Category: general

Spritz Christmas Trees

Coconut Snowmen

These were taken last year, apparently on December 24. I don’t have the full-size images anymore; these are the ones my mom had saved on her computer.

Don’t they look scrumptious?

Yesterday I was seriously considering promising to mail cookies to anyone who sent me a gift off any of my Amazon wish lists. :>

It’s a great idea, in theory.

But then it keeps giving you “smenita”, and when you type “smenita” in the box, it keeps saying, “Enter the letters as they are shown in the image.”

Like so.

Grr.

(Before you ask, yes, I did try “srnenita”)

You must read this hilarious post about buying bras in Japan over at Amy Nakazawa’s blog.

This is a country of petit bosoms. Itty bitty boobs, if you will. Mini mammaries. Tiny titti Well, you get the idea.

Go. Go now!

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of news articles about gun-related crime in this area.

11/13: Weekend Shooting at East Augusta Nightclub

11/22: One killed, two injured in North Augusta shooting spree

11/23: Augusta man sought in armed robbery [and kidnapping]

12/4: Man dies in shooting after North Augusta wreck

Today I see an article about armed robberies in Richmond and Columbia counties.

The most recent armed robberies happened just a day and a half apart. First, Richmond County deputies say a man carrying a semi-automatic handgun robbed the Waffle House on Gordon Highway.

[…]

Also early in the morning, someone hit the Best Western motel on Jimmy Dyess Parkway, running away with an unspecified amount of cash.

Just hours later, just over the Columbia County line, a duo help up at gunpoint the Dollar General on Bobby Jones Expressway. One person, wearing a green sweatshirt with black pants and the other wearing a tan jogging suit.

Meanwhile, Richmond County officers are still investigating a home invasion in South Augusta last Friday. Police say three suspects stole cash and stacks of jewelry valued in the thousands.

[…]

Lt. Young says since Thanksgiving week, his department has about seven unsolved armed robberies.

I’ve decided to do a series of posts about dreams I had when I was a kid. I only remember a few of them, so this may end up being a very short series; who knows. Unfortunately, I can’t remember my childhood dreams with the same detail as I can remember recent dreams, so these will be fairly rough reconstructions.

This first dream is probably the first dream I ever had, and it was a recurring dream through much of my childhood back when we lived in the trailer (so, somewhere before I turned 7, I guess).

There was an evil green witch with long fingernails who was after me and my brothers. She had control of these huge spikey vines that chased us through the trailer, filling up all the rooms.

I ran to get away and ended up hiding in the small bathroom off my bedroom. (In the trailer, the master bedroom was my bedroom, and my parents slept on a fold-out couch in the living room.) I knew if the witch caught me she would scratch my face up with her long fingernails. I could actually see this happening in my mind, with a weird sort of fascination: deep scratches leaving flaps of hanging skin. I was terrified.

She found me in the bathroom. When she opened the door, I ran out as fast as I could, and, dodging the vines, somehow got outside. The witch and her vines charged after me. But my dad was outside; he was always out in his workshop. I knew he would save me.

And he did. I can still see to this day the image of my father, from a distance, swinging his axe down onto the witch, who he’d somehow gotten over a stump. He chopped her into tiny black bits.

Then all the vines went away, and I felt safe again.

Hai (4:51:20 PM): megatokyo?
Hai (4:51:22 PM): update?
Hai (4:51:25 PM): what villainry is this?
Me (4:51:30 PM): yeah, I know
Me (4:51:34 PM): there’s something wrong in the universe
Hai (4:51:45 PM): as if a million souls cried out in surprise

I had another interesting dream last night. This time I was some sort of student. The school may very well have been Hogwarts, but I was college age at least, and living in a dorm-style room.

In the beginning of the dream I was still married to Sean, so when in the same day two men proposed to me, that was the reason I knew I couldn’t marry either of them. However, I’d sent them away without an answer, and I had to meet them again and tell them no.

Unfortunately for me, one of them lived in Boston, and the other lived in Miami. I started making plans to visit both cities. But before I could, the guy from Boston came to see me.

He was a single dad of two little girls, and he was played by Bruce Willis. When he arrived I’d just gotten out of the shower and was only wearing a white towel. My roommate let him in and stayed in the room for the show.

I was supposed to tell him I couldn’t marry him…

“Oh, Charlie,” I said, because apparently that was his name. I ran around the table and knelt next to him, kissing all over his face and neck. “I can’t think when you’re here! And I know it’s just going to be the same with the other guy…”

Not the most romantic thing I could have said, but apparently I have no sense in my dreams.

Not long after this, my roommate suggested Charlie leave the dorm room, since he really wasn’t supposed to be in there anyway, and she took him down to the dining hall. I said I’d throw some clothes on and join them.

The first thing I put on was some black pleather number…very sexy, low cut with an odd cutout at my stomach (and in the dream, my stomach was flat ;>). It looked awesome…but I changed into a “Women’s Rugby” tank top and shorts because it would be sucky to look all sexy when dumping a guy.

Somewhere along the way, I was no longer married to Sean, and so the reason I dumped Charlie (why, why did I have to dump Charlie?) was because it was somehow “wrong”, and I should be with the other guy. So I was trying to set up a trip to Miami to see him. The other guy was never named, but he was very hot, African-American with a shaved head. He was a singer/rapper, and someone else in the dream had a huge four disc set of all his songs.

However, Charlie was Bruce Willis (hey, wait a second, they were both bald! Hmm…). So as I kept thinking about the other guy, I realized I didn’t want to marry him. But I kept thinking there was some reason I couldn’t marry Bruce Willis/Charlie, so I ultimately came to the conclusion that I couldn’t marry either of them.

“I’ll be left with nothing,” I thought, but I was happier with that than with marrying the wrong person.

(Where did Sean go, anyway?)

At some point, I think when I was going to the dining room to break it off with Charlie, there was some sort of crisis (like Voldemort attacking or something), but since I wasn’t involved with it directly I have no idea what it was.

I also went to the bathroom at one point, and it was the bathroom from my old internship. The toilets looked kind of gross. Mari was with me, dressed in some kind of leopard pattern dress/skirt, and she took one look at the toilet and said, “This is no place for Alchemy.”

However, I had to go, so I went into the cleanest stall. Someone else came with me, and there was a sink in there, and she used that while I used the toilet. (I think that happened because I woke up at one point and remembered how Japanese toilets have a little hand wash spray on top.)

Anyway, I never did meet up with the other guy. I think the point of the dream was that I almost could have married a guy 30 years older than me, and really wanted to, but didn’t, for some unknown noble reason.

:D

I want to post something to push that other post below the fold, but I don’t actually have anything to say.

Scary, isn’t it?

I suppose a diary entry is in order.

Dear Diary:

Today was a little weird. Due to a situation I won’t go into involving my in-laws, I wanted to get out of the house, so after my shower I grabbed a Slim-Fast and my laptop and my bicycle and went to Brooke’s house. We puttered around a little and then went to the Greeneway to ride. It was okay, but my legs–just the very tops–were sore, and I still don’t know why. (Could they still be recovering from Wednesday’s bellydance class? It was a rough workout, but damn!)

We parked at Martintown and rode up to Pisgah Road, then back down to the Activities Center, at which point we stopped long enough to see Santa Claus and chat about insecurity. Then we turned around and headed back to our cars.

Back at Brooke’s place, we watched two episodes of Kyou Kara Maou: 運命の男 (Man of Fate, in which Yuuri and Greta help Izura and Nina and encounter Geigen Huber) and 炎のレース (Race of Fire, in which Yuuri is almost added to Louis Vinon’s collection–of course, Conrad would have carried him off “on foot”, right? :D). Really cool episode coming up, but Brooke was (as usual) falling asleep, so we stopped.

Then it was time for her to have her family dinner with her family, so I headed back to the house, put my bike away, and started dinner. Thanks to Amy Nakazawa, one of my newer subscriptions, I now know how to make “velvet” chicken, and so I did, with stir fry vegetables and steamed rice. It was very good.

I watched bits and pieces of Bruce Almighty while I was cooking. Pretty funny. (No, I can’t stop putting those links in. I think they’re cool.)

That has pretty much been the extent of my day. At this point I am living solely for December 17 18, on which day I will be baking cookies like a madwoman at Mari’s house. I can’t wait.

At least, according to Forbes.

Just thought you’d like to know.

(Also, Forbes agrees with me that Metropolis = Chicago!)

And just like that, the anger’s back.

I guess it was just temporarily overcome by Densha Otoko.

I was mad last night. I was so angry I couldn’t think about anything but how angry I was. I hated myself, and I hated Sean for being unable to say anything constructive, and I hated my life.

The reason I mention this is that I know I felt those feelings, so strongly that I’m pretty sure I was consumed by them…but by the end of the night, the feelings were gone, and now they seem so alien that it’s like I never felt them at all.

I cannot express to you how horrible a mood I was in tonight.

Really. It was terrible.

Densha Otoko helped.

A geologist in Taipei has theorized that the increase in earthquake activity in the Taipei basin has been caused by the construction of the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101.

Lin Cheng-horng, a geologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Taiwan’s most prestigious think tank, the Academia Sinica, said seismic activity historically had been low in the Taipei basin, home to about 7 million people.

But the city has experienced more micro-earthquakes (of magnitude 2.0-2.5 on the Richter scale) since construction began on the 508 meter (1,667 foot) skyscraper in 1997, he said.

[…]

Lin said Taipei 101 weighed 700,000 tons and estimated stress from vertical loading on its foundation at 4.7 bars, of which some would be transferred to the earth’s upper crust due to extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin.

“If a fault is about to crack, then a little pressure can trigger an earthquake. It’s like the last straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Lin told Reuters in a telephone interview.

But that’s only a theory, he said, adding that he could not determine whether or not Taipei 101 was responsible for the rise in seismic activity in the area in recent years.

“I don’t know if it’s just coincidence or if they are related,” he said. “It’s very hard to prove this scientifically, but it’s just as hard to disprove it.”

Thus, Lin is calling for immediate research into the issue, saying it could have far-reaching implications for other huge structures like the proposed 1,000 meter (3,281 foot) Sky City 1000 in Japan, another quake-prone area.

Somehow it never occurred to me that skyscrapers could cause seismic activity, but the idea makes sense. If it’s true, it’s just another example of how we can unwittingly affect our environment…

Sounds like a bad science fiction novel, doesn’t it? :D

Mom just linked me to an article from NASA about photographing shadows cast by Venus. Pretty wild!

With my Professional smugmug account, I can have a domain route to my smugmug via a CNAME DNS adjustment. Check it out! Is that cool or what? (The old URL still works too.)