7 Days

In one week at the most I will have another little sibling to cuddle! I had lots of fun today spending time with other siblings. We played outside: A challenging game they invented called 'Hen, Chickens, and Fox' which was basically a complicated, crazy game of tag and surprisingly fun; hide-and-go-seek; a game they invented based on 'How to Train Your Dragon', and a few others. I then took the two youngest on a walk, which was so relaxing and pleasant . . . I should go on a walk every day. Everything just seemed to mellow down, become peaceful and calm . . . I made lemonade for them as a treat when we got back to the house, and then we all made cupcakes together! I had never tried this particular recipe before, but it was delicious and chocolate-y. I had such a wonderful day today, and the little ones were talking and talking about how much fun they had. I hope to make my newest sibling as happy once she is born.

Now I'm going to grab a half-hour or so of writing time before bed, and then will probably read more of my Revolutionary War history book before actually turning off the light. That's another luxury I've been starving myself of lately, in addition to taking leisurely walks: Reading in bed.

I just finished watching the latest episode of "Fringe", which is why I'm up so late. Seriously, "Fringe" has been amaaaazing this season. I'm so glad I decided to stick with this show after the lacklustre opening episodes of the first season, because it's incredibly good now. Especially Torv; I really disliked her character in the beginning of the show and thought her acting was horrid, and now I both love BOTH versions of Olivia and am consistently wowed by Torv's acting. So good.

All right, back to my book now!

Why I Shouldn't Procrastinate

I'm busily working on my little brother's birthday card. Since it's in the wee hours of the morning now, it is already his birthday. This is why I should not put off making cards and things until the last minute; I always end up losing sleep. To make things extra difficult, he asked that his card be butterfly themed. I don't know why. He assigned each sibling a theme: Dragons, Dinosaurs, and so on. I got the butterfly card. Problem is, butterflies are just about my least favorite things to draw. That might sound silly, but I mean it. I've just got a block when it comes to drawing butterflies. Even back in first grade, I remember being frustrated with them. I simply cannot draw a good butterfly.

So now I'm painstakingly trying to copy butterfly shapes and colors from various reference pictures online and having a ridiculously difficult time of it. He had better like this card when he gets it tomorrow ^_^

I'm listening to the "Inception" score while drawing. This helps a little bit.

The blisters on my feet, especially on my right foot, are really, really nasty and painful, but I'm trying to do everything I can to speed-heal them so I can compete this weekend without making an utter fool of myself onstage, eg., limping around instead of dancing. This is, scarily enough, a very real possibility, since I was not even able to put my soft shoe on my right foot at class today, let alone a hard shoe! I tried looking up tips online about how to heal blisters quickly, but I just ended up finding a bunch of articles warning me to take blisters easily because if they get infected they can lead to death or amputation. I'm paranoid enough without reading stuff like that, thank you kindly.

I think I'll finish this card tomorrow morning. I mean, today morning. Later. When the sun is up. Right.

'Night! Or . . . Morning! Whatever you like.

Hot . . .

You know how I mentioned it was chilly a little while back?

Scratch that. Yesterday broke records with a high of 113 or somesuch insane number. It is hot, hot, hot, HOT. When the wind blowing feels like an open oven scorching your face, you know you have problems.

And this is the beginning of autumn? Sigh.

It's Sunny Today

. . . which is nice, of course. And it's also a bit chilly, at least inside. That, to me, is the best sort of weather: chilly, crisp, and sunny.

Tomorrow is one of my little sister's birthday, and she has requested that I make her pretzels for reasons that I'm not aware of. I've never made pretzels before. But I'm going to give it a go anyway! I'm working on a few art projects right now, one of them being her birthday card. The other is a crossover project I challenged my brother to, where we have to combine the two films "Ratatouille" and "How to Train Your Dragon"--both of which are among my very favorite films, and both of which are rather similar to each other if you think about it. That's not a bad thing :D

I've been playing "Lego Star Wars" on the Wii--it's very, very fun--and in the game, if you shoot C-3PO, he loses a leg and starts hopping around, leading my littlest sister to start calling him 'The Hopping Droid'. It's pretty funny.

Work on my novel continues apace, and it's coming along. Very exciting. Even more exciting is the prospect of doing NaNoWriMo again this year, I can't wait! I am so determined to reach the required word count this year. Mm-hm.

And that's all really, nothing much else has been happening. Oh, I finally went to the library last weekend, only to discover that the library had absolutely NONE of the many books I was looking for. That was a huge disappointment. Hawaii libraries are SO much better than the ones here. Sigh.

Okay, I'm off to go dig the yeast out of the back of the fridge now . . .

It's September Already? Wow.

Hello again, everyone, it's been a while! Life's been keeping me busy--mostly battling off one infection after another, it's ridiculous--but I hope to start blogging more regularly again now. If I were back in Hawaii now, this would be my second week of my Junior year; as it is, I am keeping the brain cells busy by writing, dancing, studying for my driver's license, and, of course--reading!

Sadly, I have STILL not managed to snag any new reading material. An entire summer without one trip to the library--I just might explode with the frustration. As a result I STILL have no Book of the Month feature to regale you with. I will, however, list for you all the books that I have been reading. I've read them before, which is why they don't count for my list of new books read this year, but they were good enough for me to read them again--some for the second time, some for the umpteenth time--so perhaps you'd be interested to have a list of titles:

• The Shield Ring, by Rosemary Sutcliff
• The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
• The Pearls of Lutra, by Brian Jacques
• The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
• Watership Down, by Richard Adams
• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander
• The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

So, as you can tell, I've been re-reading a lot, and mostly lighter books too. Perhaps that is what comes from being around kids 24/7 now; I lapse back into enjoying books written for young adults and children instead of centuries-old literature. This is in no way a bad thing, as all the above books are among my favorite books ever (or at least most of them are) and settled snugly on my shelf next to my Iliad and War and Peace and Moby Dick, but it's still interesting. I go through 'reverting back to obsessing over childhood favorites' phases at time. I guess this is one of those times.

Dance is going well, but I'm trying to figure out a design for my new competition dress; mine is about 4 years old now, and in a competitive arena where dresses go out of style in mere months . . . yep, I'm wearing a relic. My family and I always design and sew my own dresses instead of shelling out a fortune on designer dresses like most other people do, so my dress has lasted longer than most, but it does look old now. Sigh. I've also promised my little brother that I'll dress up as Toothless the Dragon for Halloween so he can ride on my shoulders as Hiccup, so I have that to figure out too!

(Absolutely not-relevant side note here: I'm currently watching Star Wars on my computer as I type this, and just realized that one of Vader's officers is the same actor who played that American rocket captain in "Tomb of the Cybermen"! The one with the annoying fake accent who kept calling Victoria 'Vic'! This just made my day.)

I've been writing a lot, and even though it's pretty hard considering I've got a spot of writer's block, this means my novel is coming along now almost despite itself, haha. Yesterday I baked banana bread; my six year old sister was disappointed initially, but now says she loves it, especially with cream cheese. My little four year old brother however loves banana bread, and basically was asking me if he could eat it every five minutes after it came out of the oven until it was cooled enough to be cut. I do like baking! And making soups, too. I really want to make this lentil soup from a recipe I found recently; I like lentils almost as much as I like baking :)

That's enough rambling from me from now, so I leave you now only with a promise that I'll try to post more regularly and interestingly this month. Oh, and I've been drawing and doodling a lot, so I'll start posting those too.

And I'm 19 1/2 today. I should have made a cake or something, haha. Does this mean I get a wish half-fulfilled today? Hm.

And the Days Go By . . .

I seriously need to start working on my novel. I mean, I've been writing, sure, but not as much as I should. Starting tomorrow, I'm determined to treat this like it's my full-time job. The fairytale is coming along nicely; I hope to have the next part posted tomorrow, but we'll see; I have dance and things tomorrow that will take up time.

Dance is actually taking up a lot of time lately; I'm determined to get into the best condition possible for Regionals this year. Of course the practicing and training is hard work, but to my own surprise I'm finding it rather fun. Not that I don't usually enjoy dance anyway, but it can be wearisome to drill and work and work like that. Now, however, I'm enjoying the hard work. I think it's a side-effect of being forced to be largely inactive for long periods of time. After not being able to practice every day while in Hawaii, I better appreciate the simple fact that I CAN train hard, and am thus more likely to make use of that fact.

This week I finally got around to watching "Fringe", something I've been considering for a while. The first couple of episodes didn't really grab me, but I kept at it and, eleven episodes in, I'm enjoying the show a lot more than initially. It took a bit of time for me to warm up to the characters, I guess . . . or something, maybe the show's tone or pacing. (By the way, I was both delighted with and distracted by the usage of music from "Sunshine" in the Pilot episode. One of my favorite science fiction films ever!) Anyway, I'm having fun with it now. Even if I keep squealing "Denethor! Denethor!" every few minutes, hahaha . . . Still, this Walter Bishop fellow seems like the sort of guy Denethor might have been reincarnated into if such things happened . . . father-son issues, high intelligence, a dangerous interest in dangerous and weird powers/sciences . . . need I go on?

Anyway, now that I've wrested the keyboard back from my inner geek, I can turn my attention to other recent news. Nothing really important, I suppose: I stayed up until 3 AM baking cookies a few days ago, painted my younger sisters' nails, am now almost halfway through "Portrait of a Lady", and have been drawing a lot lately. I've also taught myself to crochet, so perhaps I can finally make those Doctor Who dolls! I made a little mad scientist already; I will post a photograph or two of him later. I still need new charcoal, drawing paper, and calligraphy ink. This weekend I hope to see "Inception", after looking forward to it for months. But first, of course, I need to attend to that writing. So much life to do, but so little time to do it in! Life sometimes just doesn't seem big enough for itself. But I'm sure it is; it's just I have to train my mind to use it properly and to its full potential.

My Week Thus Far

Nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary happened to me today, beyond an unusually chilly wind (for Hawaii, that is) whipping me in the face all the way to Russian class. And me nearly falling asleep during art class. I've been exhausted all week, I think because of the very busy weekend I had (Honolulu zoo, Lost premiere, heatstroke, homework, and more homework). I make a point of going to the school gym every Tuesday and Thursday for an hour, and this Tuesday I actually fell asleep while pedaling the exercise bike. Yeah, I've never done that before. I only woke up because I started to fall over to the side, and the thing was beeping at me to "Pedal faster".

Watched "LA X" again, only this time I got to see Part 2 as well as Part 1. Won't say much about it, in case you haven't watched it, because I don't like to be spoiler-y, but I will say right now that Richard and Desmond are absolutely my favorite (living) characters, and so nothing bad had better happen to them. Everyone else is fair game in my opinion, but leave those two alone!

I have my first Midterm of the semester this Friday. Yes, you read that correctly: MIDTERM. Who's bright idea was it to start giving multiple Midterm Exams? Isn't that sort of defeating the purpose of the meaning of 'mid'???

Sigh. Anyway, I'm currently cramming my brain with the workings of the digestive system, what percentage of my DV is composed of lipids, where bile comes from and what it's function is, and how many kcals are in a gram of protein. This nutrition stuff isn't really that hard to understand, it's just hard to remember everything.

This Friday I am going on retreat with about 20 other Catholic students to the North Shore, which should be awesome. I'm really looking forward to it. Also on Friday, I've arranged to meet with a Medieval Combat club on campus, which I'm also looking forward to (to my mother's dismay). Anything else of import looming on the horizon? Erm . . . not particularly. Only my birthday, but that's still about a month away, so let's not dwell on it yet.

I'm currently reading a science fiction novel called "The Copper Crown". It's actually quite entertaining: Basically, the story is that the ancient Celtic people of Ireland, on their famous sea-voyages, discovered the last remnants of Atlantis, who gave them the secrets of space travel. And so they built space ships and left Earth, setting up their own world many billion miles away. Flash forward to a few thousand years from our present day, and an Earth space ship stumbles across this Celtic planet and its people. Except they now call themselves Kelts, and their planet is Keltia. A meeting of two cultures ensues, swiftly followed by intergalactic wars, plots, magic, and mayhem, with a bit of traditional Irish culture thrown in for kicks.

Surprisingly, the book is pretty good. Perhaps I'm biased, being an Irish dancer and Irish mythology lover and all, but it's curiously entertaining to read about Keltic warriors driving their war chariots, living in castles, singing bardic lays and holding ceili dances, as well as wielding laser glaives in battle and using telepathy and enormous space-ships carved into bestial shapes like old Viking seaships. Somehow it works. So far (I have about 100 pages to go) I'd recommend it.

Anyway, back to the homework before I go to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a busy, busy day.

Farewell to 2009

It's even harder, in a way, to farewell 2009 than it was to farewell 2008 a year ago. Perhaps this is because 2009 ends in a 9, (which has always been one of my favorite numbers) and therefore is an odd number. I have always liked odd numbers better than even numbers. My mother says that's because I'm odd myself, which might very well be true, but whatever.

It might also be, however, because 2009 was such a very full, very exciting year. It's strange that although things happen and change, I never really feel like so very much is going on in my life, until I stop and reflect a moment like I do at the end of each year and realize, wow, I have had a full year! In January I watched "Inkheart" after a wait of many years and finished my first knitting project; in February I discovered the beauties of William Morris's writing; I turned eighteen in March; April was the Spam Jam at Waikiki, a rather unique experience; May marked my excruciating staph infection; in June I discovered the wonderful world of Bollywood; in July I managed to overcome adversity and actually compete at the Irish Dance National Championships despite my earlier illness, as well as explore beautiful Nashville; August meant the start of my sophomore year of college; in September I went museum-hopping, visiting such places as Queen Emma's Palace and the first Mission in Hawaii; October saw Father Damien be canonized, which was an amazing thing to experience in Hawaii, at the cathedral where he had been ordained; in November I participated in my first ever (but certainly not last!) NaNoWriMo and managed to pound out over 30,000 words, as well as had the opportunity to chop down a section of bamboo forest with a machete; and this December, of course, has been all family, fun, and Christmas cheer.

There's definitely been a mix of both good and bad this year, but that's how it is with all years, isn't it? What's most important is that I feel I got a lot out of it, and have grown as a student, a dancer, an author, and just a person. So yes, I will raise my glass to toast 2009, and although I feel a tinge of sadness as I always do with the ending of anything, I also welcome 2010 and all the adventures it still has in store--both for me, and for you. Happy New Year, everyone!