Valamity!

Hurray!

Reasons of goodness:

I woke up before 9:00. Invariably, the earlier I wake up, the better I feel about the day and *shockingly* the more I feel like I’ve gotten done at the end of it. My mind just feels…sharper. It’s amazing how much of a difference getting into the shower at 9:30 rather than 10:00 makes in my mood. This morning, though, I woke up at 8:00 and got into the shower at about 8:30 when I realized I didn’t feel like sleeping anymore.

Good food! En route to the shower, my mother pointed me towards a fresh donut that she had bought for me, and I happily devoured its sugary bad-for-me-ness. Later I went to the mall and I had a salted pretzel (soooo goood) and some really delicious “fresh-squeezed” lemonade, and the combination so great that I almost didn’t mind when some mall cleaning lady yelled at me for sitting on something I wasn’t supposed to. Apparently it would have been fine for me to lean on it, but sitting was out of the question. I think that kind of distinction is extremely silly and that there should have at least been a sign. But whatever, the food was good, and I didn’t have any soda all day even though I thought about it.

I got things! The things are a haircut (which is not the best haircut, but I never, ever like my haircuts so I can’t really fault the haircut), two shirts which actually fit me, an extra ink cartridge for my printer because I ran out last year as I was supposed to be printing off my English final and it sucked, and a hardcover copy of Crossroads of Twilight for $2.67. Crossroads is a bit of a splurge even at that price, but it’s one of the better later Wheel of Time books and I adore hardcovers. This has been the summer of really cheap hardcovers for some reason….It all started when I stopped off at Pamida (Midwestern chain sized roughly between a Walgreens and a Walmart) on my way home from college, and I found Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for around $7 on a bargain rack. Loved that book, by the by–it bridges perfectly my elementary school fascination with Dickens and my middle school fondness for fantasy. This find was followed by Ravelstein by Saul Bellow and Fury by Salman Rushdie for a mere 99c each. I don’t really know much about either author, and I haven’t started to read the books but 99c was just too little for me to pass them up. Then, I finally got America: The Book in hardcover for $5 after wanting it for ages. I haven’t done anything but flip through it, but right now it’s making a great juryrigged laptop holder. In short: Hurray for cheap books that are pretty! I also used a really old gift card at Walmart that I’ve been carrying around for years and I thought only had a few cents on it and I found out it still had $20 on it, which is sort of the modern day equivalent of finding money in an old jacket. What an age we live in.

I got a bunch of stuff from my dad’s house. Okay, this isn’t going to make any sense at all to anyone besides me (and Leila), but I’ll try to explain it quickly. My dad met his future-wife online, and he bought a house in a town an hour away from his farm because our farmhouse is really old and falling to pieces and he was embarrassed and thought his new bride wouldn’t want to live there. Fast-forward a few years, that house is very rarely used, and the basement has been flooded umpteen times due to poor drainage + basement window fire escapes. I had a bunch of my stuff moved into the place back when the house was first bought because I had been tricked into believing it would actually be used by people and I had my room in the basement and my things have been chucked about carelessly in efforts to save them from the flood damage. Anyway, it’s gotten to be a pain in the ass to drive an hour away when I want to collect something from the house and anyway I worry about my books getting moldy and things like that. So, today I was grabbing a few more things that I thought I wanted and I just decided to grab nearly all of it. So I found myself dragging boxes stuffed full of my old paperbacks into car and the like. It’s kind of a pain and my room is now way, way overstuffed, but I feel like a great rift has been healed in my library. Also, I can look through all my old young adult books and laugh at the corny covers and try to remember the plots. I’m a nostalgia nut.

I got to be good at something! That doesn’t happen nearly as much as I’d like. When I was rooting around my dad’s house I found a desktop tower of my older brother’s that he had given to my dad after the motherboard broke. I’d been looking for a new case for my aging desktop because the current one was sort of cheap when I bought it and it had gotten pretty banged up from traveling to LAN parties and back and forth between parents’ houses before I had a laptop and didn’t have to deal with such things. So I bought the case home and opened it up and found spare RAM–which was awesome because my motherboard had space for it. So I ripped the guts out of my old tower, ripped the guts out of the quasi-new tower, placed my guts back into it along with the extra RAM, and excusing a few hiccups (putting the power button hookup in the wrong way and being convinced it was broken, CPU’s fan not working for awhile, etc) I got it working pretty speedily and tidily. I hadn’t worked that closely with computer guts for a long time so it felt pretty awesome being able to take it apart and put it back together again. Especially considering that I’m not a super-techie person or anything. So, hurray for self-esteem!

Fix’dness.Oh, and I thought my phone’s camera was broken because all of my saved pictures looked like grey blobs, but I talked to my sister about it (who worked briefly for Altell) and she told me just to take the battery out and put it back in, and that fixed it no problem. So I’m glad because it isn’t broke like I thought it was, which seems weird because if it hadn’t been broken in the first place I couldn’t be happy about it not being broken, but that’s life I suppose.

Girlfriend. I also have a really neat girlfriend. She likes me and plays isketch with me and is really cute and will read Star Wars books so I don’t feel so alone in my absolute Star Wars nerdiness. Yes this is saccharine. No I don’t care.