The Daily Adventures of Mercat

Can't talk much, gotta run. Not quite finished packing yet for our trip, insanely busy on my own anyhow, gotta get some sleep in there somewhere... but happy holidays nonetheless! May you be blessed with family and friends, but if you need an ear to turn to just drop me a line. ;)

I was actually rather productive today, despite my alarm deciding not to go off on time. I started my grad school applications, which is a daunting task, particularly since I have no idea who I'm going to ask for recommendations. My boss I guess? I just don't have any particular comraderie with any of my professors. =/ By which I mean, I actively dislike a significant portion of my department, and the others I am apathetic towards. Anyway.

I also paid some bills, started the FE Exam application process, and tried to fix OneNote (still no luck--Windows' "help forms" are practically worthless considering in four days I've had one response that actually provided me with zero answers, only more confusion). Tomorrow I'm going to work on stuff for my portfolio, which is also intimidating since I'm not actually an art major, and I therefore don't have much to pull from. (Man, what if you were just an engineer with no arts background? What at all would you put in a portfolio?)

Dad and Laura went out to get a Christmas tree, which I didn't help put up at all, though I'm not terribly upset about that. At the moment I'm feeling more "busy" than "Christmasy", although turning on Christmas music won't get me riled up now about how it isn't even Thanksgiving.

I kind of do want to go out shopping, though. Every few weeks I feel the need for crass commercialization. I think it's kind of a "getting out of the house" thing combined with a "need to buy groceries" and "looking for visual stimulation/inspiration" type thing. The curse of being artistically inclined, sometimes, I swear.

Anyway, prompt time, before I go do something entertaining this evening.

My probably number one example for "any place I would like to visit one day" is the Angkor Wat in Cambodia. However, also on my list are visit Australia and all the National Parks, although "go everywhere" is pretty much the rest of my list, to be honest.

I'm thinking for next year, in order to keep up the "daily posting" but with something more substantial than a prompt, I might start doing Hardy Boys read-alongs. I haven't nearly read as many detective/spy/mystery novels since college/discovering the internet in high school/etc., and I kind of miss the genre as a whole. Plus, Hardy Boys books are really easy to page through. I think I can conquer one in about three hours total. Plus, it's been ages since I read the whole collection anyway, it'd be good to recall some of the plots.

Sometimes I agree.

Oh god, it IS horrifying.

When Superman invaded the KKK. Life is awesome sometimes.

hehehehe, space.

This whole thing pisses me off. Yeah, maybe it's a little low-cut for a movie premiere, but it's the preimiere for Kick-Ass, and if you haven't noticed, I'm going to take a stab with the whole hot-pink hair thing and say she probably doesn't give a whit what you think of her. Not to mention, half the headlines talk about her husband (and call her "Mrs. Wossy") despite the fact that she's the fucking screenwriter. And somehow, they pointed this all out and still managed to completely miss the point?! I don't know. I really don't.

Oh, Liam Neeson. I still don't get this movie.

NOOOOO MOUNTAIN DEW THROWBACK TASTES HORRIBLE :C

ICHC is a Mensa favorite site. I don't know if that means they have a sense of humor or they're no better than the rest of us. Oh, humanity. You and your ego.

Old hat, but these George Takei ads creep me out a little. I mean, he's awesome, but his voice is just... weird.

Oh, FUCK YOU, Gizmodo. The dude did not "sneak a peek". HE TOOK A FUCKING PICTURE. (Oh, and remember, these are impossible to misuse, remember? At least it didn't take long. Maybe they'll realize what a dumbass idea these are.)

NOOOOOOOO why do they release all these lovely bright colors after I just got a new lappy?! AUGH. Turquoise or hot pink or lime green or sunset orange would have been SO SUPERIOR to dark blue.

Didn't know there was an Indiana Jones timeline. However, this guy seems thoroughly unamused? I really hate when people get interviewed and respond with stuff like that. At the least, make your answers interesting if you have nothing to add.

FUCK YES TREASURE ISLAND A LA THE NEW SHERLOCK HOLMES. AND APPARENTLY TWO STUDIOS ARE DOING THREE MUSKETEERS.

MOTHA'
FUCKIN'
HELLS YEAH

I really love the English's sense of humor. Or humour, as it were. Anyway, St. George is also the patron saint of... Barcelona? No, Valencia? I think it was Valencia. I remember seeing little Winnie-the-Poohs dressed up as St. George in the Disney Store in Valencia. I really wish I had bought one now, that would just be too awesome.

Heheheheheh.

Thought I'd check in... Haven't been around much lately because I'm trying to polish off my to-do list before the busy weekends kick in. So far, pretty much so good.

As for school, hydraulics is kicking my ass. I really hate Dr. Chase (he was my advisor freshman year-- rather jerkish, didn't actually listen to me) and our first homework assignment took me four hours, with help, and I know I did most of it wrong. So, uh... awesome.

I was taking a grad-level course in composites but it got cancelled because of a lot of miscommunication within the department. Kind of pisses me off because now I have to find a replacement class and there weren't any other electives that sounded interesting, but at the same time composites sounded rather dreadful so I'm glad I don't have to take it.

As for life my brain has been on word vomit for days but I've really had very little to say. I was withholding getting on LJ till I had stuff done (like the ambigrams sent! forgive me) but trying to keep my brain faucet shut off was killing me. So... you know, if you have interesting discussion material or anything, let me know. Particularly brainy-type stuff. I mean, how brains work, interesting human patterns, that sort of thing.

It's driving me craaaazzzzyyyyy

My only solace is that the Donk is making plans to get together around Christmas :D I can't wait to see everybody again! And it's amazing how close everybody wants to stay. I mean, SW was a big family like Troop but I didn't have such a close group like I do now. Which is awesome. Especially since we're planning to head out to New Orleans and I've never been there! Woo

(I can check out the levees and laugh at everyone for deciding to live there... I'm a terrible person, I know)

Aaaaand now I'm off to go look for recent articles on Indy FIVE or something. (Seriously, that is some of the best news I've come back to all summer!) Something to keep my mind occupied since my body is about to shut the fuck down after not getting enough sleep recently (or something) =/

Holy crap I feel like it's been ages since I've posted. That may simply be the fact that I have 123 tabs open because I've been too lazy to post in the past few days. (I think the guy that's on Craig Ferguson right now was the guy who voiced the turtle in Swan Princess.) Soooo I need to do a tab dump. I think part of my problem is that I've been trying to keep up better with my gmail and my google reader, but it's a LOT to read... Plus I don't have much space to be saving stuff on my hard drive, so I'm trying to figure out how to rearrage everything so it all works.

I did figure out I can keep some stuff on my netbook (which actually has more memory than my lappy, go figure--I didn't realize that the lappy only had 80GB) and keep a text document of the stats on the info that I need instead of lugging all the files around on a flash drive. So that will open up some space...

I'm not sure what to do with everything else. The problem is that the netbook is good for surfing because carrying around this thing is a pain, but for actual work I like to use this one. And I'm running out of room. Maybe if I succumb to desk use I can just use the backup hard drive? I hate having to hook up external drives though. Bleh.

And I can't put my games on my netbook because they're on CDs and I don't know if I can get my hands on an external CD drive. And I don't want to put my music on the netbook (though it would be handy) because the speakers are pretty shitty. Unless I can find some small (tiny) speakers to lug around with it? And then I'd put the musc on there in an instant. And I would still need an external CD drive.

So what I'm working with is an 80GB tablet, a 80GB+60GB netbook, a 2GB flash drive, a 16GB flash drive, a crappy old iPod nano, and a 250GB external hard drive. I will get a system working here. (It would really help if I could get a resolution on my netbook that didn't involve scrolling but did involve smaller icons and shit. Fucking asus... Excited about playing around with Linux, eventually.)

SO. LINKSPAM OF A MASSIVE NATURE.

Panhandling cat; I feel kind of sad for it. I am just a bleeding heart for street kitties... And I'm amazed it puts up with sitting there all day. (And I really want to adopt KL Kitty aka Tinkerbell.)

So you know that fugly 70's building in North Korea that's a huge abandoned concrete monstrosity (that apparently has no steel structure which I find hard to believe and has warped)? Apparently they are paying an Egyptian company to fix it up--don't know if it's just externally--but yeah. In following up on this I've learned more about North Korea than I've ever known and it is a truly creepy place. Start with this BBC photoset, and then here is a huge phototour. So crazy... They really keep all the "bad" stuff hidden out of sight, and it looks like a creepy, empty, badly-concreteized, highly stylized city. Although I guess most of this is Pyongyang... Still. And someone somewhere posted a lightpollution shot of all of North Korea and its surrounding countries, and NK is like a fucking black hole. Damn. I feel like you could film some crazy shit there if you trusted the place enough... like good Zombie films or something. I think it would feel way too abandoned like that if you did live there, though.

French, Spanish, and German translations for bizarre travelers' phrases. I particularly like "There's a corpse on the bed, please change the sheets". I'm also wondering how many of these innuendos translate to bizarre stuff... Like the silicon ones, maybe? Like maybe the German one is referring to silicon the element, and it just makes no fucking sense. These are the kind of things about languages that I love.

So did you know New Zealand is not technically on the same continent as Australia? It's part of Zealandia. How fucking cool is that? And can we please have more than seven continents? That'd be bitchin'.

5 ways common sense lies to you every day. Some of these, folks, we call logical fallacies. hurr durr

Brain decline begins at age 27?! Fuck.

A model with fake legs, and how they give her "superpowers". She's awesome.

Ricky Gervais and Elmo? That's some funny shit right there. (Is Elmo technically a muppet?! That's how I tagged it but I'm second-guessing myself.)

VERIZON customers: be careful about this. They're apparently sending out some shady paperwork you have to go through the effor of declining so that they're not sending companies info about where you take your vacations or what stuff you're doing online or whatever.

You know, with all these massive amounts of links I'm getting daily now, maybe I should just start a more news-blog styled secondary blog where I can just link these all through one at a time. Jesus Christ to I have a pile here... Bleh. (I am hating to imagine what I will come home to after a summer of tour; it was bad enough last time, but I can't imagine now with all my lovely google subscriptions and shiny things.)

Um... Why don't we stop here for now? I have to check my email and then sleep.

Almost forgot, before I leave--I'll have a running commentary on the Superbowl commercials/halftime show on my twitter. Same username.

And now, off to Cincy for tonight so we can see Wicked in Louisville tomorrow!

Interestingly, I feel more guilt about taking only 15 credits this semester than I do a lot of other things. I mean, initially, I feel a lot of guilt about things, but I have the feeling this will hang around as one of those "regret" type things... Like after I graduate, I will find out there was some awesome few-credit course I should have taken but never heard about. =/ Oh well. I am too busy with corps stuff (I want to be superbamfready for the next camp--my legs are killing me), and I want to have some free time to finish moving, do my room, work on Phi Rho stuff, actually hang out with people, and maybe do stuff for the musical, who knows. OH, and finally meet with the art department and declare an art history minor. *whew*

Anyway, I'm too tired to talk about camp right now. All worn out from camp. Amazingly, my back does not really hurt, but my legs are frigging KILLING me.

So I took Frontier, and apparently the $15 flight insurance my dad got also got me "plus" status, so I could have boarded earlier, and I got a snack (usually $3) and a drink (...minus I'm not old enough, haha, but $2-$5) and the TV/movie access ($5.99). On the way there it was six in the frigging morning, and I didn't know ahead of time I got the movie, so I wasn't paying attention and the stewardess gave it to the guy sitting on the aisle. I was kind of mad later because I could have seen Eagle Eye essentially (to me) for free. And I guess because I was asleep, I didn't get a snack, either... I would have liked to have something to munch during my five-hour weight at the fucking Denver Whirl of Doom (aka, the Denver International Airport; trying to get into or out of it is like climbing into and out of a hole. I hate the design of it, god damn is it confusing). ANYWAY, on the way home I got to see The Mummy III: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and I new going in it was going to be cheesy. One, Rachel Weisz dropped out as Evie; too bad, because I think she lended the character much more credibility than whoever is playing her now. Two, that link that showed up on cleolinda's journal ("if I knew there were going to be Yeti Field Goals, I would have seen this movie"). Yeah, by the previews (not that I was paying much attention to The Mummy III earlier this summer because Weisz dropped out--usually meaning the script will suck) I really had no idea there were going to be yetis, and a dragon, and a frog... bull... lizard... thing. (Seriously, what was that?) Okay, ALSO? WHO THE HELL MAKES A MOVIE SET IN CHINA AND THEN PUTS EUROPEAN DRAGONS IN IT. FUCK YOU. Would have been SO much more creepy if they'd used asian-styled dragons, FORTHELOVEOFGOD.

HOWEVER! Going into it knowing it was cheesy (I mean, think of how kinda-lame Mummy II was; valley of the what-what, right?), kind of along the lines of "this is somewhat along the lines of Temple of Doom sequelitis", it was extremely enjoyable. I liked it. Could have gone with a bit less interaction with the yetis, and obviously a different dragon, and the plot had some holes (a lot of misexplanations/lack of explanations/badly places exposition lines) a mile wide, but if you just sit back, laugh, and have fun with it, it was good. But maybe you have to be one of those people who grows into Temple of Doom first, I don't know. (I never really thought ToD was that bad anyhow, until I sat back and watched people bitch about it. But that was probably because I knew I still had one left in the series when I first watched it, and also when you're younger you don't give a shit as much about Cheese Factor. Oh, and the beginning kind of hooked me; I'm a sucker for musicals, what can I say.) SO ANYWAY, I LIKED IT AND I PLAN ON INVESTING IN IT since I already got the other two last Christmas.

I would say that the only thing that honestly turned me off of the movie was some of the cheesy lines, and the actor playing Alex. Not the we-lack-the-focus-to-properly-set-up-the-plot lines, but the ones that are supposed to be funny. I realize that these movies are kind of funny-movies, I mean for the love of god it's Brendan Fraser. (<3 George of the Jungle!) But those lines... like the ones they gave Jonathan... Yuck. Please, step back a little and realize those lines suck. (Or, director, your version of "delivering" sucks.) And the Alex character was way too suffering-from-sequelese-we-can't-get-anyone-decent-do-we've-got-some-random-guy-who-looks-like-Brad-Pitt. Bitch please. They kept Brendan Fraser, they kept the guy playing Jonathan, they got an awesome guy to play Mad Dog, they got a pretty good chica to play Evie, they got fucking JET LI AND MICHELLE YEOH, and this is the shit they got to play Alex-all-growed-up? Come on.

Also, Temple of Doom parallels kinda thick for my tastes, but at the same time made it more enjoyable. Lol, Shanghai nightclubs. What are you, a trope now? I hope not.




(Oh, also? Nights in Rodanthe looks like SHIT. Haha, I hate romantic bullshit like that... They totally made obx into something it's not and it looks DISGUSTING. If I am ever forced to watch that movie I will gag. I was watching the preiew decently until the woman like breaks down seeing wild horses actually running wild on the beach. TOO MUCH HORSES ARE NOT THAT COOL AND OBX IS NOT THAT EMPTY OF A VACATION SPOT SORRY GAME OVER.)

I am not ready at all for school. Packing up for corps I just realized this... I have Christmas stuff everywhere. I'm not moved in, I needed the time to relax so I still have stuff to move and then I still have to redo my room. Plus recruitment. Plus girl scouts. Plus the Minardi's project. Plus James' tattoo which was his birthday/Christmas present. Plus all the other art I owe people. (Hopefully... I can get that done this weekend, or rather, TOMORROW, while I sit by myself in the Denver airport for FIVE HOURS.)

Maybe I shoudl only take those 15 credits and not try to cram another class in there. That way I can focus on all this stuff, anc corps, and maybe looking at grad schools. *sigh* I hate "wasting" those credits, but maybe it would be good to have that space. Maybe I could join the drama club and help with props, I don't know.

Ugh. Kind of nervous about tomorrow because I should have been practicing, should have been working out. Should have been so many things... But mostly I am just stressed about school. I need a longer break, that's just the way I work. I need mental recuperation time.

Not to mention I barely got to see my friends at all, and a bunch of them are getting together tomorrow to hang out and catch up--and of course I will be in an airport for most of the day. And not even during a time when I can call them and chat over the phone while they are together... =/

Heeeeey, okay, I'm here and I'm posting! Here's what happened on Maui.

So Sunday was an amazing day. I had so much fun. I didn't get much sleep the night before because packing took a little bit longer than I expected but printing out my confirmation papers took WAY too long (installing printer drivers sucks, Windows Vista sucks more).

Soooo Sunday rolls around and I wake up at 4:00 so I can get to the airport on time to catch my flight. (My flight was super-early because the tour I was taking started at seven.) So I am tired because I didn't get much sleep and it's early, and I just grab a Nutrigrain Bar for breakfast. (Also, I have no idea when this happened, but I like poptarts and nutrigrain bars now. Maybe because last summer you're always just in the mood for sugar and salt no matter what, and I started getting those poptarts they had? I dunno.) Anyway so I try to sleep in the terminal but geez it was freakin cold in there! So finally the plane loads and we take off. You couldn't see much on my side of the plane but you could see Molokai as we came into Maui.

So I hop off the plane and it is just gorgeous outside. =D I managed to get there with only one bag, my backpack as a carryon, though it was kind of stuffed. They said it would be about an hour until the tour bus came to pick me up, so I just sit where they told me, waiting. I finally noticed there was an open Starbucks so I get a milk and a chocolate chip scone ($6!). The scone wasn't that good, it was really sweet. =/

Anyway the bus finally comes and I hop on and get situated, and the tour guide is really friendly. He has us introduce eachother and he introduces himself and he drives over to a gas station so we can all use the restroom and grab snacks before we get started. I made sure to grab a Mountain Dew because I knew I was going to get really tired. So also on the tour was a couple of ladies from Australia who were headed to Maui for a wedding (the tour guide kept saying he loved their accent), a newly engaged couple (from Montreal, though the guy was Italian; he was interesting, I couldn't tell if he was bossy or nice enough sometimes), an older couple from New Jersey (adorable), and a guy from France studying Japan. So the tour guide is just having a ball telling us that he does this every free day he has (he works 12-hour weekdays, and this is his fun) because he loves it so much, seeing the island, and passing on what little knowledge of his culture he knows. He sang a traditional chant and gave us all flowers (right side if you're single, left if you're married, like a wedding ring) and told us about growing up on Oahu and getting transferred to Molokai and growing up there and eventually moving to Maui. It was really cool to hear about all the stuff he did. I guess he was the first guy to surf on Molokai! Crazy. Anyway, he was super friendly, and we started our tour up Haleakala (house of the sun). On the way up we stopped at a Protea garden, which was really beautiful. Proteas can last something like up to three months in a vase with water and then if you let them dry they pretty much last forever. They were really gorgeous. So we got back on the road and something broke in the van that caused us to lose power and have a popping noise, so we pulled over and waited for another tour bus to come by from the company. We ended up hitching a ride on a bigger bus, which made me a little more nervous driving up to the summit. (While we were waiting we were in this forest that was absolutely amazing. Cool and smelled like eucalyptus or lavender or something.)

The road up Haleakala is sharp and winding and it is popular for tourists to ride down it on mountain bikes, so you always have to be watching out for them. Because of it's proximity to the water, it's the fastest climb of that altitude, being only 37 miles (if I recall correctly). It's also the... tallest? mountian in the world? Everest is the highest (IIRC, again) but because it is surrounded by a range its base is also higher, making Haleakala the tallest. Anyway, as you get up to the park, the trees lessen (and we saw one patch of sandalwood, which I thought was completely gone from the islands but I guess some was saved) and there are fewer and fewer plants. When you get up to the first visitor center there are lots of rocks and very few plants and they have some silverswords planted so you know what to look for. Silverswords are like permafrost; they are pretty rare and four ounces of weight in the area around them can kill them. They grow from two to fifty years and in that time only bloom once, then leave behind a skeleton. They are gorgeous though! The blooming season is around October, I think. Anyway at the top of Haleakala there is almost nothing, almost like you'd see if you imagined being on Mars. The dirt is really reddish black and there is pretty much nothing. You can look down into the pit (er, not the right term) of the volcano and see lots of cool things (which at the moment I have totally lost all the names of in my head). There are these smaller pits that are as tall as the Empire State Building (crazy!). Haleakala is an active volcano though it hasn't gone off since the 1790s, so the lava is more like dirt rather than the lava on the Big Island.

So after I took some pics of silverswords and got my National Parks passport stamped, we got a replacement smaller tour bus and drove up to the summit, which was pretty windy. It wasn't too cold, though. (There were a TON of silverswords up there, though.) Then we drove around to a back view of the pit again.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, up at the first station is also Science City, a set of buildings where only scientists can go (hence the name). It has something like 11 of the world's most powerful obseratories, and looked really wicked. =P

So it took us a while to get down but the driver (Thadd) told us more about the island and the history and stuff, like how Nenes (the state bird, sort of like a Canada goose) live on land and walk on the rocks and stuff (and lava rock is sharp/rough, let me tell you), but have webbed feet.

By then we are a little late for lunch (like noon/one maybe? and I haven't eaten since four) and I am falling asleep because the drive from the summit to lunch is a good hour plus. So I don't remember much after getting down the mountain.

Anyway, we pull into this shopping center with a food court, sort of a "world food" court. Thadd suggests a place that has the best "soup saiman" (sp?) (like ramen soup) that he has ever had, and since BBQ (Hawaiian bbq, let me tell you COMPLETELY different than Southern bbq which I am craving hard core [besdies bbq you know what I have been craving for months? Bread. And cheese. AND STRAWBERRIES HOLY CRAAAAAAP. {and El Toro salsa mmmm...}]right now) is something I can get on campus, I go for the soup saiman. DELICIOUS. It had shrimp, crab, pork/chicken/beef (something brown and pink, yes bright pink, I think it has to do with Vietnamese spices or pickeling or something) and possibly kalamari. The (supposedly) kalamari was done just right, not rubbery at all. And lots of veggies and the noodles were DELICIOUS. So now I have to find the restaurant "Ba Le" locally. It had all Vietnamese food even though it's labeled as a "French Bakery" and had SERIOUSLY GOOD BREAD. (They really did have a good bakery.) I had another huge thing of Mountain Dew, too.

So after that we head off to see Iao Valley and Iao Needle (the PC name... I'll leave you to look it up), which, let me tell you, Iao Valley is CRAZY gorgeous. It's walls are just so steep that you feel kind of trapped, but it's really cool. It becomes very obvious that Kamehameha's battle here that clogged the river with bodies so much it turned red is accurate. I really recommend it and I wish we'd had just a little more time there to explore and stuff (and I would love to go back and see if there is hiking there), but the Austrailian ladies had to get to another place and the rest of us were on our way somewhere else. Funnily enough, I didn't know we were still headed around to another coast, and I thought our tour was over. So I was very excited as we drove South and got to see Molokini and whales (TONS of whales surfacing and breaching even though whale season was like back in January!) and the gorgeous Southern shores. (Luckily earlier we had hit Haleakala with clear weather, but the clouds were rolling in as we left. Plus the tradewinds had been gone for the past few days and they'd been having vog problems, but I think they slowly came back over Sunday/Monday. It was still sort of sunny in Iao Valley but as we drove South it got sunnier.) So eventually we arrive in Lahaina and we have an hour to explore by ourselves. It is kind of like what Yellow Springs would be if they had the street festival every other weekend for tourists and it was on the ocean. There is a dock full of small tour bots (fishing, diving, everything) RIGHT THERE next to an old fort, in front of which is planted a GIGANTIC banyan tree. (Not the usual type of banyan you see here? I dunno, it's branches leaned out more than up.) All the art vendors were set up underneath it, and though they do this every other weekend it was a special weekend, celebrating the birthday of the tree. The tree was planted April 23rd back in the 1860s, I think. Very cool. So after checking out those artists and getting some gifts for people, I wandered around to the smaller stores around that central plaza seeing if I could find things for other people.

I walked into this little store selling jewelry on one side and world trade art stuff on the other (swords, blowguns, masks, jewelry, that sort of thing), and the lady noticed my shirt (QC Dashing Hat shirt) and said "oh only just a few more weeks!" and we got into this whole discussion of Crystal Skull and the crystal skulls and world travels and being Indy fans and she used to work at a resort as Indiana Joanna and it was awesome. So I got a picture with her and we exchanged addresses and it was tons of fun! That was the part that totally just made my day completely.

After that we headed back to the airport to drop off everyone left but me, and then to the Maui Seaside where I was staying.

Okay and now I just want to tell you a little more about Thadd the driver, because he made the tour, too. He is a total Hawaiian and when we first got in and he had us introduce ourselves he explained that he wanted us to be like a family for the day and that in order to get us more interested he would ask questions and give points and at the end of the day the winner would get a box of macnut chocolates. He was just so excited to be sharing his life with us, I really loved it. So at lunch we were talking and I was saying I was just traveling by myself, and he offered to let me sleep on his couch! It was so nice for him to offer even though UD was paying for my hotel and stuff. After that he offered to check up on me when I checked in and everything to make sure I found a good place to eat and offered to have his son drive the next day so I could get to a beach which was all really nice. I guess it sort of comes off as creepy or something explained like this, but he was just, I dunno, straight up Hawaiian. Maybe it just clicked because that is the sort of person I've always tried to be, I dunno. So I am calling him my Maui uncle (he's in my phone that way) and he said if we ever come back to Maui to call him up. And I said if he comes to Ohio he is more than welcome to couch surf there, too. =D

So, just between the beauty of the tour and my Maui uncle and Indiana Joanna, I really did have the best day ever. Though I crashed a little and I think maybe only the Mountain Dews and excitement kept me going, and hunting down souvenirs was a little frustrating and later after I eat dinner I will post about Monday and stuff (which is a whole different story).

But anyway, I love Maui.

ARRRRRGHAlkfjalkglakj.

I am just very frustrated today, over stupid stupid shit. I kept wanting to leave violent away messages but I think that scares a lot of people.

BUT in good news I freakin finally got my plans set for Maui. Found a day tour, found a hotel (that let me register being only 18... fuck you expedia), got a flight that was cheap. So now I just hope there's a good beach by the hotel (it's "waterfront" and faces the bay, and "close to beaches", but we'll see) and enough fun stuff I can find to do in the evenings. Er, and the next day. I dunno. Other than take a tour I'm not sure there's much "go on your own" type stuff. Soooo... we'll see.

Damnit, that's like the ONLY thing I got done today, too.

FUCK TODAY

FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT IT

I need to find something pleasingly constructive to take all this frustration out of, something that does not create drama. I FRIGGIN HATE DRAMAAAAAAAA