Ohhh poo

I missed two days of school last week. Generally, I don't approve of missing school days. It's a whole lot of unnecessary makeup work and in the end it's just a lot more trouble than it's worth. But Thursday and Friday of last week, circumstances conspired against me.

See, my mom is in Scotland right now visiting family. That's cool. But my little sister, Kelsey, goes to year-round school and she's tracked out right now, which means someone needs to stay home and watch her. Ordinarily this would be okay - my dad is going to stay home and watch her for most of my mom's trip - but my dad had to go to work Thursday and Friday last week because he was teaching those days (he's an instructor, he works with MRIs). So Kelsey was left at home alone. She's nine.

My older sister is in college and she can't miss any school, apparently. So it fell to Staci to babysit.

It's not the babysitting itself, mind you, that bothers me. Kelsey's pretty cool, most of the time. But I DESPISE missing school, and Thursday and Friday were the two worst days I could miss - I was supposed to take about a bajillion tests/quizzes and turn in a major lab assignment.

What that means is that now I am up to my eyes in makeup work and it's not looking good. I have to make up three tests, two quizzes, a freaking bajillion-question long webquest, and read the entire Scarlet Letter by Friday. That's in addition to all my normal work, and what with two huge anatomy labs and a couple assorted quizzes/assignments, this week has a pretty heavy workload already.

So naturally, rather than actually doing all that work, I decided to blog about it. Sigh. I suppose I had better go get started.

Fall! Fall! Fall!

Yeesssss it's the first day of fall!

I am ridiculously excited about this! Autumn is easily my favorite season - it's so... I don't know. Awesome. I love everything about it. The weather is great - cool but not COLD - there's just a general ATMOSPHERE about it that's frankly awesome. A sort of hot-chocolatedyness. You know?

I love the sort of Halloween, Thanksgiving holidays the best, too. I don't even go trick-or-treating anymore and I still love Halloween to death. Marshall's birthday is around Halloween and she's having a costume party again this year, (YES! My one and only chance to dress up!) and I'm going as Wasp Woman. OH YEAH. She's thinking about not having it be a costume party now, (the dates were changed and now it's a couple weeks before Halloween) but I don't care, I'm going as Wasp Woman either way. (Nerd power!)

...And I mean, come on, what self-respecting American can't love freaking TURKEY DAY?

I can't wait for the leaves to start falling! I'm obsessive when it comes to stepping on them. Once Autumn starts it takes me forever to cross parking lots.

There's something incredibly satisfying about that crunching sound. Yay Fall!

Major pwnage by Clint Eastwood

Ohhhhh my gosh I just watched "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly".

Formerly Clint Eastwood was just an old guy to me.

Now I realize that he is in fact THE MAN.

HOLY crap that's a good movie. I was never really against Westerns, but I can't claim to have been a very big fan. I never considered them particularly intelligent or anything. I was apathetic when it came to them.

Only now do I realize what an idiot I have been. I mean, I'm sure they're not all as good as that, but this at least acertains that they have potential. Whoah that was epic. Clint Eastwood's all like, "There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that have guns, and those that dig."

Also, I will get a poncho like his if it's the last thing I do.

Ohhh man that was awesome. And that music is GENIUS. You can just play the same song over and over throughout the movie and it NEVER GETS OLD.

*Adding to list of favorite movies*

Erm, not cool

So, you might be wondering where I've been the last couple days. Ah, what a good question.

I've been busy being violently ill.

There's this horrible stomach virus going around my school right now, and this weekend both me and my little sister caught it... and - it - sucked. So now I'm sort of drained and vaguely out of it - you know, that weird, post-illness feeling? I haven't been sleeping well, either. Naturally my teachers decide to bombard me with all manner of horrible assignments right about now.

For this reason, this is going to be a super-short blog post. Because I have to go now. I have to go do homework. Veritable mountains of cruel, unforgiving homework.

What have I done to deserve this?!

Overheated

Hooollllllly crap, it's hot outside.

So today in my AP Environmental Science class we were doing this lab - measuring turbidity in the creek outside my school. But because of the DROVES of mosquitos out right now (thank you, hurricane) we were advised to wear long sleeves/long pants.

So I'm standing in the middle of this creek, trying to balance on a couple of rocks because my feet are completely submerged in water at this point and I'd rather not be up to my knees in it. And I'm pouring buckets of water into a nepholometer and it's HOT outside.

I did get a bit wet, but the lab itself was okay. The problems came later, when I went back inside.

My high school has three buildings (East, West, and what's technically the North building, though we don't call it that... I will for the benefit of the blog). Again because of the hurricane, the air conditioner was out in the North Building.

Like I said, I was wearing long pants and a long sleeved shirt.

Holy crap it sucked.

We actually had Spanish class in the stairwell because the air conditioner was working in there. But it was still awful. And then we don't have an air conditioner on my bus, either... and my bus ride home is an hour and a half long. By the time I got home, I felt sick from the heat.

Iiiiiiiiiiiick.

Super big, value-size post

Soooo, I have loooots of stuff to talk about and none of it really relates, so I'm going to pull a Deborah and just talk about a bunch of stuff in segments.






First off, my parents and my older sister went to a concert last night, leaving me to babysit my little sister. Now, don't get me wrong, we fight all the time (in the inevitable manner of siblings), but in the end Kelsey's pretty cool, and whenever I have to babysit her we have waaay too much fun for our own good. We set up a picnic in her bedroom and had a Disney movie marathon. I should point out that - I don't care how old you are - it is healthy to have Disney movie marathons. In fact, it is necessary to remain sane while in your junior year at high school. Also, it doesn't count if it isn't a sing-along.


So anyway, Kelsey and I were watching "Quest for Camelot" (which, come to think of it, isn't actually a Disney movie - but you know what I mean, one of those animated musicals) and having Oreo-eating competitions (I am ashamed to say that Kelsey, despite only being nine, totally kicked my butt). She's a green belt and was teaching me how to karate chop the straw off a juice box... Which is ridiculously fun, by the way. And then we watched like eight Mickey Mouse cartoons. I'm not kidding, I actually love it when my parents leave me behind with Kelsey when they go out.





On a completely unrelated but equally awesome note, we recently bought some snails! We have two goldfish and we're lazy and we don't like cleaning the tank, so we just keep buying snails and letting them do it. Anyway, our goldfish are HUGE and we found out that they were eating the snails, which was why they kept dying off so quickly, so we went to PetSmart and bought these huge blue snails that they can't eat... Kelsey named her's Willie and I named mine Icky Steve III (Yes I have had two other snails named Icky Steve in the past.)

On a third and even MORE awesome note, guess what I knitted?

Super Funky Fingerless Gloves! (At any rate I think that's what Marshall called them, but I don't feel like going back to the original post to check).

That's right, they're the gloves that Marshall put the pattern up for on her blog (The Knit Gangsta, over on the sidebar). Well, they're sort of those gloves, only I'm super lazy and super cheap and so I modified them to make them... lazier and less awesome?

I didn't have the right needles, but I was like, SCREW THAT. So I just knitted with realllly thick yarn and took out like a bunch of rows, but I did something weird and ended up knitting them sort of upside down... But they turned out okay, I think. Also there was no way on EARTH I was going to stripe them - I hate weaving in ends - so I just picked a really colorful yarn and went for it. Also, I swear they look better in person than they do in that photo. And also my hands don't look that fat in real life, either.

As I was telling Marshall, I knit these specifically for Nanowrimo this November. There's something about fingerless gloves that sets... I don't know, an atmosphere. A writer-y atmosphere. And there's something about the cheapness and odd coffee-colored bits of that yarn that is very Nanowrimo-y. They're perfect!

Who needs standards?

I was talking with my friend Marshall today at school, and somehow we got on the topic of writing. I'm of the opinion that there's two kinds of writers - the Writer and the Author.

The Author is a bit full of himself, a bit uptight, a bit of a snob. The Author sits in quaint little coffee shops and writes while looking down his nose at people. The Author writes about things like moral ambiguity and the perils of mankind. Nobody likes Authors.

Writers, on the other hand, are a certifiably insane class. These are the kind of people who spend every November frantically typing thousands of words a day, who write their best at four o'clock in the morning, who find inspiration in things like towels and kitchen appliances. They write about things like hovercraft car chases and Pop-Tart heists.

Authors are way too serious and dull. They are the sort of people who can make a book about vampires dreadfully boring. Not so with me.

This year for NaNoWriMo I have decided to approach it from the Writer angle rather than the Author route (which I have taken an unfortunate number of times in the past). It's going to be set in modern times, and it's going to start out with a guy who decides he wants to be a pirate. I honestly don't care where it goes from there. It's Nanowrimo. It's supposed to be ridiculous.

Realism is what editing is for. If you spend all your time during the drafting process worrying about minor details, you lose the spirit of the project. That's how you end up creating these weird, dead, limp sort of stories that just kind of flop over and don't do anything. The best things I've written were created when I was in one of those screw-the-plot-outline moods and just wrote random stuff. Reign it in later. For now, just do it for fun.

Not that the philosophy comes to me with difficulty. Yes, I have written both a hovercraft car-chase and a Pop-Tart heist in the past.

I can't wait for November!

I live

Really, I swear I haven't died.

I'm a writer, and I've lost a lot of my writing over the years to malfunctioning floppy disks/flash drives, computer crashes, etc. I've found that accidentally deleting your blog is a lot like accidentally deleting a story, except slightly more pathetic.

See, in both instances the writer faces what I lovingly refer to as SOS - the Start Over Syndrome. Probably the largest piece of writing I've ever accidentally deleted was a 12,000 word story that was the beginning of a Nanowrimo of mine, and it crushed - my - soul. I swear. At the time I was writing on a really crappy, ancient laptop - as in, laptop from the Mesozoic Era, so it didn't have a USB (I'm not kidding. Seriously.) So I had to use a floppy disk. The floppy disk decided it hated me and erased my story 12,000 words in.

Suffering from SOS, I was unable to start writing that story again. Despite the fact that it was a really fun project and one of my best pieces of work, I couldn't bring myself to rewrite - and I still haven't.

It's the same way with the blog.

The only difference is that I don't deserve any sympathy in this situation, for two reasons:

1. I accidentally deleted my blog. I mean, seriously, I am an idiot. Point at me and laugh.
2. It's a BLOG, for heaven's sake! It's not 'starting over'. You just keep doing what you were already doing. POSTING.

Despite the fact that I am well aware of both of these things, I haven't been able to start posting again. So you haven't heard about various things that have been going on in my life lately. The most important of these is that I recently started my Junior year of high school.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!!!

That about sums it up. Excellent. You are now caught up with events in my life.