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Happy birthday, elemy!!!!!!

Halloween pictures

Courtesy of jour_pluvieux, photos from the Halloween party. Which, I'll report, since I evidently didn't before, was fun enough; dragonryder showed up, as did Kenji; however, leech did not, and has still not provided an appropriate explanation for such behavior. I forgot to ask yesterday. ;) Also, Ainsley was going to come but decided not to wander down Telegraph in the dark, which was probably sensible. I had my first jello shots ever, and I'll report that I'm not impressed: they tasted absolutely foul.

The pictures aren't brilliant, sadly, and none of them really shows the very cool veins I had drawn. If you look very hard, you can kind of see them in one or two of the pictures. But not.

Exercise, you say?!

I went to bed at around 1am, not quite intentionally, and woke up at 4am to write my mini-essay for William's Approaches to Literature class. This went at a bit of a snail's pace because I would intersperse bits of doing actual work with bits of discovering I'd just wasted several chunks of hours playing on the web, when I didn't even quite realize that I was playing on the web. This comes of working when I'm tired; I'm easily distractable.

When the morning dawned, it was gloriously blue, last night's pattering rain having vanished somewhere along with the darkness. At certain points today, there were still ugly leaden smudges patching the sky, but they seem now to have vanished yet again, and none of them actually fulfilled its threat of further rain.

In any case, I did get the piece finished way in advance of the Classics office closing (I was done with it by about 2pm), and that included time out for German (of course; quiz tomorrow, ugh) and for listening to AiR, who are really getting very very good. They're quite possibly the best group this year, at least when they sing outside. Because I'd finished the essay so early, I realized that I could, in fact, quite easily go into the city this evening, and hence attempted to reach girlwithjournal to see if she still had an extra ticket for The Matrix: Revolutions.

Discovering that girlwithjournal had found an inferior substitute with whom to attend the film, I went to catch the bus home; however, as I approached Bancroft, I could see the 40L already turning onto Dana, which meant there was no way I would catch it. So I, with something possibly approaching mild insanity, or perhaps simply in a show of gratifying fortitude, decided to go to the gym for the first time in certainly over a year, perhaps over two years. This resulted in me feeling somewhat virtuous, as I had indeed just gone and exercised with the sole intention of exercising, somewhat silly, because I couldn't figure out how to work half the machines (or they seemed not to work as I expected, and hence I think I was doing something wrong), and somewhat random, because I was wearing jeans and therefore was rather limited in the sensible options available to me. (There have, by contrast, been days when I thought "I'd really quite like to go to the gym today" and then discovered that I was wearing sandals. Jeans are, clearly, the better of the two evils, despite their encumbrance.) Tomorrow, I will either feel gratifyingly sore, and at the same time rather pathetic, as I really didn't exercise all that much, or else very pathetic, because I won't be sore, and I'll have to face the realization that I couldn't even convince myself to exercise for long enough to make my muscles a bit stronger. I also seem to have lost pretty much all the strength I ever had in my upper body, which may come from never ever ever using my arm muscles for anything at all.

It's nice, in any case, having a day that I'm fairly positive I'm not going to get headache-y together with exercise, so that I can go to the gym. Believe it or not, this is no small part (if perhaps no large part either) of the reason why I tend not to exercise.

My lovely parents

This just goes to show how out of it I was this afternoon, before my nice nap, and how befuddled I was immediately pursuant to it. This evening, I went into the kitchen to heat up the leftover pasta from last night, stuck it in the microwave, and phoned my parents to see if they'd gotten home yet. They indeed had just gotten home and decided to play with the dog first instead of phoning me — this is, of course, only right and proper, and besides, they might've woken me up if they had phoned. Anyway, I was talking to them, and the pasta was just about finished microwaving, so I went to get a plate off the drying rack and pulled a fork out of the silverware drying boxes. As I was emptying the pasta onto the plate, it began percolating through my mind that, wait, there was something odd. And just at that moment, my parents asked me, on the phone, if I liked the kitchen. They'd cleaned it. Washed all the dirty dishes, swept the floor, cleaned off the surfaces. And it had actually taken me until then to notice, which is a bit disturbing, as it's a massive change; the kitchen was not a particularly pretty sight. I love my parents.

Then, they also said, I should go to Shen Hua once a month on their credit card (which they'd already essentially said), and that I could take someone with me, which they hadn't previously said; in fact, which they'd previously kind of vetoed given the expense. But possibly they realized I'd be more likely to go if I could go with someone, and possibly, just possibly, they're now trying to aid me in hooking up with a certain unnamed person. Whom they seem to approve of, reasons perhaps to be given later in a locked post, so this is good (and amusing). But I'll let leech come with me sometimes, too. *grin* Anyway, their reasons for wanting me to go to Shen Hua once a month are as follows. It's their favorite restaurant in Berkeley (not even remotely vying for that title, now that Dragonfly is no more), and the majority of the waitstaff and maître d' know us and are very nice to us. Occasionally they'll give us a second round of drinks for free, which we always feel horribly guilty about and also don't particularly want. Most always, we'll get sneakily seated in advance of lots of people who have been waiting (they don't take reservations). Since my parents hadn't been up since the beginning of summer, and hence we hadn't been to Shen Hua all together since then (although I went with elemy when she visited), we figured that we wouldn't be given such favored treatment anymore this time; but in fact, we were (not with the drinks, fortunately, though there was a heartstopping moment when my mom thought she might have accidentally cued the waiter to bring her a second one when he asked what she was drinking), and hence we all felt very guilty about our general lack of patronage. So my parents, bless their little cotton socks, decided to send me as a monthly ambassador. Hee. I get some of the best Chinese food ever "for free" once a month. So, uh, everyone be nice to me until the end of November. *grin*

Photo update advisory

Added some more of the France photos. The new ones start here and continue; the index page is also slightly altered to include the new photos.