Song of the day: StayC - Bubble

Hey everyone! I meant to make another post a few days ago, but it didn't end up happening, partially because yesterday (when I was finally going to get around to it) I felt crappy! I'm not ill or anything, it's just that the weather here has been so hot and humid this past couple of days that yesterday, having to walk around to my classes all day, I ended up getting super dehydrated! And I've been trying to rehydrate myself as best as I can, I think to decent success, since. Which means that as I was going to class today (thank God, I only had morning classes) I was carrying around two Hydroflasks full of water, as well as two electrolyte drinks---not to mention the Propels I've had here in the dorm, where I've been retreating as much as possible because this place has active air conditioning---my fingers feel like ten mini Fudgesicles.

Anyways, my first week of classes went pretty well! I was apprehensive about my computer science class above all, but so far it's going well---it's even fun! My on-line French class is also going pretty well, besides a group assignment last week that was just a little odd. (I mean, seriously... wanting to do a French assignment where the point is to talk in French in English?!?)

(Let me disrupt the narrative flow and whatnot to say that I just heard a roll of thunder, looked up from my computer and saw some rainclouds coming our way through the window! And apparently the weather's going to stop being so bloody hot too. Autumn is finally coming!!)

Really, the main class I'm nervous about now is Public Speaking---firstly, we're only allowed keywork notecards, not even full-sentence outlines or a typed speech, but that's not the big thing. Honestly, the big thing is coming up with ideas for the speech assignments and figuring out what I want to say. I kind of dread it, though I think I came across a pretty good idea for my first speech. And of course, the building is on the opposite side of campus, so it's a bloody trudge. There is one pro to that class, though! There's this really cute guy who lives in my building that also happens to be in my public speaking class---let's call him Cutie Patootie. As my roommate and the rest of my friends can tell you (by the by, I need to come up with colour names for my roommates, don't I?) I've developed a pretty big crush on this guy. Whenever I pass by his door, I make a little finger heart. :) And my roommate theorizes that he might like me back a little bit, although I'm not sure about that. It would be really lovely, though!! Make no mistake. :)

My other two classes (English and my first-year class) are both going pretty well---I even met my first real-life k-pop fan in one of them! We did a little self-introduction exercise and one of the people who shared out loud was this Japanese exchange student who likes Twice and Stray Kids. We chatted about it after class and it was really cool! And I ended up safeguarding the water bottle of this person who sits next to me in my English class, and saw some random Stray Kids stickers, too! Sadly, the first is only here for the semester, but I hope to start a k-pop club here! I know there are at least a few people who'd be interested, I think... we'll have to see! Though I'm not sure how to go about polling interest... maybe a Google Form with a QR code?

That's about all that I can think of for my first week and a bit! I'll talk to all y'all soon---toodles!

Published on Tuesday, August 27, 2024, at 7:57 PM.

Song of the day: April - Mwah!

I'm a college girl now---and not just because I had my first ramen in my dorm yesterday! (It was a little Hello Kitty noodle cup I got at the World Market in St. Louis when I took a trip thither with Blue on Monday---it was actually really good!) After my post last Thursday, I spent a couple of days making some last rounds before college! Friday was my last "normal" day, and then Saturday and Sunday I visited each side of grandparents. I also spent part of Saturday packing, but spending a little more time packing would've been better. Pro tip: don't leave most of your packing until the day before, because then you'll be up until 2 AM! And then Monday, as I said, Blue and I took a day trip to St. Louis! My mum drove us because she really wanted to see the Doctor Who anniversary display at the Science Centre. Keyword: display---it was a Tardis and a few Sonic Screwdrivers. Granted, that was cool since they were real props from the show, but it was massively underwhelming.

Then we went to Missouri's only k-pop store, Kork! It was really fun, even though it was pretty small. We also had St. Louis Bread Company for lunch! It was kind of sad---it was literally just Panera to the point that even the cups and ads said Panera. We also got lost in the mall trying to find the bathrooms, which are hidden at the end of a long, skinny corridor that's really hard to spot. What the fluff?!? Anyways, afterwards we went to Penzey's and the World Market (where I got so many noodle cups and tteokbokki cups) and checked out Five Below, which I had never been to before! It wasn't that special, but oh well. It was a really fun last hurrah of summer holiday before college!

But honestly, all that kind of seems a world away now, because I moved into college this week! I'm living pretty far from home, but thankfully not too far to drive down there for the weekend or something like that. But luckily there's been enough to do during this orientation week that I've made some potential new friends! Especially my roommate. I'm in a suite, and my roommate and I, as well as our suitemates, have really hit it off! I also have a new group I'm hanging out with that met because some of them and I (I don't have colour named for them yet so I won't W them individually) are in the same department! There are a couple who seem especially cool so far, and I've been having quite a bit of fun hanging out with them all.

Speaking of, yesterday one of them and I went thrifting! Another new acquaintance came along too and it was lovely. I came home with a couple new outfits! The big school events are mostly just standard fare, I think---school spirit stuff, getting-to-know-you stuff, and so on--- but they've been really fun! If I remember anything particularly interesting (my brain's a little fried from getting in bed late all week) I'll make sure to tell y'all! But other than that, I'm really not in my routine yet, so I don't actually know what to do with myself when i don't have any activity to do. It's really odd... I'll have to try and figure that out. So far it's resulted in just aimlessly going on-line whenever I have downtime.

Speaking of the Net, I had to redownload Instagram to connect with people, because Instagram is always the first thing people ask for to communicate. It's a serious bummer to an old neo-Luddite like me who's been planning on getting a flip phone for ages---should I just start giving people my number instead? But then I'd feel left out... ugh!!

But yeah, this seems to be going well so far and I look forward to making aquaintances into friends, meeting new friends, and (of course) classes and all that junk! Sorry if this was incoherent as I'm tired. I'll talk to all y'all soon---toodles!

Published on Sunday, August 18, 2024, at 11:05 AM.

Song of the day: TWS - hey! hey!

Hey y'all! I promised I'd update more, and promised a life update post, and here I am, delivering that post less than a week later!!! Very odd, isn't it? Well, my life is odd right now. I have about a week before my move-in date, and i have pretty much every day mapped out. Tomorrow Blue and I are going to finish the Jane Eyre miniseries (I may give you all my thoughts about that, since Heaven knows I've done my fair share of media ramblings on this blog already), this weekend will be for visiting family, and so on. This is my last full day of "normal" for a while, at least until my college routine becomes my new normal. And since I got my job so late in the summer, it's not like this normal had a lot of time to become normal anyways.

Speaking of, my last night of work is tonight! Most of my coworkers have been realy cool and I'm honestly sad that I didn't get to know some of them better, but oh well---at least I've gotten to know them! But I will not miss having to work closing shifts---(weeping Mrs. Bennet voice) those managers have NO COMPASSION for my POOR SLEEP SCHEDULE!! I just couldn't function yesterday afternoon because I was massively braindead. Even now I could really go for a nap, even though I kind of doubt it'd make me any less tired. But I guess I'm lucky that it's taken this long for this schedule to come back to bite me! I do plan to work at The Grocery Store next summer, but Heaven knows I will not be working these late hours again if I can help it.

Besides that, I've realized gradually that I have absolutely no hope of getting the full KonMari sweep of my room done before school starts like I wanted to. And thus, I'll probably do yet another round of cleaning next summer, which will hopefully be the last one like I wanted this one to be! I think it'll be best if I start, y'know, with more than a month till school starts back up whilst I have a work schedule that precludes me doing that much work on decluttering. At least I'll get to kind-of declutter by moving away and leaving the crap I don't want behind! And I should be able to at least get through my papers by the end of the summer, which are what's really making my room look like a tornado went through it right now between all the boxes and piles of papers and everything. I miss having a clean room!

Anyways, like I mentioned in my last post, this past weekend was Missouri's tax-free weekend and so we did some back to school shopping in town! We hit up Target first and got me some medication for a first-aid kit, and some laundry stuff, amongst other kinds of stuff that escapes me because I'm currently braindead, and then, since Target was crammed with people, we had to go home for a couple of hours in hopes that the crowds would die down by the time we hit Wal-Mart. I may or may not have seen a high school classmate in Wal-Mart, but it was someone I was distant enough from that I was embarrassed to catch a glimpse of him and then tried to avoid and bump into him at the same time somehow. From Wal-Mart, we got a whole bunch of plastic storage bins, and again some more stuff I don't remember, and this haul is now taking up a corner of my room, which makes my room feel even messier when combined with the temporary paper situation. Oy vey.

It's really beginning to hit me that this is the end of one chapter---the epilogue to my high school career, if you will---and the beginning of a new chapter. I'm getting emotional about starting college for the first time this summer, when all along it's been pretty much just excitement. I'll miss my parents, and my friends and I are all going to different colleges. Of course, we'll stay in touch (preferably via e-mail!!!!!!!!!) but it's just going to be different, you know? But my roommates seem cool, so I'm sure it'll all be great. :)

I've done a little work on some new things for the site since my last post, but not as much as I'd have wished. I hope I don't have too, too many extra committments in college (because at times this past school year got a little busy, honestly) and that I can get the time to work on my beloved site! I already have plans to join the campus Episcopal group and to hopefully create a k-pop club, but that's about it, so I think I'll have well enough time! Although I'll have to review all the clubs to be sure. But I love this site and want to do so much more, if I can find anything more to do! Rest assured that I'll do my best to update the blog steadily, and the other pages when I have the time and ideas. I don't plan to abandon this site---especially as it's nearing its (technical, based on the sign-up date, not the date when I started working on it) fifth anniversary! That's so weird to say. And I had a site for a year before I even created this one, so I've been a webmistress for almost six years! I'm here to stay. :)

But yeah, that's the end of today's post. Next time I see you, I will temporarily no longer be temporarily employed for the summer for the school year! (Please note that if you got an aneurysm from reading that, that's your own moral failure and not my responsibility! :D) Until then, thanks so much to you (yes, you!) for supporting my site and I'll see you later!

Published on Thursday, August 8, 2024, at 3:00 PM.

Song of the day: Michelle Branch - Everywhere

Hello everyone! Right now I'm about to leave to go back to school shopping (and as of me finishing and posting this, I've already done the shopping---I'll talk about that in another post), but before I leave I'm syncing my iPod entirely (more on that later) and I thought I'd let you all know about an adventure I've been going on the past few days: installing Windows 10 on my MacBook---the very same MacBook I'm using right now to write this blog post! That's right, this is Adventures in Installing Windows: Round II!

If you've surfed through my site, especially the Computers Page and the technology parts of the Opinions section, you know that I've been considering switching back to Windows for a while. I was planning to get a new laptop for college, but then I realized (spurred on as well by my parents' correct insistence that my MacBook would do just fine) that I could just dual-boot my MacBook with Windows. And so I did! Thank God I still have an Intel MacBook. Suck it, Apple Silicon! I mean, sure, it's much faster with better battery life, but you lose compatability---and ya girl loves being able to run old software if she so chooses.

Anyways, the first big obstacle was freeing up space. I don't know how, since I really never downloaded that much on my laptop, or at least I thought so. I had started cleaning out my downloads folder a bit before, but I just kicked the can down the road and transferred everything I could onto a flash drive, I'd started with maybe 20 or 30 GB free, and miraculously ended up with 100 GB free out of a 256GB drive! It should have been easier to divide that up and all, but for some reason Mac OS loves to hoard its "system" data---by my last count there was still something like 50GB of data only marked "system", which didn't include the actual OS installation. Maybe reinstalling an OS every year is a good idea...

Anyways, that took well over a day and was stressful in its own right---I had a flash drive on a little multi-port dongle that plugged into my MacBook's USB-C port, and in the pile of crap that is my room right now since I'm going through my massive hoard of papers and have papers in different piles on the floor, I somehow managed to lost it. My parents and I tore my room apart for about twenty minutes at least, before my mum saw it in my purse (?!?!?). I have no clue why on God's green Earth I put it there, but at least I found it!

Anyways, yesterday the time came at last to install Windows! Thanks to Apple's Boot Camp software, it wasn't that eventful---much less frustrating than the Windows 7 PC, where I had to spend a whole day looking for freaking drivers. The only big frustration is that I don't have a Windows licence yet and haven't gotten around to buying one, so i've just been trying to do what I can do to get around their whole "you can't customize Windows until you activate" thing. And that bloody "Activate Windows" watermark!! It doesn't affect the functionality really, but it's sure as &%*$ annoying. Microsoft really know how to get to you! I don't really want to pirate Windows---call me a square if you like, but I prefer to stay within the law for the most part---and I know I'll get around to buying a licence eventually, but that's just one thing I can put off a little till later.

And of course it didn't totally go off without a hitch. It took me, like, a day to get everything installed and more or less how I like it, and the customization was especially annoying, but I think it's alright for now. I just copied the entire music library, database files and all, from iTunes on my Windows 7 PC to iTunes on this new computer, and replaced the old database files from the fresh library created upon installation, and somehow everything just worked without me having to import any files! And my iPod even synced without me having to delete everything and resync it. Although that infamous U2 album Apple forced into everyone's iTunes library in 2014 seems to be haunting me now. And today I tried to sync a new album I bought from iTunes to my iPod and for some reason it deleted everything off my iPod, claiming everything was incompatible. So I was agonizing over that and was convinced I was going to have to delete everything or something, but I just restarted my laptop and tried a different USB port and somehow everything synced right back. Ugh.

Anyways, I want to work more on the site and everything this school year if I can find the time and inspiration! I have an idea for somewhat of a redesign, and a page I want to add. Maybe another shrine as well... we'll have to see. I've honestly considered having a little mini-section for my various fictional crushes. Let me know what you think and especially please let me know if you have any ideas for opinions I should add to my opinions section, or new additions you think would go well with my site! That's it for now---I'll make a more general life update post soon. Talk to all y'all later!

Published on Sunday, August 4, 2024, at 9:16 PM.