Heather Meadows – Page 98 – p i x e l s c r i b b l e s

If I were the type to make MVs…

…I would make one using Harry Potter footage and the piece “Keiyaku” from Fate/stay Night.

Spider-Man 3 = awesome.

I’ll wait awhile to give my full report, since I know my friends are going to want to see the movie and they wouldn’t want me to give anything away.

Here are some general, non-spoilerrific notes:

Fabulous opening titles.
Amazing visuals.
A lot happened. I mean wow.
Lowell got old.
Yay for more Spidey characters!

I really want to say something about something that happened to Peter…but I’ll restrain myself.

Ugh (TMI)

Is nausea, to the point of having bile come up into the back of your mouth, a symptom of being out of shape?

I’ve had nausea at various times of day, often in the morning, intermittently for awhile now.

Sometimes it happens after I’ve eaten something, but it’s not the kind of nausea you get when you’ve overeaten. And usually I haven’t overeaten. I haven’t overeaten in quite some time.

Sometimes it happens hours after I’ve had anything to eat, and it’s kind of like the nausea you feel when you’re hungry, but more pronounced.

Lately it’s gotten to where no food sounds appetizing, and I both really want to eat and really don’t want to eat.

Like a fool, I took a pregnancy test, and it was of course negative. I think the chances of a person whose eggs have been fried by chemotherapy all of a sudden getting pregnant are about zero. But I don’t think my heart will give up on the idea until I’m maybe 45. ;P

Help.

Why do I keep checking MySpace, and making tiny little tweaks on my profile, and hopping around to my friends’ pages in the hopes that they’ve posted something new? I have never cared about it before. What’s different now?

Holy crap

I just watched the opening gambit of Case Closed, episode one. And by Case Closed, I mean the Detective Conan English dub.

This is the best dub I have ever seen.

Seriously. This show has better voice acting than some shows that were made in English!

Intonation that makes sense! Voices that don’t sound like people trying to sound like something else! Meguire (Megure)’s accent is a little weird, but it works.

I am so impressed I think I’ll watch the whole episode like this.

This is one of the most surreal experiences of my life. :>

Edit: Jimmy (Shinichi) just said “Huh?” -_-

Edit #2: Rachel: This isn’t an office, it’s a pig sty! No wonder you haven’t had a case in months!

Richard: You’re wrong; I just polished off a whole case!

Edit #3: I like Rachel’s voice acting, though the timbre of her voice seems a little too mature sometimes.

Conan’s voice actress is pretty good! Maybe a little too cutesy.

I’m getting a kick out of all the accents in this show.

Edit #4: One thing I don’t like is that I can’t skip past the end credits to see the final scene and the next episode preview. If I hit next, it goes to the next episode. Bollocks! Edit #11: I need to stop editing this post. But I wanted to mention that I can skip to the preview on my regular DVD player. Still can’t skip to the final scene though!

Edit #5: I do like how they did the OP and ED! Same music, reorchestrated and played, with English lyrics that seem to match the originals, albeit they’re not direct translations. The singer isn’t bad, which helps. (Of course, I don’t get to hear a guy yelling “mune ni doki doki dake!!!”) I wonder how Nazo is in English…guess it’ll be awhile before I find out :>

Edit #5: Another like: they say “Next Conan’s Hint!” :D

Edit #6: Meguire: Got the cause of death?

Random Cop: We’re pretty sure it’s the knife in his back, sir.

Edit #7: Amy (Ayumi): What do you think Conan is doing?

George (Genta): He’s been doing it for so long I forgot he was even here!

Mitch (Mitsuhiko): Maybe he’s figured out the hidden message!

Jimmy (thinking): Why can’t I figure out this hidden message?!

(Note: They actually use Jimmy’s voice for his thoughts, which is interesting. Makes for a more clear separation between him and Conan.)

Edit #8: Okay, here’s a major dislike. When watching the Japanese version, I want to see all the signs and titles and things in Japanese. But the episode titles and various things you’re supposed to read in the background have been edited to be in English. That’s annoying; it means I can’t watch a “pure” version of the episode.

Also, the Japanese version of the OP isn’t the original version, either. The timing of the music is off, and at the end they put up the Case Closed logo instead of the Detective Conan logo.

Oddly, they leave the Detective Conan logo in for the eyecatch…

Edit #9: Richard (Kogorou, asleep): No, sir, I’m sure I gave my math homework to the pink monkey in the golf cart. He said he was the new football coach.

XD XD XD XD XD

That was not in the original…:>

Edit #10: Client: It’s really a beautiful painting. Do you follow the arts, Richard?

Richard: Ahh…no.

I swear, Richard’s voice actor is spot on. The man is brilliant!

Schedule manipulation

I’m going to try something new.

My hours at work are 10 am to 7 pm. Sean’s hours are 3:30 pm to 11:30 pm. This means there are four or so hours where I have time “to myself”, but then there is at best one hour in which I can spend time with my husband before I should be asleep. Of late I have been ignoring the should and staying up until 2 or 3, and this has crippled my mornings.

I’ve never been one of those people who can consistently sleep for only five hours a night. I tend to need at least 7 hours of sleep, and on weekends I often sleep for 12 hours. (I’ve even slept longer than that, which is scary.)

Anyway, it’s obvious that I can’t stay up that late. But that means hardly getting to see Sean at all. So I’m going to try something his mom proposed: naps.

I will hop in bed when I get home from work, nap until after he gets home, and then get up and mess around while he’s here. We won’t necessarily do anything together, but it’s always nice to be able to look over and see him. I get lonely sitting here by myself.

Then, eventually, I will go back to bed for another nap until I need to get up and start my day.

I’m not sure this will work. I lived on naps back when I was going to college and working night desk, and I had a pretty decent routine going then, but I’m rapidly nearing age 30 and I’m not entirely sure my body can pull that off anymore.

We’ll just have to see.

I worked late today, which is why I’m still up. As soon as I hit “Publish”, I’m off to dreamland. (It may actually work, too, because I’m pretty tired. I stayed up late watching the end of Pumpkin Scissors last night. More on that later.)

Update: Well, I slept through the alarm I had set for 12:30 am and didn’t wake up until 5. That didn’t quite work, did it?

Maybe I can try for going to bed as soon as I get home and getting up ridiculously early…but then wouldn’t I be really tired at the end of my workday? Bleh.

Meetings

I don’t want to say I’m afraid of meetings, but I do worry about them a lot more than I feel other people do. I tend to be hyperprepared, arriving with hours of research and a stack of printouts. This is usually because I have no idea what’s going to happen and I want to cover as many bases as possible.

Sometimes this means that I end up leading the meeting!

Today I had a meeting that I had zero time to prepare for…and it actually went okay. We were talking about stuff involving my department, things I’d already done a lot of thinking about, but I hadn’t had time to go through my notes and collect my thoughts beforehand.

Fortunately, it was an exploratory and informational meeting and I didn’t have to “present” anything. I was asked a few questions and I was able to respond. So it went well.

But I sure was stressed about it beforehand!

So I guess Starbucks phished me.

This is scary because I am a pretty savvy computer user and tend to notice when urls don’t match or when emails aren’t coming from where they say they’re coming from. But how else to explain why my MySpace account was used to post ads for Starbucks on most of my friends’ pages?

I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have that many friends. :P

I’ve changed my password, but at this point I’d almost rather close my account. I hardly ever use MySpace anyway. But there are people I can really only keep in touch with through MySpace, damn it, so I guess I will just have to deal with it.

What a load of shit. Fuck MySpace. And fuck Starbucks too.

(Sorry, Mom.)

Intentionally vague

Well.

Now I have some information I have no right to have. And I feel sick.

I have to decide what to do about it. Because what’s done is done, and it isn’t going to go away.

This is the first thing that needs to be done though:

I’m sorry.

Photos

Lots of photos have been uploaded, but I haven’t had the time to tell you about them. So here goes.

Shaker Village, Kentucky, April 15, 2007

Ben and Manda and I drove out to Shaker Village, as has become typical for us when I visit. Aside from the beautiful rolling hills, well-maintained buildings and fences, and farm animals, we also had the rare experience of seeing a whole herd of deer. There were something like eight or ten of them running around the grounds. Ben managed some close-up shots from behind a stone fence, starting here.

Family Farm, April 17, 2007

AJ and I headed up to the farm with Dad, where we met up with Grandma and Uncle Steve. AJ and Dad busied themselves with uprooting small trees using a car battery-powered motor and a rolling tripod of Dad’s design, while Uncle Steve mowed the grass and I walked the grounds and sat and chatted with Grandma. And took pictures, of course!

Around the time we were gathering on the porch for lunch, Uncle Steve found a tiny frog in the grass :)

Riverwalk at Lunch, April 26, 2007

I grabbed some Chick-fil-A and headed to Riverwalk for lunch this past Thursday. Instead of the usual St. Paul’s parking I went to the Marina parking just off the 5th Street bridge. Much nicer! You don’t have to walk down a bazillion steps. I may make a habit of parking there.

While I was sitting on a bench by the river eating my lunch, some pigeons with blue coloring were poking around the area nearby. I was surprised at how close they got to me.

Later, as I was taking pictures of a rose bush, a woman asked me if I was a photographer. :>

There are also some new photos in my Life > 2007 > April 2007 gallery, including Renfro Valley, hanging out with Ben and Manda and having a pizza roll, a trip to a furniture store with Mom and Connor, a beautiful mountain road in Jellico, Tennessee, the new nightstands I just put in our bedroom last night with Reid’s help, and the new layout of the living room, which is a mess, but much closer to what I want than it used to be.

And here’s the view from where I’m sitting as I write this post.

Summaries are nice

My Boss: I get so much mail. I wish there was something I could dump it all into, and then it would spit back out the stuff I need to know and get rid of the rest.

Me: Kind of like an RSS aggregator for regular mail.

My Boss: …I have no idea what you just said.

Eyes on the road!

Here’s a movie of a winding road in Jellico, Tennessee. I ponder the similarities between Kentucky/Tennessee and Japan in this video.

I stopped in Jellico because, really, who wouldn’t want to stop in a town called Jellico? I’ve wanted to stop every time I’ve passed it–meaning every time I’ve driven between Augusta and Nicholasville. This time I actually took the exit. I was hoping to find some knick knack with the town name on it, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a single thing.

Ah, Jellico. Population 2448 and they have a website. That tells you something about the world we live in.

Just in case you didn’t get enough Jellico, here’s a movie where I don’t talk until the very end.

And here’s a picture.

This season’s anime

Tim’s made some recommendations here, and I found a brief roundup over at Irresponsible Pictures as well. Here’s what I’m thinking of checking out:

Bokurano
Claymore (if it’s not too gory)
Lucky Star
Moonlight Mile
Overdrive
Romeo x Juliet
Seirei no Moribito
Sola
Touka Gettan

Just watched the worst episodes of Detective Conan ever

I mean, wow. They spent way too much time on the history lessons and the Momotaro legend. Then the murder was so sudden, and there was zero discussion of how she was killed, and the confession at the end just seemed trite.

I felt like the episodes were contracted by Okayama Prefecture to promote tourism. There was hardly any of the usual Conan goodness, and a whole bunch of slow, detailed scenes discussing historical locations and showing how beautiful the cities of Kibitsu and Kurashiki were. Sheesh.

So yeah. Eps 377 and 378? Not so much.

On the other hand, I now have another Japan location to add to my to-visit list ;P

I hate celebrity "news"

I don’t want to read about what celebrities are doing on the main page of news sites. If I really care about what they’re doing, I can go to a gossip page. But honestly, I think celebrity “news” has gotten way out of hand. A lot of what’s “reported” is none of our business. Would you want that sort of information about yourself broadcast across the world? What makes it okay to tell stories like that about celebrities?

I say nix this sort of “news” and cover something important. There are things happening in the world that aren’t scandals and trash talk. And I’m not just talking about crime and disasters!