Journal of an Emerald Magistrate

watchmen was good, not great, but good

the trailers were pretty damn badass, I didn't know there was a new terminator movie even in the works, was not a new wolverine trailer but it was the first time i saw it somewhere other than youtube, I might almost be excited about this star trek movie now...maybe

it was really amazingly nice today

I forgot to detail Dinah as GM cat in my earlier post, Karon had been sitting in her chair GMing when Dinah hopped up into her lap and proceeded to help by occasionally nuzzling the adventure to a different page. Working theory is she noticed when Karon overlooked something in the module and was trying to direct her to the parts she wasn't doing according to spec

Druids are sickly broken. I mean seriously, at level 9 I'm going to have a pretty kickass spell selection, wildshape, and a pet that does 2d6+9 damage on a bite with a 21 AC and evasion, that is really darn overpowered

Chester gas continues to kick the butt of local gas prices. Of course if I actually drove anywhere in St. Louis county I could probably get cheaper.

I've only had two responses to my email about doing stuff on my birthday, neither of which were actually positive sounding

Dinah is being super cute

I'm a sleepy monkey

Chinese

blarg

ded

我觉得中文很难。我觉得复习生词容易、语法太难、也写汉字太很难。

Typing in chinese is so much easier. I just have to know the pinyin and remember what the character what I want to say looks sorta like.

the real question of course is if lj takes hanzi unicode...

So over the weekend Karon and I decided to retile the kitchen, Karon had been looking at color schemes for a while and had narrowed things down to a few tile styles so when we were killing time in Carbondale Friday we decided to hit Lowes and found some pretty and cheap ones we liked for the kitchen so we bought a fuckton of them and brought them home with us.

Speaking of coming home that night, despite what Karon says about it being because it is so hard to prove I rolled through a stop sign without video I think I disarmed the police officer when I corrected him on my gender at the start of the exchange. Suffice to say warning acquired. Don't be distracted by watching drunks on the side of the road rather than making sure there are no cops about when you come to a stop in Chester or else you might get pulled over for wanting to be past the drunken yahoos.

So most of yesterday and a chunk of today has been spent in moving furniture and applying our new tiles, I'm currently down to the hard part, being the parts I have to cut and the parts I have to move a fridge for. Was gonna take a nap in an attempt to recharge before hammering out the last of the floor but the kitties have been conspiring against me again, they woke me up at quarter to 8 and now they won't let me nap. Naughty adorable fuzzies.

So far the only major annoyance is that my knees are kinda bugging me from sitting on the floor working so much. Oh well almost done and then I get to start moving the furniture back to where it should be. And doing my homework that I have been ignoring all weekend. It's only reading assignments so I don't feel too bad about blowing it off. I mean I have 45 minutes on the train in the morning and then 40 minutes before chinese class and 40 minutes before my St.Louis and the West class. Plenty of time to at least skim my readings. Yeah ok this might all not get done tonight...

So weird thing in my mail the other day. I mean there was a lot of normal stuff, my birthday present for myself, my birthday/christmas present for Spivey, my book for my chinese history class, My Chinese Coach for DS, but then there was a letter from Philmont. Someone at OVC(Okaw Valley Council for the non scouters in my viewing audience) apparently tossed my name into a hat for people to send to some conference out at Philmont this summer. Philmont is one of the super awesome national camps that you get to go to if you're lucky, and by the read of the pamphlet(which is a little detail sparse in some regards) it sounds like while you do the conference thing you do get to do a lot of the stuff that you would have done if you came as a troop as well. It isn't even like a you've been selected as a candidate thing either by the read of it as their is an included approval code from OVC that is required for processing my application. It's just weird, this is the sorta thing I would have expected say 6 years ago when I was still working for OVC as camp staff, or even a few years later when people who knew me would have still been active, not a half decade later. Not to say I'm not interested either, it sounds kinda interesting, even though it is some kind of conference where I get trained and then am supposed to go back and share my experience with the council. The main thing is that I keep thinking lately about how I have no money really, and then here is this awesome thing that I could go do...but costs 500 for me to go on, and while I could apparently bring Karon I think if I'm reading it right it is another 350 then and to top it off I think this is just my fees for once I get there not travel expenses. There isn't like a bus from OVC, I have to drive my happy ass out to New Mexico to do this...frustration, I has it.

please note that the gifts presented in this song are in no way indicative of what I or my household(Karon and me combined) received, they just were geeky or amusingly appropriate to real life. Number one is actually resultant from Dinah snuggling down under the tree on the blanket sparking a comment about how she was the best present of all.

Also if I wasn't lazy I would only post this one day at a time until Epiphany, but I am so you get the whole song at once.

On the first day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
A Dinah under the tree.

On the second day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the third day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the fifth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the sixth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the seventh day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the eight day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
eight video games,
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the ninth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
nine Star Wars plushies,
eight video games,
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the tenth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
ten history texts,
nine Star Wars plushies,
eight video games,
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the eleventh day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
eleven gigs of memory,
ten history texts,
nine Star Wars plushies,
eight video games,
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
twelve graphic novels,
eleven gigs of memory,
ten history texts,
nine Star Wars plushies,
eight video games,
seven painted mini's,
six dice a rolling,
five animes,
four gaming books,
three food dishes,
two feather balls,
and a Dinah under the tree.

I'm smelling 2 A's and 2 B's. Got back my history term paper which was a full 50% of the semester grade and I got an A on it, also had an A on the midterm so chances are I got an A for the class. Chinese is confirmed as an A. My writing class I don't know about as Dr. Troy was really vague about her grading which we never got to see any of. No returned papers or assignments had a grade so we're left with a void of subjectivity that is hard to read. My ed psy class I did ok on but I think I flubbed the final largely from burnout after my history term paper. Good thing it was a smallish(a bit under 10%) part of the grade so I'm not worried about it killing my score too much.

Time for some much deserved WoW. I mean I'm still not 80 a month after the expansion came out, what the hell is up with that?

I'm at just under 4 pages at 1300 words. I have a strange question though crossing my mind. So the prompt for the paper says 3000 words or 12 pages in a standard double spaced format. I've checked some of my other shit and I'm usually running about 350-400 words a page that means even going down to say 300 words a page thats only 10 pages. I'm not sure where this 12 pages is coming from he wants. Maybe my margins are too narrow. If at 3000 words I'm at 8-9pages as I project I might try going to a 1.25 margin to see if that pushes me to 12 cause otherwise I think he doesn't know how long papers are in actuality.

With that in mind I'm gonna take a stretch and walk around for a few minutes to get the blood flowing and wake up some then settle back down to work in 20 or so. I was really kicking myself at first that I hadn't broke 5 pages at midnight until I did that wordcount.

I thought last night suuuure, I got through 400 pages I can sleep from 1-5 and then have plenty of time in the morning to read before school at my journal sources I hadn't gotten to. I got up at 8. Twitch twitch.

At school got my pdfs ready to be read, just needed to update people about my how I am made of self sabotaging Epic FAIL.

I should not start with the smaller pdfs and work my way up, mix them together so that I don;t have only big files later.

So I'm done with my ed psy bullshit for the week, I think. Finished the group paper a little bit ago and then retouched my morality development paper some. Managed to tack an extra half page on without either A repeating myself or B sounding too much like an asshat. Even though the topic is moral development. Uhm, go me?

So that leaves first and foremost my final interview in Chinese tomorrow. Oh I want to kill myself already just thinking about it so to be quick and to the point, I seriously think I remember less right now than I did at the interview in October, not only that we only get 4 minutes, 4 to cover everything from the entire fucking semester. Ya know, we have days where we have an hour and a half for class. Why don't we use those instead of the ones where we only have 50 minutes to do shit like this? Fucking hell.

So after that I have 48 hours to finish my history paper. All ten pages. I really don't know how I will do that. I might actually have to be awake that entire span to do so. If that is the case I will enjoy my sleep tonight and remember it longingly over the next two days as I pile drive through a stack of articles on the government of Philip Augustus and craft a paper detailing how he reformed the French monarchy to actually be a working whole instead of the bit of claptrap it was previously. Reminds me I should get more articles tomorrow.

Twitch twitch twitch. Need more time need more time zomg how the fucking hell am I gonna get that done, stupid procrastinating fucking dipshit sunnuvabitch. rant, splode, die.

Ok, I think I got that out of my system now. Gonna grab a shower then go to sleep the sleep of the just and righteous who don't get to sleep till after the work is done.

avoidance-drrr it's the week of thanksgiving of course I have way too much to be doing and not enough give a shit to go around

progress-got all my sources read and organized in my head for my ed psy papers

video games-first of all I dinged 74 in WoW earlier during my avoidance, this shows the end of my rest xp and as I refuse to deal with the 1.5 million xp for a level wrath has brought sans rest xp I have lost my main source of avoidance.

in a random ad I saw earlier though I spotted somethinng weird

http://www.gotgameentertainment.com/rhiannon/

a game, named rhiannon with probably welsh/celtic ghost story plots

I has a friend named Rhiannon

I have no idea if Rhiannon actually likes the point and clicky horror adventure games, but if she does she almost has to play her own game doesn't she? Otherwise Rich should play it and tell us about it.

in other news:

Dinah seems to be settling back in well to my place. Karon and I moved her prior to the end of the semester so that A: we both had kitties to maintain our sanity, B: we wouldn't have to move both kitties when we move her, C: Ash would have a few weeks without Dinah to torment him when he is recovering from his impending surgical adventure at the vet.

Shes been a bit of a beggy whiny cat, but she always is. It's worse I think cause she has nothing to really beg for since I eat at the parent's house most days which eliminates the hope I might drop food for her to gobble up before I can get it cleaned up. On the upside she is eating and drinking on her own which means I don't have to worry about a poor starving kitty. She isn't eating as much as I'd like, but she is still just getting settled in.

Tomorrow's agenda: write a paper, draft a second paper, read for a third paper, and possibly due some more article hunting for a fourth paper. And at somepoint in all of that I need to study my Chinese too.

yeah it's time I went to bed.