Yesterday my stepmom and I went out for lunch and some shopping; we talked about relationships, and I told her all about Allen and Matt #2... It's been a long time since we've spent time together like that, and I don't think we've ever really talked about relationships before, either. I think we both had a really great time. That's about the highlight of the past few days; Belle Chere just ended, and I only went there long enough to visit the anime store with Mollie and pick up the "Escaflowne - Lovers Only" OST. ^_^; My auctions are at $23 YAY and I'm getting my wisdom teeth out the day after tomorrow ACK

You wanna know what I've been doing all day? Well grab your wallet and find out.

Work last night was particularly chaotic, but in the middle of crunch time, Lexi, one of my friends from UGA, came in with her parents to eat! Neither of us could believe it; she's here visiting the Biltmore House with her family (the main reason that these next two weeks are the peak season for the restaurant, too), but had no idea I worked at the restaurant. I surprised them with a tiramisu after they ate and they were very happy. ^_^ Yesterday I got not only a letter and drawing from Mollie but a CD of Jin/Hwoarang themes from Devan! ;_; What a great day it was! Tonight is my third night of work out of a row of six. Blaiugh. But then, that means $$$$$...
To eventually stick on a site or something I just jotted down my favorite ten albums ever, but I'll slap them here for now in case I forget. In no particular order:

Yasunori Mitsuda - Xenogears OST
Garbage - Version 2.0
Various - Tekken Tag Tournament Direct Audio
Yoko Kanno - Cowboy Bebop OST1
Madonna - Ray of Light
Spice Girls - Spiceworld
The Carpenters - Singles Collection 1969-1981
George Michael - Older
Esthero - Breath from Another
Nobuo Uematsu - Final Fantasy VI OST

THE HOUSE AND CAR ARE MINE FOR TWO WHOLE DAYS HAH HAH HAH. But no really, Dad and Suzy are down in Athens closing on the condo and cleaning it up-- I'm stuck up here only because I have workshifts all weekend. Right now I'm downloading the Tekken 4 intro from Tekken Zaibatsu. I am way too excited to play this game. And I'm RPing with Devan which is always insanely fun. <3
I had two funky dreams last night. In the first one, I was in the Utena anime. I think I was hired to fix the metal gate to the school, and as I was doing it I talked with Akio and Utena and stuff. o_o Anime self-insertion? WTF sort of lame-ass loser okatu dream is that? In the second dream it was apparently my birthday, and as a surprise, someone had planned a giant city-wide (back in Falls Church) treasure hunt sort of thing for me and my friends to do. Except they must not have known me very well, because besides my friends, along with me were people I knew from school that I wasn't too close to. Eventually people from the Buffy cast showed up (like Sarah Michelle Gellar *_*) and helped me out, all buddy-buddy with me, and I realized that that was logical because I was one of the stars on the show. I don't remember any of the little hunting events themselves except one in which someone I knew was looking something up on a computer in DOS, and using a big clunky DOS version of Winamp to play "Yume Mireba Yume wo Yume Janai." ...I wish I could blame all this on having eaten something odd before bed, but I didn't eat anything. So I guess I'll blame it on that.

This site is hilarious: Anti-Rinoa Central

I went to a baseball game tonight! It was with my parents and my father's coworkers, as some sort of casual business function. I thought I would hate it, but there is actually something refreshing to be found in sitting outside, having junk food for dinner, listening to crowds hoot and hollar and watching uniformed jocks trot around scratching themselves. Since the food and alcohol were already paid for, though, a lot of the coworkers were getting drunk by the seventh inning. They started throwing popcorn and peanuts at each other like little kids... It really disgusts me to watch what alcohol does to people. I've never had alcohol yet, and I have never planned to either, though, so it's no skin off my back. In any case, the home team won the game, 6-3.

The 265 doujinshi came in the mail today and most of them are a) xeroxed pages stapled together, b) notecard-sized clumps of badly-done sketches, c) high-quality but text, or d) high-quality but nothing explicit. DAMN THE DOUJINSHI MARKET! ;_; I am very sad.

Oh and by the way, my and Beccu's 265 doujinshi are gonna be delivered tomorrow or Tuesday! :D WE'RE IN THE MONEY, BABY

I saw AI a little while ago, and it was really disappointing. It starts out great, and then it just gets... lame. u_u I'll talk about it later.

I guess I oughta say something. e_e Since injuring myself on the Bread Knife of Despair my finger's been hurting and bandaged and while I've been online and typing a lot, I just didn't have the initiative to type anything in the blog. But I've just been doing the usual, anyway. Today I bought Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for the PSX which is even cooler than the arcade version was and Alan was awesome enough to tell me the following, which makes me quiet chipper:
"Garbage's new album, 'Beautiful Garbage,' is due out September 2001. The track listing is: Shut Your Mouth, Androgyny, Can't Cry These Tears, Til The Day I Die, Cup of Coffee, Silence Is Golden, Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!), Breaking Up The Girl, Drive You Home, Parade, Nobody Loves You, Untouchable, So Like A Rose." Having been waiting for this CD since, oh, the second one came out, I am very very very very excited.

What a day. @_@ I awoke this morning to find at my door not only my luggage but also my awesome new shoes delivered and both those things made me very happy... I had my wisdom teeth looked at and they're all gonna come out later in the month (eep)... And at work tonight, I gashed my first finger on my left hand with the (serrated) bread knife badly enough to have my boss end my shift an hour or so earlier than normal. Right now it's bandaged up and hurting and I'm angry at myself for being stupid and clumsy. -_- On the bright side, I've been reconciling with my online friends (if you've been reading up on the saga of the past few days) and I also get to see Becca tomorrow, a thought that can always cheer me up.

It's been an exhausting day. After my farewell brunch, when I was saying goodbye to everyone, my grandfather hugged me. It's the first time I can ever remember him doing that; on the ride to the airport I got pretty emotional over it. I'm going back to Virginia for Thanksgiving but there's no telling if he'll still be alive by then, so that might turn out to be my last memory of him.
...But let's move on, huh? The flights back were exhausting and they lost my luggage. Thanks a million, US Air! I'm just hoping they'll find it... Once I was back I hung out with Becca and finished those drawings I've been talking about, so they'll be up in aaron'site3 soon. And now it's bedtime, dammit!

I signed off at 1 last night, opened my sketchbook, and before I knew it it was 3AM and I had a freshly inked and Prisma'd picture! It turned out pretty neat and was also great Prisma practice. I went to sleep feeling proud of myself.
This afternoon Joe, Jenn and I drove to old town Alexandria and walked around ducking into the small stores. I bought a book about creative writing in a used book store and for my dad's birthday (which was on the 4th, so I wasn't there), I got him a gorgeous leather-bound journal since he's always talking about how he wants to write more. It cost $30, which feels a little steep, but I really think he'll like it, and by the same token it's nice enough to guilt him into using it. ^_^ My grandfather was a published writer and someday I think I would like to be one also; I guess it just runs in the family. After I came home I did some shopping with my mom and we had dinner out, and then I went out again with Jenn and Beppe to see "Shrek." Cute movie. The CG is astounding (but nobody's clothing ever wrinkled, it reminded me of my own drawing style ^_^;) and the Princess rules.
Now it's 11:30 and I'm home again. My flight for NC tomorrow is at 2:45 and so I ought to get some packing done, but I don't feel like it yet. What I do feel is a little lonely. I've already said bye to all my friends, Mom is asleep, Becca isn't online, and none of my online friends are talking to me since I have yet to apologize for my alleged maliciousness, so there's not really anyone to talk to. Once in a blue moon when I'm feeling down I'll put on some sad music and just cry for a while, and afterward I always end up feeling a little better. Right now, though, I don't feel like doing that. I guess the upside to having nothing to do now is that I'll have less reason to delay packing and will end up going to bed earlier. I guess that could be called an upside...

BIG NEWS! I was half-right about that Rabbit in the Moon song-- the song does exist, simply under a different name. The song is actually a remix of Tori Amos's "Precious Things" by Rabbit in the Moon, subtitled "Out of Body Experience." I am the bomb.
Why all this stife over a song? Well, not only is it awesome, but it's also used in a pretty amazing Cowboy Bebop video that Manna currently hosts on her site. That too is an excellent download, if you've seen the series or don't mind massive spoilers. ;_; Bebop... (insert lengthy, emotional rant about the show's greatness here)

Today was on the complete other end of the spectrum from yesterday... most likely due to the fact that I was away from my family all day. Alan of classroom2a.com drove down so we could meet and we hung out all day! We hit the thrift stores, got lunch out, went to the used CD store, went to the anime store, went to the mall, and lastly watched a couple episodes of Gravitation before he had to go. We ate at Uno's, and one of the super-popular girls from my class, Keri, was working there as a server. We were always too different to try to talk to each other while in school, but we had a great talk for a few minutes. She was a lot nicer than I remembered-- or took the time to notice-- her being; I'm really glad I got to see her again. (Later she came back to tell me that our server thought I was cute, and before we left our server gave us a free dessert. She was so nice!) Among the couple shirts I got is a t-shirt with a comic book-style panel of Dick Tracy and Clark Kent kissing, and the caption reads "Clark wants Dick. Dick wants condoms." And I thought Goodwill was a children-safe store!
The Random Bin: 1) I'll have a couple of unfinished drawings to complete once I'm home again, and I also did a little drawing tonight for the first time in a couple days. Since I don't think it's awful, it cheered me up a little. 2) I've spent the past couple days looking everywhere for a song called "Stealth" by Rabbit in the Moon and am now convinced that it is just a figment of my imagination. 3) I swear that Janet Jackson's "China Love" samples a Seiken Densetsu 3 song and will find proof of this once I'm back in NC. 4) Becca I miss you crazybad and can't wait to see your face when I give you your present. *ohohoho*

I think... to grab to a rusty screwdriver and jam it repeatedly into my eye sockets would leave me feeling more emotionally sound than I am right now. Overall, this entire trip has been one big anxiety fest. All of us came here to see dying relatives, after all, so one might think that that would considerably destroy the fun-factor to begin with. Not to mention as soon as you get a lot of my family together, they start badmouthing each other when people's backs are turned, and I can't stand to listen to that. I just want to be out of here. All I brought is some music and my sketchbook and I'm going absolutely stir-crazy... I don't go back to NC until Sunday, and that seems like a damn eternity.
Also bothering me is the fact that several of my friends online have thought that I've been acting mean lately. (Note that I was also the last person to find out about this.) I don't know what I did wrong, but I plan to fix it however I can; until then it's just kind of hanging over my head like everything else. Two more days. God, I want to be out of here.

Mom took me shopping! *_* We went to Michaels and I got a new sketchbook and six Prisma markers (bringing my total to 35), and then we went to the mall and I bought shoes and in the end, a good time was had by all. <3 I love my mama. Since I have nothing to do here, I've just been spending the days listening to music, drawing, sitting around online and also doing a lot of napping. A lot of napping. I have some good stuff to scan when I get back to NC this Sunday!

Hello from Virginia! I am back in my old room, missing my own computer greatly, but nevertheless doing fine. I finally went to bad at 3:30 last night and got up at 6:45 to get ready for the flight so now I think I'm off to nap for a while. The flights themselvs were pretty uneventful. More later.