saturday, july 15

•••    I don't know what neale is on about lately, but I think he has run out of quitters, whiners and naysayers and is just blogblogging.

either that or everyone is a whiner and a naysayer, which is also a possibility, but it seems to defeat the purpose of having a roll of them.
11:15 PM +

•••    today, the vcr tried to eat one of my precious videos. it completely mangled the first seven inches or so of the tape, made some horrible noises, and refused to spit the cassette back out. the vcr repair guy on the phone said the tape was unsalvagable and we would have to wait for a technician to come fix the vcr on monday.

did I panic? well, yes. but did I surrender? no!

with the help of my mother (I was the mastermind, she was the dexterity and patience), I took the vcr apart, snipped the tape, unwound it from all the machinery (this required tweezers), and pulled the cassette from the vcr's metal-clamp clutches.

then I snapped the case open and extracted the tape reels. I took another, older tape that was held together with screws instead of melted plastic, took it apart, and took its spools out. then I cut off the entire length of the tape that had been crumpled and twisted inside the vcr and attached the new end to the empty spool (this involved lots of snapping little plastic pieces in and out). I threaded the tape around the pins, tightened the reels, realigned all the gears and widgets and springs, closed the case up and screwed it back together. (I put the vcr back together too.) then, holding my breath, I stuck the tape in and pushed play.

lo and behold, it actually worked. my somewhat irreplacable video survived the first-ever tape transplant I have performed, and lost less than a minute of the entire six hour recording. it was so exhilarating - I felt all full of chutzpah and stuff. ;)
10:55 PM +

•••    estimated number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14,286,000,000.
(I love harper's.)
1:15 PM +

•••    the cousins are here! woo. I'm trying to be unobnoxious. I feel like such a teenager lately - always annoyed with the slow-as-molasses adults. isn't that awful? maybe it's because I only have a year left and then I'll be almost two whole decades old. gotta get it out of my system. anyhow, I'm attempting to be nicehappypoliterabi. ;)
12:46 PM +

•••    I just read all of seth ginsberg's diary. it was a happy little discovery. I am not the only rising college sophomore with an "old person's disease" on the web. yay. creaky joints is hereby bookmarked.
12:41 AM +

friday, july 14

•••    I can't tell if it's avante-garde or just confusing, but maybe that's the point. anyway, clickclickclick.
10:51 PM +

•••    awesome blog - how have I been missing it all this time?
9:36 PM +

•••    I have a question. how come whenever someone starts yelling about how weblogs are crap, people get all upset, but the dominating opinion, or at least one of the loudest-shouted, is that aol users are idiots - and no one has a problem with this? the complaints have a lot in common: blogger makes it easy to publish a site, aol makes it easy to get online; a whole bunch of people are making weblogs, a whole bunch of people are using aol; people are blogging instead of being really creative, people are poking around aol instead of discovering the entire world wide web.

if you complain about the signal-to-noise ratio on the web plummeting because of weblogs, you are setting yourself up for rebuttal from a lot of rightfully ticked off people. but if you complain about aol users polluting the internet, you probably won't get much reaction at all. what's up with that? am I wrong? are we hypocrites? what?
8:51 PM +

•••    oy, I'm going to cry (cause my head is going to explode).

WB ~B P- @WJ #Bl *E++ M Z-

(I'm not about to bring other blogs into it - that would be too difficult.)
5:52 PM +

•••    in our basement there's a storage area that hasn't been opened in years. we don't have the key, and I think all the stuff in there belongs to our landlord or some previous tenants. the wall that separates it from our part of the basement doesn't go all the way up; there's a series of little square holes separated by the floorbeams along the top of the wall. I have long entertained thoughts of squishing myself through a hole so I could explore the stuff on the other side, but I have never done it for a few reasons (the most important of which is I don't think my shoulders would fit through).

today, while I was vacuuming the basement (such a futile exercise, by the way) and trying to clear the cobwebs away from the water pipes that line the ceiling, I climbed up on a table and stuck my head through one of the holes so I could see over the wall. most of what I could see was dust-covered suitcases and cardboard boxes draped in cobwebs and dead parts of plants that tried to grow through the wall. however, one box was open, and I could see what was lying inside. it looked like a sign, with circus-type lettering arching across it. it was partially obscured by one of the box flaps, but I figured out most of what it said: "this is a (something) school play. please act respectable."

for some reason I think that is really great. ;)
5:36 PM +

•••    I thought my fascination with quidditch would be my undoing, but I survived. how anticlimactic.
12:18 PM +

•••    we have company coming tomorrow, including my adopted cousin who is allergic to dust and every kind of animal dander in existence. we have six animals. there is some serious logic problem here but I suppose it's not my job to worry about that. :P anyway, all week my mom has been cleaning every square millimeter of the house, vacuuming the ceiling, washing the venetian blinds, and of course, keeping the animals doused in anti-allergen stuff and confined to the basement. my brother's room has been wrapped in plastic and scrubbed all around. the air purifier has been running around the clock. today is crunch cleaning day. meanwhile the various cleansers and animal shampoos are suffocating me. I think they have somehow managed to get inside my head and to saturate my brain.

I will admit that I am not the greatest when it comes to dealing with relatives. part of that is because I'm so antisocial that any situation involving extra people for an extended period of time makes me very uncomfortable. usually I manage to put on my game face for a week or so - and since I'm the oldest cousin in most situations, I have to be mature and responsible and whatnot. but I'm not sure how I'm going to pull that off with all these chemicals dancing around my head all week. sigh. (today is the last day I have to be disgruntled about this, so I'm making the best of it. tomorrow is game face day.)
10:40 AM +

•••    I have the geek code practically memorized, but I have to admit this gave me a little trouble. anyway:
ST2 S+++i^ JP++ D++{+} JD~/?[++] Q-[+] LT---? KN->++ Kes++i^[~] HD-->++ E:balance of terror & I, borg TOS+++ TNG+{+} DS9-->+[+] VGR~ $ #17 @CN2D
whew...
(via ctrl-alt-ego)
1:44 AM +

thursday, july 13

•••    these eyes are giving me the screamin' willies.
11:14 PM +

•••    I think splitting headache is a misnomer. it should be crushing headache or pressure-cooker headache or electric headache or burning headache or bunches of little white-hot pins headache . . . although I suppose that's too many syllables. (I have gathered that my head doesn't hurt in an especially normal way, so maybe that is why I can't identify with the splitting headache thing. in any case, I have probably just demonstrated how well my head doesn't work when it hurts. ;)
10:57 PM +

•••    ::blinks:: steamed children? I don't care how bad your english is, how do you get steamed children?
10:08 PM +

•••    (they look even bigger in spanish.)
3:01 PM +

•••    thing number one I don't get right now: sailboston 2000 and all this tall ship stuff. there are tourists pouring in from everywhere, long island (not that long island, the one in boston harbor) has been turned into some kind of elite ship-viewing club, and the wharf is crawling with people all the time. I don't understand. okay, there are some really big tall ships here . . . but they're just really big tall ships! as a fleet, do they have a purpose beyond racing around the world every six years? no. some of them have interesting histories, but all you hear about now is how freaking tall and pretty they are. they are tall and pretty, but understanding of all the fanaticism is completely eluding me.
2:58 PM +

•••    mollie, you are being quite the nomad these days. ;) hopefully I'm all caught up now for the last time, yes? my blogger template has gotten such a workout lately.
12:15 PM +

•••    what exactly is supercooled water, and why isn't it ice?
8:34 AM +

wednesday, july 12

•••    ZOG!
9:53 PM +

•••    there are so many street performers around boston and cambridge this time of year that I tend to walk right by them unless they're doing something really impressive. today the two-man acoustic band bedlam was playing traditional renaissance music in harvard square. they were good. I sat and watched. then a man requested a jig, and they played an arrangement that included the white petticoat, which is one of my favorite traditional irish dances. so, while the man who made the request was doing some improvisational step dancing on the sidewalk, I actually bought a cd. it's good stuff. not many people know how to do relentless happiness and relentless sadness as well as irish balladeers.
5:55 PM +

•••    every time I do my hair in two braids, I end up braiding the left side twice, because it invariably sucks the first time. for some reason I can never remember the right way to hold it so that it doesn't stick out funny - until I redo it, when it comes out flat and sleek and perfectly matching the right side. I suppose I should be glad my brain isn't wasting its time remembering how to braid the left half of my hair, but it's odd. (I am probably the only person in the world who thinks it is interesting enough to warrant being labeled "odd," but oh well.)
10:50 AM +

tuesday, july 11

•••    you know what's fun? sticking bubble wrap to the floor and rolling across it in an office chair. yes. :)
11:57 PM +

•••    my brother can do some scary things with his ribcage. he was just demonstrating to me how he can get his fingers underneath, grip his ribs, and pull them outward. he is not just sucking his stomach in, or lifting his ribcage up - there is some actual bending going on. it's freaky. I tried it, and I can't do anything like it. I can poke my fingers under, but I can't make anything move. I don't think this is simply because my brother is a skinny little twig and I'm not, but it's amazing that so much ossification (or whatever) could take place between eight and eighteen. I can't think of any other reason why he would be able to bend his ribs, unless he has mutant bones.

(all my bones are jealous; only the cartilege is not jealous. it's more flexible!)
9:48 PM +

•••    d, g, j, m, n, q, x, y, z.

do you know what these are? they're missing and I'm looking for them. it's something of an academic exercise (my mind gets like this occasionally.) any suggestions?
7:33 PM +

•••    any bill or test that thinks I am a terrorist (87.5%, but it was only semantics that kept it from being 100%) is completely wonky. I'm an activist, but I'm also a pacifist. just because I agree with the cause doesn't I agree with the methods everyone else uses in its name. but come on! demonstrations aren't terrorism! having opinions isn't terrorism! where do people get this stuff?
(via mefi)
4:16 PM +

•••    you have to burn to shine . . .
or else take a bath in fluorescent paint, maybe.
2:58 PM +

•••    what do you suppose is the difference between inner and outer scapes?
2:29 PM +

•••    chandra finds another first: a flaring brown dwarf. isn't the universe cool?
1:59 PM +

monday, july 10

•••    I went out today to buy some shorts, because I only have two non-soccer pairs, and they're both kind of too big for me.
I came home with a skirt.
I must be losing my mind.

(addendum: I realize that probably made no sense for people who don't know me pretty well. I almost never dress up, and I really almost never buy dress clothes that aren't appropriate formal concert wear. when I do dress up, it usually involves borrowing clothes from other people. the skirt I bought today is turquoise. it's just weird. and I still need shorts. :P)
9:46 PM +

•••    you know, if everyone was not so eager to abandon their bikes and start driving around, the world would be that much less polluted and it would have that much more natural oil left, regardless of parental overprotectiveness or lack thereof. :P
1:46 PM +

•••    maybe by the year 2050, leapgene will have replaced leapfrog as the most unnecessarily-painful-for-little-people playground game.
1:16 PM +

sunday, july 9

•••    I also want to play quidditch. it sounds like it might be almost as much fun as rugby. :)
9:30 PM +

•••    finished with harry for another year . . . crushing on dumbledore yet again. you'd think I would learn, but no! the goings-on at hogwarts terrify me, but I want to be a student there anyway. ;)
8:31 PM +

•••    I want to fly on a broomstick!
2:34 PM +

•••    I am of course reading harry potter and the goblet of fire . . . who knows when you'll hear from me again.
12:45 AM +