Crazy week.. more updates and lots of pics when life slows down.

When did life lose the magic?

Light a pumpkin spice candle, plug in the LED Christmas lights, turn up some music, and chill.  My name means Christmas for a reason.  It is, after all, my December.

On Thursday I got together with the other engineering grad girls and decorated cookies (SO much fun, and way relaxing).  One of my cookies won the "best decorated" award and I brought it home on a plate, along with a couple others to munch on before the holidays.  Well, this morning I woke up and found the plate of cookies on the floor with teeth marks in the plastic wrap... and my favorite cookie was a room away, the frosting chewed off and smeared into the carpet.  Somehow my cat knew which cookie I liked most, and destroyed it, leaving the rest untouched.........

I saw something yesterday that you would have liked.  Someone had the license plate RBLSCUM and a giant "Long live the empire" Star Wars sticker on their car.. too funny.

The hardest part will be unlearning when I see things I want to tell you about.

Life is a bit like the climate models I work with.  If you narrow down your point of view to a day, or week, or month, what you discover is mostly noise, and you become lost in the nonsense and meaninglessness.  But, if you extend your point of view and see beyond to years.. or lifetimes.. there, the true meaning exists.

Watched the first part of Planet Earth this afternoon.. way relaxing, and some of it is hilarious, like this segment on birds of paradise.  If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth the 2 minutes......

When I need a break from studying, I browse youtube.. here are 3 completely random things everyone should see.


Christian the lion

I saw the full story on this once on Animal Planet, it's really incredible.  Wish they'd picked a less cheesy song for the vid though.



Carl Sagan explains the 4th dimension

If you have 7 minutes to kill and you want your mind blown, this is completely worth the watch.



And to lighten things up..

Britney Spears Womanizer parody

Don't want an Aragorn, I want a young Gandalf the Grey  *giggle*

I did my best; I have no regrets. We shall see if it was good enough.

Random thoughts.

Realizing that you have limits is humbling; realizing that you've reached them is terrifying.

The weather lately has been cloudy, in stark contrast to the cobalt-blue skies of Arizona that I'm used to. I've never equated sunny weather with happiness (I'm pretty fond of storms); rather, to me sunny weather represents clarity of purpose (which could be described as happiness itself, don't you think?). The overcast skies these days seem to mirror my state of mind.

One final down. Much love to all my friends who are going through the same hell right now (nail those nursing exams Bre!)

Finals are kicking my butt. Today I spent 9 hours straight in the library.. and the guys I was studying with told me to get up because I hadn't moved the whole time haha. I'm like dude, you should see me when I'm gaming, this is nothing ~

I have a new Nikko cartoon to post when I find some time, probably after Monday when my last final is over with.

Otherwise, here's a quick update on life.....

AZ people are mostly dicks (maybe just the guys. or maybe guys in general.), it's too damn cold here at night (gets down to 40, brrrr!), and being alone is the worst around the holidays.

I got home today and went to check on the cats' Le Bistro machine............. to find it missing. Gone. All that was left was the detachable food dish that the machine dumps into. WTF.

I start the search for the 2 foot tall, 10 lb machine, wondering if my cats had been practicing telekinesis in my absence. Finally I found it, apparently dragged two rooms away, buried under a blanket by a cat that clearly wanted to hide the evidence. This is what I get having a brilliant cat with a food addiction. Maybe I need to get him hooked on something else. Like crack. At least that's something I can hide from him.

Maybe.

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I want to thank my friends for being the coolest people on the planet and making me feel special on my birthday, even though I'm a million miles from all of you. Thank you <3

What I bought myself for my birthday...



.... peace of mind. This morning at 7am as Caspian was stepping on my face and blaring his 80 decibel meows, I realized that the only reason he abuses me is because he thinks his human needs constant reminding to provide him with food. So, I thought, what if a machine feeds him instead? Naturally I googled it and found this little gem for the ridiculous price of $69.99 (plus, it needs 3 D batteries, not included, unless you want to go to their website and spend another $20 for the charger and base.. as if!). It dispenses a preset amount of food up to 3 times a day at times you set. The look on his face when it spat out food was priceless.. maybe when he realizes that it does this at the same time every day, he won't need to complain about food anymore, and his human can finally get some sleep.

If this works, it was worth every penny.

Do you ever wake up not knowing where you are? That brief second when you're opening your eyes, and you feel like you're back in some other place or time. Guess it's a side effect of having lived in so many places.


The memory of waking up in a hotel room is somehow more comforting to me than waking up in many of the places I've lived. Maybe because being in a hotel room meant I was on an adventure, and if there's any place that's ever felt like home, it's somewhere new.