(And before anyone can freak out at me for killing off one of my most popular characters EVAR - this post is about Domerin my computer not Domerin the character :P)

I've known this time was coming for quite awhile. It happens. Computers get old. They get slow. They burn out. Eventually they stop working all together. Things happen unexpectedly. About a year ago the screen on my husband's computer died. There was no sign that it was going to happen just one day the screen was utterly blank. That was what lead us to replace the computer. Those are the sorts of things that usually prompt us to replace computers. I had high hopes for Domerin. I knew he was getting old but I figured I could get another good 8 months or so out of him. I planned to replace him about June 2010 (for my birthday).

The problems started at the end of September/ beginning of November. They started in the usual way; seemingly harmless. A blue screen. Nothing to worry about, you see them from time to time. You restart and they go away. The message was Hardware Failure. I shrugged, I restarted and I moved on with life.

But that's when the weird stuff started to happen. Errors when restarting. Unexplained dragging in the system. Programs not behaving the way they're supposed to. Things I couldn't quite put to words but I could tell. Something was wrong. Domerin was dying a slow and painful death. When you work with computers; hell when you OWN a computer, you get to know them. They have a personality. When something is wrong, when the system is nearing the end of it's life, you start to be able to tell.

It was about that time that my battery completely died. I used to get about ten minutes of battery that allowed me to move between classes without having to shut down. I had this habit of hitting the "home" button on my computer to wake it up (because it's often slow and sluggish to come out of stand by mode and I'm often impatient especially when I'm working on something). Pressing the home button opens Media Direct inside windows and wakes my computer up. This time, since my battery died without my noticing, it instead tried to boot up from the Media Direct partition (which I was too lazy to delete during my last reformat) which never had media direct properly installed. This somehow overwrote my master boot record and completely fucked up my file system (computer death for those who are less technically inclined).

So I went through the familiar process of reformatting, restored my computer to it's former glory and was prepared to move on with life.

Except that the same blue screen came back a week after I reformatted. I just have this feeling that if luck hadn't transpired to screw up my HD when it did, something else would have happened sooner or later. The weird little problems have persisted. I've had to re-install word about three times since I reformatted because it freaks out about the normal.dom even though I don't touch it. It's starting to give me errors again and I fear it's only a matter of time before reinstall number four. The system seems to get hotter than it used to when performing certain tasks (such as playing Guild Wars. I used to be able to play that game for three hours without worrying if I wanted to. Now I start to worry after a two hour session when my keyboard starts to get uncomfortably warm). Another blue screen, this time more severe than the last one. One day Explorer would crash every time I restarted. It would recover and crash again after five seconds until I restarted. Then my screen froze. Screen freezing used to be a sad and sorry fact of life back in the days of Windows 98 and Windows ME, but it doesn't happen so often in the world of Windows XP.

The message to me is clear; Domerin is dying. He's old. He's failing. It seems to me some piece of hardware is going dead, but I can't be sure which one. It could be a corrupted sector on my hard drive; the damn thing has been reformatted about four times in it's three year life. That eventually wears on the system.

But then I think back to my husband's last computer and I remember that it didn't last all that much longer than Domerin has. It was probably slightly younger, in fact, when the same thing happened; the battery died, and shortly after the screen. Three years for a laptop is a good long life. After that they become outdated. They become slow. They run but not the way you want them to. I knew this time was coming for Domerin but I hoped I could stretch our time together a little bit longer. Maybe that's the danger in giving your computer a name and personifying it. You get attached. It feels more like breaking off a friendship than setting aside a computer.

But Domerin's sudden death is my nightmare right now. I NEED a working computer to get my homework done. I can't keep fearing that someday I'm going to shut down my computer and it's never going to restart again. I dread loosing all the hard work I've done on a project so that I end up failing when presentation day comes around. Most of the work I have to do for these projects is cpu intensive; certainly not the sort of thing you want to do on a failing computer.

So the time came to bite the bullet. We ordered my new computer last week. It's a Dell XPs Studio 15 updated to Windows 7 Professional (Windows 7 yay!) with a 500 GB HD, 4 GB RAM and a pretty decent video card. I'm happy with it. Even slightly excited... but I will miss Domerin. My new computer is supposed to ship on the 23rd... so by the end of the month I should have a shiny new system.

As for Domerin, I don't plan on tossing him out (you don't just throw an old friend on the trash heap while he still functions!). I'm going to strip him down and install a Linux distribution in order to get more familiar with the system. I'm leaning towards either Ubuntu or Fedora (I'm more a fan of Fedora but Ubuntu is supposed to be more user friendly). However long he manages to last he'll continue to accommodate my learning. I've already had an offer from one of my school friends to take him when he finally dies and refurbish him, so I know eventually he'll go to a good home.

In the mean time I'm trying to decide what to name the new computer... but the final decision will have to wait until I "meet" it.

Well it has been a long time since I posted here... hasn't it?

(Added after finishing: This post is long o.o holy crap. I'm too lazy to cut it XD but I felt I should warn people about it's length)

I feel like so much has been happening in such a short time span for me lately, and it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on AND write about it at the same time. But I have decided that I really do need to set aside time to write about my reading week this semester because it was very special to me and I don't want to let any of the details slip away before I share it.

For the first time in my college school attendance, I blew off homework for reading week in favor of a pseudo vacation. This was the last opportunity I really knew I was going to have to take time off work without having to fight to get a week in a row. On top of that, myself, my husband and our good friend gloryinthunder had been trying for nearly three years to work out a time when we could all get together in person but it had never worked out, either because I couldn't leave the country, or because Wuffy moved and started a new job or any other number of things that popped up along the way. So we discussed it and we all decided to take advantage of this one last opportunity. The planets aligned, and everything managed to work out this time.

So on Saturday October 24th, I left work early, knowing that someone I spend about half my evening hours on any given week talking to and roleplaying with on the internet, someone who's very special and important to me, would be waiting for me when I got home. It made me giddy. I kept thinking about how we'd finally see each other in person. Of course I've met people in person before that I first knew online; my husband, for one. There's always this sense of ZOMG I'm finally going to get to see them in person and talk to them and be able to touch them... but at the same time you think ZOMG I hope they don't hate me once they meet me in person! It was less scary than the time I met my husband in person (since we're not dating LOL XD), but there was still a small sense of that anxiety. As I've found with my previous meetings, when that moment finally comes there's this one small moment where you just stop and stare and you think "ZOMG that's really him!" (or her as is the case, I also once met a female friend I met online in person as well when we moved to Toronto where she also lives). Then the moment passes, you shake yourself and realize you're staring and things proceed in 'normal time'.

The first thing we did was give Wuffy all the back presents that we had around the house for him; Christmas presents we had bought for him which were games that he could download and play as soon as we gave him the CD keys but never got around to sending the game boxes to him. And the Wii we conspired with several others to buy for him to replace the one that was recently stolen from him :P It was quite successful, I must say, and I think he both rather surprised and pleased with the gift (yay! :D)

Sadly I also got my period on the first day that he arrived... and everyone who knows me knows that means that I'm in terrible pain for 24 hours. Of course it's arrival pretty much coincided TO THE HOUR with Wuffy's flight's arrival. So of course that spoiled a few of our plans (but none that we weren't able to make up for later on! HAHA take that body!) and we ended up spending the rest of that day here at the apartment. I think that worked out for everyone because Wuffy had had quite a long way to travel and flying always sucks. We watched The Last Samurai because we've always liked it and Wuffy hadn't seen it yet. We got pizza for dinner and hung out and talked and it was totally awesome :D

Sunday, his first full day here, ended up being our down day since I was still in a fair amount of pain. I discovered I can take two roboxicet(sp?) and not pass out from the drowsiness so I managed to be MOSTLY myself which was a good thing. After we'd all roused ourselves and Frosty had gotten home from work, we mostly ended up hanging out and watching stuff. We watched the rest of season two of Metalocalypse(sp?) which is always awesome XD of course! There were a few rounds of Guild Wars - ironic because that's what we'd have been doing if Wuffy HADN'T been visiting XD and then in the evening we watched 300. We had originally planned to go to Halloween Haunt on this evening, but I was in too much pain to be able to walk around like that. Thankfully when we were planning the initial trip, we made sure Wuffy had one day at either end of the week when we'd be able to go to Halloween Haunt JUST IN CASE! Wuffy and I ended up being up pretty late that night just talking. It was great... it sounds silly. We've spoken so many times on MSN. And we tell each other practically everything all the time, and when we weren't staying up late RPing we used to stay up till all hours just talking. But there was something about sitting there on the same couch being able to see each other and hear each other and not having to type that was so refreshing! We talked about everything; life, the universe, stories, characters, role playing. Eventually we realized we don't do the staying up till 3 AM thing very well and retired for the evening.

Monday was our first venture downtown. We chose to go to the Science Center first because neither Frosty nor I had ever been there either. And hey.. it's SCIENCE! XD How can that not be fun? We took the bus and then the subway and then the bus again and then it was finally time for SCIENCE! We went to the Body Worlds; the story of a heart display first. For those that have never heard of it, this display is about the insides of the body, the muscles, the organs, the inner workings, and all of the things in the display are from real people - they've been plastinated (sp?) specifically for this display. So all of the people that you see with their muscles and arteries and organs showing are REAL people (or were at one point) who donated their bodies to the people who made this display. There were parts of it that were quite freaky (freaktastic as Wuffy would say XD)... like the guy who was spread eagle balanced on three wooden balls and holding up all of his internal organs in his free hand o.o Yeah.. And the sliced up giraffe at the end who's eyes you could see from the right angle even though it didn't actually have eyes... Yeah. But it was also really awesome. You could see how many arteries there are in the human body. You could also see what certain things (such as smoking) do to the body. You could really tell the damaged/diseased cells just by looking, before you even read the descriptions, they'd be all black and icky looking. Wuffy pointed out that the black, icky smoker's lungs is what's going to happen to Domerin someday XD

After Body Worlds, we walked through one of the fun sections of the Science Center and played around with some of the SCIENCE! Then we visited the space area and played cosmic pinball XD (we won!) and played with the display where you could "send balls into a black hole". After a brief snack we then hit the science arcade which is great because you get to play with the science XD We had such a great time! At the end, right before closing, Wuffy and Frosty talked me into going up to the van-de-graff generator thing that one of the staff was running so that my hair would poof out all over the place so Wuffy could take my picture XD I could feel little shocks running up from my head while I was shaking it and then the science guy put his hand out towards me to 'mix our energies' and I could feel it when his hand got close to me (we totally did it ZOMG! XD /geek)

We stayed at the Science Center pretty much till closing time. We had a great awesome amazing time :D Then we took the bus and the subway and the bus back up towards home and took Wuffy out to eat at Montana's (which is a Canadian steak-house style restaurant). Like many of us, since they no longer give you crayons to color on their brown paper table cloths, Wuffy defied them by drawing on it with his pen XD We got the good spinach and cheese dip and my husband was SO horrified by the fact that he accidentally hailed down the wrong waitress that he tipped extra (seriously). Then we headed back to the apartment for another round of Guild Wars and hanging out before we all passed out in bed.

Tuesday we had decided to go see The Invention of Lying in the evening. Frosty had school so we had some time to kill in the afternoon. Wuffy and I took a slow walk down to the Promenade mall (about 20 minutes closer to this place than our old place). We spent the walk pretty much just talking again. It was nice weather and we had a good time. We talked about how awesome it was to be together for once, and how much it sucked to live so far away from each other. We resolved to get skype set up again so we can talk to each other more often and that made me feel alot better (I hope it made him feel better too). When we got to the mall we were both thirsty as hell so we went to Yogen Fruz and got some smoothies. Then we pretty much just wandered around the mall. I took Wuffy to the T&T Supermarket which is an asian market with some pretty awesome stuff. We visited the really awesome china store that everyone falls in love with first so he could get a mug for the person watching his cats. Then we went to the trinkets store which is fun to go through. He got a change purse that was pretty kewl (to hold his Canadian one and two dollar coins XD) and then we wandered around the super market to see what all you can get. I took him to the sea food section since they have a pretty impressive live sea food section and we found a sign that asked customers to please not squeeze the lobsters (XD!!!) We ended up going through the Carleton Cards store on the way out because I found this cute little Halloween thing that danced to the Ghostbusters music!! We found some really horrible sound cards XD and then for more amusement we stopped at the "As Seen on TV" store. We found "ShamWow!"s and "The original Shammy"s which looked exactly the same (so which was the rip off? XD) and some kind of exercise contraption which we couldn't figure out if you were supposed to sit or stand on (neither looked safe or comfortable). Then we took another leisurely stroll back home.

When Frosty got done with school we took the bus down to meet him at the subway station and went to see the movie. Before the movie we got a snack of Poutine from New York Fries. For those who don't know - poutine is a Canadian dish which is basically made up of french fries, gravy and cheese shavings (or cheese curds). It's WONDERFUL ZOMG, and we make all of our American friends who visit try some :D Wuffy even took a picture of the poutine before he ate it XD Then we saw The Invention of Lying which was pretty funny. I <3 Ricky Gervase so much XD and it was a fun little movie. After the movie we walked down the street to a pub for a proper dinner. Then we headed home for smoothies and another round of Guild Wars before bed (hey we had to do the halloween stuff ZOMG!)

Wednesday we headed back down town for a trip to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum). Frosty and I LOVE the ROM. We've been there several times since we moved here, but our last trip was quite awhile back (I think when Kristin and Jake were here and we saw the feathered dinosaurs exhibit). We hadn't been there since they opened their newest renovation. We knew we had to take Wuffy there because we knew he'd be able to appreciate it with the same geeky joy that we do, and also because the Dead Sea Scrolls are on display until January. We hit that display first and it was pretty kewl. They had alot of information on the culture at the time and it gave alot of context to the scrolls. Then they had a room that was really dim where they had display cases that had actual fragments of the scrolls in them. They were pretty awesome to behold. After making it through that exhibit and the dead sea scrolls gift shop (seriously! x.x) we grabbed some lunch and then set off to enjoy the rest of the museum.

I must say, we were quite impressed. Now that we've seen the museum after the renovation, it's twice as awesome as it used to be! They have SO much more room for exhibits than they used to! And so many things are laid out so much better than they were before. They even have a bunch more exhibits that they didn't have set up when we were there last time. We tried to hit as much as we could. Of course there was Greece and Egypt and middle eastern cultures. Then we headed down the stairs to hit the dinosaurs (which are three times as awesome as they used to be!!!). Wuffy really enjoyed that section, I think. He really really knows his dinosaurs o.o holy crap! He named most of them without looking at the labels! After dinosaurs and large mammals we hit the bat cave, which is a must for each trip to the ROM. After that we settled down on a bench to sneak a quick drink and when we got up my husband pointed out the 'please no eating or drinking' sign we'd inadvertently sat in front of XD Since Wuffy was our resident American, we took a picture of him in front of the sign before we moved on. Our last stop was the China, Korea and Japan area which is also much larger than it used to be. Before the ROM closed we also took a quick trip to the Canada area to look at one of the historical paintings. After braving the museum gift shop, we headed home through the rush hour traffic.

As most of my LJ friends list already know, Thanksgiving in Canada occurs in October. My husband's parents visited for Canadian Thanksgiving this year because they wanted to help us finish getting our apartment in order. After we had finished the huge meal, it was clear we still had a TON of turkey left over, so we froze most of the left overs so we could eat them while Wuffy was visiting. This also gave me a chance to inflict dried corn (a PA dutch dish) on him as well XD It was Wednesday night after the museum that we thawed out the thanksgiving dinner and shared it. I discovered that I can make mashed potatoes! XD It was very yummy. We had Boston Cream Cake for desert :D

On Wednesday morning we had set out what we intended to do for the rest of the week. Probably because we realized there had been so many things we wanted to do that we'd better get our ducks in a row if we wanted to get all of them done. I felt a small shock to realize that there were only three full days left in Wuffy's trip. A week is such a short period of time. Especially when you're having fun. I started to feel the fact that the trip was nearing the end very keenly on Thursday morning, but I firmly put it aside and threw myself into enjoying the last two days.

On Thursday we decided to go to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). We had originally planned to go to the CN tower but we couldn't find any information about the brunch which my co-workers recommended and the restaurant in the tower that rotates around it sounded extremely expensive. We decided it wasn't worth paying so much money to go up into the tower to spend 15 minutes up there and instead decided to go to the AGO (which neither me nor my husband have either been to either). The morning started out pretty well - we took a picture of me outside in front of the giant Anubis statue which is advertising the King Tut exhibit they will be getting soon (sadly it wasn't there for when Wuffy was here :( and we saw this abysmal looking building that was labeled FUN in all capital letters which made us chuckle. The art gallery itself? Well we weren't all that impressed. I guess that's the problem with art galleries. There was so little in the modern sections which we considered "art". It was hard to respect it. And it was even harder to enjoy because they had security officers roaming EVERYWHERE. They practically shadowed us the entire time. I got yelled at on the fourth floor because my finger brushed one of the displays in the middle of the room (and yeah it was somewhat intentional. But it wasn't art so I don't even feel bad (ZOMG!)). Frosty got yelled at on the second floor for leaning in to look at a painting (yes, my husband, the most harmless person/thing in the world got yelled at!) "Please stay at least one foot from the displays sir". Then there was the time we were in one room and there was a painting of a guy in leopard print pants (in the Canadian section I should add) so we joked that he had to import the pants and laughed... and one of the security guards came running because WE WERE ENJOYING THE ART TOO MUCH ZOMFG!!! By the time we finally found the good art we were too discouraged by all the pretentiousness (and dim lighting holy crap!) that we didn't really enjoy it (not even the shadow puppets with the sexual and violent content - yes you read that right). After having spent an arm and a leg to eat in their pretentious cafe and killing ourselves walking up their deceptive stairs, and enjoyed the view of the CN tower more than the art, we dubbed it "The Pretentious AGO" and took our leave.

Now I should stop for a moment and say that we did actually have some fun while we were there. And the model boat section was pretty awesome. I've been to the MET (Metropolitan Museum of Art) on at least two different occasions before and I rather enjoyed it. I guess as the name implies it is a MUSEUM of art rather than an art GALLERY and maybe that makes all of the difference. I have always enjoyed my trips to the MET. I don't think I'd go back to the AGO (except that I HAVE to go back to see the King Tut exhibit but they don't need to know that).

After we vacated the pretentious AGO we took Wuffy to a few other must see sights. The first one was The World's Biggest Bookstore. Being that we all read fantasy and science fiction and that he works in a library, we had to go and admire the sheer size of the store and the amount of books in there. Someday I want to have a personal collection that big - no kidding! Then we walked down the street to the Eton center and showed Wuffy the super old church that half the city has been built around. After that we headed even further downtown so that we could have dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. We met Frosty's mom there for dinner. She had come down for a meeting which then got canceled O.o so she ended up going to a different conference about management instead. We had a great time! The Rainforest Cafe is always awesome! After dinner we went to Yogen Fruz for desert and sat up by the movie theater just talking and hanging out for a bit. We went home and resignedly retired - for Friday meant the end of Wuffy's trip.. but it also meant the absolute highlight of the trip which was HALLOWEEN HAUNT!!!!

Friday I was awakened by a surprise. My husband came in to let me know he didn't have time to discuss it but he had to go to the airport NOW (ZOMG!). Being only half awake I panicked and though something had happened to Wuffy in the middle of the night, but no, it turned out his mom had lost her purse in someone's car and actually needed to go to Barrie to get it back (long story). Anyway while we waited for him to get back, Wuffy and I spent the morning watching Rocky Horror Picture Show because it is a Halloween MUST. I will admit I did feel a small sense of dread hanging over my head on Friday. I knew that Saturday was the day Wuffy was leaving and I really didn't want him to have to leave. I was enjoying his visit way too much. But again I put it firmly aside and had a good time. Since I couldn't wear my Halloween costume to Halloween Haunt, I wore it around the house for awhile and got Wuffy to take the pictures I promised for everyone. We watched Into the Woods after Rocky Horror, with a pause in between acts for lunch. By the time we had finished watching that, it was time to get ready and go pick up my brother-in-law for Halloween Haunt!

We stopped at a Tim Hortons to eat before Halloween Haunt, because we didn't want anything too heavy before going to get the crap scared out of us and ride all those rides. This also gave Wuffy the FULL Canadian experience because, of course, Tim Hortons is another staple of every visit to Canada. After dinner it was finally time for Halloween Haunt! :D We were understandably excited... since we'd been waiting for THIS year's Halloween Haunt ever since we left LAST Year's Halloween Haunt XD It is one of the most fun things I've ever attended. It's so much better than Wonderland during the day! The way they have it decorated, the people all dressed up, the scare factor XD the rides at night. It's just great. We got all into it this year, talking to the monsters and stuff LOL sometimes they even interact with you XD I even figured out how to go through the mazes without getting too jumpy - if you "apply the zen factor" and look very calm, they leave you alone mostly (though of course they still try to get you). If you huddle together and act scared they'll target you ALOT XD We came out of one maze and these girls were running from this guy - who just chased them XD For quite awhile. It was hilarious. There were two new mazes which were pretty frekin' awesome, especially the one in the forest with the enchanted creatures. Somehow one of the creatures managed to sneak up on me EVEN THOUGH I should have been looking directly at him XD How he moved that fast I'll never know.

We all had a great time! At the end we stopped to get Dairy Queen and took Wuffy to the gift shop so he could get a mug (Now we all have Halloween Haunt mugs ZOMG!) It was horrible to try to get out of the parking lot since we ended up staying till closing, but we had fun giving names (mostly ones like "dickhead") to the cars that were trying to get out of the park with us and we discovered that Wuffy PROBABLY wouldn't drive that way (:P) By the time we got home we were all exhausted. We agreed on a time to get up the next morning and we all passed out (it was 1 AM by that point).

Needless to say, I was not a happy person on Saturday morning. I don't deal well with goodbyes, I'll be honest. I hate that all the people I care about most live very far away from me. It's very precious to me the times that I get to see them and spend with them. When they're visiting me (or when I'm visiting them), I want it to last forever. I don't like parting. We'd had such an amazing week and now reality was looming over my head. Wuffy was going to be far away again. There was going to be homework to do, and school to go back to, and work would eventually come around again. I wished (and I still do) that Wuffy could have just stayed forever. But if wishes were horses then fools would ride, and reality always comes crashing in on your vacation to remind you you have to get back to normal life. My mother-in-law was still in town so she drove us to the airport to see Wuffy off. By the time we got there, there wasn't much time. We didn't even end up going inside, we just dropped him off, got his bags out of the car and hugged him goodbye. I felt really bad... like we'd somehow dumped him off. Of course I know he's an adult and he doesn't need help in the airport, but I wanted to stretch out my Wuffy moments as long as I could. As soon as he disappeared inside the airport and the car was moving again.. I finally lost it. Yes, I'm a crybaby (I'll readily admit it). But I'm glad I could at least hold out until after he was gone.

I can easily say this was one of the most fun weeks of my life. I had a great time, and I got to meet someone who's very special to me and get to be closer to them. That's something that I wouldn't trade for anything. Not only that, but I SOOO NEEDED that week. I'm finally recovered from the move, from the summer, from the first half of the semester. I feel like MYSELF again. I feel like I can face the world again, even though I know it's going to be a really rocky two months with the end of the semester being so busy and work on top of it (and my computer being about to die but that's the subject of another post). Even though I'm sad it's over, I've embedded every moment of that week into my mind to recall fondly whenever I need a mental break. And we've already discussed doing it again. Wuffy wants to come back and we want to save our pennies to go and visit him. That makes me happy. Happier than I can really put into words.

It's been so long since I had a chance to sit down and post... I hardly know where to start any more. Pretty much every week I've meant to sit down and dump my mind out into words here and pretty much every week something comes up that prevents me from having time to do so. First it was the the fact that none of my teachers seem to understand the concept of "read one chapter a week" but would instead rather we read half the book in a week (when you have to do that with four different books it doesn't quite get done). Then there was the time that one of my teachers canceled class and sent us 25 emails worth of readings to summarize in it's place. Add that to the sheer number of reports and other assignments I've had to keep me hopping over the past few weeks and you've got a joyful old time.

But this past week was just one nightmare after another. I swear the universe has it out for me somehow.

It started on Monday. I was feeling pretty good on Monday because I had finished most of my assignments early. I had finally started to feel better after being sick the week before and I felt like things were going to turn around (finally). I spent one of my classes helping one of my partners for one of my other classes finish the perl scripting assignment because she was having some trouble with it. After I ended up tutoring half the class I was feeling pretty good and couldn't wait to get home and tackle the rest of the tasks I had to get behind me for the day.

About four hours after I got home I realized I left my external hard drive which I absolutely NEED to have for my security classes in class. Since it was five hours after the fact, the class that was in there after ours was long gone and I had no way of doing anything until the next day. Luckily the friend I had helped with her assignment was still at school and took a run back up to the room for me. She got me the name of the professor who was in there after us and I managed to get an email to him to let him know I had left a hard drive in there and ask if any of his students turned it in. I should mention at this point that I go to school largely with assholes - most Seneca students, when they find an external hard drive, will pocket it, rather than try to find the owner. Free hard drive woo! is probably what they say to themselves. So I wasn't very hopeful at all about getting it back. It would have been $75 had I had to replace it, so I was feeling the pain of dropping that much money to replace something. Luckily there wasn't anything sensitive or any work I had done on said hard drive so I wouldn't have been set back school work wise if I hadn't been able to recover it.

Luckily, however, the student who found it fessed up to the professor and asked for information to verify that I was the rightful owner. I gladly supplied a huge paragraph worth of information about the drive and the person who found it agreed to meet me on Wednesday morning to deliver it to me. I was QUITE relieved, if you can imagine.

No sooner did I get all THAT worked out, however, than did Domerin (my laptop) die completely and utterly. We're still not sure what, exactly, happened. I was working away at a report and put my computer into stand-by long enough to change classes. I always do this because my battery barely works any more and if I go into stand by I can usually get ten minutes to run from one class to another. I have reason to believe on this particular day, however, my battery finally decided to die completely (needless to say I now shut down in between classes rather than take the risk). In any case, I must not have noticed my computer was turned off. I have a habit of pressing the 'media direct' button on my laptop to wake it up if it doesn't seem like wiggling the mouse is going to do it. He's finicky, after all. Normally this opens the media direct window inside windows and effectively wakes up my computer. On Tuesday it instead tried to open the media direct partition (on which media direct was never properly installed) and we think this somehow managed to over-write the master boot record. For those that have no idea about computers and that sounded like gobbledegook let me just say it means I was royally screwed.

So there I am with all my files sitting there unharmed on my computer, my windows operating system perfectly fine with no virus infections and all my lovely programs installed and ready to go and my damn computer can't find the damn operating system to load it.

Of course being that I work in IT you'd think this would be no problem for me. Except that I can fix other people's computers till the cows come home but as soon as it's MY computer I freak out and have no idea what to do. SO I run back to my last class to get my friends and class partners Danny and Dave (the two guys I trust most in that school) and ask them to help me fix my computer. They fought valiantly for four hours. My husband even brought me my XP install disk, but it was to no avail. The file system was just too screwed to be salvaged. Alas.

Luckily for me, I'm sort of used to this by now. Looking back it hasn't even been a year since my last reformat. In fact I don't even think it's been a full six months since my last reformat, or if it was it wasn't that much more than that. I keep obsessive backups because I know that it's inevitable that computers fail. I did a backup just before this semester started because I had some sort of premonition that I would be reformatting this semester (call it instinct). So the only things I was missing were the reports I had been working on for school literally that day. Also luckily for me we had a tiny 2GB partition that had nothing on it that I needed and it just so happens you only need 1.5 GB to install windows XP. So Dave ran a quick installation for me and set it up so that I could grab the few things I needed for school before I did a reformat.

But of course reformatting my hard drive is basically a 48 hour marathon of re-installations and copying data till I finally get everything back up and running again. And of course while I'm doing that... none of my school work is getting done.

By now you can't even tell I reformatted (unless you're me, because I moved some things around this time to make things more organized) but I'm also pretty much behind on everything. I have a major report due on Wednesday which I have to put together in the next two days (if I can ever gather all the information from my team mates) and I STILL have to finish my damn APL report which I swear, come hell or high water, will be done by this Thursday (even if the universe seems hell bent on preventing that)! Friday I had my first test of the semester so I pretty much shifted gears to concentrate on that and leave the rest of the homework heavy lifting for the weekend.

You can imagine by Saturday I was ready to just get my single work shift of the week over with so that I could settle down for some relaxation. Despite the fact that there's going to be an awful lot of homework mixed in with it, at least I knew I'd have some time to relax and rest and not have to worry about any form of crisis (at least none that were mine). Work was even pretty quiet - that maybe should have been my first clue.

On Saturdays I only get a half an hour for lunch. Now that's not an issue any more because there's a place where I ALWAYS go for lunch that's literally right across the street from where I work. Five minutes to get lunch and life is good. I always pay with my debit card, because half the time I forget to take cash out of the bank and just don't have any with me. Yesterday I had literally $1.75 on me. And my debit card was declined. 3 times.

So there's an ATM right down the stairs from the place where I'm getting lunch. I run like the wind down stairs to get some money. Only the ATM gives me an error and says 'check receipt' and the receipt says my bank balance is $0.

-My bank balance is WAY more than $0. As well it should be after pouring six years worth of savings into it.

At that point I was ready to freak out. I'm studying computer security - I KNOW about all the deep dark bad things people can do with computers, including breaking into your bank account. Even though I KNOW for a fact we've never logged into our online bank account with any computer other than my husband's, and even though I KNOW what happened to my computer was no one's fault but my own. I still can't help but worry that somehow, someone managed to break into our bank account and drain it dry. My heart skipped a beat.

I ran back up stairs to the place where I was trying to buy lunch and let the lady serving me know that there was a problem with my bank card and I had to go to the bank. I also had to let her know that unfortunately I don't have any money to pay her. Luckily for me, I'm a regular and she knows me and she says it's okay that I pay her next week. Relieved and highly embarrassed I returned to the office to call my husband and inform him of what was going on. We tried logging into the online banking from my work computer but it wasn't working so I tried to call the bank's customer service numbers. Neither of those worked either. At that point I remembered there's a branch of our bank about five minutes walk from where I work. I informed my supervisor that I had to deal with a minor personal crisis and practically RAN to the bank. (When I got back one of my co-workers asked "where you running?" and I said "Man, you think all your money is gone from your bank account you don't walk. You RUN.")

When I got to the bank I gave the teller both my debit card and the debit receipt and asked him what was going on. He checked the account and assured me the balance was not $0. I didn't ask to see the account balance because he hadn't asked me for any kind of photo ID and I know how much SHOULD be in there. He said there was a flag on my card because they think someone tried to copy it. When that happens they lock the card so that it can't get any money out of the account. It means I have to get a new debit card and create a new PIN code, but it also means our money is safe. He told me the alert happened on Saturday morning but he couldn't tell me the time. When he started to explain about how cards can get copied I told him it was okay, I understood because I work in IT and I know the kinds of things that can happen. I could have gotten a new debit card right then and there but the help desk line was long and I was supposed to be working... nor did I actually NEED any money at that point since I already had lunch and I was meeting my husband and his family later that evening for dinner and movie, at which point my husband could just give me money. I made sure that he wasn't suffering the same lock out of his debit card then left the bank to call my hubby and let him know what happened.

As soon as he got home he checked the online banking to make sure the account balance was correct. There were no strange withdrawals and the balance was as it should be. Heart Attack averted.

But it was scary. The thought of loosing everything we've worked for six years to build, when we just moved into a new, more expensive apartment, and my husband is probably only about 8 months away from quitting his job since he won't be able to work when he gets into teacher's college. I about had a heart attack. I remember feeling somewhat giddy afterward, as if I couldn't really take the rest of the day seriously after having been through that. All I cared about at the time was making sure our money was safe, and after that I just felt like nothing else really mattered.

Having to work helped ground me back in reality, however. After work I went with my husband and his family to see 9 which was really good, although I do wish it had been a bit longer (though at the same time it's just long enough for the story to run it's natural course so that's just my own selfish wish that it was longer because I was enjoying it so much). I'm hoping the universe is done trying to scare me out of my mind, at least for a little while. It'd be nice to get through a week without having to have a crisis of some kind.

Dear Microsoft,

FUCK YOU. I hate you. But you already know that. I, like so many others out there, only put up with your shitty products because there are WORSE things out there (as hard as that may be to believe) and they just happen to work better for whatever the desired purpose is.

I used to use about five different messenger programs. Then I started using Trillian, which allows you to connect to all five of those messenger programs from one handy interface. Then, when Trillian's features started to become incompatible with the newer features of some of the messengers I used, I switched to one and only one messenger, that being MSN messenger, because out of all the ones I used, I liked it the best. It featured a smooth, sleek interface that was small and simple. It wasn't flashy. It didn't take up too much room. It allowed me to customize things like my username and the picture I wanted people to associate with me with minimal effort in changing it. It allowed me to have multiple people in a single conversation without having to open some kind of chat. It allowed me to save my chat conversations. It didn't annoy the crap out of me while I was using it.

Life was blissful for many years.

Then Microsoft did something stupid - why should that surprise anyone, isn't that how it always goes? - They decided that they HAD to update the MSN messenger program to make it flashy. Did someone, somewhere in your company have the idea that BIGGER and FLASHIER was BETTER? Because I have some news for them, that's so far from true that I can't even begin to put it into words.

I loved my smooth, simple MSN interface. I clung to it. I refused every upgrade that came my way until, alas, I was FORCED against my will to accept the newest update and make due with the new "better" version of my beloved messenger. This is how the pattern persisted for quite some time. Each and every time that I was forced to "upgrade" to the newer "better" product, I swallowed my sorrow and moved on with life. In the end I was always able to adjust; the new changes weren't REALLY all that bad.

But then Microsoft did something so unbelievably stupid I can't even put it into words. They invented "Windows Live Messenger". For over a year I have dreaded the time when I would be FORCED, once again, to upgrade to the newest version of the messenger program. MSN Live messenger is beyond ugly, beyond annoying. I can't stand to look at it. I can't set it up the way I want it. Everything is backwards. Everything is ginormous. What is this horrible piece of crap that has invaded my smooth, sleek messenger service?!

And then today it finally happened. I viewed the "You cannot proceed without updating to the newest version of MSN messenger" window with a great deal of disgust. I hit "no" several times, but alas, there really was no way to sign in until I performed the dreaded update.

I used the newest version of MSN Live Messenger for about ten minutes. I refuse to be saddled with it. Each and every program marked "MSN Live" has been uninstalled from my computer. I will never go back. Never. Never. Ever. I would rather not feel like puking every time I want to talk to one of my online friends, thanks. I have reverted to Trillian which is, for the moment, far less annoying, and much easier on the eyes. I will not touch another MSN Live Messenger program until it becomes far less ugly and far less annoying (so probably never). There are plenty of other alternatives out there, so should Trillian cease to amuse me, it too will fall by the wayside and something else will take it's place.

I refuse to use a program that is going to force me to "upgrade" and then drive me absolutely insane. I don't use internet explorer anymore either, for some of the same reasons, and of course for many many others. If only you could play more games on Linux, then I could abandon windows all together! *sigh*

So in conclusion, Microsoft, please kiss my ass.

Well I haven't had a chance to write a post since we got into the new place... so I think it's about time. There's so much I have wanted to say over the past week... I'm not even sure if I can remember it all now. But I'll do my best.

It sure was a good ship
The place we just moved out of was our first place, the first place that me and my husband lived together, the first place we lived outside of our parents homes. It was the first place that was "ours". It was just a basement apartment. It was small, there weren't many windows, the shower was small, and we had limited control over certain aspects of the apartment (such as the temperature), but it was a really good first place for a couple just starting out. The landlord was extremely nice. He let us paint to make the apartment look the way we wanted it to. Despite it's limitations, we were happy there. Certainly we were content enough that we didn't want to move even when we found out we had to.

Now that we've left that place, it's easier to see how... well crappy it was in alot of respects. The air didn't circulate very well due to the fact that we only had two tiny windows, and both in places which were tucked out of the way. It wasn't very bright in there because we didn't get much natural light. If you didn't take an active interest in the weather outside, you could pass the whole day never knowing what the weather was like outside. Because we shared the internet with our landlord, and because the wireless router was in his house, we had to call him whenever there was an issue with the internet and nag him to restart the wireless router. We hated doing this but... at the same time, we often needed the internet when we were without it. It's hard to do your homework when you're a computer student without the internet, for example.

Now that we're here in the new place and all our stuff is here, and we're mostly unpacked rather than living in a sea of boxes, we can really see how much extra space we have. Even in the bedroom, where we have MORE stuff out in the room than we did before, we have so much extra space to move around it! The things fit in the kitchen cupboards better. We have two extra bookshelves and we still have so much room! And the windows. There's SO much light in here during the day. You don't need to turn on a light until 7 PM. I can lay in bed and look out the window and see the sky (though sadly no stars since I live in a city). We can sit at our dinning room table to eat our meals. And we have a full sized shower! We even have a bathtub, so I could take a BATH if I ever really wanted to!

But despite the short comings of our first place, despite realizing how small and stuffy it really was, I still liked our first place. I wasn't ever really dissatisfied living there until right before we left, and by then it was because we knew we had a better place waiting and just couldn't wait to get into it! I'm reminded of the line in Apollo 13 (yes I still have that movie memorized - shut up!) when they finally cut loose their lunar module after having lived in it for about four or five days, and Fred makes the comment she sure was a good ship. So too was our first apartment. And while it was appreciated while it sustained us, it will not be as missed as we originally thought... not the least of which because, when we moved the desks to leave, we discovered water damage that had likely caused mold in the wall, of which we were previously unaware. Likely if we had stayed we would have inherited alot of unpleasant problems we wouldn't have wanted to deal with...

Nothing ever goes according to plan
In any case... moving on to the actual move itself. Of course things started going wrong right from the outset, despite our careful plans. First there was the fact that the previous tenet turned in the keys late, despite the fact that he said he was leaving the apartment early, and the supers didn't get a chance to get in here and clean before we could move in. Which might not have been such a bad thing except for the fact that the person who lived her previous to us was apparently a pig and lived in utter filth. (I seriously don't know how he lived the way he did). Along with an air conditioner for the bedroom (which is actually nice and works well) he left us a HUGE mess which we had to clean before we could do any of the things we wanted to do. So of course the painting got started late and things just sort of went on from there. It wasn't a downward spiral... but certainly there was a slope.

Since I had to work last week still, most of the painting was done by my husband and his parents. They spent two twelve hour days shopping, cleaning and painting for this apartment. By the time moving day rolled around, I don't even know how they could stand up. For my part, when I got home from work each night I finished the last of the packing that needed to be done. In fact when it came time to move we had only one "ZOMG We're moving throw everything in a box" box, which we lovingly nicknamed "the last minute box".

When moving day finally came, my mother-in-law and I made the last minute run to Ikea to get the table for our new kitchen, while the boys started loading the truck. As usual, Uhaul messed up our order, but we got a bigger truck rather than a smaller one (which turned out to be a very good thing since we ended up having to make two trips). While the boys loaded the truck, myself and my mother-in-law worked on getting the house clean - because we did NOT intend to leave our previous place in the same state as the person who used to live here. When it turned out that we needed to make two trips, we finished up the first half of the cleaning and then joined the boys at the new place to finish the unpacking and work on getting the rest of this place clean. When the first load was unpacked, the mother-in-law stayed behind to work on getting the floors and kitchen cleaned while we went back to finish loading and cleaning the old apartment. Tired and ready to be finished, we came back here and unloaded the second truck load and the stuff we'd shoved into the back of the van.

It was a long day. The boxes were heavy, and by the time we were finished the new apartment was such a huge mess that I about wanted to cry. None of the carefully putting boxes in the room they were supposed to be in (when was there time for that?!) Furniture was all out of place - the couch wasn't even together! The truly lowest point of the day was when the pigeon pooped on me - yes a pigeon pooped on my head. There was a drip at the back door which was just water, except for the one time when it fell on my head. I came back up to the apartment with the next load and about cried. But my mother-in-law just smiled, got a wet paper towel and a small bit of mister clean, and scrubbed the pigeon poop right out of my hair.

Probably the kewlest part about moving in to the apartment building was getting to have the elevator under our control. They put one of the elevators in service so that you can load all your stuff into it, tell it where to go and then unload. It's sort of nice having your own private elevator XD

At about 8:00 at night when the last of our stuff was finally unloaded into the new apartment, and we realized we hadn't eaten anything other than Tim Horton's coffee, a cinnamon bun and a cold piece of pizza each all day, me and the hubby took his parents out to Chili's to thank them for all their help in moving us here. It was wonderful. Quite possibly the best dinner we've ever had XD because we were all starving. It felt so good just to sit down and not worry about anything for a little while. We all drank about twice as much as usual because we were so dehydrated from all the work we'd done x.x

When we got home from dinner, the hubby went to bed because he had to get up early the next morning to work (how he did that, I'll never know) while me and the in-laws rearranged some of the furniture to get a feel for how things would be arranged. With all the boxes, it was hard to get a real feel for everything, but at the end of the night I was satisfied that the new apartment was going to look really awesome when everything was finished and I even started to feel a little better. I took a shower because I felt too grimy to sleep until the pigeon poop was properly scrubbed (and I scrubbed my hair alone for a good ten minutes) off my head and then I finally hit the sack at about 2 AM.

Bruises are the battle scars of moving
Of course I didn't sleep very well the first night. I never sleep well in strange, unfamiliar places, and I knew it would take a short while to adjust to sleeping in our new bedroom. It didn't help that the room was still half covered with plastic because the painting wasn't finished in there yet. We also didn't have the bed put together right. We have an egg crate which we use to offer extra support for the back (which I need or I wake up feeling like I slept on a log x.x) and even after taking some advil I woke up at 6:30 the next morning with a terrible back ache and had to get up and around. It wasn't until I changed into my PJs that I realized how bruised and bumped up I was. Most of them didn't hurt when I got them, except for one harsh scrape on my arm that I got by stupidly trying to lift a box I couldn't quite manage on my own all by myself.

Battle scarred and with burning feet, I got right to work getting this place to feel like an apartment rather than a mess. My mother-in-law put together the table for the kitchen while I unpacked said kitchen and my father-in-law worked at getting the curtains up in the livingroom and the blinds up in the bedroom. We ran into alot of road blocks here because most of our walls are concrete and our ceilings are plaster. They're VERY hard to drill through and we don't exactly have the right drill. Till all was said and done, we got the table put together, and we got all the curtain rails hung (we got hanging panel curtains from Ikea), and we got one measly curtain hung over one of the windows ^^;;

Sadly, my in-laws had to hit the road at that point because they had a long drive ahead of them, and they had to be home in time to work the next week. I don't think they were happy about leaving when they did, but they resolved to come back in October for Canadian Thanksgiving to help us get a few things finished, and we resolved to step up and learn to do certain things (hanging shelves and curtains) for ourselves, since we're all growed up now and it's time to learn how to maintain our own homes.

Once they had departed, my husband's brother came to visit us for the weekend (which he almost always does when he's in school) and he helped us out by putting our two new bookshelves together, which we thanked him for by taking him out to Montana's for dinner.

Since then I've spent at least part of each day putting a dent in the unpacking. The apartment is finally starting to feel like home. We've got some more curtains hung. We've got the books, DVDs and video games unpacked. We're really getting to the point where we need to hang stuff before we can do any more... but my husband's boss is letting us borrow a drill that should help with that. Each room now functions as the room it was meant to be. The painting is done in the bedroom and the doorknobs are finally back in place. We've actually been able to cook in the new kitchen. Every night I sleep a little bit easier. Every day I'm a little less achy. Every day this place feels a little bit more like home.

Moving week has finally arrived. With all the work put into the move up to this point, you can imagine that I'm anxious to get it done and over with. I still can't believe the sheer amount of things we've thrown away. We've lost track of the number of garbage bags... how did we ever store up this much crap over the course of six years? How did we never realize we kept so much useless stuff? The mind really does boggle.

As for the packing, it's almost done. The bathroom remains and a few random knickknacks that haven't fit in anything else yet. The husband graciously took care of the kitchen for me. Everything's been washed and carefully tucked away. With everything pulled off the walls, the apartment echoes. It really does feel like a cave in there now, with no natural light and everything you say echoing and the walls in the bedroom plain and drab again (at least the living room has paint on the walls). It doesn't help knowing that the new place is bright with natural light from the windows. That the bedroom probably won't get as stuffy with a good window and good ventilation compared to the heat trap our current bedroom is. With the dream of the new place growing in our minds, I don't think either of us are sad about moving any more. We want the new place and we want it bad.

Now that all the paint and curtains are picked out, I can't wait to see the new place in all it's glory. I imagine where our stuff will be and how much extra space we'll have. I imagine going out to sit on the balcony in the rain to breathe the fresh air and feel the cool breeze on my skin. I imagine the bright light filling up the room and shining off the beautiful glass dining room table we will [i]actually[/i] be able to use to eat dinner from now on! And I want it. I want it now. I don't want to wait any more.

But then I remind myself that it's only four more days. And those days will be so busy that they'll be gone before I've realized it. The in-laws arrived yesterday to help with the moving effort. I think that my mother-in-law is as excited about this move as I am. I've entrusted my (quite through) shopping list to her and told her that she can add anything I missed. I never got to pick out rugs for the bedroom but I trust her to find nice ones. Picking the paint and curtains were the things I wanted to do most (and I got to do that). We talked last night about how she plans to lay out the curtains and I think it's going to look amazing when it's done.

Today my brother-in-law is moving in to his new school (Humber). It'll be nice having him in the city again and able to visit from time to time (although he may not come as often as he used to). Tomorrow the tasks for our move begin. There's all the garbage to get out of the house. The clothing donations to be donated. The used books to be taken to the used book store. The ancient computer under my desk to be taken to either a computer store to be scrapped for parts or it's final resting place (RIP Natasha. RIP). Then there's the buying of the paint and other tools necessary to paint the apartment, hang the curtains, shelves ect.

Tuesday we get the keys (yay!). Tuesday and Wednesday are the painting and the curtain hanging and probably new furniture assembly (we really really need a new bookshelf like WOW). Wednesday the guy is coming to hook up the new internet and phone (hopefully the new internet will be functional that day, meaning we'll have access as soon as we're moved in... which is important since I need it for school next week).

Then Thursday is the big day. We load our lives onto the back of a truck, drive three blocks down the road and unload everything into the newer, better place. It has the added value of not possibly being able to be as bad as the last time we moved... so there is that. This is the part I'm most looking forward to getting over with because it means I can start unpacking and getting settled in - which is really the best part about moving.

Meanwhile, while all that is going on, I have my last week of full time work with McKinsey for the summer. I really honestly can't believe that four months have come and gone... like the blink of an eye. It will be weird going back to school once more, but I'm looking forward to getting my last semester over and done with. I'm back down to weekend work until I finish that, and I'm hopeful about coming back full time again come January, this time for a more permanent stint. I'm crossing my fingers and toes hoping that there's room for me when the time comes to return.

All in all, although this summer has been very hectic, I don't think it's been an overly bad one. And with the Fall on the horizon, we once again wipe the slate clean, start over fresh, and look forward to the new journey that awaits us on the horizon. This is not a thing to be hated or feared, but rather embraced. Soon we shall shed our old skins, and don our newer, more grown up ones, and find that we are finally closer to that which we have been striving so long to achieve. Hectic and stressful as it may be, this is the beginning of a brighter future, one we have worked hard to build together, and I personally look forward to the rewards at the end of the hard work.

I spent pretty much my whole weekend packing. Thursday I didn't even realize a whole day had gone by without me really stopping to do more than eat and then it was 10:30 and I was like holy shit!! I did manage to take some relaxy time on Friday but I still did alot of work on getting things organized and into vessels in which they can be transported to the new place. I was quite dismayed to look around the living room on Thursday night and realize that after an entire day of packing, it didn't seem as though I'd made any progress at all.

Buuut a big part of the reason for that was that we have way too many books to fit on our current book shelf (we're getting another one, hopefully of the same size when we move)and I had to bring out more books to fill up the space I'd cleared off to organize them before they could be put into boxes. Once I redoubled my book packing efforts on Friday, the bookshelf cleared off quite quickly (although now it's filled with boxes of books, DVDs and video games).

The more I pack, the bigger a problem storing boxes becomes. Once I ran out of book boxes (there are 11 of them by the way) I had to start filling boxes half with books and half with other things... because the boxes that my husband's store supplied us with are ginormous. I mean it's going to take two guys to lift these. I can push them around the room enough to organize them but that's about it. The book shelf offered handy little compartments for boxes now that it's empty. The rest of the boxes are pushed into or gathered around the closet where they're mostly out of the way of people trying to walk. I've utilized most of the drawers that I've cleared out to pack stuff for the computer area (which will make unpacking that area ten times easier) and I've got a plan to use my freed up totes for the knickknacks which are now sadly lacking in boxes.

As always, I've been thrifty with my packing. Doing my best to keep certain things together but at the same time fill up every available space in a box. I even managed to fit multiple knickknacks in boxes meant for single figures so that more of them are protected during the move. The ample supply of plastic bags we've been hoarding for shopping have done well to pad breakable things (like picture frames!). I even have a fair idea of where every single article that's been packed is located so that I can unpack them again when needed (I had to unpack my Domerin and Snake plushes T.T I missed them too much!) Since I've even managed to find boxes for the PS2 AND the guitar hero guitars so there's only about two things that won't be able to get into boxes (they're too big x.x the giant Jack Sparrow picture wouldn't fit in a box no matter how hard I tried, and the print Kori gave us for our wedding is sadly too long to fit safely even in our huge boxes).

Meanwhile we've thrown out so much crap you wouldn't believe. Another full garbage bag worth of stuff to hit the curb. Two squares on the book shelf full of books to go to the used book store. It's amazing how getting rid of excess game boxes can 'thin the herd' (and why do you need a separate box for every expansion when at least one of them comes in a HUGE box with just one lonely disk in it?). I have gotten a bit lax though. As time runs out and energy runs low, I put the last batch of figures in their boxes without cleaning them first (what shame!). Clearly there will need to be some cleaning done after the move, but at this point I'd rather get everything in boxes before we get to the OMFG we're moving throw everything in boxes so we can get it to the new place! stage.

While the packing is moving along quite well (1 or two more boxes should about finish off the living room!), unfortunately I haven't had time or energy for much else. There's a part of me (and not all that small a part either) that just wants to write, RP and forget about boxes and moving. Sadly, I just don't have the time and energy to work full time, spend most of my spare time getting things settled into boxes and still find the emotional energy to write something that's not total crap. I think once we get to the new place and get the unpacking taken care of, I'm going to spend two weeks doing nothing but writing! (sadly... this won't actually happen either because I'll be going back to school literally two days after the move curses!)

It's strange to sit here and realize that there are only three weeks left in the summer. Three months ago I was looking forward to a summer free of stress and filled with the normal schedule of working and not having to worry about anything else outside of that. That so totally happened!! Srsly!

This summer has been so hectic I can hardly believe it's almost gone already. From the funeral in May, to the sudden revelation that we had to move out of our first place, which we've lived in for six years, to the wedding this weekend, to the moving day fast approaching, it feels like my head has been constantly spinning for three months.

I really just want to get the next three weeks over with. I hate moving. It's not that I'm not excited about the new place - I am; so excited in fact that it's hard to put into words. I can't wait to be in the new place, have control over the temperature in the apartment, have control over our own internets so we won't have to wait until the landlord comes home half a day later to finally be able to do what we want to do. The natural light from the windows, the open space, the good ventilation, the balcony if we so desire to venture out there. Yes, I think we're both greatly looking forward to the change.

No, it's the act of moving itself that so bothers me. Shoving my whole life into boxes so that they can be shoved into the back of a truck, driven however far and then unloaded and scattered around the new place until I get the time and energy to unpack my life and make everything organized and normal again. It's mostly the packing and moving parts I hate. Unpacking can be fun, or at least a relief at the end of all the other efforts. I don't like to see my walls bare. I don't like to see my books in a pile of boxes rather than displayed like a mini library on my book shelf. I cringe at the thought of all my beautiful glass and resin figures cramped in their boxes, possibly getting jostled about roughly no matter how much I tell people to be careful with them.

I want to be in my new apartment with fresh paint on the walls and my stuff out of it's boxes and all in it's proper place. I want all the stress of picking paint colors, curtains, and actually doing the move to be over with.

The last time we moved it was horrible. I remember it quite clearly because it was the adventure of a life time. We moved from Maryland to Toronto Canada and it was just... insane. First we loaded everything we owned into a Uhaul trailer and drove to PA to visit my family and friends one last time, knowing I wouldn't see them again for awhile. THEN we found out that the tailer wasn't hooked up properly and we had to take everything out of the trailer in the blazing hot sun and re-load it into a Uhaul truck for the rest of the drive. Then, when we got here, we just sort of unloaded everything in a heap and honestly it took us years to go through everything and finally get it all sorted, because at some point we just sort of threw stuff in a place and ignored it until we re-painted/decorated the apartment.

Recalling the nightmare that was moving last time, we're trying our best to do things right this time. Everything is getting sorted through before it's packed and anything and everything that's clutter or junk we don't need is getting tossed out. Friday I went through the living room closet and ended up getting rid of a whole garbage bag's worth of crap. It's somewhat eye opening because I had always thought, in more recent years, that I'd done a good job of sorting through everything and keeping it all organized. Of course... when you're a packract (like me) you think you need something and you keep it only to come back later and think why in hell fire did I keep this?!

Though it's been both tiring and time consuming, we are making progress. I've cleared out three drawers and been able to fill them with contents from other places, and everything that's in drawers can be moved in drawers rather than packed in boxes. I've cleared out one whole tote which can now be used for packing. I managed to get most of the stuff we want to keep from our wedding and high school graduations into the ottoman we have in the living room - not only can the stuff be MOVED in the ottoman, but it can be stored there, where it's unlikely to be damaged. It's also mostly stuff we'll probably never want to get to, hence why I stored it in a place we're unlikely to open very often.

Meanwhile I've been unable to find alot of the boxes I need to move my figures :/ this is upsetting because I worry about trying to move them without them being packed tightly in the Styrofoam which is shaped to their contours. I honestly cannot figure out when I would have let their boxes be gotten rid of, but they're also absolutely nowhere in the house. I'm trying to come up with some clever ways to pad them, so we'll see how that goes. I've been using plastic bags to pad everything, since we shop at grocery stores where it costs extra money to buy bags and it's just easier to recycle the ones you already have by keeping them around, taking them with you, and carting your groceries home in them.

Everything is being washed as it is packed (linens and figures alike) so that everything will be able to come out of their boxes and be put in their proper places as soon as we reach the new place. I'm going to do the same thing with the storage units and furniture as well so that on moving day we just have to vacuum/ mop the current apartment. All the cleaning will be done by the superintendents before we move in to the new place and we intend to go in to the new apartment before hand and get all the painting done so that we don't have to paint around our stuff this time.

I'm accumulating quite a list of things we will need for the new place. It's mostly just small things (new phone to replace the dying one, new mop and broom to replace the dying ones) but there are a few big things like a table for the kitchen and an air conditioner for the living room. The plan is to buy it all on or around moving day so it comes directly to the new place. So only the little minor details are left now like picking paint colors and curtains. We finally picked our colours for the living room/foyer/hallway and agreed to quarter tint the color for the kitchen and bathroom. Now all that's left is the bedroom. I've been shopping around online for curtains and I think I found a few potentials.

We also have the stress of getting the internet hooked up in the new apartment literally the week we move because I need it three days later for school (the internet is sort of required for a computer student). I'm just going to be glad when this is all over and I can breath a sigh and relax. I can only pray that the first few weeks of the new semester will be quiet enough to let us recover from all the flurry of moving.

More fun with Memes! Because I can!! XD This is the same meme from my last post only this time I'm cheating :p Instead of using one band, I've used a selection of my favorite heavy metal bands (cuz I love them all dearly but there aren't enough varied topics from just one of them to answer all these questions. Seriously.)

Answer the questions with only song titles (lyrics again included because I can and I enjoy them :P)

Pick your Artist(s):
Iron Maiden, Iron Savior and Running Wild

Are you a male or female:
Bring your daughter... to the slaughter - Iron Maiden
If there's some living to be done / Before your life becomes your tomb / You'd better know that I'm the one / So unchain your back door invite me around / Bring your daughter / Bring your daughter to the slaughter / Let her go / Let her go / Let her go

Describe yourself:
Nomad - Iron Maiden
Know the secret of the ancient desert lands / Your are the keeper of the mystery in your hands / Nomad, rider of the ancient east / Nomad, rider that men know the least / Nomad, where you come from no one knows / Nomad, where you go to no one tells

How do you feel:
Unchained - Iron Saivor
So many tears / Oh, we will always remember the years / Earth has been burned / but then they returned / to save us and now we are / Free - from the tyrant / The conqueror's been banished / Free - and united / The throne in the sky now is / Free - free from the tyrant

Describe where you currently live:
Out of the Silent Planet - Iron Maiden
Out of the silent planet, dreams of desolation / Out of the silent planet, Come the demons of creation / The killing fields, the grinding wheels crushed by equilibrium / Separate lives no more disguise, no more second chances / Haggard wisdom spitting out the bitter taste of hate

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
Paradise - Iron Savior
Ooh take me away / Far beyond the stars / Far beyond the skies / There must be a land / We're calling paradise / Far, far away / Far beyond the skies / We shall be questing out / The land we're calling paradise

Your favorite form of transportation:
Thunderbird - Iron Savior
Cruising the stars / On cosmic wind / Let us explore / The miracles and more / Thunderbird / Take us away / Show us the realm / Show us the wonders / We're holding the helm / Final frontier / How many secrets do you hide / Cosmic creation / We're born to you / In dignity and pride

Your best friends are:
No Heroes - Iron Savior
Men of honor / In brotherhood / True and loyal / Sworn in blood / Ancient tales / Of truth and lies / And sacrifice / Keep up the spirit / Let it shine inside the heart / and may their glory deeds / Enlight us in the dark / We ain't the heroes / We're just true and simple men / Men of honor and pride / We ain't the heroes / Oh, we ain't no splendid knights / But for their sake we will ride

You and your best friends:
Libertalia - Running Wild
We stand tight in the darkest night / We will fight for freedom rise / We endure till slavery's gone / We stand proud to fight all wrong / Libertalia, the wild and the free / The Ideal of Freedom is ruling the sea / Libertalia, the strong and the brave

What's the weather like:
Rainmaker - Iron Maiden
And I dream of the rain as it falls upon the leaves / And the cracks in our lives like the cracks upon the ground / They are sealed and are now washed away / You tell me we can start the rain / You tell me that we all can change / You tell me we can find something to wash the tears away

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
Dance of Death - Iron Maiden
And I danced and I pranced and I sang with them / All had death in their eyes / Lifeless figures they were undead all of them / They had ascended from hell / As I danced with the dead / My free spirit was laughing and howling down at me / Below my undead body / Just danced the circle of dead

What is life to you:
New Frontier - Iron Maiden
And who is my god? / And where is my soul? / Too tired to jump too young to run / Neverending, forever searching / Chasing dreams, the dreams of my heart / Always seeking, always asking / Questions right from the start

last relationship:
Forevermore - Iron Savior
From beyond our space and time / Rise and be free / From the darkest of dreams / And let us be forever / An eternal flame / And forevermore our union will remain

Your fear:
Riding on Fire - Iron Savior
Riding on fire - touching the sky / Riding on fire - take you up so high / Riding on fire - with tears in your eyes / Riding on fire - and your heart it dies

is the best advice you have to give:
Wasted Years - Iron Maiden
So understand / Don't waste your time always searching for / Those wasted years / Face up / Make your stand / And realise you're living in / The golden years

for the Day:
Solar Wings - Iron Savior
Facing the man with the blade and an evil smile / The innocence of madness seems to grow / And now you stand and stare and wonder / Can you believe in what you see / There is a place beyond the suffering / If not for you, there's one for me / I'm high, I ride on Solar Wings

I would like to die:
Dream of Mirrors - Iron Maiden
Am I still inside my dream? Is this a new reality / Something makes me feel that I have lost my mind / All my hopes and expectations, looking for an explanation / Coming to the realization that I can't see for sure

soul's present condition:
Wildest Dreams - Iron Maiden
I'm feeling ready to just open up and go / And I just feel I can be anything / That all I might ever wish to be / And fantasize just what I want to be / Make my wildest dreams come true

My motto:
The Thin Line Between Love and Hate - Iron Maiden
There's a long and winding road and the trail is there to burn / There's a thin line between love and hate / Wider divide that you can see between good and bad / There's a grey place between black and white / But everyone does have the right to choose the path that he takes

Real update coming soon.

Because I can! Taken from snowy_row's facebook. Did something similar to this once before but didn't use only one artist (I may have cheated that time XD)

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me. (Do it if you wanna :P) You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "my life according to (band name)" (Quotes added BECAUSE I CAN XD)

Pick your Artist:
Kamelot

Are you a male or female:
The Mourning After (Carry On)
She was by the riverside / Alone and dressed in white / Paling in the cold / Walking on the icy face / On memories of glory days

Describe yourself:
Memento Mori
We're a second in time / We're the last in the line / Of the prey that walks the earth / Good and evil combined / I am the god in my own history / The master of the game

How do you feel:
The Edge of Paradise
Sleepless / Not really quite awake / Where the soul conforms / To deeper needs / Free within frames of custody / I revolve my spirit and exhale

Describe where you currently live:
Nothing Ever Dies
Still we are certain / That what we know is truth / The only truth / We're building our temples taller

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
Farewell
I must take your farewell / Carried by destiny / Bound to obey / I must take your farewell / Trails of discovery / Lead me an ocean away

Your favorite form of transportation:
The Haunting (Somewhere in Time)
Somewhere in time / I will find you and haunt you again / Like the wind sweeps the earth / Somewhere in time / When no virtues are left to defend / You fall in deep

Your best friends are:
Soul Society
In the dark we're the same / In the concept of time / We're like a grain in the sand / And we strive for the flame / As if death was our aim / Cause we cannot understand

You and your best friends:
The Descent of the Archangel
Name a pleasure / One...a few / Any form / Of lust in you / Will tremble at my touch / I come down from heaven's light / I have all the perfect alibis / There's so much... / I will show you everything so vividly / You won't deny me

What's the weather like:
EdenEcho
But how come I want you / Like the soil yearns for the rain

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
Ghost Opera
Welcome all to curtain call / At the opera / Raging voices in my mind / Rise above the orchestra / Like a crescendo of gratitude / Don't wake me / Until it's over

What is life to you:
III Ways to Epica
You would not feel sadness / If you never tasted joy / That's the curse of humans / Born in passion you destroy

last relationship:
On The Coldest Winter's Night
Lost in the present, I am sure / This is the moment, say no more / You found me here today / On the coldest winter night / This moment is our right

Your fear:
March Of Mephisto
Cause when you're lost / I am solely there to share your grief / Wailing for your sorrow / Is only my way to comfort you / Reminders of innocent youth / Waiting for morrow you're lonely / I name your solitude

is the best advice you have to give:
Center Of The Universe
Don't you wonder why / If the war by heavens gate released desire / In the line of fire someone must have known / That a human heart demands to be admired / Cause in the Center of the Universe / We are all alone

for the Day:
Lost & Damned
Don't ask why / Don't be sad / Sometimes we all / Must alter paths we planned / Don't forget what we had / But let me save you / From the lost and damned

I would like to die:
The Black Halo
Darkness come tonight / I have no fear of what you hold / Darkness come alive / You are the stories I've been told / Darkness come tonight / Nothing can take my faith away / Darkness come alive / Life fades to black from silver grey

soul's present condition:
A Feast for the Vain
In the splendor of the night / I've found company / Once again I feel that life's begun / All the wrongs seem to be right / Drowned in ecstasy / Every star is like a newborn sun / May the life I knew be gone

My motto:
Serenade
So bow down with me / Where summer fades into fall / And leave your hatchets of hate / Bow down with me / And sing the saddest of all / The song we all serenade


Wow that was hard XD and I totally sort of ran out of songs.

I recently re-read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I meant to re-read it way back when the movie came out, but I never got around to it until now (I have quite a reading list stacked up). As usual with books I've read that end up turned into movies, I wanted to do a very close comparison, also partly because at the time the movie came out, I had forgotten alot of the details.

It didn't even take me a full chapter of the book to remember why I loved reading this series so much. The way they're written is so vivid. The moment I start reading I can see Lyra in the retiring room, crouching in the wardrobe, staring out at the slides (Which I can also see clearly). I can smell the butter and poppy. As I follow the story through to it's conclusion I feel every one of Lyra's emotions, from anger to fear to sorrow to joy and pride. I shudder at the mere mention of the evil Mrs. Coulter with her golden monkey deamon and her fox fur coat. The book just draws you into it. Ever moment is a roller coaster ride as you hold your breath and wait to find out what will happen.

With such an amazing story laid out before them, it's hard to imagine how the studio managed to make ( such a shitty movie. (Warning: spoilers behind the cut) )

I hold hope in my heart that someday, when the world is less tight assed than it is now, and enough years have passed, they will re-make this movie someday, and maybe even make it through the entire series. Sadly, I don't think I'll live to see it.

In any case, I enjoyed re-visiting this book and I look forward to re-visiting the other two books in the series. ESPECIALLY The Amber Spyglass which is by far the best one in my opinion.

In other news, for those that don't already know, our credit check came through. On Monday we found out we got the apartment. Ten minutes later we found out that the LandLord sold his house and the new buyers were interested in keeping us on as tenets. Isn't that the way life always works? But we're happy with the new place and we don't really want to stay here any more anyway. Who knows what the new owners would do? Raise the rent? Prove to be a pain in the ass to live under? Hell they already come down here and try to open the door without even knocking -.- luckily we always keep the door locked, even when we're home. I'm looking forward to our new place with it's nice windows, bright sunlight and balcony for sitting outside on occasion... I can't wait to sit out there and watch it rain.

We get the keys September first. The plan is to go on the third and paint the apartment and then move in that Thursday and Friday. The in-laws are going to help us move. It's going to be a good thing. I just wish we didn't have to wait a month and a half to actually move ^^;;

This one was taken from gloryinthunder

1. Go to photobucket.com.
2. Type in your answer for each question into the PhotoBucket search bar.
3. Only use the first two pages. Choose your favorite photo to represent your answer.
4. Copy the html and paste it here.
5. You can only answer in picture form.

Warning, some of the images are large.

( Memage )

Trying to post in here once a week is harder than it looks. I swears!

So alot has happened (again) since my last update. First and foremost, we got our new fridge! The landlord wasn't all that keen on replacing it, we could tell as soon as he came down to look at it. But he called the repair guy again and the repair guy said it wasn't worth putting the money into fixing it because it's so old and we didn't have any choice but to have it replaced. NOTHING would freeze in the freezer and the fridge was WARM. We told him we didn't need anything fancy and second hand was fine as long as it A) worked and B) wasn't ratty as hell.

This past Monday afternoon the new fridge was delivered. It's new, not second hand, and the only difference between it and our old one is the color (it's white instead of yellowish which is nice XD) and the size. It's only slightly narrower than our other fridge was. There's about a 4 inch gap between the fridge and the wall now, which isn't really that big a deal. Most importantly, it WORKS. It works really well. Our fridge is cold again and our freezer functions beautifully.

We did end up loosing alot of stuff. More than I probably really want to think about. We've been restocking slowly, but we've been using this as an opportunity to create better eating habits. We're trying to buy less food at one time so that things will get used more quickly and be less likely to go bad - in general and if there's ever another huge fubar with the fridge/freezer. We're trying to plan our meals for the week in advance, eat more fresh and less frozen, as well as eating healthier and eating out LESS. My husband's parents have asked us to buy our selves one of those little grills for the kitchen on the visa card as a gift for our anniversary, and we're quite looking forward to it. I think it will entice me into cooking more often. I'm already drooling over the idea of grilled cajun chicken, burgers and corn on the cob, and hubby already picked up some beef fillets wrapped in bacon which will taste divine on the grill! :D

On Tuesday, after we got the new fridge set up, the hubby and I went out to see the second Transformers movie. The fact that it's called "ROTF" makes me want to tape an "L" after it's name XD We went down to the Scotia Bank Theater and stopped at Jack Asstor's for dinner. But not before we found a building that defied all logic by having NO DOOR by which to enter. Jack Asstors has this cheese dip made of goat cheese and spinach and artichoke that is TO DIE FOR. I swear it's even better than the kelsie's/montana's four cheese spinach dip - NO LIE. Then I had a nice stir fry with shrimp which was lovely and we headed up to catch a late show of the movie. We settled down at the bar to wait for the movie time to arrive, and about half an hour before show time my husband caught sight of a HUGE group, possibly a high school or some kind of summer camp group, filing into the theater and he figured he knew where they were going. So while he got food before the line could get too long, I scouted ahead for seats. It's a good thing he has a good eye because we NEVER would have gotten seats other wise XD Two seconds after I sat my butt down and claimed the seat beside me this huge group filed in and started filling up all the seats.

WE rather enjoyed the movie, despite the fact that there's dissatisfaction all over the internets about the movie. In fact everyone who saw it with us rather seemed to rather enjoy it so I don't know where all this discontent comes from. Personally, I think it's that all the movie reviewers went after the movie because it's a squeal and ZOMG blockbuster sequels can NEVER be good things! I thought the movie was good, if a bit on the long side and if a bit predictable. Sure they could have cut some things to make the movie more concise. Sure they could have made a movie wherein it wasn't possible to guess the entire plot by the mid point of the movie, but I don't think they made a bad movie. It was way more kick ass than the first one, that's for sure! But, I think Transformers has gone the way of Spiderman, and one movie sooner. That movie was on such an EPIC scale, that I just don't think there's any way they can ever top it. They sort of screwed themselves over as far as a "Transformers 3" is concerned. I don't REALLY think they can top the second one.

I had a three day 'weekend' (in the middle of the week) this week due to Canada day, so we spent the extra day cleaning the house. Not that we ever let it get to be a huge mess any more, but it's always good to wipe every thing down and mop so that everything sparkles :D Of course it also always sucks to go back to work after a three day weekend. But I have the best and most awesome husband evar XD He surprised me with a nice dinner of chipotle and mango pork chops, scalloped potatoes, corn and salad on the side. DIVINE!

There are plenty of other things on my mind at the moment, but I think they warrant their own separate posts since they're not really related to anything here anyway, so they'll come in their own time. For now I guess I should stop screwing around at work... although it's quite dead this weekend XD Seeing as it's Fourth of July weekend and everyone in the states is out camping and spending time with family so they're (finally!) not calling us! :P

It's been a week since my last update... so I suppose I should write something, since I decided I wanted to post in here at least once a week.

Sooo... Let's see.

It was our Anniversary on Sunday. Since we both had to work, we ended up doing stuff spread out all over the place. Originally we were going to go see a movie last Wednesday, but the movie we wanted to see turned out not to be out yet. So instead we went to Red Lobster for dinner then came home and just chilled out. We gave each other our gifts on Friday. For my hubby I got him two video games: Red Faction and Mass Effect, which were both on his list of games that he wanted. He got me the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet on DVD (four hours of Hamlety goodness! YUM), and the Reduced Shakespeare Company's video The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged and their book to go along with it. I'm still waiting for this to arrive from amazon, but I am quite excited :D

Over the weekend we realized our fridge is on the fritz again. It broke down about two or three years back (can't remember exactly when). We had a repair guy look at it the first time and it turned out to be the defrost regulator. He replaced it and the fridge was fine, until now. You really shouldn't stick your hand into the fridge and feel warmth -.- nor should you have bread and fruit in the freezer that remains soft and just will not freeze no matter what you do. *siiigh* So we call the landlord and, keeping in mind the disaster with our ceiling a year ago, press him into getting it taken care of fairly quickly. The repair guy was here on Monday - which was exactly when we wanted him to come. He took a look at the thing, pulled out a piece of insulation from the back and put in more of the freezing gas (whatever it's called). He basically just said that the damn thing is old. I don't care how old it is as long as it still functions. Hubby kept an eye on it for the rest of the day and it looked fine so we thought everything would be okay.

Last night about midnight I went to get something to drink so I could take some Echinatia and as soon as I stick my hand in the fridge I realize something is wrong. It's pretty much warm in there. I check the freezer again and once again the buns we keep in there so they won't get moldy are soft to the touch. I turned the fridge and the freezer back up to max. The freezer stays cold but it doesn't freeze anything that's not already frozen solid. The fridge just doesn't get cold... the water that comes out of our tap at work that we drink from is colder than the water in the pitcher we keep in the fridge. Things aren't looking good. We haven't been able to get ahold of the Landlord all day, even though we've heard someone moving around upstairs a few times. We'll see how that goes. Something tells me he's not going to be too keen on replacing the damn thing, seeing as how he tried to claim the repair on insurance. He had some insurance woman come down with him when he came down after the repair. She walked through my entire apartment, without asking permission, including going into our bedroom and she turned on all the lights in the house and then didn't turn the light in the living room back off, even though we clearly didn't want it on because it wasn't on when she came in. *double sigh*

In any case, this needs to be taken care of relatively quickly. We can't keep perishable food in the house because the fridge won't keep anything cool. The hubby took some stuff to work to keep it in their freezer because his boss offered for him to do so, but that means that none of my ingredients are close to hand, and it's not fair to have my husband run to the store every day to buy fresh stuff, especially after he popped his knee and probably sprained his calf yesterday. He's all gimp and can hardly walk x.x This has resulted in us eating out way more often than we usually do because, well what else are we gunna do?

In other, slightly better news, as a result of the fridge breaking down we ended up going out on our anniversary anyway, after we both got off of work. We took a ride down to the Rainforest Cafe, one of our favorite places, and gorged ourselves on delicious food. It ended up being a gift from our in-laws because they don't take debit (and apparently they wanted us to put it on the visa even though my husband wasn't going to because we can afford it ourselves). Then last night we went out to see Year One the new Jack Black movie. It was pretty good, we both got a good laugh out of it.

My cough is also feeling alot lot better than before. I think it's almost gone (today I hardly noticed it at all). I finally resorted to Echinatia because nothing else was working, and low and behold! Today is my first day not taking my inhaler at all and I'm feeling pretty good. I think I'm almost back to normal, FINALLY! At least that's one good thing. Now if we can just get the fridge fixed I think things will finally be some semblance of normal again!

Stole this off of snowy_row's Facebook...

Go to urbandictionary.com and write the answer to each question in the "look up" box and paste the definition on a copied version of this note.

1. Your name?
Megan

A girl that is very stubborn but at the same time can be the greatest friend on the planet. She loves pizza and is absolutley gorgeous. She is loved by everybody and is fucking hilarious!

"Megan is my best friend."

2. Your age?
24

24, The Jack Bauer Power Hour. The most entertainment you can stuff into a single day. Full of twists, turns, violence, and Elisha Cuthbert.

"I had all kinds of work to do, but I decided to watch 24 instead."

3. One of your friends?
Wuffy

A pet name for someone loyal and devoted, who will always be there for you no matter what.

"Whenever I'm most down, I turn to my wuffy for comfort."

4. What should you be doing?
Working on my website (looked up 'website' for simplicity)

1. here are 3 types of websites. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good:
Supplies generous amounts of information, images and music aswell as has a nice layout with decent amounts of CSS.

The Bad:
Is made poorly with little or no effort. The background is horribly annoying. This website gets millions of hits, however, which is most annoying.

The Ugly:
A websiet with a white background, blue and purple hyperlinks, uses only Times New Roman font, and non-colored horizontal rules, plus crappy tables with sad borders and no design.

2.
A place on the internet that usually contains stimulating material, such as pictures, animations, or links. Noramlly created by website designers.

"Nice WEBSITE."

5. Favorite color?
Blue

1. The hue of the portion of the visible spectrum lying between green and indigo, evoked in a human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 490 nanometers.

"The sky is blue".

2. The feeling when u wake up at 7 in the morning and remembering it's a monday.

"I got the monday blues"

6. Hometown?
Selinsgrove

The hub of the rural Central Susquehanna Valley, the word "urban" doesn't really describe Selinsgrove. Famous for BJ's steak and ribs, the Strip, and the occasional flood, this town is the place to go for a Sheetz run, your Wal-mart needs, or a Rita's fix. Also known as the home of "those damn college kids" and the epicenter of disillusionment with the assurances that someday, the bypass will be built. Locals tend to complain about traffic on the strip, and to like country music.

"Selinsgrove needs a Target."

(this is a fairly apt description XD)

7. Month of your birthday?
June


The month the hottest people in the world are born.

"DAMN! I'm hot I was born in June!"

(if by 'hot' you mean as in temperature then sure...)

8. Last person you talked to?
My husband (Nathan)

Husband:
1.Someone who has your back when you need it, but knows when to get the hell out of your way when he has to. Useful for fixing things, keeping you warm, and that fuzzy soft happy feeling that he usually creates.

"I love my husband, he managed to fix the toilet after it exploded and started spitting zombies out every fifteen minutes"

2. The man who gets you coffee.
"'Get me coffee', says wife.
'Yes', says Husband."

Nathan:
1. The end product of an accident.

"Mom and Dad got too frisky one night, and now we're stuck with Nathan."

2. A guy who is caring and intelligent and is superior to all even God.He is loved by all his mates and is there for everyone who has problems and is a great listener.He is so caring and such a strong fighter that nothing can beat him.He is the kinda guy you want as a mate or a lover.A legend at the guitar and guitar hero.He is just an amazing happy person who is easy to love.He has a very nice personality and is very easy on the eyes and is very cute.He is a perfect man in everway unless you cross his path when he is sleepy then you have hell to pay lol. Generally a nice guy with lots of friends who adore and love him.A one of a kind...

"Girl 1: Who is that guy?
Girl 2: Oh him he is a Nathan.
A nice guy.A legend on
The guitar!
Girl 1: He is such a dream!"

9. Where are you right now?
On my computer

1. a machine for downloading porn

"oh no, the computer broke, i ejaculated all over the keyboard"

2. What you are on now

"You are on the computer now"

3. The most useful and most frustrating thing any human being will ever work with.

"The computer crashed again. I lost three thousand lines of code."

10. Your nickname?
Striker


An undefinable god-like person dwelling in a dark, trance-like state of mind, who revels in challenges.

"Striker silently yet lethally put down his her opponent from the shadows before scanning the scene for his her next victim."

Well here I am. Overall I'm feeling alot better now than I did a week ago. I at least feel human again. I'm still coughing a bit, and still more than I'd like, but I do think it's getting better. I just have to pray the cough runs out before my inhaler does...

In any case, you know how when you're sick for awhile and you finally start to feel better? It almost feels like coming back from some dark, far away place. Personally? I'm just glad to be back from wherever that place is. Feeling like I lost several days which I can never reclaim in a black, swirling void of some kind is unpleasant to say the least.

One thing it did make me realize, however, is that I am spending entirely too much time on my RPGS. This is a difficult thing for me to admit. On the one hand, I love role playing. I love having my characters interact with other people. I love that element of surprise, knowing that I'm not in absolute control of the turn the story takes, that I can't accurately predict how another character is going to react to my character or their actions. I love to weave an intricate storyline which is added to by several people, where each person is allowed to achieve a goal throughout the course of the exercise and in the end you have this beautiful collaboration that no one would have been able to sculpt on their own.

I've said it many times, but Role playing is like my drug (you know those 'my anti-drug' things from awhile back? Role Playing would be my anti-drug (if I needed one, which I really don't, but that's another tangent entirely)). It draws me in, it keeps me captivated. It lifts me up when I'm down, gives me something to look forward to to get me through the rough times, offers me a place to escape when I just can't deal with life at the moment, or even just when I have a quiet moment and I want to slip away.

That's a large part of the reason why I've never shied away from taking on as many RP storylines as are available at the moment. There always seems to be time; and if not then I make time. Awhile back I cut down my RP posting so that I only posted in each thread once a week. The whole point of doing this was so that I would have time for personal projects, not to mention homework (at the time). But as time has gone on, I have steadily increased the number of storylines I've undertaken to the point where it takes me a week or half a week to get one post in each thread I owe a post in. Instead of decreasing the amount of time I'm spending on RPGs, I've actually INCREASED it x.x

I love my RPGs, I really do. But I need to take a step back. I need to put my foot down. I have personal projects that aren't getting any time and they are in desperate need of it. My novel hasn't been touched since November. My website hasn't been touched in two months because I just keep thinking 'I'll get caught up on my RPGs first'... but no sooner do I get caught up than is it time for another round of posting.

So I need to put my foot down. I need to lay myself a set of ground rules and stick to them. I need to do this, because my novels are very important to me; all of my personal projects are very important to me, and as important as my RPGs are and as much as I love them, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life if I lay my personal projects down and let them fall by the wayside in order to make my RPGs a priority. I need to go back to making a list of posts that need done once a week and if someone misses the cut off by a day - they miss it by a day and I get to it the next week rather than updating the list. I need to start spending more time working on my personal projects. I need to start making them my priority... even if it's going to make my RPG storylines drag even more than they already do. Even if it's going to disappoint people to have to wait a little bit longer... I'm just going to have to hope that people will understand and that it will be worthwhile for them to wait the extra bit of time. After all, it's not like I just throw up a post and think 'whatever', I put real time and real effort into these things... I just can't keep putting the same amount of time in every week.

Here's hoping people can understand that.

There is a line in the first Star Wars movie where C3P0 is talking to a young Luke Skywalker and he makes the comment "We seem to be made to suffer. It seems to be our lot in life." You can't help but chuckle a little internally at the melodramatic statement - C3P0 has a tendency to doom say at every opportunity, and one can't help but wonder how it is that a droid can 'suffer' in this manner that he speaks of.

But there are days when I can't help but call that statement to mind. I tend to express my feelings often through songs or interesting quotes that I've picked up from movies or books that I like. Days like today, I can't help but share C3P0's sentiments - today I feel like I was built to suffer, made for pain. When you feel as bad as I feel right now, it's hard to imagine that you will ever feel good or even 'normal' again.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and miserable. I've been coughing up a lung for three weeks now. While the cough has eased off a bit, it still lingers. It's annoying. It makes my job hard - talking seems to aggravate my throat and make me need to cough more. Monday I quit taking my inhaler because it didn't seem to be doing me any good. A mistake I've paid for, to be sure.

By Monday night my cold was back in force. Woke up Tuesday morning contemplating calling in sick. Got up, took a shower and felt better. Went to work - another mistake. Asked if I could go home at lunch time about an hour before lunch. Even with the cold medicine holding my sinus headache at bay, I was spaced out, having a hard time concentrating, and that isn't a good thing in my job. Got home at about a quarter to 2. My husband wisely made me eat something before I passed out in bed. Laid underneath a bunch of heavy blankets in our bed room and still shivered my ass off - that's when I know my body is fucked up. Got up for a bit in the evening and tried to be coherent but failed pretty miserably. Passed out on the couch at 9:30, managed to get up the energy to go to bed a little after 10 and was dead to the world for the night (bliss really)

This morning I don't feel as sick as I did. My head doesn't hurt, my sinuses are still clogged but not going crazy. But I got my period. Everyone who knows me knows what that means. So much for resting for half a day so I wouldn't have to miss a day of work. So much for getting to feel more human today. There doesn't seem to be anything I can do about my back cramps except endure them. As I write this they've gotten pretty bad. When the pain spikes, it drives everything else out of my mind. There's nothing I can do but sit here and remind myself to keep breathing... remind myself that tomorrow will be a better day. At least I know that it's not a huge deal to call in sick any more this one day of the month. My boss was really good about it on the phone this time. I just told him it was my back and that was that.

But I still hate it. I still wish there was some way to reclaim that one day every month where I'm basically knocked out of the universe. One of my co-workers pointed out that's about 13 days out of the year that I loose. What I wouldn't give to reclaim those days. It seems that I am built to suffer once a month [/C3P0]

In any case, I finally broke down and made a doctor's appointment at my school. I refuse to go back to that goddamned walk in clinic and see that horrible bitch of a woman who demeans me every time I go in there. Besides, this way I'm seeing the same doctor I saw before when I had trouble with this cough. I'll bring my inhaler with me to remind him what he put me on and see if there's anything else they can give me to inhale that will clean out my lungs. It's my hope that I'll be feeling alot better by the end of the day on Friday... here's hoping.

This weekend (well weekend for me :p end of the week for normal people) was everything that I hoped it would be.

Thursday was my brother-in-law's graduation. That didn't go off as smoothly as we planned, but then again since I didn't have much to worry about myself, it wasn't all that big a deal for me. There were several miniature disasters like the fact that they didn't send his 'guest vouchers' to the right spot so we had to go pick them up at his old residence. Only to find out that they only sent him three even though he requested four. So we had to run over to his school to see if we could get a fourth one, only to get told that the tickets wouldn't actually be collected and if he went over to the graduation hall then he probably wouldn't have trouble getting a fourth ticket. So we went over there only to find out that they WERE collecting the vouchers and the tickets, only when the mother-in-law explained that they'd come from the other side of the province to see the graduation, they gave her an extra ticket without any argument. Then there was the fact that the brother-in-law forgot his photo ID so he couldn't get his diploma... so he ran back here to get it and got back just in time to find out that the reception had closed 20 minutes early.

But aside from that it wasn't too bad. There's something about watching an endless parade of strangers walk across a stage that makes you want to sleep (it doesn't help when your graduate comes at the beginning of the list with a last name starting with 'c' XD), but aside from that the ceremony wasn't so bad. There were some good speakers. Margaret Atwood was given an honorary degree and her speech was pretty awesome. I guess my only complaint was, I wish they would have focused more on the graduates than they did on the people who got the honorary phds, but I guess that's how things go. Work your ass off in school for years to get a phd or get famous and let one be thrown at you...

But anyway. After that we went down to the Yorkdale Mall (while the brother-in-law came back here on the subway to get his photo ID) for a shopping trip. First shop was to the Bell store so that the hubby and I can be the last two people in the world to buy cell phones. We got a nice little buddy plan and the phones which come free with the plan. They're pretty nice. They have cameras in them. I mean there were two options, one with a camera and one without, so it wasn't all that hard to choose really. While my husband and his father worked out the details of the plan, my mother-in-law took me shopping for my birthday. We each got an awesome new pair of shoes - nice, fancy enough to be worn to work, but comfortable like slippers and built to stand up to alot of walking (they're sketchers). Then we hit the clothing store. The idea was to get me one really nice work outfit to add to my wardrobe but we ended up getting three XD I had so much fun trying on the different outfits and finding stuff that will work nice with the stuff I already have here at home. It was really great.

After that it was time for dinner at the rainforest cafe, which pretty much speaks for itself XD I had the same awesome tuscan chicken as the last time we were there. It's sooooo good! Then we went over to the book store to kill some time before the movie started. I wanted to buy the last two books in the Out of the Silent Planet trilogy, since a friend bought me the first one for my birthday, but the store failed at having those in stock so I bought the next two Gunslinger novels instead (now I have the first four). My hubby also picked himself up a history book of some kind and on a whim we decided to pick up a copy of The Art of War. We found it in a nifty little book which also has other similar texts and papers comparing them (Yes we are geeks). It's going to make for good Domerin material :D

Then we hopped over to the theater and saw Night at the Museum 2 which was awesome. I don't think it was quite as good as the first one... I guess because it's hard to replicate something like that and do it better than you did it originally, but it was still really good. All the great humor from the first one, and it was pretty awesome to see one of the hugest, most amazing museums in the world come to life. By that point it had been a pretty long day so we all pretty much came home and passed out.

Friday was a trip to Canada's Wonderland, which was just great. The weather was perfect for a day at the park. Not too hot and not too cold. The lines weren't that long because it's early in the season and it was a weekday. There were a bunch of schools there on end of the year trips... so there was alot of teenaged stupidity (like the inability to put away cameras when they were on rides), but it wasn't really that bad. We rode twice as much stuff as normal, because we waited in lines half as long. It was good. The only thing which sorta sucked was that white water canyon got closed before we could get on it. Although from the sounds of it, it sounded like someone had fallen in o.o so I hope that worked out okay...

Saturday after I got off work we went to the Mandarin which is this huge Chinese buffet restaurant. There's literally like five tables of food and three of deserts. There are massive amounts of food there. Then they give you fortune cookies and mints before they let you leave, holy crap! So of course by the time I was done there I was so full I could only waddle and I don't need to eat for like three days afterward. Then we came home and watched Outlander which my in-laws had picked up a copy of. My brother-in-law described it as "Beowulf with aliens instead of trolls" which isn't all that inaccurate. It was a pretty good movie. It started off slow but then built up to be really really good.

All in all, it was a really good weekend. I had alot of fun. But it was also a really busy weekend x.x and now I'm tired and have to wait two more days to get caught up on rest. Oh wells. It was worth it. Most definitely.

Well my birthday has come and (mostly) gone. It passed fairly quietly, nothing all that big or overly exciting, but it was more than enough to make me happy despite that. Pretty much everyone grabbed me by email or MSN at some point today to say Happy Birthday which makes me smile. My co-workers all wished me Happy Birthday too when they found out. Norm gave me a mini aero and caramel chocolate bar as a birthday gift XD (not that he wouldn't share his candy bars any other day) and Mary and I walked down to BBQ Xpress for lunch because I wanted to treat myself to an awesome burger (my GODDESS their food is so amazing!) and I gave her the craving while I was talking abouts it hehe XD

On the way home from work, Frosty and I met up and went to Swiss Chalet. Not the highest class establishment, to be sure, but more than enough to make me happy tonight. I wanted quesadillas, and I got them, and this makes me happy. During Canada's Worst Handy Man tonight we will be partaking of smoothies (YUM!) so that will also make me happy.

For my birthday my wonderful husband got me a copy of Enchanted on blu ray (our first blu ray disc!) because I've been belly aching that I wanted to see it for awhile. He also got me the first season of X-files on DVD - which stunned me a bit. It's been SO long since I mentioned X-files, I don't even know how he managed to remember it! It wasn't even on my list of TV box sets to buy (mostly cuz I'd forgotten about it) but it is now, and I'm quite glad he reminded me of it... though I do believe I will be leaving out the last two seasons, since those were the crappy ones (IE when they basically tried to replace both main characters). The one of Waffles got me two books that I am very much looking forward to reading. One of them is Out of the Silent Planet which I've been looking forward to reading ever since I got into Iron Maiden (the first song of theirs I ever liked was "Out of the Silent Planet" which is inspired by the book... funny how listening to heavy metal makes me want to read more XD). The other one isn't one I've heard of before, but if he says it's good, I'm sure it is :D

Most of our 'celebrating' will be done later in the week (as previously mentioned). I'm really looking forward to rainforest cafe... that place is so awesome! All in all, a mundane day, but a good one none the less. Work even managed to be quiet today! It's like the universe gave me it's own little birthday gift! XD

Normally this is the moment where I'd write something deep and meaningful about looking back over my life for the past year but... this year I don't think I really need to. I know how much happier I am than I was last year. I know how much progress I've made. I know how lucky I am... for once, I don't have to remind myself to be happy for the fortunes life has given me. I'm looking ahead to the future now, and I'm looking forward to where the path is taking me. Here's to the future. Here's to another year of good fortunes and great discoveries. Cheers!

I know I've been scarce since we got back... but it's because I really just haven't had much to say. Life marches on as usual, and I'm content, for the most part, to flow with it.

I still haven't got rid of this cough I picked up along with my cold in Sudbury. I think it's finally getting better, but it's annoying to be coughing your lungs out almost constantly for over a week x.x It's moved more down into my lungs now (I can feel it when I breathe in and out, which I think is what's making me cough now) and my inhaler should clear that out in a few more days. I've been keeping up with cough medicine too and my wonderful husband picked me up some riccola to get me through.

Yesterday I finally sat down and filled out my forms for citizenship. I've been putting it off and putting it off... and there's always something else going on, but I finally decided I had to just do it and get it over with. It ended up not being that bad - waaaay easier than my residence stuff was. I scanned in copies of my documents and printed them out to make my photocopies, got my pictures from way back in November signed and set up and even addressed the envelope. The only thing left is to pay my fee and stick the receipt in there... then I can mail it off and wait the 15 months for processing.

I actually ended up going back through my LJ to find the dates when we had left the country (We've actually only spent 19 days out of the country since we moved here in August of 2003). While I was doing that, I ended up encountering all kinds of stuff about my shifts back at Starbucks. MAN I hated that place. I always seemed to be trying to get rid of hours... I couldn't stand to be in that place for upwards of 20 hours in a week. It also made me realize how much happier I am now. I may not LOVE my job but I like it just fine, I don't mind spending the time here, and I love the people I work with. I'm much better off, and much happier than I ever was before. If nothing else, it certainly made me appreciate what I have now.

In other news, the in-laws are returning on Wednesday for my brother-in-law's graduation which will take place on Thursday. We have quite an exciting "weekend" planned (partly to celebrate my birthday, which means I get to pick all the stuff we do *cackle*) which will include dinner on the town (rainforest cafe w00t!) and a movie I want to see (Night at the Museum 2 people!) and possibly a trip to Wonderland (if I feel decent enough to enjoy it). All in all, life is good.