Saturday, October 30, 2010

Itteh Bitteh Kitteh Does Not Believe in Sleep

We have a lot of cats. When I get married and move out, I am taking my kitty, Bunny, with me. Bunny has a bestest friend named Lucy. Lucy is my sister's cat, so she will not be coming with me. Thus, Bunny would be terribly bored and lonely. Living with a bored lonely Bunny is HELL. HELL I TELL YOU. So as a "wedding gift" my Gramma adopted a kitten for us and Bunny.

He has no name yet. For now we've been calling him Baby, or Itteh Bitteh Kitteh.
He ran and played for hours without resting. Most of the other cats hate him. They think he is terribly creepy. Bunny LOVES him. Bunny thinks he's awesome. This is probably because Baby looks like a Mini-Bunny.
For the whole day, Baby would run away if anyone tried to pick him up. If someone picked him, he lost The Game. A few times we succeeded in grabbing him. He didn't mind once he was caught, and we could hold him a few seconds before he'd start to climb over our shoulder and try to sneak out the back way.

As is the custom on Friday night, my family went over to my grandparents for a few hours. Itteh Bitteh Kitteh took a nap while we were gone, so when we came back, he was all rested and ready to start zooming around the house, leaping higher than a kitty of his size should, and smashing into things.

By night, I wondered if he would decide to sleep in the closet as he had previously, tear around the house and be a general holy terror as he did during the day, or he'd settle in someone's bed.
Of course, he decided on my bed.
I felt something leap up onto my pillow. For a moment, it didn't move.
Then I heard it.
*purr...purr...*
It began to come closer.
*PURR....PURR...PURR*
It grew louder, and faster.
*PURRPURRPURRPURRPURR*
And then it was on my face.
No kitteh, you may not sleep on my face.
Holy terror by day....Purrmonster that LOVES YOUR FACE by night.
But so, so, adorable. He's got a little white face, and absolutely ENORMOUS green eyes. No one can resist the Enormous Green Eyes.


After a while of purring and rubbing, I finally got him asleep. On my arm. Then I had to go to the bathroom.
Dammit.
He had fallen into the Deep Sleep of Much Twitching within a couple of minutes, so I hoped he just wouldn't wake up.
No such luck.
When I came back from the bathroom, he was purring his loudest, and trying to love all over my sister's face.

And so the cycle began again. He'd toddle back and forth from one face to the other.
*PURRPURRPURRPURRPURRPURR*
FINALLY, around 3:30, he settled wayyy up on top of my pillow. Finally, sleep was had by all.

I was awakened around 7:45 by my dad, who feeds the cats breakfast every morning. Apparently he couldn't find Baby. I was about to check the top of pillow, when I realized there was an itteh bitteh kitteh paw on my ear.
Baby had migrated, and was now sleeping in my hair.
I picked him up and put him down next to my bed, where Dad had placed the food dish. Baby snuck up on the dish, and peered in, to make sure the food was dead. It appeared to be, and I fell back asleep while he was eating.

When I woke up, he was back on the top of pillow.
Looking as though he had never moved.

*EDIT* A discussion of names was had, and eventually it was narrowed down to Blitzen and Skippy. Itteh Bitteh Kitteh was christened Blitzen. So now the pair is Bunny and Blitzen. I like to call them the Pretty White Boys.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Mah Hooooood.

A little while ago, I said I would blog about my neighbors.
Because they're funny.
So guess what?
I'm blogging about my neighbors! (And sort of hoping none of them will find this and run me out of the neighborhood with pitchforks, torches, and creepy statues of children.)

First off, here is this very intricate and detailed map I have drawn up for you (People in my family have a knack for Cartography. I am not one of them...)
First off, the yellow thing in my yard is my dog. She's poofy.

So next door to us is a retired couple.
They are very nice.
They love luaus and block parties.
They also magically know when we get a new cat, or I get engaged. I'm not entirely sure how they know these things, BUT THEY KNOW.

People in the blue house have a broken window and a bread truck in their driveway. The kid who lives there used to have a spherical friend who'd visit him a lot. Yes. The kid was SPHERICAL. I was always expecting him to just tip over and roll down the driveway one day. The Spherical Kid liked to squawk like a parrot, make very loud "prank phone calls" (Which were pathetic. And he'd do them in the street.) and show passing cars his boxers.
I have not seen Spherical Kid in months. He probably got arrested or something for the boxers thing.

Behind that row of houses on the left is the nightclub. They have karaoke.
We hear sirens a lot at night. I think the loud rock music is probably coming from there.
My little sister's best friend's house is back-to-back with the nightclub. Sometimes she loses a frisbee or something over her fence, and has to go out into the alley to get it.
Along with her frisbee, she found a whole bunch of bagels strewn all over the ground. Each bagel had one bite taken out of it. I believe someone was probably searching for "The Deadly Bagels".
To learn more about Deadly Bagels, please see this video by LoadingReadyRun, a crazy bunch of Canadians.
http://loadingreadyrun.com/videos/view/327/Bagel-Time


The people in the pink house love to exercise. My brother used to take martial arts from one of these fitness-obsessed people. My sister and I would watch from our window, and make up commentary for them. Martial Arts Dude is a morning person. He would bang on our door at 8am. FOR TEN MINUTES. Seriously. I timed him once. I should have been sleeping, but he kept banging, and I wasn't about to encourage this early morning knocking by answering the door. So I timed him, and my sister and I came up with all sorts of booby traps and security devices and evil plots to get rid of him. Best ones were the "Ejection 'Welcome' Mat" the "Giant Boxing Glove That Pops Out When He Come a'Knockin' and Knocks HIM into next Tuesday" and the "Guy We Hire to Sit in Our Tree and Throw Rocks". Martial Arts Dude's dad like fitness too. He runs down the street fairly regularly. Backwards. Then he runs back up the street forwards. Then down backwards. The he takes a break to clean his driveway. He hates dirt in his driveway, and sweeps it thoroughly. Sometimes he gets a rag, and gets down there and really scrubs.  Then it is clean, and perfect, and fit to park his cars on.

Lastly, we have the weirdest neighbor of all.
We call him Creepy Neighbor. He has bushes growing over his front door, and a basketball hoop hanging over his driveway at about a forty five degree angle (I am waiting for the day it finally collapses. I'm sure the neighbors are making bets). Sometimes, he hangs a black sheet over the inside of his door, so it looks all dark and like there's nobody home (This is an unfortunate fail. You can see the sheet sticking out at the top of the door). He used to take his fence apart, and pt it back together again. WITH STRING.
Creepy Neighbor is EVERYWHERE. Walk the dog? There he is, in his yard, or out walking with his giant 80's headphones. Go shopping? There he is. Wal*Mart, Target, Kohl's...Everywhere. Happen to look out the window? There's creepy neighbor, driving by in his car.
Watching.
Always watching.
One time, I was walking through Target with Evan, when I noticed this weird loud breathing behind me. The breathing came around to the side and passed us. IT WAS CREEPY NEIGHBOR. HE HAD BEEN WALKING BEHIND ME. IN HIS BAD 80'S SHORTS.
He goes to Kohl's. I see him there. Always wearing bad 80's clothing. Whyyyy, Crepy Neighbor, whyyy? Why don't you buy anything?
And why do you leave your wallet in your car, and have to walk all the way out of the store to get it?
AT least he got a new fence.
And he doesn't keep that barbecue in front of his front door, and thus partially hidden in the bushes anymore.

And then there's us.
We're the  people who turn off our lights so we can spy on our neighbors without being seen.
I wonder how many of our neighbors think WE'RE creepy?

Friday, October 22, 2010

Radical Equations Are Totally Radical, Dude (OR NOT)

Dear Precalculus,
Sometimes, you are okay. Sometimes I understand you.

But then you ask me to cube things. If you TOLD ME how to cube things, then I would not have to Google it, and things would be fine. But you don't. And then, you change the little bitty 3 on the cube symbol thing to a 5. I barely know what to do with a 3, and now you give me a 5? I don't even know what to call that. How can a I Google that IF YOU DO NOT TELL ME WHAT IT IS?

You have issues. Serious issues.
You are either someone who obsessively keeps secrets as it inflates your ego and gives you the feeling of knowing things nobody else knows (I'm sure this has name, I just don't know what it is), or you are a pathological liar. Please seek psychiatric help.
 Sincerely, Some Who Hates You Now More Than Ever Before

 P.S. I am now in your answer key, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with you. (Yes I am in your base. All your answers are belong to me.)
  Dear PreCalculus,
Seriously? All I had to do was bring the other side of the equation to the power indicated by the little number on the squarey symbol thing? 

SERIOUSLY??

THAT'S FREAKING EASY!

What ever happened to that weird equation thing with the random numbers in it that you showed me in the example? Remember Example 1?? I don't see that being used anywhere in your answer key.
All you did was multiply things. You brought them up to a certain power. 
That's it. 
I learned how to do that MANY MANY YEARS AGO. (Note: I am aware I haven't been alive for very long, and you may scoff at my usage of "many" to mean "maybe five years ago". But may I remind you that five years is really a significant portion of my life so far. Five years ago, I WAS THIRTEEN *shudders*. So to me, five is "MANY MANY YEARS AGO.)
You could have just told me this PreCalculus, yooouuuuu bastard, you.

I still think you need psychiatric help.
Or be fined, or have to do community service, or SOMETHING.
You won't get away with this nonsense forever Precalculus.

I'LL SUE.


Sincerely, I Know People Who Own a Paper Shredder. And I Love to Shred Paper. LOVE IT.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Writer's Block

You know how I haven't blogged in two weeks? Writer's block. Writer's block is a strange thing. Some days, you can write about anything. ANYTHING. You could write about your brother's old holey hobo socks. You could write about your creepy neighbor (Ohhhh, I should write about him). You could write about the silverware in it's silverware drawer.

But if there's writer's block, you can't write about anything, even if hilarious things happen to you. Like you had a hilarious day at the zoo with your fiance. Or if, in your ballet class, all the ballerinas made a train and ran around the room in a "perky" fashion. Or if you and your fiance started talking about scientific theories and various sorts of dinosaurs for half an hour, instead of kissing like you're supposed to on Monday nights.

So then you just sit and stare at your keyboard, hoping it will give you words. But then you just start playing Word Find on your keyboard, and start laughing because, while you can find very few real words, "Derf" is really funny looking, and the word is organized in a neat little cube on your keyboard. Then you think that maybe derf is a possibly offensive word and you just haven't heard it yet, so you look it up on UrbanDictionary. They can find a sexual reference in ANYTHING, so if there is one, you will know. Turns out, there were some, but surprisingly few for UrbanDictionary. It has a ridiculously large amount of totally unrelated meanings. It can mean a stupid person, or an awesome person. A person of unusual agility and skill. A word to use in place of the F-word. Fred spelled backwards. A person of extremely high and incomprehensible intelligence.

Then I looked it up in a real dictionary: Derf\, a. [Icel. djafr.] Strong; powerful; fierce. 
So there you go.You learned something new. Maybe. You may have known it already. In which case, sorry you had to hear about it again.

VOILA. Writer's block gone. :D If I had known it would be this easy, I'd have come on and typed whatever popped into my head a week ago. And yes, I realize there is very little connective thread in this post. But I don't care. My brain certainly doesn't have any, so why should anything I type need one? I get along okay without them. Wait...the female brain is supposed to be all connected and running together, like spaghetti. I know I don't have the male waffle brain, full of little individual syrup-traps of thought. Mah brains iz like a box of chocolates. Ya never know whatcha gonna get...Yes, sometimes there is a little piece of paper telling you what all the chocolates are so you don't get a nasty surprise. But I tend to lose things. Especially little bits of paper. And sometimes important discs and the occasional school book.


Now I have a new topic for a blog post. I can blog about my neighbors. Some of them are hilarious, and some of them are downright creepy. 

Peace outtttt.

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

The Department of Public Safety

Getting a learner's permit in Texas is great fun.

Okay, so if you're under 18, you need a driver's ed course, and then you get to take the permit test down at the DPS.
If you're over 18, no driver's ed course was required, you just had to take the test.
But by the time I turned 18, nope, that wasn't cool anymore.
You don't need to take the test anymore. You get to take a six hour driver's ed course, either online or in a classroom.
Being the internet addict that I am, I opted for the internet course. Before I joined Blogspot, I had a blog on Xanga. Just to give you an idea of this 6-Hour State-Mandated Online Driver's Ed course, here are a few excerpts from my two blog posts about driver's ed:
"This course does not understand speed readers. Mostly I just listen to the guy talk, but often there's extra time on the timer for the poor simple-minded folk. And because they're trying desperately to streeeeeetch the smaller-than-you-might-think amount of information into six hours.  I use this time to get snacks, take Facebook breaks, or as time went on, just stare blankly at the computer screen.
They like to show me pictures. Many of these are computer generated. Because they couldn't just take a photograph of someone passing a semi-truck, oh no. They have to MAKE one. It resulted in a picture of a road, with a  lil' bitty red car trying to pass a ginormous dangerous chemicals truck, on what appeared to be Tatooine. My favorite computer-generated picture was the one of a wine glass full of wine, a shot glass full of some...thing, a beer bottle, and marijuana plant. All these items were tastefully arranged on a wooden table. Dd I mention the animation quality was the same as it is on those creepy Wiisport games? Yeah. O.o"
"Now, there are nine chapters to this course. At the end of each one, I get to take a quiz. Before I can take the quiz, a robot has to call me and ask for voice verification to make sure I'm still a real person and didn't replace myself with a robot made out of an old vacuum cleaner while they weren't looking. So I have them call, I repeat a series of random numbers, and start my quiz. Ten multiple-choice questions, and I get three chances to take the quiz, in case I'm a complete idiot and get less than 70% correct. I get 9 or ten correct, they congratulate me for being a good noodle, and send me on my way to the next section. And the creepy mind-numbing cycle continues."
"Yessss, I have successfully conquered Driver's Ed, and got 93% on my final exam (2 wrong out of 30. I don't care)."

Yeah, I defeated it. The course and the quizzes were not hard. I just have problems with being forced to sit still for THAT LONG. It was sort of okay because I had barely gotte any sleep the night before, and had slammed my head into a brick wall that morning, so I didn't feel like jumping around too much (See my URL? Absent Minded Insomniac? I am also accident-prone.But  Accident Prone Absent Minded Insomniac is ridiculously long and doesn't have that lovely ring to it).

Anyway, today I had to go down to the DPS to show them my certificate of smartness (If I was charge, it would totally say, "Certifacte of Driving Smartness. This person had to sit and take an online/classroom course of driving-related information. This course was six hours, but since we don't actually have enough material to fill six hours, we have to draw it out, talk slowly, and repeat ourselves a lot. This person really deserves more than a certificate of smartness, but since this is government, we ain't givin' them a DAMN THANG. In fact, they had better love this certificate while they got it, because DPS is going to take it away, and not give it back.") and they had to do stuff.

First was the vision test.
I am aware that I can see. I can read road signs. Sometimes I have to squint my left eye a little, so I end up reading them like this: O.o. BUT I CAN READ THEM.
Texas allergies really suck. They make my slightly nearsighted (Farsighted? Does anyone actually remember which is which?) left eye worse. The actually vision testing box was stupid too. People who have ridiculously good vision have trouble with it. I had to move my head around until I could actually see all the numbers, and when I COULD see the left line, my left eye couldn't read it well until I got at the Magic Angle at Which Left Eye Can See Just Fine (In the process I clunked my head on the box, but I don't think anybody noticed).
So I eventually passed that.

They took my thumbprints.
I think my thumbprints must be ridiculously awesome because their computer crashed after I did that. So they had to restart, and retake my thumbprints (The computer, having gotten over the initial shock of freaking awesome thumbprints, did not crash this time).
Then they took my picture.
The first time, they took too long, so by the time the camera went off my eyes had tired of waiting, and blinked.
So we got to do it again. The final product has me looking like a crazy hyper squirrel-person.
 KILL IT. KILL IT WITH FIRE.
Ugh. Bad hair day. I hate them. The hair, not the people at the DPS.
I don't know which is worse... My learner's permit picture, or my ID picture...Here, what do you think?
Crazy squirrel person or evil elf thing?
I honestly don't know.

This has been my DPS experience. It could have been worse. Most of the people who work at the DPS (Or the DMV, for those states who refer to it as such) are slow moving government zombies. They slowly and quietly give you only information they think you need to know. But you only learn that information if you ask the right questions. But you don't know what questions to ask because you've never actually done this before, and last time you were at the DPS you realized it reminds you of a doctor's office, and doctor's offices make you dizzy, thus DPS did too. Yeah.
The lady who was helping me out was actually generally helpful and had a sense of humor. We actually managed to have fun. So that was nice.

But overall, the DPS always is, and always will be....strange.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

That Dream I Had Last Night

So, in my dream last night, me and Evan, my fiance, were staying at a fancy hotel. I have yet to figure out WHY.
My dreams like to keep themselves at least rated PG, thus we had rooms way down the hall from each other.
Evan seemed to be a very well-paid elevator repairdude. All the elevators in the hotel seemed to broken, which was kinda weird because we had just been going up and down in them.
So he fixed them. The people rejoiced. And then all of them crammed into the elevators.
Maybe THAT'S why they were broken.
Also, remember that magic measuring watch from The Santa Claus 2? EVAN HAD IT.
I think he killed Santa or something and stole the Christmas magic.
But kids kept mysteriously ending up with free ice cream, so I guess nobody minded.
(Note: There was no evidence that Evan was actually giving anyone magic free ice cream. The ice cream thing was just weird, and he had the watch, so that's what Dream Me was suspecting.)

Back at home, my dad had decided that having a pet bear would be awesome.
 So he built a giant bear-fort in the backyard so that it couldn't get out and maul the neighbors or whatever.  The bear had furniture in his bear fort. It was mostly plaid. It matched the bear's golf hat that the bear wore at all times.

My house is just a plain ol' one-story house. But not in my dream. It appeared that after my dad finishes his bear fort, he added another floor to the house as well.
Me and a couple of my dancer friends were working on choreography, when one of them, Leah, decided that if she didn't have pizza, she would probably die.
We ordered her a pizza.
Okay, we ordered several pizzas.

The pizza dude came to the front door (Which looked nothing like our actual front door as my dad, who appeared to be on some crazy remodeling spree, had replaced it) and handed us one of our pizzas. Leah grabbed it and ran off to devour it messily.
The pizza dude looked thoughtful.
Haley (The other dancer friend who, every time I looked at her, was wearing something different. Fortunately, none of it was ever plaid) asked, "Where the rest of our damn pizzas were" and the pizza guy responded that delivering pizzas at the front door every single time was dreadfully boring and if he had to do it one more time he would probably have to jump off a bridge, and could he please deliver the rest of the pizzas at various windows, and maybe one in the alley behind the nightclub so he could pretend he was partaking in a secret drug deal?
Not wanting a pizza dude's life on our hands, we agreed.
He delivered one at the back door. He delivered one at my brother's bedroom window.
He delivered one at the upstairs bathroom window.
He delivered one behind the nightclub (It was a small cheese pizza. He wore a trench coat. I'm hoping he was wearing something under that trench coat. He had been wearing pants previously. I'm hoping he had shorts or something. We could see his plaid socks.)

So that was it.
This is what my mind does while I sleep.