. . . Hi

Hi. (I hope you're well.)

I can't remember the last time I posted, which is probably a really not-good thing. It's funny, that, because for a long time I was the only one who hadn't missed a day. Life sort of happened, I guess, and I keep forgetting. I've been kind of a fail at a lot of things lately; summer is not doing much in the motivational department. 

I went to China for a month, from the 27th of June to the 24th of July, which somewhat accounts for but doesn't excuse my long period of not-posting. It was really great; I got to meet the relatives I haven't seen for seen years, some of them even longer than that. It was fun playing tourist, and yeah. Fun times. 

Apart from that, though, life hasn't been particularly interesting. I looked after small children at a science summer camp last week and I'm going to be babysitting my sister starting Monday, again for a week. I kind of wish I had a paying job. It's pretty thankless work, shepherding around kids for nothing more than a 10% discount at the science center store, but that's volunteering, sigh. At least the people there are pretty nice, adults and camp volunteers alike. 

 I dunno, really. My birthday's coming up, but it's also right in the middle of the week of babysitting, which kind of ruins it. My family's going to do celebratory stuff this weekend, though, so it's alright. 

That's about it. See you, and enjoy the rest of the summer.

xiy

a quick post before I go to bed

Hey hey, readers and purveyors of this lovely blog! How is your third Friday of this month going? It's lateish now and I want to catch up on sleep (lovely lovely post-AP sleep), so this is going to be short. Basically I'm just glad the bulk of studytimez is over; there's only really math to worry about now, which is awesome.

We have to take a personal finance class now that there is no American history to overfill our brains with (I returned my books yesterday, and it was actually kind of sad ;A;), and the enormity of adult life is really quite a scary thing. We should just be children forever.

Anyway. It's eleven o'clock right now. I don't have any good books to read, which is disappointing. Well, that's not quite true; I'm reading This Side of Paradise, but Fitzgerald is only good in small doses in the right frame of mind, and I'm too sleepy to concentrate on the beauteous writing. I wish I could write half as well.

Goodnight.

AP AP AP AP AP APPPPPPPPPPP—

asdlkjsdkhd so it wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but wow this morning was pretty stressful. I'm not sure my hand's fully recovered yet, though when I did do all my other annoying, writing-filled homework after coming home and so it's not like it had much chance. Must spend this weekend studying for bio, argh.

Anyway. Moving on.

Well, I'm watching Hulu and there was this dumb Intel (oh haha irony) commercial. I almost prefer the ones about alcohol. At least they have relatively tasteful music.


Today is Friday. Today was boring.


idk what else.

 

/pokes the blog

It looks like recently we've been getting more active again, which is lovely. c:

Anyway, today was a nice day; we had a day off of school and Momo and Virgil came over to do the source of all great unhappiness in the world, i.e. the 40 Questions of APUSH Class. We got through ten, ate dumplings and pineapple, and then went on a walk with Lynda and her siblings to the elementary-school playground. The seesaw there is pretty good, though not a legit seesaw (it has springs :|a) and thus not perfect.

Later, Virgil and I wrote some more of our pottergatsbyfic, which now has a witty and metaphorically resonant title: Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past. I also made us an ff.net account tentatively titled shupicorns. We've finished the first two chapters and might post it soon. Harry & Co. travel back in time to fight deatheater!Tom Buchanan and destroy Voldemort's eighth Horcrux, which is actually Gatsby's fabled green light. The metaphors all fit so perfectly; what's not to love?

(Oh and speaking of writing, Lynda and I started a writing journal as well, though as of yet there's not very much on it. I might post pottergatsbyfic up there too; who knows.)

I like Alex Day's music. Not so sure about "Lady Godiva," though. :|

Well, that's about it for today. I will go back to procrastinating on the Internet.

a comparison of what Friday should be and what Friday actually is

and I have so many things to do tonight but I'm choosing to spend it doodling, sob

(oh and sorry for failing at posting for weeks in a row :c)

a belated picture post

So today is actually Saturday (shhhhhh), but I'm setting the day to Friday and posting anyway because I feel kind of bad about not posting for two weeks in a row, so this post will be made up of (some of) the things I've been drawing lately. 


they're on my tumblr as well, if you're so interested.


Enjoy.

Hi.

My life is not cooperating, and I don't want to write a post that's going to basically be me whining about my not-very-terrible life (as I am quite perfectly aware that it's certainly not as bad as it could be and that I'm incredibly lucky, etc, and as such it just feels wrong to complain), so. I'm not going to complain about it here.


I've been listening to Charlie's new song, and it's been helping me calm down. ^.^ I've also recently discovered the joy of Draco/Harry fanfic, so that'll keep me nicely distracted for awhile from life, at least. Coping methods are fun.


I wish we could go live in our dreams. I've been having some nice ones lately, I think, though I never remember them properly after I wake up. I've also been waking up, like, ten minutes before the alarm lately as well, which sucks, because I can't get back to sleep before the alarm is blaring incessantly into my head and everything goes downhill from there. At least when I wake up in the middle of the night it seems like I get more sleep. :|


And okay, that's going a bit too much into the self-pitying track, so yeah. Nevermind.


I wrote a poem about sheep, but it's kind of long and so I won't put it here.


Speaking about poems (but not about sheep), I've been trying to memorize "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" after reading TFIOS. So far I'm only onto the first stanza. That's a good coping method as well. Poetry's fun when it's not being overanalyzed by incompetent tenth-grade English students.


Sigh. I think I'm going to go draw character art for some people now. I'm so behind on that it's not even funny.


xiy

oh wait I'm supposed to post today

. . . and I have no inspiration. I'm supposed to be either studying for Science Olympiad (it's supposed to snow 3-5 inches between tonight and 6AM tomorrow morning, and I am sort of hoping it gets canceled) or doing an English assignment.

Needless to say, I've started on neither of them. Ah, life. 

/derp

tfios!!

My copy of The Fault in Our Stars came in the mail today! 8D So this post is going to be correspondingly short, because I am going to read it alllllll.


There was a math final today. It was a harrowing experience that I never want to go through again, because life sucks when you know you've done poorly on a horribly difficult math final like I have. :(


There was also an APUSH final today. That wasn't so bad.


Aaaaaand now I will go back to eating grapefruit and reading TFIOS. See you.


xiy

in which xiy avoids public speaking and (successfully?) philosophizes

I had to present the NHD board today, which was basically a study in how quickly I could put the APUSH class to sleep (i.e., not a very long time), because I suck at public speaking and presenting things and there was such a lot to say and not very much time to say it. It's hard to fangirl over dead French revolutionaries when one stumbles over one's own words far too often. :|a

And this is why I like the Internet! Because my writing skills are so much better, see. I should just retreat into a cave with a good wi-fi connection and never come out again, but then again I wouldn't ever see my friends. That's not good, but perhaps my friends could visit me. I would be like Thoreau camping out in the woods, only I don't care at all about finding myself (because the self is very good at evading enlightenment) or cutting myself off from the world, hence the occasional friendly visit and Internet connection. Scathing criticisms of society could still work, I suppose, though I doubt anybody would care.

Interesting, isn't it, how Thoreau, despite being a recluse by a pond for two years (which reminds me, I was given the entirety of Walden last Christmas by this one Chinese college kid I don't know very well that my parents invited over, and I've been meaning to read it), had to rejoin society and actually write for his message to be known. If he'd stayed by the pond and never left, then nobody would know or care, except for maybe Thoreau.

At any rate, I think I could live pretty nicely in a well-stocked cave for awhile, though the nights would probably get pretty cold. The stargazing opportunities would be endless, though, if it were on a mountain. If it were on a mountain, the frostbite opportunities would be equally endless. I would probably fall off of the mountain and break something major, in which case I would have to retreat to civilization (assuming that civilization ever found my broken body, etc) for awhile. I could publish the book and call it Mountain and then get famous. Or something.

Or I could learn rock-climbing and/or proper balance, get a few goats, and start up a successful cheesemaking business and thus fund my enormous Internet bills. Perhaps I could learn hang-gliding with the extra money. That would be cool. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

Listening to Muse right now. It is pretty, but quite sad.


Not sure any of this post makes sense.


xiy

o NHD, what hast thou done

I am getting entirely too sick of looking at the Marquis  de Lafayette's face. :|

I feel like House and I have been a lot more laid-back about NHD than a lot of people, and we're not working around the clock and there's been no drama or anything, but still, I just really, really want it to be over. I haven't bothered studying for finals or anything and school is not going to be fun. D:

Aaaaaand I guess it's almost 2012 and stuff. Which is good, I guess. It'll be kind of disappointing if the world doesn't actually end after all this fuss they've made about it.

Yeah, I don't know.

xiy

winter break, yay?

So judging by previous posts, winter break hasn't been going as well as hoped for some of us, which is quite sad. D: After all, it's hardly fair that the longest break we're going to have until summer vacation is being ruined by a number of things, of which NHD is only a factor. Silly school.

As for me, winter break has been okay, though not as terribly restful as I'd expected. NHD's been the main factor, and I'm quite glad that House and I have been working well together and that we haven't reached the levels of drama that are afflicting Momo and Virgil. Hang in there, guys!

Apart from NHD, though, I haven't really been getting much stuff done, which is probably not good. The only real piece of homework I finished was the Greek translation, and that was, like, on the first day. Mostly I've been distracted by Internet drama and such, which is kind of funny to read but wastes a lot of time. Um.

I volunteered a few weeks ago on the nanowrimo forums to draw character art for people, and I am so behind on that it's not even funny. I thought I'd be able to get stuff done but I really haven't, so now there's stuff I should've finished a week ago that I've barely started and I feel bad.

So I'm working on three sketches at once right now, yay.

meh. I re-did the top-right one since making the screenshot and it still doesn't look quite right

 In other news, it's nearly Christmas, which is good. I've been procrastinating on NHD, which is not good. I've been procrastinating on a lot of things, which I think I've mentioned, which is also not not not good.

So, yeah. Winter break's been okay. I'm really annoyed that it hasn't snowed properly yet here in Curlyfryland.

xiy

Lynda and I are Mature, We Swear

So today is the last day of school in 2011, woot woot! I look forward for two weeks of lazing around (except not really, because of N-H-stupid-D) and eating too much food and getting into the holiday spirit! We Curly Fries did a Secret Santa, and my present was a necklace and a mysterious part II that should be coming in the mail, if all goes well. It sounds very mysterious and exciting. :D

Now just for two weeks of frantically trying to put together an NHD exhibit board. . .

Anyway, on a separate note, Lynda came over this afternoon and we watched Merlin together; it's really quite a cliche and overdramatic show at times, but it's enjoyable and fun to watch and the actors are all adorable. We were watching one of the creepier episodes (the one with a vengeful well-spirit who possesses a knight) and basically the whole thing went something like this:

(The 'oh Gwaine' mostly comes from Lynda, who is in love with him.)

 Basically, just read left-to-right and then repeat for as long as necessary, aka the whole episode. And yes, we were actually frightened by shoddy green-lit special effects and a bit of ominous music. Yes, we are mature, we swear. And yes, all of the actors on Merlin are lovely to look at.

And, um, yeah. Knitting myself a scarf; that's going well. 

That's it for today.

xiy

this is post #485

Oh, right, I was supposed to post today.

Well, nothing terribly interesting has been going on lately, and I don't want this post to be lamer than it already is, so have a few doodles and the completed version of last week's Lafayette.

 Okay bye now.

xiy

tablet tablet tablet (lafayette!)

Hello* and happy December! Today is Momo's two-days-after-birthday, which should count for something, and today I got my tablet in the mail (hooray for quick shipping times!), which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

here is an ugly illustrative sketch

 I'm still not actually very good at it, because it involves drawing on one thing while looking at the computer screen on which the drawing shows up, which involves hand-eye coordination that I'm not superbly proficient in. However, everything is so much easier than drawing with the mouse and everything is sparkly and filled with rainbows now. :D 

(My mother insists that it's nothing more than a glorified mouse ["WHY DOESN'T IT HAVE A SCREEN? WHY DOES IT HAVE NO INTERNET?" she complains, even though I've already explained to her that a graphics tablet isn't like a portable-computer tablet] and that it definitely wasn't worth $60, but she is completely and utterly wrong.)

So I was messing around in Photoshop and trying to do a few get-used-to-this-thing doodles that morphed into a sketch of  our good ol' Marquis de Lafayette that I guess I'm going to color now.

Here's what it looks like so far.

And thus we segue into the second part of my post today, in which I talk about how content I am about the fact that NHD is going swimmingly. House and I went to go visit History Teacher and APUSH Teacher today, and they both had very positive and helpful comments about our entirely crazy; why do people even do National History Day? project on dear Lafayette (see? iz a segue), and I feel a lot better. Perhaps we might even get through winter break and not crash and burn. I am actually semi-hopeful about it now.

This week was a very long week after Thanksgiving break, but now it's Friday and therefore all better. Our school's putting on the musical Wonderful Town this weekend (plus yesterday and today), and I'm not yet sure whether I'm going to be going or not. It sounds like a good play, but I'd rather sit at home and play around with the tablet I don't know if I'll go.

Holiday decorations have already been put up everywhere, which is both nice and kind of sad; nice because they're pretty and shiny and colorful, but sad because we've only just finished Thanksgiving--one practically gets holiday whiplash and there's no real time to process one holiday before moving straight on to another. I suppose this says something about the human condition. :P

Aaaaaaand I think that's pretty much it. Have a lovely weekend!

xiy

 *I really can't type today. It took me three tries just to type 'hello.' >.<

oh right it's my turn to post today

I hope everybody had a lovely Thanksgiving! Mine was quite nice; my family spent the day at home cooking, and it was very relaxing.

Nothing much really happened today except that my parents dragged me along to go Black-Friday shopping, though I didn't really get anything major. Mostly it was just stuff for my little sister, eg a winter coat and a ginormous package of giant Legos. I probably had more fun with the Legos than she did. >.>

In other art-and-sort-of-relevant news, I'm going to be getting a tablet (not to be confused with a computer/iPad sort of tablet) soonish, which is exciting because drawing with a mouse is difficult and now I'll be able to draw semi-legit things in Photoshop now. Hooray! :D


Ummm. Yeah. That's really about it.


xiy

happy almost-birthday, Lynda!

Tomorrow is Lynda's birthday! Hooray!

Tomorrow is also when I have a fencing tournament/library thing (not in that order) to go to and a Greek project to finish and a lot of homework to do, and I'm not really looking forward to the last half. We might possibly go see the second Happy Feet for Lynda's birthday, though from what I can tell from the trailers it has no redeeming qualities other than very cute penguins. I guess that makes up for the possible lack of plot and general sequel-not-as-good syndrome, so I'm looking forward to it.

Momo is right now probably in Jerseyland, which sounds like fun. I'm not going anywhere for Thanksgiving, but that's alright as well, since sleeping is so much easier when there is no traveling involved.


I was going to start homework tonight but then I got distracted by The Little Prince, some of which I can read in French though I mostly stuck with English, which is kind of a sad book but also quite a happy book and I do recommend reading it if you haven't already (I read this one sequel to it when I was little without having read the original book, which made me very confused but now I understand all the things!).


Virgil and I left Nerdfightery notes in all the copies of John Green's books in the school library today. It was fun, but then the librarians chased us out because it was four PM and the library, being silly, closes early.


There was also a kind-of book club meeting today in which nothing very much was accomplished. There were muffins, though.


/ramble ramble ramble


xiy

NHD-sy things and the eleventh of november

So you may remember that House and I did a rather silly project on Robespierre last year for not-quite-National-History-Day; this year, we're at it again, only instead of Robespierre, we bring you another French revolutionary who happens to be a) conveniently tied into American history, b) not hated by the general public and not considered a raving maniac, and c) a person who actually lived a nice, long life. In short, Marie-Joseph-he's-got-too-many-names du Motier, commonly known as the Marquis de Lafayette.

The outline powerpoint is due Monday and I spent awhile today doing that; it took longer than I thought and I got through about three-ish slides.

It's quite interesting to see how Lafayette gets old; one minute he's all chipper and wig-wearing and then he suddenly gets kind of old and chunky and you can see his actual hair color, which is apparently completely brown-red even when he's, like, sixty years old.

here is an illustration to illustrate my point

We've not gotten very far into the exact design of our exhibit board yet, but hopefully it'll nicely fuse the French and American flags together and it'll be pretty and mind-boggling and sparkly. :D

something like this, maybe, minus the mini-Lafayettes. also, this kind of looks like some sort of shippy Hetalia fanart, but it's not. and I just realized that I super-failed on drawing the leftmost American flag. >.<" ah well; too late now

Soooo, yeah. It was a lovely day today; Curlyfryland received some snow, but it didn't stick around, much to my extreme disappointment. I ate a lot of ice cream and leftover Halloween candy and also read a lot of Merlin fanfiction and completely failed to increase my wordcount, but that's okay because I still have the rest of tonight and I'm almost to the halfway point and yeahhhh.

It's 11/11/11 today! Make a wish! (I missed 11:11 AM, unfortunately, but there's still the PM, so it's all good.) I wish that NHD were over, amongst other things.


okay bye.


xiy

happy national dress-up-like-Bio-Teacher day!

I think that Momo has already mentioned in a previous post what Bio Teacher (as opposed to Other Bio Teacher, who is the biology teacher of House and Lynda and therefore far less cool) dresses like; for those who missed the memo and and don't feel like clicking the link, he basically wears a lumberjack shirt and carries around a gold (but probably not real gold) coffee mug every single day. Today, by popular agreement of our bio class, was dress-up-like-Bio-Teacher day, in which over half the class showed up wearing plaid. It was funny.

here is my interpretation.

Bio Teacher also bought us bagels, because we organized Bagel Fridays and nobody else wanted to bring them today, so he was forced into it. So it's like he's earning negative money for teaching us. ^.^ I had a raisin bagel and it was very delicious.


School was pretty dumb today and nothing very important was accomplished; after school, Lynda and I hung out with a fellow freshman nerd who, unlike his largely far-dimmer compatriots that populate my math class, has decided to take proper traumatizing ninth-grade geometry/algebra instead of being dumb and jumping up a grade. It was nice and we talked about how the high school library is terrible and also about grades, because no nerdy conversation can be complete without a conversation about grades.


(It almost made me feel popular. ^.^)


And then I went home and ate a lot and now I don't feel so well and I really don't want to do some dumb French homework assignment. And the IB programme is stupid. They need to work out their nouns and adjectives, because that's just stupid. (Speaking of the IB programme, there used to be a poster for it hanging on the wall of the school, but then the wind blew it off the wall and it broke a window, so now it is no longer there; that amused me to no end.)


In NaNo related news, my wordcount is at 7,115 (I haven't written anything yet today) and I guess putting up excerpts is, like, a thing, so here you go:


They ended up, oddly enough, with a minimum of fuss and explodey noise on some sort of damp greyish rock with enough terminal force to bruise a rhinoceros; gods not being rhinos, they got away with one slightly bashed shoulder (Rediculus), a copiously bleeding nose (Sors), various smaller injuries, and lots of pained not-wailing-because-gods-are-better-than-that. Rediculus ended up having most of the minor bashery and landing in a puddle as well, as Sors was the god of luck and it was probably about time that particular facet of his personality kicked in. It was only fair.

So, yeah, NaNo this year is about Roman gods. On vacation, only not really. Sort of. I don't even know. But anyway, I need to ask you Latin people quite a few questions once December kicks in and I actually start to care about realism.

xiy 

math class and nanowrimo

 In math class, we're learning how to find the roots of polynomial equations, and it involves (at least right now; maybe there's a better way to do it) doing some factoring and then basically guessing and checking until one finds the right number. I really don't like doing these sorts of problems (not that I like math in general or anything, ew) because the whole point of math, at least how I see it, is that there are ways to do things that work out properly all the time; there's not supposed to be uncertainty in math. But now there is and I don't like itttt. :(

Did you know that Nanowrimo is in three days? WELL NOW YOU DO. It is not going to be pretty, this November. >.<


For Halloween, apparently I am supposed to dress up as Christopher Robin, which basically means dressing in yellow and trying to look as short and short-haired as possible, I think:

except pants instead of shorts, because Curlyfryland is freaking cold on Halloween

Virgil is going to lend me her Pooh stuffed animal and it's going to be rather interesting.

Ummmmm. Yeah.


Momo, Virgil, and I started writing a photosynthesis song today, inspired rather by Not Our Bio Teacher's cell respiration song. It's called "Plant," because it is to the tune of "Animal" and we think we're so clever.


And I think that's it.

(NANOWRIMO IS IN THREE DAYS DID YOU KNOW FFFFFFF)


xiy