An Ordinary Day

Hunter and I woke up early today to make venison jerky for the trip up to a cabin in a couple days. My mom yelled at us because she thought we'd been up all night and was convinced we were lying. We mixed up the marinade for the jerky while fending off the cat, who liked the smell of venison but wouldn't eat the scrap I gave him. I took a nap after that.

A little bit after I woke up, we took the pets to be boarded for the trip. One of the people there was neurotic and shouted whatever she said. I don't think either of the pets or I will like her. Too loud. The other person there offered Hunter a job. He'll probably take it. After we left the boarding place, we went to Big Lots to look for floaty things to play with in the water. We didn't find any because they'd replaced it all with school supplies. The make up selection there was crap, but I did get a soda. My mom still wanted to look for floaty things, so we went to Walgreen's. I stayed in the make up isle and looked at the nail polish, but the colors I liked were too expensive (7 bucks for Sally Hansen? Seriously?). As they were leaving, I found a nice selection of cheaper ones, including a nice duochrome blue. They walked out without telling me, and I had to run after them.

At 4:00, Hunter took out the strips of marinated venison and set them out on racks. I didn't do it because I can't stand touching raw meat. Once it was quiet again, I turned on the TV and started watching Pride & Prejudice. At some point, I had the random urge to go outside. I took a walk down to the end of the street and found that the grassy area was all covered in caterpillars. I watched them for a while, then I went back. On the way back, I realized that walking on asphalt with bare feet is not the most comfortable thing in the world.

Once I was back, I walked around on the soft, smooth tile in the kitchen. I wanted to keep watching my movie, but Hunter had changed the channel. I went upstairs to my room, and Mom yelled at me to do something. I couldn't understand her very well, but at this point I didn't care what she was saying so I ignored her.

Now it's 6:00 and she's calling me again. Probably for dinner. Dinner is plain pasta with a few meatballs, which is hardly ever satisfying. Meanwhile, the house is filling up with the smell of the jerky that is getting harder and harder not to eat.

Yay, life.

Lotsa Reds

This summer, I suddenly fell in love with nail polish and lipstick. I have no idea why it popped up like this, but I think it's here to stay. Nail polish was first.

I think, actually, this love of having pretty colors on my nails started with those fake things I had. Sure, I couldn't do much with my hands while I wore them, but they were long, colorful, and pretty. And now that the damage from getting the things has finally grown out, go figure that my nails are long and pretty. So I needed colors.

And that's when I discovered that the only nail polish I knew I owned was a pink that had gotten so thick it was annoying, and the materials to give myself a French manicure (which I suck at doing, by the way. Even with the stickers). This lead me to go searching...into the closet. Specifically, my mom's closet because I know there's a ton of old make up lurking in there.

And that's where I found this beauty:

Cherries in the Snow. The name could not be more fitting. It is literally cherry red, in all the brights and darks. We bought cherries not long after I found this, and I confused my fingers for the fruit. Seriously cherry red.

At that point, I was satisfied on the nail polish front, but I still wanted lipstick. I'd gotten it into my head that for whatever reason, I needed something bright. Maybe it's because I'm sick of being shy or something, or because I swoon for the classiness in those photos of old movie stars with the wavy hair, and the pale skin, and the bright red lipstick.

Fast forward a week. I'm sick of red. I want blue. I've been tagging along on every trip to anywhere that sells nail polish and sneaking off to the make up section to look for it. On one such trip to the make up section, I passed the Revlon area. Because I am spontaneously in love with all things Revlon as well (Don't ask. No clue.), I stopped to look at the lipsticks.

LO AND BEHOLD! I found this:

Cherries in the Snow. It has a lipstick. I begged. It was bought. I tried it on in the car. This is red. Holy fairies of lipstick, this is RED. It's red, and fuchsia, and oh so bright. It's perfect. As long as Revlon makes this, I will never want another lipstick.

Did I mention that it looks awesome on me? It does. No photos for now though, because it's in the other room and I have a kitten on my lap. Just suffice to say, I look good in red.

Weekly Roundup #2

Well, it's maintenance day on WoW which means I'm not going to have much to do until 2pm, and nothing has happened that was spectacular enough to get its own blog post, so here's another weekly roundup.

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-If role players wrote movie scripts, we'd all be rich.
Okay, maybe not all of us, but a pretty good number. On Saturday, the officers of my guild (including me) held a private meeting to discuss matters that had to do with the rest of the members. It started off that way, at least. Before we knew it, the Captain went absolutely nuts thanks to previous plots and a convenient voice in her head. The conversation (and duel!) lasted for several hours and I ended up going to sleep after 3 in the morning. We were all on the edges of our seats. Those eating salad forgot to chew. There were many Star Wars references. Here's a sample:

Those two people you can just barely see behind the gigantic wall of text are Lanica and Jovanna. The ones that are easier to see are Astera and me.

Even though it was WAY past our bedtimes and hardly any of us could focus (you should have seen our Out of Character chatting while this was going on) due to lack of sleep, the entire scene was epic. We all pretty much agreed, if Sterling were a movie, we would all be rich and have many awards.

-Sleep is good.
Last night is the only night in a week or so that I got more than 4-5 hours of sleep, and that's because I went to sleep at 1am instead of 3...or 4, or 6. Sure it was worth it. All those hours I wasn't sleeping, I was doing stuff like that screenshot up there ^. I've definitely been exhausted, though. I wouldn't have missed all that awesome role playing for the world, but I really wish it could have taken place before midnight. I stayed up anyway, though. Diligently. Let nobody say that I don't take my fun seriously.

-Poor kitteh got snipped. :(
Jack the kitty got neutered yesterday. Poor Jack. He hid in the back of a closet after he got home and now he's medicated up the wazoo. Such is the life of quadrupeds.

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That's pretty much all I've got this week. Yay, excitement! Maybe next week there'll be something for me to do away from the computer screen. >.>

Interwebs Roundup #1

I figure that since I spend most of my time on the internet, I should probably write about things that happen there too. Thus, I have decided that every once in a while, I'll give an update on the fun/interesting/somewhat bizarre things I have found while wandering through the great expanses of the interwebs.

First up, TKB Trading.

At first glance, it looks sort of odd and professional-ish, but after looking through the site for a while, I realized that it has lots of potential for fun. Lots. TKB Trading sells everything you need and more to make your own make up. It even has free recipes. Making your own make up. Store quality, or better. Is that cool or what? I think it would be awesome to get a group of friends together and have a mad scientist party or something.

The bad news? Since TKB is a wholesaler, they have $15 minimum for purchases. That, combined with how addictive it will probably be once I actually make something, means that if I start buying from this place I will probably have no money left for food. :(

2. Adagio Tea.

Tea is yummy. Personally, I prefer fruity herbal teas, but pretty much everything is good. Well, almost. What I didn't realize for a while is that the regular tea that comes in bags and is sold in grocery stores is very crappy quality. How do you tell? Aside from wherever the little leaves may come from, the point is that they're little. They're dust; crushed up little bits. Crushed up little bits is not tea, it is the leftovers of tea. It's whatever was left at the bottom of the barrel when they cleared out the other stuff. You know, the good stuff.

Good news! Adagio sells the good stuff. Whole leaves, petals, and berries. It's more expensive (In most cases, $2 for a sample, $7 for a full size, $20-ish for the supergimongous), but you can really taste the difference. I bought three samples a couple weeks ago: Masala Chai, Berry Blues, and Sour Apple.

The Chai is tasty black tea with cloves and some other various spices. In fact, whole cloves take up about as much of the sample bag as the actual tea leaves. You could probably use the stuff to season something. After some experimenting, I found out that it's best at 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup, with the water microwaved for two minutes. It's a smooth and very aromatic tea, and you can really taste the cloves and cinnamon. I'm not a huge fan of chai in general, but it's good stuff.

Berry Blues is my personal favorite. It has hibiscus petals, apple chunks, and blueberries. Yep. Whole berries. It's tart and sweet, and when you're done steeping it you can eat the apple chunks. They're tasty. I'm definitely ordering the regular size of this because my sample is almost gone.

I'm not a fan of the Sour Apple. It's too tart, and that's pretty much all I can taste. The name is definitely fitting. Then again, I might have put too much of the tea in my make-it-yourself bag. Apparently loose leaf tea is finicky that way. It's still not my favorite.

3. Killing your guildmates is fun. :D

One of the other officers in my guild on WoW thinks that we should try doing more PvP (Player vs. Player) combat. This would be nice, except for one little hitch: While she and her girlfriend may be awesome at PvP, the rest of us aren't very good. To solve this problem, I suggested we gather once a week to beat each other into bloody pulps in the name of hands-on learning.

It works. As we fight each other, we learn our own and each other's weaknesses and improve on them. If we keep this up, we'll be a force to reckon with. Either that, or sad little puddles on the ground. Unfortunately, a few hours after we started (Way to tell it was successful: it lasted two hours longer than I planned), some Horde showed up and killed all of us for the fun of it. We realized that if we want to keep this up (and we do), we're going to have to keep changing our fighting spot. Otherwise we'll have weekly ganking sessions instead of practice.

And that's it for the weekly roundup! I'll try to post another next week.

Summer Update!

Yay, summer!

I know I haven't posted in a while. That's for a few reasons, and for once my laziness is not one of them. The most important reason is that I was getting a lot of unwanted attention for a while, to the point of harassment and maybe even cyberstalking. Seriously. No embellishment. I looked up the legal definitions of both, and this fit. I stopped posting on most of the websites I normally visit because I'm pretty certain this guy read everything and I didn't want him having normal updates on my life. Thankfully, he seems to have backed off. If you are he, please stop reading this and leave.

...

Is he gone? Kay.

Other than those issues, I've actually been having a nice summer. Alright, other than those issues, and a REALLY BAD sunburn, I've been having a nice summer. Stupid UV rays. Now I have a weird tan. >.>

I went to the beach with some friends I haven't seen in a while (possibly a year or two), and had lots of fun there. We spent a few hours diving into waves, feeding cheese puffs to the seagulls and trying to swim up to a pelican we named Larry. After we left, we went to Sonic and I discovered two unfortunate things: 1 - I was redder than a lobster. All of us were, actually. We were probably the whitest people on the beach when we got there. 2 - They smoked. Icky.

The next week was full of pain because of my stupid sunburn.

Since then, the only contact I've had with things outside my house has been WoW, and going to see Killers with my mom. I am now craving human contact, and seriously wishing I could run over to Washington because half my available friends live there. Stupid geographical issues.

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In other news (meaning things that are not stupid and/or complaint worthy) I've sort of spontaneously developed a love of nail polish and bright red lipstick. Problem? I lack nail polish and bright red lipstick. I only have one of each. *grumble*

Okay, maybe it is complaint worthy.

Darn!

The Photo Gallery

I've got this new friend named Vince. He saw me dancing that one day, said hi to me in the hall the next day, and we've been running into each other all over the place ever since. We ran into each other again yesterday and started talking, and since we're both art fanatics he invited me to go to this photography presentation tonight. I thought it sounded pretty fun, so I went.

I didn't think I'd ever heard of this photographer before, so I didn't know what to expect. I didn't even remember his name until I got into the room for the presentation and it was projected onto a screen. The photographer we went to see was Stephen Wilkes. In case you didn't know, Stephen Wilkes is the guy who took that Verizon network photo with the tons of people in it. Yeah, him.

He showed us some pictures he took in China many years ago, then some very nice photos he took in Ellis Island, and some more recent ones in China, and many, many more. He even had some portraits of horses. And with all of the photos he showed us, he told us the story of when and why he took them. How his assistant thought he saw a ghost in the measles ward in Ellis Island, and his guerilla tactic of snapping shots in China because the government there didn't want pictures being taken. When he got to his advertising work, he pointed to a box-like thing toward the back of one of the photos he took for IBM and said, "You see that little cart there? There's a funny story about that. It was the police, and they were coming to arrest me for taking pictures." Most of the things he showed us are on his website, but there were a few he said that he hadn't published anywhere yet.

Photography became about five times more interesting. That isn't the only presentation that will be there, either. Annie Leibovitz is coming to give one next week, and Vince and I are planning to go to that one too. Hopefully we can get there early enough to get seats.

Springtime!

This is gonna be a long one because I have a lot to catch up on. There's been a lot going on, but I've been busy, and lazy, and procrastinating. The stuff that's been happening has been happening since it was sunny, so I'm going to go all the way back to about...

-April Fool's Day (Told you there was a lot) - It was the second day that week that it had been nice, and sunny, and warm out. I had to go draw a landscape for my drawing class, and figured what better place was there to draw a landscape than outside? So I went walking around campus in the glorious sunlight with my sketchbooks. I had just gotten past the first building when I started to hear drums. I went to go investigate and found four guys playing some bongo drums between the Whitney building and the student center. People were gathered all around the area watching them and talking, and some people had actually gotten out into the middle and started dancing. It looked like lots of fun. So I got out my pencils and started to sketch them (not as easy as it sounds, since everybody was moving). As I was drawing, the idea of getting up there with them seemed more and more fun. The last bit of my sketch was drawn in kind of a hurry, and when I was done I put everything on some steps where I could keep an eye on it, took off my shoes, and started dancing.

To bongo drums.

On concrete.

In front of total strangers.

Go me?

When I started dancing, the others who had sat down to catch their breath got back up. I knew people were watching, but it really didn't seem to matter. A few minutes later, this cute little girl joined in and she said my skirt was pretty. :D

I'm not sure when the drummers finally stopped, but when they did I sat down on the steps pretty well worn out, and only then did I realize that dancing barefoot on concrete was maybe not the best idea. Why? Huge blisters had formed all over my feet. D:

Needless to say, the walk back across campus to my dorm was pretty interesting, with an emphasis on "interesting" and not so much on "pretty".

-That Friday (I shall title thee, "Adorable Little Kids".) - I woke up at 7 and debated for a good, long time whether or not I should go to my drawing class because the blisters on my feet still hurt like crazy. In the end, I did go because I didn't want to miss class just for being a wimp. Although, for the record I will say that I am not a wimp and those blisters hurt REALLY BAD.

Class was pretty normal, except that my professor decided that since it was sunny out, we could all go outside and draw random things, and that this would be our assignment for the week. I hobbled out and found a nice patch of flowers. There were some bees, but they seemed to be ignoring me, so I returned the favor. I had gotten to about the fourth flower when this group of little kids (with some chaperones) came walking around to look at all the wonderful outdoor-ness that the quad had to offer. On their way back to the building, they stopped to look at the flowers and, since I was there, me.

"Hey, what's she doing? Is she drawing?"

"Can we go see?"

"Not over here, there are bees."

*gasp* "Bees?"

I smiled and kept on sketching while they went around the scary bees and came up behind me to watch. My fold-up kit of art supplies was unfolded so that all of my pencils, and micron pens, and other such things were visible and they stared at it like it was the most amazing thing they'd seen all week.

*glances over my shoulder* "How does she do that?"

"Those are pretty flowers."

"Why do you have so many pencils?"

"What are the pens for?"

"Can you draw a bee?"

"Can you draw one on a flower?"

So. Flipping. Cute. I gave them a demonstration of what all the pencils and pens did, and why they were different, and then I drew some bees for them, and they all looked happy. By the time their chaperones (teachers? Babysitters? No idea.) took them back inside, they were all talking about drawing things. If I made them all enthusiastic about art, then I can consider that my good deed for the month.

-Easter - I had planned on sitting around doing nothing for Easter, since I really don't know anybody here, and the people I do know are either my roommates or friends that aren't close enough to do things with on Easter. Fortunately, one of my roommates (Kishma) knows a very nice person (Anita) who invited us to her family Easter thingy.

We left at two, then went around Anita's yard hiding plastic eggs for...

Guess?

More cute kids!

And then we went around with the family and watched them scamper all over the place looking for them. Once they found the last of the elusive eggs, everybody went inside to chat idly and snack on cheese. Yay, cheese! There was gorgonzola, and camembert, and brie, and three other types that I don't quite remember. And of course, they put the cheese platter right in front of me and I was a very happy camper.

After the cheese, we played Life. We didn't get very far because dinner was ready soon after that. Dinner was ham with a tasty raisin sauce, sweet potatoes, salad, and surprisingly nothing that I didn't like. We ate, and talked, and then talked for a while after that. And after the talking, there was cake. Yay, cake! Two cakes, actually. One was regular white cake shaped like a rabbit's head, and the other was a blackberry clove cake with buttercream frosting. I had the second one. I'm still kicking myself because I didn't ask for the recipe. That was an awesome cake.

After the cake, there was more talking, mostly with one of the kids, whose name I cannot remember because I'm bad at that. We learned that she's going through regular middle school frustrations with annoying boys and twits who think they know it all. We also learned that she doesn't like Disney movies/shows except for the older ones that I grew up with, and she is also not a fan of Twilight. I commend this.

It was her parents who took us home, and I was glad that they did when they did. Otherwise, I may have been tempted to eat more cake, and at that point I really should not have had room for more food.

-Last Friday - My ever-entertaining drawing professor wanted us to try drawing figures again and was about to get up on the little platform in the middle of the room when he decided that I would be fun to draw. So I perched on a stool in the center of class with my legs up to my chest for twenty minutes while people drew me. Some of the drawings turned out really well, and I kind of wish that I could have copies of them.

-Today!- The art club has a bake sale today! One of my friends in my design class made some goodies for it, and after we left class, she bought one for me. :D We parted ways and as I walked across the bridge, I noticed something else: a hot dog stand for another club! Well hey, there's lunch! So I went back to my dorm to get some money. Leslie wanted to come with me, so she did and she bought as much as her arms could carry. I got two scones and a hot dog. I'm pretty happy. And while this hasn't been the whole day yet, I think it's safe to say that any day that starts out with cookies cannot be a bad day.