The Daily Adventures of Mercat

Ugh, the one thing I hate about two-week winter break is NOT HAVING ENOUGH TIME TO GET THINGS DONE.

Today I actually got the desk and two bookshelves that I've been wanting for my room. This may actually lead to me getting the whole damn thing organized. Amazingly.

Also, trivia tonight was awesome. Question on Jelly Roll Morton, I was the only person in the whole place who knew it. TAKE THAT. Also, had a headache so I drank a lot of Mountain Dew and rather unusually it made me EXTREMELY HYPER. Kevin and Lara tried to calm me down with a long island iced tea (which does not taste like iced tea I have been LIED TO all these years) and I did not feel it at all. Crazy.

Then we watched The Hangover and it is amazing. AMAZING.

And tomorrow I have to clean my room and do Christmas cards and buy a new laptop (I think I'm going to get a Sony VAIO) and then Thursday go out and buy party supplies. Busy times.

Dad had me run out to the store to get supplies for chex mix, and ugghhhh I feel like crap again. I was hungry and grabbed a cookie on my way out, and now I'm not really interested in eating. Everything ends up tasting like stomach acid. :C Although I am really craving shrimp or sushi or something equally delish at the moment... (And by "at the moment" I mean "since I came home from Hawaii".)

Anyway, the list of things under the tree for me... My parents said they were going to keep it small since we decided to MOVE all of a sudden this year (seriously... still weird) and that our gifts would mostly be the house and new furniture and those sort of things. Buuuut I guess they had a little too much fun buying stuff.

Both mom and dad got Laura dvds of "A Christmas Story"... greaaaat. Now she can watch it all the time. That movie really annoys me, for some reason.

Probably one of my favorite gifts was a lamp and lampshade that James got for me... it's so flipping awesome. The shade is this burnt-orange-silk looking material with a brown damask pattern on it. Laura picked it out but seriously James whatthehellit'ssocool. Laura also got me this antique wooden stamp that used to be used for printing wallpapers, and an tibetan-looking chime, and a set of tibetan prayer flags.

I made Laura a scarlet-and-gray pillow, and now I feel bad that it was kind of cheap because she and James' gifts are so awesome... =/ But otherwise I didn't really know what to get her and I know she likes to spend. So, I dunno.

Otherwise:
--Pushing Daisies Season 1 (!!!!!! I didn't put this on my wishlist because I was going to buy it myself, but YAY! Also, I need to remember to buy mom The Big Bang Theory for her birthday gift.)
--DIAGNOSIS MURDER SEASONS 1-3 OMG YAY. I DID NOT EVEN KNOW THEY MADE THEM PAST THE FIRST SEASON, WOO-WOO
--Galoshes! Unexpected but particularly useful on UD's puddle of a campus.
--underwear... you can never have enough.
--"dark blue" Lindt truffles (milk chocolate outside with dark chocolate inside)
--waffle house moneys!
--a "one minute organizer" book... strangely the only book
--SpongeBob Christmas Special DVD
--seat covers for my car
--a fuzzy and warm Dayton beanie
--chapstick
--advil
--UD socks
--gloves
--orange tictacs
--my sister's old athletic iPod nano strap... stained blue by a backpack-highlighter leak, I am sure. I am also worried I will be sweating blue or stained blue myself. (I also had to restrain from making "I BLUE MYSELF!" jokes, as no one in my family watches Arrested Development.)
--TWO OF MY DAD'S ANTIQUE CAMERAS OMG THEY ARE SO COOL. One I think is maybe just a pin-hole, but the other one is the type where you flip the front out and it has this accordion-type thing behind the lens... SO COOL.
--a really wicked tin-covered wooden side-table for my room. It's made out of recovered Indian furniture... It's wicked. Not as cool as the velvet-and-polished-tin-stool from Europe that I wanted, buuuut significantly cheaper. And probably looks more well-traveled because it is older, and it looks a little grungier (read: oxidized).

I got a piece of pizza down, no trouble, but I still can't get rid of this taste in my mouth... And my head kind of hurts. I'm not as tired, though, which is excellent. I mean, I got at least 12 hours of sleep last night, that's rather excessive.

Haha, didn't post a celebratory post earlier... I got distracted. Selling back books, getting a flu shot, cleaning, some errands, that sort of jazz. (My arm hurts from the flu shot. And my mom gave me this inhaler for my wheeze-cough and IT HAS A FREAKING USE COUNTER. It's so awesome. I am a huge nerd.)

We drove down to Cincy then to check out a bar for the new house and I found a silver side table like the stool I wanted! (The stool was going to cost like $150 in shipping alone, because it was from Europe, but they only shipped to UK/Spain/France/Germany anyway. So I'm really excited about this side table. It's wood, covered in stamped tin. Aaaand it's my big christmas gift.)

I have a lot of good linkspam tonight BUT MY COMPY IS HAVING ISSUES AGAIN and firefox froze. IE has been freezing like crazy, and Opera is having some memory issue I need to fix before I can use it without being ridiculously annoyed. OH, and I kind of hate opera because I keep trying to close the tabs and keep accidentally closing the whole window, which you can't recover. So that's annoying...

Anyway, YAY I'm done for the semester BOO now I have like a million non-school things to do. GREAT.

Time for beddy-bye for me...

OH MY GOD I GOT A ONE ON MY PLAYING AUDITION! :D I don't know how that happened. But I am really excited. So January 2-4 I am headed off to Wyoming, where I still have to do a marching audition, but which I am not at all worried about. Marching, I love. Marching, I can do. (Their vis staff was not able to get to the camp, so we were done early and everything. It was lovely.)

Oh my god, I miss drum corps so much. I can't wait for next summer. Just need to do more pre-conditioning this time around, and I'll be good. Arm strength, ability to run... Especially since everydays in June will be a mile high and cold. Breathing block will be miserable. And it sounds like Troopers is big on running laps.

But I'm glas I made the choice I did... It was interesting to hear the guys at the camp talk about how vets would go off to the "good" corps for a year or so and then age out back where they had family. Basically, the impression I got from my audition at Phantom was right... They are mostly interested in winning, not in who you are. Apparently one of their friends was the center snare for Phantom--center snare--and the staff didn't know his name until several days into everydays. That's ridiculous. And not to say every winning corps is there, but it just makes me feel better about not going to Crown. I think it's insulting to get money out of camps for so long and waste my time, not to mention... that. So much a different type of family, it's not even funny.

As for my computer, UDit is completely useless. Every time I email them about a message I am getting (no matter how minor) their general response is a lame question about retrieving data I already gave them, and "if that doesn't help then bring it in". So once again, they proved completely useless and with several hours of programs that didn't work, I finally found the solution through Google (I ran the fake program name as well as the "trojan" name). Oh, I don't know if I got that far in explaining before--it turned out to be an adware file that only looks like a windows security message telling you that you have a trojan (mine was Trojan.Zlob.G, but the file itself was merman.exe) and recommends you download a removal program (Program Defender 2009). This is fake safety software that "runs" a diagnostic to find the issue and fails partway through, prompting you to upgrade. So then the hackers get your money. And the multitude of anti-spyware programs I now have downloaded got rid of the fake security program, but to get rid of the adware (the fake windows messages) you have to start your computer in safe mode, go to Applications, find the "Google" folder and delete the two fake files in it. (I was worried at first, but there's nothing else there--it's not actually a Google folder.) So, once again, UDit is a failure and I fixed my own computer simply with Google-fu.

And now, lots and lots of linkspam because I've been a terrible, terrible tab user lately. And no lj-cut because I am CRUEL.

I rather love this Neil Gaiman poster. And speaking of zombies, I just watched 28 Days Later, which is a pretty good movie but feels... incomplete, somehow. But it did remind me of watching Sean of the Dead, which I somehow connected to that from the fact that I finally got my Phi Rho paddle, and I thought it looked like a cricket bat, and Christine and I somehow determined we are going to play cricket with my paddle and bouncyballs. Yesss. I miss Nookball a lot, haha.

This may be the saddest PostSecret ever. Not the most depressing, but one I could never understand... That's a sort of compromise I could never make, and it must be terrible to be in fear of something that other people think is so great about life. Wow, that was a really concise version of what I think and probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense... Maybe I'll expand upon it more later. I don't know.

Harrison Ford doing J. J. Adams Comedy? I'd be up for that. He's really entertaining with dry humor.

Daniel Craig wants Moneypenny and Q in the next Bond movie. EXCELLENT. Craig should be my new best friend. I want Q back and I think they should keep John Cleese. He can do srsface just fine.

The interesting source of phrases such as "in the limelight". Cool beans.

FSM nativity, pirates included. I love it. (The displays of FSM lights are awesome, too.)

I am totally doing this in my room. Now just to find tables...

This freedom-of-religion article showed up on my friendslist somewhere. I've had that sitting around but today I randomly stumbled upon an article discussing it (and atheist messages) which I think is really interesting. Another article about atheism where I think the more interesting topics are unrelated--digital ghosts and older people's mentalities. My dad said he read an article about the testing of older folks, and that it's not the idea that "old people are grumpy" but rather, they lose the ability to censor themselves, so to speak. Which is interesting in contrast to the idea that they are like children.)

A really interesting article about the "anti-wedding" which I may have posted when I was talking about feminism. It has a lot of good points. Sorry about the awkward formatting, the link to the actual article was really messy.

Thylacines can open their jaws up to 120 degrees... That's so, so disturbing.

The octodress. Is it not amazing? As creepy and fucking disturbing as ocotpi are, they are really cool as a deocrative element. (However, when they decide to take over the planet, we are doomed.)

This is some pretty cool art with lamps and such in nature. Awesome.

I forgot about this Pushing Daisies soundtrack that was coming out! SO MANY SONGS, I LOVE IT

Pretty cool article about major movie studio logos. I forget what the original reason was that this was so fascinating... Some tidbit I can't remember at the moment.

Pretty cool old "music video" from 1928.

I like these alternative Christmas Tree ideas.

Someone commented on Betty Page's death calling her "spectacularly singular"... I don't know why, I really like that phrase. And it's true.

So tonight I went out to dinner with my parents and grandparents and my aunt and uncle, and we got to talking about Facebook and the fact that my dad has one to keep in touch with people, and then of course my grandparents being my grandparents we started arguing about the morality of employers checking the Facebook profiles of potential employees. Of course I just gave them my solution--lock your damn facebook. But it's interesting what some people might think about what's on your profile, and different points of view on that. And talking to some people, it's weird to have parents on facebook. I was just looking back at an older post from when dad joined, and I said "WHAT" like it's weird but I think moreso it was just unexpected. Laura apparently didn't friend him, but she, who knows, might have something to hide. (Partying, probably.) I don't necessarily want dad to see my excessive cursing or the fact that I'm no longer Catholic (not that he'd necessarily see "pastafarian" and "church of heathus christ of ledger-day saints" not as humor only), but you know what? Laura's cursed in front of him, he knows we watch shit-for-tv or movies sometimes, I don't care so much. I don't curse in front of him or my grandparents, that's good enough for me. But other people talked about having family finding out about photos on facebook that they didn't want their parents or others to see, and you know what? I don't really get it. If you're worried, make it private, friends-only. If you're concerned about your little brothers and sisters showing your parents... Here's a grand idea: don't do anything in your life you wouldn't be proud of. If you make mistakes, admit they were mistakes and move on, but if something is a concern to your image, don't do it! I don't understand why that's so hard for people... I mean, from peers to politicians, what's so difficult about making good decisions? About thinking things through... Honestly.

Oh my god there is a hilarious skit on Robot Chicken about the construction of the Raiders temple. IT IS AMAZING. Hopefully it will be up on youtube superfast.

OH MY GOD. THEY CAN TAKE IMAGES OUT OF YOUR BRAIN NOW. You have no idea how long I have been waiting for this sort of technology to get started... I want to record dreams like crazy.

Whew, I think that's everything for now.