....but the study abroad kinda nixes that. Still.

I'M DONE WITH CLASSES!!! *realizes she only has a year left and deflates a little*

Now all I have left is a 5-8 page paper based on the subject of Chaucer that can be about pretty much anything due on Monday and a final exam for my Planets class on Wednesday. I'll probably spend Saturday and Sunday writing the paper, with a break on Sunday to pack up stuff/hang out with my family when they come here to do a mini-move-out. I'd say it'll be easy-peasy, but I know I won't be getting a lot of sleep Sunday night/Monday morning writing the paper. *sigh*

11 Days until I leave for Rome, bright and early (tooooooo early...) the 17th. *flails* I keep getting caught between being psyched for it and being completely overwhelmed/terrified of it. I think the excitement is pretty self-explanatory. But...I'm going to a foreign country with only Spanish (I doubt Korean is going to help me out there) under my belt. I've heard that there are people who speak English, but...it's still frightening. I think I'd feel a lot better about studying abroad if I were going to a country where English (American or British English) was the predominant language spoken, or even if I were studying that language, because then I have a grasp for it. Italian...not so much. Now that I've finished Korean, though, I can focus studying the new language, so maybe I'm just freaking out for no reason. *hopes*

Plus, this is the first time I've ever been truly away from my family/home. Sure, yes, I'm mostly on my own up in Seattle, but my family's a phone call and 1 1/2 hours of driving away. But now I'm seriously on my own. And I know, I know, I should be ready to be independent and not hold onto my mommy's apron-strings and etc. etc. etc., but the fact is... I'm going to be on my own without my usual support group. No me gusta! 싫습니다! Non mi piace! *sigh*

It turns out someone already took Via Appia for their project (I guess I can hope that they're a Doctor Who fan...) so I took Temple of Vesta. And, sadly, I read and wrote the name wrong so for a while I thought I was researching "Temple of Vestia." Not even Wikipedia redirected me, and I've put some really wrong spellings in that search bar. And I think I emailed my prof saying I would take the Temple of Vestia. *headdesk* ETA: Aah, now, see, my misspelling is okay! Because the only reason I wrote Vestia is because that's how my prof wrote it. *feels better about her English skills*

Yesterday I was walking along back to my dorm, and I see this gray feline-body walking toward me through the bushes. There's usually a cat around there, and though the cat I normally see is brownish in color, I thought, "Oh, cute, another kitty!"

Um. Nope. 'Twas a racoon the size of an oversized house cat. Out in daylight (er, well, 2 o'clock-ish; Seattle/Western Washington hasn't gotten the memo that it's June already).

Off to play...way too many hours of FFX. Way too many.


"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." Jonathan Harker --Dracula by Bram Stoker

.....to have everything come together.

My dratted Italian visa (and thus my passport) finally came back! So now I can actually get ON the plane come the 17th! And I got my health screening done Tuesday, so I turned in my Concurrent Enrollment form when I went to pick it up, and I've just finished signing up for the Student Health Insurance (*winces*), so.....yeah. I'M DONE WITH THE PAPERWORK!! There are no more hoops for me to jump! At least before I head off to Rome, anyway.

I believe I have all the book-y stuff for Rome now (so long as the directors don't randomly add anything else to the booklist....). I've got Metamorphoses, an Italian-English dictionary, a little tour-book for Rome, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, and I've also got a moleskine notebook! ^____^ It fits so nice and neatly into my back pocket! This is exactly what I look for when I pick up new notebooks/journals to write in; I think I've got a brand, now. Hee. It's not one of the city moleskines, which is slightly disappointing, but I wanted it more for the number of pages I could write in, so it's all good. Now I just need to come up with a proper name for my little notebook......what? Nobody else does that? (ETA: I've decided it's Leonard. *hugs* But not the proper way of pronouncing Leonard.)

I also had my Korean presentation today (on the 1988 Summer Olympics), which I had 99% memorized before class and (by going over it again and again and again and...etc.) I finished memorizing the last sentence just as the teacher walked in. Of course, as soon as I got up front I completely lost the flow and had to keep looking at my sheet from time to time, but it all came out. I got through the Korean part okay, but when it came to the English translation/question and answer time I was shaking like a leaf--hopefully not too noticeably. I don't know if it was the adrenaline or the nerves, but it took a while for my hand to stop trembling. I also proved my English-major-worthiness by saying "protestations." It's technically a word, but not with the 's' at the end, I don't believe. And my Korean teacher, whose English is her second (if not third or fourth or....some other number) language, caught it. *hides face*

Speaking of really bad English...I was looking through my Korean-English dictionary looking for the number 12 (it should be so simple.....but it's not) and I happened to look at the ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.). They wrote "twelfth" as "twelveth." Ha.

I've seen the first 3 episodes of Chuck, and...yeah. New show to add onto my Need-to-Keep-Tabs-On. Adam Baldwin FTW!!!!! Now if only NBC would put up episodes 4-12 instead of randomly jumping to having episode 13 up, that'd be great (because...I have nothing better to do besides homework...or update fanfiction....or do my reading for Chaucer and Rome.....or study for the Planets final come the 11th.....)


"And the wheel," said the Captain [of the load of bloody useless loonies], "what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl [one of the bloody useless loonies], "well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look. "All right Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be." --Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Restaurant at the End of the Universe, technically)

50 Books in a Year:

6. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Beidler Ed. Includes:
*The General Prologue
*The Knight's Tale
*The Miller's Tale
*The Reeve's Tale
*The Wife of Bath's Tale
*The Merchant's Tale
*The Franklin's Tale
*The Pardoner's Tale
*The Shipman's Tale
*The Prioress' Tale
*The Nun's Priest's Tale

One of these days I may actually read the entirety of T.C.T., but at the moment I'm good with this. Yay.

So, I'm a bit pathetic. Let's just say it involves a window that is not completely sealed from the outside, a spider which crawled all over my window but never came near me, me cringing and internally wailing, a bottle, and a kindly neighbor who took pity on me and squashed the spider. And now one of my chores later tonight will be to tape up the sides of my window so it may never happen again. *shudders*

Lots of Autumn 2008 pondering/querying behind the cut.
( Yeah, I know I said I'd leave off about this until it got closer, but I'm a nerd. )

Official-Rome-Meeting in T-minus 5 days! ...Not that I'm, uh, counting down or anything....*shuffles* And I went ahead and requested a copy of the impossible-to-get-Rome-book assigned to us through the library. Hopefully we're only supposed to read the book by the time we get to Rome. If we're supposed to have it on hand and/or have had it read by the time of the meeting...then I'm just going to have to shrug and tell them they should've sent out notices/had the meeting earlier.

It was a little surprising/eerie to me, but in my Planets class Toby was covering the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars, and I was following along with him, almost to where I started predicting where he was going with his lecture. O.o Guess taking Weather101 was of some use after all. Though, probably not in the way Jerome meant it to.

And, hee, I wanna go live on Mars, with its dust-devils that put tornados to shame and sandstorms that encompass the entire planet. hey, future scientists, get to work on it; we wouldn't want to make liars out of the Babylon 5 creators with their Mars colony, do we? ^.~

I've suddenly developed a craving for Korean noodles. A particular type, too. Naengmyun, particularly the ice-water broth variety. Though now that I think about it, the spicy cold noodles sounds tasty, too. *wonders where the craving came from, then goes back to her ramyun*


Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. --Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

The PC at home has never been disk-defragmented, and it's been almost 7 years since we got it, so I figured....probably way overdue for defragmenting. I started it at about 1:40PM and as of 3:23PM it is....6%. Woooooo.

Progress on my 50 book project:
1. Sabriel by Garth Nix
2. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

I can't write book reviews for the life of me, so don't expect any long-winded descriptions of the books I read. If I really don't like the book, then by all means I'll forewarn people, but generally I don't read books I don't like (the one exception being way back in 7/8th grade, reading The Exodus by....I don't remember who, but...*shudders* bad book. BAD!

But anyway....I liked Sabriel. Necromancy actually being used for good rather than evil is new to me, and I liked the heroine, though I'm hoping Lirael and Abhorsen kinda departs from the whole Touchstone/Sabriel romance; I like Touchstone, but...I don't feel the chemistry. AND NO ONE SPOIL THE BOOKS FOR ME OR YOU WILL GO TO THE SPECIAL HELL (where they send child molesters and people who talk at the theatre)!!!!!!!!

I cried reading My Sister's Keeper. I got teary and maybe let a tear or two drop in the beginning and middle, but the end....I bawled. It was 12:30 in the morning (last night/this morning, actually) and I bawled. I can see where some people say it's cliched/they knew the ending before the book began, but.....it's not about the ending. It was about the characters. It was about the journey (yes, yes, I know, corny as hell, but true nonetheless).

I go back to the UW on Sunday, don't know when precisely. Dorms open at 8, but there's no way I'd even manage to convince my sister (let alone myself) to get up at 6 in the morning just to get there at 8 (my sister takes a long time to get ready, then she'd insist on breakfast, then [of course] the I-5 traffic would be insanely murderous). Then I have to wash my 4-week-old, oatmeal-crusted bowls/spoons since I didn't have any time to do so before my mad rush out of Hansee back in December, change my bedsheets, and catch up with whomever happens to have arrived by the time I'm there. And, of course, I'll be able to watch Voyage of the Damned with Nikki sometime soon....

Oh, and also buy my textbook for the quarter. Yay....*twirls finger* 'Course, I have no reason to complain, my textbook will be under $100. But that doesn't include whatever coursepacks my teachers will not inform us about until we sit down in class Monday/Tuesday/whenever my first class is.

I saw Murder Mystery dinner kits at MegaFoods, and I was thinking and debating buying one....I just don't know whether it would be used if I bought one....There are a pasta-restaurant, a luau, a backyard grill, a fancy-wine dinner, and a snow-resort themes...I may go ahead and buy one and if it doesn't get used...then it'll be saved until there can be a use for it. *shrugs*

I've driven my mother's Caliber (which is kind of a smaller version of an SUV-body vehicle) twice now. I think I might be more comfortable driving a smaller vehicle; I just felt the tiniest bit unsafe driving it.

And now, as of 4:10PM, the C:drive is......10% defragmented. *sigh*

Edit 7:02PM: So, um, aaaaappppppaaaaarrrreeeennnnttttlllllyyyy I am unable to go one Winter Break without power outages. The power went out at about 5:45, and didn't come back on until 6:50 or so. Not the longest I've ever gone without power, and right now it's not the worst thing happening in the State or on the West Coast, but..grr. One winter break without power outages. That's all I ask. Really. And the power outage disrupted the disk defragmenting which, at the time the power went out, was at around 16-18% complete. Needless to say, it's not getting done this weekend. Maybe the next time I'm home, which is the Martin Luther King day weekend (huzzah for public institutions, and not private ones which don't celebrate it like PLU [sorry Nicole and Jared; you hear it every year, but us UW-students do get gloating rights since you do get out mid-May]).

[restaurant owner] glances down at Judge. "Dog stays here."
"Dog comes," I respond.
"Not in my restaurant," Luigi insists.
"He's a service dog, he can't stay outside."
Luigi leans close, a couple of inches away from my face. "You're blind?"
"Color-blind," I reply. "He tells me when the traffic lights change." --My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Was a sheep that mooed today: I pre-ordered Harry Potter 7 at Barnes & Noble. I kinda wanted to buy it at Costco, because there it'd be about the same price B&N were offering for members, and what with requiring membership to purchase anything at Costco outside the food court there'd be (theoretically) less people able to lay their hands on a copy. But I decided I wanted to buy at least one HP book at an actual bookstore, as I haven't done for the most part with the others. I'm a duck with strange thought-processes, yes I am.

My sister and I also went by Target today, where they were having some sort of summer sale or whatnot. Some of their (cheaper) plates, bowls, and cups were on clearance, 4 plates/bowls/cups for $1.38. I should really go back and get some for the next school year. That and possibly a DVD rack, so that I can replace the DVDs currently on a bookshelf with the piles of books currently taking residence on my floor. My sister bought one that actually rolls under the bed; I'm not entirely sure I'm bought with that one, especially since it was a pain to put the screws in, but we'll see. It all depends on how much space I have in my room.

The 2nd year Korean class I'm hoping to take is (last I checked) one person short of the room capacity limit, which is 4 more than the class enrollment-size. And I'm still not able to enroll in it, because I'm overloading on credits this autumn quarter so that I can get back on track credits-wise. *sigh* maybe they'll change rooms to accommodate for class-enrollment....

Summer break is going by slowly and fearsomely dull. I really need to find something to do......

"I think as a human being... Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to." -Alanna of Trebond, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

Daine] frowned, remembering. "[My heart] made too much noise. I wanted it to quiet down so I could talk with the dolphins."
"Do you hear her?" Numair asked the clouds. "She wanted to talk to dolphins, so she stopped her own blessed heart! Mithros, Mynoss, and Shakith!" -Wild Magic

“Sergent Domitan, tell me these children aren’t the result of your squad’s Scanran frolics,” Kel heard Raoul say cheerfully. “Though I do admit, some of them look a little old to be yours.”
“Well, sir, my men helped,” Dom said, the picture of boyish mischief.

"It appalls me to say this, but for the first time I find myself in agreement with Sir Nealan." - Lord Wyldon of Cavall; -Lady Knight

Slave Woman: "So were you always mad, or did it come on you when you was took?"
Aly [daughter of Lady Knight Alanna, who, when grumpy, always claimed she was insane for trying for Knighthood]: "I'm told it runs in the family." -Trickster's Choice

Just finished selling my soul to the University Bookstore, a.k.a. buying my textbooks for next quarter. The bookstore really needs to return more than just 8% at the end of the year for Merchandise credit for it to totally worth it. *sigh*

Spring break was alright; I spent a lot of it home. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were spent outside the house doing a variety of TV shopping, though Mom didn't buy any. It'll probably happen while I'm up here. If I had the money I'd buy my mother the 52" flat-screen TV at Circuit City, but....$5000? Not really in my savings account. We also went to this Nike Clearance Store down in Centralia, where I got 2 pairs of Nike shoes and bought my mother an extra-large winter coat for ~$80. A bad deal? I think not. We went to Shipwreck Beads after that, much to my mother's annoyance. She doesn't think my sister's craft hobby is very productive; she might be right. *shrugs* Ironically, though, it was our mother who delayed us in the store looking at all the beads and stuff rather than my sister.

I wanted to buy a box or something to hold my DVDs in, but sadly there wasn't anything at Target that would do or fit in our room. Maybe if/when I get a room to myself either this coming year or the one after I'll invest in a DVD rack. Til then, a shoebox, a Suncoast bag, and leaving my Friends series on the bookshelf shall have to work. In spite of it, my sister bought Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels for me at Borders. I don't really like that bookstore; my friends enjoy it, but I'm a B&N customer all the way. I'm just sad that the B&N down in Olympia doesn't have a DVD selection; maybe they'll purchase the empty store next to it, tear down the wall between the two, and expand.....*hopes*

The tree outside our window is no longer brown branches with little green spouts on it; it's got actual leaves and what-have-you. I can't wait to see the Quad and all its pretty little cherry blossoms; of course, it'll have to wait until the afternoon, when I'm awake and not crabby about having to wake up at 7:15 for my 8:30 class. It's sad, how far my sleeping habits have degenerated. I've gone from staying up til 1:30 in the morning and waking at 6:30 my senior year of high school to feeling unrested unless I get 8+ hours of sleep now. How terrible.....

I'm taking two religion courses, which I'm sure was stated in an earlier entry, and while I'm tempted to change my Intro to the New Testament class (and get a later one so I don't have to wake up at 7:15 5 days a week), I think it'll provide an interesting contrast to my Eastern Religions one. I only hope the teacher makes "studying the New Testament" a lot more fun than it sounds. He seems prepared, at least; he has an entire course website up that lists the assignments, reading, etc. etc. with a detailed calendar of what we do each day. I'm good with the preparation, though looking at the homework and knowing I have to write a 4-5 page essay makes me sad a little.

I told myself that I'd finish CCP this break, and maybe even get a little headway on ICC or Rat Pack. Instead, I started a new crossover between Mortal Kombat and Buffy which still has no real plot, resolution, or development, tinkered a bit on N3iT, and pretty much nothing else. I have very bad habits. And Muses. I think my Muses have formed an insurgency against me. *sigh*


Everyone: (walking down what seems like endless stairs to the Yeerk pool)
Marco: Some superior aliens. You'd think they could have put in an elevator.

Cassie: How long until your people return to Earth?
Ax: (hesitates) One of your years. Maybe two.
Jake: Two years! (looks stricken) Five kids against an enemy that has destroyed half the galaxy? Five of us?
Ax: (smiles) Six, my Prince.
Marco: Six. Well then, with six it shouldn't be any problem. --The Animoprhs, by K.A. Applegate (I really need to read the last few books of this series, just to give me some sense of closure...)

...The University says I don't have to declare my major until junior year. But see, their logic is completely screwy because BY your junior year, you're either locked into one department or you get to look forward to being a 5th-year senior (or 6th, or more). So, I'm trying to come to some sort of semblance of a decision as to what I'm interested in, and YAY for me, none of them have impressive paychecks (note: that IS sarcasm in that sentence. I wouldn't mind not needing to live in a one-room apartment and eating Top Ramen the rest of my life). But doing what I want to do with my life is much more preferable than winding up stuck doing what my mother wants me to do with my life, which is to be a lawyer. I have no interest whatsoever in that, though I have entertained the idea of being a judge. But... it's like, "Ooh, judge." and then, "Ooh, shiny tassel!" So I don't think I have the right amount of desire to be a judge.

I came to the UW for 2 reasons: 1) They taught the Korean language, which is a huge plus for me, and B) They had a Creative Writing program. While I'm in the process of fulfilling the former, it's the latter that's causing me to freak out. I would first need to be accepted into their English Lit program, which is competitive in and of itself, and then apply to the Creative Writing program from there. And I can only do that TWICE. So, if I'm rejected twice, I'm stuck being only an English Lit major. Which is NOT what I want to do. I despise analyzing text. I like WRITING books, particularly fiction and not poetry. This means I would need to declare a different major, and early at that so I can get all the requirements done.

Cinema studies is something I'm considering. I've been interested in films for a bit (not nearly as avidly as my friend Melissa) so it isn't like I'd absolutely hate it. It'd be awesome if I could turn some of my ideas into screenplays and direct films for them, or something. The major has some minimum requirements to enter, but it's definitely way more open than English CW. If I chose this route, I'd probably be able to still take some other classes that I want, and not have to worry about not completing the requirements in time. (Fun little fact for people with somewhat crude humor to laugh at: Cinema studies falls under Comparative Literature [why exactly is a mystery to me], and whenever the Comp. Lit needs photocopied textbooks the acronym for Comp. Lit is C LIT. Get it? hehe, yes, it's very, very bad).

In English we went over BLAST which is essentially a really long, contradictory list of things the Vorticists hate and therefore "blast" along with a list of some things they love, or "bless." Several things made me wonder what the hell they were smoking, particularly the way they format it like they were kindergartners with scraps of paper and glue and no direction, but otherwise it's funny. An excerpt:
( BLESS the HAIRDRESSER )

Weird, isn't it? They also had a manifesto written in it, which had a few things that made me think. Three things among them (one of which is used as a quote below) were: 9)We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy. 10)We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb. Another segment that interested me was:
( TO SUFFRAGETTES )

There's more to it, where they ask the women to stop destroying art etc. etc., but the bolded text is what interested me. I know there are people out there who think fanfiction and other forms of fandom-obsession is blasphemy against the fandom, and these lines also apply to far more important things like gay rights or banning books simply because they go against your beliefs (Harry Potter). But as the advice says, stick to what you understand, or you may ruin good things. What I just wrote could easily be shot back at me, and people could say, "You are destroying the creator's vision with your non-canon imagination and making all these stupid, unfounded 'ships and pairings." I think, so long as people aren't yelling in your ear to write/read/support fanfiction or pairings, you shouldn't argue what you don't understand about fanfiction and leave it be. You could be stifling someone's imagination that way, and they could very well be the next Douglas Adams (yay! RIP Adams) or (*shudder* Heaven help us all) J.R.R. Tolkien. or (*harder shudder*) Tolstoy.

I freely admit it. I only wrote this entry because I'm avoiding my Java homework. Damn. I've got nothing else to write about---WAIT! Haha, I do!

*the audience moans and wishes the writer would just shut up*

I want to be more involved in the UW than I was last year, and so far....I've failed. But Vanessa and I are checking out this BodyNBrain group, which does essentially Yoga, meditation, and a lot of other stuff, tomorrow, so that gets me out of the room and meeting people. Also went to a Root Beer Float thing last night on our Floor (though I admit it, Vanessa had to drag me out; still, I HAD FANFICTION TO WRITE!!! I can't help it when the Muse chooses to be active!!!) though on the flipside I had to suffer through 1 1/2 hours of Flavor of Love, because that's what the get-together focused on. Blegh! The inanity! There's also going to be Yoga and Canoe trips in the future, though, so I'm planning on going to those (so long as they provide life jackets, anyhow, ^.^) of my own free will--as long as I don't have anything else planned.

I'm trying desperately to write on my WIPs for my fanfiction and the one-shot with its sequel that refuses to be written, but sadly that wasn't what I was inspired to write yesterday. It's a little piece (starting on its 4th page, though, so I don't think it counts anymore as "little") providing a bit of backstory on Stryker and the circumstances behind Jax recruiting him into the OIA. *all the FF fans and other people who don't give a damn about MK/Stryker walk away rolling their eyes* I don't know why exactly it's taking 4 pages to write, but apparently my fingers just didn't want to leave the keyboard. Kind of frustrating, really; when I open one of my WIPs my fingers just don't want to move anywhere on the keyboard, but when I have a new plot-bunny they're all, "YAY, free-rein, no-holding back! Just type until the writer's roommate drags her off to Target or Root Beer Float nites!" (we also went to Target last night, too, fyi).

Okay. Now I REALLY don't have anymore to write. Damn.

"We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours." --BLAST (Think about it. Think about it in terms of the current political parties today. Which do you 100%! agree with, no questions asked, would jump right off the bridge if they did it first?)

The one good thing about taking an insane amount of English classes....is that the "textbooks" are usually just literary fiction that Barnes & Noble sells for cheaper than the university bookstore.

Huzzah for saving $11.05 on 3 out of 8 books.

The Borders store that recently opened in this area seems pretty cool, but I think I'm going to be a B&N customer all the way. And the Bed, Bath, & Beyond store? o.O TOTALLY made me lost. All the shelves go pretty much to the ceiling, so it's not like you can stand on your tiptoes and say, "Oh, there's the so-and-so aisle that I need." No, it's pretty much a frickin' labyrinth--once you go in, you gotta follow the path and go out on the other side. But it's got lots of stuff there--didn't buy anything, but I have almost a week before I head off to school. I am being led to believe we still need surge protectors....Unless my darned roomie went to *Walmarts* again.... *cue dark, menacing glare*

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." --Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

Well, Mount St. Helens didn't erupt while my friends and I were there!

It was kind of a tame field trip, but that was okay. We were all going mostly to hang out with each other, not to take everything in and enjoy the mountain. We swung by Lindsey's new place first which looks VERY awesome (which also means that when her family finishes fixing it up it'll look even better, lol). Then we went to an observatory (Coldwater Ridge, I believe--like I said, wasn't really paying attention to the field trip), went around the Weyerhauser museum, and then went outside and played on the jungle gym ^.^ We acted *very* much our ages. 19&20 year olds are supposed to jump up and down on bridges and hop on some weird little bouncy-thing, right? Hehe.

After the jungle gym we checked out the elk-viewing part, but there was so much fog that if there were any, we wouldn't be able to see them. So we chose to leave for another observatory and eat lunch there.

Got to the observatory (Johnson Ridge, I think) and found that you had to pay to get in. So we chose to say 'no' and ate our lunch outside in a convenient little nook. And there was a $95 fine for picking flowers, lol! We were very amused by that. Lindsey was uber-nice and bought us Meconi's subs when we probably could have done with something else, and they had the snickerdoodle and peanut butter cookies my sister cooked up the night before. We had a really long conversation about religion, relationships, boys (which doesn't really go under the heading of relationships), and some other stuff. 'Twas very enjoyable.

Rain started drizzling, so we forsook the lunch-area and decided to head back to civilization. On the way back north to Olympia we decided to stalk Nicole at her work---er, *cough* I mean, "shop at Mervyn's." She was ecstatic to see us and took her 15 minute break to talk with us. Afterwards I was going to wait for my sister, but the four of us decided to have fun going up and down the escalators backwards first.

....Yes. We are 19&20 year old college sophomores. Doesn't the future frighten you?

Came home after a grocery trip, waited about 4 hours for Eureka to come on, and I had my Eureka-fix. (WARNING: SPOILER FOR THE NEW EPISODE AHEAD!) But as soon as Jack got ambushed by the speedster in his own home, I knew it was Dylan. It was just too predictable. But otherwise, EXCELLENT episode, with plenty of Jack vs. Nathan moments. Poor Nathan got his own handed to him twice; once when Jack was in the cafeteria and the other time with the tape recorder. Ha, take THAT Nobel laureate in mathematics!

Now I get to look forward to dinner with mis amigos tonight. Nicole, Jared, and Lindsey all head off to college tomorrow *curbs the jealousy that pops up* so we wanted one last hurrah with each other. Poor Lindsey; she gets a red-eye flight to Pennsylvania. Take care!

"I don't think, sir, that you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience." --Jane Eyre