FUCK YEAH KITES

I went on a kite-flying picnic thhe other day!  It was awesome.  I skipped work and went downtown on the bus with a bottle of pepsi and a box of cookies and two dollar-store kites, and met Tom near some park-like thing.  He brought his fantastic sandwiches and some mangoes and a hot chocolate from Coffee Matters, perfect picnic things.  His sandwiches are really amazing lunchfoods.  He gets a fresh baguette or ciabatta bread or something, and some nice cheese to slice onto it, and some nice thick slices of pepperseed salami and sandwiches it up.  It's really simple, but amazingly yum.  I should have taken a photo to post, but they are so good I couldn't stop eating to grab a camera.  Or rather my iPod, since I've lost my charger and made my camera into an expensive paperweight.  I gotta find that thing.  Or get a new one.  Where the hell do you go for a new camera battery charger?

Anyway.  Nummy picnic on a park bench!  I forget which park, but there were lots of pretty trees around and nice flowers everywhere and a bajillion ants and everybody who walked by had an adorable dog and I just wanted to feed each and every one, but I didn't want to share the sandwiches so I didn't.  We fed the ants some mango, though, because it's really hard to keep a grip on a mango when you're cutting it on your lap without a board or a table or anything.  Mangoes are yum.  I didn't know I liked them until Tom showed them to me.   I should eat mangoes more often.

After the picnic we had to find a new park, because Tom had not realized there were quite this many trees until we came here with kites.  So we started walking!  We wandered the mean streets of St John's until we could find a suitably kite-friendly patch of land.  We would have walked for hours if necessary, though I would have complained ever step of the way.  But we didn't need to walk for hours, we just had to walk for ten minutes or so until we got to The Rooms.  The Rooms, along with all its fantastic displays inside which I will talk about another day because we went there and I took pictures of the giant squid and it's fantastic but it's not the point of this post, also has a very large grassy front lawn with no powerlines overhead and hardly any trees at all.  Perfect for kite flying!

Like I said, we got our kites from the dollar store.  I picked a lovely large parrot-shaped kite and Tom got a traditionally diamond-shaped kite with fighter plane jet things all over it.  Before we went out we agreed that Tom's kite would probably fly better, because after all kites are traditionally diamonds, right?  It must be the best kite-shape if that's what they're all like.  And while we were putting our new kites together on the lawn of The Rooms, it certainly seemed that way.  Tom's kite was much easier to put together than mine, the clip thingy on mine was bent so I had to pretty much break my kite and put it back together to make it work.  But once our kites had been assembled, it turns out that my parrot (whom I decided to name Percival) was a natural flyer, and his wings caught the breeze easily and took him delightfully high up.  Alas, Tom's kite must have been afraid of heights.  It wouldn't go more than five or ten feet off the ground and only flew in dizzying loops before crashing to the ground again.  But it was still lots of fun!  I flew my kite for ages while little children running around turned green in envy, and Tom flew his kite in loop after loop after loop until his string clip broke and his line became hopelessly tangled.  Then, because I was very nice, I let him fly Percy!

He proved to be a much more skilled kite-pilot with a working kite.  While he showed off his skills, I went to his goofy kite and tried to untangle it to see if I could fly it, because to tell you the truth those loopy-loops looked kinda fun.  So I only had half an eye on Tom and Percy, and when I looked away, tragedy struck!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PERCY COME BACK

It was inevitable, really.  Percy crashed into the ground, as kites are wont to do now and then, and his poor cheap dollar-store string-holder broke, so he got free.  Being the excellent flyer that he is, the wind caught him easily and he flew away, loose into downtown St. John's.  I hope he did not land on anyone's car windshields.  That's why I don't have any close-up pictures of Percy, by the way.  I was gonna take some after getting tired of flying him so I could show the world how pretty he was, but you can't take pictures of a kite that isn't there.  Sorry, my fellow kite-fanatics.  You will just have to take my word for it, and also maybe the far-away pictures where Tom is flying him.

But the loss of Percy wasn't the end of the world!  Birds are meant to fly free, after all, and with no more working kites Tom and I went to get some Chinese noodles, because we were right next to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants (Mea Mei Wok Eatery!) and noodles are delicious, and then we went to....THE GEO CENTRE.  Fuck yeah!  I love that place.  I haven't been since I was a little kid!  And it's just as rad as I remember.  There was the Titanic room and the rock wall with the spray bottles and there was a room about oil and stuff and all kinds of geology!  Awesome geology!  The Canada guide from Lonely Planet described the Geo Centre as an interesting way to learn about stuffy boring geology, but fuck that book because geology is always amazing.  

And then the next day we went back to The Rooms!  But I'll save that for another blog post because hey, if I tell everything all at once what am I gonna blog about then, huh?

Skype, Why You Gotta Dick

Skype is nice and all, but sometimes it is sweaty dicks.  Listen, Skype, when a name pops up in the corner of the screen because someone's signed in or said something to me, I'm gonna click on it so I can talk to them.  So maybe you should start putting the text in the conversation-window instead of the search-bar, ok?  I've opened the chat I want to find.  I don't need to search for it.  Come on, it's like you're deliberately trying to be useless.  Be cool.

Sick

I had a heck of a cold this weeked.  I'm still getting over it, so nobody shake my hand or anything for the next week.  I was blowing my nose pretty much every half-hour for about three or four days straight, including all through the night while I was trying to sleep.  I think on Saturday night I got maybe an hour of sleep in total over eight or nine hours tossing and turning in bed trying to breathe.

Which led to some interesting thinks.  Does anybody else get kind of loopy when they're sick and exhausted and trying to sleep?  At one point I was lying in bed willing my nose to clear (didn't work), and out of nowhere I suddenly became obsessed with this thought that popped into my head, "My nose is trying to turn me into Bears Griffin!"  I do not know what a Bears Griffin is.  I think I was trying to say Bear Grylls?  I don't know why though.  I don't know who this guy is.  I have vague ideas of him having a survivalist tv show that I've never seen, and a meme about drinking his own pee a lot.  I was neither trying to survive in the wilderness nor drinking my own pee.  They are both activities I would rather not do at all, thanks very much.  I have no idea why I started thinking about him, or why I was so convinced that my nose being stuffed up meant it was going to turn me into him.  It was a very confusing thought.

Sci Fi on the Rock

I went to Sci Fi On The Rock on Saturday!  And neglected to blog about it for pretty much an entire week, because I kind of suck at this.  Oh well.

It was kind of a blast!  Twenty dollars seemed a little steep for a day pass, but whatever.  There was some pretty cool merchandise; I got two fridge magnets, a Storm Trooper with a bow and a Pokeball.  The fridge magnets, I mean, that's what they were.  I also got a knit R2D2 cap and a tribble!  I named the tribble Nimoy and he is now wearing the R2D2 hat.  The tribble came from one of the workshops, a dramatic reading of the episode The Trouble With Tribbles from the original series Star Trek.  That was a blast.  I also went to the Second Most Dysfunctional Writing Panel, which was fun, but in hindsight I wish I'd gone to the Terrible Fanfiction panel instead.  I tried to go to the Steampunk Tea but there wasn't anywhere to sit, so we went to McDonalds instead.  Then I got absorbed into a group of strangers and we went to the movies and saw Jurassic Park.  There was one workshop I really wanted to go to, Build Your Own Airship, but it was on Friday and I had a dentist appointment so I couldn't attend.  Sadface :(

I also got buttons!  I got two Doctor Who buttons and a It's OK Pluto, I'm Not A Planet Either button. The Pluto button was actually free!  I couldn't find a dollar so the woman at the booth was like, "you know what, it's one button.  Here!"  I wish I could find her business card so I could tell everybody to buy things from them, but I seem to have lost it.  Alas.  If I ever find it I'll make a dedicated post specifically for that business, because it really was nice of them to give me the button.  I'd like to repay them with a little publicity in lieu of a dollar.

All in all, it was a good day.  I spent a bit more money than I meant to, because who can turn down tribbles and R2D2 hats, but it was a fun day all the same.  I only went on the one day, because twenty dollars a day?  Ouch.  It double-hurt, because when I checked the website before I went I saw the price and it said it was ten dollars for an adult ticket.  I didn't scroll down to notice the part where it said it was for Friday only and that Saturday and Sunday were both twenty dollars each.  It would have been nice if they'd removed the Friday price after Friday passed, but oh well.  Next year I might go on a Friday instead, or I'll just suck it up and buy the weekend pass for forty bucks.  I'll have to decide when next year comes around and I can see what awesome workshops are on the go then.

Oh, Tumblr

I should really start paying more attention to tumblr, there's some funny and/or awesome shit there.  But then, it would be a lot of work to look for it, I think.  I'll just stay on the system I have where my friends who use Tumblr link me to the good stuff.  I might be the last to see it, but I'm ok with that.

In other news, I still miss Busty Girls comics.  I get why the author stopped at three hundred, because I'm assuming there are only so many comics you can make about the subject, but still.  It was a really fun little thing while it lasted.  I loved how the artist represented so many people and body types with such a simple cartoony style.  She had women of all colours, and of different religions (seriously, how often do you see brown women with headscarves represented in comics?  So cool!), she had women with scars and stretch marks and body fat.  The comic was just such a great space to feel included; there was always something or someone to relate to, even if you are less-busty than the women depicted, and it was always funny.  And just seeing so many body types depicted was a real breath of fresh air.  And it was a comic specifically about large-breasted women, and they never got sexualized or objectified!  How fantastic is that, right?  Dang, I miss that comic.  I wish I could find a new one just as good to lose myself in.

Dear Gmail

I wish the "Delete Forever" button and the "Not Spam" buttons weren't right next to each other.  It seems like a recipe for disaster.  A very small, unimportant disaster that won't have any really serious consequences and will affect at most one or two people, but still a disaster.  Wait, I should check the dictionary definition of disaster, I could be wrong.

Oh well.

Record Store Day

I went to Record Store Day with a friend yesterday!  We went downtown at ridiculous o'clock in the morning (read, ten thirty) to check out Fred's Records.  I've never checked out Record Store Day before, but now that I've actually got a record player I figured I should get some new records to play on it.  I didn't get much, just a few cheap second-hand albums because I couldn't really afford anything new.  I might go down another day to have another look when it's less crowded, there were a fair few people flipping through records and I didn't want to be in anyone's way by spending too long in one spot.  I ended up getting an album of tango music, the soundtrack to Cats, Chris de Burgh's Crusader, and Eartha Kitt's Greatest Hits.

It's been a long time since I listened to Cats.  I had forgotten most of the songs on it; I loved the musical as a kid when we had it on VHS, but when we lost the tape I kind of forgot about it.  Mister Mistoffelees is still my favourite.  It's just such a fun song!

BLASDFALSGKJFLADF MY FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

Just got back from the dentist's, I had a couple of fillings done.  It's the first time I've been to the dentist in years, and the first time I've had fillings since I was a kid, so I had no idea what it was gonna involve.  Turns out it involves my face feeling super weird, holy crap what is going on.  Even my nose feels funny.  Blhagghaghhh.

Ughh

I decided to start watching The Mentalist because people were telling me it was good, so I got the first season and I just tried watching the first episode.  But some dickweed  has hardcoded subs into the episode.  Normally, I would not mind hardcoded subs.  I prefer watching stuff with subs anyway, and even if the subs are in another language they're pretty easy to ignore when you can't understand them.

But these subs are impossible.  They're for the wrong episode so it's hard to concentrate on the real dialogue when I keep seeing the wrong dialogue at the bottom of the screen, and because they're English I can't very easily ignore them since I automatically read every word.  And they're fucking hardcoded, so I can't turn them off.  God damn it.

Stop Creeping Me Out

Denim tits and baby corpse.  I don't know what denim tits would look like, but whoever used that search keyword has at least one odd fetish and I hope that they are not the same person who found my blog through baby corpse because that would be some seriously creepy porn.  Is the baby corpse also made of denim in your weird porn things, person?  Actually whoever found my blog through baby corpse must be one hell of a downer.  Not only are they looking for dead babies, they didn't even find any.  To the best of my knowledge.  I don't have baby corpses on my blog, do I?