"Tangled" Tomorrow!

I am so extremely excited about this film, it's unbelievable. It's an obsession. I'm terrified it won't live up to my expectations. Augh, why do I do this to myself?

Here's a shiny new trailer--Japanese, no less!--which is a million times better than the standard American trailers. Why couldn't the American trailer been more like this one in tone? It gave both me AND my 16-year old brother goosebumps. Take a look. The audio is in English, never fear, although the voiceover is Japanese. I tried to get my brother to translate for me, but he was able to manage translating only about 60% of it.



I've been kidding my younger sister and saying that we shouldn't comb our hair until we watch the film. My younger sister is 10 and has never had a haircut, and my own hair is down to my knees, so we are major Rapunzel fans.

Sacramento was gorgeous and fun. The drive there and back went pretty well, all things considered--we got a new 12-seater van, which was really strange, especially since I was sitting in the back and found out the hard way that my parents in the front seats can't hear me when I'm way back there unless I yell at the top of my lungs. HR, my 6-week-old baby sister, cried sporadically but overall was extremely well-behaved. I'm very proud of her.

I did not recall in my championship, but I did place 22nd. To be ranked 22nd in the entire Western Region is not a bad thing; sure I wish I had placed high enough to be recalled, but I am grateful I was able to dance at all, and enjoyed myself. I haven't been to any big competitions in a long while.

My little siblings weren't that excited about the competitions, since they go to feises all the time; dance is old news now. Instead, they were excited about other things: a horde of cows we saw (and smelled) on the drive; trying to translate the Latin painted on the walls of the cathedral we attended Mass in; howling with laughter when the wind blew my umbrella inside-out during a rainstorm; seeing magpies for the first time; collecting the bright-red fallen maple leaves. I liked all that too, as well as the cold weather; it was nippy, but so refreshing a change, especially seeing all the fall colors.

There was a basketball court at the hotel we stayed at, so my dad got a basketball from the front desk and we all trooped outside to play. The littlest kids have never played basketball before, so it was fun teaching them and seeing them attempt to dribble and shoot a ball which is basically as big as them. Then we had an impromptu game after dividing up into teams. It was fun until my 16-year old brother for some reason decided to pass the ball to me by throwing it as hard as he could at my face while I was standing about two feet away from him. I was afraid I had broken my nose at first, but it seems okay now, though still very sore if I touch it. That was the end of the game for me, anyway.

Now I will spend the rest of the month focusing on exercising, "Tangled" (I am saving to buy the soundtrack and graphic novel), Thanksgiving, and my NaNoWriMo novel. Said novel is currently only at 15,000 words, partly because I spent the last week or so devoting all my writing energies to writing a birthday story for one of my sisters (it ended up being 38 pages long), and partly because of how dance has been eating up my time this month. I wrote a lot more on the car trip though, and I'm determined to get back on track. Somehow. I'll do it. I WILL.

Oireachtas Coming . . .

Oireachtas practicing officially started today, and I have the aches and pains to prove it. Plus, after losing my beautiful old hard shoes at my last competition due to a mix-up and REALLY poor management by the feis committee, I have a brand new pair to break in which, as any Irish dancer can tell you, means I'm going through a torturous time. I mean, I have blisters on my heels. Blisters, Gandalf! And I never get blisters any more, or at least not for a good many years. It's sad :(

Dance itself, however, remains wonderful. Frustrating at times of course, but always well worth the effort put into it, and more. Blisters become calluses, with a little time. I'll be fine.

Books! I've already finished my Nathan Hale biography, the first of the O'Brian novels I borrowed, and am now happily devouring both "The Mauritius Command" and my book on the American Revolution. So there will be a real proper Book of the Month this month, as well as a good number of reviews, huzzah!

As to writing, I've been determinedly plodding along, and it's going splendidly, actually! I'm really excited to actually be making this much progress in my novel. In addition, I am just getting more and more excited about NaNoWriMo! I've written up a little blurb about the story I'm planning to write--the type you'd see on the back of a book--but nothing more than that, so I can have enough creative freedom to actually write the 50,000 words without hitting a block. I'm trying not to plot ahead at all, which is difficult for me, but hopefully will prove a helpful exercise. I'll post the blurb here once October hits.

I'm currently typing this with only half of my attention; I'm mostly absorbed with an animated short I'm watching on Youtube, "The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello". Steampunk and silhouettes and adventure and creepiness, oh my! A friend recommended it to me, and I'm loving it so far.

Tomorrow I make a birthday card for my littlest brother, who will be turning five this week! And then I'll read some more, write some more, and attempt to make tapioca pudding with the contents of a really old box of tapioca I found in a kitchen cupboard the other day. Hopefully it'll be yummy, instead of poisoning me or something. We'll see, I guess . . .

PS: Just finished the film. Strongly recommend you check it out :)