Song of the day: Yena - WithOrWithOut

Sorry I haven't blogged in a bazillion years but I've had a pretty busy two weeks! School started on the 17th, and I was literally starting to blog that weekend when some personal events happened and, as y'all might have seen, I had to close the site down for a little bit. But it's all blown over now, and so I reopened the site! (A few days ago, actually, but again with the business. Plus, I was tired from my school retreat---but I'll get to that in a moment.)

So far school's been going pretty well! As of right now, I'm planning to go into languages, so this year I'm doing the one non-AP math class (basically the math class for people who aren't good at math---I would've done a somewhat more challenging one but there was the only option---and no science class. I'm definitely not going into biology or chemistry or something, so I didn't feel the need to take AP chem, especially not after last year's disaster of a chem class. Although the new chemistry teacher this year does seem pretty cool.

Speaking of new teachers, I have a new Latin teacher this year and so far he's pretty decent! He's apparently going to have us speak Latin some, as if it were a modern language class, which seems pretty cool! And his dad jokes make me laugh. But of course nothing can replace our old Latin teacher. She apparently sent all my classmates from Latin last year an Instagram IM on the first day of school wishing us all luck, but I checked and didn't get it. But then again, I use Instagram once in a blue moon, mostly to look something up, so that's probably why. Speaking of languages, my AP Lit class seems really big this year, and meanwhile, my French class is down from four of us last year to three this year. But at least we'll hopefully get a lot more advanced learning done!

The real treat this year is that I have a study hall four times a week, and one of those is an hour-and-a-half double period! I'm sure I'll need it pretty bad eventually, but so far I just have some chillaxing time. And then I have college counselling---that'll be needed with applications!---and performing arts this semester, and (I believe) PE and some "adulting seminar" next semester. I've been looking into finally starting riding lessons to count for my PE credit, but the lady I want to do them with (the one Blue does them with) does one half-hour slot at a time, and the requirement wants three hours or more over at least two times per week. Yeah, I do not have time for that, and I doubt the horse lady does either. So Blue and I have presumably been doomed to a semester of slaving away in ugly gym shorts. I hope we can find some way to get out of it!!

The other big happening so far is my school's retreat, which, unlike last year's, was three days and two nights rather than two days and one night. It was a lot, so here's the basics: Green came, but Blue only came for the afternoon and evening of the second day, but we had a lot of fun in that time! Overall, there was a lot of pool activity during the whole trip, including a (teacher-sanctioned) water wrestling ring (of which Pink was one of the undefeated champions) and a cardboard boat competition! The food was really good, and though it was unbearably hot and humid outside we still had some fun visiting with each other and participating in some other activities. I took a nice nighttime walk with Green and there were other fun things, like face paint (not on our faces) for us seniors. There was some drama with the freshmen that was shocking, to say the least, but for the most part the retreat was all good.

And the past few days have been pretty good too, although I found a fly in my lunch today and one of my fish (the second Duke, for those of y'all who know my fish dynasty) died mysteriously this afternoon. I looked at him and it seems like his top and back fin were both nibbled on or something, like his late "wife' a few months ago, but while she got really stuck under a decoration, we don't know what caused it for him and he wasn't stuck when I noticed he wasn't moving a normal amount, and moved around over the past couple of days. I only noticed the fin damage last night, and only saw the extent of it today. But of the three fish I bought earlier this year (the second Duke, the late Duchess and the Princess Beatrice), that's now all three that have died already, although I have a fish still alive and well that's two and a half years old, which is, I believe, the upper end for a platy, and those three fish still have a bunch of really healthy kids. I'd imagine it has something to do with the aftershock of the fishy population boom over the summer (maybe their waste built up faster and it weakened him?) which killed another of the three, but that seemed to have worked itself out. I'm not sure, but I do feel like I have some inability to keep a fish alive this year. But then, I do have the two-and-a-halfer (the Dowager Duchess). Maybe I ought to replace the filter?

But besides that I've been having a decent time. I hope this week will be better, and that I'll get some cool ideas for my site! Because updates around here have been sparse this month, but I plan to update it as much as I can this year! Which may not be as often because of senior year, but I'll make some effort. I just need something to update with. But anyways, thanks to y'all who made it to the end for sitting through my prohibitively long life update blog post, and I'll talk to all y'all again soon! Toodles!

Published on Sunday, August 27, 2023, at 7:34 PM.

Song of the day: 5 Seconds of Summer - Amnesia

At least if my mother has anything to say about it. We were putting away our groceries and my mother remarked on how I eat Special K, which notably has no cartoon character on the box and doesn't turn the milk radioactive purple, and how with that coupled with my recent complaints about how every fast food joint has an app now instead of any other kind of loyalty program, I'm apparently "turning into a geezer". I suppose by this time next year, I'll be an old lady gossiping in a beauty shop, like in Murder, She Wrote or that song "Suds In The Bucket".

But I suppose I do see where she's coming from. Y'all might already know about my general technological curmudgeonliness, i.e. my hatred of smartphones and hope to soon buy a flip phone, amongst other things, and my love of thrift stores, especially for fashion. And I've been talking for about a year now about how I act like an old lady, etc., so I suppose this shouldn't be news.

Speaking of news, in other news, school starts on Thursday! I'm not ready to start my senior year, and evidently none of us is ready for school to start, except maybe my dad, who seems more nonchalant than my mum and myself. In the next few days, I have to make sure my binders are ready, and hopefully get an old table in my room taken apart, order a rug, and more, and my mother has to see when riding lessons would work for her since I want to start taking those after riding camp this past summer. So I'll print out some labels for classes today, and maybe scan a couple of photos I need to scan into the computer, and all that.

And that's the other way I'm becoming old: growing up. I don't know if I'm ready, but I suppose as my mother said the other night when we were having McDonald's on the way back from my grandparents', no-one ever really is. So I think for this last year, I have to just do as well as I can and enjoy myself as much as I can, and appreciate what I've got here in high school while I've still got it.

Ahem. So that was deep. Anyways, the other day, Blue, Green and I went "back-to-school shopping" at the mall, except I was the only one who bought anything and also didn't really need anything for school, so I ended up buying some socks from Target that may or may not fit, a Carrie Underwood CD and some cat stickers from the CD store, a Bible and the first CD by this band 5 Seconds of Summer (I'd heard of them before but never listened to their music, but it's really good! Album review soon, maybe?) from Barnes & Noble, and then we all had some cinnamon sugar pretzel bites from Auntie Anne's and went to Starbucks. They were out of the strawberry purée, so I tried a double chocolate chip frappucino. It was really good! And yesterday, my mother and I had Chinese for lunch, and I tried chicken chow mei fun, which was also really good! And that's my last few days. (BTW, sorry about the site being inactive---I hope to get more ideas soon!) Now, without further ado, I'm off to make some binder labels and pack up my backpack! I'll talk to all y'all soon!

Published on Sunday, August 13, 2023, at 4:10 PM.

Song of the day: Yena - Smartphone

Hey y'all! I meant to post this a few days ago, but then I stayed with my family for a few days and by the time I got back I realized it was outdated since right when I was about to post that I got some more cool things! So prepare to be awed and amazed by all the cool stuff that I now own.

Firstly, let's start with an easy one: a free VHS copy of Titanic! The library group my mother volunteers with has long since stopped taking VHSes, and so when they got a donation of this when I was there last Thursday I got it for free!! And better yet, I think it's still in the original packaging!! Now, I doubt I have a priceless artifact on my hands, and I still plan to just watch the movie, but c'mon, that is cool.

I also went to the thrift store and got a green lamp. I'd show a photo, but right now it's occupied in the pantry, since my mother's using it to make sure we don't have any moths. But suffice it to say it's a super cute, colourful desk lamp and I'm totally putting it in my dorm room when I move to college.

Also, my Aunt Travelbug came into town from out west, and gave me some cool little goodies, including a little newspaper called "The Skinny" that they got in Scotland, a little newspaper called "20 minutes" that they got in France, a little keychain from Paris, some money from the UK to add to my paltry little no-effort collection of foreign money that I've accumulated over the years (a few Canadian coins, a two-euro coin one of my old frenemies tried to pay me back with once, a random Thai coin from Blue and now some British coins), a little bookmark and some postcards, including one from Belfast, one from a Scottish museum, and some really cute faux-vintage postcards from Paris!!! (To which the photos do not do justice.) All in all, I'd say that this was a really fun load of stuff. (Selected photos of this part to the right; certainly not everything since I want this page to load!) There was also something else, but I'll talk more about that later.

Now comes the software! The same day I got that free copy of Titanic, a copy of Mac OS X Tiger came through the donations, and I got that as well! It's an iBook G4 specific copy, and I wouldn't be able to install it on my iMac G3 anyways since it's too old for anything after Panther, but if the black MacBook wasn't in the state it is and I had the non-iBook disc, I might be able to install it there. But besides one missing CD envelope, it seemed to have everything, even the license info (Let's do the EULA hula! So fun!), the little pamphlet about .Mac (iCloud's predecessor's predecessor) and the DVDs for the iWork '05 trial and the 2004 World Book Media Edition for Macs. It also has a little DisplayPort to VGA dongle. So I think this is all really cool!!

Then, yesterday, for $5, my mother bought me a "Mac FunPack", which actually is compatible with my iMac G3 and is specifically marketed with a huge honking picture of one on the box, and has a whole tonne of games to try. It's super cool and I really want to try it out once we hopefully get the iMac working!

But the last thing is an iPad my Aunt got from her husband's work! It's an iPad 3, the pretty rare ones Apple only sold for like seven months, and so far it's not super useful for Web surfing, even, since it's on iOS 8 and most HTTPS refuses to work, but it can use YouTube. I haven't reset it since it's still on someone else's iCloud, and I definitely learned my lesson from the last used iPad we bought! But I have a cute glittery wallpaper, 2014 style, and I want to cover it with stickers and use it as a PDA or something.

But here's a quick Cliff's Notes of the rest of my last week or so: I saw Barbie with Blue and Green, and thought Simu Liu was pretty dang handsome and the movie itself was pretty good, but nothing super special. I also had lunch with my Grannie Thursday when she had an appointment around here, along with another aunt and my mother, at Olive Garden and had enough leftovers for supper, and then my Aunt Travelbug came into town and I went down with her and her son #1 to my Grannie and Grandpapa's and stayed the night, which was super fun although tiring, since #2 and #3, and #4 especially, will really tucker you out. But some of the fun included: driving, Minecraft, ice cream and going to some big park! Where #3 and #4 proceeded to tell some little boy that I was "a boy that looked like a girl" despite my numerous attempt to cut them off. Awkward...

But then I went home, and Aunt Travelbug and #1 came back through town yesterday and we all chatted some more and went out to supper. And that's what my week's been like! Now there's only 9 more days until school starts... barf!! And I haven't gotten much done today, but I'll try my best to get more done soon. And now I've got to go take a few photos for this post and then do some other stuff. Toodles!!

Published on Tuesday, August 8, 2023, at 5:04 PM.

Song of the day: Verivery - Get Away

Howdy howdy and Happy August! It's been a pretty monotonous past few days here for the most part, but there has been a little excitement. First, my aunt who lives in Colorado and her son (the seldom-mentioned #1) are coming to visit in a few days, and will be staying for about a week. We haven't seen them for about a year, but even that's unusually common for them, considering before that we hadn't seen then since 2018. (Okay, part of that was due to COVID, but still, sometimes it feels like they must be allergic to us.)

But I suppose despite their avoidance of visiting, the important thing is coming, and it'll certainly be a nice treat to see them. They're going to be staying at my Grannie and Grandpapa's, and I'm planning on going down too to spend a night there, firstly since I've actually seen my aunt and cousin in person for a total of two or three hours over the past half-decade, and secondly because it's been too long since I went to spend a night with either set of grandparents. And it'll hopefully be fun! But I hope the rest of the kids stay on their best behaviour---if you've read my blog, you know that those kids combined have a level of energy like no other!

Other news: it's finally raining properly! (As is illustrated by my singular rain GIF, because I felt like this post is long enough it needed a visual aid to spice things up.) The past three days have been rainy, including some storm last night that was intense enough my mother felt the need to get up in the middle of the night and turn her (desktop) computer off. I went to read the rain gauge this morning and it was at a whopping... 1.7 inches! So yeah, not necessarily what one would expect given the (relatively) torrential rains, but then again, my Nan had two rain gauges on opposite sides of the deck that had more than an inch's difference between them. I'm just glad we've been getting consistent rain!

Another interesting thing: I had steak last night! (Yeah, somehow I had never had steak before. I also don't know how to whistle, blow bubblegum or ride a bike well. Go figure.) My parents and I went out to supper, and I got my usual I always get when we go to this certain restaurant, but I tried a little bit of the tenderloin steak my dad got out of curiosity. Surprise, surprise: it tasted like beef! Really, it tasted a good deal like roast beef, although I did prefer the texture and that it wasn't quite as dry as roast beef I have tends to be. Anyways, it was pretty good and I'd eat it again, but nothing I could imagine myself hankering for.

And that's pretty much the sum of it! I also went to a local bookshop yesterday with my mum and we bought a few cool books: I bought a Pusheen the Cat book, a book called The Jane Austen Society that looked really good and a Jane Austen choose your own adventure called Lost in Austen! It all seems really cool. My mother also bought a Georgette Heyer guide book that she apparently plans to give to me eventually, and picked up some new book by an author she really likes called Mercedes Lackey. I really need to clean up my downstairs bookshelf now, but I still had some really good fun. Pictures of my books here to the right. But that's it for now. Toodly-oo!

Published on August 2, 2023, at 6:46 PM.