Something useful? . . . not. And crocheting

Hmm, I know I was going to blog about something. But now that I've logged in and gotten here and everything, I've forgotten what it was. So I'll just talk about my blanket.

I'm currently crocheting a blanket for my sister, mainly because I thought the pattern looked cool. Then, after starting it and telling everyone I was making it, I checked the actual size. It's meant for a queen sized bed. Yeah. . . this could take a while. Thankfully it's all granny stitch, so it's pretty easy, except for the color changing in a few of the squares, which is merely tedious.

Let's see, has anything else happened in my life? I went shopping with my mom for a few hours today, which was fun, except for the whole Saturday before Christmas thing. We first went to Michael's so we could get yarn. A lot of yarn. Eight skeins of it. But it's very nice yarn (called Simply Soft), and is apparently made of 20 percent recycled plastic bottled. Cool. Then we went to about five other places. My legs hurt! And the snow and other drivers made it terrible for driving, but we got it all done with and came home and now we're watching Stargate. :)

Sigh. I really really was going to blog about something useful. Really. Well, when it comes to me. . . .

Contest poetry

I feel better now after logging in and having seven messages and 35 notes. Lots of people appreciated my comments (even if allpoetry didn't *pout* :), and many commented on my poems as well.

The real reason I'm posting is for another interesting phenomenon of mine. It seems that most times I find a cool contest and enter a poem I really like, it gets an honorable mention or (more often) nothing. But whenever I kind of halfheartedly enter something just to enter it, it will do well.

Yesterday I entered this contest with a really cool picture, but I just wasn't doing that great on the inspiration, and kind of cranked out what I saw as an unoriginal and boring poem. I sighed, but entered it anyway, thinking I might as well try. And I got silver. :P I've decided the universe likes to torment me. . . .

Are you KIDDING me?!

So I'm fairly active on allpoetry.com, and I enjoy having all the perks of being a gold member. Problem: I don't have a job right now, so I can't do even the fifteen a month that it costs. Solution: if you're the top commenter of the day, you can win a week of gold membership. I did this on the seventh, and thought the whole "problem solution" thing should end there, but apparently not.

I found out today (the hard way) that you can't win twice in one week. I wasn't sure how much internet time I would have later this week for racking up the comments, so I was going to take the extra precaution of getting another week of gold right now. So I've been on most of the day, commenting and entering contests, like I normally do, slowly working my way up to first, which I accomplished around 12:30 (11:30 Pacific Time).

I thought I was in the clear, but when I checked back the person in second place was still gaining. I then entered into a desperate battle of numbers, but I knew I would win, I just knew. I really quickly read some short poems, gave some good comments, and, yes, managed to slip ahead just before one (midnight Pacific Time). Then, as I'm waiting to celebrate, I get the message "Congratulations on your great comments today! Unfortunately, you already won the top commentor award less than a week ago (on 2008-12-07), so you aren't eligible for an award today. Sorry for the bad news Thanks for being such an active member, and keep up the good work!"

I am not a happy person right now.

Hot Chocolate No Longer

Okay, so I swear for about the tenth time this week (and maybe 50th this month :P) I've wanted hot chocolate. Because of this, I get all excited, go heat the water, wash my big graduation mug and everything, make it, set it in front of me. . . and promptly forget about it. Then it gets cold, and I have to heat in the microwave, at which point I forget about it all over again. I've also done this with tea and ramen. My mind has lost the capacity to remember hot drinks. Just like it cannot store the information of where I put my cell phone last. Or maybe it's just cause I'm always up way too late. :)

So that was random, but I thought it was a rather interesting phenomena. And now I have that dang muppets song in my head. (phenomena, doo doo, doo doo doo, phenomona, doo doo doo doo. . . .)

And the crazy little kitten we recently adopted is rampaging about the livingroom again, chasing invisible nothings and meowing. Early she very efficiently stalked and captured a stuffed teddy, pouncing frantically and running from the room with it in her mouth. For a moment I really thought she'd caught a mouse, she was so protective and paranoid of her "kill". Lol :)

Spelling!!

This is why I could never win a spelling bee! I've long known that I learned most of my grammar and spelling from reading (and my mom), but this is apparently what happens when you grow up reading British books. Okay, so it started with my spell checker constantly stopping me from writing "arguement". It kept saying the proper word was "argument", which looked completely wrong to me. It also complains about "judgement" and "develope". Finally, having grown sick of this, I googled it, and found out that most of my spelling "errors" are actually British spellings of the words.

Problem: I spell by what looks right to me, and I've been using these spellings since I was very little, so they're what come naturally. Sigh. Oh well, I like having a little Brit English mixed in with my stories, and if I ever get published I'm sure they'll just slaughter and Americanize them at that point anyway. I forced my spellchecker to accept them all though, mwa ha ha ha to that.

So anyway, here's my list of words I apparently spell "wrong".

arguement
judgement
develope (still can't quite find a conclusive source on whether this is a British spelling or just a misspelling)(edit: apparently, it's just me being random and misspelling it)
dialogue (the American spelling for me is more slang, like "Let's sit and have a dialog, shall we?")
catalogue
dreampt
leapt
learnt
dwelt (etc, all of these look wrong to me with the "ed" on the end instead of the "t")
knitted
etc.

It's even gone so far that with some, like dialogue above, the British and American spellings have different connotations. e.g. I would use "color" to describe blue or green, but "colour" for physical changes. ("That's my favorite color" vs "Her face coloured with embarrassment")

Grey and gray are different for me as well, grey being more yellow, and gray being more blue.

And I know that lots of people use center and centre, as well as theater and theatre as words with almost different meanings, the latter, British spelling often connoting something of more sophistication.

Anyway, there are some others I jump back and forth with, but mostly I seem to be an American girl with British tendencies. Hmm, that sounds almost like I just said I was bisexual when it comes to literature. :)

I did it. Wow.

At the beginning of November, I really wanted to start this, but it was still kind of just a "yeah, I'll get a few pages out, get some ideas, but abandon it halfway through like everything else I do". I never quite believed that I would make it, even when I was staying a week ahead of schedule, and especially not when I spent three days writing nothing (twice). But I did it! I wrote 50,000 words in 25 days.

Now my goal is to actually finish this story. If I do that, it will be the first novel I've ever finished. That's my new goal, and I think it'll probably be much much harder. But I won NaNoWriMo almost a week ahead of schedule. Right now, I feel like I can do anything. This would make a great patronus moment, if you know what I mean. :) Yay!!

Oh, and I got ahead of my mom again. :) Bob, you're next!! (I can dream, right?)

And, in the way I do things, I wrote a poem about my success. For Once at Allpoetry.

NaNoWriMo

Those are my NaNo 2008 stats. Yep. I know I'll finish it, by this point that's basically inevitable, unless I die in the next few days. *looks around with a paranoid glare*

Yeah, I like that I actually wrote this year, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to actually do anything with this story. So much rambling description, so little good plot. Sigh. We will see when I read it after November is over.

The calendar isn't as pretty, but I think it's a cool widget, so I'll put it up here too.



edit: these widgets update each year, so they're no longer current to this post. They'll stay at 2010, since after that I changed my username.

Art and semi-writing

So I'm actually attempting NaNoWriMo this year, and I'm up to 36,669 words, around a week ahead of schedule. But for the past few days, I've been so bleh that I haven't written much of anything. So I've been drawing a bit, and have come to realize that I am a much better artist than I give myself credit for, especially when I'm not constantly comparing my art to that of other people, all of whom I see as being "better". So when I just draw unrestrained, I'm actually quite pleased with what I put out. Check out my deviantart for some of these new coolidinks pictures.

Oh, and one more problem. I haven't really written any poetry since August. Sigh. And here I thought I'd pushed past my problems with that and was actually going to keep it up fairly regularly. Sigh.


This thing below is to get me points on hatchlings, a game on facebook. Because I'm silly like that.

I. Hate. Money. Actually, I hate not having any. And how ridiculously expensive tuition is.

So I can't go to Westminster this semester. They want $12,000 for 13 credit hours. And I know half the reason the cost is so much is my own fault for getting my stupid ass on academic probation, but that's still just ridiculous. They basically offer NO financial aid for those who are struggling with their grades. Thanks a lot, school that screwed up my schedule and made me depressed and not wanting to go to class in the first place. I love you too.

So I'm not happy right now. I've been planning this whole time to move out in two weeks (because they basically didn't inform me about this until about a week ago, when I had to call in to ask for my account statement), and just now to find out I can't afford it and I'm going to have to stay at home. Which I don't really mind. . . but I wanted to go to the dorms for another year, to hang out with Katelyn-tachi and the rest of everyone I know up there. And now I can't take those cool anthropology classes either.

So I'm basically stuck at SLCC now. It's not too horrible, but it's still not Westminster. Jeez, I'm such an elitist now. :P At least I can get a job and a car now, and maybe help clean the house up. Sigh.

I. Hate. People. And improved sites. Which have people at them.

A never mind to that last post. The only good thing about improved sites is the spigots. Everything else sucks. Like icky biffies that are never pumped (going in the bushes is so much better). And other people, who are often worse than unpumped biffies.

Camping!!

I am incredibly sore. I just got back from an overnight camping trip with two of my friends, and have a sudden respect for "improved" sites. I mean, they kind of suck because there are more people and it's less "back to nature"y, but still. . . they have spigots and stuff. And you generally don't have to hike to them. Like we did. Loaded up with a ton of stuff. Yeah, trying to go up steep hills with a five person tent + poles + other random junk is really really painful, especially since the best way to carry said tent junk was on my back/shoulders. So my right shoulder is killing me, and I'm just generally sore all over. Although I got to take a shower finally. That was pretty awesome.

Of singing and whistling

Hmm, technically that last one was written on the 14th, so I haven't been slacking as much as it would suggest. I'm kind of wrecking the title of this blog, but it's mainly there as a cautionary for later when I lose the "novelty" or whatever of blogging and never come on here. It seems to happen to everything I do online. ADD, or whatever.

Anyway, my happiness for today is that I've rediscovered my love for Phantom of the Opera. I've been singing it all day long, and all of last night as well. :) And I read through my (very short) Phantom fic and liked it. Hee hee, mary sueness!

The poll is tied now, two votes for "Isn't this a trick question?" and two for "Cheese sauce". And I only know who one of those voters was. Actually, two of them, if I count myself. I voted for the trick question one, because of the lactose intolerance or something.

The 14th was a very good drawing day, I got a bunch or pictures started, worked on some, and even finished a couple. But the next day failed, as far as drawing goes. I hope today will be a somewhat good writing day, because I want to work on my fics. Oh, but yesterday was a very good singing day. I was hitting some pretty good notes in Phantom.

So I still can't whistle, at least not with my lips. But I've found I'm basically the only person I know who can whistle with my throat/back of my mouth and actually do tunes and scales (kind of). At least I can change the note up and down, though I do best when going up. It's pretty awesome. I'd do it now, but people are sleeping.

So that's about it. I need to go work on my manga, or something.

At least it's something

Yay, I have one other thingy in my poll. Cheese sauce. I basically just wanted the poll so I could have a poll. It looks spifty.

One more post before I sleep

Two posts in one day! I could just edit the other one, but this one is on a different subject. Actually, not really. It's just more randomness.

I was all excited, "yay, I have 11 profile views already", when I realized that all those views were me, checking up on everything and making sure it all looked pretty. Darn.

Oh well, I'm not really writing this for comments or to be popular. I enjoy talking to myself, basically, and this accomplishes that very well. And tagging things is fun too.

First Post (a.k.a. what a creative name *sarcasm*)

Okay, so I got on here just for the heck of it. And I've been wanting to better catalogue my thoughts for a while. Hmm, why doesn't the spell check accept catalogue? Is it a British spelling, or just a Danica-bad-spelling? Or maybe the spell checker is just stupid.