Happy birthday random_meow!

Every now and then the police arrest somebody suspected of some terrible, violent crime, and as a piece of public relations they'll announce all of the horrible books, movies and/or CDs they found in the suspects' house, as if to prove that the suspect is obviously guilty and horrible and monstrous.

So here is my challenge to you. You can either do this from memory or take a moment to look through your book and music collections, and then answer this question:

Name ten or more books, CDs and/or movies or other stuff that you own that the police would cite as evidence against you at their press conference. ( Read more... )

I had a huge long bad dream that our wedding venue had decided to host our wedding on a Saturday instead of a Sunday, and then told my mother instead of me, and she didn't tell me until the very day. D: So nobody showed up because it was the wrong day and I didn't have everything ready and Paul was at work and I couldn't get in touch with him so I was afraid he wasn't going to show up and I was trudging around some muddy small town on foot in a wedding dress trying to find wedding paraphernalia. And I was afraid that if I said I couldn't do the wedding that day, that Paul would think I didn't really want to marry him that bad. D: D: D:

Upon waking, I know this dream makes no sense at all, because the venue would have no reason to have contact information for people in another province, such as my mom, so why would they call her? And I couldn't possibly be caught SO off guard by one day's difference when we still have more than a year to prepare. And I would have screamed a lot more at them for randomly changing the day and then made them give me a day I wanted, or something. But the dream was still pretty upsetting.

I got an A- in art. :3

This happened yesterday, the same day I took skjie to the hospital because his heart was beating erratically, so I'm feeling a little worn out over all. He's okay, it had gone back to normal by the time we got to the hospital and they ran tests to make sure it wasn't a heart attack, but he gets to wear one of those fun heartbeat monitors soon.

Work early tomorrow, then cleaning frantically before my future father-in-law comes over to our house for the first time ever on Saturday. :X

I was reading about abandoned-animal nightmares after a post on it in ursulav's journal, and then last night I had a dream that there were all kinds of hamsters and budgies in my house that I'd forgotten about and hadn't been cleaning up after or feeding. The dwarf hamsters had a litter of babies that were already half-grown. And yet, none of them looked sick or anything? They just pounced on the food when I poured it in. Too weird.

Even in the dream I knew I'd been taking care of the gerbils and such, I'd just forgotten about my 'new' pets...

I caught an episode of the 100 Mile Challenge reality show on the Food Network a little while ago. It's being filmed, or has likely already finished filming, in Mission, which happens to be a town an hour or so's drive away from me. That makes everything the families in the show go through very personally applicable. I'm poking at the linked websites and thinking about whether this is something I could do, maybe even for just a week in August when I've got the time. We're living within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean, in a fertile valley that grows everything that WILL grow in a wet temperate coastal climate. Does a 100-mile challenge limit me to fish caught within my 100-mile limit of the shore? Could you cheat that rule with a sailboat that uses no fuels? But then I realize, no tea? Herbal infusions are nice but not the same. I could use sea salt instead of regular salt, sure, if I could find a local source, but I'd have to replace my olive oil. Would locally made vegetable oils work the same? I've been trying to find Tahini paste, so I could try making my own hummus, but I may need to find an 'ethnic' food store, and unless I find someone that's growing their own in a greenhouse I'd be out of luck for a 100-mile challenge. Sesame won't grow outdoors in Canada's short summers. Am I within 100 miles of a source of wheat (I think I am but I'd have to look into it)?

I could do it as a short challenge, but it seems a shame to give up valuable traded goods altogether. I LIKE non-North-American foods. I've already been taking advantage of my locale to buy from the co-op and the farmer's market, and my second-most recent batch of eggs were laid by my coworker Emma's pet chickens and ducks (the most recent is local from the co-op, I didn't want to bug Emma about eggs when she just got back from vacation). I've gone up to a farmhouse and bought the wobbly and oddly-yolked eggs the farmers can't send off to the grocery stores, but I worry about the freshness of eggs acquired from strangers with no commercial rules to follow.

I've found some lovely from-scratch recipes at the SOS Cuisine website jagash linked (I made my own salad dressing yesterday!), and they have some 'prepared base' recipes that make other things faster to make later (pre-prepped parsley-and-garlic is tonight's goal), but I can only do so much until school is done. I'm on the mailing list for the site's 'budget' meal plan, but it keeps giving me spicy recipes that I don't want to make, with no option to cut out foods I don't like short of selecting all the recipes I do like on the entire site and telling it to only pick from my choices, which is fairly unwieldy.

Ah well, I'm a week and a half away from the end of one of my classes, I'll have more free time with only one course to worry about (especially since hours are still chopped at work). Maybe then I'll be able to stock up our freezer properly.

I'm registered for the fall in English 325 (British Literature, 1780-1830) on Tuesdays and Thursdays 7-9:10pm, and English 336 (English Anglican Fiction 1880-1920) online.

I'm waitlisted for English 369 (Studies in World Literature, 10:45am-12:55pm), 301 (Homer, Classicism & English Lit, 1-3:10pm), and 306 (Chaucer, 8:30-10:40am) ALL on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I will not take all of them, I'll drop whichever ends up being least convenient or I don't get through the waitlist.

All I really have left for mandatory courses are one particular second-year English that isn't being run this semester, one more Education course, and a bunch of higher-level English. @_@ And a Math course, but I'm not ready for that yet.

Today's art class was a nude figure model session, which was interesting more for the class reaction (or lack thereof) than the drawing itself. When I did life drawing in high school, there was a slightly different atmosphere. The only students present had signed up specifically to practice drawing people, and knew pretty much exactly what they were getting into. Everyone was very serious and polite about it, particularly because they knew they would be turfed out the door instantly for giggling at the wrong moment.

But this is a first-year introductory class, free registration for any student of the University. There are kids in the class that have never actually taken an art class before, so having a woman stand up on a platform in dramatically lit bare skin so that we may spend 30 seconds, two minutes, five minutes, and then an hour doing sketches and gesture studies and drawing after drawing, was something about half the class had never done before. There was no specific warning in the syllabus that there would be nudity, nor in the class description, and in fact it wasn't until the start of class today that I discovered that "figure model" meant "naked," when the teacher warned us and said we might leave if we were terribly uncomfortable. I didn't notice anyone leave. I couldn't see the faces around the room clearly enough to read expressions, the lights were low and I still haven't replaced my lost glasses, but while it was certainly awkward at first everyone drew very quietly and, as far as I could tell, politely.

The teacher touched on the 'politics' of drawing nude models in her little this-is-what-we're-doing-today introduction speech. Politeness is so very important to remember, along with remembering that yes, this is a person, when she is not posing nude she has friends and a life and probably a day job and deserves every respect. Every time I get irritated at the general twitchyness of live models ("AGH she scratched her nose and now her arm's in a different place and my shadows are all wrong grumblegrumblegrumble"), I do have to remind myself not only how bloody difficult it is to hold perfectly still for minutes at a time, let alone a full hour, but also that relatively few people have the balls, literally or figuratively, to shed clothes and let a bunch of people of any age stare at them intensely. If you're doing it right, the stare of an artist at work is VERY intense. Every line and shadow transferred to paper to capture the depth and shape of a thigh, a nose, the curve of the belly. After a few minutes you find yourself losing the awareness of "this is a naked man/woman" and going into a mindset where the overall shape and shades are all you're thinking about. And then maybe you catch the model's eye as you're trying to figure out the spacing between forehead and nose, and you just have to smile or nod politely and keep drawing.

People look so DIFFERENT out of their clothes. Every time I've seen a model in and out of their street attire, I am at least a little surprised. Paunches hidden under shirts or bone-rack lack of buttocks hidden under good jeans. But I know I'd rather draw the paunchy than the skinny, boniness has such hard edges that it's even more difficult to give a sense of fullness to the body on paper.

I'm quite pleased with the second-last drawing I did, the full hour one, but for some reason I kind of lost it in the last one. Hrm. Ah well, practice makes perfect...

I had my art 'midterm' today, which meant laying out all the stuff I've done so far so my teacher could get a good look at my progress. She told me I've got a B+/A- average going on, and with a bit more work I could easily have an A. She also told me I 'work fast' which kind of made me want to laugh hysterically. :X But I have managed to produce a surprising amount, I think it helps that this is something I am doing to be happy, and not just something I'm doing because hey, art high school, it's what I was supposed to do. I didn't put everything up, because I don't feel like showing off my rough scribbles, but I did photograph my three main projects that I was really happy with until I photographed them and they started to look like crap on the computer screen. >_< Oh well, they DO look really good, considering my years out of practice, and as long as I keep working I will get better! They're up on DeviantArt now and I'll make a Facebook album so my mom can see.

Mercury decided to pee on the sleeping bag and possibly the couch the other day, I am unimpressed. He almost never does stuff like that, so I am also vaguely worried and if it happens again I will take him to the vet. But it may have something to do with the upstairs dogs coming down into the apartment for an accidental visit when I left the door open to do laundry.

Anyway, my next art project is actually a lot of no-pressure fun. I had to do random messy splashes covering some sturdy paper with india ink, making sure to represent the whole greyscale as much as possible, and then I chose a photo. I'm going to chop up my mess into individual 'pixels' with which I will roughly build a collage that will sort of look like a photo I took of my family's horse, and then fill it in a bit with charcoal and pencils. So far I had a lot of fun with ink and brushes and tape and salt and all sorts of things to make interesting patterns. :3

My teacher recommended I try doing a self portrait in white-on-black, it's kind of intimidating but I'll try it if I have time.

Okay, the snails that hitchhiked in on my wisteria were cute at first (they zooooooom surprisingly fast across the glass), but the population explosion got out of control. I just pulled 30+ snails out of the tank by hand, and I'm going to try baiting them with lettuce tonight. I don't mind a couple of them, but unfortunately they're the hermaphrodite mega-breeding pond type, and that's not good for my tetras and otos. They've gotta go.

I'm very pleased with my art class. Work is D: but it's a manageable level for the moment. It's warm enough to have the window open so I can listen to the birds sing. I had a tasty salad for dinner because I needed the lettuce anyway. A friend I hardly ever manage to see dropped by for a couple hours last night, and we had a lovely visit. I'm going to play a bit of Twilight Princess and then go to bed early before class tomorrow, whoo.

I'm generally feeling much better, but now I'm annoyed that my boss at work is either not paying attention to my availability, or is looking at an old sheet from another semester. He keeps scheduling me during class and giving me the wrong days off. >_< And then when I tell him he's done it, he just crosses those shifts off the schedule so the department ends up understaffed, and I lose a bunch of hours. Arrrrrgh. I've left a note asking to have a talk tomorrow, because he's done it AGAIN, after I talked to him about it twice!

As soon as I've showered off bird feathers from work, I am taking my lounge chair down to the river and pretending the world does not exist for a bit.

The only issue I have with the Wii is the fact that my cat can't sleep on me while I play, he gets pissy every time I swing the wiimote (and since I'm still playing Twilight Princess, I'm doing that a lot!). He keeps trying anyway, though.

I cannot read kind words from my loved ones back in Ontario (and abroad, for that matter) without tearing up. I love you all. I'm going back to my wine and Twilight Princess now, but I'd like you all to know that when I am having a bad day, I have only to think of how blessed I am to have SO MANY people that love me, and my tears of depression become tears of joy. I cannot say it enough, I love you all. Even if I didn't say anything this time, I love you.

I got all the way to art class and found a note on the studio door saying it was canceled, the teacher's sick (obviously not her fault but argh). I was actually looking forward to that class, unlike my syntax lesson this morning.

I'm going to go have a bath and play Twilight Princess.

EDUC 230 Info Services for Children: B+

ENGL 209 The Structure of the English Language: B

KPE 103 Active Health: C

Not as good as I'd hope, but manageable...

I have a car and free time tomorrow evening, who still loves me?

Some sources tell me that my resting heart rate is my heart rate taken first thing when I wake up, before I get out of bed. Other sites tell me I just need to sit or lie down until relaxed, and that's my resting heart rate. When I wake up in the morning, my heart rate is between 45 or 50 bpm, but when I take it in the afternoon when I've been sitting reasonably still for an hour or more, it's more around 60. Argh.

I scraped a chunk of flesh out of the main knuckle on my left middle finger, and scored two grooves out of the underside of my right arm (right where it rests on things like chair arms and tables) on unexpectedly pointy objects at work, and now they are iiiittttcchhyyyyyyyy with healing, the one on my arm in particular is driving me frantic with the itchy. >_< I have a bandaid over it so I can't really scratch. Rawrg.

This is what is occupying my mind instead of studying for my last, and most difficult, exam tomorrow afternoon. D: Stupid Active Health class, why must you be full of calculations for heart rate, and yet no calculators are allowed at the final exam? Arrrgh.

Four mice have been caught in the trap so far (one of them just had a foot in there, I released him far away outside and wished him luck in any place that is not my apartment). With the one Mercury caught that means there were at least five mice in our house. Hrm. I'm hoping that's all of them, I've seen no new signs since I cleaned everything yesterday, and now that I've removed every food source I could think of and sealed everything away, they should take the warming weather as a cue to go back outside anyway.

But I can't really work up to getting actually annoyed, it's a gorgeous day and there are chickadees taking turns at the window feeder (whenever Mercury isn't scaring the daylights out of them by leaping at the glass).