And if I told you I felt ageless

Hello from over a week later! :P I had an actual valid reason for the gap in entries this time. That reason involved my cat, the computer, and a very large glass of water.

Yeah. Panic was had.

HOWEVER! All is well! After about thirty seconds of freaking the hell out and physically tossing the cat out of the room, I got the computer unplugged, took out the battery, toweled off whatever I could get to, and set it up upside down in a large box of rice - and then didn't touch it. For three days.

I now have a fully-recovered laptop. :D


...Well. Mostly fully-recovered. My optical drive doesn't seem to work anymore, but it's always been finicky and has had to be replaced before. I'd rather that than have to pay like $500 for a logic board replacement or something.

I'm considering replacing it myself. I'm still under warranty, but water damage is not exactly a warranty-covered sort of thing, and I think I could do it. Hell, maybe there's just a piece of rice that managed to get itself wedged in there.

Hmm.

It's been ages since I last posted here, and I'm sorry about that. To amend, I'm going to do a series of photo posts recapping my summer and fall. Thus condensed, and minus the TV marathons, Sims sessions, and weekends holed up sketching and knitting, my life will seem twenty times more thrilling than it actually is!

( Part The First: In which my sister visits Okinawa. )




Next update: the mainland.

So I fell asleep last night at 8:30.

I'm not entirely sure what my problem is, as I did the same thing last Saturday - fell asleep by 9:45, and this was after having slept in until nearly noon - and I've been fighting fatigue all week.

I'm losing such huge chunks of time it's disorienting.

I do in fact have other things to write about, but I'm just too out of it to focus right now.


...



:/

Okay, because I'm obviously terrible at keeping a blog when I have a lot of large updates to make, I'm going to stick to making single small posts. (Maybe I'd be better off with a Tumblr, but I still prefer this.)

Today's inconsequential update:

I'm getting odd literary spam again!

For those of you who missed the original, back in December 2006 I blogged the following:

------------

You know what's entertaining? The spam that Gmail catches. See, the thing about Gmail is that it shows you a preview of any email's content in the subject line, so you can see what's in it without even having to click on it. My spammers are starting to send me what appears to be a variety of...novels?

Excerpts:

"He suddenly realized that Annie was doing exactly what he could not: he was-"

"He reached down, but his fingers stopped a clear three inches short-"

"And she heard it - low, painful scraping sounds in the earth-"

"An hour later, full of dope and drifting off to sleep-"

"Annie was in the second row, her face a blank white circle uno-"

"Then he slowly rolled over on his side and began the painful process of getti-"

"When a senator procrastinates, the imaginative bottle of beer flies into a rage."

"A crank case toward a hockey player feverishly throws a mating ritual-"

"Behind it was a narrow space empty save for dust and-"

"She really was an idol, and if she didn't kill him, she might kill what was in him."

"Getting into the chair didn't hurt as much as he had feared, and that was-"

"In spite of them, he saw Hezekiah beginning to swing the potentially dea-"

"Bourka bee-woman work powerful mojo magic, Bwana, fill in all dese hooda-"

"But instead of weeping with exalted grief as she should have done-"

"When another inexorably radioactive sandwich is hardly pr-"

"He put the knife on the night-table, hoisted himself into bed,-"

"Now she stood beside the car, shaking her finger at his cl-"

"The image came to him - Pomeroy's naked body floating in the do-"


I am fascinated. Intrigued. There is a genuine story to be found here. I think we should rearrange these sentences properly and write it. What is happening with Annie, the mysterious girl who appears twice? Is she the same "she" who appears three additional times? And who is the man so often in pain? Is he, as he appears to be, the main character? What happened to Pomeroy (I'm getting echoes of Gatsby here), and did Hezekiah kill him? Or did the man in pain? And what do mojo-magic and inexorably radioactive sandwiches have to do with anything?

Find out! Next time on Gmail Theatre.

------------

Now, almost 3 years later, I think I'm beginning to collect material for a sequel. This month's selection:

"As for the unfortunate Spaniards in Paraguay, the enactments against them became more and more-"

"A secondary court of appeal, though still a superior court to those of Brazil-"

"Perhaps - I gripped the chair more tightly -"

"But though he shouted, What ails you, king's daughter-"

"And she said, It's a fact the whole world knows - something came creeping-"

"Question peers inside the boy. The economic rhythm..."



[I suspect the last belongs to the same surrealist spam author who produced the inexorably radioactive sandwich and the rage-filled imaginative bottle of beer.]

*pokes the internet*

I have discovered the trick to collecting an instant crowd of elementary schoolers: get out a sketchbook and sit somewhere prominent during recess. Hey presto.

Seriously, it's been good fun - although I've been getting a lot of "Whoaaaaaa, manga!" From teachers AND students. Apparently I draw manga style? This is news to me, but okay. It's interesting, though; it draws a lot of different kids from the ones that usually hang around me. Some of the quiet girls that are normally too shy have sat themselves right next to me to watch and even talk. One of the special ed boys who has seemed kinda intimidated in the past had a whole conversation with me once he saw me drawing. And then, for example, there's Ryota, who's a good kid but textbook ADHD, my god - he actually sits still and chats and creates no chaos at all while watching!

So. Behold the miraculous power of the sketchbook.

( WIPPPPPPPPP. )

...So I know it's been pretty much complete radio silence from me for the past three weeks. I went back to the states for a visit at the end of May, during which time I didn't get online at all, and I got out of the habit of updating things.

I'm back now, after a crazy, family-packed week or so, and have been getting back into the swing of things at work and life. It was gorgeous beach weather for a while there, and I spent several wonderful sun-drenched days by the ocean before the apparent beginning of the rainy season kicked in. It's since been grey and a bit apathy-inducing. Thus I've been sketching and reading a lot in lieu of actually getting anything productive done like cleaning my disaster of an apartment before people start coming to visit this summer. But I've been enjoying myself, so hey?

( some WIPs. )

Will get back to posting travel journal entries and such soon.

Today Motobu Elementary School held a "welcome festival" for the first graders. For two periods the entire school gathered in the gym to play games - like a relay race in which each first grader was paired up with a sixth grader, and the two had to make a circuit of the gym while both in the same hula hoop. At the end the first graders did a song and dance for the older students that I *think* was supposed to be coordinated but was mostly just a mob of small children doing their own thing on their own time and literally tripping over each other in the process. The principal wrapped things up with an awesomely cheesy speech about how "everyone at Motobu is so kind, like family," and "the 2nd-6th graders are your older brothers and sisters now," and "today was fun, right? Keep working hard and trying your best!"

The new kids are pretty entertaining - I am now "英語人" to a number of them, as apparently to seven-year-olds "English" is a nationality. Also some of them are freakishly tall.

It was a really cute morning, and I'd like to say I have photos...but unfortunately I dropped my camera off a very high wall in Taiwan and now it is no more.

Speaking of cameras and travelling, ( here's today's page from Vietnam. )

Are you kidding me.

Are you KIDDING me.

"FBI Director Robert Mueller told a congressional panel that he had concerns about bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to prisons in the United States. Among the risks is 'the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States,' said Mueller, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and is serving a 10-year fixed term in office."

the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States



Quick, somebody check on Ted Kaczynski! And scratch those plans to put the detainees in Alcatraz - the thrilling escape movie won't be worth it!

One of my schools finally has a working scanner! So now, nearly two months after the fact, I can finally start posting the journal I kept while in Vietnam. I'll probably stick to one page a day, though today I'm going to do two since the first is just scribbles from the airport.





( Katie is not allowed to look at these entries for a few days, as I mention a gift I bought for birthday/graduation. )