Allison

Even though there's not a very noticeable temperature or weather change, there are still some reliable signs of spring in Los Angeles's South Bay.

The first is a brief period of heavy fog. This is Silent Hill levels of fog, where you can't see one side of the street from another. (for a certain width of street, which if you've played the first Silent Hill, you'll know the streets are quite wide in that game) Eerie to stop at a stoplight that you can't even see!

The second is the perennial ducks. I'm not sure whether it's the same mating pairs from year to year, but pools, fountains, any consistent body of water will have some ducks show up. They would show up at the fountain at Konami (and even walk to the the grocery stores nearby!). These are the ones that showed up at my apartment's pool this year:

It also makes cats think about gardening


I went through the planters on the porch and threw out some old annuals I had put in in the autumn that had died off, as well as the other general plant trash that accumulated over the winter. A couple of annuals were still alive, so I consolidated them into an empty planter where I'd tried to do some onions that ended up getting waterlogged. I added some perlite, so hopefully the new ones won't suffer the same fate.

There were some little plants that came up in my potato container that I don't recognize. I moved them around so they don't have to compete with the potato vines. There also seem to be some narcissus that are coming up, but they don't seem to be substantial enough to expect them to bloom. There were some little four o'clock seeds that sprouted after the main one bloomed back in October/November. I swept up a lot more seeds, so I just added them to the one that had the majority of them, but a couple of seeds have probably ended up in every planter.

The orchid I saved from the dumpster has been very limp and languid lately, so I went ahead and replaced the bark in it and saw that the roots were fairly waterlogged. I think they might revive with some new bark mix, though. I also repotted the only onion I got to root, which still has extensive amounts of green onion shoots, and saw that its root system was pretty healthy, although no bulbs seem to have formed yet.

The last sign of spring, or really "it has rained relatively recently":


How long do snails live, anyway?

Now that the initial sadness has released my limbs back into movement, I feel a little better! I even worked on my first hw assignment tonight (well, not very much on it xD) and made dinner for myself. I've gotten all my clothes put up and only have basically one more box of junk to sort out. I've got an idea for bus routeage and reduced my book price by $100.

Here are pictures of the apartment as it stands: (if I spell it appartement, realize that a certain amount of the brainspace necessary for spelling has been taken over by french spellings in lieu of english ones)
( YAYTIME )

So yeah, settling in pretty good.

K so, got a call this morning saying the university is going to be closed the rest of this week. Well shit.

I call my house repeatedly, no answer. I look up clinics in fayetteville and call the family doctor at home, no appointments available until monday, except one I could make if I left RIGHT THEN.

They planned a power outage in the dorm so I was kinda getting frazzled, I'd lose my internet soon, so stu called his mom for advice and I finally got ahold of dad, and they both suggested to go to the ER.

It was a question I had been wrestling with for a few days. How do you know when a disorder has escalated to the point that it qualifies as 'emergency?'

This, I guess.

Anyways, I got some cute pictures of me in an unflattering hospital gown, and Stu pointed out a very interesting coincidence concerning the name of the doctor who saw me!
( pix )

Anyways, I have three kinds of antibiotics. One oral, one nasal, and one topical. Of course the topical one is just neosporin, but whatever ;) The nasal one is pretty funny. I spread some on a q-tip, wipe the inside of my nostril with the q-tip, turn it around and do the other side then pinch my nose together to slather it really well xD Apparently Staph lives in our noses, generally (wikipedia says up to 1/3 of the population hosts it there) so this prevents reinfection, I imagine.

I also have a painkiller (hydrocodone) which hasn't seemed to do much yet. I guess I was able to lay on my back while reading earlier tonight.

( TMI TIME )

In less butt-related news, here are some pictures of the massive ice storm that delayed my medical treatment by two agonizing days.

<-post-apocalyptic looking, isn't it?
<-You really CAN fit three cars into two parking spaces
Deathcicles. Their brethren sent a dude to the ER in the room next to mine with some substantial cranial damage. doctor came in after treating him and said he'd had head trouble, and I asked if it was from icicles, and funnily enough, it was! (thank you again stu for warning me against Deathcicles)
What you can't see in this picture is the tree immediately to the left of frame which split into five pieces, completely obstructing one of the main entrances to the business college building. (pictures forthcoming when I feel like uploading off my digicam)
My new phone bground

(I would lj cut those, but then people who want to see pretty ice pictures would probably end up seeing butt stuff xD)

Anyways, I am safely at home, in my parents' tender loving care, well anti-bioticked (remind me to get some yogurt soon) and almost able to sit comfortably.

bluetooth is being just a pussy atm. Stu's wanting some musix for his listening pleasure while he's on airplanes tomorrow, so he was trying to get my phone to use to transfer files, but didn't seem to catch on that I didn't have my phone's usb so we've been duking it out with bluetooth. Half the time it doesn't want to send, and when it does send, it's at some impaired adsl-esque speeds. Oh well.

I did paint an awesome cool statue I've had since about 4th grade though. Found it up in the attic and realized my skillz had surely become l33ter, thus:


I'm gonna miss stu, but I'm not freaking out about it too much, compared. We watched American Beauty which was pretty good and got our favorite Chinese (soooo hungry) My brother invited us over to play GH World Tour, so we rocked it up this aftenroon.

Yesterday I was cleaning in the attic and I compiled two trashbags of trash and broken or half missing toys. I've become heartless in my old age, to be sure.

oh yeah, final grades:
Statics- C
Materials- B
Linear- B
CAD- A
Calculus- A

3.2, guess my governor's distinguished scholarship is going down the drain! oops

Sometimes I forget to update WILT before I go to bed, so when I think about it the next day, I wonder 'do I want to keep trudging on?'

well I think it's become too much of a habit to give up too soon xD It's nice to think back over a day and realize just how much information I am expected to absorb in a day.

Anyways, that was just an excuse to plug it if some of you have forgotten or never saw it before :)

I had another France dream this morning, except Mrs. Cioppa was there. We walked up a staircase with famous quotes by french people on it, and I was reading them and exclaimed 'oh wow, I totally know what all these mean now!'

More interesting though, was the first part of the dream.

I dreamed I went on a trip with a lot of young people my age. We stopped at a place that looked like my elementary playground (that's been showing up in dreams a lot lately too). But this had a large tract of sodden sand. I walked over it pretty easily in my flipflops, but there were 50 girls wearing high heels with us, and after they walked over, the sand was filled with these cute little holes that the heels made.

I made an awesome 3d model today. I guess it's not really that awesome, but it's a lot more awesome than my wedge.

I also borked my tablet in a new way. Well, not today, but I discovered it today. Apparently when I had rocked my chair onto the cord, it'd actually rocked onto the plug, so when I tried to plug it in,hmmmmmmmmmmmm didn't fit! UGH. Mike and Stu managed to pound it back into shape enough that it can be jammed into a port and used. Ugh. I sent an e-mail to wacom to see if they would be generous to fix it (and the cord) for me.

Anyways, my teacup pot.


I initially wanted to do a teapot, then forgot about the lid and started drawing a handle, then decided to make it a spout instead, then still forgot about the lid. so it's kinda weird. The other thing is just a random object xD

I wrote a song in linear this morning.

Shadows bloom,
I will rise again.
An inner quiet roiling,
The calm before the storm.
Shadows in their beds are blooming.
Heralding, they bloom for me.

The night, it creeps upon us,
Stealing breath by breath.
I will take my bounty.
I will give them death.

It's just so awesomely creepy. I like it.

I did some cad after lunch and just barely got enough done to turn in before going to Cal, but luckily all the things i left off were things we went over in class, so I know how to do them now:) Feel prettygood about this. I'm so happy I have autocad on my computer now. It's just so nice.

It rained today. Like hard. All afternoon. I got a pretty picture of the clouds coming back from cad though. *bluetooths it*


Oh yeah, I ordered 50 4x6s from shutterfly.com (completely free with a new registration!) and they came in today, so I'm pretty excited. They're so gorgeous. Well, some of them are cropped weird, and I don't know if I just picked the wrong picture (I mean I had twenty thousand pictures of the eiffel tower) or if the site is just dumb, but whatev. Free+most of them look good = win

anyways ^_^

"Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions."

My first cad-thing :O



Took quite a while xD

okay, so the first thing that signals that today is going to be an unusual day is when my parents and I are sitting in the smoking room watching the rain (in august at that), and I dare my dad to go out and run around in the rain, and then he goes and gets his bathing suit out of the bathroom. When he doesn't show up for a while, I go looking for him and see he's out in the garden just getting rained on and picking vegetables.

I go get my bathing suit and make the plunge so to speak. In the garden, I look at the cucumber vines that haven't made anything, and notice a small baby cucumber. Dad comes over and things kinda escalate, and we end up with this monstrocity
( long cucumber is long )

7.6lbs that thing weighs. sheesh.

I've eaten part of one of the others. They're kinda over-mature so not good eating :( they're so WEIRD looking though!

anyways, dad gets a ton of tomatoes and plans to make tomato sauce/paste, so that takes up a good deal of the day. Then he starts a small pan of figs to jamming. It smells terrible, looks worse, and tastes pretty good, if you like figs (which I do).
We plan to make gumbo with the okra.

Anyways, things happen slowly, I read a creepy book I don't think I'd ever finished before (it's a children's scary book. Needless to say I wasn't too petrified), and then I get the idea to go looking for my black nail polish. See, in 8th grade, I dressed up as a gothic business person for halloween, so my friend hannah and my sister both lent me makeup. Hannah was probably glad of the opportunity to get rid of the nail polish since she's rather conservative 8))) and nikky didn't really have a use for her dark purple lipstick, I don't believe. One has to grow up when raising three small boys!

anyways, I got my nails painted, and I thought I'd better run over them with some glitter before I got too unbearable emo. Did I mention this is the first time I'd ever done black nail polish? So counter-counter-culture, me.

anyways, the glitter looks horrible where it clumped up and rather nicer where there isn't so much of it, but then, get this, then I decide 'oh hey Ill just complete the goth look and put on that makeup' so I go into the bathroom, powder my face all white (lots of powder), mascara my lashes, put on more lipstick, muck about with eyeshadow, then decide to go for the real emocore and pick up the liquid eyeliner.

Let me just say, getting a little bit of that in my eye was the third most painful experience my eyes have ever had.

First was getting shampoo in both of them.

Second was getting more eyeliner in my other eye a minute later.

Needless to say, I was very glad for my functioning tear ducts and have more or less sworn off the eyeliner for ever.

anyways, to top it all off, I dolled. LOL.

( Who comments the most on this journal? )
At least I know that if stu ever comes down with some strange finger infection keeping him from being able to type ever again, Denffe will be able to keep me infused with lj comments.

Anyways, day 2 of paris typed up:
Woke up at 9:15 to a phone call-- Cherise coming for her batteries. Groggy, dressed, slept unsoundly. Got a monoprix breakfast (sugar wafers). Took metro to Notre Dame- couldn't remember which was the important stained glass, so I took pictures of all of them. I found a very cute friendly sunny circle on the floor and took a picture of my shadow in it. They were actually having a ceremony in there at the time. I dunno what kind. There was a band playing outside when I emerged. I took a picture of the marimba there and wished I was playing. There was a mom that just picked her little girl up at the crotch to put her legs around the posts of this fence so she could sit on it xD it was so weird

Finally got new batteries and got temporarily "lost" while a little chinese man told a couple about not being able to restore pictures deleted from a digicam. Apparently no one had heard me when I said I was going across the street while they purchased street paintings. Got found again and we headed for some shopping after failing at deciding to visit Saint Chapelle (or something like that).

Started Jennifer's quest for l'argent while everyone else shoe shopped. We had just got to a La Poste when the woman inside locked the doors for the week-end. were unsuccessful in finding a place for her to change her bills.

we all went into H&M then, and I totally did not enjoy it because I was hardcore bleeding at the moment. I thought about getting stu a €5 polo shirt but I did not grab the chance. I sat on the fence outside H&M for a while until I just decided that no one would come out soon and went into McDonald's to wait in line for the bathroom. Luckily I had brought my napkins from starbucks with me; the stall didn't have any TP.

Returned to the fence, found people and we decided to manger à McDo's It was pretty expensive, but the mcnuggets I got were the best mcnuggets ever and I don't even like them at home. The fries were horrible though. They had these little balloons on sticks and I took one and then left it on the metro in front of these two twin asian girls. I hope they took it.

After that, we walked towards the river to ride the batteau mouche and we went past the bridge Lady Di died in. It was kinda sobering. The boat ride completed erased somberness from memory though, except a niggling regret at the huge sunburn I was getting (the boat ride sunburn was actually the least of my worries. I put my sleeves down for that and the tanline there is almost imperceptible compared to the overall day's)


We went to the Musée D'Orsay and it was closed! I was really looking forward to it after learning it had the 19th century stuff. I kinda dig Impressionism and the beginning of modern art like that. On the way back to the subway I got another pistachio ice cream cone (which wasn't very good. I think I'll give up on french pistachio for the time being), and successfully navigated the RER C line. I was pretty proud of that inspite of being doubted so hard. I wish people would have more confidence in my navigational skills.

Planned to go to D'Orsay the next day, got back to hotel, accompanied Jennier on pt 2 of money quest, still failure. Walked almost all the way back to Notre Dame in the pursuit, however. Passed a little menagerie with ostriches 8) No money changers though, so I made a silly off-color joke about it being saturday and all the french who weren't catholic were jewish and at synagogue. I felt kinda uncomfortable on the walk because I had shucked the pajama bottoms I had worn under my blue dress all day. It's not an immodest dress by any standards, but it still felt weird xD

Got back, had a short bathe, dressed, and withdrew some €€€. Left on a super crowded metro. My companions were pushing me onto the train and the french were pushing me off of it (rather angrily). walked to the George Pompidou building, thought "holy crap you can see every important thing in the city at once from here nearly". We ended up getting a table inside where you couldn't see, but I sat on the corner that could just catch a glimpse of the eiffel tower.

I definitely had a freak out here. "I'm not dressed good enough," "I don't have enough money to justify this". etc I also wasn't sitting next to anyone I knew very well, and that didn't help. The menu was impossible to understand with their fancy names that don't describe the food at all (the tiger who cries for example). also they gave us no water. I ended up ordering a bottle of vittel inadvertantly because I was dying for something to drink. I hate how stingy expensive places like that are. They wouldn't even let me take the rose place setting home :( they were getting wilted anyways so I don't know why they cared >:{

But it ended up that my place setting mates were more genial than I had hoped; johnathan complimented me on my pictures and Melissa told a lot of funny stories, and the three of them (the ones who didn't generally hang out with the other ten of us) were wide eyed when I responsed to their question that I was 19.

There was a movie of appalachia playing on two lcd tvs above our heads that featured long winding paths, a fish on the chopping block, and a naked man wearing a pig's head and brandishing a gun. I snapped a picture to remember pigman forever. I should reread the book The Pigman, at that.

I ended up paying for Jennifer's dinner since she had not found money, otherwise I would've gotten off light with only spending €38 out of €892 total for all thirteen of us. I felt physically ill when I thought about how much money that was, or maybe that was my conscience berating me for supporting the death of cute little crispy ducks.

On the metro home, I got into a car with a bunch of drunk people who were smoking and doing shots of something whiskeylike in a dark brown bottle. Their friends were singing a drinking song and the mood was so infectious that I had to join in a little bit. Not too much incase they were like 'wtf you're not french' and decided to rape me or something. It was exhilarating, making the second time I was scared and excited at the same time.

It was the Fête de la Musique that night so I went to bed to the heavy bass beats from down the road, but I snapped a picture of the solstice moon (didn't even realize it was the solstice!) and slept unsoundly again (because of sunburn but also because I was lying on my wallet xD)


the weather was so gorgeous that day though.