Hum ho, chillin at my mom's. It's late and I should go to bed, but instead I'm "surfing the web." I rarely surf because who needs more than facebook and google reader to kill time? But tonight I am watching Spaced on Hulu, purchasing things on Amazon, reading blogs, listening to itunes, and playing spider solitaire all at the same time. No wonder I don't want to go to bed, this is putting my brain into overdrive.
I also do not want to go to bed lately because I don't really want the days to be going by so quickly. This weather has robbed me of a good portion of the summer, and I still have Big Plans to carry out, dependent on at least some sun, but not enough time to do so. And working, man, it's kind of disrupting to my leisure schedule.
Thus far, the summer has been scattered with some extreme highs and some extreme lows, and I look forward to adding to the highs. Thank god for friends, old and new. Soon I will be a whole year older (that's how birthdays work, right?)! And soon I will move out of town, I hope. I mean, I have a lot of decorations to hang and my current living situation is not really adequate. Also it will be fun to not live in the ol' m-town again.
I know it's silly to get attached to material objects, but I am attached to "my camera." In quotes, because it has been three different cameras since 2002: a Canon Powershot S200 Digital ELPH, whose blurry pictures and slow processing I defended until January of 2007, when I got the Canon Powershot SD800 IS. In May of 07, I dropped the camera onto some cement during senior week, days before graduation! Clearly I needed a camera, so I convinced my dad to get an identical camera that my brother could then receive as a high school graduation gift the next month, after my camera returned from its repair with Canon.
Because I had a camera, and enjoyed taking photos, over the course of the years, I ended up being the unspoken designated photographer for any special events or outings, or on any run of the mill days when I saw a photo op and happened to have my camera with me. The thing is, a camera is an unusual material object. It captures moments wrapped up with emotions and memories, which sort of transcend the material.
This current camera and I have covered a lot of ground and been through a lot of moments, and so last July when I lost my camera on a beach in Burlington, I was pretty sad. Hoping that some kind soul in Vermont had picked up my camera on the beach, I wrote a "personals" ad in the Seven Days "I Spy," cleverly personifying the camera to make it work, and appealing to the kind soul's sense of humor. After a few weeks of checking for replies, I gave up. But a few months later, I sat down at the computer, bored, and checked the I Spy site. There it was! "Canon SD800 IS, lonely on the beach, I thought you left with someone else..." or something like that. I could not believe my eyes. So I wrote to the newspaper and asked if I really had to pay the fee to subscribe to the personals thingy which was like $20 for me and $20 for the other person for us to get in touch. Another shocker: after hearing my story, the woman at the paper broke the rules and sent my contact information to the write of the other ad, and he got in touch with me, and mailed me my camera after I confirmed that all the pictures of cats were mine. (As an aside, perhaps this is one of the reasons I think Vermont is amazing.)
Seven months and thousands of photos later, I go to turn on my camera, and nothing happens. No error message, no crunching sound, no power light. Aaaaagh. I have tried many fixes, and now I am trying to decide between paying about $130 to repair the same camera, paying $160 for a refurbished different model camera of the same year and similar specs, or $250 for a brand new middle of the line camera. It is tricky, because I am leaning towards the new camera, even though I don't really want to spend money, but I kind of feel like I am betraying my SD800 IS and leaving it behind. Sad sad. But I need a working camera!
Friends who are Harry Potter fans, and also everyone else, I am so excited. I wish more of you were around so I could share more of my excitement and discussion of the first six books before tomorrow. But I do look forward to talking to all of you once we are all through reading the book. I mean, I'm so excited, but I also am not looking forward to the let down of knowing that it's the last book. Sad. And I miss the idea of sitting around a round table in Buckland and talking about Harry Potter. My plan is to get to work very early tomorrow, pick up the book that I bought through the library, and start reading it before the pesky patrons come in and demand all kinds of service. I'm lucky that the other two people I'm working with are also Harry Potter fanatics. And none of us are going to have the book before work tomorrow. So maybe they'll let me read out loud to them. As long as no one walks in and tells us anything about it, I'll be alright. Except it's kind of going to be torture being there for four hours just waiting to go read. Also, why was I so stupid to not just plan on going to get it tonight at midnight?? Duh. I wish I had something Harry Potter-like to wear to work tomorrow! Maybe just some gold and maroon? Or, like, a locket from Slytherin? Not that I'd want that. But you know.
A list of things I am going to be doing, or hope to be doing in the next month or so: - Helping my mom move to Keene by August 1st: cleaning that house up, and packing up this house I've lived in for nearly 22 years! - Hopefully visiting New York at least one more time this summer, to see Carolyn, Tracy, Amanda, and whoever else might be there at the time. - Visiting Ximena at Wellesley! - Amanda visiting me??? - Chilling with my cousin Cora and making cheesy potatoes with her and my aunt. I am really very excited about doing that. - Flying to Chicago to see Lara and Amanda - and the windy city! - Watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the big screen! - Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and savoring the end of the series... - Finishing up a restaurant guide for the Pioneer Valley/Five College Area so my little brother Sam knows what's up when he arrives at UMass in the fall. - Keep on getting hours working at the library. - Have a bonfire! Any of you in Merrimack who want to come, you should. I need to wait for sometime after it's rained a bit, so it's not so completely dry out.
The house my mom is moving to is in a really cute neighborhood, across the street from a cemetery, and walking distance from downtown Keene, with all its cool downtown-ness. The house itself is pretty cool too. It's smaller than this house, and thus more manageable, but it doesn't have the same feeling as this house - obviously - as we have lived here for so long. My mom has lived her almost 30 years! And she helped make the plans to build it. The Keene house was built in 1907, and it's now 100 years later! It's had plenty of updating, though, which is nice, and means that it's not going to be falling apart. This house sold fast - one day less than 3 weeks - and to nice people. They told my mom she can come back anytime to dig up some of her gazillion plants that she's grown here. And to think my mom was worried about someone wanting to buy it.
Referring back to my last post, when I mentioned the weird movie Babysitter's Seduction, I would =like to ask if anyone has seen The Good Son (1993) starring Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood as ~10 year old boys. OhMyGod. That is most likely the strangest most creepy movie I've ever seen. Not only is the whole story creepy, but Macaulay Culkin is eerily good at being evil. And the ending?!?! (I saw it on TV last week and I couldn't turn it off because I hoped it would end well. I was disappointed.)
A quick update on my quest to find Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream: I found one pint in the back of the freezer at Market Basket a week ago, after getting lost for half an hour trying to find the store. But I did like the ice cream, and I would have it again.
Every day I work at the library, I have a favorite person who comes in and a least favorite. Today my favorite was a 5 or 6 year old boy who took care of the whole checking out books transaction while his mom looked for movies. He lifted the bag of children's books up to the counter, above his head, and then told me a story about the fish he used to have. Unfortunately, he also has a cat, and as he explained to me, "cats like to play with fish." I asked what happened, and he said his cat "played with the fish, and killed it!! AND the cat knocked over the entire bottle of water onto the floor, and it took FOREVER to clean it up. Cats can jump very high."
Well I've been home for a while now. 4 weeks I guess. I'm kind of getting sick of this town. I mean, in Merrimack, and even in Nashua, we couldn't find a coffee shop besides Dunkin Donuts. What is that? No iced tea, no iced coffee or anywhere to chill out for half an hour - freakin' lame, New Hampshire. However, some fun things have happened since I've been back, like my brother's high school graduation. And I drove to Queens to see Amanda and Giselle. Also, I started watching The Sopranos. And I've been hunting Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream Ben & Jerry's ice cream at every possible place, to no avail. And Carolyn and Dan and I went to the beach one day, which was really fun. However, I do miss being at Mount Holyoke and with my friends, but I like not having school work to think about. I gotta get it together and decide what I'm going to do in the fall. And hopefully my mom's house here in Merrimack will sell soon, and then I can help her move into her nice house in cool Keene. Meanwhile, what's the deal with the father from 7th Heaven being allowed to star in a movie in which he is a murderer and a babysitter seductress, when Jessica Biel got in trouble for being topless in a magazine. This movie is creepy. Also creepy: after some people had a showing at our house yesterday with the realtor, I found my one of my pearl earrings out of the jewelry box, sitting on top of my dresser. What are people doing touching my things? I guess I didn't really have a reason for posting.
I am officially bored. The tv at my house is apparently broken, which I wouldn't mind too much because we have 11 or 12 channels, with not much on, but now I can't watch DVDs on it, as I planned to do this evening. Instead, I figured I'd watch it on this computer, but that's not working, and I don't understand why. There is a DVD drive. I've spent at least an hour on the facebook today, and no one has updated anything recently, so I've just been going in circles there. I've read all the live journal posts on my friends' page for the last week, and checked my email several times. I could write a post about graduation, and everything surrounding that, but every time I try to do that, I get a little bummed out, and there's too much to organize in one post, anyway. I guess I should just go to bed. Maybe start one of the books I brought home. Speaking of which, do you have any good book recommendations?
I love senior week! Today is the first day I have had anything I am scheduled to do since last Thursday. I love this so much more than finals. But I have kept busy. Last Thursday, Amanda, Sarah, and I went to Boston to visit Kerry. We planned on going to the aquarium, but it was closing, so we went to Starbucks for a while and had a really nice, long dinner. I've watched a lot of movies, or at least TV shows, and started packing. Saturday we had a bonfire in the Torrey living room's fireplace, and ate banana boats (bananas sliced open, stuffed with marshmallows and chocolate chips, wrapped in foil, and placed in the coals). We played a game, and watched Bring It On, and slept! Then went to Bueno y Sano. I saw Borat again the other night, and I really enjoyed it more watching it with other people, rather than seeing it by myself. Yesterday was a perfect day to be on top of Mount Holyoke (all 942 ft). As my mom said, it was probably one of the "top 10" days of the year, and I'm glad the bbq had been postponed for better weather. I realized that yesterday I had three meals. At 3ish, I had veggie dogs. At 6ish, I had ice cream from McCray's. And at 9:30 I had free Chef Jeff cookies and strawberries. I'd say that's a pretty well balanced dining schedule. Last night Ximena, Katie, Sarah, Jen, Erin, Katherine, and I played sardines outside! I am so glad. I wanted to do that, and it was, as I have said, perfect weather. We never realized how many creepy places exist on our campus! And then they watched The Office with me, which made me really happy because, I don't know if you know this, but, I love The Office. This morning I saw another transferred friend from first year, and it was a nice breakfast. I've been taking a lot of pictures, but my camera seems broken! I can't believe it. I really, really need it to work for graduation weekend. Now I will pack and get some laundry done, before tonight's commencement choir rehearsal. Every time I walk around the campus I get a little teary-eyed thinking about how I will not see the campus or my friends next year, and it is going to be so weird. So I am just going to enjoy it now.
What a good weekend! Today was really a great Sunday, as Sundays should be. I mean, I didn't do a lot of work but I did work on the glee club scrapbook which will mean I am less worried about that during the week. Senior ball last night was amazing! Forget about all those other lame dances and parties, this was the best! I am glad so many of my friends could be there, seniors and others. I was also glad that I got to go to the 5 college film festival on Friday, which I never would have gone to if Tracy hadn't wanted to go! I think that's a pretty good thing to check of my to-do list. Also, ice cream is always good, and then I got to go to the ABC, which is another item checked off my list. It is a good bar, as far as I am concerned. I don't go to many though, so it could be an incorrect judgement. I am having so much fun, but the time is going by soooo fast, and I really wish that it would slow down. That is all.
Psycho is crazy. I will have to shower tomorrow morning when the sun is shining. Bright. And when Norman Bates isn't there. No, but seriously, whatta movie. Anthony Perkins! Today I called the company who made my bike lock, because the lock broke. It was still functional, I just figured I ought to tell them since it was brand new. They are sending me a new one, immediately! And a better one! I was impressed. OnGuard Locks, guys. Why could I not sleep last niiiight.
excited
busy