infinity zone

Little sister's birthday this weekend, so I'm back at my parents' house for now. She's turning 15, so she'll mostly be spending her birthday entertaining her friends while her siblings just kinda hang around. It's interesting, since my brothers and I never really did that; since our birthdays were all in the summer, it'd be an occasion for all the cousins to come out and we'd have a really big family party. I was personally never inclined to have friends over for my birthdays; I liked just having them as family affairs, or ... barely celebrating them at all.

This Friday was my second class of basic kendo. More footwork drills, and we learned our warmup exercises that we'll be doing after bowing in and breathing exercises. Just like last week, my calves and Achilles tendon ache a bit from all the footwork. Unlike last week, my arms don't ache terribly; I guess I'm not death-gripping my bokken anymore. Huzzah.

My mom didn't understand what I was talking about when I told her two weeks ago that I was going to be taking kendo lessons, so I was happy to talk to her about it when I got home. She's proud that I'm doing something new and ... well, fairly athletic. (Okay, really athletic. I'm realizing my balance really sucks since I'm out of shape.) My dad was a part of the conversation too, but I don't recall him giving any opinion of it. :|a He did ask about the shape of the shinai and (jokingly) how soon I would be hitting other people. They were both a bit surprised by how disproportionate the male-female ratio of the class was; there's maybe four girls, two of them under 10 years old, in comparison to the approximately twenty-five boys.

I'm curious how heavy the armor is, since my conversation with some other students mentioned how some students would drop out of the advanced classes because of the armor. I'll have to look it up sometime.

It took a grand total of six minutes to import my personal account.

...

Gosh, and here I thought I actually used this thing.

In any case, I've got nothing to add. I had thought about making a Christmas haul list at some point, but I'll have to leave that for when I'm not exhausted and it's not ... five in the morning.

So yes. Hullo hullo, my "reading pane" buddies.

The terrible thing about combining LJ RP and Plurk? All free time goes down the drain.

And when you are without RP drive for awhile? It seems like you have absolutely nothing to do. So, so terrible.

I've been wanting to color icons, write things, make little lists and such ... for a long time now. My current system with RPing has me feeling like there's always this cloud of Stuff to do that hovering over my head. I don't like that feeling; RP should be fun, not work.

I need to do something about that. Not sure what at this time.

I should do more reading, too. I can practically feel my vocabulary slipping away, and I need to sit down and just read something that'll hold my interest and still challenge my mind. I've got several books in my room, but little motivation to crack them open. Gotta work on that.

Gotta work on a lot of things. But I still want to watch things, play video games, chat... Auuuugh. :|

Let's see... Well, we held a wedding shower for my brother and his fiancee this Memorial Day weekend. It was lovely, and the games were a lot more fun than just talking them over with my older brother and a friend (one of the other bridesmaids). It was nice to be social and talk with people I know, even if we had a ton of food leftovers and my mom had to throw away some foods that would spoil quickly. Palabok, pancit molo, all the melon fruits... Gonna have to get through the pancit canton today. :|

Still need to shop for my silver shoes for the wedding. And get my dress and see how much it needs to be altered (probably a lot).

On the RP front, there's another draft that's gonna go down in Luceti. I need to write up my stuff for Albert's plans, but I've got plots/ideas for Albert, Leon, and Terra. Now it's just a matter of getting all of that out in a timely fashion.

I need to sort through my icons here and replace them with ones that better fit different moods. I've just got a lot of ... blah icons now.

On Luceti: The AU event is awesome. I'm looking forward to the plotty stuff going on with Leon, now that the details have been fleshed out a little better. Also looking forward to things with Albert. Terra's kinda floating around right now, doing his own thing, but I'm hoping to get him out and interacting once the festival log comes out. ...Maybe I should toss him at Gold's poker game. It's an intriguing post.

The dreams/revelations will be fun. I've been focusing on Albert (of course), so I have a few ideas there. I'm enjoying this completely dramatic/hilarious what-if scenario in which Buffy and Albert completely misinterpret their dreams and try to break up Jack and Raine. It would be some kinda of dramatic hell once the experiment ended and they had to talk about everything afterward.

Of course, Leon will likely have his own dramatic hell, too. ...And I think Terra will too, since Aqua will be disappearing. Geez, my boys.

In other news, my guinea pig Ahab is sick. His right eye looked really red last Friday, so I took him to the vet on Saturday. The vet said he had a URI and an ulcer in his eye, so he's got antibiotics and eyedrops. ...I'm mostly annoyed that the vet spent all of five minutes looking at Ahab and wouldn't even properly examine his eye because she said it was unlikely he would make it (because Ahab was wheezing hard). My brother said that the vet was just covering her ass in case Ahab did die, but it doesn't piss me off any less since she was pretty darn dismissive.

For the record, he's sniffly but never showed any disinterest in eating or drinking, and he's back to making noises after being miserably over needing eyedrops so often. And his eye is no longer red, so that's good.

...And I'm still using Plurk. Argh. I still need to collect good Plurk memes and post them to my musebox.

First off, thank you to everyone who responded to the last entry. I appreciate it, and everything is okay for me now. And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. :|b

I really needed that RP love meme boost. It's been a slow, arrhythmic month RP-wise because of all the holiday shopping and other stresses, so I was really starting to close up in terms of RPing and interacting. I'm hopeful things'll be good once we get started with the next year.

Let's see... Lots of gifts this year.

( Cut for gift haul )

And now I'll be spending the weekend watching Hell's Kitchen. For the most part.

Finally finished book_of_chaos's profile. I ditched the idea of using someone else's profile coding and just jazzed up the actual picture and added a background so I could put words on it. Still debating changing it since I hate the dividing line that shows up when I tweak the browser.

I can't believe he's 16. 8| He's perpetually 12 in my head, and I have to keep track of how tall he's getting. Man.

Hrm... Need to go to the store as soon as my brothers are out to buy guinea pig food. Guess I'll be working later than usual today. I really need to get my act together at Damned and finish that thread with Yukari. u_u But ... Minato. Processing death. What.

...And I need to get over this whole stressed feeling of buying things. This is the one time of the year when I actually buy a lot of stuff -- and not just for me, but for other people. I need to flip that frugality switch off.

So we had a housewarming/birthday party this past Saturday with mostly family. It makes me happy that my family is full of geeks and computer-savvy types; my cousins set up a LAN party with Halo Reach (complete with full-wall projection) while the parents streamed a college football game. My cousins raved about how they love our house because there's a TV or computer (or both) in every room.

One of my cousins let me borrow Alan Wake, which I blazed through on Sunday and Monday. I bought The Signal DLC on Monday and went through that, then watched a playthrough of The Writer since I didn't want to shell out more money if the DLC was as short as The Signal. Considering I can't stand playing scary video games myself, I'm kinda surprised I went through Alan Wake so quickly. But the game gives you warnings and slows down the action to allow you react, which ... really, really helped me for forest sections.

I'm in the process of finally getting around to replaying the Quest For Glory series. I bought QFG5: Dragonfire sometime ago and told myself I'd play through all the other games and import my characters along the way. I've finished as a thief on the EGA version, and now I'm playing as a magic user on the VGA version. I might go back to the EGA version for the fighter, since I recall not being fond of the VGA speed. This will also give me the chance to play the fan remake of Trial By Fire.

In other news, I think I'm in an RP slump. I think the crazy tagging of the Luceti Malnosso mission has left me less than enthused about picking up dropped tags with Albert or starting new ones with Leon. I can't even get the willpower up to write for the new NS at Damned, even when I have a clear plan of what Minato should do. ...I also need to stop looking at reserves and apps; I get this conflicted feeling that I'm not fond of. I hope it'll pass soon.

I should probably comment about how much time I've been spending moving things and getting settled into the new house, or apologize for being so spotty with RP lately... But I'm tired at the moment and completely "/blank face" at Kuroshitsuji II right now.

What the hell, anime. What the hell.

I don't... I don't even know what to say. But it's definitely not a nice feeling welling up inside me at that ending.

I'm glad I didn't watch the majority of the episodes now.

Soooo... I've been back since Wednesday, but I've been putting off replying. First it was because I was feeling lazy, and then I kinda forgot, and then it just started feeling overwhelming trying to write down everything that's been going on. So I'll skip the finer details and just focus on some broad summaries.

Hawaii was fantastic. Apparently we missed a heat wave in the area by going on vacation, so I think we lucked out in that sense, too. We went snorkeling at three different locations, looking down at the coral and all of the tropical fish. We also walked through a lava tube (read: lava-created cave) and did long-exposure light writing in a pitch-dark section of the tube. Very, very cool. We also ate ... expensively. Hahaha. And visited three candy factories. The big island is apparently big on chocolate and macadamia nuts. :| I'm almost out of my chocolate-dipped macadamia shortbread cookies. I'm already debating ordering more and having them shipped.

On Saturday, I attended a Lady Gaga concert with my brother and his fiancee. It's the first concert any of us have attended, and it was amazing. Bright lights, smoke, rising platforms, a burning piano, springboards, a fame monster, a disco stick, and lots of crotch-grabbing. The song "Boys, Boys, Boys" featured a lot of crotch-grabbing. :| I also found myself preferring how she sang Paparazzi live versus the album. We had good seats for paying the cheapest price for the three sections; I think it's because the seating was reserved for Citi card users.

Aaaand the Luceti events. Holy crap. So much stuff going on to get back into. And there's applications just around the corner, too. So excited about a lot of the reserves by returning players and characters.

Then over at Damned, my hiatus ends-- er, like, tomorrow. Ahahaha. I have no plans for the nightshift, so this will be interesting. Huzzah for Yukari and Mitsuru apps, though! ...Minato's going to have all the girls except Fuuka there. Oh boy.

And on top of all this... We're moving into a house soon. I need to start packing stuff. My new bedroom set will be delivered sometime in the first week or so of September. I'm so excited about that; I've never bought my own furniture set before. So much to do ... and I haven't really started at all.