Song of the day: Auld Lang Syne

Happy New Year! I was thinking of doing some sort of "best of 2023" for my blog, but it's a bit late for that now, isn't it? If I have time soon, I'll do it. But for now, I just want to say thank you to all y'all for all the support you've given me in 2023. Y'all's comments to me have been so nice and I'll be glad if my site can bring any sort of light or happiness to someone's day. I hope we can all continue to grow in love in 2024---we're about to enter the mid-2020s! This year, the iPhone 6 will be a decade old! It seems weird that it's about to be 2024---is this the future? Anyways, I hope we can all continue to grow in love and goodness in this next year. God bless you all and happy new year!

Published on Sunday, December 31, 2023, at 11:52 PM.

Song of the day: Choi Minhye - Teenage Superstar

Howdy, y'all! As I write this, it's flurrying outside, as it has been for most of the day. Sadly, I don't think very much will accumulate, since, even though it's supposed to snow for the next couple of days, it's just cold enough to snow whilst still kind of being above freezing, and so it's in some weird sort of limbo. Anyways, today, since it's winter break and I don't have to do anything, I've been lounging around in my pyjamas and dancing, and just generally rocking out to some mid-00s style pop rock, like today's song of the day, embedded below, which I just discovered today.

By the way, in case you're wondering what that was embedded with, it's YT2009, an alternative frontend for YouTube that brings back the 2009-style interface! Naturally, I love that interface so much more, and it even has a very rudimentary (non-password-protected) account option, which seemsto let you "log in" with a username of your choice and associate playlists, favourites, etc., with that "account". Anyways, the public instance of this is here and it's one of my favourite Net things recently! It's going on my links page ASAP. Shoutout to the creator!

But I digress! That's not at all the point of today's post---that's Christmas! Sunday evening we went out to my dad's family's house. It was fun: I got to have some good chit-chat with my aunt and some cousins, and of course I got to stuff myself, and thankfully I didn't end up feeling really nauseous this time from overeating like I did at Thanksgiving. I did, however, bring some Tums as a precaution, just in case, which came in handy for some cousins! Anyways, that's about all that's properly notable enough for here from that Christmas, besides the fact that we didn't leave until 10:30 and so I didn't get to bed until 12:00 that night!

Anyways, the next morning, we had Christmas at my house, which was pretty nonchalant. There's a bit of a clutter issue in the area where we have the big tree, so my parents and I opened our presents in my room, where I have two of the little four-foot aluminium Christmas trees, one in purple that I've kept up year-round for ages and one in silver that my mum only just got me. I got a little water game with cards to switch out to make it like different arcade games, as a make up for one of these kinds of oil hourglass thingies pictured below that I bought and immediately broke on a field trip ages ago, and which couldn't be fixed, despite the collective efforts of myself, Blue and my mum; a hand-fashioned wooden British puzzle; one of those year-in-review book/magazine things from the UK from 1981, about the British Royal Family, including Charles and Di's wedding; a positive cornucopia of little squishy animals; and a purple luggage set, including a rolling suitcase! I've never had a rolling suitcase before (or a rolling backpack, and I was obsessed with the idea of having one of those for a while) so it's very exciting and novel. In an embarassing memory failure, I found out I had totally forgotten some presents I had picked up for my mother months ago for Christmas at a puzzle swap (in my defense, they were totally hidden underneath my bed) and she was the one who had to remind me of them. Oy! Anyways, my mother and I watched the royal Christmas message, as is our tradition, and that was it for the morning.

We went to my mother's family's very briefly in the afternoon. We had had our Christmas a couple weeks ago due to a surgery in the family and a required quarantine to prepare for it. We stopped by because my mother was going to act as chauffeur/stayer-in-the-hotel, because the surgery's a little while from where my family lives, and they're getting a bit older. Anyways, we ended up staying for only about an hour---a remarkable feat, considering my little cousins were there! #3 and #4 spent most of the time having me play like they were my cats, and insisting my new bangs make me look like a girl---to my aunt's chagrin and my silent, knowing amusement. I only got to chat with #2 and the rest of my family for a couple minutes, but my grannie gave me two pairs of fun, colourful socks whilst I was there, as well as a good variety of snacks, and my aunt gave me a Nintendo gift card as a gift, and we were on our way home.

Speaking of Nintendo, I saw reports that some people couldn't play on-line on the Wii U anymore, so I booted mine up and thankfully was able to get in a few on-line rounds of Mario Kart. I plan to play Splatoon 1 for one last time as well, one of these days---I used to play that so much back in the day! The Wii U shutting down its on-line will be quite sad indeed! But yeah, that's about it for this (rather lengthy---props to you if you stuck it out till the end!) post. Toodles!

Published on Wednesday, December 27, 2023, at 3:40 PM.

Song of the day: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope and pray that each of you has a lovely, blessed day with your loved ones. :) I also hope it's snowing where you are, because round about where I am, we've got a bit of a warm (relative to the season, it's not like we're sunny and 75) and rainy Christmas, which is weather that's fine by me, as longtime readers will know I'm ever the pluviophile, but nonetheless, it's not quite as picturesque. I'll post a full post later on detailing all the rest of my Christmas, but for now, I just wanted to pop on here and wish y'all a very merry Christmas! :)

Oh tidings of comfort and joy...

Published on Monday, December 25, 2023, at 8:58 AM.

Song of the day: Girls' Generation - Snowy Wish

I have no clue how long it's been, but y'all are free to go back through my past couple months of my blog and see when I first mentioned wanting bangs. Well, guess who finally got them?? I used this picture below as my reference, and I think they turned out really well! I went to a hair salon where Blue goes (and whither I think Green goes too) and the owner was really nice and cut my hair splendidly. I think the new style suits me pretty well, and everyone who's seen it so far has really liked it! It hides my massive forehead, whilst also just being really cute and also easy to style!

Meanwhile, I'm sorry for not having posted here in so long! I've been meaning to, but for some reason it's been most of a week since my last post. So, here's a quick Cliff's Notes of my Christmas break so far:

• Blue, Green and I went out for lunch, shopping, a movie (the new Ghibli movie The Boy and the Heron) and dinner on Sunday! For lunch, I had a chipotle chicken sandwich, which was SCRUMPTIOUS! And then I bought a Reba CD, the first season of Friends on DVD (which I'll probably sell after watching it unless I feel some strong desire to continue watching it), an 80s vintage sweater and a 70s vintage blouse, which I all think are quite lovely indeed. Except for the Reba CD, which I haven't listened to yet. The movie was quite good! (Although it didn't make me cry like I had been led to expect, and I still prefer Ni No Kuni as my favourite Ghibli work.) And then we went to an Asian restaurant, where I had my first proffessionally made yakisoba, a nice little miso soup, some dumplings that we shared and, for the first time ever, sushi! I tried a little bit of plain salmon, which tasted like very little, and then a "tiger roll" and some other kind of roll, which were both rather tasty, though I don't expect myself to be raring to eat sushi again. It was all very nice!
• I worked on some non-blog pages on this site for the first time in an eternity! Including my gallery, the iPods page, the home page, and more. I encourage y'all, if you're so inclined, to poke around and see what's new!
• Blue, Green and I met up again yesterday to have brunch (mac and cheese and pancakes for me, the pancakes because Green had had the last cinnamon roll) and then we went to Blue's house to try and finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy which we had started over the summer. We got through the rest of the second movie, but only got about halfway through the last film before Green had to leave, at which point Blue and I watched a bit of the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Anyways, the LOTR films were quite enjoyable, and, of course, Legolas was as dreamy as ever! And Blue and the family supplied us with ample junk food: jaffa cakes, multiple kinds of cookies, popcorn, artisanal crackers (not really junk, but still)---and then we balanced it all out with a couple of clementine oranges, so it was a healthy meal. (Those are the rules---don't shoot the messenger!)
• I found out that college in Canada is almost definitely not going to be in the budget, so I started researching some more American universities. I was disappointed, but I had been growing to expect it over the last little while, so I wasn't devastated. Maybe it just isn't God's will for me to go to Canada. I'll just do as best as I can!

And that's about it! How are y'all? Y'all should e-mail me so we can chat. :) Now, I'm going to go reheat some leftover Chinese for dinner. I'll talk to all y'all soon, hopefully sooner than this last time! Toodles!

Published on Thursday, December 21, 2023, at 7:18 PM.

Song of the day: Kara - Pretty Girl

I'm finally finished with finals!! I turned in my essay, which I thought went pretty well! I'm excited to write some more essays next semester in history and English---I think they keep getting better! Meanwhile, my Latin finals---about which I was so worried---was only seven lines of the eleven lines it was supposed to be over, with ten words we had to grammatically analyze, and for the people who took the longest, it still only took maybe twenty-five minutes. So yeah, that was underwhelming. Which also makes me worried, because if I got something wrong, that's that much more off my grade. Oh well.

My English final was mostly AP practice multiple choice with a few easy questions from our teacher (which were quite fun!) and a couple "ghost points" that got magically added. I was just in the nick of time to get there, but I think it went well. I also got some hot cocoa-flavoured Hershey's Kisses when I was done---she gave them out as we walked out the door---and they were really good! And then my French final was also AP practice exercises. The listening comprehension was a little difficult, not because I'm normally bad at listening comprehension (except for that one time we Zoomed my French teacher's old friend and neither Pink nor I could understand her southern French accent) but because for whatever reason, only when it comes to those exercises, my attention span (which I'm working to improve) just plummets. But I think that with that, and the whole test, overall, I did well.

And then my performing arts final performance was yesterday! I think it went well as well, although we three witches (we had to modernize the "double double, toil and trouble" scene from Macbeth) did all forget a line for ten awkward seconds. We met up beforehand in a period where none of us had a final, and practiced our lines and set up props, and then we played this really fun party trivia game called Papa's Quiz. I really liked it! It was trivia (which I love---I'm such a fan of Jeopardy!) mixed with ridiculous characters and an amusingly unenthusiastic-sounding host character. I recommend to y'all to try it out the next time you have a game night with your friends. (Which, come to think of it, I never have---do people do that much?) But I digress---I hope I didn't sound like a shill there! Honestly, I don't think I'd ever really like my blog to be sponsored at all---this is my hobby, so I don't want to sell out, you know? I think monetization is a lot of what's wrong with the Net and especially social media today.

Anyways, today, so far, I've done some chores around the house and other little things on my to-do list, and I need to wrap presents for Blue, Green and Pink because the three (or maybe two if Pink isn't able to make it) are going to have a little meet-up tomorrow to exchange Christmas gifts, have lunch and see the new Studio Ghibli film! Which is going to be my first Ghilbi film, I think, although I have played Ni No Kuni, which they did a lot of the art for, and I absolutely loved it! So yeah, I'll talk to all y'all later. Toodles!!

P.S. I signed up to be assistant stage manager to one of my friends during my school's spring play! Which is Twelfth Night, I'm pretty sure. It all sounds cool and I'm quite excited!

Published on Saturday, December 16, 2023, at 2:41 PM.

Song of the day: Girls' Generation - Baby Baby

Ya girl is coming back at you from the local library, once again! My mum has a book club meeting tonight, so I'm tagging along before she and I go out to supper with my dad. I've just quickly reviewed the Latin selection for my final tomorrow, and I think I'll do pretty well, actually! Maybe not A++ levels, but hopefully well enough to keep my letter grade.

Meanwhile, speaking of finals, today was the start of finals "week" (four days) and it went pretty well! First came my study hall "final", which basically just meant Blue and I had two hours of free time, which we both used to prepare for our other finals. I met with my history teacher and she gave my essay draft a quick look over and basically just warned me to make sure I avoid passive voice, run-on sentences (which dear readers of my blog will know I can be prone to), etc. I actually think my essay's in pretty good shape! Although during our "final" time tomorrow, I will look over it again and maybe ask Pink or another classmate to give it a quick peer review. I would've asked Blue or Green, but neither of them are in the same history class as me and there's some setting with the class's shared G-Drive that prohibits sharing it to someone outside of the G-Drive. So I'll have to think of some other solution.

Meanwhile, afterwards, I had my math final, which I think went pretty dang well. It only took me half the time, and that's with checking all of the problems and also, if I'm honest, zoning out for part of the time. Afterwards, I stopped by Barnes & Noble to buy Pink's Christmas gift (I know he reads this blog from time to time, so I won't say what it is!) and honestly, I ended up buying more for myself than for him! LOL. I found a DVD of Jane Eyre and one of some documentary about the Royal Family, and a CD from a new j-pop/k-pop group called &Team, which, from the iTunes previews (I haven't properly listened to it yet) seems quite good. And then we hit up Mickey D's for lunch, and I got two double cheeseburgers because there was a deal even though I wasn't that hungry, and I'm still full hours later!! But yeah, I actually feel pretty prepared for my finals tomorrow. But somehow I feel both more and less stressed than finals weeks past. ??? But yeah, I'm gonna go now. Toodlie-oo!

P.S.: Today was the second year of my Verivery concert I went to in St. Louis!! (Read about it here, by scrolling down to the post with the title that reads "SUPER SPECIAL VERIVERY CONCERT EDITION!") Sadly, even though I remembered it leading up to today, I didn't think to wear any Verivery merch until I was in my math final. Oh well---I'll wear it tomorrow!

Published on Tuesday, December 12, 2023, at 7:12 PM.

Song of the day: Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles

At last!! After most of a day spent writing, I finally just finished the History Final Paper from the Mildly Grey Lagoon, which wouldn't have been annoying if I hadn't had to do all the actual writing in one day, and a Sunday at that because of Family Christmas Numero Uno yesterday. Speaking of, it was rather fun, though... eventful. My trio of little cousins were there, and as usual, they were arguing over who got to spend time with me and in between running around with all of them---which, don't get me wrong, is generally really fun!---I didn't really get much time to, y'know, sit down and visit with all the adult members of my family. And I don't know why, but all of a sudden the two youngest (aliases #3 and #4 for those familiar with my blog) just had so much energy yesterday that, for the first time in a long time, I basically half-passed out on the way home. I did accidentally break #4's favourite necklace and there was another situation I won't get into which made me feel (wrongfully, according to everyone else, so I suppose it was just, as my mum said, a "self-induced guilt trip") like rather a rotten cousin.

But besides all that, it was all pretty nice. I got to see some random cousin of my mother that I hadn't seen in ages, and got to have at least some chit-chat with the rest of my family as well. My grannie and grandpapa got me this pretty purple blanket and a cross-body bag, both of which will prove useful, I imagine---I really liked this pre-Christmas Christmas! (Sidebar: I hope I don't come across as materialistic when I mention the gifts that I've received---actually, I've found as I've gotten older that I've started to appreciate the presents more, since most often they're just things people saw that reminded them of me and that I now associate with them in return, and aren't just whatever toy is popular now. I really love the thought put into each gift and giving the special people in my life something that made me think of them, you know?)

But yeah. I listened to Vanessa Carlton's CD today, and I really enjoyed how cohesive its sound was. Not a lot of songs stood out to me as ones that I'd like to add to any of my regular playlists, but on second thought, I might add Ordinary Day to my favourites, at least for now, and add one or two others to my study playlist if I find any that are study-esque upon a brief re-skim. (Blogger's note: I ended there and forgot to upload until the next day, so all this is written like it was yesterday, because it was. Toodles!)

Published on Monday, December 11, 2023, at 8:34 AM.

Song of the day: Muse - Snow Halation

Gosh, long time, no blog! This is the week before finals week, so I've been studying and/or working pretty hard all week. I won't get into everything, but suffice to say that I. Am. Pooped. I have Christmas with my mum's family tomorrow due to some logistical cirumstances I shan't get into that necessitated it, and so I won't have tomorrow to study bits and pieces, and, more likely, to hammer out my history essay. I don't like to do homework on Sunday if I can help it (partly because I'm a Christian and partly because I just need a day where I don't have to do anything school-related, you know?) but I reckon that I'll have to. My history teacher still hasn't commented on my paper outline, so I don't know if I'm alright to get started yet or if I ought to change something, but oh well. I'll just try and have fun tomorrow with my family!

Now granted, I already know what gift I'm getting from my Grannie and Grandpapa since I witnessed my parents buying it (the dollar store in town where my grandparents live was all out of iTunes cards) but it's the family memories that matter. This year is going to be a small Christmas, at least in terms of gifts, all around, I reckon---my Nan has already said as much---but I've come up with meaningful gifts for my best friends and for my parents, so I think it'll be a lovely Christmas! Speaking of, I need to go order my dad's gift.

Speaking of ordering, I ordered some CDs a couple weeks ago on Black Friday, and they finally arrived today! I have 5SOS's Sounds Good Feels Good, which I listened to already---about as good as their first album, I think, although I didn't like a couple of the songs' lyrics that much---Carrie Underwood's Some Hearts and Vanessa Carlton's Be Not Nobody. (Which, yes, I ordered simply because I love A Thousand Miles so much, okay? LOL) But I really need to go now, because it seems this week evewrything has been happening to mean that I can't do anything in reasonable time. Gotta go!

Published on Friday, December 8, 2023, at 9:26 PM.

Song of the day: Cho Tokimeki Sendenbu - Suki!

Howdy, y'all! The school dance was pretty fun last night. Green and Blue both didn't go and Pink was hanging out with some other people most of the night on whom I didn't feel like intruding, but I got to hang out with some cool people from my D&D club most of the night. It was pretty fun overall---there were Twinkies on sticks and Ritz crackers with cheese whiz as the hors d'oeuvre (classy, I know, but still delicious!) and some sort of punch I'd never had before, and, being a disco-themed dance, there were sparkly outfits abounding (including my own, which I quite liked!) and a massive honking disco ball. There were also a pet rock-decorating table (at which my group spent much of the evening) and some arcade game machines, one of which had the Fix-It Felix game from Wreck-It Ralph! I didn't even know that was a thing in real life, but I think it's really cool! Most of the songs were pretty good and (naturally, I should hope) I danced quite a bit!

In all, it was really quite a fun night, though I don't think I looked properly good in a single one of the seniors' grade-wide photos. I'm only properly visible in one of four, for Pete's sake! And even then, because of the way people got crowded iunto the photo area, I was behind a couple of taller people, so even on my tip toes you could only see my head and my neck, which looks... bizarre. Luckily, I have a couple of more salvageable photos to make up for it.

Beyond that, I spent yesterday before the dance working on homework, which I think I have pretty much under wraps, and I've been chillaxing today and surfing around the Net! Which got me thinking---since I switched to my frame-based layout, it'd be really easy to switch this to an iFrame design if I ever got an inkling to, since I could just make a new "shell", change some CSS, and I'd be good to go---I wouldn't even have to copy-paste page contents into a new layout like I have in all of my past redesigns! I don't have any immediate desire to change my site's layout, but if I ever do, I very well could. Anyways, I'm going to go hopefully have dinner---I'm getting hungry!! Toodles!

Published on Sunday, December 3, 2023, at 7:20 PM.

Song of the day: 2Eyes - Shooting Star

Happy December! It's almost 2024, which is my graduation year, and of course it only felt real once I changed the (as of yet hidden) "next month" link on this page to January 2024. This year is going so quickly and yet so slowly! Sorry for not blogging since Monday but this week has just been super tiring for some reason and I haven't had much energy to expend beyond schoolwork. My school has a disco-themed event tomorrow night that I'm going to in the evening and beside that, I'm going to be doing schoolwork, probably all day. I have some research for a history essay, and then a (thankfully short and relatively informal) English essay to write, and a math study guide to finish, and finally, I get to modernize part of a scene from Macbeth, which should be pretty fun. I feel like the last two will take maybe a half-hour each, and the history and English essays probably won't take too much time, so it may not be all day, but still. I think the dance will probably end up being rather fun, but still, I wish the tonne of work and the dance could maybe not coincide.

Anyways, highlights of this week: it was spirit week, and yesterday was "role reversal day", wherein teachers dressed up like students and vice versa. Some of the outfits were just plain funny, especially the teachers' outfits gently poking fun at students (the principal dressed up as this guy in my math class and her outfite was absolutely legendary!), but the absolute highlight was when, poking fun at the stink that some people put up because of the dress code's prohibition of crop tops, some teachers (including a pro-crop top teacher or two), right before the end of the day, left class, changed into crop tops, and paraded around the hallways.

Also, my class chose a Dolly Parton quote as our senior motto! Thankfully, we didn't choose a quote by the Joker, which I feel like would've just been a little weird, and I think our quote is quite nice! Also, we got our second semester schedules, and Blue and I, who both put off getting the dreaded PE credit (dun dun DUN!) to the end of high school, at least get to suffer through PE class together! There was a little oddity, though. I'm in Performing Arts, which is supposed to be year-long, but I got double scheduled with History of Rock: '80s through '20s (a sequel to a class from last year---read my blog posts from fall of 2022 to hear about that class) in case I wanted to switch. I had Performing Arts today and performed a Shakespeare monologue, and for the first time in my life froze on stage because I randomly forgot the second half of a line, although besides that (which, according to a friend of mine in drama class, who, thank God, reminded me of my flubbed line, looked like a dramatic pause) I think I did pretty well with the actual acting part! But it was pretty bizarre, since I've not really had stage fright before. I hope I can overcome it! But I think I will continue with Performing Arts second semester. I mean, it's such a fun group, not least of which is that friend and some other pals, and a fun class in general, although if I could take them both I would. But we'll see. But that's pretty much it, and it's getting pretty dang late---toodly-oo for now!

Published on Friday, December 1, 2023, at 9:02 PM.