Friday, April 29, 2011

Well, my friends, today marks the beginning of both an awesome month of amazingness, and the terribly sad temporary ending of possibly the best thing I’ve ever been a part of since moving to the ‘Boro.

Why? Well, this month I’m attending wedding number #2 at my grandparent’s house. My Aunt Jessi is getting married and Kievan and I are junior bridesmaids, Wilbo is the ring boy, A.C. is the flower girl, Ben is an usher, and Allie is the kid who walks down the isle with the babies and makes sure they make it to the altar. That's not really the super exciting part, though. (actually, I'm worried about being a junior bridesmaid. I'm notoriously prone to locking my knees.) The exciting part is that we'll be staying for close to a month, and I don't have to work! Not only that, but our friend Greta and her family is going to be attending a wedding at the same time we are, in the same place! We've decided to overlap our schedules and spend some time around town with each other. Fun, huh?

The sad part is that Shakespeare Club must be put on a break for a while. Kievan and I were both very mucho sad, and promptly forgot to say goodbye to anyone except Olivia and Andrew's mom. Go figure. Anyways, to sort of celebrate a sad temporary ending to Shakespeare Club, we ordered Hamlet from Netflix and watched it. Sadly, it was the wrong Hamlet (as in not the one with Kenneth Branagh in it) but it was alright because it turned out that the guy who played Hamlet was the same guy who played the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who. Needless to say, he made an EXCELLENT crazy Hamlet.

Now, I bid you all adieu, I have this really crazy urge to pack. Ciao!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Happy easter and MORE!

Well, first off, happy Easter! I'm drawing an Easter picture, I promise! I'm done with the lineart, I just have to color it. ;)

Next. I got a haircut! Actually, that's part two of my crazy hair tests. My mother experimented with highlighting my hair herself. Despite the fact that we all almost had multiple heart attacks because of crazy failures during the process of putting the foil in my hair, I think it turned out okay. Unfortunately, the second we totally finished the highlights, our power went out. For almost two hours I had no clue what my mother had done to my hair.

After all that, I got my hair cut pretty short today. (at the salon, my mother didn't do it.) It looks kinda like my favorite Smallville character's hairdo. (She also happens to be named Chloe... go figure.)

(yeah, that's about how my hair looks.)



What else was I gonna say? Oh yeah, what have I read lately? Hmmm..... well, I read more 39 Clues, (which are seriously some of my favorite books, right up there with Percy Jackson and Harry Potter) and I've gone more crazy over them. I'm seriously reaching fanatic stage now.

Also, I read this cool book called the Emerald Atlas that seriously has some of the seriously prettiest cover art ever...

(it is, isn't it?)

Anyways, I found out about this book from my wonderful friend Greta. It's a very exciting book, and I loved the characters. I recommend it. :D


And on a final note, have you ever seen Christina Grimmie (a.k.a. zeldaxlove64) on YouTube? I love to watch her. I'm not sure why, but I just love to watch her sing. She reminds me of Hiccup (you know, from How to Train Your Dragon) for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I like this one, "Rolling in the Deep by Adele" a lot, and I also think she did a good job on her version of "Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri".

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Maaaaaaalllllllllll

So today was just about a pretty good day. Kievan, Greta and I went to the mall and ate pretzels, and read books, and drank root beer, and tested perfume, and ate candy, and toured Target, and drank coffee, and went pretty much nutso.

I had a brilliant time. For some reason, though, after a while I went completely brain-dead and pretty much zoned totally out, which probably resulted in a very glazed expression. I'm not sure.


After that was all done, my friend Charlotte called me and read part of her story to me, then ordered me in total seriousness to write. She honestly used the words "write or ELSE." With Charlotte, not doing what she requests is like tempting the fates of death, or something. Therefore, I am writing, and I'm actually seriously enjoying it.

Our story is titled, "The Summer Project" and pretty much she writes a chapter, then I write a chapter, then she writes a chapter. Our story is a zany concoction revolving around Luke the ninja, a cyborg/steampunk girl named Autumn, a traditional vampire named Isabella (you know, she can't play in the sun or eat garlic or wear silver jewelry) and some evil guy who wants to gain world domination and whatnot. His name is, for no apparent reason, Mr. Ed.


Anyways, today Kievan and I discussed what would happen if Natsumi Vladimir (one of her characters who has a super-power of being unbelievably persuasive) was mad at the family who was allowing her to board at their house. We imagined she'd probably yell at each of them in turn, telling them to more-or-less stop being themselves. We spent a few hours giggling over the idea of a serious Jean and a giggly Dan. :)

Friday, April 15, 2011

On fleas and other pleasant matters

"Randy decided to give Isaac a bath; the flea situation had reached its usual autumnal pitch, and she had bought a bar of soap that smelled as if it could kill anything.

"She scrubbed and soaped and rinsed, and in his saturated state Isaac was revealed as a much smaller, less important-looking dog than he was when he was dry and fluffy. (Perhaaps that was one of the reasons for his horror of baths.) The air positively pulsed with the odor of strong disinfectant as whole flea communities gave up the ghost."

~Elizabeth Enright, "Spiderweb for Two"



Today Beowulf the Hero got a bath, and it was pretty much exactly the same as Ms. Enright's description above with one very important difference.... Beowulf didn't only have whole flea communities, he was infested with whole countries of fleas. He was like the country of Japan... there were so many fleas they practically had to live on top of each other. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed with the flea soap, and was even reduced to such cruel tactics such as dunking him to expose the fleas on his face.

Recap: It. Was. Terrible.

Fleas were dying all over the place. While I worked the soap into his fur (which is actually so floofy it takes almost half a bottle of soap to work... I blame it on his Alaskan ancestors) dead fleas got on my hands and arms and-ick-even under my fingernails. Let me repeat, in case you somehow missed that; dead fleas were under my fingernails.

Anyways, Beowulf is now mostly clean, and I put that flea-killer stuff on him to hopefully take care of the dozen left surviving. I'll probably have to give him another bath again soon, to try to take care of all of them before we leave for Virginia in May.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Not..... enough....... time.......

Sorry for the lack of updates, drawings, and, well, whatever else I usually post here. I've been really really busy, and have pretty much been doing three things: working at my job, reading random books, and drinking pink lemonade.

One; working at my job. Okay, so what am I supposed to say about it? Um... I really like to work, I really dislike the waking-up-early part and the not-hanging-out-with-my-friends part. All in all, I don't hate it, but I really wish I didn't have to do it.

Next, reading random books... so I finished the tenth book of the 39 Clues! I kind of stopped reading them for a while, but then I went to the library and finished the first series. I never saw the ending coming, literally, on the paragraph before the climax was resolved, I still had absolutely no idea what was gonna happen. Seriously, it was amazing and I love love loved it. I can't wait to get my mitts of "Vespers Rising", although I think it's only an explanation of the next series. Also, Hamilton Holt is just pure awesomeness. He's my favorite character in the entire book, and I told Kievan, "Hamilton is about two-thirds as cool as Horace from Ranger's Apprentice!" (For me, that is very high praise. Kievan is constantly asking me if I've persuaded Horace to marry me yet. I usually pretend not to hear her. ;D)

I also read Margaret Peterson Haddix's (she wrote the last 39 Clue book too, I only just now realized that) book "Sent", which is book 2 in her "Missing" series. I love that series! Seriously, maybe I'm just into "kids getting into trouble and learning about Shakespeare and other cool people" type books, but the Missing series is just really fun. I recommend it. I also find it funny because it has a character named "JB" in it... Kievan and I see people with the initials "J.B" everywhere we go.

Oh, yeah, the pink lemonade. What's up with that? Well, see, my mom apparently isn't cooking anymore, and since I work from 10:00 in the morning to 2:30 I practically miss breakfast and lunch. THEN, I get a measly Asian takeout dinner. Therefore, I have been living mostly off.... you guessed it..... pink lemonade, which I now have an addiction to. Oops.

And that's about it. ;)

Happy birthday, Beowulf!

Beowulf the Heroic Pom-Yorkie mix is, as of two days ago, officially three years old.

He was born the day before Easter in 2009, which earned him the very strange original name of "Calvary", which, bye-the-way, was the name of a hill that multiple people, including Jesus, were crucified. It means "Place of the Scull". When we got him, we changed his name as quickly as we could... which actually wasn't that fast. there were six people who had totally different name choices. Kievan wanted to name him something like "Augustus" and Mommy wanted to name him "Porkie" (he WAS pretty fat) or "Rhett Butler" and every one else had similarly strange name choices. We ended up calling him "Dog" for a few months, which finally stopped when my friend Charlotte came over for her yearly visit and was horrified by our lack of creative naming skills. She promptly told us, "Well, I'm gonna call him "Beowulf the Hero" until you think of a better name." We never did think of a better name, so his name is Beowulf. Strangely enough, I've had people not remember my name but walking up to my dog and saying, "OH! Beowulf the Hero! I remember him!"

The only problem with naming your dog Beowulf is that if I ever get another dog I'm gonna be stuck with names like "Gilgamesh" or "Cyrus the Great" or something.

Oh well, sorry for the rant, and happy belated birthday, dearest dog who will never read this blog post! (that was exasperation, just so you know.)

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Coincidences

One of the recurring jokes among my sister, cousin, and me, and recently Greta too, has been when somebody will say, "I like such-and-such" to which someone else will blurt out, "What a coincidence!! We must be related!"

Anyways, a really bizarre coincidence occurred the other day at work. The restaurant I work at has a playlist of music that plays over and over and OVER again while I'm there. The thing is, about two years I got a line from this random song stuck in my head for months. I'd never heard the song before, and I didn't hear it again until I was washing dishes a few days ago. It's Jordin Sparks' "One Step at a Time" and it was on a playlist of contemporary christian music. Now that was a weird coincidence. ;)

Friday, April 08, 2011

**Yawn**

So, the scoop on my week thus far:

I worked and worked and worked and worked and WORKED at my job. I kinda like it, except I now have no time at all to do other things... most importantly Shakespeare Club. (Which is actually the only fun thing I do, besides childrens' choir, which is technically a volunteer job.) Luckily for me, my amazing wonderful and most amazing mother knows how much I adore Shakespeare, so she went to my job today and let me have the day off. I had so much fun!! Unfortunately for me, I was really really sleepy and didn't really wake up until I had to make lunch (pizza! no more Asian!!) and then my friend Greta had to leave. That was definitely a bummer.

So instead of talking to Greta, I decided to continue my mission of making a different girl, Olivia, talk to me. And guess what? I HAVE FINALLY SUCCEEDED!!! Get out the ice-cream and confetti! What happened was, Andrew (another kid, Olivia's brother) Olivia and I were still eating pizza at the dining room table when somebody decided to turn on "Liberty's Kids". I don't know if you people have ever watched that, but it's pretty much this awesome TV show about kids living during the Revolutionary War. It also has somewhat faulty animation at times, and repeats some stuff. So we all watched it and would exasperatedly announce, "They aren't exercising proper gun saftey!" or "Every time they open a book it's already on the exact right page." or "They're supposed to be running away from angry British soldiers! They don't have time to recite poetry!!"

I went back to work today (Saturday), and we're going to church tonight so that I can sleep in tomorrow. YES! YES YES YES YES!

Anyways.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

BRAINS.


Kievan and I were having one of our, "I didn't know that about you!" conversations, and we realized that I have a character who is a cyborg (see above ;D), and she has a character who is sort of a half-zombie. So naturally we spent the rest of the day with her following me, arms outstretched, mumbling, "brrrraaaaiiinnnnssss....." and I would pretend to zap her with my awesome cyborg laser gun. It's been..... interesting.

Also, THE KIDS ARE COMING HOME!!! My wonderful amazing magnificent adorable very noisy and slightly annoying but nevertheless perfect siblings ARE GONNA BE HERE ANY SECOND!!! WOOT!

On Dr. Who and other lifechanging TV shows

(Please notice I'm posting this at 2:00 AM, sorry if I seem a little crazy. Hahahahaha...)

So my dad is the ultimate Sci-Fi fan and you know what THAT means..... that's right, the two of us stay up until 2:00 watching Star Trek: The Borg and Dr. Who. Believe it or not, even a TV show as corny as Dr. Who can get kinda creepy at 1:30 in the morning, which is probably why Kievan looked so freaked out when she passed through the living room at about that time and I joyfully announced to her, "They're ALIENS Kievan!!" while somebody got killed.

I love corny scifi shows. They're the best. **shakes head in admiration**