Ok, so this is probably going to be my last piece of bloggage before I go home. Flight's on Tuesday, and I have every intention of spending all tomorrow having fun with with D and Dog.
We took Dog to the Japanese Tea Garden today, which she thoroughly enjoyed because it mainly consists of steps. Having mastered the art of climbing stairs a couple of weeks ago, she's taken a shine to them to the point where she drags me up the stairs if she's on her leash. We have lots of pictures of us at the Japanese gardens, so I might upload some when I get home. It's a very pretty place.
The rest of the afternoon D and I spent sitting in the back yard playing a game D's mum taught me called mancala. It's difficult to explain the game unless you've got the board in front of you, but it's a lot like backgammon with marbles. It's incredibly good fun.
One last thing before I go and play more mancala. A little article for you. HIDE THOSE MAN-NIPPLES! (Tell me you don't want to know what it's about! ^_____^)
I still love Kannaduki no Miko more than I really should. @_@ But the ending was so fluff-tacularly satisfying I couldn't help it. >_< I can even forgive the incredibly disturbing evil Chikane-chan bits because of the lovely fluff. But at the very least it wasn't half as bad as the manga/fansubbing groups would have had me believe. I hate to say it, yuri fanboys, but you don't get to see anything. :p No wait, I don't hate to say it. The weird yuri thing was the only thing stopping me watching the end of the series. @_@
...and if I get any comments along the line of "but what about the terrible plotline and Fushigi Yuugi-esque "CHIKANEEE!!" "HIMEKO-CHAAAN!!!" screaming" people will get slapped. :p I thought it was cute. It may not ever convince anyone else, but it was fluff and at the moment I feel the need for fluff.
So that's that. I'll probably bring a copy of Kannaduki home with me since I imagine the chances of it ever being licensed are slim to none. And if anyone else wants to watch it I will incredibly gladly organise many a Kannaduki no Miko showing. ^____^ But somehow I don't think it'll come to that. o_0
In other news, I have a request to make of everyone. I'm coming home on Tuesday. This is, of course, going to involve me doing the horrible, horrible 18-odd hour trek home. Bad because it's long and also because I usually feel as lonely and miserable as sin the whole time. So, as something to do/remind me that at least I'm coming back home to many many fun people, I'd like to ask anyone who feels like it to send me some stuff to read on the plane. If you want fics beta'd, you can send them; really really good fic that everyone ought to read (that's low on the smut content, please, ladies ^___^) or just anything I can print off and perouse when I'm bored stupid and miserable. ^___^ Send me links here or files or whatever to my email account. ^__^ Pleeeease!
We watched the end of Kannaduki no Miko this morning.
Squee, I shall say. And squee again. And that is all.
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Dog is going to get her ass kicked if she does a repeat of last night. o_0 She cried all night. To this end we've spent all day playing with her so that's she's so knackered by the time we put her to bed she won't even know what's hit her. We need to sleep, too, Dog! >_<
Whenever it comes on tv over there, everyone has to watch the really, really wrong episode of The Simpsons on here last night. The Springfield legalizes gay marriage and Homer fantasizes about what it would be like to marry himself episode. @_@ Something makes me think the writers are having issues/soapboxing this year, what with this and the episode a few weeks ago where one of Homer's gay temporary flatmates kisses him. o_0 Or, y'know, it might just be because it's so easy to get a shock reaction out of the public these post-Janet-Jackson days they feel the need to try harder. The "WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" content warning at the start of the episode made us laugh anyway. What's wrong with more discussion of issues in the televisual public forum, people! It's not just going to go away if you ignore it! >_<
In other television -related news, the new season of 24 continues to kick astronomical degrees of ass. Between me, Daniel and Daniel's younger brother Jack and Tony Almeida have a stalwart band of fanboys. (Yeah I am a Jack and Tony fanboy, calling yourself a Jack fangirl just implies too many things about Kiefer Sutherland that I just don't think @_@).
Going to play socks with the dog now. It's a complicated game that essentially involves her trying to eat my socks.
You are the man girl so very much! ^_____^ Finally my Ico quiz is online! Finally after slogging over it all week! YAAAY!!!
Now all of you go over to my Ico page and look in the Omake section. Then post your results in your blog, regardless of whether you know anything about Ico or not. It's pretty and I like it a lot. ^____^
Daniel had me playing Typing of the Dead today. o_0 For them what are not familiar with said title, it's exactly what you think it is - House of the Dead with typing instead of shooting. Zmobies + typing skillz = dead zmobies. You would approve of it so very much. Perhaps the best thing about the whole game is the way that the characters walk around with keyboards strapped to them. They don't even pretend it's not retarded. ^_____^
In other, strangely enough, related news, under D's influence, I bought a Dreamcast. It was ten quid on eBay and since my PS2 died and went to heaven I need a console to tide me over. Hopefully (fingers crossed) the paternal parental unit will let me borrow his PS2 if I can them a dvd player for the living room, but I don't know. Frankly I'm going to need somewhere to play DMC3 when people are watching telly. >_< I have great plans for what I want to do with my room when I get back, including the internetting I was talking about a few days ago. If I can hook me up some consoles and, y'know, actually find an aerial for my telly, it might actually end up being the funnest 6 x 10 ft in the house.
Woooow. I could play videogames from my hiding place. That would be so cool. ^___________^
This one's for you. The person I'd be voting for if I could vote for the new Governor of Texas : Kinky Friedman.
What's so great about Kinky Friedman, I hear you cry? Well, let's take a look at some of his policies:
• Legalize casino gambling to fund education
• Abolish political correctness “We didn't get to be the Lone Star state by being politically correct”
• Take a good look at death row. “We need to make sure that we're not putting innocent people to death, which I believe we are”
• Outlaw the de-clawing of cats
• Bring young people into his administration. “Young people are less corrupt. They are the future of Texas ; it's theirs to win or lose.”
Frankly he had won me with the interview on CNN where he announced his aim to "Stamp out wussiness, one wuss at a time."
His campaign bumper stickers go "Kinky for Governor, why the hell not?" Exactly. ^______^
In other, less amusing news, can anyone help me with a problem they've got with the computer back home? Apparently they've been infected with something called brbpajhl.exe. It's sitting in C\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and it won't let them delete it. Adaware and Spybot are both detecting it but aren't able to remove it because System is allegedly using it. Any ideas on how to remove it and its damage manually?
I need some techie help on a couple of fronts, people.
1. I am planning things to make me feel better when I get home in a couple of weeks. Besides getting a dog, the only (ok, alright, probably even more important) aim is getting my computer in my room back online again. This is going to involve me networking my house and, uh, I haven't got the slightest idea how to do it. Happily, both our pcs have ethernet cards in, so that *ought* to make it easier, I suppose. But anyway, I'm not averse to drilling holes in the house, but doing it as cheaply as possible is the main problem. Ideas?
2. Where can I get a nice plug-my-own-words-in template for an personality quiz? I'm trying to make one for my Ico fanlisting.
Ideas please!
Yes, I'm covered in dog at the moment. Apparently I'm spoiling Sammie rotten because whenever I sit down she leaps straight into my lap just because she knows I'll let her sleep on me.
She's had an eventful day today, between being made to take a bath and discovering the dead skunk in the yard. o_0 And here are some more happy pictures for you...
(...I really am treating this dog too much like a baby, it's so wrong. o_0)
Wet dog. They actually do do that shakey thing any time you get them near water.
Dogball, and an amazing demonstration of just how small Sammie is. o_0
Sleepy dogs are the cutest things ever.
And that concludes the dog-related section of this entry.
I've been meaning to do reviews of a bazillion things recently. Having had far too much time on my hands to worry about things, we've been distracting ourselves with various interesting stuff. On her recommendation I fangirled out and got Moon Child from Blockbuster.
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What can I say? It has Hyde as a depressed vampire. It's a winning combination before you've even started. ^________^ Yeah alright it is _extremely_ cheesy, but it was better than I expected it to be. For a film written by melodrama-meister Gackt, it had a surprising amount of focus the non-vampiric elements of the story. But essentially, Hyde is a pretty vampire and people shoot guns. I really need to get that film on dvd. o_0
Tonight we went all cultural like and watched Maria Full of Grace (or Maria Llena de Drogas as D dubbed it - I'll let you work out why o_0), the Columbian film in the running for an Oscar this year. It's one of those films I'd put in the Grave of the Fireflies box. I didn't like it, but it is a very, very good film. One of those films anyone who's ever thought their life sucked ought to watch. I might have my problems, but hey, at least I'm not a Columbian drug mule. o_0 If you like your films foreign and improving, this is the Oscar nominee for you.
And from that I move on to one more review, and it's all her fault. I couldn't spend any more time without owning more Deadpool crack, so Cable/Deadpool vol. 1 was mine. Eeeeheeheehee. ^_________^ Yes it's very silly, yes Cable is incredibly sanctimonious and annoying, but Deadpool glee! Deadpool combats the problem I have with a lot of comics that they just get too serious and seem quite daft. But between his 14-state Olsen twins restraining order and *interesting* ideas for internet ventures he amuses me far too much. ^___^ So yes, silly plot, silly characters, lots of fun. ^____^
Now I'm going to sleep. I have my life to plan when I again spend the night tossing and turning. >_<
As you may have noticed/been involved with, everything on the Ass-no-Ryu.com blogs died a horrible death this week so I've not been able to blog. On the one hand this is bad, because I have many lovely pictures of Sammie to share with everyone, on the other it's very very good, because a generous handful of not very fun things have happened this week.
If you just want the good news, Sammie pictures can be found here, here, here, here and here. She's a very cute puppy, except when she tries to poo on the bedroom floor.
If you want the bad news, the meeting with the lawyer this week didn't exactly go well. It's probably the worst kept secret in this group of friends that D and I intend to get married pretty soon so that we can actually live in the same country, but guess what, we've hit another problem. -_- D has another two years to wait before he can apply for American citizenship proper and apparently despite being a legal permanent resident in the US, if we were to get married the law still wouldn't allow us to live together. Yeah, go and figure that one. Yes sir, of course you can live in our country, but your wife, who has no intention of committing crimes/sponging off benefits/being a nuisance to society? Nooooo, we don't want her. -_-
So I'm quite depressed. Not only do I not have a teacher training course to be on, I'm not going to be able to live here for at least another two years. -_- Oh and did I mention that the paperwork alone for this is going to cost $750 at least? -_- That's before we even think about how much two years' worth of flights and a wedding are going to cost. -_- I'm thinking about putting a Paypal button on here and being like that woman who started an internet campaign to have people pay off her credit cards. Do you have lots of money? Do you like seeing other people being happy? Donate money to the Katy and Daniel are mired in bills and bad luck fund!
I think the lawyer we visited summed it up quite well when he asked us after our initial enquiries, "So, is there anything else I can not help you with?" -_-
TENEMOS UNA PERRITA!!!
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*glee*
...and Daniel's hairdresser is far too much fun. ^______^
...and t'other half has a new toy.
Honestly, he's been clutching that thing ever since I bought it for him, bless him. (It's Sesshoumaru from Inuyasha ^___^).
