Oops, we're on the state line between Indiana and Michigan.

we're in Hartland, at mobile/Hartland express pizza & grill. They have a Lot of alcohol here. The pizza was good. <3

Of Various Stuffs I Need to Improve (Or Me Whining a Lot)

I've been feeling kinda stupid over something that shouldn't be that big of a deal and I think it's because of flaws I have that I could improve.

The one that's biggest and probably the most impossible for me to fix would be my ego. Outside of the realms of Settlers of Catan, Mabinogi, reading, and Japanese it's pretty tiny. In some cases positively minuscule. Like in talking to other people, writing in any form beyond simple text messages and IMs, driving, and how I look. I think my tiny ego causes me to have absolutely no backbone and to say 'sorry' a lot. I'll say it regardless of if it's even my fault or if I could have even influenced whatever it was. At the same time, I blow off other people's 'sorry's with not your fault, or its fine, or whatever. Maybe this is why it feels like people skim over them as if they're not sincere. It's like crying wolf and expecting people to pay attention to it, but ignoring them when they say it. I'll try to work on the sorry part, but the ego'll will have to follow after all this stuff. Maybe being more positive when things I attempt don't work out or something.

Some of the things I need to work on are kinda part of what I just said. I need to consider how to actually communicate, I'm great when blathering on about whatever random subject I happen to be talking about, but when it's something I actually care about or that needs specific information to be successfully conveyed to whomever I'm talking to I become rather inarticulate and I just sorta stop being able to think sometimes. Same thing goes for the writing. Only for that it's even worse because I usually don't care about what paper or whatnot I'm writing. Which is the point of this blog. To work on the whole 'I can't write to save my life' view I have. I don't think that's been successful so far, but I'll keep at it.

Lets see... Next up would probably be the driving bit. I can't drive, so I need to practice. I can't control when I can too much, but a friend of mine had a point. On Saturdays when my mom is out and driving anyway, why don't I practice then? So I'll have to bug my mom about that one. Once I quit feeling shakey after driving maybe I'll be able to practice even more.

Hmm... I had oodles to say before, but it's kinda washing away. You know how when you try to remember a dream it gets harder to remember? Thats what it's like when I try to remember where I was originally going with what I was writing.

You know what? I'm gonna talk about mundane stuff now.

Theres some meteor shower that was supposed to be best August 11 & 12, but I procrastinated and managed to go outside on the thrirteenth. I saw one meteor, which is pretty awesome considering so many of my neighbors had lights on, and I didn't spend much time outside.

I went to this convention called Northern Michigan Anime Convention, or NMACon for short, that was really small. Thats where the picture of the Pinky:cos figure came from. They were showing Baccano! in one of the screening rooms, but it was in the smaller one, so I didn't stick around to watch. My mom and I decided not to go for the second day and ended up driving around the area west of Traverse City for quite awhile. We went to Luddington, walked on the beach for ten minutes, then headed for home. I kept trying to stay awake on the way home, but it didn't work. Though my mom woke me up for this weird happening in the clouds. It looked like they were falling off a ledge and swirling back up or something. I was trying to frantically call my dad and freaking out about the idea of tornadoes too much to get a picture. Now that I know it'd would've been okay I wish I had.

Oh, and the car's steering wheel was shaking. We kinda knew the tires were bad, but we really had no idea that day how bad they were. The next day my mom went all over shopping for food and the like. At her last stop, after she spent a fair amount of our money, she noticed you could see the wire mesh of the tires. She had them replaced the next day, but the thought that we were driving around for nine hours on really worn tires is kinda scary.

I almost don't want to post this anymore, but I went to the trouble of typing it all, so I guess I may as well. I started it August 18th, 2009 at 2:37 AM. I'm posting it on August 25th, 2009 at 4:13 PM.

A few of my friends decided to walk to Qdoba, so I went with. We had to walk over Orchard Lake Rd. It was kinda unnerving seeing all those cars coming towards me, but the entire walkway was well above the street and encased in that metal caging, so it wasn't all that horrible.

After we got back we played Settlers of Catan, but I was falling asleep for a lot of it. =.= They walked too fast and it was too hot out for me to not be exhausted afterward.

A huge windmill west of Traverse City. Not sure what we're doing next, so we're wandering.

Rabbit outside of meijer.

Of Mabinogi and Plying Yarn

Mabinogi is having an event where you post this somewhere and tell 'em then hope you win.  So here's my random plug:

I've thought about posting what I'm doing in mabi, but I either forget, don't feel like posting, or think 'no one wants to read about that'.  Am I right or would that actually be interesting?  Probably not, running ciar beginner over and over is rather boring.

I finally finished spinning all but two ounces of my white wool.  I decided to ply it yesterday.  Plying is where after you spin it into a string (it doesn't like this at all) you take multiple spun strings or each end of the one you spun (I did the later) and spin them the opposite direction so they wrap around each other and don't keep trying to undo them selves.  To get at the beginning of it I wound it onto something else, part of a cardboard tube, then slid it off. (I almost couldn't)  I was told that it'd be bad if I let implode, so I used my thumb to stop it. It tried to take off my thumb by cutting off my circulation in return.  ._.  Kinda scary, I tried using something else (a sharpie) to stop it, but that fell out.  ><  It turned out not to mean total -doom- but I did end up with a lot of knots to figure out, with it trying to twist on itself the whole time.  I was refering to it with various phrases that tended to include 'gordian knot' (I heard this somewhere and it stuck with me) and 'snarled mass'.

Hmm... anything else... School is actually going well this semester.  I still need to come up with two topics for the web site project for Intro to Web Systems.  I already have an idea of what I could/probably will use, but I kinda wanted to come up with something I haven't done before, but that would still be possible.  Oh well, whatever.

Woo!  I get to go to a fiber store tomorrow! (Today)   I need to go to sleep... Maybe after an episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann...  (Squee~ <3)

Of Wool, Spinning, Cats, and Knitting.

I mentioned in my last post (I meant for there to be multiple Arizona posts, but it didn't work out that way, I might still try to put something together later) that I learned how to spin wool into yarn. For Cristmas Eve Eve I got some purple wool, three crochet hooks, and three skeins of yarn. The purple stuff has been tucked away until I run out of the white wool and am a bit better. I've been doing a bit here and there, but not much, and yesterday my spindle kept falling off because I had made it too thin. >< In the long run I'm probably going to end up with quite a bit of really low grade yarn, and thus it will be unsellable. (People actually do hand spin and sell yarn) I'll need to be able to do something with it myself so all my hard work doesn't completely go to waste. Which is what led me to attempt to learn how to knit. With skewers. I don't own any actual knitting needles, so I thought they'd be a good alternative. They've got nearly everything I think a knitting needle needs, wooden, pointy, just missing the ball on the end. I was wrong. I'll still try again some other time, when I'm not tired and I actually feel like digging through them to find ones that wont catch.
One of our cats, Whitey, has really long fluffy fur. (You can see where this is going, right?) My dad was joking about making a sweater out of it. After reading an article in Spin Off (a spinning magazine) about making dog fur yarn, with a pattern to make a cell phone cover shaped like a dog out of it, I decided that somewhere along the line cat fur is going to go into one of my projects. I'll have to wash it really well, considering my allergies. Oh, and you know that cliche about cats and yarn? It's totally true.