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Actually I've had worse moments of stupidity this week, namely when I was changing a CD in my car while in the garage and I accidentally took my foot off the brakes and was suddenly all "WAIT WHY IS THE GARAGE MOVING?" It's almost as bad as when I wonder where my keys are while I'm driving (which has to happen about once a week). & then there was a fricking deer in the middle of the road when I was driving home from dance last night, but thankfully I didn't hit it.
School is going all right, I guess. The greatest part is definitely senior pass so that I can go places during my lunches. It's especially nice when we can sit outside when it's warm out. It's also nice not having to worry about signing out and passes. Especially after the incident the day before we got senior pass when the nun in the library was refusing to let me leave the library to go back to the cafeteria. It took rather a lot of convincing on my part (I'm not in study hall! I'm in lunch! I was just getting an assignment! I'm not eating during this lunch period because I already ate lunch earlier today!) before I could go back. But thanks to senior pass, I don't have to worry about getting trapped in the library anymore!
My normal schedule is pretty much back in motion now, what with school and dance. I pretty much got my ass kicked in jazz/lyrical on Tuesday. I still can't sit down without experiencing pain. I need new legs. I've also realized that every other week I'll be spending 7 days a week at the studio (since I have reperatory company rehearsals on Wednesday now, and Christmas show rehearsals starting next Sunday probably, and helping with classes every other Saturday morning). But it's all good. It's the last year I'll be able to do so anyway. :(
- Mood:
amused
I've also been on an icon-making spree. I've discovered the wonderful world of brushes, and it's about on the same level of awesomeness as when I discovered textures and LOL GRADIENT FLARE YAY. I'm also experimenting with different methods of coloring rather than just hitting "color enhance" which is what I used to do because I was lazy. Needless to say, this means I've uploaded some new icons, one of which features a brush that I made myself. I'm rather proud of my mad GIMP skillz.
Meanwhile, when I haven't been being somewhat of a geek I've had my first three days of life as a high school senior which is pretty awesome. Most of my classes are great. AP English 12 pretty much pwns AP English 11, I've decided... although we haven't really done much so maybe I'll have to withhold that judgment? Although the fact that we took three tests over the first two days of school was not fun. Latin continues to be awesome; there are only 11 of us and since when is Latin not awesome anyway? Contemporary American Studies is also a lot of fun; today in that class I learned that our generation's children are going to be hippies that will probably hate us. Awesome.
I've also recently discovered that I have somewhat of a fetish for guys with books, which suddenly explains my love for Zexion, Sawyer, and Genesis. And I suppose Desmond, because of the whole "Our Mutual Friend is the last book I'm going to read before I die" thing. And Ben, although I don't love him in the sense that he's attractive. (I still can't think of anything that explains my irrational love of Sephiroth, though, except for the fact that he was actually a pretty nice guy before he went batshit.)
... Yeah, why am I talking about things like that when nobody cares?
Now I've got to take a shower before going to the senior class lock-in, which will be loads of fun because what's not fun about hanging out with your class all night with games and such?
- Mood:
dorky
In other news, yesterday I thought that pressing all the buttons on my watch at the same time would be a good solution for getting it off some strange setting that it somehow ended up in. Pressing all the buttons makes the watch reset, and now I have no idea how to stop the watch from thinking that it's 9:38 on January 1st. I was just starting to get really reliant on watches, too. Oh well.
I guess I should read Antigone now. Yay plays featuring Oedipus' daughter/half-sister. (Oh, and I realized that ancient Greeks were very much in support of the Fred/George shipper slogan: "If you can't keep it in your pants, at least keep it in the family. High-class Athenians just loved to marry their cousins.)
- Mood:
ecstatic
( colorbars! )They're surprisingly easy to make; the hardest part is resizing all the images (especially for the FFX one because I had to capture all the images from video files). Then after that all I had to do was go into GIMP, adjust the colors/brightness/contrast if needed and then run a rainbow gradient across it. Stay tuned; I may be making more.
I've also uploaded a couple of new icons that I made this weekend, including a new default one. I'm rather proud of my texture use on this one, and also that on this particular batch of icons I refrained from being all LOL GRADIENT FLARE YAY!
Only five more days left of school, and then exams. This year has gone by so fast. We should be getting our schedules for next year this week. I'm taking AP English Literature, Honors Latin IV, Honors Precalc, Honors Physics, whatever the quarter-long senior theology courses are (I know two of them are World Religions and Ethics), Contemporary American Studies, and Anatomy, in case anybody wants to know.
I also went to graduation yesterday. I was part of the water crew which was pretty much the best job ever because we were under a tent and surrounded by water coolers so we could have a drink whenever we wanted, and we got to socialize with a lot of people. Except we were the one job that didn't get any recognition over the announcements this afternoon thanking all the students that helped out with graduation. PEOPLE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN DEHYDRATED IF I
Over the weekend I found a good site for watching movies online. It pretty much has every movie you could ever want to watch, except it directs you to brightly colored Asian websites to watch them. So on Saturday I watched Serenity (the movie sequel to the TV show Firefly) and it was pretty awesome, except WASH FRICKING DIED and then right after it happened I had to go eat dinner... it was almost as bad as the time I had to go on a tour of the Ben & Jerry's factory in Vermont right after Dumbledore died. Anyway, next time I have a large chunk of time free I'm going to watch Fantasia, which I haven't seen since I was probably between the ages of 8 and 10 and pretty much one of the only reasons I want to watch it is for the Nightmare Fuel-inducing "Night on Bald Mountain" segment because let's face it, that song is awesome. (& of course there's the Sorceror's Apprentice segment with Mickey Mouse and the moving brooms.)
Oh, and I started organizing one of my storylines into an actual story. Let's see how far I can get with it.
- Mood:
accomplished
I'm in the mood to list things off so here are some of my ramblings.
( ten things about my life, some of which no one cares about )
Uh, yeah, pardon my rambling. I think I'm going to be productive now and finish my Roaring Twenties packet for history.
- Mood:
thoughtful
( cut for mini-rant about faraday's age )
But other than that little nitpick of mine, tonight is going to be awesome. This is the first time since season three that I get to watch the finale "live," since last year I had to wait until the Sunday after it aired because it was on while I was at a dress rehearsal.
Also, today I took the AP English test, which was not that bad. We were very well prepared, I think. & then afterwards we had Adventures in Clarisse's Car and went to La Festa and Starbucks. Now in English it will be ALL BOOKS, ALL BOOKS ALL THE TIME, NO MORE AP WORK. (Too bad we can't actually do really fun stuff like in the other AP classes.)
- Mood:
excited
Took the SATs this morning. Some parts of it fried my brain but as always I did derive extreme pleasure from the writing sections--the grammar-correcting bits, not the essay-writing. I've decided that I hate timed essay writing, which is kind of bad for an AP English Language student since that's what half the AP test is. That test is going to kick my ass, I just know it. (Thankfully that night I can celebrate with the season finale of Lost. Which, of course, will only make my mind melt more, but Lost is the good kind of mind melt. Yes, there is a difference between good mind melt and bad mind melt.)
Yeah, so I have a feeling this has the potential to get really rambly as I begin to talk about how hardcore cosplayers kind of creep me out and how I'm going to start another playthrough of FFVIII even though I'm going to have very little time to do it ever and how I'm and Organization XIII fangirl and probably a lot of other stuff.
[ETA: My mum made CUPCAKES! *glee!*]
- Mood:
annoyed
Well, what's new with me. I got accepted to the St. Paul's Advanced Studies summer program, which means that I'll be gone for the second half of June and all of July. I'm taking a class on Ancient Greece, which was my third choice I think but should still be fun. But don't fear, I will be around in August.
I also finally managed to trim down my junior speech to under three minutes (it clocks in at around 2:40, which is very good because now I don't have to worry about going over the time limit). It took so long to edit it down (I ended up having to cut about two minutes out of it, after having it be over four and a half minutes when I read it in class for the first time), so I'm rather proud of this. I read it for my family today and they liked it (except my mum was all, "You use such big words! What does misanthropic mean?" and I'm like, *facepalm*). So yeah.
I really hope my brother isn't using the Playstation right now because I've been having major Final Fantasy X nostalgia moments lately and I kind of want to go on my partial file which is somewhat towards the end of the game and play just for the heck of it.
- Mood: bouncy
Also, Tuesday dance classes have become extremely hazardous, because I injured myself about four times in the span of forty-five minutes this evening. First I somehow manage to get a floorburn of some sort on my knee (through my tights), and so that starts bleeding. Then, I'm doing a tilt and my standing leg kind of slides out from underneath me and BAM! I crumple onto the floor (no real injury there, though, just me falling on my bum). Then at some point during lyrical I opened up the scab from the floorburn I got on my right foot last week, so that starts bleeding. Then I was doing a shoulder roll and my left foot banged right into the heater vent. Oh, and my right shoulder hurts from doing all the shoulder rolls. Dance is a HAZARD TO MY HEALTH.
(Also, one of my jazz costumes this year is a belly-dance outfit from India. I have a feeling that's going to be a very hot outfit for everybody to dress up in at my house. It's got jingly gold things. It's pretty awesome.)
Snow day tomorrow, Y/Y?
- Mood:
hopeful
Also, GRYFFINDOR TOTALLY WINS at Harry Potter Winterterm 1. We have a freshman in our group who apparently knows the whole Order of the Phoenix movie word-for-word. See, I'm not that bad. (Though I do think I get my ability for quoting things from my mum, because we'll be sitting together watching an episode of Lost, and we'll both be saying some of the lines before they happen. But only the really good lines, like "Jesus Christ is not a weapon" and "So I guess I'm out of the book club" and "You just killed everyone on that boat!" "So?" Lost has a lot of hilarious lines, some of them mainly because of context.
And speaking of Lost... ZOMG SPAZZFLAIL NEW EPISODES TOMORRO
... Damn it, I'm trying not to include so much fandom/geek talk here anymore.
- Mood: excited
...What the hell, my x key is being silly. Something must be stuck under it. I'll have to be careful getting it out so that I don't end up with gum stuck under the key again (long story there, though no lasting harm was done).
So yeah, I get to be a tour guide at the open house at STA on Sunday. We had a meeting for tour guides during part of last period today, and it turns out that being a tour guide involves been much more of a people-person than I am, but it wasn't as if I really had a choice. It was the only job available when I went to sign up, and since I'm in NHS now I was pretty much obligated to have a job at open house (though I'd much rather be at dance rehearsal, to be honest). I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be an ideal tour guide. Trying to connect myself with the families by making small talk? No, I don't think so. Small-talk is the bane of my existance. I'm probably going to be awful in that department, but maybe I can make up for it by being good at pointing out things & such. Yeah. I'm definitely not a people person. Though I don't think there are many jobs at an open house that don't involve being a people person.
On Monday morning I discovered that the song "Eyes on Me" (the ending vocal theme of FFVIII) sounds utterly ridiculous at 6:15 in the morning. Waking up to Ominous Latin Chanting is fine. Waking up to Ominous Instrumental Music is fine. Waking up to Japanese Techno Pop Video Game Music is fine. Waking up to Cheesy Video Game Romantic Song? Not fine. Even though despite its cheesiness, I really like it. Just not at 6:15 AM. I should just wake up to "Liberi Fatali" every morning because it's freakin' awesome to begin every day with Ominous Latin Chanting. "One-Winged Angel" is also a good song to wake up to, although whenever that happens it ends up getting stuck in my head even more that it already does. Every Latin class, invariably, I get "ESTUANS INTERIUS IRA VEHEMENTI, SEPHIROTH!" repeating in my head over and over. & sometimes when Sephie's being an attention whore, I get "ESTUANS INTERIUS IRA VEHEMENTI, SEPHORA!" and that makes me angry because dammit, Sephie, you are not burning inside with violent anger or whatever the hell that translates to.
Speaking of Sephie, I've had an idea to write a sequel/follow-up of sorts to "Traveler" for the past month or so, except I haven't really had the time or inspiration to work on it. I'm going to try to start it this weekend, though, except I have to try to figure out how to begin. ( cut for more brainstorming )
One thing that I have done this week writing-wise is to finalize the alphabet used by my characters. I call it the "Sublimely Magnificent Alphabet Mark III," called "SMA3" for short until I can figure out a better name for it. (& unlike the Sublimely Magnificent Jecht Shot Mark III, it actually does have a Mark I and Mark II /FFX reference.) It has 34 letters (though some of them stand for more than one English letter). It's kind of cool, because with the way some of the letters work out, the names have so much fewer SMA3 letters than English letters. Perrin's name, for example, is 6 letters in English, but in SMA3 letters it's only 3. That's because spelled phonetically it would be Pairen, and since SMA3 has one letter for "air" and one letter for "en," you get only three letters. If my name were to be spelled out in SMA3 letters, it would be a similar thing, as phonetically it would be Alesen, which would be representated with only four letters: short A, L, ES, and EN. I really do love phonetic alphabets. They make me realize how utterly screwed people trying to learn English are because things can make so many different sounds.
Season five of Lost starts two months from today. I am extremely excited. It's always kind of weird getting new episodes again after a long hiatus, but it's always so awesome. & it's back on Wednesday nights now, which means yay! If they had it on Thursday nights again this year, it would not be good, especially if it was on at 9:00, because that would leave very little time for me to get homework done.
[ETA: Just came across a promo poster for season five and ZOMG FARADAY IS SO ADORKABLE. I also just found out that on January 21st we apparently get TWO EPISODES! ;alsdfl;kasjdlkfjsa;lkjf;salkjflksd!]
- Mood: dorky
ZOMG THERE IS A LOST SEASON FIVE TRAILER UP. I must go down to my mum's computer to watch it, as my internet connection doesn't like to play videos. But judging from the comments over at
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lost_tv, it's freakin' epic.Speaking of freakin' epic, we watched parts of The Patriot in US History today. That is an extremely gory movie, what with heads being blown off and cannonballs taking off people's legs and Mel Gibson repeatedly hacking up a British soldier's body so that you can see bits of blood flying through the air. And then there's the Big Epic Battle in which Mel Gibson ends up totally owning Jason Isaacs. As you can see, my class really got into the violence and making fun of the British soldiers who obviously attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
So good news: my dance classes on next Thursday got cancelled so if there are any plans to go trick-or-treating I can go, as long as I don't have that much homework and I can convince my mum that 16 is not too old to trick-or-treat. Otherwise I might just have to stay at home and either a) work on homework all night or b) dress up and hand out candy. There's still the Halloween party to look forward to, though, even though I won't be showing up until 9:00 ish. But the fun will only be just beginning then, yeah? (And if I do end up going trick-or-treating, I guess I have less than a week to come up with a costume. Into the Closet of Dance Recital Costumes I go!)
[ETA: Gah! I forgot to include the First Line of Songs meme that I wanted to share. It's similar to the movie quote meme that Shaylagh did a while back.]
( instructions )
- Mood: ecstatic
I have an Algebra II assignment due tomorrow. I have about half of it done at the moment, and I was going to finish it today when I was in a better mood to deal with Hell's Computer Program, Winplot, which I like to call Failplot. However, for some reason my mind lapsed and I forgot to check which book I was actually bringing home, so now I have my Chem book instead of my Algebra book. So I'm going to have to finish the assignment before school tomorrow, with my last two graphs not done on Winplot, and hope that I get it all done because the assignment is due first period tomorrow. And I don't want to use the excuse "I left my book at home" when technically I've had several days to get the assignment done (and I would have had it done already if it wasn't for the damn FAILPLOT!).
Oh, and I'm also facing major dilemmas with the final draft of my English essay, because I keep second-guessing myself upon whether I'm explaining things enough or not, and whether rambling on about antitheses and how they convey unity is convincing enough. You know, I think my life would be a lot easier if it was just a four-paragraph essay because I think my points about hortative sentences and rhetorical questions are somewhat decent, but my paragraph on antitheses seems to be lacking in explanations because sometimes you can't really explain how you come to your conclusions, dammit. Sometimes you just need to say "this quote shows that this is that, that is my point, the end." I miss when essay-writing was somewhat simple.
- Mood:
stressed
Oh, which reminds me that I should try to find some more Lost spoilers because now that they're well into filming there will be many spoiler-type things on the Internet. I have an unfortunate desire to want to know things before they happen. It is tragic.
I didn't have that much homework tonight, which is good. Though I do have a chemistry test tomorrow. & I was supposed to do a reading for Social Justice except I couldn't find the article, only an old forum about the article. So I guess I just won't do it. But I suppose I could start the week's Moby-Dick readings. Maybe there will be more Quotes of Win like the one about Queequeg's head looking like a cannibalistic George Washington. The problem is that as always I am highly unmotivated and rationalize putting things off by thinking about how I have a long weekend to get about half my work done.
I've been reading a lot more of "The Shoebox Project" lately (which reminds me that I need to download the next few parts). And I think I said this already, but it's odd to go from the fanon interpretation to thinking about what actually happens to the Mauraders in canon. But I've realized that the song "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" by Death Cab For Cutie (which I've already mentioned as being a very Remus/Sirius song) best relates to the pair of them after Sirius escapes from Azkaban and he and Remus meet in the Shrieking Shack after 12 years. I think it's because of the lyrics "no longer easy on the eyes, these wrinkles masterfully disguise the youthful boy below." And also, I've found myself inexplicably relating another Death Cab For Cutie song, "Tiny Vessels," to Lily/James--although that doesn't make much sense because a recurring lyric is "she is beautiful, but she don't mean a thing to me," which is most definitely not Lily/James, since James is pretty much completely infatuated with her. Oh, and not relating to SBP but relating to associating Death Cab For Cutie songs with stuff: I've started to associate the song "Transatlanticism" with Perrin. I think it's because the song mentions distance between people, or something like that, and emotional distance is definitely something I associate with Perrin.
Yes, I've been on a Death Cab For Cutie kick, can't you tell? It's what I listen to when I'm driving. Not when my mum's driving, because she prefers the radio.
I need to change my layout. The fact that the text overlaps with the borders is really starting to bother me.
- Mood: contemplative
To give you an idea about how amusing the translation is, here's a scene from the end of the movie, with the correct dialogue in parentheses following the Blind Idiot Translation.
( this is your own masterpiece )
As you can see, most of the hilarity simply comes from things getting lost in translation (especially the character names: Anakin is refered to throughout the film as "gold," "Allah gold," "line," and "the peaceful is willing to" and Obi-Wan is "ratio," for example). There are times, though, that the Blind Idiot Translation is actually better than the real dialogue, as in the line "This is your own masterpiece" (instead of "You have done that yourself) as seen above. The most awesome example, however, comes from my subject title:
( we are for the big! )Anyway, there are a ton of awesomely mistranslated lines that you'll see popping up in my subject titles, and that is where they come from. /geek
Ever since last weekend I've had a plot bunny for a short piece involving Daria and what is essentially her friend-with-benefits, since they're pretty much best friends since they were kids and then end up having four kids together (though they're certainly having a little more sex than that which produces the children). The problem was that I had no good name for said boything. He had been called Finn for a while, but I realized that wasn't really working out (and the second "n" would be lost in the phonetical spelling from their alphabet, which would make his name Fin, and even though the phonetical spelling doesn't turn up in the actual writings, it would still bother me). I then thought about calling him Owen, but that didn't work either (because even though I used to love the name, the look of it now inexplicably bothers me), and I considered Mattin nicknamed Matty, but then I realized that I hated the look and sound of Mattin so that wouldn't work either. Then there was the whole Aeron issue of last night, in which I couldn't have Aeron pronounced as Aaron because then it would rhyme with Perrin, and so then I considered insisting on the pronunciation "EYE-run"--but then I realized that that sounded like a treadmill manufactured by Apple: iRun. So I thought I would remedy that by spelling it Aerin, so that it would be pronounced more like "EYE-rin," but then I realized that that would be one syllable off from Aneirin. So I was at a loss for a moment and then I realized I could shuffle around some names so that he was Destin (which had previously been the name of Perrin and Julia's son, who hadn't yet done anything of importance). So now the boything has a name: Destin Palenight. Now hopefully I can get started on the piece. (Of course, now Perrin and Julia's son doesn't have a name, but he might be able to pull off Zorion. He has a sister named Axelle, after all.)
(And then, after all that, I realized that I shouldn't really be concerned about the similarity of names because I have a Leah and a Leon--whose storylines don't intersect, thankfully--and that's not subject to change anytime soon. So conceivably, I could have had an Aerin and an Aneirin. But Destin will remain Destin. It's easier than trying to force the pronunciation EYE-rin for Aerin.)
I started reading Moby-Dick today for English, and what I've read so far (the first six chapters) has been surprisingly amusing. And I've also found hints of Ho Yay. (Damn you, TV Tropes Wiki.) Anyway, I know I shouldn't get my hopes up for this actually being a good book, because I've been assured that there will be times that I will hate this book. But at least it's good for now.
- Mood: amused
GAHHH. I hate when people decide to mill about the kitchen when I'm trying to do stuff online. >:( At least Andrew will be leaving soon, so that I can start using his room for my Internet connection once more. It'll make life so much easier. (or maybe I should know better than to go online between 5:00 and 7:00.)
I did the ending of FFX again today and completely destroyed both forms of the final boss (well, the final one where there's a risk of dying, because after that you're in perpetual Auto-Life status). One hit on the first form, and two hits on the second form, and it was DEAD. This made me laugh, considering how much trouble the final boss initially gave me. After all the Original Creations at the Monster Arena, the pitiful 120,00 HP of "Braska's Final Aeon" is such a pushover. Anyway, I've decided that I'm pretty much done with FFX now, since many of Tidus's stats are completely maxed out and I've got Auto-Protect/Auto-Shell/Break HP Limit armor for everyone (well, "everyone" as in Auron, Tidus, and Yuna, the only three characters I use anymore). The only thing left for me to do, really, is to capture 10 of every monster so that I can unlock Nemesis, but I don't have the patience to do that. Other than that, there's nothing to do but be generally dominating, and that gets tiring after a while. Now I'll just have to be video game-deprived until I have an excuse to get FFVIII, which probably won't be until around Christmastime anyway, since school will start again. (but yay for FFVIII because Squall is awesome, even if he is a bit loner/emoish.)
I'm beginning to panic just a little about the amount of summer work that I still have left to do, especially because I returned to The Scarlet Letter again today and had to read the first two pages that I started with about four times to understand it. I still have to take notes on quite a few chapters of that, plus watch the three movies, plus read The Origins of American Slavery. And I have quite a busy week this week. Gahh.
... Yeah, I think I'm going to get off now because my mum is still milling about and talking about my dance bag and watershoes, and I'm really not in the mood to sit around trying to be online when she's doing said milling about.
- Mood: annoyed
We started out on Wednesday going to Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly known as Disney-MGM Studios). Our first Disney ride experience? Rock 'n' Roller Coaster which was absolutely brilliant. You start off going 60 mph and you go upside down three times and it's mostly in the dark which makes everything even more thrilling (oh, and there's also Aerosmith blasting everywhere!). Needless to say, we rode that twice. Then we went to the Tower of Terror, which was also awesome. Andrew and I rode it twice; the second time was much better because we got a better drop sequence and we kind of knew what to expect. We then went over to Star Tours, a Star Wars flight simulator (we got to fly around the Death Star and get shot at by Imperial ships, yay!). We also learned a lot about stunts in the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular and the Studio Backlot Tour. We then saw some literal flaily Muppet hands at the Muppets 3-D show, which allowed up to get out of the brief downpour that occured during that time. Finally, we went to the Fantasmic! fireworks/laser show, which was awesome - it had Mickey, lots of Disney villains, and "Night on Bald Mountain" (which immediately makes everything more awesome!).
On Thursday we spent half a day at Sea World because my dad had discounted tickets because his Kiwanis group was having a dinner there. We saw lots of sea animals, but things began to get not-so-good when it started downpouring while we were on the Journey to Atlantis log-flume-type ride. We were soaked, and it Would Not Stop Raining! After three hours of being miserable, we decided to go back to our hotel and change into some drier clothes before dinner. Once we were dry, we salvaged our day at Sea World by seeing a Shamu show and a water-skiing show.
On Friday there was no rain whatsoever, which made for a very hot (but very magical) day at Magic Kingdom. We did some epic Fastpassing to ride the three Mountains (Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad) with minimum waits (we even rode Splash Mountain twice). We became master naviagators between Frontierland and Tomorrowland, and we got to see Captain Jack Sparrow on Pirates of the Caribbean - the ride even got stuck when we were right in front of him! We protected the universe on Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, although I swear that there was something wrong with my blaster gun because I got a really sucky score. We saw an awesome 3-D show, Mickey's Philharmagic, in which Donald made his way through various scenes of Disney movies to retrieve Mickey's conductor hat in time for the orchestra (for some reason I was vaguely reminded of "Kingdom Hearts," except without Sora and the Heartless). We saw some ghosts at the Haunted Mansion, and then we ended our Magic Kingdom Adventure with none other than It's A Small World. But our day wasn't over! That night, we headed over to Universal Studios to see Blue Man Group, which was absolutely fantastic! It's basically three guys with blue skin doing wordless silly comedy (with lots of audience participation!) and some amazing percussion stuff (I want the soundtrack - you can choreograph some awesome tap pieces with the music).
We slept in on Saturday and then headed over to Epcot for a very low-key, but still fun, day. We walked around and looked at all the futuristic stuff over at Future World, and then we saw a show in which Ellen DeGeneres was educated by Bill Nye the Science Guy about the importance of energy. We visited The Seas With Nemo and Friends and saw lots of undersea life, including cuttlefish, which allowed me to spout my cephalopod knowledge. We rode Test Track and became living vehicle test dummies. Then we headed over to World Showcase and went around the world in
So that's the fairly condensed version of my adventures in Florida; I have lots of pictures that I will hopefully get up here so you guys can share in the fun.
Also, I thought I would share how I did on my final exams and my final grades.
I did amazingly well on my finals; I honestly don't know how I pulled off some of the grades. I guess my beastly study guides really pay off. I got an A+ in everything except Geometry, on which I got
My final grades (not final exams, final as in the whole year):
English: A
Latin: A+
Biology: A
Western Civ: A
Geometry: A
Scripture: A+
My GPA ended up as a 4.4, which is up a tenth of a point from last year, yay!
(Yes, you may all throw sharp objects at me now.)
- Mood: nostalgic
I think I've already used my subject title before, but I find it so amusing so I'm using it again.
I'm definitely missing my endless icon uploading abilities, because I've made a lot of cool Lost ones lately. My favorite, I think, is one that I made yesterday, a Hurley "DO NOT WANT!" one. I've also made a Faraday one and a Kate and Jack one with coloring that I really like, but alas, I can only have six icons at a time. Yet I keep making more, because I really enjoy it (except when the resizing is wonky, or I can't fit captions that I want, like with the Miles "Anybody want a peanut?" icon I tried to make a few days ago).
So I never really realized how much Jack cries on Lost until I took a look at the recaps found here, which make fun of practically ever single time Jack cries. And there's a lot of Jack-crying (the fan term for it is "Jears" - Jack + tears). Anyway, the recaps are pretty much my new best friend because they're hilarious in so many ways, and I don't know how the creator of them can come up with so much wit and hilarity. I certainly can't come up with that much (I'm more into writing over-thinking, somewhat anti-social introverts who seem to be a male extension of myself).
I only have one final exam left, which is English second block tomorrow (which means sleeping in/extra study time). The only bad thing is that I heard it's a hard test with QUOTES. :( I feel as if I shouldn't stress about it, because I normally do well in English, but still. (Then again, I managed to get a 97 on the midterm, and that was a fairly hard test if I can remember correctly.)
Tomorrow's plans after school, for those who don't know: my mom picks us up and we go to Panera (or somewhere else) for lunch. Then we go hang out at my house for a while before going to Katelyn's party. We stay there for as long as is necessary, and then we go to Shaylagh's house. I will provide the Friends for our viewing entertainment, unless anyone has any movie suggestions. We spend the night there, and sometime on Saturday we will likely take a visit to the library to visit Ms. Houde. So that's the plan; you can participate in as many activities as you want.
- Mood: contemplative
Tonight I plan to beat "Final Fantasy X." I have armed myself with knowledge from various FAQs over at Gamefaqs and I will fight the final boss over and over again until I have turned him to BUG SQUASH. (I'm fully preparing for it to take a while, unless I get extremely lucky.) Then I get to sit and watch the ending, which I'm pretty sure will make me depressed, but whatever.
I've decided that my brain has some sort of aversion to "The Power of Light," because now that I'm up to TPOL material in my writing project, the wanting-to-write switch in my brain has kind of turned off. Even more reasons to send my old series to the Land of Dropped Stories and write more exciting stories with my characters instead. I'm thinking that three novel-ish things will encompass all my major plot stuff. I've decided that I work much better when I only have to deal with one viewpoint (i.e. third person limited POV; in my current project, the action is strictly focused upon what happens around Perrin).
Also, this recap of the season four Lost finale is Full of Win. It totally does not give an accurate summary as to what happened, but So. Amusing.
[EDIT: I've officially completed FFX as of approximately 12 minutes ago. YAY! It on'y took me one attempt against the final major boss too (because it turns out that you have to fight more battles after that, but you automatically have Auto-Life cast on all your characters so there's no possible way you can die). I don't even know how I got through that last important battle. It seemed too easy for some reason. I think the fact that Yuna had Ultima helped me a lot because that stopped any shenanigans like the Yu Pagodas healing the final boss and filling his overdrive meter and such. I didn't even have to haul out the big guns, i.e. the aeon that hits for 45,000 HP with his (her?) overdrive. But yay for beating video games! Though I hate how the credits always have to be so long, especially if the background music choice is the longest version of "Suteki da ne" EVER, and of course it's the version with the Japanese woman singing, which quite frankly scares me. I would've been much more content with the instrumental version, which I love to pieces. Oh well.]
- Mood: amused
Sarah and I have FINISHED our INSECT COLLECTION. (Well, almost. All I have to do is print out the label for our thysanoptera.) We spent about an hour and a half working on it after school today, and we were in a panic for a while because we were afraid we didn't have enough orders, but then it turned out that our mosquito was actually a thysanoptera and then we got a neuroptera from Eric, so then we REJOICED! It looks very nice now; everything is all pinned down and arranged in semi-straight lines. We owe our lives to Brandon, who allowed us to acquire many cool bugs from Florida.
So in Scripture for the past two days we've been having intense conversations about the Bible and whether or not God exist. It's supposed to be a debate-type thing, but it ended up being basically the whole class versus Paul, the class's resident atheist who believes that those who believe in God are "misguided." Today's discussion involved the question of faith and how there's no proof either way as to if God exists or not, and my writing!brain was desparately wanting to revise/rewrite a short novel-type thing that I wrote two years ago that is about the importance of faith, etc. I also had all kinds of Lost dialogue going on in my head, such as "It's a leap of faith, Jack" and all kinds of other Man of Science vs. Man of Faith arguments. But seriously, once I finish my current writing project, it's going to be a hard choice whether I'm going to work on the circular-arguments-as-why-destiny-exists-o
I was doing my geometry homework about an hour ago and randomly fell asleep. I woke up about 10 minutes later feeling rather disoriented, and for a moment I thought it was morning. (Proof that finding the area and volume of spheres does not excite me.)
- Mood: excited
