Blogger is dumb and posted a blank bit. Soooo...

Barber Baby Bubbles and a Bumblebee.

So I'm back in school, once again. It's been incredibly hectic this past (not even) week, and already a new hurricane is approaching. All my classes are good, and I think I'll actually enjoy German. I'm still not fully unpacked, as everyone is dragging their feet getting my stuff out of storage, but it's slowly coming together.

This weekend was spent watching both volumes of Kill Bill for the first time, and drinking pina coladas. Diet starts again tomorrow.

It's already two, so off I go to bed. More info later.

It's time for flitterin'
Dusting off the trunk and flitterin' far
Where the grass is greener
Now and then, comes the time again, for flitterin'

We'll soon be packing up
Stacking up our dreams and bric-a-brac for
Some destination
Don't know where, but we're going there
We're flitterin', again

New places, new faces
New friendships will start
While old places, old faces
Stay dear to our heart

As we go flitterin'
Following a rainbow, flitterin' bright
Over the horizon
Maybe then and maybe there
We'll settle down and never care
For flitterin' flitterin' flitterin' again

At this point, I'm about midway or beyond in my packing. All my clothes are packed (except some for the next few days), my three bubble crates are packed, and most of the rest of my stuff has at least been gone through and condensed, if not packed. While packing I went through a stack of cassettes that my mom found in the Triangle. I found a copy of Jagged Little Pill that Ashley taped for me in the seventh grade, and belted along to it, feeling twelve years old, a little silly, and strangely angry at the male species. The most amusing find, however, was a blank tape from when I was fifteen. One side of it had stuff I'd taped off the radio: sadly, most of it was stuff from Celebrity Skin and assorted Metallica, with a little Rob Zombie and Orgy thrown in for good measure. But the other side...the other side had stuff from Unwelcome Guests!

I have no idea how I got a copy of all this stuff, but it probably had to do with Casey, or maybe somehow Axel. For those who haven't known me since I was fourteen (or ten), this was a ska band of students, mostly band geeks, mostly percussionists, that I was (good aquaintances? friends?) with in high school. The members, in one band or another, played at virtually every high school battle of the bands (except, of course, my all-time favorite one). I was once shown on the news cheering them on at one in Crane's Roost Park. Ahh, those were the days. As I listened to them today, I laughed. I winced. I laughed some more, and bopped around my room. I will be bringing this back to Florida with me.

Okay, so my family has all these little tapes from the camcorder. I finally got around to buying a pack of VHS tapes, and I'm currently in the process of transferring all of these. Since most of these tapes are from 1996-97, and all of them are from 96-2000, some of them are getting pretty old and crackly. As a result, my mom is having this copy be the "master copy" of VHS, and won't let me edit anything out. I have slight reservations, as there's a lot of memories on these tapes, but surprisingly it doesn't affect me (or Melissa, for example) nearly as much anymore. Just got through cringing at my freshman band festival - 40 people in a brand-new school and polo shirts. Ouch. And yes, Casey, you make an appearance. :) I have also noticed I had HUGE eyebrows when I was fourteen, and slouch waaay too much. And my freshman year, all the guys (like Casey) were my height! Too funny. Anyway, this means there's tons upon tons of my family on this tape, so all you school people (or, well, Michelle) will get to see who I talk about all the time.

Oh, and Melo, you're on the festival tape too! And I will send you an email describing the whole long "why I'm in Tennessee" thing as well. Or actually I can say it here; most people know and I don't much care. You see, at the end of senior year a bunch of stuff happened. One, my stepfather got diagnosed with prostate cancer; two, the owners of the house we rented decided we had done such a good job making the house look better that they wanted to sell it, thus kicking us out. Doug couldn't work, what with the cancer treatments, so my dad offered to have everyone move to Tennessee and stay with him while Doug got treatments. They moved about a month before graduation, so I lived with Katie through AP testing and all. Then they came back and got a condo for a month or so, for graduation and through June. We then went up to Tennessee and stayed with my dad (living in the basement, more or less). When the treatments were successful, they decided they liked Tennessee and decided to stay here. So now, it's like I'm away at college, even though I'm where I grew up. Weird, huh?

And yes, my parents had a very amicable divorce. Living with my dad for those six or so months, though, reinforced that my father drives my mother crazy, and probably vice versa, and they work best together when they see each other very rarely.

The amount of cleaning and packing I have to do tomorrow looms over my head, so off I go.

From the Rollins website:

"The start of classes for the College of Arts & Sciences and the Hamilton Holt School has been delayed until Wednesday, August 25. [...] Check-in for returning students is postponed until Tuesday, August 24."

Not quite sure how I feel about that... I think I'm going to go with all right; I'll be seeing certain people later than I wanted to, but I'll be seeing them soon enough, and my mom wasn't ready for me to go back yet anyway.

I'm mightily worried about all you kids in Florida. I've been gone all day, and come home to find out the possible Category 2 hurricane I heard about this morning is a 4! Let me know that everyone's okay when it blows over! This is one time I am glad I'm missing all the summer excitement. :P

I don't know what happened with that previous quiz. Sigh.

Rarrrr. I have been arguing with many people on the board concerning the movie The Village. I saw it on Monday, and I haven't yet posted a review on this board concerning it (and Catwoman, which was a double feature at the drive-in) because certain persons haven't yet seen the film. And since a large element of Shyamalan films is surprise, well, I'll hush for now. But....*grumble*

Catwoman, by the way, sucked, but actually not quite as bad as I expected. Luckily most of the cheesiest scenes (with the cliche 'cat' bits) are shown in the trailer, so it really doesn't get much worse than what you've already seen. Not necessarily much better, either, but you get the point.

Yesterday I started going through my boxes in the Bermuda Triangle. Understand, some of these hadn't been opened since I moved from Florida my senior year. After three years of searching, I *finally* found the cases to my NIN CDs, or more specifically, the cases to Pretty Hate Machine, Broken, and The Downward Spiral. I'm relatively sure the case to Further Down the Spiral is in the box as well, but I haven't hunted through the entire box yet.

Beyond finding that, I've stumbled across quite a bit, both that I didn't realize I missed and stuff that I didn't even realize I had. For example, to continue the NIN theme, I came across copies of the 1997 Spin magazine and the 1999 Rolling Stone that had Trent Reznor in it. While I do remember buying the Spin (and pulling out the pictures to decorate my walls, oh yes), I don't even remember purchasing the latter. Weird.

I also found more personal stuff, much of it amusing. Perhaps there will be more about that in the future.

Once again, off I go to make cookies.

So, the blue moon was still going strong tonight. Spoooooky.

I think it may have caused one of the dogs to act insane. He ate...something. I don't know what, but I don't want to know. It was a mammal. Both my mother and I were too upset to let him in the house. I just let him in finally, at 2 am, and put him straight to bed. I'm still disturbed. This may be the thing that tips me over to vegetarianism.

Went to dinner at Krista and Jim's tonight. Had a reasonably good time; we whined about the possible changes to the original Star Wars trilogy on the upcoming DVD release, watched some old episodes of the Osbournes (which, btw, I can understand waaaay better on the DVD than when it was on TV), ate some food. We laughed about Jack Osbourne, who of course has been forever tainted in my eyes. :P -Hohoho, I made a funny pun and that's not even who I was originally referring to.

Tonight I became re-obsessed with a book that creeped me out when I was little: John Bellairs' The Figure in the Shadows. Wonderful, wonderful book, aimed at the Harry Potter age group but really fun for all - and spooky as hell. If I can't find our copy when I go through the book boxes in the Bermuda Triangle, I will hunt down a copy. And I'm going to get the cover I remember, not this new goofy one. This is the proper cover:



Now, I simply need to find a larger ver. of this image so I can make an avatar. Later.