Happy Chinese New Year!!

I am a little late, but it ain't CNY until the fat lion dances. 

That was me today!

Spent pretty much the whole day doing store blessings. What happens is lions run around inside a store, bringing good luck to the whole place. Sometimes there's an altar set up with oranges for us to peel into flower shapes, red envelopes to pick up, or lettuce to throw around. 

The red envelopes are the fun part. Sometimes they're hung on the ceiling, so the lions have to do a headsitter...which is where the head player sits on the head of the tail player. If that wasn't obvious. How do we get up there? The head jumps and the tail lifts--the lift power depends on the head's jump and fatness. 

Oranges are the most annoying crap ever. You know those Cuties that people take to school? The Easy Peel!, Super Sweet!, Seedless! ones? Well, not every orange is like that. Take your bog-standard orange. It has a thick skin and the peel crumbles into little pieces. Plus the juice squirts out like crazy. I punctured an orange in this really pretty jewelry store, and juice dripped all over the counter and the spotless carpet. Oops. And then I spilled water, crashed into a few doorways, was molested by packs of children who wanted to "pet the pretty dragon, " and accidentally whacked a few people with the lion head when I couldn't see what I was doing.

And all of this bestows a blessing on the store. Go figure.

Miscellany

Hawk, is your made-up-number-of-computers e on purpose, or was that a freudian slip?


Speaking of Freud, we started learning about him in psychology, which led to one of the most AWKWARD class lessons I have EVER had.


EVER.


I...I don't think I want to hear about my teacher's small children, and where they are in relation to Freud's psychosexual stages in graphic detail like that ever again (it was the phallic stage, by the way).

It was hilarious, though. And my teacher is pretty awesome.

In other news, the Eyrie will be getting a bit of print time in the school newspaper. Exciting, huh? See what connections can get you?

Oblivious

I didn't even realize that CNY was this week @_@. Thanks, Quail. 

But as a new year has passed, I started pondering all the advancements of humanity.

Just twenty years ago, creating nearly-living organic molecules that perform almost lifelike processes would have been the stuff of cheesy, $2-million profit sci-fi movies. Students would be lucky to own a tape Walkman--meanwhile, many of my peers carry their iPhones and iTouches around school while they let their obsolete iPod Nanos rot at home. A plasma screen TV and and average of 2.71* computers per household was the stuff of a hyperactive imagination. Britney Spears' oscillations between insanity and "queen of pop comeback" would not have been the hot topic of discussion. Fifteen-year old stars like Selena Gomez wouldn't be featured in films that contain not-so-subtly sexual moments (All right, I admit it. I caught some of Another Cinderella Story last night when I was bumming around, procrastinating piano). 

On the other hand, we may just be digging in our fingernails as we slide backwards down the muddy slope, achieving a few worthy distinctions, but, for the most part, being inexorably drawn back into the primordial cesspools where we originated from. 

*Ok, I made that up. But it sounds reasonable.

Jolly good, wot wot?

So, today I have one of those dinner parties to help with.

You know, one of those. The ones where your parents say "Let's invite a few friends over for Chinese New Year. It'll be fun!"

Except they neglect to mention that a few = 6, and each one is bringing a family, for a total of 26 people.

I don't know how Blondie does all her party planning business without going absolutely INSANE.

Well, I have another minute of rest before helping out with cooking and cleaning and setting up the garage for gaming. Oh boy oh boy!


On a side note, I've been starting some commissions. Exciting stuff! :3

Relief often causes more problems than it solves

Ask the citizens of starving nations where care packages dropped by "benevolent" American planes cause numerous concussions because of the poor aim characteristic of their nation (Dick Cheney anyone?)

Yes, it is finally second semester for me. Which should be a great feeling, but it just means the approaching of more deadlines. 

I have so much to say, but the readers lack the attention span to read it all. 

This is not an insult to you. I love you and appreciate you and regret not posting about you all in my Thanksgiving post. But SO many things have happened in the past few days since I've blogged that even the most patient of friends would most likely walk out on me in a huff if I were to truly reveal what I'm thinking all the time now.

But because this is the internet, I can be a complete jerk to strangers. =] Thank you.

First and foremost--Gunn Titans WAWOOT! Quiz Kids round 3 has been won against MSJ. Hawk deeply regrets that she was not as much help as she would like to be, but she will definitely step it up against Harker for the final match.

One problem. My Certificate of Merit test is on the same day...and those at the Certificate of Merit office only allow specification of either a "morning" (anywhere between 8 and 11:30) and an "afternoon" (until 5) time. Just great. It's a 2-hour test, so requesting a morning time could very well cause a spillover. Besides, cranking out a 1.5 hour music theory test will wear out my brain (since music category questions have yet to make an appearance in the question set, it's unlikely that this information would be useful (though as a wise teacher called Mr. Stallings once said, there is no such thing as useless knowledge. Oh man. I have so many inside jokes I'm tempted to whip out now, but I shall suppress the urge). Additionally, playing through 30 pages of music at my speed (Hammertime, I like to call it--hammers? pianos? get it? ha..ha) will wear out my buzzer fingers.

There is no way I'm giving up this test. I've played piano for 10 years and this is what I've been aiming for the entire time--my level 10 test. Maybe somehow I'll be able to pull a miracle out of my ass and memorize the 25 pages of music I'm still lacking..and maybe I'll be invited to State Convention again. Or at the very least, the Branch Honors recital. It's doubtful, and I'm looking at memorizing only 3 pieces (still about 15 pages) to just pass the test and hit the Advanced (yes, capitalized) level. 

But the alternative is to ditch my Quiz Kids team. Yes, I do mope about how useless I am for a large part of the contest. But the fact is, I do help during the collaboration round, I know a compendium of the most random information ever (which usually helps when divining what John Keats and ancient pottery have in common), and without me, there is a lack in the general sciences and lit department. Perhaps the defeatist attitude does not help much. 

What do I do!?!?

Meanwhile, SciOly is coming up. I'm extremely excited about Write it Do it, as Quail and I will be returning state champions in that event. We've also signed up for the Pictionary-like Picture This, and I'm returning to the Ecology event (it's pretty much a test. Last year, my partner and I tackled the vocab crossword rather viciously. For a 7-letter word meaning "native," I drew a total blank and scribbled in "erotics." Shockingly, we got second place at States). 

ON TOP OF THAT, in the less brainiac department.

Swim season starts soon. Having quit polo this year, I feel rather fat and blobby and would really like to get back in the water. But I barely managed to scrape by my six AP classes this semester. Besides, I am (finally) a second semester senior and I'm wondering if I really want to drive myself insane with 2-hour practices on top of all the trivia stuff and other things I'm doing to hold down the fort. Moreover, swim meets eat up about 5 hours each time, and I really can't afford to miss classes (which I would have to do at least 5 times, judging by past years). Additionally, conflicts arise for Friday and Saturday. 

I'm still lion dancing, and New Years' is coming up. It's fun playing with (or scaring, as the case may be) little kids and wearing foofy pants, but each show eats up time I should be spending on practice for CM. You see, I don't have 24/7 access to a piano... I really don't want to throw lion dance on the backburner, since it'll be my last chance to get anything done, and I've recently hit a big milestone that I've been aiming for for a while. Of course, I could skip Fri and Sat swim practices, but then I'll never get fit if I miss 33% of practices.

I would like to quote my econ teacher, Mr. Lyons, for my summary statement of this monster.

I am in deep shit.

(P.S. The answer is "endemic." I realized this when I was walking out of the room with Tammy, feeling like we'd failed the test. I hope the examiners at least got a laugh out of it.)

Quail is currently:

studying for finals.




....at ridiculous hours in the morning. (but not all the time)

At any rate, this sums up my mindset right now:

(image courtesy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics)

And I guess I shall share some links, for a lack of anything else at the moment

A list of bushisms, both fantastically side-splitting and a little sobering. Includes such gems as:

"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."
Reuters, 5 May, 2000

and

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
Washington DC, 12 May, 2008

^ which is kind of frightening, if you think about it.

Now, I'm sure all of these are blown way out of context, but all the same, I'll be breathing a sigh of relief when the presidential inauguration comes around.

Pity we won't be getting anymore delectable Bushisms, though.

A bit of link-posting

Found some cool stuff, but I gotta scoot off to study now. It's finals week, don'tchaknow?!

/lame attempt at Bleach reference.

This site encodes a text file into an ASCII art file. I thought the idea was awesome. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to print out the image to see if i can read it. And I haven't been able to save the file, either o_O. Which defeats the purpose. But it still cool to look at. 

http://pictureworthsthousandwords.appspot.com/

More link-mongering, but this stuff appeals to other mad scientists out there. 

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090111-creating-life.html

Toodles!

Well, that was odd.

Hawk had an exceedingly (yes, even for me) strange dream last night.

I was planting a field of corn by hand.

I was holding a handful of corn kernels, and as I walked between the plowed furrows of someone's (presumably my) piece of land, I dropped the seeds one by one into the furrows on my right side. After I finished walking down one line, I reached into a burlap bag of seeds sitting next to a red tractor to replenish my supply, then turned 180 degrees and walked back the other direction.

One of my fellow farmers in my dream told me that each row ought to have 300 plants. What's weird is that as I walked down the long furrow, the supply of seeds I had in my hand did not diminish--but they were magically all gone by the time I reached the burlap sack (Now, I suppose there were two of them--one on each end of the furrows).

Finished, I left the field. As I trudged away from the field toward my red farmhouse, I happened upon my TI-84 lying in the dirt, recognizable because of the orange smiley face sticker on the back.

"Oh," I said, rather shocked. I picked it up.

Happy New Year!

Quail would like to wish everyone a happy new year from Las Vegas :D

2009 is where it's at!

Let's get in a year of good bloggings!