ceramic bird.

NOTE: this entry is really just a big complaint about my room. Be advised.I

'm running out of time to do everything. When I think of winter holidays, I think of numerous, copious days in which to do loads of stuff and still be able to sleep in. This has not been the case this winter holiday. No, no it has not.

Between the actual holiday days, family events due to holiday days [doubled this year because of my newly adopted boyfriend family], and just plan whoosh, I feel like I have no time to do what I really wanted to accomplish this break: cleaning and rearranging/decorating my room. NOTE: I was slightly extra peeved since I only got my room back yesterday when I was told I'd have it back for winter break and thus have lots of time to do what I had to do.

So far my room is almost clean [except now I'm afraid to put things that I'm taking back to school with me in their proper places because in a couple days I'm just going to have to take them out again and pack] and new arrangements of furniture are flying around my head...but I don't really want to move all my furniture myself - I'd probably wreak my back worse than it already is. Also my mum refuses to let me move my hope chest somewhere else.

Really, I have too much stuff and too little time to do everything. It's already 2pm and I have until 5 to really get down to the nitty gritty [Kyle gets bored when I clean and make him entertain himself] and get things done. And shower. Well, I guess that could wait until after 5.

I need a time machine.

Moving Day

Today, after many months spent abroad on the couch [and at my other home in general], I have finally reclaimed my room. Now all I have to do is clean it. Goody.

Boxing Day Laziness

Originally today Kyle and I were going to venture forth to Toronto and go to the ROM, which we both have been dying to do for a long while now [who wouldn't want to go to the ROM? It is a very fun time with all the dinosaurs, swords, mummies and other erroneous things] but we decided after calculating total bus scheduling, how much time we'd need to successfully conquer the ROM, and what time we needed to be back by [unfortunately around 5 or 6 because I am on dog duty tonight while my parents take their turn to venture to Toronto and spend the night] we figured that we'd be too rushed [and no one wants to be rushed past anything at the ROM] and would have to get up too early - so we have postponed our ROM trip...once again. Our rain date is the 1st though: spending our 6 month anniversary there sounded like a lovely idea since we were going to be in Toronto anyways.

Anyways, this decision was made around 1:30 last night/morning which was then proceeded by our Kyle at driving me home and getting into my house, which was unsuccessful. I had forgotten my keys on the key rack inside my house, and after 15 minutes of searching for the spare one, I gave up, wrote a note to my parents saying I was going back to Kyle's because I didn't want to wake anyone up and left. I'm glad I made Kyle walk up to the door with me.

So because of this incident I am now currently sitting on Kyle's couch with a blanket over my head waiting for him to get out of the shower because we have things to do and dogs to feed. I'm also partially blind since last night when I took my contacts out [and put them each in their own separate bowl of water] my right eye has been stinging and occasionally watering [very annoying, I might add] so I'm too afraid to put my contacts back [especially now that they've been soaking in water: I don't actually think water is a good thing for contacts] because I'm afraid my eye is going to sting even more horrendously and go all red again. Luckily it's almost the end of the month and I can switch contacts....once I get back to the G-Spot.

On a truly exciting without a bad twist to the ending - for Christmas my darling Kyle got me tickets to see the Nutcracker Sunday which I am very, very excited to see and get dressed up for. I'm just hoping the dress at the back of my closet still fits.

Hopefully that dress at the back of my closet still fits.

snow

Yesterday I got back from Cuba, which was lovely [aside from the heat rash and mild disagreement on my stomach's part] and warm. I managed to get a lot [and by a lot I mean over 200] of pictures, like these:

We went horse back riding, my first time, and the guide took us down to a beach and made us go through the water. I'm pretty sure my sneakers are still soaked.

One view down onto the beach. Beaches are always lovely, and always a favourite.

We celebrated my birthday: I even got my mum to do shots.

Now I'm home and have to catch up with my Christmasy things - ie. finish wrapping presents, and attempt to de-thaw cookie dough.

Tonight is Christmas Eve with my lover's family which shall be exciting as I've already established my lovable reputation with them over a wedding weekend earlier in the year [as I was typing this, Kyle's cousin Karen sent me an endearing 'yo bitch' message on Facebook telling me to be there tonight with my dancing shoes. I feel the love] so I'm excited. They apparently exchange gag gifts at Christmas but in some random way which Kyle really hasn't explained to me [aside from 'my aunt punked this awesome moose from me last year'] so I have no idea how it's going to work aside from that I didn't have to wrap my present [which was a mini disco ball: which, while cool, I think is slightly uncreative].

Christmas is my favourite holiday. I think it's going to be positively brilliant this year. All my free time is starting to be eaten up by plans: Dads tomorrow, possible ROM plans on Boxing day, sledding Monday, casino [!] Tuesday, New Years Eve quite probably in Toronto Wednesday, Kyle's and my 6 months New Years day [corny to celebrate, I know but it's a first for both of us so it's tres exciting] which might include a day in Toronto but atleast a lovely dinner, then going to see We Will Rock You in Toronto the 2nd [birthday present from ma maman! how exciting!]. I'm also trying to organize a belated birthday bash with my Shwa crew.

So really, I barely have any time left. I definately need to make a schedule.

Gilligan

This is my story of the day. It may or may not be exciting but it made me rant a fair bit when I got home:

Today I called in to the local pharmacy to see if I could grab some pills this afternoon so I would have them for Cuba [I forgot the originals at Fort Abraham, my other home], and they said sure and to pick them up in half an hour.

Half an hour, my bum.

When I got there after searching by one lady, it led to the conclusion that there wasn't actually any of my pills in stock.

"Can you come back tomorrow to get them?"
"No, I'm sorry, I can't; I shall be out of the country tomorrow."

So I was told they should be getting them in around 4, so I have to walk back around then to get them. Luckily I'm planning on waiting until Kyle's on his way that way I'll meet him at the bus stop and then force him to walk with me.

Actually it's really not that far. 7 minute walk or less, perhaps.

In other news, my fish, Gilligan, has been set up on my desk and my stepfather has insisted on a pump in his bowl so occasionally little spurts of water end up on my hand. I don't think Gilligan actually likes the pump. His depression comes out more when there's a pump nearby.

True story.

am.

I have the weirdest dreams. Ok, maybe not the weirdest. I'm sure someone's had more effed up dreams than I have.

One of the weird things about my dreams is that almost nothing in real life will have the same layout as it will in my dreams - and the layout in the dreams will stay the same from dream to dream, even if the dreams are months apart.

I've had the same mental layout of Disney World for years.

eight days

Today is somewhat the crunch time for me.

In other news, this is what I accomplished the other day:
These two have started my love for plastercine [what I used really wasn't called plastercine but I didn't pay that much attention to the label before I torn it off in excitement] and now I wish I had come up with the idea a while ago so I could just make animals for everyone.

Today was Lovely.

I had a very, very lovely afternoon which was a very lovely ending to the last of my exams. The Shakespeare group [minus one] decided on a downtown adventure to the Redbrick Cafe, a place I had never been to before [it was delightful], and then Nicole and I went to the Bookshelf which I had been dying to do for awhile and came out of very, very satisfied. The rest of my birthday money from my Uncle M was well spent:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen
No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories - Miranda July
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
The Paperbag Princess - Robert Munsch
and a book on Salvador Dali


I'm super excited to read all of them. Well, Look at for the Dali book. I'm thinking I'm going to save them mostly for Cuuuuuuba when I am laying on the beach. I plan to do a LOT of reading while I'm away. I've barely been able to do my own reading in a while. Over the weekend I got to start 1984 by George Orwell. It makes me think of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale which I now really want to read again. I also really want to reread Cocksure by Mordecai Richler; it's almost an ache.

After the book excursion, we went to the art store and picked up a couple supplies. I came up with an idea for my mother's Christmas present [I've decided i'm going to make her a mini-storybook] and some plastercine type stuff that I've made a duck out of for my step-dad [over the weekend I drew a cartoon of him as a duck] and another little figurine which I cannot name in case my lover reads my blog [which I know he occasionally does] before I can give it to him.

Nicole's and my last destination was Nicole's apartment where we spent the next couple hours colouring in her Disney Princess Colouring Book. Which was awesome because I haven't coloured in a colouring book for a very long time. We also enjoyed lovely girl talk which I always find extremely refreshing with Nicole since we can say basically anything to each other and not shock the other.
All in all, it was a brilliant day. Now all I need to do is think of a story to write and design for my mother. This will be fun.

I am your own forever.

There are a few different things running through my mind and so I'm going to make a list of them in an orderly fashion:

1. I have a bit of a headache. It's been fluctuating back and forth between a regular headache and a migraine since we were sitting in the bus terminal waiting for Kyle's bus. I don't know if it's because of the nap Kyle and I had earlier, the weather, or the impending doom of my exam tomorrow.

2. I'm somewhat excited that I managed to eat the last piece of slightly old cheesecake and didn't get a stomachache. This is good.

3. Othello is very tragic and he's very foolish; jealousy is not a very pretty thing. Especially murder contrived on jealousy [and on such little evidence too! Fake evidence, I might add]. Iago appeals to me in a very strange way: because Kenneth Branagh who plays him, or because he's so violently clever, who knows. I've just discovered that it is not Samuel L. Jackson who plays Othello, but instead Laurence Fishburne. I seem to get the two confused sometimes. Praise be to Laurence Fishburne.

4. Now I'm just trying to come up with what I'm going to talk about in my exam tomorrow/trying to make the headache go away/looking at Modcloth/ not really doing any work at all.

[Note to readers: I just took a giant pause in writing to talk to my sweetheart who had just arrived safely home. I've promised to go to bed soon so I can't talk much much longer]

5. My room smells like popcorn and the homemade mac and cheese I made us earlier. Slightly annoying although now that I think about it, it could be something non-food related. Entirely possible.

6. Tomorrow after my exam, unless something quite impossible to refuse comes up, I'm going to come home, nap and do laundry among other home-like things. I've decided this, yes I have!

7. Although with all my blankets, pillows and erroneous books on my bed [including myself, I, however, am not a book. I am a person being] it seems quite small. I know for a fact however, that it fits two people quite snuggly on it and it makes me a wee bit sad to think I'm going to fall asleep alone tonight. I know, I'm a typical girl but you know what? Bed company is lovely. Especially bed company that smells absolutely delicious, cuddles you in all the right places, looks gorgeous by moonlight and kisses you goodnight, good middle-of-the-night, good morning and every time in between and after.

And that is how I'll end it.
Goodnight.

Mirculous Wireless

My house in Oshawa doesn't have wireless. Or I thought we didn't. Somehow I've connected to a wireless network which kinda makes me happy since I had 'given up' my internet to be able to turn around to the tv so I could fully watch Willy Wonka. THE original Willy Wonka. It kinda makes me happy as I haven't seen it in a while and, personally, Gene Wilder rocks my socks.

Stella

One of my biggest problems this weekend is that I forgot my journal in which I had written all my essay workshop comments in, at my house in Guelph. So I barely remember what was recommended to fix and focus on. I guess I'm going to have to guess for now and then fix it when I can look at my notes.

Essays and I have a love/hate relationship. If it's something I'm interested in and usually once I start writing my essay and I have a good relationship. If I'm not that interested and am having trouble starting it or writing it then I hate it and we are not friends. We won't talk, it'll send me chocolates and I'll ignore them. That's how angry we get with each other.

That hate part is also very detrimental to my concentration levels [alongside my grandfather who keeps trying to show me things on the tv even though I have headphones on and all attempting to read websites on naturalism in literature] and I keep getting distracted or thinking I need things after every three words I've typed.

Maybe I should have gone to the UOIT campus library with Kyle..or maybe not. We wouldn't have gotten any work done.

The good thing is that technically I have a giant intro-ish paragraph I can still somewhat use. Pablo, my semi-lovely, sweater-vest wearing, soon-to-be-ex-prof told us in the workshop that we should begin the essay introducing naturalism and what it is and then go on to connect it with the novels [I think] and THEN make our connections. So I can concentrate on that right now. I'm hoping to finish most of my essay by the end of tomorrow because, really, I won't have time Monday, and Tuesday I really should be spending on reading Othello and preparing for my exam the following day.

Dear Othello,

It's not that I don't like you that I haven't read you. It's just that I'm bad at reading things I'm supposed to for school. It's not your fault - I'm sure you're quite lovely in your own wife-murdering ways; I'm just a bad procrastinator.

Sincerely, Tor.

Underwear in the Mornings

When I was little, I had the very strong belief that there was something under my bed and more under my dresser. Occasionally I would decide to make up a big, comfy bed on the floor of my room - thinking it an ideal way to have a sleep-over with myself - only to find out when the lights went off that there was now the possibilities of the creepy, dark thing under my dresser of getting at me more easily. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The thing under my dressing really had no shape; it was just this big, dark shadow that could slink out and fluid, mist-like motions and wrap itself around me to drag me under the dresser. Have you ever seen Little Nemo in Dreamland? It would be like the thing in that but less like mud, and more like plain pitch black.

Unlike the thing under my dresser, the thing under my bed was an actual thing. I usually imagined a brown-red, bandaged mummy hand sneaking out to drag me under whenever I fell out of bed and didn't get back in quick enough, or when coming back to bed in the dark and not jumping onto my bed quick enough.

Which is what happened last night. Well, no, I did not get snatched at by creatures under my bed. When I was feeling my way through the darkness of my room on the way back from the bathroom, as I neared my bed I got the instinctive feeling to jump the last few inches into my bed so as to avoid getting sucked below it.

Needless to say, I did not have any troubles and was very relieved to find myself safely in my bed.

This then prompted me to text Kyle [at 2am] to tell him what had happened because honestly how many times do you think there's a monster under your bed when you're hitting the end of adolescence? - plus I was wide awake and thought Kyle would appreciate the story if he managed to sleep through the text alert and read it in the morning [which he did not, I got a groggy response about how he loved me and was glad no one was actually under my bed; this is why I love my man].

In other news, I woke up this morning after many dreams but quite tired [I still didn't fall asleep until after 3] and am now pondering what to wear to my painting critique/to life in general that isn't Kyle's shirt that he left here [and I've been basically living in ever since]. This dilemma is one of the things that makes me typically a girl: I can never decide what to wear.

Sigh.

A Prayer for My Darling.

Ooooh, dear baby Jesus,
Dear little 10 lbs., 8 ounce
baby Jesus.
Please let this mook be rained down upon by baby mooses.
And let him be sat on by the Great Cat Turbo in the face.
And let him be purred upon with such vengeance that his entire body shakes.
And let him forever more be flustered by sexual frustrations
so that he squeals.

AWOMEN.

When Kyle reread what I had written to him over the phone, I laughed so hard at myself that I literally couldn't breathe. I think I even shed a tear.

This is why I feel I must share it with the world.

Confessions of a tea-chugger.

I have this really bad habit where once a hot beverage is warm enough to drink [and by warm enough I mean it's cooled down enough to drink without burning my entire mouth; I actually prefer warmer beverages than hot beverages. If someone were to say, 'would you like a hot tea or a relatively warm tea?' I would respond with, 'a relatively warm tea, please'] that I don't usually savour it. I get it into my head that I have to keep drinking and chugging it until it's gone.

I don't know why this happens, it just does.
One minute I have a cup of tea I'm gulping at because it's so delicious, and the next I'm setting down an empty cup.
It actually annoys me a little bit.
But I can't stop; it's a vicious cycle.


On another desperate note, after reading Nicole's latest blog entry, I've realized with a longing how much I've missed reading just for the joy of reading. I've missed going to browse in a bookstore and come home with 2 or 3 new books that have that nice clean yet dusty smell of paper and ink; the excitement of having a new, excellent book to read and get lost in, the amazing feeling of having a new book that you've never touched before this day in your hands and all yours, yours, yours!

I get very excited by books if you couldn't tell.

I remember one very specific time last year when I was having a particularly rotten day [a heartbreaking incident at the time involving a boy] and so I decided to screw it all and go downtown to browse books [and art supplies].

Walking into The Bookshelf gave me a gigantic high. I believe I spent a good two hours just looking at books and when I got back to my room with three new books I was giddy and all thoughts of the ravaging [stupid] boy was out of my head and I was ecstatic about getting lost in three of my favourite authors: Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood.

In conclusion, I miss that feeling. I'm almost tempted to hop a bus downtown and go in search of books right now. Except I'm still in the throes of a battle of work ethic and procrastination, in which procrastination is winning.

That's one of my problems: I have no nerves when it comes to exams or assignments. There will be brief periods in which I'll have a spazz attack about one or the other but not too often. The things I usually freak out about are my art projects. They are usually the only things I care enough about to freak out about finishing, or attempt to maintain a stable work schedule for them.

But I'm already done my art projects [aside from a write-up]for the semester so what have I to worry about? Only an essay and three exams [one on Thursday]. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

See? No nerves. It is both a blessing [I don't have high stress levels/blood pressure like some of my friends] and a curse [I am extremely liable not to get as good of grades as those stressed out peers of mine]. Even my boyfriend studies more than I do!

Actually he's really not a good example as he's a good kid and I would die if I ever tried to do what he does [and is brilliant at].

On a random note, why do I spell cheese capelletti? Oh, East Side Mario's! How I miss thee! My darling Kyle has promised me a real date when I get home and I'm determined for East Side's since my father swindled me out of it the last time I was home and instead I was made into a horse by my little brother.

And with that, I say 'neigh'.