Sakura of DOOM

Whoo! I am set for vacation!

WHOO!

And once more, WHOO!!

Right now, I'm not even looking forward to Italy, or even to seeing Mely and Rachel tomorrow. I'm looking forward to five hours of uninterrupted sleep and plane time, and an entire week in which I don't have to think about anything. Honestly, even if it were at home, this would be awesome, but it is even better in NYC and Italy!

I shall endeavor to eat three times my body weight and take tons of pictures. I don't know if I'll have any internet access though, given my parents' inability to understand why I cannot survive without email for thirty minutes.

EEEEEE!!!!! I have Saiyuki Reload 7, volume of awesomeness and angst and viney goodness EEEEEEEEE!!!!

Nevermind that I cannot read half of it!

Viney goodness!!!!!!!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!1!111!!!!!!1111eleventyone!!!!!exclamationpoint!

I have a Christmas tree!!!!! (thank you cychi for the help!)

It is all sparkly and lit up and has ornaments and smells lovely and is Christmasy and I have carols playing and eeeeeeeeeee!!!!! TREE!!!!

The sad thing is that because it is my tree and not my family's tree, my ornaments only date back to when I moved here =(. So there are only two years worth of history on the tree, as opposed to the twenty-some years of mixed and matched ornaments, broken ornaments, random things that me and my sister did that's at home. But still! Tree!! I put it up and remembered putting up the tree in Taiwan despite no one else in the family really caring and listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Mariah Carey (the only two Christmas CDs we had) and plugging it in to light it up.

I must get a star for me tree now!!!!

To imagine I was almost too tired to get it today! When it was on my car and we were driving back I just wanted to pat it and grin at it and call it George. I named it George before we decorated it, but I think it's just Tree now, because all I can really do right now is squiggle around and wave my hands and yell, "Treee!!!!!!!!!" and jump up and down!

EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

I have found my must-see movie of 2005!!

Witness!

OMG CANNOT WAIT!!!!!11!! BBQ!

*gibbers excitedly*

Other than that, I fear this journal has been severely short on actual content lately. Unfortunately, I write that not to say that now I shall be putting in Actual Content, but that my brain seems to have shut down this past month or so. I'm barely even reading, which is never a good sign. On the plus side, I have picked up knitting, but that doesn't actually take away from my reading time, given that my reading time takes away from my sleep time. I'm halfway through about half a dozen books, but so far, none of them have grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to read at breakneck speed.

In more optimistic news, it has been sunny and warm here the past week! This lifts my spirits immeasurably. And all the trees are starting to bud, and they're so cute! Two months of Californian winter is quite enough for me, thankyouverymuch. Please bring on the heat and the sunshine very soon.

The boy has managed to find a video game that even the hand-eye uncoordinated me can play. Also, it's incredibly addictive. It's this weird little game called Katamari Damacy, and I really mean weird. The whole goal of the game is to roll around this thing called a katamari and gather stuff up (magnetically? who cares!). Yeah, that's it. I mean, there's a goal -- you're supposed to get your katamari to a certain size by a certain time, but that's it. And all I have to do is use the little joystick things on the Playstation controller to roll the ball around and pick stuff up. It's really horribly addictive. And it's got these weird Japanese kitschy/retro graphics with psychedelic colors and some weird guy called the King of the Cosmos and music that's a sort of blend of people singing "Katamari mambo!" and swing and electronic.

Really weird, but really fun. Plus, it's horribly amusing watching your katamari grow from several cm in size to a few meters (so far). I can't decide which size I like better... the small size is fun because you get this ant's eye view of a house and pick up thumbtacks and butterflies and marbles and stuff, but when you get bigger, you start rolling into more places and picking up people (who run away screaming) and cows and fences and become a giant, Godzilla-like ball of destruction! Hee, maybe I am enjoying this too much ;).

Other than that, we ventured out to Wal-Mart this weekend because we needed knives (no forks or spoons, just knives), which apparently only Wal-Mart sells individually. I hate Wal-Mart. It is suburban hell. Shopping carts filled with screaming babies in every aisle, people walking everywhere, too much noise, too much stuff, all of it is messy because everyone is just tossing stuff everywhere. Ugh. And giant lines at the register in which you swear to yourself that you'll decapitate the next screaming baby you hear.

And the boy had this assignment for his negotiations class in which he had to negotiate a price for something at a usually non-negotiable place... no flea markets or used bookstores ("Hey!" I said about used bookstores. "We are not price negotiable unless the stock is damaged!"). He ended up getting some slow selling plants from Summer Winds, so now we have even more plants. Yikes. Mostly he's taking care of them, given that I am not that great with plants. Well, I ordered more minis (my last ones were killed off by spider mites, powdery mildew and then negligence), so maybe I will be inspired to be nicer to them. But he came back with three hanging baskets of something with small purple flowers, mint, oregano, chives, and basil. Apparently we will now have an herb garden, despite the non-cookage on both our parts. Oh well. They smell nice.

Sat. was the boy's birthday, which was a great opportunity for me to spend way too much money to buy the rest of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs (we had DVD 2). So hopefully Cowboy Bebop watching will commence soon! I love that series. And we headed up to his parents' place. I think I am getting more used to his parents now, though there was a brief freak out point in which they were mentioning marriage and kids. While it's generally accepted between me and the boy that marriage is somewhere there in the distant future, my brain still sort of went kablooey because eep, in-laws and kid discussion and wedding planning and my god the clashing of two cultures. They were mentioning something about them paying for the reception and my family doing the wedding, and my brain went, "But I think in Chinese society, it's the other way around!" (though I might be confused). Weird. But we got lots of free food to take home (chocolate-covered strawberries! roast beef! cheeses! apple crisp!). And I now feel like it's autumn because their house is decorated that way. The boy's mom is very big on house decoration.

ETA: On the subject of Katamari Damacy, I would just like the add the small note that I rolled over a cow today. I cannot possibly describe just how happy that made me, but it did involve much yelling ("Hee hee hee hee hee look at me I rolled over a cow hee hee hee hee hee!") and laughing so hard I almost fell off the couch.

Guess who has a job?!?!

I think I've been so depressed about this for so long, that this feels almost soap bubble like -- if I stare at it too long or think about it too long, it'll go away. But! The bookstore has taken me! And even better, because I said I was interested in having my own store someday, they are going to put me in both positions almost! So I will be doing cataloguing for part of the week and learning how to be a book buyer for other days. It means I have to work harder and learn faster, but oh, it sounds like fun ^_^.

Must call later today so that they can work out my schedule and the like.

Wow. I'm working. In a bookstore!!!

*skips off*