Happy Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for (not in any particular order)

10) My health: That even though I'm sick, I don't always feel this way;
9) My sleep: That even though I've been going to sleep at 2AM regularly, I've been able to sort of catch up...;
8) My computer: That my computer's been working--not perfectly-- but fine recently. Nothing to majorly complain about;
7) My work: That I've been getting my work done on time;
6) My friends: That my friends have been around to support me;
5) My stuff: That I have a lot of unnecessary things to entertain me and electronics to fool around with;
4) A day off tomorrow!;
3) A (hopefully) exciting Thanksgiving dinner with family;
2) A decent brain: That, out of all chances of me being born with a condition or disorder, I don't have one;
1) Chapstick: Since I've been sick for a while now, my nose has been stuffed up and it's impossible to breathe through it (even now, sitting upright, I'm breathing through my mouth). And when I sleep, I have to sleep with my mouth open, resulting in a horribly dry and cracked and bleeding and cruddy mouth when I wake up. And the damage is still pretty extensive (I think my lips need to be smoothed by sandpaper), but I'm thankful for chapstick for helping tone the pain down a little bit.

Have a nice Thanksgiving :)

Dream Journal, 11/11-12/10

My Dream, 11/11/10-11/12/10

It's a dark night. I see this first half of my dream from the sky, like I'm in a helicopter; though I clearly see myself down on the ground.

I'm running. I and another guy next to me are running away from a car, a car whose headlights are blazing and following us. I have no idea as to who the guy running with me is.
We eventually run parallel to a green fence (of a CVS Pharmacy), and I decide to jump the fence and seek refuge in the closed CVS. As I jump, I hear a couple gun shots ring out.

The rest of the dream takes place through my eyes, not from the sky.

Inside the CVS (how did I get into the CVS?), I switch on the TV, and watch the news
...
I see that a gang had been driving through the streets, and a helicopter caught the gunfire on TV.
What happened was that one shot went right past me as I had jumped, and another shot hit the guy that was running with me and killed him.
And, of course, I go on Facebook and tell people that I was shot at.

I don't remember the rest of the dream, but I think that the police took away the body in a white bag.

Today is

Today is 10/10/10. People claim that today is special, and that it won't come again in 10,000 years.

Think about that. Why would I beg to differ?

First of all, the next time we will see 10/10/10 is not in 10,000 years, but in 100 years. We will see 10/10/10 again on October 10, 2110. But that's not the main point here.

Tomorrow is 10/11/10. We won't have another date like this for 100 years as well, until October 11, 2110. Later in this year, we will have 12/20/10. There will also be no 12/20/10 for another 100 years.

But the thing we have to realize is that despite that those dates might share the same fancy set of numbers, that today is, in fact, today. There will never be another day like it again. Despite all the rumors of deja vu or living the same day twice, I highly doubt that I will ever have the opportunity to blog about the shallowness of American culture and random patterns that appear in the dates of the Gregorian calender.

Today is a special day not because it is 10/10/10, but because it is the only 10/10/10 you will experience; this moment right now is the only 10/10/10 you will ever have, and no other moment will be the same-- despite how cruddy or how great today has been.

So enjoy it, won't you?

Scam Artists?

I was at Wallmart the other day (Great store, love their prices), and I wandered through the $5 DVD box, and I found Sherlock Holmes, the movie. I picked it up (five bucks, after all) and continued on my stroll throughout the store.

When I was at the check-out register, however, the little screen said that the DVD cost 18 bucks. I didn't want it anymore.

Makes me wonder who put the 18 dollar DVD into the bin, though: Wallmart, the corporation trying to squeeze out a couple more dollars; or, some guy who was too lazy to put the DVD back on the shelf, so he placed it in the big basket instead?

Oh well. I always loved Holmes and mysteries. Maybe I'll buy the DVD when it's cheaper.

Good thing I checked the price, though.

Blog v1 Archive

This post is dedicated to preserving the blog before its new color and layout, before this current gray layout was implemented on June 16, 2010.

There will also be a page up top for the same purpose.

Music Monday Er...Thursday?

10 songs running through my head:

Artist - Song

1. Eminem - Not Afraid
2. Kelly Clarkson - Already Gone
3. Deana Carter - Strawberry Wine
4. Something Like Silas - Divine Invitation
5. Lady Gaga - Paparazzi
6. Frank Sinatra - My Way
7. Keith Urban - Tonight I Wanna Cry
8. Justin Timberlake (featuring OneRepublic) - Apologize
9. Evanescence - Lithium
10. Brandon Heath - Give Me Your Eyes

Youtube Video

Here's a Youtube video I found. It's short and really fun to watch. Enjoy, and have a great weekend.

10 Things I Really Don't Care About

Here are 10 things I really don't care about (but probably should):

1. The World Cup (FIFA)
2. What Blu-Ray is, exactly
3. How the internet works (click on the little fox icon, right?)
4. If the refrigerator light stays on when you close the door (Just kidding....we all know the answer is yes.)
5. The oil spill (Life will move on.)
6. TV shows (don't have time to watch it)
7. What happened to Chris Brown, anyway?
8. What they really put into your burger at a fastfood joint
9. Why Macs cost so much (If I couldn't get 3 PC's for the price of 1 Mac, I'd get one...maybe)
10. The annoying-ness of people (though I shan't complain, for I'm sure people had to put up with me, too)
    

Remove White-Out From Your Clothing- A "How To"

HOW TO: Remove white-out and oil stains (like WD-40) from your clothing

True story: I was sitting at my desk, filling out a form (I was filling out the form, not the desk). I reach for the white-out jar, and...

It jumped and attacked me. It leaped off the desk and attacked my right side of my chest. Great. Now I had a great, noticeable blob of white out about the size of a quarter on my new navy blue shirt and another blob about the size of a nickle on my new black pants. Fantastic.

So how do I get white out off my clothes? This How-To is compiled from the internet....and my own experience.

First off, I advise

1. Fully reading this post before trying anything
2. Testing this strategy on an inconspicuous part of your clothing (inside the collar, for example)

You will need:

1. WD-40 (the lubricant)
2. Rags (like an old t-shirt)
3. Dish soap (the one you use to wash your dishes - not sure if it works with dish washer soap)
4. Water (from tap/sink)
5. Traditional washing machine

Procedure:

First, we will remove the white-out from your clothing with the WD40.

1. Stuff the inside of your affected clothing with the rags. This will prevent WD40 from leaking into the other (unaffected) side.
2. Spray the WD40 onto the white-out stain. The white-out should start to flake or peel off.
3. Dab the white-out with another rag until the white-out stain starts to disappear (the stain might smear a little -- this is fine).
4. Re-apply the WD40 as needed.

When done, wait about 30 minutes before moving on to the next step.

Yay! Your white out stain is gone! However, now you have a WD-40 grease/oil stain on your shirt.

In order to get rid of your WD-40 stain,

1. Prepare your dish soap solution. Add water to dish soap so that the solution is 3 parts soap to 1 part water (this is equal to 3/4 soap, 1/4 water). Your resulting solution should be slippery (like soap) but runny.
2. Spread your solution liberally on all places that have been touched/stained by the WD40.
3. Let the soap sit and soak into your clothing for about 20 minutes.
4. Throw the shirt/clothing into the washing machine, and wash like normal. The stain should come out.

So, hope this little How To helped you get your white out stain out of your clothing
and also get your WD40 stain out of your clothing as well. Good luck with all of this, and leave a comment if you tried this!

Cool Chess Video

Bugs

I was attacked by a swarm of flies yesterday.

Well, not really.

But here's what happened:

One fly/bee flew straight into my right ear and got stuck...it buzzed around and I felt it in my ear and it was ticklish and really gross.

One gnat flew into my right eye.

Another bee/fly hit me on the right cheek.

Stupid bugs.

Cheap/Free Food

So....
I got a couple emails today/yesterday.

First off is this one: Baskin Robbins is offering ice cream at 31 cents/ scoop tonight only. Which is always cool. I will be sure to take advantage of this opportunity. No coupon needed (I don't think...); Once again, this is tonight only.

Secondly, Jack in the Box is giving out free sandwiches (this one needs the coupon which can be found here). You can grab one of these Deli Trio Grilled Sandwiches (which look pretty durn good, by the way) if you make another purchase as well. This coupon expires on 5/2/10.

Well, that's that.

I'm exhausted. I need some water.

See you all around.

Doesn't it pay to follow my blog?

Thursday- The Day I Almost Got Hit By A Car

I've completely forgotten to put up this post on Thursday, and now that I've remembered, I will.

On Thursday, around 4:15-30ish, I was really tired and I was walking through the parking lot. I passed behind a big dark blue (indigo blue, if you will) van. And I think to myself: "What a big van."
And next to the van is parked a white mini-van. A mother is there, and she smiles at me. I smile back.

Then, in my side vision, I see the blue van start to back out. I freak out-- I mean, this thing is going to hit me if I don't move.

But I'm so darn tired and my legs hurt so I can't move out of the way. Instead, I raise my hands up and throw my body away from the van in hopes that the blow won't hurt as much.

Then I realize that the van didn't actually move at all, and it was me just being tired that made the world around me spin a little.

And, of course, the woman in the white van saw me flinch and dodge a parked blue van, so she laughed for a good chunk after that.

But that's that. And I have been hit by a parked car before. So I consider dodging this one to be quite an improvement.

The Spark of American Culture: Review of Next, by Michael Crichton

As you all might have known, a good chunk of time ago (see the first post about it published Sunday, July 19, 2009) I obtained an audio-book of the Michael Crichton’s futuristic Sci–Fi Next. I finished it somewhere around mid-December. Here’s the review which I so duly owe:

Starting off from the beginning—the very first words the narrator (remember, it’s an audio-book; I can’t tell where things are positioned—only what comes before the next [as a side note, some of the chapters were damaged, too, so I couldn’t listen to them]) heard as follows:

“This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.”

The dryness, the simplicity, and the truth of this line—the realness, in other words—is the best way to summarize the entire mood of this novel.

Plot wise….

In this novel, gene-research company BioGen is involved in a variety of law suits—and its employees are extremely shady people. Like I said before, there are a number of minor plot threads in this novel—and most of them are here, within the company and the employees. (But these are so minor I’m not going to dive into them.)

The three biggest plot lines, however, aren’t within the company of BioGen.

First off, Henry Kendall realizes that his other company’s research with genes has produced a transgenic chimpanzee—with his own genes. Such transgenic experiments are outlawed, and, the talking chimp, named Dave, must be killed. However, Henry steals Dave away, and his wife, Lynn reluctantly allows him to stay. Their son, Jamie, becomes attached to Dave, even though Dave’s primal, animalistic instincts make the chimp hard to keep secret.

The second thread is the tale of fleeing Alex Brunet. Her husband’s (Frank’s) cells have been bought by BioGen—and they need more. Frank is gone. The company hires bounty hunters to find Alex’s son, Jamie (yes, there are two Jamie’s), but Alex is aware of their plan and runs away with her own son Jamie. Alex flees along to her long-time friend named….Lynn Kendall.

Yes. The two Jamie’s are now united—and most of the plot threads tie together.

Dave, Jamie, and Jamie all make friends quickly. So when the bounty hunters come, Dave (the violent chimp) tries to defend the kids from the bounty hunters (he bites off an ear!). However, the bounty hunters grab the wrong Jamie—they grab the Kendall Jamie instead of the Brunet Jamie.

Meanwhile, Alex and the Kendalls manage to track down the bounty hunters within a couple minutes. They find that the bounty hunters have taken refuge into a health clinic at a resort, where they plan to extract the cells from the boy. With the help of a genetically engineered parrot named Gerard and Alex’s gunmanship, they are able to recover the kidnapped boy.

Now, here’s what I think about the book:

The Good: The plot is excellent. The characters are well developed. Everything about this (expect what is below) is very, very nicely done.

The Bad: Goodness, all the swear words! Really! Throughout the novel, there are tons and tons of cuss words, both in narration, and many spoken. While they give credibility, I really think they weren’t needed.

The Ugly: The plot threads, in my opinion, are the worst part of this entire novel. They’re usually scattered (Plot Thread A, Plot B, Plot C, Plot D, Plot A, Plot D, Plot C, Plot A, Plot B) so you forget what’s happening and you lose track of the characters. Goodness, it gets a little annoying.

So all in all, this novel’s not that bad…One of the better ones I have read in a while by a contemporary writer…

Though not extraordinary, Next is at least, a tiny spark of what we used to call American culture.

Oranges

Today, I got an orange-- you know, because oranges have vitamin C, and since my throat feels like crud and I'm sick, I could use some vitamin C (in addition to the V-C pills I took this morning).

So this orange is huge-- way bigger than the size of my fist...It's like the size of two and a half fists (by my standards, 2 fists-- but I have big hands). So this huge this is barely sitting in the palm of my hand, and I get out my little pocket knife to peel away the orangey stuff. (It seems redundant to say that I peeled away the peel.)

Peeling, peeling, peeling-- it seems that I've been whittling away at this thing for at least 5 minutes now, and then...

I cut myself.

The knife hits my skin and it hurts-- but there's no blood drawn, and it didn't actually break the skin (so technically I didn't cut myself). I thought how cruddy it would be to get the citric acid into my blood-- that would hurt a bundle.

So now I'm done peeling the entire white pith away (of which there's at least a good pound or two). I split open the orange (you know, into sections) when some of the juice gets into my eye.

As a result, now my right eye hurts like crazy.

AND the keyboard and mouse and desk are all sticky.

But it was a good orange (and now my trash can is full).

Oh well. Hope I get better.

10 Reasons to be Happy

1. Nice weather (Rain and Sun, can't get much better than that)
2. Migraine went away
3. It's MLK Day!
4. Craisins :)
5. Helping Haiti
6. Warm Socks
7. Time to blog
8. Cookies
9. Good sleep
10. Jesus

Dream Journal (for the night of Monday, Jan 11)

Here's my dream I had last night/this morning:

I was in the back of a cart (a horse-drawn cart type thing, only I don't think there were horses). It's day time. There are three other people in the car- two girls (one tall and blond), and another white-faced Joker-type person (who is laugh-y, but not evil). I let him see my smiley-face pen. He plays with it and twists and untwists the springs and whatever. Somehow, he produces a wax type substance. We play with this, making it into different shapes. I make a dinosaur type shape when it's my turn-- a T-Rex.

Then suddenly, the Joker-guy goes on to talk about combining powers with another and making a new creature or whatever.

Here's a break in the dream.

I somehow find myself at a home (uptown, like on a hill). It's dark out, and looking out to the city, I can see that part of it's on fire, like a monster has been ravaging through it or something. I'm also, for whatever reason, in charge of a big (30ft high?) blue blobby type creature with legs and arms and hands, but no fingers. Out of his hands shoot a low-pressure beam of water (about the equivalent of a garden hose). Together, this blob and I, we walk down to help combat whatever monster is attacking the city. But, as we're walking down the hill (I'm riding on the blue blob), a green-clothed flying with a glider type guy who uses sonar to get around keeps trying to attack us by sweeping at us from the air. And so we try to hide in the shadows and creep around and to knock the guy out of the air with our garden-hose abilities.

No wait! It gets even weirder:

We stop at a bathroom. No, not to go to the bathroom-- to put on sunscreen.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I had-- in my dream-- heard my mother's voice telling me to put on sunscreen, and I stopped in the middle of a battle to put on sunscreen.

So I stop, I put on this sunscreen, and then the evil woman who's terrorizing the town comes! And so we're having this battle and I'm losing and then suddenly she has to go to the bathroom and change. So she goes in and she changes and comes out. (This is when I first realize that it's light outside.) And so I take a picture of the girl with my phone so that I can go report her to the authorities or whatever later. Then I quickly walk away. (The green-guy is nowhere to be found.)

I walk over to the dock (because I'm near an ocean or something), and some 16 year old looking guy is following me. Two Storm Troopers (yes, from Star Wars) are posing for pictures with people on the dock and are charging them. I realize that the guy following me was my cousin (I don't have a cousin that looks like that...). I ask him how old he is, and he says 23. "23!" I explode. I think of how to ask the next question- if he had gone to college or if he had dropped out-- and I wake up.

So that's my dream for last night.

Dream Journal (for the night of Tuesday, Jan 5)

Okie dokie.... here we go.

Here's my dream journal for the night of Jan 5th (yesterday/this morning). Instead of doing it for pre-night, I did this instead for the actual dream itself.

I went to sleep at 10:50 ish. In the shower (in which, by the way, I sneezed out the most disgusting red-veiled snot thing ever) I decided to try a little trick-- I simply said out-loud a couple times "I will remember a dream tonight".

And guess what?

I remembered 2.

Dreams occur in cycles, separated by time. I usually only remember one (the last cycle- that is, the one before I wake up). I don't know why I remembered 2. Maybe it was because I said the line out-loud. Whatever.

Let's see. I actually remembered the first dream second-- I remembered it as I was writing down the dream I most recently had (the second one listed here).

First dream: I was a super hero where my power was something like the rain/water healed me but damaged others, and since it couldn't touch my super-hero allies so I had to absorb all the water-shocks that the enemy sent out. Then, I had to go down a drain (like a bathtub drain) to go talk to someone or another, and I point out that I'm too small to fit. But my allies tell me I'll fit, and they throw a chair or two down to prove that point. So I go down and--magically-- I fit. And then I don't remember what happened next.

Second dream: Girl that's a friend asked me to go out with her or something. I seemed to know that it wasn't real and that I was dreaming. The dream itself seemed chunky-- thoughts didn't go well together, and it's hard to remember.

Anyway, dream journal for tonight.

And now I have to go to sleeeep...

Dream Journal (for Mon, Jan 4)

I've been commissioned to write a dream journal, either about a dream I had or how I feel right before I go to sleep. This is for yesterday, before I went to sleep.

Pre-sleep: 10:47 PM

Feeling: I'm feeling sorta calm right now. I'm was really pissed and annoyed beforehand, though, with people and myself. People really can make you mad.
I've come to realize that there are a couple certainties in the world:

• There are dumb people out there
• There are confused people out there
• There are people above you in power out there
• There are dumb and confused people in power above you out there-- and, when this happens, you can get really, really annoyed...

But you just have to deal with it...

Anyway. Today, thought about Psalm 69 because friend-that's-a-girl wanted me to find some Bible verses for her. It's a very vivid chapter of the Bible (v2:

I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters;
the floods engulf me.

I also went on Facebook to cool off after that incident. Great time-- great people, great friends. Just remembered I have to ask N.M. [name shortened for privacy] something tomorrow. I'm a little worried about one of my friends, though...Am I supposed to do something to help him?

I will try incubating that question today, by asking over and over, "Am I supposed to minister to C.R.?"

Will pray, put in contacts, then go to sleep.



That was my entry.

I do not remember having a dream.