before they were actually due. There's just too much going on with life and school and everything to keep track of it all. We've all got bigger things on our minds than whether we have some dumb assignment to take care of.

When I got to the class, I sat down and had plans of asking that Kim girl out, seeing as I'd given up on Esther. She didn't arrive until about ten seconds before class started, and everyone else was already there and she was already engaged in discussion with other people, so I didn't really have an opportunity.

We wrote our Tuesday quiz, which was really quite straightforward and easy to make up the answers to, and then settled in to a lecture about binding theory. It wasn't really very necessary, seeing as the majority of the class was just review from last semester, so I took out the little black book that I'd brought to school today.

This morning when I packed my backpack, I brought my quill-pen and bottle of ink, and I searched the house for this little black book. It has pretty nice paper clean paper in it, fairly heavy, and it looks oh-so-goth. Apparently I've designated this to be Goth-week or something. Either that or, oh, who knows.

Here's the sad poem I wrote today.

The point is that I had this little book with me, and my pen and my ink, and Care was there across the room, so I decided that I was feeling rather sad and lonely, so I started writing poetry. I don't usually write poetry, but Tasnuva seemed to like it, and thought it was rather sad. Basically, I just really miss Meghan a lot. And I feel bad about all the same old stuff - guilt, longing, regret - you know.

I decided by the end of that class that I wasn't going to bother asking Kim out anyhow. Here's the thing: I don't want to be dating Esther. I don't want to be dating Kim. I want to be dating Meghan, and it's silly to go grasping around for some other girl to just take her place. Because they won't be able to. Nobody can - not unless I somehow "get over her". Hah. I guess we'll just have to see what happens.

After that class I went to my German phonology class and Esther showed up a bit late, and sat down in the handiest spot (which happened to be beside me). She, of course, didn't pay the slightest mind to my presence, as I had predicted. Care had a wonderful shirt with "Angel" written across the front of it, but I didn't really get to talk to her today either.

Leaving that class, I talked a bit with some other girl and then got on the motorbike and came back home. I was very pleased to discover that my Star Wars Trilogy that I'd ordered used from Amazon had finally arrived. I guess I shouldn't really say "finally" as it only really took a week and a half, but I've been waiting very expectantly for it. It's the special edition, which I have mixed feelings about, and it's widescreen, which I also have mixed feelings about.

First, about the special edition. I think they did a good job of remastering the colouring and making everything so much crisper and less washed out. I thought that the added computer graphics were a kind of bad idea, and an especially horrible idea in Return of the Jedi where there's that song and dance number in Jabba's Palace. What the hell were they thinking???

Second, about the widescreen nature of the films. I love widescreen because you don't miss any of the picture. Of course, it's only good on really big televisions. My television is medium-size, so the picture is just at the edge of being too small. It's tolerable, but I think that full-screen would have probably suited my television better.

The tapes themselves are in great condition. The boxes are slightly damaged. I think it was well worth the thirty dollars I spent on the set, in the end. So, at about six, I started watching the trilogy. About an hour ago, I finished watching the trilogy. I really really like those movies. Empire is, of course, the best of the three, but I discovered that I didn't really hate Return of the Jedi as much as I remembered hating it. Having played that Knights of the Old Republic game so much, I was amused to be able to identify many of the alien races in the movies. Wheeee.

So, anyhow, I should probably be heading to bed after I test this post. I have some ridiculous German homework to take care of in the morning before class, but it shouldn't be too bad. I suppose I'd better make a trip to the library to look for some books to cite for my phonology paper. Goodnight, internet.

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status.mood(Not terrible - a little lonely);
status.music(Memories of Green, Vangelis);

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apple cider

Take the Dead German Composer Test!

This morning I woke up to my Blade Runner soundtrack CD. Ah, Vangelis, you crazy fellow. I thought that it would be creepier to wake up to that than it was. I turned the volume way up so that I could be sure it would actually wake me up, but I was kind of hoping for it to influence my dreams in some way. On the CD, each track starts with something like thirty seconds of dialogue from a scene of the movie, so I assumed that I'd start dreaming about Harrison Ford or the like. Alas, there are no crazy dream stories related to that.

It's good that I learned that my alarm clock stops trying to wake me up after an hour. That's a really handy thing to know, so I actually managed to get out of bed within that window. I showered and then started searching on the internet for five German writers and five German composers to deal with the task for my German class today. I finished that ridiculous German writing project last night - it was about "What [I can] do to save the environment". Basically, the trick is to just recycle your milk jugs and turn off the light when you leave a room. Then I said something about how you should always be questioning and always be thinking and then just maybe your children will have an environment that is not filthy.

Regardless, half way through my eSearch for various German cultural figures, I came across some quiz about dead German composers. I'm apparently Hugo Wolf... not... that I know who that is or anything. Anne probably would.

I finished that up, put the new registration sticker on my motorcycle's license plate, stuffed the papers into the little folder under the seat, and then was sad to see that my Star Wars movies still haven't arrived from Ontario. Theoretically they should have been here by now, but whatever. Half the fun is worrying about whether you'll ever even see your stuff.

I didn't have enough time when I got to school to see if Anne was about, and to invite her to the House at half past two. Instead I just went to my German class, and waited in the hall for the previous class to leave. Esther is in that class, and she totally saw me in the hall, but neither waved nor nodded nor smiled at me, so I think I'll just give up on that pursuit.

In spite of what Tasnuva said about Kim not wanting any sort of relationship right now, I think I'm going to ask her out tomorrow. If she seems to be in a good mood, anyway. And, you know, if I'm actually brave enough to do that. So, I probably won't ask her out tomorrow, but hey, it's fun to think about it.

We're not learning German in the German class anymore this semester. We finished the textbook, and now we're just talking about culture. Today we, get this, talked about THE WAR. No, we haven't forgotten, guys, don't worry!

Tasnuva wasn't in my syntax class, but apparently she comes up in my blog as the very first hit in a Yahoo search for "Tasnuva". Mandy, however, was in my syntax class, and likely doesn't come up anywhere near the top of a Yahoo search for "Mandy". Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy Mandy! Oh what do I care.

After that class, Mandy and I went outside to share some clove cigarettes, and I saw Cory sitting outside with a cute girl with fantastic lip piercings. We chit-chatted a bit, and then I hopped on my motorcycle to go meet Carl and Colin at the House in Kensington.

I discovered that it's kind of confusing trying to remember how to get to Carl's house when you don't know how the "no left-turn" signs are organized in Kensington. I basically ended up taking nineteenth and crossing my fingers that it would let me onto Memorial, which it did. So, that's really a non-event, at the end of the day.

I parked in front of his residence, and saw him and Colin walking down the sidewalk, so I gave a little honk from my pathetic little horn. They stopped, I parked, and then we went to get cookies, (milk for Carl,) and an apple cider for me. I really like their apple cider. Their bathrooms are kind of scary, though.

At the House I finished the second letter for Lindsay, and now I just have to address it and put it on the "outgoing" pile on the dining room table, and I'll assume that mother will put a stamp on it and stick it in the mailbox when she gets around to it. I'd do that myself, but she's the one with all our stamps.

After the House, we went to Hot Wax for a little while. I looked at the CDs, Carl and Colin bought some records, and I baked alive in my leather jacket. Afterwards, I decided I'd just ditch Carl and go back home. It was four at this point in time, and I really didn't want to hang around for rush-hour-proper to begin. So I sped away, and now I'm home.

Plans for this evening are to meet up with Alex at the Kensington Pub, and Carl and Anne are both invited to that too.

In other news, I spent the night cuddled up with the vibrating teddy bear because I felt like cuddling a teddy bear. It was rather unpleasant, however. Ocassionaly I'd roll over and the bear would start vibrating and wake me up. Then in the morning I scratched my back on one of the plastic lumps on its back. I've decided that I really want a proper, moderate-sized teddy bear. It has to be really soft, too. And ideally, a girl I like would buy it for me. So, Lindsay, wanna buy me a teddy bear? Lord knows I can't afford one at the moment. I'm really hoping that my income tax return comes soon.

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status.mood(pretty good);
status.music(nothing right now);

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great fun

Here I am, all gothed up, and somewhere to go!

Well, I had a quite nice day today! I spent a bunch of time with Anne and Carl. This morning I paid the registration for my scooter and my motorcycle, and then Gramma and Aunt Peggy came over for a bit. I chatted with them in German, then seared my left index finger on the red-hot element of the toaster oven. I was trying to pull out an english muffin, and instead I got a nasty burn, a horrible smell, a sizzling noise, and a puff of smoke. The english muffins were good, though - some with cheese and some with honey.

Gramma gave me five dollars to get a drink for myself, as I was heading out, and that was very nice of her! Father drove me down to Kensington, and I had my skateboard tucked under my arm. This morning I decided I wanted to put my hair up and wear my collar, so that's what I did. He thought I should comb my hair, and I thought that it looked fine. So we compromised. I left the house so he didn't have to look at me. Hah.

Anyhow, I met Anne and Dave, her brother, down by the Danube in Kensington (that's a great place to get crepes and various sandwiches). She bought an Andy Warhol calendar for Carl and then we headed to Carl's place to see what was taking him so long. His parents hadn't shown up yet, so we waited at his apartment for a bit, and then I was greeted by a fantastically wonderful dog. It made sounds like some demon from Hell, and licked my hand a lot when it wasn't being generally hyper. So terrifying, yet cute at the same time. Terrifying, but in the "trying-to-hard" sort of way, so it just came off as "precious".

Then the lot of us, including Carl's parents, went to the Danube. I had the mortadellawich, Anne and Carl had roastedwiches, and the others had crepes. Next Carl's parents went back to Carl's place to sleep and the rest of us went back to Anne's house. I got tricked into raking leaves with Carl after having a discussion about the Mormons with Anne's father, then I got a nasty sliver in my right palm. I could only get it out after a deal of digging and tearing about with my safety pin. Safety indeed!

I listened to Anne practice the piano for a while, then I got driven home as Carl and Anne went out to a murder mystery thing at some church. A little while later Alex came to get me so I could watch him and Marianne eat dinner.

Shan Tung, of course. The usual food. I didn't have any. I gave Alex one of my wretched herbal cigarettes, and I don't think he'll ever forgive me. Marianne left, and Alex and I went back to my place where he played "Rogue Squadron 3D" with my fancy new joystick, and then left to go sleep with Marianne.

It was about nine at this point in time, and Anne called me up about half an hour later. We made plans to meet at Weed's Cafe about an hour later, and then to go to the Warehouse afterwards. I've never been there, but I'm told it's where the goths like to hang out, so I gothed myself up (after gaming for a bit, of course), and got father to drive me up to the cafe.

So many cute girls there... so many. I didn't pay cover because I wasn't planning on being there for long, and then I ended up waiting outside for about fifteen minutes, smoking a clove cigarette, until Anne, Carl, and Colin showed up. We got invited to a house party at one of the evening's performer's (friend's?) houses. We didn't go, of course, but it made me happy for some reason.

They had nachos and then we decided that, instead of going to the Warehouse, we'd go to the Machine. I'm really glad we did. I'd never been there before, either, and it was fantastic. The music was great, I had my token Corona, and Carl was nice enough to surprise me with a second Corona. I had a bunch of clove cigarettes and worked on blowing smoke rings. I even danced a bit, and had a good time. Unfortunately, I cannot dance to save my life, and I think I looked completely retarded and like an idiotic goth wanna-be poser jerk. Regardless, Colin and I totally gayed up the dance floor. I think his name is Colin, anyhow. I'm probably wrong about that, though, and thus: a big jerk.

Anyhow, it was fantastically fun, and I was all excited when they played Karma Chameleon. I love Boy George! I danced and smoked and drank my beer, and hooray! At about two, we decided we'd call it a night, and I got dropped off at home. I took out my contacts and now I suppose I should probably go take off my makeup. I'm rather tired, so I think that I'm going to forego gaming tonight and instead just go to bed. I wish I didn't have to take off the makeup before I could sleep, but I really don't want to get black eyeliner all over my pillows and so forth.

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status.mood(fantastic);
status.music(0);

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company, booze, animations, and great music

First order of business, those of you who are more observant may have discovered a link to the left to "the animations". Currently there is one animation up there, that Carl and I just put together this evening, so you may want to check it out.

Currently, Carl is laying on my bed with the vibrating bear, so he'll be good for a bit here. I'm taking the opportunity to write an update about my day. Tra la la indeed. So, here goes.

The big news of the past short while is that last night I went to Futureshop with mother and bought a fantastic joystick, and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D. I'm really happy with the joystick, and I think I'm going to have to borrow that other Star Wars game from Adil at the first opportunity. I'm having a great amount of "joy" with this device. Wheee.

I got up and did whatever, then ate some day old fried rice and a pair of peanut butter and honey sandwiches. They were decent enough, then I went to school, where I neglected to care about dealing with the German homework for the day. We were supposed to come up with a list of five events in Germany's history. I didn't do this on principle: it had nothing to do with learning the German language, and it would have been more of a waste of time than the homework for the previous day. What I felt really stupid about, however, was forgetting about my German written project completely! I can't believe it just slipped my mind like that, but thankfully I wasn't the only one. Some other girl completely forgot about hers too, so we begged the teacher to let us have until Monday to hand it in, and she seemed to be okay with that plan, so I gave her a boquet of flowers that I drew. They were poorly drawn.

Then I went to syntax and maybe it's just that time of the semester, but I'd reckon that neither Mandy nor Tasnuva really care to have much to do with me. I'll just assume that it's that time of the semester and leave it at that. Surely I'm not that disagreeable person. Bleh.

Then I headed back home and played my new game with my new joystick for a while, and had some stuff to eat. Then at around six, Carl showed up, and we played with my skateboard and unicycle for a bit before heading to Safeway to pick up some candied cocktail cherries and some angostura bitters. Mmm, bitters. Leaving Safeway, I couldn't keep myself out of the booze shop, and I picked up a 26 of Finlandia vodka and a mickey of St. Remy's Napolean brandy. We came back and I fed Carl some brandy, which he liked quite a bit, then I made Manhattans. I love those cocktails - probably my favourite cocktail. Carl really liked the Manhattans, so I went for a hat-trick, and prepared a batch of nachos. Success! Carl liked those too!!!

Boozed up and containing nachos within our stomaches, we went to Mohawk, where I bought half a dozen boxes of Nerds, three king sized boxes of Smarties, and brought my bank account balance down to four dollars. I sure blew through four hundred dollars in the last week! But to be fair, half of that was a credit card bill...

Carl and I came back to my house after Mohawk. He played some of my Star Wars game once he'd finished talking with Anne on the telephonemachine. I had a bit of a German conversation with Anne and we decided that we may get together tomorrow. I like German conversations, but I worry that I'm just a stuttering idiot in that language. At least Anne didn't make fun of me.

Regardless, once that was all taken care of, we (Carl and I) decided that we'd try our hands at some stop-motion animation. Our first attempt was a twelve second scene of a baby seal terrorizing my artist's figure model. Our second attempt was filmed at a lower resolution, and was twice as long, and a much better use of the file space. We called it, "The Life and Death of King Louis XVI", and I posted it to one of my webspace accounts. Check it out.

We've just been listening to the CD that I made for Meghan oh so long ago. I miss that girl, you know! He's been drawing for the past while now, so I guess I should go back to entertaining him. And by that I mean I want to go outside for a cigarette... but not until this CD is finished.

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status.mood(damn good);
status.music(be for real, leonard cohen);

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worst. cigarettes. ever.

I just bought a package of these, and they are by far the worst things I have ever smoked. I've smoked pepper, and I've smoked tea, and those pale in comparison. They smell like burning grass, they taste like filter chemicals, and it's nearly impossible to pull a drag through them. I bought them because they looked funny. I thought it would be amusing. It wasn't funny. It was just awful. Apparently they're supposed to be some sort of stop-smoking programme (according to their website), and I can kind of see how that might work. Not in the way that they envision, however. It reminds me of parents painting that vile substance on their children's nails to get them to stop nail-biting. I also bought a package of clove cigarettes. Maybe I'll just quit smoking or something. The dirtyness of the clove cigarettes coupled with the absolute vileness of the herbal cigarettes may work well. Either that or it won't. Doesn't really matter either way, I guess.

Today was a pretty good day. I woke up a little later than I would have liked, but it wasn't that important because I didn't have any homework to deal with. I had a German test at noon, and plans to go out after school, so I took the bus instead of my motorcycle. I also ran out of my pipe tobacco today, which is why I had to buy more smokes. Regardless, I think I may be one of the few people who asks themselves before leaving the house, "Do I look suitably insane today?" Today, the answer was no, and I decided that I had to put some product in my hair to stand it up on end, and wear a cloak.

When I got to school, I found Anne upstairs, as well as Caitlin and her friend. Anne wasn't sitting with Caitlin, apparently because Anne was there first and Cate didn't see her or something. I wanted to show off my new sunglasses and cloak to Caitlin, so I went over there, but they didn't seem to care in the slightest about it, so I went back to sit with Anne. Then I penned a declaration of war on their couch, and delivered it to them. They didn't seem to think it was as funny as I did, so I stopped caring.

Then I went to write my German test, finished half an hour early, and went wandering around. I tried to find Lindsey, as we were supposed to be meeting at two to go down to Steeps, but I couldn't find her anywhere. So I just went to my classroom and waited a few minutes before going inside. That class was alright, and Tasnuva wasn't there. Mandy was, and she made fun of me for wearing a cloak. What a big meanie.

After class, I went back to look for Lindsey again, didn't find her, so went to the student centre to buy a stuffed pepperoni bun and a banana chocolate chip muffin. Excellent as always.

Then I got on the C-Train, went to Steeps, and discovered Carl waiting at the bus stop by said tea shop, apparently en route to Recordland to kill some time. He was supposed to meet me with Anne at Steeps sometime around five, and it was about three at this point in time. Seeing as Lindsey was nowhere to be found, I'd planned on writing Lindsay a letter in the couple hours I had to kill. But Carl was there, so I had some company and someone to chat with.

I had a pot of "blue eyes", which smelled wonderful, especially steeped, but was kind of tart and slightly unpleasant to actually drink. I put a bunch of honey in it, and had three pots. Then I found another tea (Adil could maybe leave a comment to let everyone know what tea that was, in particular) and had a few pots of that. At around five thirty, Adil showed up with Brandon, and I proceeded to tell them the secret story of this weekend, which amused the party greatly. Then Brandon had a story to tell about Iraquis sleeping on wrestling mats in his office, which was fantastic. I had previously told Carl the parable of the Ox and the Monkey. I don't know whether he thought it was a good parable in the slightest, but that's not the point. It was an exciting afternoon and evening of stories at Steeps.

That marvelously cute Angie girl was working there tonight too. So cute... so cute. ::sigh::

Afterwards, Adil took me to his house, I played with his cat a bit, confusing him with the cloak, then borrowed "Jedi Knight 2" and mother came to pick me up. We went to Northland Village Shoppes where I visited the tobacconist and bought my herbal cigarettes and my clove cigarettes. The cloves are Djarum Black, and they more than make up for the lack of tar and nicotine in the herbals.

I'll probably go have something to eat now, then install that game and see if (a) it works and (b) I like it. Well, tra la la!

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status.mood(alright);
status.music(0);

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now what

So, I've gotten you all curious about what crazy things I got myself into this weekend. Now that I step back and look at it as memories and somewhat more objectively, I realize that those adventures weren't really all that crazy after all. I mean, it definitely wasn't G-Rated, but crazier things have certainly happened. Really, it pretty much just boils down to Tasnuva, Alex, and me being irresponsible, somewhat immature, and throwing morality and care to the wind. I laughed, I cried, and it's nice to get out of town for a bit sometimes.

Then there was Sunday night, which featured Tasnuva crying on the phone in my room with her mother for two hours, getting completely freaked out about life in general, Alex coming over with the drugs to get her high, and so forth. All the while, I just kept asking myself, "What would Jesus do?" because throughout the whole ordeal, I really wished I had some sort of instruction manual to outline the way I was supposed to act, react, and respond to happenings and goings on. I concluded that night that I am definitely not the least bit "interested" in Tasnuva. Maybe I was, maybe I thought I was, but I'm definitely not. And no, I did not use the drugs Sunday night. I rolled for them, but what I had was just some of my pipe tobacco, as per usual.

In my last class today, I exchanged a few pleasantries with Esther, learning that she's seriously really busy with school and stuff, and seems to be stressing out about it quite a bit right now. So I figured that the moral thing to do would be to just be patient. I mean, it's not like she's going anywhere for the moment. She doesn't really need to worry about how she's going to work a boy into her schedule right now, and maybe that's just a big ol' cop-out on my part. Whatever, though. I feel better these days anyhow.

Then at one point there was this little exchange with Care. She was eating some of that non-milk-based ice cream of the chocolate variety, and had gone to stick it in the fridge. When she came back, she complained about being tired, so I told her that I prescribed more ice cream. Then she told me her uncle had died. I don't think my response was the correct response of empathy, but, seriously, that caught me so completely off guard that all I could do was make something of a puzzled, confused face. I just didn't know what I was supposed to say or do, so I basically just didn't say or do anything. She has a husband anyhow, so dealing with it is his job anyhow.

Earlier in the day on Sunday, I had an appointment with the company to fill out some paperwork, authorize a security/background check, and sign the job offer. That took about twenty minutes, then I went to meet my mother and grandfather at Value Village where I bought a fantastic coat, a burgandy chef's hat, a ridiculous manual bowtie, and a statue of a pig wearing a tuxedo. I named the pig, Esther.

Then we went back to gramma's house, where we had lunch and visited with my Great Aunt who lives in the "Nation's Capital". Mmmm, I like going to gramma's house. Gramma's enjoy feeding people, and I was very hungry, so it all worked out nicely. Also: I like pea soup, and that's what she had prepared. I think I may have played a little bit of guitar for them, or maybe I didn't... hard to say, really. At any rate, it was fun.

Yesterday was pretty decent... I went to my two classes, handed in my interim report (along with Tasnuva's), and then came back home. I had to hand in Tasnuva's report because she was off with Alex presumably getting some stuff from her parent's house so she could move out. She was supposedly going to be moving in with me for a couple days and then somewhere else. Suffice to say, I'm rather relieved that she's rethinked her position and decided to just stay at home.

At any rate, after I got home from school, I gamed for several hours, then went to Safeway with mother. There, we decided that we'd just get food from the food-court at Market Mall. I wanted to go shopping around for a bit anyhow.

Zellers was the first stop, and I was really excited about buying myself a new pair of sunglasses. Man alive, I like sunglasses. I'm just so glad to be able to wear those devices now that I have the option of putting in contact lenses. The ones I bought have these mirrored lenses that change colour from blue to violet, depending on how you look at them. Furthermore, the lenses themselves are brown. They don't make any sense, but they look really great - in my opinion, at least.

Next stop: the foodcourt. I had horrid chinese food from Manchu Wok - ginger "beef", lemon "chicken", and fried "rice" - and mother had a veggie pita. We bought a six-dollar submarine sandwich for father then took a lap around the mall.

At Abbington's Animals, I found a couple little stuffed flowers with happy faces and wire in the stalk. They're really cute, and I bought a blue one and a pink one. Boy flower and girl flower. They were only three dollars each, so I felt justified. Then I went to Compucentre and looked at games and peripherals. There don't seem to be any more peripherals that I can get for the computer. Not useful ones, anyhow. I'm thinking of buying "Dungeon Siege" as the next RPG to play. Has anybody played that and either liked or disliked it? It seems kind of pretty and potentially interesting.

Speaking of RPGs, about an hour ago I finished "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic". Here is my review of said game:

Review of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

I really liked that game, and I was really rather fond of the story-line. The graphics were nothing special, but good enough. The sound-track was kind of tedious after a little while and spent most of it's time being turned off. Sound effects were pretty good overall, but I had a couple complaints. First, the whelping of Kath Hounds when you killed them. That was painful and un-necessary. Actually, come to think of it, I retract that statement. I liked it. It was painful and un-necessary, so in keeping with the requirement that games should hurt the experiencer. The other sound-related complaint that I had was to do with the lightsabers. They didn't make those woowooWOOOwoo noises loudly enough, I don't think. I really had to listen very very closely to be able to hear it at all. In the movies, those sounds were rather loud. I like that sound, but I guess I probably would have gotten rather tired of it and turned the sound effects off if it were any louder.

Let's see... sound... graphics... story-line... ah yes, gameplay. Not great. Actually, kind of bad when you get right down to it. As a third-person sort of game, it uses a modified version of WASD + mouselook. The mouse only functions as lookabout at the edges of the screen, and otherwise it is a pointer for selecting things. The combat engine was kind of annoying at first, but became tolerable as I got used to it. It's similar to the Baulder's Gate turn-based combat, only with the ability to queue up to four actions.

It's a party-based game, but they didn't seem to put too much thought into the party-physics or balancing the difficulty accordingly. One thing I had a huge problem with was the fact that you couldn't issue a command to the whole group, which made running away from combat completely impossible. This was generally more annoying than anything, but near the end of the game, it got kind of silly. Also: the AI seemed kind of iffy at best, and completely random at worst.

Items, weapons, armour? I really didn't see much difference among any of these. There were, in my opinion, too many different kinds of weapons, but not enough variation among them. Swords, blasters, and lightsabers. What I didn't like was how swords were better weapons than guns. Of course, I gave my party members a bunch of guns and let them do their own thing, so it didn't really matter too much to me.

With respect to the balancing, they did a terrible job of that. Basically it boiled down to: Jedi are very good, everyone else is crappy. For this reason, I made my primary party from a droid and the wookiee. When I got a second droid, he replaced the wookiee as the third party member. Your main character has to be in the party, and you can add up to two other characters to the party from a total of nine, which you obtain as you play through the plot.

And balancing difficulty as the game progressed was kind of silly too. For the first quarter of the game until you become a Jedi, every combat round is tricky and takes a combination of good-luck and active command of the combat engine. Once you become a Jedi, the rest of your party members become mostly superfluous. You could solo through pretty much the whole rest of the game, with key exceptions. The key exceptions are near the ends of stages and boss fights. Appropriately, these are typically the only areas that you cannot modify who you have in your party. So, I was stuck hauling some combination of droids and wookiees around with me to use them as fodder for the bosses and occasional ridiculously hard enemy scattered about.

Of course, I started out thinking that I had to pretty much actively control the party members to get them to do what I wanted them to do if I wanted to be successful. Then I realized that it didn't make any difference and just basically ignored them, to great success. The same could probably have been said of my "Force powers". Buhh, use the Force because that's what the Jedi do. And I'll admit that I used my Force powers quite a bit. But that's just because they were more interesting to watch. The lightsaber was really a better and more efficient way of killing stuff in the end. Not to mention that the enemies that the Force would have been useful against all had really good resistance to it. The final battle was silly and far too difficult. I had to turn the difficulty down to easy because I was getting really tired of saving, reloading, and doing exactly the same thing fifty times until I lucked out with the random numbers and was able to progress to the next phase.

One thing that I liked about this game was how you could follow the dark side or the light side. I suppose the light side was a little more interesting (from what I played of it anyhow). It has more variety in the approach you take to solving problems. The dark side approach is to just insult whoever, stab them in the face, and take all their money. At some points in the game, playing dark side really let you be a total ass, instigating horrible things, killing old women for fifty cents, fun stuff. Playing light side involves giving your money away to everyone. What was particularly nice about being dark side was that most of the NPCs in the game are tremendously whiney, and it was nice to be able to have the option of telling them to shut up, stabbing them, and getting yelled at by your other party members for being such a horrible person.

Anyhow, I think the story line was really the strong point of the game. It was kind of cliche overall, but had some really great twists that I should have seen coming, but still surprised me. I mean, the storyline isn't as good as the real Star Wars movies, but I'd argue that it's quite a bit better than Episode I or II. There are a bunch of mini-games slapped into the middle of everything. They serve to break up the plot, and I'm undecided if they are completely stupid, or kind of fun. The card game that you can play throughout is really stupid, though. My character didn't play it ever. It's just stupid and a waste of time. If I wanted to play dumb card games on my computer, I'd download freeware solitaire games. Or better yet, I'd stab myself in the eyes and go eat some fish.

Despite all of the complaints I had about this game, the whole was definitely better than the sum of its parts. It was super-addicting and really one of the most fun games that I've played in a long time. I actually finished it, which says something. Usually, I just play halfway through, then get bored, start another twenty or so characters, cheat them a bit (or a lot) to see some of the magic effects or high level items or whatever, then go buy a new game. It had problems crashing and freezing and running out of memory (I suspect a leak), but I always wanted to restart the computer and keep playing. The replay value isn't particularly high, however. I kind of want to see the light side ending, but not badly enough to play through the whole thing again. Once you figure out the puzzles and so forth, it's just not much fun anymore.

In conclusion, this was a really good role-playing game. It probably took somewhere between 30 and 40 hours to play through it, which is the optimal time for a game like this, I believe. It was about sixty dollars when I bought it, and if you're interested in playing it, I'd recommend waiting a few months until it drops down to under forty dollars. It's good, but sixty dollars is just a little too much for the product in the end. I'm not going to give it a numerical rating because those don't mean anything.

Update: Oh, and here's everything you ever wanted to know about your touchpad.

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status.mood(fine enough);
status.music(Honeysuckle Rose, Holly Cole);

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christ

What an insane day. I mean, seriously. Nothing I could write could accurately describe how insane this whole mess is getting. Crazy driving, sirens, running, hiding, shenanegans, tom foolery, blowing bubbles, camwhoring for real this time, edward scissorhands, we've named the vibrating bear Care after that girl named care, sketchy sketchy confusion where do we stand where do I stand what the hell is even going on? Does any of this make any difference? Who knows. I fully intend on going through with the likely bad plan of asking Esther out properly on Tuesday, because I think maybe a good Christian is what I need to help cool things off for a bit. I fear I'm turning into Alex, but not in a good way. He sure looked confused to see us. What the hell is happening here, is what I want to know.

Update: Too far. We've gone too far. This thing has its own momentum now, and I kind of want to turn back. Crossing every line there is to cross, and then drawing some new ones, crossing those, and throwing packets of sugar at a beautiful girl with a sailor's mouth in Edmonton.

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status.mood(wtf);
status.music(ha ha ha);

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hah, take that, god

Hey, check this out! I love meninhats.com. This particular episode is absolutely fantastic. I think "God" would appreciate it. And by "appreciate it" I mean "I don't very much like this God person." I'll consider updating this with a real post later tonight.

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status.mood(hard to say);
status.music(Seven Years, Norah Jones);

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stress overload, then a pleasant evening

As promised, here's the picture that Carl drew for me Thursday night.

Yesterday, I didn't go to school, and instead worked on preparing what I could for today's child language acquisition presentation. Tasnuva came over after she was done at school, and we spent the afternoon and early evening working on that and having a gay ol' time. Then we made the photocopies for the handouts, and mother and I brought her home with the truck.

But, now, today...

Okay, today was nuts. I was too out of it last night to deal with the phonology assignment that I had, so I figured I'd just go to bed, skip my first class, and then do the assignment this morning. That's precisely what I did, and it only took me about an hour and a half to deal with it. So that was alright. Then I headed off to school.

At school, I went to the classroom for German and planned on working some other stuff. Then I realized that I'd forgotten to hand in the phonology assignment so I had to trek across campus to deal with that. Upstairs, I saw Amanda in the Verbatim (linguistics club) office, so I popped in to say hi to her. As it turns out, the phonology assignment's due date got extended until this coming Tuesday, so I didn't need to worry about it after all.

Anyhow, I handed in the assignment and went back to the empty classroom that I'd started out in, and started working on the homework for my last class of the day. Elsa (a girl in my German class) came in and we chatted for a moment and then I went back to working on my stuff. Eventually I finished that, and then decided I may as well get cracking on the GERMAN homework that I had to deal with for the class that was starting in about half an hour.

That went over fairly well, and it wasn't too tricky. It was kind of nice to relax in that boring class for half an hour and not deal with anything for a bit. At that point in time, the whole load of stress was really catching up to me and I was basically just running on adrenaline and instinct.

Following the German class, I went to the Den where I met Tasnuva so we could get some much needed alcohol into our systems and prepare ourselves for the big presentation. We ran through our speeches for the first time together, and had a few cigarettes, then made our way to the classroom.

I was surprised to see that nothing had gone wrong with booking the powerpoint and so forth, and also that my CDRW worked properly and we had slides for them all to see. Tasnuva had tricked me into wearing all black for the presentation, saying that we were both going to do so. Apparently that was all just a big joke, however, and the only black shirt I could find was a turtleneck. It's hot enough in that class without giving a presentation, and giving a presentation is stressful enough without wearing a heavy black turtleneck sweater in a hot room.

The presentation itself went off more or less without a hitch. I missed talking about one of my slides, but it didn't seem to matter too awful much, and I could handle answering the questions that were asked to us afterwards. When we finished, Tasnuva and I ran outside for a cigarette, then came back for the rest of the class.

Next up on the busy day, and arguably that which was the source of the majority of my stress, was going to my German phonology class. That, in and of itself, wouldn't have been so bad, but I was supposed to be getting word back from Esther regarding whether she could go out for tea with me on the weekend. I really had my fingers crossed and all that, but when she came in, she didn't exactly seem to notice that I was even there, despite her sitting right beside me.

Eventually I said hello to her, and it took her a couple seconds to register that I was, in fact, there, and then to discover that I was, in fact, talking to her. She quickly went back to whatever she was doing, though. Once we moved to the lab to "work on our assignments", I decided I'd go talk to her to see what was going on. She was startled when I seemingly appeared behind her out of thin air, and explained that she had tons of schoolwork to do that weekend and it was the only time she could work on it. She said we'd have to take a "raincheque", whatever that means. I couldn't exactly decide whether I was supposed to cry or be happy about that, so I went home. It has been suggested that perhaps I should be more direct in asking her out. I wonder if that's even something that's possible for me to do. I suppose I don't really have very much to lose by doing so, but, christ, that's a scary prospect for a shy little introvert like me.

Anyhow, I came home and took a bit of a nap, and then Anne called to see what was going on. I told her that she could come over with Carl at any point in time, and if I was in bed I'd just wake up. So, at about half past seven, she arrived with Carl, and we listened to music, a lot of Prince, and then we brought down the kettle. We had a mate party with my sake set. It seemed a little ridiculous having mate out of those little tiny cups, but it was still really good. The problem is that I don't have a large french press, so I cannot steep very much at once.

After we were done that, we went back upstairs and discovered that it was kind of raining out. So I had a cigarette and we decided to get the gigantic umbrella and walk to Mohawk for candy and chips and the like. We did that, and came back with a 2L bottle of Coke. I kind of like how when those two come over they buy large quantities of stuff and then leave all the massive leftovers for me to enjoy. I also really love how Carl reports to enjoy coming over to not... really... do much of anything! It's the best kind of party ever, in my opinion, and I always feel better for it.

I will update this post some time in the next day with a scan of the little picture that Carl drew for me, so keep your eyes open for that. I'll probably stick it near the top, and I'd do it now, but I really don't feel like pulling out the scanner. Additionally, seeing as I don't really have any plans for Friday (at all), I think I may end up taking some before and after shots of me cleaning my room (again). The desk is dangerously close to reaching critical mass, and it's completely impossible to find anything in this nonsense.

Update #1: in my infinite wisdom, I deleted the previous entry without checking to see if there were any comments associated with it. Of course, there were tons of comments associated with it, so if you want to check out that thread, HERE'S THE URL.

Update #2: as promised, I posted the picture Carl drew.

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status.mood(fairly good now, relieved that this insane day is over);
status.music(there was a lot of music a little while ago, but nothing at the moment);

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mate, mate, mate!

That's mate, as in the herbal beverage, not mate as in what animals do to create a new generation. I'm currently on a bit of a mate high at the moment, and it's really wonderful... I think I'm actually going to buy some of that wonderful substance to take home for those long nights of last minute paper writing, and so forth.

Friday afternoon was really quite pleasant, although I did feel a little bad about having skipped all my classes. I was really saddened when I discovered that I'd lost my black plastic skull and crossbones bracelet, but that seems to be all better now. I just got back from Steeps with Adil, and as we were leaving, I discovered my very bracelet sitting there behind the counter! I was all happy because I got my wonderful bracelet back.

At any rate, Saturday was a pretty good day too. Tasnuva came over in the early afternoon - I picked her up on the motorcycle from the Sunnyside C-Train station. She was a little terrified of the whole motorcycle thing, but she claims that I was a good enough driver that she kind of got to relax a little bit by the end of it. It's still a little stressful driving with a passenger, but whatever, I suppose.

So, she came over and we threw together a powerpoint presentation for our child language acquisition class. Then we lazed about for a little while and eventually she decided that she wanted to get out of the house - I guess the vibrating bear wasn't enough for her anymore. We waited around for about twenty minutes for the lazy number one to arrive and take us to Kensignton.

In Kensington, we went to "The House: Coffee Sanctuary", a really "post-post" looking Christian place. I love it in there - it's so... relaxing... or something. And, with a little help from the man upstairs (or possibly the basement prayer room), we breezed through our phonology assignment and then chatted about life, love, morality, and God. Then I used the woman's washroom because the toilet was backed up in the men's. I'm a little disappointed that they got rid of the terrarium, but I suppose that the humidity levels were reasonable today.

Once we were done there, I called mother and she came to pick us up and drove Tasnuva home. That's about it for Saturday.

He came outside to visit me while I had a cigarette.

And that brings us to today, Sunday. This morning I was woken up by my cousin as we were all supposed to be going to gramma's house today for pancake breakfast. She seemed very interested in hurrying me up, but once we got there, we still had to wait for an hour for my uncle to show up and start making the food. That was alright, I suppose, although I was getting pretty hungry by that point. I had a smoke after breakfast and then layed myself down for a bit while the first half of "Mambo Italiano" was playing on the television. It seemed potentially interesting, but about half an hour into it, they seemed to have exhausted their supply of plot devices, and it looked like they'd set everything in place but had no idea what to do from there.

I figure that we didn't really miss much, mother and I, when we left to go shopping for a new alarm clock for me. As I have previously mentioned, (probably,) I broke the button for setting the "hour" on my old alarm clock, so I've been using the television. I decided today that I wanted an alarm clock that plays CDs. So, we went on a quest to find one of those for a reasonable price.

Our first stop was London Drugs, up at Brentwood. It always makes me sad when we take that exit off of Crowchild to get there. As we drive past the church I always catch a glimpse of Meghan's house, and sometimes their van. And then I was a little nervous being in London Drugs because I kind of worried that I might happen to see her. I don't even know why this bothers me so much at this point in time - I guess I just don't want to deal with things at the moment. That's probably why I haven't returned any of Alex's calls or talked to him since our fight on Thursday. I'm just really not in the mood to deal with stuff.

At any rate, I failed to find anything remotely good, alarm-clock-wise, at that store - they had some nice looking alarm clocks, and some nice looking (inexpensive) CD playing devices, but nothing that combined the two. So mother picked up some laundry detergent and I went to the hair dye section and picked out a new box of dye. Mother was kind of upset that I didn't want to go for the blue-black that I usually pick. Instead I wanted to try something fun and new, so I picked out a box of bright red. I'm really looking forward to that, but I'll have to wait a couple months until the blue-black fades enough. I just don't it when I don't have the option of dying my hair.

We picked up the stuff, I convinced mother that it's just hair and that it's not really important anyhow, and then we went up to Futureshop. There, we found a few alarm clocks that had the option of playing CDs, but they were only available for between seventy and one hundred dollars. That seemed a little too pricey, so we opted to go check out Walmart to see what they had.

On our way to Walmart I got distracted by the bead store. So of course I had to go in there, and the result was, twenty minutes later, I came out with the stuff to make a pair of necklaces. I'll take a picture of (or scan) them some time so that you can see what they look like. But, they're really cute, and I put them together as soon as I got back home. I'm really happy about them, and they were only ten dollars for the pair.

As we approached Walmart, mother handed me a letter to mail and said she'd meet me in front of the store after she was done in the bathroom. After mailing the letter, I decided I'd go look at Radio Shack for a bit, and discovered that was in fact possible to find a cell phone for fifty bucks without having to sign a three year term contract. So that's good news for once I get my job. As I intend on getting one of those machines. They had some alarm clocks there too, but nothing too good. The CD playing alarm clocks were more expensive than the ones at Futureshop, and they weren't real brand names either.

So, Walmart. They had a couple devices that I was looking at, and they were really sketchy looking brands. For example, the clock I bought was made by "Durabrand". I'm not kidding. They only had one on the shelf, and the box was all wrecked and broken and falling apart, but the machine inside looked like it was still undamaged, so I figured, "what the hell, I can just return it if it sux0rs."

We payed for it, bought a nine-volt battery, and then went to leave Walmart. Of course, the cute (but kind of incompetent) clerk at the electronics counter had failed to deactivate the security device, so I nearly had a heartattack when the alarms went off. At any rate, we had that taken care of and headed home, where I set it up.

It worked fine, and I have my "From Autumn to Ashes" CD all set up in there. It also has a "dual alarm", so I've got my MWF time set, as well as the (earlier) TR time. Handy, no? Setting the time back and forth is probably what broke my other alarm clock in the first place. Nice.

Then I went and took a nap for a while.

I woke up at half past five and realized that I had an appointment to meet Adil at Steeps in half an hour. So I hopped out of bed and mother had just finished cooking the stuff for tacos. I had a couple tacos and watched the end of "Empire Strikes Back". That's easily the best of the lot of them. I really want to buy that boxed set now. And despite the fact that it will probably sux0r, I still want that last of the new ones to come out. I really like the whole Star Wars mythos.

Mother drove me to Steeps, and agreed to wait with me inside for Adil to show up, as I hadn't actually confirmed my appointment with Adil. I don't have that boy's cell phone number either, so I couldn't really call him to make sure. So she waited with me and had some herbal tea and I had the roasted mate. Adil showed up a little while after, as mother was nearing the completion of her tea. She said it was really nice and fresh and that she was considering buying some to take home. I think I'll pick some up for her the next time I'm there, maybe. I really think I want to pick up a tin of the roasted mate for myself. It's so good.

Oh, and the employees were really cute tonight. Sarah, and that Angie (???) girl. So cute. Aww. But, I have my own pursuits right now, and Adil wished me the best with that as well. I appear to have a lot of support on this one for some reason, and oh it would be so nice if it did work out. I've made a decision that I'll quit smoking as soon as I have a girlfriend because it's awful kissing people who smoke. And therefore having a girlfriend would be the "incompatible" behaviour required to break the habit/addiction. Maybe that's just my excuse, but if I say I'll quit when I get a girlfriend, you can believe me... I think.

I suppose I should probably get started on reading that paper for my presentation, so, until next time, I guess. And be sure to check in on my webcam if it claims it's online. Not that watching me use the computer is terribly exciting, but hey, it could give you something to do to kill a few minutes.

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status.mood(pretty good);
status.music(Tourniquet, Evanescence);

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exciting

Well, I just spent the past hour and a bit setting up a webcam server. I ended up settling on the Hcam service through myusedbook, after utterly failing to find anything else that was even willing to work properly. It's hard enough to find something that works to begin with, let alone something I can figure out how to work with my network. So, with a mess of port-forwarding and proxy serving, I believe I have everything up and running.

I intend on having the webcam running as often as possible, so be sure to check it out from time to time. In case you hadn't noticed, I've put a link to it up in the menu, and in the interest of something or other, I've set it to open in a new window. It would seem that my Mozilla decided that it was a pop-up, however, and figured it ought to block it. So, if you have something that blocks pop-ups, you may need to put my site on a safe-list or whatever. I'm all excited about this, and I hope it works out nicer than my last attempt at running my webcam over the internet.

Regardless, I've got it attached to the laptop, so theoretically it should use less power that way... but I think that the laptop fan may be a little noisier than the fan on my real computer. That means it might annoy me while I'm trying to sleep. I suppose that doesn't really matter very much, though, seeing as it'll probably be WAY TOO DARK to see anything then anyhow. I refuse to leave the lights on while I sleep just so that you can watch me laying down and rolling over occasionally. At any rate, enjoy!

Update: Well, it would appear that my lazy laptop really doesn't like looking to see if I've actually plugged my webcam into it, and just assumes that I haven't, or something, and decides to freeze up 90% of the time when I try to do anything webcam related with it. As such, I'm going to try moving the webcam server to the main computer, and hopefully it won't take me as long to set it up this time.

Theoretically Tasnuva will be coming over so we can work on our insane presentation for thursday. I'm not looking forward to that presentation, and it seems like there's a lot more work to be done with that crazy presentation than we'll be able to accomplish today, but whatever. Really, I just want to drink alcohol and smoke cigars or something. But I guess that's going to have to wait.

Updated at 11:11 AM, March 13

Update #2 Well, it looks like I'm going to be leaving myusedbook in favour of some other webcam hosting service. Seriously if any of you know of a good, free service that I'll be able to coax into working through my router, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Updated at 12:11 PM

Update #3 Now I've decided to try Camarades or whatever the hell it's called. Check it out and see if it's even remotely tolerable. Ugh, what a nightmareworld.

Updated at 1:15 PM

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status.mood(pretty good);
status.music(Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth);

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bad student

And this makes another day that I've neglected my studies. I've really needed this break, I think, and I doubt I'll have too much trouble getting caught up again. I've just got too much going on in my head right now to be able to deal with classes and all that crap.

Yesterday I was rather displeased with what I skipped my child language acquisition class for. There was supposed to be a big gathering of people at the Den, so I showed up there, didn't see anyone, went to my classroom to see if Kim was going to be coming, and then didn't find her, so I went back to the Den. The only people there were Alex and Tasnuva, all like cuddled up in the dark corner. Nobody else showed up, so I got to be a third wheel for an hour and a half until I got tired of that and went early to my German phonology class.

Neither Esther nor Care were there when I got there, nor were they there for the first half hour of class. Esther's excuse was that she was at Steeps (nice work, Esther) and I'd assume that Care's excuse would have been that she's tremendously ill right now. So I didn't get the notes from Care from the class I missed as I'd planned. But she was nice enough to be willing to go track them down and make a photocopy of them for me. So, hooray for that.

Then Alex and I got in a big fight over the MSN last night, with him threatening me and demanding that I stay the hell out of his plans. Dealing with all this was just too much, and then I started thinking about Meghan to top it all off, and spent the next hour crying my eyes out.

So, today I didn't bother going to school and instead dyed my hair. I guess I'll have to wait until Monday to pick up those notes from Care, and I'm pondering whether I'm even going to bother going to Steeps this afternoon. I suspect I'll probably end up rather let down by the whole thing, but who knows, I guess. I suppose I'll start by getting dressed and getting something to eat and seeing how I feel.

Update: As it turns out, I was quite the opposite of rather let down, and I left Steeps feeling quite good and hopeful.

First: before I left the house I returned the phone call I got whilst dying my hair. It was my potential employer, and we negotiated a bit of a raise in pay for me, so I'm assuming the prospects are looking good for that job...

Then I had a bit of cake and a bagel and some cornbread muffins before leaving the house. I threw on my fancy hat and my trenchcoat and ran to catch the bus. Once at Steeps, I sat around for a while thinking that she wasn't going to come, but she showed up with a couple church people (I believe) at about half past. I was all smiling and sipping my tea and she had her meeting and came and we happily chatted for about twenty minutes until her mother arrived to take her to dinner. I plan to continue to clumsily court her. Not that I have any idea how to even do that... Regardless, I'm feeling somewhat better now.

Updated at 5:49 PM

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status.mood(don't start);
status.music(various commercials, much music);

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a pleasant surprise

Well, as I may have already mentioned, my alarm clock is broken and we still haven't gotten around to getting a new one, so I've been using the television alarm function to wake me up. I'd decided that I should set it to Much Music on account of how it would probably be annoying enough to get me the hell out of bed. Well, today I was very pleasantly surprised because they woke me up with the video for "Waterwings" by Alexisonfire. What a wonderful band, and what a wonderful song, and what a nice way to start the morning.

Oh my god oh my god! They're playing MORE Alexisonfire right now! Is this band actually popular? Oh, how I love screamo! Whee, and they have a new album coming out!

Anyhow, it's already been established that I'm not going to my phonology class this morning (seeing as it's over now) and I think I'm not going to be attending German today either. I was really hoping to go to my language acquisition class, but Tasnuva has managed to convince me to instead join the party in the Den. So, I'm hoping that Care will be in the last class of the day so I can get some notes off of her, if she's so inclined. Und ich freue mich auf Esther heute zu sehen. And I like that class anyhow, so I'll be attending that for sure.

Yesterday was pretty alright too. I didn't have any classes to attend (for real this time) so I met with Anne and Carl and we made a trip down to Steeps and I had the Raspberry Vanilla Rooibus. Anne decided that she actually liked Steeps a lot more than she remembered it - perhaps because, when she went there the first time, Alex was being rather negative. Or so I'm told, anyhow.

After we were done there, Carl took off and Anne and I went to a music store and decided everything was too overpriced so we headed back to the university and I drove Anne to someone's house where she may or may not have been giving a piano lesson. Then I came back home, played some of my computer game, and then took a nap. After waking up, I gamed more, chatted on the MSN, and then went to bed at around three.

I kind of want to go with you too, Steve.

And there sure are a lot of pretty girls hiding in my television these days.

Finally, if you turn your attention to the comments on the previous post, I think you will find that n.a.L.M. is being a little ridiculous and apparently has far too much time on her hands.

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status.mood(Not so bad);
status.music(Yeah, David Usher f. Ludarcis & Li'l John);

---

crazy world anyhow

Carl drew this last night when I promised Kyle C. a surprise picture.

Alright, to get everyone actually fully caught up since the first of the month when I wrote the last real post would take far too long. I'm on a time budget at the moment, and I don't really want to get into the whole spiel at the moment. Therefore: I present a gloss of the last week.

Basically, I guess I should elaborate on a couple of the things I hinted at in my previous update, at the risk of making a bunch of people further pissed off at me. But, c'est la vie, and all that.

First, the getting drunk alone in my room. I did that on wednesday and friday. I did that by pounding back about five ounces of vodka or gin or whiskey and then sitting at the computer until I got drunk. Wednesday, it was motivated by how completely horrible Alex and Tasnuva were making me feel. Alex seems to be on some sort of "adventure" with her - that is, he's cheating on the wife again and pretending he isn't. I was thinking I was having "feelings" for the girl, and just as I was coming to that conclusion, they make sexplans for Banff. I voice a bit of opposition to the whole situation, and suddenly Alex is calling me a clumsy oaf who ruins everything, and Tasnuva is thanking me for officially ruining what could have been a really nice Friday. So I got shitfaced and cried for half an hour.

The second drunkenness escapade was prompted on Friday by a related circumstance. You see, after class I went to the Den with Tasnuva and I was under the impression that she'd be going for coffee with Alex while I headed to my job interview and then she'd call me at five and head over. Apparently that wasn't the plan, however. Apparently the plan was to call me if Alex wouldn't mind me tagging along. Well, obviously he would, so I waited around at the phone for a few hours on Friday, napped for a bit, and when nine or half past nine rolled around, I'd decided that she would not, in fact, be calling me, and I got drunk and played computer games. I didn't really cry very much because at that point I'd more or less stopped caring about the whole situation anyhow.

Oh, the job interview. I'm applying for my old position at the bank, much to my disappointment. It's a tremendously boring job, and I think I'll probably get it. The only reason I've come to think that it would be alright is because I am really quite poor these days and it beats working for minimum wage wherever. I may end up with a security position on alternating weeks, so that should be interesting. Really, though, I just need the money because it really tears me up to not be able to afford to do nice things with and for my friends. I feel like an old miser, and I feel so cheap. I really need to be making money so I can afford the nice things. I really like nice things.

Moving right along, I went for tea with Adil on Saturday, and it was a kind of quiet affair. We sat at the bar at Steeps and had our tea and got a couple ladies (perhaps a girl and her mother) interested in the varieties of tea that were available. Oh, Adil and I had randomly met each other on Thursday when I'd skipped a bunch of class to finish a paper and then went looking for Tasnuva in the Den. We went for tea at five on Thursday as well.

So, Adil and I had our tea and our chatting and then he had to take me back home so he could do whatever it is that boy does. I suspect I probably spent Saturday evening gaming.

Then, Steph and I had plans for Sunday, and she came over shortly after eleven. We hung about listening to some music and talking for a while, then decided to head to Steeps for tea. She'd never been there, and I believe she was pleasantly surprised by the quality and atmosphere there. I picked the Sacher Blend for her because she wanted a strong "regular" sort of tea. I had a variety of green, the name of which evades me at the moment. It's the one with the popped kernels in it, though. I wasn't particularly fond of it, but it was good nonetheless. I might try some herbal infusions next time I'm there.

We came back afterwards and played some super nintendo while I lay on the bed and relaxed. I think all in all we had a good time.

Which brings us to yesterday, and the highlight of the past little while. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Yesterday morning I got up and took the motorcycle to school (because it was so warm). I had practiced reading the short story for my oral exam in German, and I was pretty much ready for it. When I got to school I looked up a bunch of words in the text, and then went in to deal with it. It went perfectly fine, and she complimented me on my pronounciation. Afterwards, she gave me a little survey (to fill out in front of her while she was grading my oral exam) about the quality of the instruction in the course and what's useful or not. I thought that was a little bit of a conflict of interest, but whatever, I answered honestly anyhow.

When I came out I discovered that that girl in my german class I like was there, also waiting for her oral exam. I was thinking I might hang around and try to get up the nerve to ask her out, but as I was waiting, she was talking to someone else about church and the like, and I discovered that she actually does have a boyfriend already. So, short of killing her boyfriend and burning down her church, I'm out of luck with that one.

I finished waiting around and a different girl from that class and I went outside to have a smoke. It was then that Anne came out and saw/smelled me out there and came to chat. We walked to my next class and made plans to go to the pub after I was finished that.

So I finished my class and had a smoke with Mandy and then headed off to the pub and arrived twenty minutes late. Twenty minutes! Late! I'm never late! Oh well. I was intending on being like five or ten minutes late because Anne's usually late herself, but twenty minutes was really way too much and I felt really bad about it. Regardless, she had the veggiburger and a kokanee and I had a pint o' guiness and the cheesetoast and the chicken tenders and fries. Once we'd finished, we tried figuring out what we would do, and like always, I suggested she come over to my place later (so I could have some company). To my surprise, she agreed to this and asked if she could bring Carl. I was rather excited about the prospect of meeting this Prince-loving fellow, so I happilly agreed. The plan was to have cocktails and watch "Run Lola Run".

Well, I came home and gamed for a while and then Anne showed up with Carl and I shook his hand and got the impression that his first impression of me was that he wasn't particularly impressed. But, he started to warm up to me once I started mouthing along and dancing to Prince, and after that everything was great.

After hearing some music and talking for a while, I asked Kyle C. if he wanted me to draw him a picture and send it to him via MSN. He said he would love that, so I commissioned Carl to draw a picture, and that's the picture you see at the top of the page.

Eventually, we went to Mohawk and bought a bottle of Coke so I could mix them Malibus and Coke. I made a Fifth Avenue for Carl, which he claimed to really like, and my standard slight modification on the Velvet Hammer No. 1, which I so enjoy. The drinks were great, and I fed them some ice cream sandwiches and rice crispy treats, and then we brought a couple bags of chips and some dill dip down to my room to watch "Run Lola Run". I love that movie, and Carl loves that movie, and Anne loves that movie, so we were a room full of people who love that movie. Anne and Carl were doing the standard tasteful boyfriend/girlfriend sort of thing while watching the movie. And Carl offered to scratch my arm because he thought I was missing out because Anne was scratching his arm. That was nice of him, so I gladly accepted the offer. What a fantastic night it was - I like Carl.

Well, I'd planned on making this post less in depth about the week and more in depth about my crazy dreams last night, but it looks as though it may end up being the other way around. Mind you, I still have a good half hour before I need to leave the house (seeing as I'm driving again today, despite the wind). So let's see what we can do.

Alright, I guess that it's been a little too long since I woke up for me to remember everything quite as vividly as it happened, but there were a few scenes that I think were of particular note.

Alright, so I'm somewhere on eleventh Avenue with my motorcycle, and I want to run into a store quickly, so I just park it and throw on the flashers and head off. Then I discover that there are a lot of actual parking spaces along the street, and because it's Sunday, the meters are free. So I go hop on the motorcycle and back it up a bit so it's actually in a parking spot, and then go walk away. I turn around to see a couple girls walking up to my motorcycle and then one of them sits on it and goes to put the kickstand up. So I run back and start yelling at them about how you never touch someone else's motorcycle without express permission, and I slap one of them across the face with one of my leather gloves and they go running off crying.

I go into the store to do whatever it was I needed to do in there and came back and sat on the motorcycle and saw that the two girls were coming back and they had a boy with them. The boy said that there was a problem that we needed to deal with, and so I explained why I got so upset about it. It looked like they were thinking about stealing my motorcycle and I maybe over-reacted. So then the one of them on the right still looked a little hurt. She had kind of short hair and a light cotton blouse and was somewhat skinny. She had lots of freckles and a frown. I looked at her and we hugged and I whispered apologies to her, seeing as she was the one who I'd slapped with the glove and I felt so terrible about the whole thing. Really, I did, and she was such a nice girl too.

The next scene was a bit more of an epic. I was with some generic person and we were near the Night Gallery, and we had to go into a building, where we discovered a large nuclear weapon. This was all in keeping with the prophecy that the world would be destroyed several hours later that day, and we thought that we'd try to avert the catastrophe. So I tried using my skills to disarm the device, but the protective screen closed around it once I'd gotten halfway through the process. Unfortunately, getting halfway through the process involved bringing the entire system online and activated. So, as it turned out, activating the nuclear device in the first place was actually my fault. But I couldn't have possibly known that.

So, we decided that the best thing to do would be to use our knowledge of the prophecy to try to get as many of our friends together in the location that we were supposed to be to survive the blast. This was Pearl's house, which, in my dream, is a basement underneath the costume shop in Inglewood. That's the best description I could really give, although it wasn't quite like that. Close enough, though.

The next thing I remember is being in the back seat of Alex's car as he was driving the lot of us through downtown to get to Inglewood. Lindsay was in the front seat, and she had her left arm behind the seat and I was holding her hand. I knew she had a lawyer boyfriend, and I knew that he probably wouldn't be happy with the situation, but I didn't care. The world was ending, and I needed to hold someone's hand. I needed to hold her hand. Alex glanced over and kind of smirked when he saw that, but it didn't really matter.

So, he dropped me off at Pearl's and the rest of them had to go out to get some supplies and food and the like. Well, there were a bunch of us hanging around in Inglewood, and I wasn't quite ready to go into Pearl's house just yet, so I joined the crowd, and we started line-dancing in the street until the police came and asked us to stop because the neighbours were complaining.

Well, then I went to Pearl's house and got my leg stuck in a chair. It took a lot of effort to get it out, and Pearl said that she's gotten her leg stuck in that chair many times and she was impressed at how quickly I got free. I asked her where the bathroom was, and she didn't hear me, so I looked around and saw the bathroom and muttered, "Well that was very nearly a stupid question."

While I was in the bathroom, Lindsay and the rest of them returned and we sat around by the fireplace talking and trying to keep the mood up. Ten O'Clock was fast approaching, and I decided I'd make a list of things I needed to do before the world ended. I had four things on there, and they were really great things, but I can't quite remember what they were. I know one of them involved Lindsay somehow, but I don't exactly remember what it was.

So, we were all laying on the floor with our hands over our heads, and I decided I wanted to get a place next to Lindsay. I'd turned my back for a minute and all of a sudden Alex had taken that spot, so I threw him out and moved over there. Then I thought it would be funny to add "update my weblog" to the list of things I had to do. Alex didn't seem to think it was very funny.

Well, ten o'clock came and went (that's when the world was supposed to end). Nothing happened. So we decided that perhaps the end of the world was just running behind a bit, and I got bored and woke up.

So, there you have it. The dreams were, as usual, much more vivid than I may be leading on, and some things happened that I had a hard time convincing myself hadn't actually happened when I woke up. And then there are a few things which I'm pretty sure were just dreams, but actually did happen. It's gotten really really hard to draw the line between dream and reality these days. Seriously.

Well, I've taken care of all I'd planned on, so now I'd better go rush about finding all the stuff I need to bring to school, warm up the motorcycle, and head out.

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status.mood(hungry, sore);
status.music(0);

---

deal with it

I haven't been in the mood to deal with writing posts, and I assure you that I'm not in the mood to write a post right now either. A couple of you have had intermittant updates of what I've been up to these days and the crying and getting drunk alone in my room that I've been doing. Sure, I could probably write a dozen pages about all the thrilling and heartbreaking events of the past week, but I doubt I'd be inspired enough at this point to bother. If you think you like someone, incidentally, you may as well just go stick your heart in a blender before someone else does it for you. I might consider asking that girl in my German class out. She's probably already seeing someone. Everyone's already seeing someone. Whatever, I guess.

Well, if anyone feels like sending me plaintext files, I'd be willing to post "guest" updates or whatever, just to keep things interesting while I'm out of the blogging mood. I'd request that you keep the material PG if you're gonna submit something, though. Also, feel free to use HTML should you desire, but do keep it simple or it's getting edited out.

That's enough for now. Yes, I'm pissy. Deal with it.

---

status.mood(pissy and miserable);
status.music(Alles nur Geklaut, Die Prinzen);

---

the last three days - an epic tale

Alright, here's that post I've been promising. The last few days have been somewhat busy, and, although I've had plenty of evening time to write posts, I haven't really felt like it. Now that I have school in the morning, it seems like a perfectly logical solution to stay up extra late and work on an update. So, without further adieu, here it comes.

I saw cute Caitlin first thing on Friday.

Well, Friday I got up and decided that, seeing as I had plans to go out later with Tasnuva, I should probably just take the bus (instead of driving the motorcycle). So I got up a little earlier and showered and all that stuff, and then I sat down to the computer to do my requisite web-surfing and so forth. Then I remembered what I had sat down at the computer to do in the first place, and checked the bus schedule. As I was doing this, mother called to let me know that it was "snowing" at work and that I should probably take the bus instead of driving. Nice.

So, I took a pill and had a bagel and some orange juice and took off out the door. This time I'd actually remembered to grab my camera, so I actually managed to get some nice pictures of people and events and stuff. I took a picture of some people on the bus, but it was one of those candid shots so it didn't really turn out very well.

When I got to the university I went to the pharmacy to have them start refilling my prescription for pickup an hour later. Then I saw Caitlin was sitting upstairs with her boyfriend, so I went up there to harass them for a while before my class started. I took a bunch of pictures of both of them - the ones of her boy were candid and I actually managed to get them of his face. Then Caitlin took a few pictures and we took off.

In German class we basically wasted an hour, then I handed in my writing project that I'd started (and finished) the night before and headed off to the Den to meet Tasnuva. She wasn't there at that moment, so I went back to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription (which was five pills short, to be picked up some time this week). I saw Caitlin upstairs again, so I made note of that and went back to the Den to meet Tasnuva. She arrived shortly and was kind of sad that neither of us had managed to recruit anyone else for our adventuring. I suggested that we go see if we could trick Caitlin into coming with us.

Tasnuva didn't want her picture taken, but I took it anyhow.

Well, we went up there and tried to drag Caitlin off, but she insisted she couldn't come because of having a "class" or something. Hah! Well, she said that she'd "see" about meeting us at Steeps some time after three with her boy. She never did, but then again, we didn't really expect her to. At any rate, after failing to recruit Caitlin, we decided that we may as well just go. We were going to go track down Mandy, but apparently I forgot about that. Tasnuva thought I knew what I was doing so she didn't say anything when I started walking towards the C-Train. She should know better than to assume I know what I'm doing!

We headed out and got on the C-Train and got off at Kensington to check out Charisma. I wanted to pick up a Smashing Pumpkins patch for Caitlin, but they didn't seem to have any. I was considering getting a Rush patch for myself, but I couldn't think of anything to put it on, so I didn't. They also didn't have any buttons that caught my attention, so I gave up on that and we caught the number one bus and went downtown.

Downtown was our next destination because by this point in time I was extremely hungry and had a hankering for falafel and baklava. So, the obvious solution was to go to the Falafel King! I love the Falafel King. Sure, their pitas aren't the best, but their baklava definitely is. I had the falafel sandwich and three pieces of baklava, while Tasnuva had two pieces of baklava. She got a couple styrofoam cups of water for us, and once we finished, we decided (or rather I decided) that we'd walk to Steeps from there.

The hollow shells of our teapots and teacups and sugar dish and the like.

A couple blocks later we decided it was rather chilly out and I saw a bus stop with the number thirteen listed on it, so I had Tasnuva call to see when the next bus was. It wasn't for another fifteen minutes, but then I saw a shuttle bus approaching. The fellow told us that we could get to seventeenth and fourth with him, so we happily hopped on. After that, it was just another few blocks of walking along seventeenth to get to Steeps.

I had the cinnamon black tea and Tasnuva had some other manner of tea and I got increasingly headachy and tired and apparently I looked really cracked out. When we finished our tea we took off and walked back to the place with all the buses and C-Trains and the like and she went home and I went home.

After I'd returned home I napped for a little bit then went on the internet and utterly failed to make any plans with anyone. Anne suggested that we could do something together with Carl, but all of the plans she seemed to have would involve me getting somewhere and back home again. It was too cold for me to drive, so that would have just been a lot of trouble. Besides, I was sleepy and didn't feel like dealing with anything at that point, so, at nine (or very shortly thereafter) I just went to bed. Anne apparently called about half an hour later to see if I wanted her to come over, but I was already in bed at that point, and mostly asleep, so nothing ever came of that.

On the road, on our way to pick up my new mattress!

Just before I went to bed, I got a phone call from Sears telling me that my mattress would be available for pickup the next morning at half past nine. This was a pleasant surprise because I wasn't expecting it until Monday at the earliest. I guess that's just a tactic they have to make you like them more... but whatever. So, I got up about eleven that Saturday morning and prepared myself for the day. Then mother and father and I all piled into the lovely pick-up truck and headed off to Sears. I don't really know why exactly I took a picture out the window on the way to get the mattress, but there you have it.

What I should have done was remember to take pictures of the fellow running through the storeroom with my mattress slung over his head. Of course, I didn't, so we don't get a real action shot of that. I mean, we could have gone back and told him to do it again so we could get a picture of that, but they were having a barbeque in the storeroom (with a door open or something) and it was just too much bother at that point in time. So we didn't. And we went home.

I'm always nervous when I'm in charge of carrying anything large and expensive.

Once home we hauled the mattress downstairs and leaned it up against the wall. I was too afraid of breaking all the pictures and awards and stuff, so I put mother in charge of helping father move the mattress downstairs. Of course, I got put in charge of helping father move the old mattress back upstairs, but I guess it wasn't really that big of a deal. I didn't break anything, so that's good. Mother claimed she could see daylight through the old mattress, but she was mistaken. We put the old piece of junk in the back of the truck and it's presumably dealt with now.

Then my parents decided they were going to head off to see that new movie about Jesus or whoever. This was a little inconvenient for me, on account of how an hour later I was supposed to be meeting Alex and Tasnuva for coffee at the Roasterie. It wasn't really that big of a deal, though, really, seeing as the bus goes right from my door to the Roasterie, basically.

I arrived at the Roasterie about five minutes early and had a smoke and waited on the bench outside. And waited. Half an hour later Tasnuva showed up. I suggested that she should call Alex just in case he hadn't woken up yet. No answer. A short while later Alex showed up and didn't seem to be particularly happy to see that I was there. Hah. We had our coffee (none for me) more or less quietly and I spent my time trying to blow smoke rings. I'm slowly but surely getting better at that. Then we went outside to figure out exactly what we were going to do next. Among the ideas was getting stoned and drawing art. The other option, which we picked, was going out to the country to shoot stuff (with Alex's air-gun) and then get some ice cream at Cochrane.

Getting ready... for DANGER!

Personally, I'm really glad that we chose that option because I really wasn't in the mood to do the drugs at all. Alex wanted a Booster Juice before we left, so we got that, then hopped in the car and made our way out to the country. More specifically, we made our way out to the super secret little clearing that we like to go to to set up targets and shoot at them. Sure, it's trespassing, but we mostly clean up after ourselves and we don't really break anything (except a couple branches) so it's not really much of a crime.

Alex is taking careful aim...

So we trudged through knee-deep snow and got our shoes all wet and filled with snow and hid out in a lightly wooded area. We shook the snow out of our shoes and then I tied a noose for the little doll. I tied the doll up to a branch and stuck a few styrofoam cups on a couple other branches and we shot at that for a while. Now Tasnuva cannot say that she has never shot an air-rifle! She did alright, and I actually hit a couple things too!

Eventually, though, we got kind of bored of shooting at dolls and cups. We kind of wanted to do some skeet, but we didn't have any oil jug things, so that didn't look too promising.

... because he's about to shoot his best friend! That's a BB lodged in my jacket.

So I decided that I felt like being shot. I was wearing a leather jacket and I was kind of curious to see how well it would protect me from his gun at twenty paces. I was kind of nervous about a number of things, including ruining my coat and having the BB ricochet off a button and hit me in the face. So I held up a cup for him to aim at and kind of blocked my face from ricochet as best I could and sort of shrugged and he went ahead and shot me! Now I can say that I've been shot by my best friend, and Alex can say that he's shot his best friend. As it turns out, my coat made a really nice bit of armour against that particular "weapon". I barely felt it, so we figured that we'd play a neat game where I run through the forest and he shoots me. We did that a few times, one of the shots caught me in the arm in the one place where the leather had worn thin, so I've got a bit of a bruise now. After a few rounds of that we decided we should really stop because it was just tempting fate too much to carry on.

We thought that the array of cups and hanged doll mounted on the tree in the woods in the middle of the winter made for a pretty artsy scene.

So, we gave up on that game and Alex stuck his Booster Juice cup on a branch and when he shot it it looked like it was leaking pus all over the place. We took a couple pictures of the scene and got a couple really artsy shots of the doll and the like, then we cleaned up after ourselves and took off.

I suggested that someone should just carry Tasnuva through the deep snow so that her feet wouldn't get any more wet. She suggested that we weren't strong enough, so Alex told me to hold his gun and picked her up and carried her through the field. Hahaha. Then he hurt his hand on the barbed wire fence. As we were walking back towards the highway we realized that it probably would have been an interesting scene to see two guys and a girl walking off to the woods with a gun and then coming back with a girl flopped over their shoulder and carrying the gun. I kind of wish I'd gotten pictures of that, but, like always, I seem to forget to get the good shots. I guess I'm just not really used to having that camera with me, which is a bit of a shame. I should make a point of trying to carry it more often, perhaps.

A rather unimpressive two star restaurant in Cochrane. OMEGA: the END of GOOD TASTE

Well, we hopped back in the car and it was about quarter after four at this point, and about half past by the time we got into Cochrane. We were initially going to go have coffee and then get ice cream, but seeing as the town closed for the night in half an hour, we didn't really have time to do either. Instead, we wandered down the street and discovered the "Omega" restaurant. We just couldn't pass it up because it was such a ridiculous concept. Alex's little joke about how it was the END... of good taste wasn't actually too far from the truth! But we didn't know that going in. In fact, I think that two stars was a bit of a stretch. We all thought that two stars was a bit of a stretch.

Here's a picture of Alex and Tasnuva sitting beside each other at the Omega restaurant in Cochrane.

Well, we went in and sat down and the waitress asked what I was taking pictures of out there. She seemed slightly confused that we were just taking pictures of the restaurant for no good reason. Alex posited that we were tourists, which wasn't a complete lie. Going to Cochrane is pretty much the biggest trip that I am interested in making, though, so I guess... tourists... sure, why not. She was a business learning girl much like Alex is a business learning boy, so they chatted about that for a while and then we ordered our food. I didn't take a picture of the food, but you're not missing much, seriously. Basically picture two burgers that came from the freezer section of Safeway, one order of chicken tenders from the deli section of safeway, a couple piles of fries that came from the other freezer section of safeway, and a salad that came from five months ago and you've got our slightly poisonous dinner. I say slightly poisonous because I'm suspicious of that burger on account of how I was poisoned this Sunday evening.

Alex had some iced tea and instant decaf. At first he thought the coffee wasn't that bad, but as he drank more and more of it he decided it was absolutely wretched and had to ask for "more iced tea and less decaf". Apparently the girl liked us or something and decided to not charge us for drinks at all. It was still more money than we would have liked to pay for the completely unspectacular meal that we had, but whatever - it's all about the experience, and it was a pretty ridiculous abstract experience, so I think we came out on top.

Buying ice cream at Laura Secord at Market Mall.

Because the ice cream store in Cochrane was closed, we got in the car and went to Market Mall for ice cream and other purchases. The first thing we did when we got there was force Tasnuva to wait while we had a smoke. The next thing we did when we got there was rush to the Compucentre to find a new game for me to play. I decided upon "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic". It's actually a pretty good game, although it does seem to have a bit of a problem with crashing now and again after using up all the virtual memory. It's still fun, though.

I love going to Laura Secord for ice cream for some reason. I had the Apple Toffee Crunch (it's not crunchy at all) and Alex had the Cherry and Tasnuva had the Rolo. I had a double scoop in a dish and Alex had his single in a regular cone. Tas was the middle ground and she had a single in a dish. We went and sat down in front of Miss Teen and I dragged one of the chairs around to face them. I finished first (king fatty!!!) and then went to get some water. Apparently while I was gone Tasnuva decided that her ice cream was disgusting and threw it out, giggling about how it was alright because she could afford to waste money. She's so wonderful.

Alex enjoys eating ice cream, and so do I!

Well, we finished our ice cream and went to Claire's to see about getting some girly stuff for me. I really enjoy hunting for girly stuff, but unfortunately they weren't having a ten-for-ten sale on that particular day. They did have some great stuff, though (as usual). I bought a wonderful rubbery black bracelet with UV-active orange skull and crossbones all around it. I also bought a clip-on earring with a wonderful rainbow bead. If nothing else, I think I'll try to get that bead on my proper earring. I may need help with that, though. What was arguably even more exciting was playing debit-card-roulette. I didn't know if I even had the ten dollars left in my account to pay for these things. I did, thankfully, so I didn't have to put any more stuff that I couldn't afford on my Visa card.

Afterwards, we went and sat on a bench for a bit and Alex went to the bathroom and then we sat around staring at the wood panel on the ceiling and like a little excited kid I opened up my game box so we could look at the manual. It's just so much fun to open up a new game box and read the manual. I wonder if you even have to be a nerd to understand that...

We finished up with sitting around and Alex drove me home and presumably dropped Tasnuva at a C-Train station before meeting Wifey for dinner. While I was out, Amanda (aka. She-who-must-not-be-named) had reportedly called again and mother actually answered the phone this time. She is supposedly living with her husband in Bowness with her father in the old apartment. I'm actually rather tempted to return her call and get together with her, if for no reason other than to have something to do. I figure nothing too bad could happen as a result of that. At any rate, I spent the evening flirting with one drunken Mandy over MSN and chatting with Alex and Tasnuva, then spent my first night on my new mattress.

As it turns out, my back actually hurt more when I woke up this morning than usual. I attribute that to the fact that it's just a new mattress and I need to get used to it. It's really quite a comfortable mattress, but it's just not what I'm used to. As per usual, I woke up terrified in a cold sweat after really stressful dreams during the night, but there's not really much I can do about that, I don't think.

Today I was up around eleven and prepared myself for another wonderful day of excitement. I used the white pages and (very little) cunning to track down Anne to learn what was going on. We decided we'd get together for Moxie's after she was done work, and then come back here to watch movies. I had a couple bagels and a sandwich for lunch and then went downstairs to record my German speech samples for my phonetics class. Then I decided I'd try to figure out a way around the copy protection on a couple of CDs. Not for piracy, mind you, but just so that I can stick them on iTunes. I buy my music, thank-you very much. I just want the convenience of being able to listen to my music without tracking down the specific CD and having a new window open up for the express purpose of letting me listen to it. No. Everything goes through iTunes and I'm happy. But this stupid copy protection keeps me from doing that, and that's precisely the reason I did not buy Norah Jones' new CD, and precisely the reason I will not be buying it. Ever. Which is a shame, because I really want it. It's just too much trouble, though.

Before I knew it, it was time for me to head off to meet Anne up at Moxie's. I grabbed most of my stash money and walked to the bank to pay off my Visa bill for the month, then walked up to the mall. She had the quesidilla or whatever and I had the mocha cheesecake. She was very kind and paid for my dessert because she has a lot more money than I have. After Moxies we came back by foot and stopped at Mohawk to buy candy. We walked back to my place and after about fifteen minutes I managed to find the drum solo I was looking for from the Rush: Live in Rio DVD. I love that solo, and I also love the following acoustic guitar duet that Alex and Geddy do.

Then we watched Hackers (I love that movie!!!) and ate our candy. I pulled the "Meghan-box" out from under my bed. That's the box I used to contain all of the stuff that Meghan gave me (with the exception of the Holly Cole postcards and a couple other things). I've decided that I can't stand to have that box sitting under my bed anymore - it just hurts too much and I'm worried that I'll flip out one day and do something I'll regret with it. So Anne was kind enough to be willing to take it and hold on to it for me for however long. When we were taking Anne home, I kept seeing the box out of the corner of my eye and I was having a hard time keeping from welling up and crying.

We (father and I) took Anne home and came back and I came downstairs and played my new computer game for about four hours while using MSN on the laptop. Near the end of that period, something I'd previously eaten decided it was rather poisonous and I had to make a few trips to the bathroom until the drugs I took finally kicked in. I know it was probably a little too long ago, but I'm going to blame those dumb burgers in Cochrane anyhow.

Well, I have to be up for school in another four hours (or something like that) and I'm really not even the least bit tired. This does not bode particularly well for our hero, but this two and a half hour long update has gone on for just about long enough. I started it really really loving Evanescence, but, seeing as I've been listening to the "Fallen" album on repeat since then, I'm kind of really really sick of them now! I guess I'll go have another cigarette and go to bed now.

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status.mood(Satisfied, more or less);
status.music(Bring Me To Life, Evanescence - although it doesn't really matter which track it is in particular at this point in time...);

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