Tonight, I went shoe shopping. =D

Lest you think me totally shallow, I do actually need new shoes. The ones I was wearing to work I got second hand from my mom, and while they have been loyal and comfortable shoes, they no longer offer me any support and need to be replaced. So I went in search of comfy shoes that I can wear to work where I'll get lots of support since I'm on my feet all day long. I went to Ross first, but unfortunately they didn't have anything great in the comfortable/supportive department. What they did have were a pair of really fun brown snow boots with a slight heel and those really fun little fuzzy ball things at the end of the laces for only $15.00. Total steal. And then I found these.

Oh yes.

I have converse.

=D

Greatly satisfied by my converse purchase but still in need of comfy supportive shoes, I headed over to Payless on my mom's suggestion and found some of the most kick ass tennis shoes ever created. Pictures forthcoming. Funny thing is that I didn't find a damn thing in the women's section, but when I went over to the men's section everything suddenly got really comfortable and neat. You'll understand better when I post pictures later, but these shoes are seriously kickass. Hopefully they'll be as comfy as I think they are tomorrow when I go in for my huge eight hour shift. :) In the meantime I'll try very hard not to rant about how women get shafted when it comes to comfort, style, and ease of use in regards to clothing, footwear, and pajamas.

In the meantime-- time to podcast!

Most of these are for Helen so that she can see all the lovely honeysuckle, with some pictures of our new tomato and cucumber plants included because they are just too awesome to leave out. :) We started growing these veggie plants a few weeks ago, and it's amazing how quickly they've grown. (Even with the nasty cold snap in April that killed almost everything else!) Now the cucumbers are starting to bloom and the tomato plants gain inches almost daily. We have beefsteak, cherry, and pear tomatoes, and just transplanted them into larger containers yesterday evening. :)

Enjoy! (I also included some pics of our herbs since they're making a comeback as well.)

( Sunshine mode: activate! )

This is the funniest thing I've seen all week.

And no, I totally didn't just lose an entire hour surfing lolcat sites. *whistles innocently*

Over the weekend I plotted to start a dog walking business, bought myself a pair of kickass rollerblades which I look like a total idiot using because I am badly out of practice, ate Thai food, ate Japanese food, watched several excellent movies, made homemade pasta noodles, and ate fish.

Yes. That's right. FISH. With their heads STILL ATTACHED.

( And I took PICTURES. Because I live to gross you guys out. )

How was your weekend? =D

Yesterday I decided I was really getting sick of my room being laid out the way it was. There was too much noise channeling itself down the hallway and straight into my head, I couldn't easily get to a lot of my things, and pretty much all my stuff was in complete disarray and chaos. So, yesterday, instead of sitting about like a lump wishing and theorizing, I took some measurements and got to work. Four hours and a lot of sore muscles later, my task was completed...

(And no, I have no idea why these pics are working perfectly and the last batch are still little red x's. Grr.)

( For some reason I thought moving my room around by myself would be a GOOD idea...don't ask me why. )

Well, I wished for snow, and on Saturday my wish was granted! :) It was a really good snow, too, with really big fluffy flakes that crunched together nicely when molded by mittened hands. Snowballs abound! It was still on the ground Sunday morning, so I bundled myself up in my heavy coat, snow boots, gloves and a hat and stood out on the back porch of our house taking pictures of our back yard. :)

( Behold: SNOW! )

Not only did I get snow on Saturday, but I got some nice power outages as well! Everyone in Tennessee is so INSANELY OBSESSED with snow that I felt their twisted fantasies of being stuck in the dark as a massive blizzard raged outside were finally fulfilled. Even though the blizzard was only about an inch worth of snow (and I'm being very generous with that estimate) and the power outages were more like power blips, each lasting no more than about ten minutes. =P There were three as the night went on, and only the very last one actually left me in the dark. It was quite startling - I was in the kitchen getting ready to make myself some dinner when all of a sudden everything went black. I could still feel my hands on the knife I was sharpening so I knew I hadn't been knocked unconscious, and the dog appeared almost immediately to try and velcro himself to my leg in fear. *eye roll* He's such a wuss. Anyway, the "black out" lasted all of ten minutes and I survived it by feeling my way along the walls, gathering the flashlights together in one place and fetching some candles from downstairs. Then the power came back on and I watched Kim Possible. :)

On December 15th, after reading through Holly Lisle's website and seeing her workshop on world building and drawing maps the previous night, I felt extremely inspired. So I cleared off the art table we have in the guest room/storage room/pet hangout, set up some incense to cover the unmistakable scent of cat food, taped together a bunch of big pieces of paper I found in a large sketch book, and got busy. I started off using pencil so I could correct mistakes and add or remove things as I went along, even though Holly says not to do this. (It was either I did it in pencil or I stared at the paper in fear for a week - looking back I think my choice was a wise one considering this is my first full-size hand drawn map ever) I had had an idea rattling around in my brain for awhile at this point after having a particularly cool dream about a week prior. It involved a lot of running, a lot of world saving, elves, Yggdrasil, hideous mutants, and a lot of icy tundra landscapes. The main character was Losia Moonsword, a female half-elf I created for Neverwinter Nights years ago. She's one of my favorite RPG characters ever, actually, so it was pretty natural my brain would choose her to be the dream's protagonist. I won't bore you all with details, (even though it was a very vivid, colorful, and totally kickass dream) but the basic plot involved a city of elves that lived in the arctic protecting a very important world tree. They were supposedly preparing it and keeping it safe until the apocalypse arrived, at which point it would be destroyed anyway, but things went wrong because all of a sudden these nasty little mutant creatures started popping up all over the place and tried to destroy the tree before it's time had come. Nobody was prepared for this in the slightest so a lot of fighting broke out and Losia was the only one left alive to save the world from these monsters.


I thought that this dream could become a pretty cool story with some tweaking, so I decided that I wouldn't make the same mistake twice. This time I would do a lot of proper world building before I wrote the story, and that I wouldn't make the same mistake with TEC as I did with TSW. (Yes I know I have an affinity for acronyms starting with the letter T, shut up) As the beginning of the outlining process, I decided to make a map. And here it is. :) It took me about a week to finish and I think the hardest part for me was coming up with names for everything. It's now hanging proudly above my bed where my old Star Trek calendar used to be. I'm hoping a map of Secotha (TSW's world) will be accompanying it sometime soon.

( My new favorite planet! )

About three weeks ago on December 23rd, mom and I had a Saturday all to ourselves, so we decided to spend the entire day just making cookies. Some cookies would be for us, others would be for our neighbors as thank you gifts for mowing our grass. Some would be decorated and others would be just plain. We made chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies, peanut butter blossoms, coconut macaroons, and sandies. It was a lot of fun, and needless to say the house smelled spectacular for pretty much the entire day. Our chocolate chip and sugar cookies hit a bit of a snafu when they didn't rise at all and basically came out as flat as paper. We later realized our baking soda was completely dead and had to adjust our decorating plans accordingly, but things still worked out OK. I didn't get pictures of everything we made, but I did get pictures of our gingerbread cookies. (Which smelled AMAZING, btw, I LOVE gingerbread) Since we didn't have any men-shaped cookie cutters, we used the only cookie cutters we did have: Our Christmas themed ones that we've had in our family for as long as I can remember. The day after they were baked, on Sunday, I whipped up a huge batch of delicious and beautiful royal icing (Thank you Nigella Lawson for the recipe) and mom used some gel food coloring to make all kinds of colors. We whipped out huge cannisters of nonpareil sprinkles we'd bought a few days earlier as well as some random tubes of writing icing we'd picked up along the way, I sat down at a counter, and went to town. XD

( WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CUT CONTAINS COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF COOKIE PORN )

P.S. No, you haven't missed anything, there isn't yet an episode 2 of Picspam!. At the moment I'm just being all Star Wars-ey. XD

I would have posted this sooner, but Black & White pwns my brain our internet connection was on the fritz for awhile there. These lovely gifts arrived for me on Friday, brought home by my mom in a green Harrod's bag with a note attached saying it was from "Kimberly, Marcus, and Fiona xxx". They went back to England for the Thanksgiving holiday and, much to my surprise, apparently thought enough of me to buy me a few gifts. Needless to say my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I opened the bag and saw a beautiful, shiny edition of "Doctor Who Magazine" staring back at me.

( But that's not all that was in the bag... )

Yeah. I spent pretty much all of Friday night pinging off the walls and gushing excitedly at my mom about all the cool stuff I got. :) For people I haven't even met yet, Kimberly and Marcus (pubmarcus) sure have been awfully nice to me! Though it's pretty much like we're family even though we haven't met face to face. We exchange stuff all the time and mom always has a new story about Kimberly from work. And I'm so glad to hear that little Fiona is enjoying the stuffed animals and puppets I gave to her. :) I didn't need them anymore so I'm happy they could be passed on to someone who will love them like I did when I was little.

Do you realize that at this very moment I have stuff from another country sitting up in my bedroom? So awesome. ♥