One Abnormal Girl

I'm gonna look cool

So I finally ordered a pair of these.  Close-quartered apartment living + writing/reading/thinking = frustration.  I also got a nice white noise app for my phone, which has also been helping, but my little earbuds are just not enough to drown out the children environment.  (Seriously, this is not a playground.)

I just hope they ship fast.  I’d been using an iPod stereo as my computer speakers, and about a year ago the knob responsible for the power and volume stopped working.  Luckily it came with a small remote that still worked, but yesterday I dropped it in my cereal, and of course it’s not working anymore.  I fiddled with the knob enough to get it to turn on again, but the volume is too low, and my efforts to take it apart and look at it were foiled by my screwdriver shaft being too thick to get to the screws.  Even once I get it open, though, I’m sure I can’t fix it.  It’s a shame, because the sound is excellent for such a compact device, and it would really, really pain me to trash it when technically it still works fine.  In fact, I’d probably just store it just like my old Canon camera, taking it with me from apartment to apartment.  Thanks, companies of the world, for making piece of shit equipment that only lasts a year before taking up space in a landfill.  Do you know how many millions of people there are, trashing up the planet?  Stop making things that break.

In other news, we should all cross-dress more.

I think I was only able to post regularly back in the day when I had no one else to talk to. Now there’s peeps to chat with and I have less to say.

But today, maybe I have things to say! Not all of them are so great though.

Family

In the beginning of April, my grampa had a heart attack and fell and broke his ankle, then had another heart attack while in the hospital. The fam agreed not to resuscitate if it happened again, but then it didn’t. My parents were going to cancel their trip to come out and see me since his condition was so unstable, but he didn’t stick around. A few days later he passed away. He was the last of my grandparents. It was rough not being on the east coast, and it’s still unreal because I’m so far away, but I don’t know that it would have helped to be there. There’s not much I can do with the concept of death.

After the funeral and its related transactions, my parents did come out for their trip as planned. We spent about three days in Disneyland and California adventure. It was a good time; good to have them in SoCal, and I think it was a good break for my mom. This was also my first experience with paid time off.

Cosplay

I think, if I can kick myself into action, I’ll be attempting Ishbal!Roy. I should have just enough material left to make the coat, but I will have to make my own bias tape trim, which I am none too excited about. I do however have the ring and some extra collar plates. I would need to make a new jacket, belt (maybe), over-jacket belt, and overcoat, and I’d have to buy gators to go over the boots.

This is unfortunately the best reference of the uniform I can find at my disposal:

But let’s focus on this one instead:

Nom.

Starbucks

Today they didn’t charge me for the soy in the London Fog I ordered because I’m there so often. I love our Starbucks. I love the people who work in it.

That’s it.

Writing

I haven’t been able to write consistently since college, but recently I’ve been doing pretty well in terms of dedication. I’m steadily plowing through Unconditional, which is the longest fic I’ve attempted, though that’s not saying very much. Anyway, it’s got me actively writing and interested and I’m glad people seem to like it so far because I think I’m so emotionally invested in it that I’d cry if they didn’t. 8D

Gadgetry

Before my parents’ visit, I bought a new camera. I hope it works forever. It’s delightful. It’s a Canon Powershot SX200. Here are the things that make me geek out over it.

• Need to mute the sounds, but can’t beep beep beep your way through the menu to do it? Fear not, with the right button combination you can mute all the sounds on the fly at startup.
• It has a cute little stand-alone clock on it.
• You can temporarily increase the screen brightness without digging through the menu.
• There are two time settings: one for home and one for travel, and you can flip between them.
• There’s a timer setting that will wait for you to enter the frame, then it will take the picture.
• It can automatically detect the scene mode based on its composition.
• It can automically correct red eye, or in playback mode afterwards.
• When photographing people, it will alert you if someone’s eyes were closed.
• It’s blue. I got the blue one.

Most of these things might be standard nowadays, but it’s been a few years since I went camera shopping, and the camera has definitely endeared itself to me. It also seems to take decent pictures, the LCD on the back is ginormous (to me), and despite its relatively small size, it has 12x zoom. (It also has that neat little feature that lets you choose a color, and it will desaturate all other colors.)

More Importantly

In other news, our lease is up. ;lajd;flkajdf

So I totally finished my yaoi-con post.  It’s here if you wanted to see it finished.  It’s all out of order and haphazard, though.

In recent news, we have a router for the second time, because the first one we bought was the wrong thing, har har.  And although this one is actually the router we needed, I’m not sure it’s very good at all.  It seems to like dropping the connection intermittently, which hardly affects something like Internet browsing, but makes WoW all but impossible.  Or maybe it’s not the router, maybe it’s the Internet itself, but I’ve never had external problems with the Internet actually result in a message on the computer saying the cable is unplugged.  It might be going back.  Apparently my old one must not have been so awful: it actually worked solidly and steadily up until its burnout.

Also I can’t stop listening to Dr. Horrible and Muse, and I’m amused that the combination of those two names/titles results in Dr. House, whom I’ve been catching up on by ninja-ing the eps onto my iPod.  Somehow the laptop just isn’t portable enough.  And I can finally also put videos onto my phone now that I have the creepily tiny 2GB card for it, but then it would just be too small.  But it’s pretty sweet that I can still do it if I want to.   I just wish the BlackBerry could decode the same files I put on the iPod, then I’d only have to encode the file once.

Job’s going well.  It lacks many of the perks that seem commonplace these days, and it’s still temp work (no benefits), but at least I don’t really notice the passage of time.  Besides, waterjets and lasers are cool, even if I don’t work with them directly.  Best of all, I get paid.

So I used a Walmart giftcard (courtsey of the team at my last temp job when I left!) to buy myself this.  Now I’m about to zoom off to the bank on it!

Pay no attention to the Xtreme Danger depicted on the Webpage for the item.  These are also used as non-fatal modes of urban transportation.

Now I just need to find a gate that isn’t locked so I can get out of here and back.  lulz no gate key.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, amirite? Part of the reason was that I had to keep something a secret but most of the reason was that I’m easily overwhelmed by my to-do list.

I sent in my applications for 3/4 of the schools on my list, the last of which isn’t due until January 15th, and I should be sending all of that one in around the 1st. My GREs were pretty late in arriving to me, so I seriously doubt they reached Stanford in time. Even if they did, the address on the transcripts was insufficient for USPS (but not FedEx), so they were returned and had to be re-sent. Stanford feels like it was doomed for me.

Ohio State . . . well, I may not have sent the GRE scores to enough offices. Their instructions didn’t match at all the actual process of requesting GRE scores these days. I think UMich is still in good standing. Cornell is still not submitted.

I was just getting two of the apps done for good when edchii came up to visit for a few days starting on the 7th I think. We watched some stuff and she made me many pancakes. Come Tuesday, crazyloststar arrived in my city via our tiny but international airport as a Christmas gift from her parents and a birthday gift for sky_dark, whom we were heading down to visit on that Thursday the 13th.

On the way down (and for the month before), we’d been thinking up ways to reveal that crazyloststar had in fact come with us, but it was all for naught. Sky was asleep when we finally rolled in around midnight, so we had crazyloststar wake her up, and I think Sky screamed a little. Awesome. XD

Got to hang out with sky_dark, wiccat, heironymousb, hieadenna, psycholullaby, sami-chan and hakuyama for almost a week before we sadly had to leave on Wednesday morning! I should have pictures soon. Sky, wiccat, and crazyloststar took all the photos.

Got home with edchii, and then she had to leave on that Friday, and then I spend the weekend downloading World of Warcraft and working on my elricmas fic, which I finished in the nick of time. Then I went back to World of Warcraft.

Spent Christmas Eve at the aunt’s as usual, where I got a cute fleece cardigan from my parents. Then, on Christmas morning at my parent’s, I found a small pile of prezzies I hadn’t been expecting. I had wanted the iPod Classic, but didn’t think they’d actually get it . . . and then on top of that, they got me a laptop cooling pad, four seasons of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, an iFish, chocolates, and a small boombox that can dock iPods. That, though, is staying with mom because it doesn’t accommodate the Classic (wtf) and I’m giving her my old 1G Nano in return, so she can use it with that.

It’s been years since I got so much for Christmas . . . and so much I honestly didn’t expect. My parents spoil me so much. <3

It may be coming to a close here on the east coast, but Merry Christmas!