the procrastination tactic

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:01:12 GMT

We made snow angels in our excuse of a front yard. (Well, I did. B made something deformed.) Even though there was snow everywhere, and clothes had to be changed, and our cat thinks we're insane, and haha I almost drowned short joke, it was the absolute happiest I've been in forever and awhile.

Penny Lane

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:09:52 GMT

penny lane
Originally uploaded by nini bubbles

She's such a riot. :D

We picked her up yesterday from the aunt's -- so far, she's adapting well to her food and other living stuff here at the apartment, and she seems to be happy and friendly. Already she knows where her food is kept, and she gets excited when we make any approaches towards that end of the kitchen. She's clearly one of us :P

Still hasn't managed to find a good sleeping spot for her though -- there was one brief incident where we went looking for her this morning in the house (apparently she's a serious escape artist, so we were advised to keep tabs on her for the next few days) and we found her under our bed, contentedly tucked in the box spring portion of our mattress. She emerged from it just fine, but we were in laughing hysterics at the sight.

Writer's Block: Memo to Myself

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:44:44 GMT

If you could travel back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self?

View 561 Answers

I know you say you never regret anything (and it's true, you almost never do), but you will regret not finishing your bachelor's degree when you could. Do yourself a favour, and stick it out.

NSFW (for language)

Fri, 22 May 2009 01:52:24 GMT

A different way to check the weather.

*gigglefits*

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:57:02 GMT

College application is in.

*crosses fingers for good omens and 60 transfer credits*

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:19:46 GMT

After this weekend, I don't know if I can go back to my normal life.

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:05:07 GMT

Books from the BBC!

The BBC claims most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. Italicize the ones you've partially read
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings trilogy - Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 Time Traveller's Wife - Audry Niffenberg
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis+
34 Emma - Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne*
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood+
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan+
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov*
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce*
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath*
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry*
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare*
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo*

22, nyah nyah.

O.o

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:15:51 GMT

Dee shooting herself, Kara finding her viper with her ring and dog tags on the body, and Ellen Tigh as the fifth Cylon? *flails hysterically*

pardon my spaz, but:

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:53:52 GMT

Kathleen Edwards is going to be in World Cafe Live Philadelphia on my birthday! ;_;

First night of Hanukkah.

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:34:56 GMT

A power failure hit the entire block early this evening.

Ben's response: "I thought the light was supposed to last all eight days?"

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:19:15 GMT

My graphics card is, for lack of a better comparison, acting like a teenager who's just been denied a later curfew.

Symptoms:
- Last night, started crashing hard-core during World of Warcraft; graphics went kerbunkle, and computer froze.
- After a hard restart, tracer lines across the mobo and Windows start-up screen. Monitor receives no signal after that. This persists after several hard resets.
- Normal during safe mode.

Attempts:
- Tested memory overnight with the Windows memtest. No issues.
- Uninstalled graphics drivers in safe mode. Rebooted computer in normal fashion. Graphics looked ok, but I honestly didn't let it run long enough in that state to see if it's a drivers issue or a hardware issue.
- Reinstalled graphics drivers. Right now, graphics are quietly rebellling here and there, and my monitor is intermittently losing signal.
- Yeah, I tried to play WoW when it looked like my computer had settled down. That was a mistake, but the repair utility came out fine at least.

We'll probably take it to the computer doctor tomorrow, but urrrrrgh. -_-

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:29:54 GMT

Is it January yet? -.-

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:16:15 GMT

Guh. More free time please. *flops into bed*

Also - it's snowing! :O

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:13:13 GMT

While reading CBC.ca today, I caught a reader's comment made in response to the article about Election Day:

If Obama wins it will be a defining moment in the history of humankind as pivitol [sic] as E=MC2, breaking the sound barrier or walking on the moon. It will be the day that the world accepts all people as equal in the eyes of their peers. It will be the day that humankind breaks through the colour barrier.

To my American friends: I get a stay-home pass today, because I'm not allowed; what's your excuse? Go vote. :)

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:41:09 GMT

I've seen this Honda commercial several times already, and it amazes me each time. Why? None of it is digitally enhanced. I kid you not.

citizenship diary.

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:45:57 GMT

I heard this on the way home from fencing tonight, and wanted to share - it's an introspective radio segment about a British woman's journey towards obtaining American citizenship. Still five years to go for me, but a great deal of the segment talks about immigration and its personal and political conflicts. It's painfully honest and incredibly resonating, and reflects a great deal about my experiences and thoughts on the process (yes, including the silly application questions and the Windex fingerprinting) - it's on Soundprint this week only, so feel free to take a listen. :)

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:40:15 GMT

This stomach virus hurts, in a horrific biological warfare kind of way.

understatement of the month.

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:14:00 GMT

Hi, green card. It took a year, but you're finally here. *hugs*

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:43:48 GMT

from zephre and relentlesstoil :
As was demonstrated in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

Alright, I'll bite. The one that still resonates with me to this day: Reference re Same-Sex Marriage [2004], where the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its opinion that proposed legislation extending marriage to same-sex couples was consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

To get geekily triumphant, the Conservatives who opposed this legislation got pwned in the fase.

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:17:09 GMT

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

She faced the horizon and listened until she heard what the sea was saying to her: "Give it to me, my daughter. And I will take it and wash it and carry it to a far country until it is no longer your sin; but just a curiosity adrift, beached and made innocent."

- Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:27:00 GMT

Not that I have a baby (what a thought O.o), or know many people with kids, but I thought this article might be worth sharing. The Lancet article is here for those that want to take a deeper look at the study. Overall, some fairly intimidating stuff.

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 05:44:04 GMT

Not the milk. ;_;

(We drink Organic Valley milk over here, but this is still depressing.)

hi, spore. also, tina fey.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:48:36 GMT

So, Spore is taking some heat and getting not-so-great reviews on Amazon. Not because of the gameplay itself, but because of EA's decision to use DRM in the game. Hrm, and here I was thinking about walking to the Gamestop tomorrow and picking this up >.>

In other news, Tina Fey playing the Republican veep down to her high heels yesterday in SNL? Frakking hysterical.

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:42:48 GMT

My big brother mcsimpson has reminded me most poignantly about my fondness for soft-serve ice cream, which is not easily accessible in the land of suburbia. More importantly, I shouldn't indulge, simply because I start my fencing class on Tuesday, and my workout routine for the last few months has been very similar to moo, which is to say none at all.

In other news, I received my super-special absentee ballot election package today from Elections Canada. In relation to that, I bring you this article, which made me laugh my pants off. (For those that aren't in the know - This Hour Has 22 Minutes is Canada's version of the Daily Show.)

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:02:49 GMT

We were feeling decidedly in need of sunshine yesterday (especially since we'd spent the last month practically holed up in the den with stacks of BSG DVDs) so we took a cue from mcsimpson and went to the Chaddsford Winery about an hour southwest of us. I'm generally not a huge wine drinker, but they were having a jazz performance thing on top of wine tasting in the cellars, so it was a pretty decent compromise.

We tried out a couple of reds and whites - I was pretty partial to the sample of white Reserve 2006, but I couldn't justify spending $18 on a bottle considering that I'm not the primary wine drinker in the house. The clerk giggled a little when I made that comment, and we ended up purchasing a bottle of Syrah instead. Unfortunately that purchase, which we tried out tonight, ended up being more acidic than we liked, so I'll probably use it in a beef stew sometime this week. Another wine we tried out in the cellar, a dessert wine called Sunset Blush, ended up being overly sweet.

Afterwards, we listened to some jazz in the winery courtyard, then had dinner at Margaret Kuo's Akari Room and celebrated Ben's upcoming birthday. Nom nom sushi and good company. <3