Rudolph Update

New information in the Rudolph saga.  The note on the fridge was apparently written by my brother Sandy; when he woke up today he asked if we saw it.  We were all, yeah but the trap sprang without catching anything and he was like, what.  Apparently he heard what was, according to him, the most disgusting sounds he's ever heard.  He was convinced he was listening to Rudolph die, he heard the snap and a scuffle and then what he described as "arterial gushing," the sound of blood gushing out in time to a heartbeat.

So into the bathroom we go to check again, this time with a flashlight to make sure we don't miss anything.  And sure enough, about two feet back underneath the tub was a pool of blood...

...But no rat.

And there are no tracks to or from the blood either, no sign of anything being there, just a dried puddle of blood on the ground.  And it's pretty far away from the trap too, it was like two feet away and didn't have any blood on it at all.  The only explanation I can think of is he was flung there, bled out and died, and after the blood dried he reanimated and scurried off.  Clearly we have an undead rat living in the walls of our  house.  This will be Ground Zero for the zombified rat army uprising.

Honestly, I'm starting to think we should just give up and move out.  This is just too much for us.  He can have the house, we don't want it any more.

Rudolph The Rat

So, we have a Christmas rat in the house.  I've named him Rudolph, in the spirit of the season.

Artistic interpretation of Rudolph, except not.  It's just a random Christmas rat picture I stole from Google Image Search.

Sorry for stealing, The Dapper Rat.

He got in a few days ago.  I know, because I'm a complete night owl so I was the only one awake all night to see him.  And I saw him all right, because he was freaking all over the place.  First I heard something moving in the kitchen from my seat in the living room, so I get up and walk down the hallway just in time to see a dark thing scurry across the way from the kitchen door to dad's office.  "Okay," I think to myself, "So we have a mouse."  No biggie.  We live kind of far back from the street, a little into the woods, so we get mice on a regular basis.  Especially in winter when they are looking for someplace warm and full of food to snuggle up in during the cold weather.  In fact, we'd just gotten rid of a mouse or two in the past week with sticky traps.  Personally, I hate the things; I can't stand hearing mice squealing in terror when they're trapped in one, and pretty much all you can do with sticky traps is either crush the mouse to death (we use wine bottles) or, if the poor thing is unlucky, you don't notice it's there so it dies of thirst over a period of days, all the while struggling and screaming and biting at itself in a futile attempt to escape.  Unfortunately they are easily the most effective type of trap.

Anyway, I thought nothing of it at first, but Rudolph wasn't exactly shy, so I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't a normal mouse in the house.  I caught another glimpse of him as he ran behind a cupboard later, and I thought "That seems to be a bit bigger than your average mouse."  Later on I'm back in the living room, sitting on the sofa with my laptop on my lap, and I see something out of the corner of my eye.  I look up just in time to see his tail flash by in the gap between the garbage can and the chair; it's long, dark, thick and held at least an inch off the ground.  I don't know a lot about rats, but as an animal lover I've happily played with friends' pet rats and none of them seemed that big.  But it was most definitely a rat's tail.  Next time I go into the kitchen, I see his adorable ratty face poking out from behind a bag before he takes off.  Later on I get a properly good look at him (and he is huge) when he climbs up onto the tv stand to explore...about five feet away from me.  I guess he figures that as big as he is, he can take anyone, especially the short person on the sofa.  To be fair, he probably has a point.

Anyway, clearly something must be done before Rudolph starts feeling at home.  I spent most of that night chasing after every noise I heard with a bit of pipe in my hand, stomping and shouting at him.  I have no idea how my family slept through it.  I didn't have any proper rat traps, but I had a few mouse-sized sticky traps so I was hoping they could do the trick.  No luck.  I set one behind the bag and in front of the drawers, where I saw him before, and not fifteen minutes later I hard thrashing and the bag rustling in the kitchen.  But when I get there the bag is already knocked over and the trap gone.  I pull out the drawers (they are a plastic set on wheels, we are theoretically still renovating the kitchen) and yep, it was hauled underneath them, no rat inside.  Damn.  Later on, when I catch him trying to go at the big garbage bag (successfully tearing it all to pieces before I can chase him off) I take the ineffective trap and put it by the bag to ward him off, using his freakishly large intelligence against him.  We both know the trap won't actually stop him...but he knows it is a trap.  It must have worked, because he stayed away from the bag after that.  The next day I go to Canadian Tire with Dad and we buy half a dozen rat traps.

The big ones.

We set two as soon as we got home, then promptly lost the bag.  Grammy was spending the night that night, so I stayed up later than usual (or rather, as late as I normally do, but intentionally this time) both to be around to help her if she needed it and to listen for Rudolph and keep him from eating my sleeping grandmother's face Compsognathus-style should he show up.  I heard him rattling around a lot and I think I caught a glimpse of him once or twice, but nothing like the night before.  The next night my brother Sandy hears him; he was int he front of the house, and I was in the living room at the back.  He comes tearing down the hallway like a shot and vanishes into his bedroom, bellowing "MOM SAID I COULD!"  I figure out what he's talking about when he comes out and runs off with a bow and arrow; clearly a Rudolph situation.  I haven't got the pipe at hand this time, so I grab the death stick (an electrified tennis racket I use for flies, a gift from my mother last Christmas) and follow behind.

We don't catch Rudolph, because rats are quicker than people looking for weapons to kill rats with, lucky for them.  But we do find the Canadian Tire bag with the rat traps in it, so we set a bunch.  Two around the front of the house, where we keep hearing him.  One behind the silverware drawer, where I saw him that one time.  One in the attic where Sandy thinks he heard him and where we found a dead bird that Rudolph may or may not have been eating.  One in the bathroom behind the tub, where my parents think he might have gotten in by squeezing around the pipes.  One underneath the record player; I haven't seen him over there yet, but mice like that area as we've caught a few in the sticky traps below there, so we might luck out with Rudolph.  I feel like there's another one or two that I have forgotten, but I don't think there actually are.  I'm just imagining things.  Anyway, we rat-proof the house as best we can and post a list of the traps on the fridge so nobody breaks a finger digging too deep in the food cupboard under the microwave and go to bed.  The next day when I get up somebody's scribbled "RAT IN BATHROOM TRAP" but I checked and the trap has been sprung but there's no rat in it.  I think he set it off and someone heard that and wrote it down without checking to see if it actually got him.

I am hoping we catch him before Christmas.  I don't want Rudolph getting into and ruining my Christmas candy or anything.  Sandy had to get rid of his Christmas stocking last year because a mouse chewed a hole in it.  Not during Christmas, I mean, but over the summer when he had it put away.  And Dad is already sick of dealing with rodents getting into the garbage box down the driveway and ripping the garbage bags up and spreading trash everywhere, we would rather keep that out of the house if at all possible.  If we do catch him I will post updates and possibly pictures, if I ever find my camera cable to connect to the computer so I can actually take my photos off the camera!

I Dreamed A Dream

Last night I had a dream that the walls of my house were full of maggots.  Not tiny normal maggots though, but giant snakelike maggots.  And they would burrow through the walls like fish swimming through a coral reef.  I watched them come out of the mouth of a man on a poster in my room, and go back in through his eye.  We didn't know where they were coming from, until we went underneath the house to look at the foundations and saw what must have been at least a dozen blocks of cheese, huge blocks, the size of a large trunk or sailor's chest.  Then my alarm went off and I woke up, which was disappointing because I wanted to know how the cheese factored into all this.

FUCK YEAH KITES

I went on a kite-flying picnic thhe other day!  It was awesome.  I skipped work and went downtown on the bus with a bottle of pepsi and a box of cookies and two dollar-store kites, and met Tom near some park-like thing.  He brought his fantastic sandwiches and some mangoes and a hot chocolate from Coffee Matters, perfect picnic things.  His sandwiches are really amazing lunchfoods.  He gets a fresh baguette or ciabatta bread or something, and some nice cheese to slice onto it, and some nice thick slices of pepperseed salami and sandwiches it up.  It's really simple, but amazingly yum.  I should have taken a photo to post, but they are so good I couldn't stop eating to grab a camera.  Or rather my iPod, since I've lost my charger and made my camera into an expensive paperweight.  I gotta find that thing.  Or get a new one.  Where the hell do you go for a new camera battery charger?

Anyway.  Nummy picnic on a park bench!  I forget which park, but there were lots of pretty trees around and nice flowers everywhere and a bajillion ants and everybody who walked by had an adorable dog and I just wanted to feed each and every one, but I didn't want to share the sandwiches so I didn't.  We fed the ants some mango, though, because it's really hard to keep a grip on a mango when you're cutting it on your lap without a board or a table or anything.  Mangoes are yum.  I didn't know I liked them until Tom showed them to me.   I should eat mangoes more often.

After the picnic we had to find a new park, because Tom had not realized there were quite this many trees until we came here with kites.  So we started walking!  We wandered the mean streets of St John's until we could find a suitably kite-friendly patch of land.  We would have walked for hours if necessary, though I would have complained ever step of the way.  But we didn't need to walk for hours, we just had to walk for ten minutes or so until we got to The Rooms.  The Rooms, along with all its fantastic displays inside which I will talk about another day because we went there and I took pictures of the giant squid and it's fantastic but it's not the point of this post, also has a very large grassy front lawn with no powerlines overhead and hardly any trees at all.  Perfect for kite flying!

Like I said, we got our kites from the dollar store.  I picked a lovely large parrot-shaped kite and Tom got a traditionally diamond-shaped kite with fighter plane jet things all over it.  Before we went out we agreed that Tom's kite would probably fly better, because after all kites are traditionally diamonds, right?  It must be the best kite-shape if that's what they're all like.  And while we were putting our new kites together on the lawn of The Rooms, it certainly seemed that way.  Tom's kite was much easier to put together than mine, the clip thingy on mine was bent so I had to pretty much break my kite and put it back together to make it work.  But once our kites had been assembled, it turns out that my parrot (whom I decided to name Percival) was a natural flyer, and his wings caught the breeze easily and took him delightfully high up.  Alas, Tom's kite must have been afraid of heights.  It wouldn't go more than five or ten feet off the ground and only flew in dizzying loops before crashing to the ground again.  But it was still lots of fun!  I flew my kite for ages while little children running around turned green in envy, and Tom flew his kite in loop after loop after loop until his string clip broke and his line became hopelessly tangled.  Then, because I was very nice, I let him fly Percy!

He proved to be a much more skilled kite-pilot with a working kite.  While he showed off his skills, I went to his goofy kite and tried to untangle it to see if I could fly it, because to tell you the truth those loopy-loops looked kinda fun.  So I only had half an eye on Tom and Percy, and when I looked away, tragedy struck!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PERCY COME BACK

It was inevitable, really.  Percy crashed into the ground, as kites are wont to do now and then, and his poor cheap dollar-store string-holder broke, so he got free.  Being the excellent flyer that he is, the wind caught him easily and he flew away, loose into downtown St. John's.  I hope he did not land on anyone's car windshields.  That's why I don't have any close-up pictures of Percy, by the way.  I was gonna take some after getting tired of flying him so I could show the world how pretty he was, but you can't take pictures of a kite that isn't there.  Sorry, my fellow kite-fanatics.  You will just have to take my word for it, and also maybe the far-away pictures where Tom is flying him.

But the loss of Percy wasn't the end of the world!  Birds are meant to fly free, after all, and with no more working kites Tom and I went to get some Chinese noodles, because we were right next to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants (Mea Mei Wok Eatery!) and noodles are delicious, and then we went to....THE GEO CENTRE.  Fuck yeah!  I love that place.  I haven't been since I was a little kid!  And it's just as rad as I remember.  There was the Titanic room and the rock wall with the spray bottles and there was a room about oil and stuff and all kinds of geology!  Awesome geology!  The Canada guide from Lonely Planet described the Geo Centre as an interesting way to learn about stuffy boring geology, but fuck that book because geology is always amazing.  

And then the next day we went back to The Rooms!  But I'll save that for another blog post because hey, if I tell everything all at once what am I gonna blog about then, huh?

Sick

I had a heck of a cold this weeked.  I'm still getting over it, so nobody shake my hand or anything for the next week.  I was blowing my nose pretty much every half-hour for about three or four days straight, including all through the night while I was trying to sleep.  I think on Saturday night I got maybe an hour of sleep in total over eight or nine hours tossing and turning in bed trying to breathe.

Which led to some interesting thinks.  Does anybody else get kind of loopy when they're sick and exhausted and trying to sleep?  At one point I was lying in bed willing my nose to clear (didn't work), and out of nowhere I suddenly became obsessed with this thought that popped into my head, "My nose is trying to turn me into Bears Griffin!"  I do not know what a Bears Griffin is.  I think I was trying to say Bear Grylls?  I don't know why though.  I don't know who this guy is.  I have vague ideas of him having a survivalist tv show that I've never seen, and a meme about drinking his own pee a lot.  I was neither trying to survive in the wilderness nor drinking my own pee.  They are both activities I would rather not do at all, thanks very much.  I have no idea why I started thinking about him, or why I was so convinced that my nose being stuffed up meant it was going to turn me into him.  It was a very confusing thought.

Sci Fi on the Rock

I went to Sci Fi On The Rock on Saturday!  And neglected to blog about it for pretty much an entire week, because I kind of suck at this.  Oh well.

It was kind of a blast!  Twenty dollars seemed a little steep for a day pass, but whatever.  There was some pretty cool merchandise; I got two fridge magnets, a Storm Trooper with a bow and a Pokeball.  The fridge magnets, I mean, that's what they were.  I also got a knit R2D2 cap and a tribble!  I named the tribble Nimoy and he is now wearing the R2D2 hat.  The tribble came from one of the workshops, a dramatic reading of the episode The Trouble With Tribbles from the original series Star Trek.  That was a blast.  I also went to the Second Most Dysfunctional Writing Panel, which was fun, but in hindsight I wish I'd gone to the Terrible Fanfiction panel instead.  I tried to go to the Steampunk Tea but there wasn't anywhere to sit, so we went to McDonalds instead.  Then I got absorbed into a group of strangers and we went to the movies and saw Jurassic Park.  There was one workshop I really wanted to go to, Build Your Own Airship, but it was on Friday and I had a dentist appointment so I couldn't attend.  Sadface :(

I also got buttons!  I got two Doctor Who buttons and a It's OK Pluto, I'm Not A Planet Either button. The Pluto button was actually free!  I couldn't find a dollar so the woman at the booth was like, "you know what, it's one button.  Here!"  I wish I could find her business card so I could tell everybody to buy things from them, but I seem to have lost it.  Alas.  If I ever find it I'll make a dedicated post specifically for that business, because it really was nice of them to give me the button.  I'd like to repay them with a little publicity in lieu of a dollar.

All in all, it was a good day.  I spent a bit more money than I meant to, because who can turn down tribbles and R2D2 hats, but it was a fun day all the same.  I only went on the one day, because twenty dollars a day?  Ouch.  It double-hurt, because when I checked the website before I went I saw the price and it said it was ten dollars for an adult ticket.  I didn't scroll down to notice the part where it said it was for Friday only and that Saturday and Sunday were both twenty dollars each.  It would have been nice if they'd removed the Friday price after Friday passed, but oh well.  Next year I might go on a Friday instead, or I'll just suck it up and buy the weekend pass for forty bucks.  I'll have to decide when next year comes around and I can see what awesome workshops are on the go then.

BLASDFALSGKJFLADF MY FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

Just got back from the dentist's, I had a couple of fillings done.  It's the first time I've been to the dentist in years, and the first time I've had fillings since I was a kid, so I had no idea what it was gonna involve.  Turns out it involves my face feeling super weird, holy crap what is going on.  Even my nose feels funny.  Blhagghaghhh.

Dungeon World

We had our second session of Dungeon World last night, and holy crap, I am the best rogue.  Well, technically thief, but I didn't really steal anything so much as I killed everybody in my path and looted the occasional corpse.  Found some filthy coins in a supper-pot, though.  Also, this game is fucking amazing.  Last session I was a little disappointed that I never got to backstab anybody, but oh ho ho, did we make up for that this time.  I am pretty sure my halfling thief, Mouse, killed more goblins than anybody else in the party.  Mostly by sneaking the fuck out and stabbing them all in the back.  Or by throwing knives into their backs.  Whatever.  It was an awesome session, is my point.

At least twice as awesome as this gif.

Early on, we stumbled across a room with four sleeping goblins.  We spent most of our first session in this same cave, and we've already had goblins noticing us and ambushing us with their other goblin friends, so we didn't really want that to happen again.  So the group discussed what we should do, and in the end, I chose the most logical option for a halfling with questionable morals but a stern sense of self-preservation: Mouse quietly picked the lock and walked into the room, grabbed a pillow from an empty sleeping roll, and held it down firmly over the first goblin's face as she slit his throat.  Dungeon World being the delightful game that it is, the DM decided I didn't even need to roll for it, the goblin being sound asleep and completely unable to defend himself.  He did suggest that Mouse's alignment might end up changing from Neutral to Evil due to this, but in my defense, Neutral for a thief just means avoiding detection or infiltrating a location, and I completely succeeded at infiltrating that room and evading detection from the sleeping, soon-to-be-dead goblins.  Evil is shifting blame from myself onto someone else, and no way am I letting anybody else take credit for my amazing skills at murdering sleeping people.  I considered killing them all like that, but I figured it would be mean to steal the fun from my party mates, so I invited them to get in on the action.  That didn't work out so well, in that the shapeshifting druid Nils was less-than-stealthy and woke up the other goblins when he fell and knocked over the cooking pot, but it did lead into a very fun fight that gave me some more opportunities for stealth-murder, and other kinds of murder.

At one point a goblin escaped the room and ran out, presumably to alert the other goblins of our presence.  So Mouse chased him and threw a dagger at his back.  Unfortunately for Mouse, this goblin was quite a bit quicker than the others we'd faced so far, and he actually dodged the knife, caught it as it whizzed by him, and spun around to throw it back at her.  Unfortunately for the goblin, this started a game of Knife Pong.  Mouse ducked to the side as she saw the knife come at her, grabbed it from mid-air as it went past her head, and threw it back at the hapless goblin.  He was not good at Knife Pong, and that was the end of him.  Just as Mouse was retrieving her dagger from his corpse, though, there was a racket from the sleeping-room behind her where her teammates were.  Apparently, some more goblins came charging in through another entrance, and there was more fighting.  Since they hadn't seen her, Mouse ran the long way around so she could come up behind them and backstab the fuck outta those dicks.  Thanks to some truly delightful rolls, she moved like lightning, killing the first goblin in one stab before he even realized she was there, then charging down the hallway to the next goblin, also in the dark as to her murderous rampage, and stabbed him through the throat, spraying his blood all over one of her companions in the process.  Backstabbing is awesome.

Of course, that's really nothing compared to the end of the game.  Just before we finished up the session, we had to track down one goblin who got away.  We could hear him hollering at the end of the path, and again, we wanted to avoid an ambush from him and his friends, so Nils and Mouse decided to sneak after him, by Nils going ahead transformed into a rat and Mouse following behind, so she could hear him tell her what was up ahead.  Nils had taught Mouse how to talk to animals when they first met, so she could understand him when he was transformed.  Anyway, the plan had been, sneak up, decide a plan after we found out what was up ahead.  Unfortunately, Nils rolled a one when he transformed, so the DM decided that instead of successfully becoming a tiny, sneaky rat, he turned out to be quite a bit larger than intended.  You might even call him a Rodent Of Unusual Size.

As you might guess, this quickly became silly and hilarious and, yes, amazing.  Nils and Mouse went down the cave-path, and saw the single goblin hammering at a large wooden door and screaming.  We had been distracted by some very interesting beetles for a while, so he'd been there shouting for about five minutes and it was clear there wasn't anybody nearby to hear him.  Initially I had thought that since he's distracted, Mouse will just walk up behind him and backstab him.  She does so love backstabbing, after all.  Nils, however, had other ideas.  Better ideas.  So we went with those.

Imagine yourself in the place of this poor goblin: you had just been beaten to a pulp by a druid who was, at the time, large bear.  The bear was accompanied by a paladin in shining white scale armor with a large, nasty, painful-looking halberd, and an unimpressive halfling who killed half of your little goblin friends before you even realized she was there.  You decide that nope, you've kinda had enough of this crap, you want out of here already.  So you take off running down the hall until you find yourself at a locked door, but no matter how loud you yell or how hard you pound the door does not open and you are all alone.  Suddenly, you hear screaming behind you, and you spin around to see the last thing you will ever look at: the halfling from before, brandishing a short sword and howling a battle-cry while riding the largest, meanest-looking rat you've ever seen.  You don't try to defend yourself; you simply stare, hopeless, knowing that your death is imminent as the giant rat leaps and lands on you, crushing you beneath its weight and putting you out of your fear and misery for good before chewing your face off.  This is not the best day for you.

Daaang, that was a really good session.  I can hardly wait until next week.

Now I Just Need To Buy Some Records

I got a record player today!  Well, actually, a combination record/cassette/cd player and old-timey-looking radio.  It was my grandmothers, but we got it when she moved to Ontario to live with my aunt.  Check it out!

Now I kind of desperately need to find a copy of Phantom of the Opera on vinyl.  To Ebay!  And probably the nearest thrift store as well!  I seem to recall seeing tons of records at Value Village, and even if I can't find Phantom there I'm sure there will be a few other neat things to pick up.

I Am A Terrible Dream-Pet Owner

Once I dreamed that I had two pet hamsters that I kept in a standard-size (read, small) cage on top of the dresser in my room.  I dreamed this a year or two ago, and it was not a particularly exciting dream, with the exception of two cute hamsters.  I have always wanted a hamster.  I can't have one though, because I am not nearly responsible enough to keep a small pet.  I can handle a dog, but a hamster is beyond my capabilities.  I'll leave the cage door open and the hamster will run out and get caught in the sticky trap in the kitchen, and it'll be just like when mice get caught in it.  I'll hear my pet screaming in terror and biting at itself until it bleeds, immobilized in the glue until somebody finds it, and all you can do is put the entire trap with the screaming terrified rodent into a plastic bag and smash it with a wine bottle to put it out of its misery.  It's the most inhumane form of trap.  I wish it wasn't so effective.  Also, I wish people would keep hamsters in larger cages.  I've never seen a hamster really happy in one of those standard-size cages, that are like the size of a shoebox.  Hamsters get bored in those and just sleep in the corner all day and get fat because there's no room to run around so all they can do is spin on that little wheel.  I've seen hamsters get bored of that wheel.  Hamsters seem to be happiest in those huge two-story cages with the tubes and shit to run around in, and a little cubbyhole to hide and sleep in.  If I ever get a hamster, that's the cage I'm getting.  Fuck the tiny one, I want my hams to have all the space they need.  

But I digress, I was talking about my dream-hamsters, not my future-hamsters.  Once a year or two ago I dreamed I had two pet hamsters that I kept in a cage on top of my dresser.  And every so often I remember that dream, but I forget for a second that it was a dream.  So I remember owning hamsters, and then I go, holy shit I haven't thought about those hamsters in months the poor things have starved to death I'm such a terrible person!  And it's only after I have made myself feel miserably sad and guilty over being such a terrible person that I remember, wait, I've never owned a hamster, that was only a dream I had once.  I am not sure if this is an odd story or if it happens to a lot of people.  I'm just blogging about it in the hope that once it becomes a funny story I tell, I'll stop forgetting that the hamsters were only a dream.  I love my dead dream hamsters, I don't want to think that I killed them.  The poor little things.

Dungeons and Dragons

So I'm pumped! I've been wanting to get into D&D for ages, but I haven't had much luck finding people to start playing with, I lucked out and got to go to one game of Pathfinder in December, but the DM left shortly after that and the group hasn't gotten together since. I was sadface.

The saddest sadface!

But I lucked out again the other day! A friend of mine recently realized how totally awesome D&D sounds, so she called me up and we decided to give it a shot! She's got a few friends who are also interested in trying it out, and there's plenty of space at my house to get together for a session.

I admit I'm somewhat apprehensive, since I don't actually know any of the kids except for Sam, we're all completely new to the game with my one Pathfinder session months ago being the most experience any of us have, and there is the potential awkwardness of me being the oldest person at 23 in a group of junior high students, at least until May when a friend is planning to move here and join in. But Sam at least is pretty mature for her age, and I trust that her friends are cool, so I'm sure we'll get along well. After all, there are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them, right? D&D is a great experience for anyone, does it matter how old someone is when they stand loyally by your side through thick and thin, facing mighty foes and challenging the forces of evil in a glorious quest to save the world and bring honour to your family name?  

Let me rephrase: when they don't immediately stab you in the back during your quest for loot?

Anyway. DnD is gonna be lots of fun, I'm sure! I bought my first set of dice the other day and ordered a physical copy of the Player's Handbook off Amazon, and I'm making a badass dwarven fighter character now. The character sheet is a little complicated and looks pretty intimidating at first glance, but a bit of Googling helped me find some really useful guides on building characters and filling out the sheet (that first link is the one I found to be the best), as well as background information on dwarves to help me with the roleplaying aspect. Add in some pdf copies of the core books and an online dice roller for the players who haven't got their own dice yet, and we're set! I'm really looking forward to this game.  You know, as soon as we figure out how to play it.

St John's Blizzard

We just got power back.  This is some blizzard, apparently power's going out all over the island.  Not just the city or something, the ENTIRE ISLAND.  Which I guess means I should have named this post Newfoundland Blizzard, but hey, too late now.  I'm seeing photos on Facebook of people who are snowed in -- literally snowed in, there's a four-foot snowdrift against their front door.  Our doors are pretty protected from the wind, so we don't have to worry about that too much.  I've been making an attempt to keep our front door open-able though, by going down every hour or two and pushing it as far open as I can.

Check out my front yard.  I'm not leaving my doorstep to get decent blizzard photos, because fuck getting out of my pajamas today, but you can see enough to make a point.  See that picnic table?

It's a big table, and it's buried up to the seats in snow.  But usually when it snows the top of the table is covered too, and I use the snow on top to measure how much snow fell that day.  Today?  Fuck that, the wind clears off any snow as soon as it lands on it.  And that other flat thing to the left?  That's another table, it's been buried completely.  Forget seeing the street, I can barely see to the end of the driveway.  My house is shaking and creaking in the wind, and my bedroom window is buzzing like an angry beehive.

Everything is shut down today.  My mother tried to call the radio to announce that her work is closed, and they told her that they weren't taking closure announcements any more because everything was closing.  Mom had to use my cell to call them too, because our landlines are down.  I've been listening to CBC's extended coverage of the storm on the big Dewalt worksite radio in the living room and a little hand-crank radio in the kitchen and there's some pretty cool stories people are telling there.  This storm is kind of badass.

I love my glasses!

I hear it all over the place, from people who have to wear prescription glasses -- they suck.  They're awkward, they're ugly, they're annoying, I want contacts, I want Lasik.  Nobody likes glasses.  Glasses are like plastic herpes you caught from the optometrist.

Herpes framex

Fuck that!  I love my glasses!

<3

My eyesight is shit.  Super-shit, actually, I can see maybe five or six inches away from my face and then it gets blurry.  I know one person with eyesight worse than mine, and she's on her way to being legally blind. Well okay maybe two people with eyesight worse than mine, but the other one is my grandmother who actually is blind so that doesn't count.  

So I love my glasses because when I wear them I can see shit!!!!  Do you not get how amazing this is?  The gift of sight is a wonderful thing, my friends.

But I also love my glasses because my glasses are adorable.  I like how I look in glasses.  And maybe it's just because I've worn them all my life, but when I take off my glasses I feel like my face is missing something.  Granted, I'm still adorable, but that's just because I'm just irresistible in general.

Mabel is the only one who gets me.

I have two pairs of glasses -- they're new!  Ish!  I got them a few months ago.  In retrospect, I should have gone for the one-normal-pair-and-one-sunglasses-pair because I really do need prescription sunglasses.  But I just couldn't decide between these two frames, they're both pretty rad.  So I got both of them, because apparently I am completely incapable of making decisions and planning for my future needs!  Yay!

One is a purple plastic pair with a butterfly on the arm joint, and they suit my face really well.  They're just so cute, I can't get over it.

And my other pair is a really neat Geordi La Forge sort of wrap-around thing, and they just looked too neat to pass up.  I spent like an hour agonizing over which pair to pick before I went, fuck it, I'll get 'em both!  It's important to be satisfied with the glasses you're going to be wearing every day for the foreseeable future.

Glasses are awesome. They are so pretty!  And they come in so many styles!  If the pair you're wearing doesn't suit you, then next time get a different set of frames that go with your face.  It's not that glasses are bad, you're just not wearing the right pair.  I'll never understand people who go "I don't like my glasses."  What the hell is there not to like?  I get the "My glasses are inconvenient sometimes" angle, or the "My glasses aren't the right prescription any more so I don't like them" or whatever, but glasses are rad!  If I ever get Lasik or something, I'd keep wearing my glasses just for fashion, even if I didn't need them.  Again, I've worn them all my life so my face just looks right with glasses, but I like the look of glasses on pretty much anybody.  I think everybody should wear glasses, prescription or not, just for fashion.  There's a frame for everyone!  And the more people who wear glasses, the more pressure movie theatres will be under to make 3D glasses that go on comfortably over normal glasses.  It's win-win!

So that just happened.

"HEY ROBIN YOU WANT SOME FROZEN FUCKING YOGURT?"
"FUCK YOU!"
"THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER!"

and then this other thing happened:

"HEY ROBIN YOU WANT SOME FUCKING BABY KOALA COOKIES?"
"WHAT THE FUCK?"
"YOU HEARD ME."
"I DON'T THINK I DID."
"DO YOU WANT TO EAT A BABY KOALA."
"OH, I GUESS I DID HEAR YOU.  PASS THAT SHIT OVER HERE."

Con Artist Or Just A Douchebag?

So either I was conned out of a couple of dollars today, or I donated to a real charity that I shouldn't have donated to anyway.  Whichever one it was, I feel bad now.

Anyway, it was at the Avalon Mall.  I was sitting in front of the bookstore at about quarter past ten, just waiting around and playing Doodle Jump on my iPod.  Next thing I know, some pushy Asian guy is shoving a laminated pamphlet into my hand talking about how there was a disaster in the Philippines last week, and how he's from there, and he goes to MUN here, and he's raising money for the children, blah blah blah.  And he was really pushy.  He didn't really introduce himself or try to start a conversation, it was just shoving a pamphlet at me, and then shoving a little black book into my hands and waving at it with a pen -- I dunno if I was supposed to sign it or if it was a pledge sheet or what.  I should have told him to piss off right then, because he was being really pushy and rude, so even if it was a real charity it was charity-by-guilt and I should have refused to donate anything on principle alone.   I didn't, though.  I'm bad at being immediately mean.  Give me a few minutes and I can be the meanest bitch in the world, but surprise me and the combination of Girls Are Nice Niceness and Canadians Are Nice Niceness take over.  I basically went "Uhhhh have some change and go away."  I had a few dollars in my pocket, and when I pull it out the guy said "It's okay, just donate whatever you have, you can donate all of that" and that's definitely when I should have refused to donate it, because who the hell says what I can and can't donate?  Unfortunately, I still hadn't started thinking at this point -- I have the worst reflexes in the world -- and so I keep the two-fifty I needed for the bus and gave him the two or three dollars left, mostly in quarters and dimes.  He thanks me and wanders off, and it isn't until after he's gone that I realize, "Wait, that was a really sketchy thing that just happened."

So I go to Google and look up "flood in the philippines" and the only articles that pop up are from August.  I immediately start feeling like a moron, because what kind of idiot lets a stranger talk them out of three dollars?  Granted, it's only pocket change, but still.  I've been kicking myself ever since -- I should have realized that the guy was ambushing me, I should have realized it was sketchy as fuck that I didn't hear of any disaster, I should have realized he was being way too pushy, I should have I should have I should have.  Anyway, I can't change anything by thinking about what I should have done.  Worst case scenario, some asshole has a handful of small change and the confidence to try scamming someone else (hopefully someone who is quicker on the draw than I am).  Best case scenario?  While my initial Googling didn't give me anything, a friend has linked me to a news article saying that there was, in fact, a flood in the Philippines last week, so it's possible that it really is just a pushy guy with a charity.  I still shouldn't have donated, because charity by guilt is a shitty way to get money and it's really rude to ambush a person to look for handouts, no matter the cause.  But at least it could actually be a real charity.  I'd rather the change I was conned out of actually go to saving people from floods or whatever instead of paying a jerk's bus fare.

New hats!

I dunno if you realize, but I love hats.  I collect them.  I have a box full of dorky hats, and I need more.  More!  I've got a cow hat, a sheep hat, a raccoon hat, a cat hat, a frog hat, two fedoras, a sparkly top hat, a Cookie Monster hat, a Luigi cap, a one-up beanie, and now two more!  Plus, all those other hats in my box that aren't springing to mind immediately. Hey, it's like all the way in the other room, I'm not getting up and looking through it for a dumb blog post.  Just trust me when I say I've got a ton of hats.  Where did you think the name came from?

So I bought two hats this weekend!  Now that winter is slowly, slowly approaching, then backing off, then coming up again for a day, then going back to summer, then threatening to eventually come back, I figured I need a new hat to keep my ears warm when my other hats won't do because I need more hats all the time because you never have enough hats ever no matter how many are in the box.  And because the store was having a two for one sale, I bought two!  I bought a panda hat, and a superbright hat!  I wore the panda hat downtown this weekend and two different people stopped me on the street within like half an hour of wearing it, so they could compliment it.  And one woman was like, "Oh wow, I want that hat -- wait, I have that hat!  It's got a panda on the front!" when she saw it from behind.  The superbright hat is also rad.  It is like the traffic cone of headgear.  It is retina-meltingly-bright!

I wish my camera could show you exactly how bright this hat is.  It practically glows.

I gotta limit my hat-buyery though.  Lets face it, I can only wear one or two hats at a time.  If I bought a hat every time I wanted a hat I'd be broke and crazy warm.  So I only buy a couple of hats a year, or whenever I see one that I really can't resist.  Hey, I don't have unlimited willpower.  How do you expect me to resist a puppy hat or a Canada Day visor if I see one?  That's just ridiculous.  You are ridiculous.  I'm going hat-shopping.

Mardi Gras on George Street

So I went down to George Street the other night for Mardi Gras!  It's not real Mardi Gras, though.  That's in February or something.  In St John's Mardi Gras just means Halloween Party.  I don't know why.  It's kind of confusing.  I mean, why steal somebody's holiday if you're not even going to pretend to do that holiday?  Just call it Halloween on George Street, seriously.

But anyway.  Costumes!  This is the first year in a while I actually did a costume, instead of just throwing on some awesome stuff I had lying around.  I went as Wesley from The Princess Bride!  Well, sort of.  The Universe was pretty insistent on me being Stripper Wesley, because when I went to look for a shirt the only ones I could find with the right sleeves were transparent.  The only non-see-through shirt I could find was too small for me, so I couldn't do up the top button properly and my cleavage was pretty visible.  Looked good though.  Not Quite Stripper Wesley is a good look for me.

It was a quick and cheap costume, for the most part.  I already had the sexy boots, and most of it I bought at Value Village.  Except for the leggings.  They were surprisingly expensive, but at least I was allowed to try them on.  I've been burned by leggings before.  You gotta be careful when you buy them, because a lot of the time they are labelled leggings when they're actually just footless tights.  You know what the difference is between leggings and tights?  You can see your underwear through tights.  Always check your leggings for underwear sightings.  And wearing dark panties helps too.

I'm on the phone with Shannon in this picture.  He asked for photos.  You're welcome, Shannon.

I went to Mardiween with Petron, because his friends ditched and Sam didn't have money to get in and then when she could get in she had a headache from shitty glasses, and Ash had to work but she showed up later anyway because she's cool like that.  Petron was a blogless mad scientist with a tube of glowy worms.  It was pretty cool, he did it by sticking a couple of glow sticks in a jar of milk and water.  Then he dropped it and the top cracked, but it still worked.  The seal didn't break so no milkwaterglow spilled anywhere. But he kept rolling it all over the table, because he never learns.

We went down around seven, because that was the only time I could get a ride.  It is unfortunate, because the weather was crap so most people either didn't go, or waited until nine or ten to show up.  Including Ash, who didn't get off work 'till eleven.  So Petron and I were kinda stuck on the street waiting for hours and hours for it to get interesting.  We passed the time by calling random people, getting food at Greensleeves, and trying to harass our friends into showing up.  Also I called Shannon, because Shannon is cool and apparently my phone does reach Clarenville when it wants to, and every other time I've tried to call people in Clarenville it was just being a wuss.  I don't know how a phone can be a wuss.  Probably by being too wussy to call numbers.  Thanks, phone.

But it got cool eventually!  Later in the night people in cool costumes showed up, like the Lego Batman people and the Adventure Time characters.  I didn't get photos of them though.  I should have.  And Ash came down dressed as a mob bitch/mobster/mob boss/person in rad outfit.

After Ash got there, we switched it up!  Instead of wandering aimlessly all over the street like we had been doing, we started wandering aimlessly all over the street and dancing in one of the bars.  Took photos, made fun of people, got photos interrupted.  Seriously, don't bother trying to do a posed photo around drunk people, they think it is hilarious to jump into it.

Petron went home at around one or one thirty, and Ash and I went to another bar and made new friends, Doctor Who, Po the Teletubby and a Free Mammogram machine.  Ironically, Doctor Who was the only one without a sexy foreign accent.  And yes, I know technically he is The Doctor, but face it everybody calls him Doctor Who.  Even the show does it.  Calm your tits.

Also what the heck is the deal with stuff on George Street.  You have to pay twenty bucks to get on the street, and they give you both a ticket and a wristband, but if you leave the street you can't get back on?  What the hell is the point of the wristbands?  Either use the wristbands to say "You have already paid for your ticket and been on the street, so if you leave this is proof that you can come back," or don't bother with the fucking wristbands in the first place, what the hell.

But we stayed on George Street till last call, me and Ash and Tom of the Free Mammograms and Po the Drunk Teletubby, and after that we went down to a really cool little bar with a nice atmosphere and stays open serving alcohol past the legal hour, lets you smoke in the bar, and never cards anyone.  I love that place.  I don't smoke and so far I've always had my ID, but it's cool to know that there's a place like that to go if I am hanging with underage smokers at three am for some reason.  Then we went to Celtic Hearth and stood around waiting in the rain for like half an hour waiting for a table.  Po ditched us to join a group of strangers who got a table before us, and vanished into the night like a mysterious wasted ninja.

So overall it was a pretty rad night.  Well, half and half.  The first half was kinda lame, but only kinda.  Petron is awesome to hang with, and we got some decent food.  The second half was rad as fuck, despite a lack of Petron.  I have no idea how I spent as much money as I did, but whatever I spent it on was probably worth it.  It was a good night.

ADHD

Okay, so I have ADHD.  I don't bring it up often, but it's a thing I have.  When I do bring it up, I expect a couple of different responses.

The most common one is, "Oh, you have ADHD?  I never would have guessed!  You don't seem like that kind of person."  Because people with learning disabilities are all idiots, I guess.  Yeah, you can always tell who has a learning disability and who is normal.  The LD kids are different from normal, not-stupid kids.  They can't read well, if they can read at all, they aren't smart, they talk slow or don't "get" things easily.  So a lot of the time if I mention that I have ADHD, people are surprised.  Because I'm not stupid, or something?  I'm not obviously one of those "special needs" people with a learning disability.  I mean, you know what those people are like, right?  They're just different from regular people.  They're stupid.  That's why they have learning disabilities.

(For the record, this is where I was gonna embed a video clip from Bob's Burgers, but Youtube blocked it because FOX has copyright notices and shit. I am annoyed that FOX hasn't figured out that funny clips on Youtube are a good way to get more people to watch their shows.  And maybe I will eventually find another site to put it up on because fuck you FOX you cancelled Firefly.  But the clip I was gonna post was from Spaghetti Western and Meatballs, where Gene says "I acted like Banjo and took Choo Choo down.  Everybody laughed!" and Louise goes, "Well, one kid.  He has a learning disability."  Because kids with learning disabilities have a crappy sense of humor and laugh at everything, because they are not as smart as the kids without ADHD or whatever.  They just laugh hysterically whenever they see or hear things going on around them.  Because they're stupid, I guess.  All of them.)

No, by the way.  In case you didn't get that.  You can't just immediately go "That person has ADHD!" and "That person is completely normal!"  It does not work that way.  Sometimes the kid who has ADHD or some other learning disability is one of the smartest kids in class.  Sometimes the class clown who's failing everything is just a lazy, stupid, neurotypical kid.  Sometimes people with learning disabilities aren't even kids!  They're grown-ups who just go on with their life, and keep having ADHD or whatever even when they get out of school.  You don't hear about those people very often, do you?

The second most common is, "Oh, right.  Sure.  I guess you went online and found a list of symptoms, right?  I hate that, people always have to convince themselves that they have whatever bullshit disorder they read about online."  I always feel equal parts indignation and smugness when I tell them, "Actually, I was diagnosed.  By a real doctor and everything, when I was in elementary school.  And I see that doctor every couple of years just to check up on the whole ADHD thing, you know, just making sure it's still there."  Yeah, there are a couple of hypochondriacs out there who insist that they have Super Special Snowflake Syndrome because they're just so different and special omfg.  There are also a lot more people with Actually A Thing They Have Disorder, whether it's been diagnosed or not.  So maybe don't assume all the time that the person you meet who says they have something going on is lying.  How about you try asking them about it a bit before you immediately jump in with the accusations, okay?  Because you're gonna have a hard time talking with your foot in your mouth after I tell you that no, I'm not making it up for attention, it's actually something I have to deal with.  And trust me it's a lot less awkward to give a hypochondriac the benefit of the doubt than it is to go off on a rant about how ADHD is not actually a real disorder and people just pretend to have it because they suck at school, only to find out that actually the person you are ranting at was diagnosed years ago and takes daily medication and knows a lot more about the subject than you do.  And who now thinks you're a complete moron.  Congrats.

This one I don't get quite as often, but it still comes up and it's still really, really infuriating.  Usually it shows up in specific situations.  Like I'll be talking to somebody and saying, for example, "The recipe I'm following says I can prepare the blahblah while the thingy is fizzing, but I have to prepare the blahblah before I start the thingy fizzer because of my ADHD, I'll hyperfocus on blahblah and won't hear or smell the fizzing scorch.  I'm not good at multitasking."  And the person I am talking to will be all "Oh, well just pay attention to the food while it's cooking!" and gives me instructions on how to do the thing I'm doing.  Okay, first off, the problem isn't that I don't know how to do it.  The problem is I can't.  I know I can't, I've got a lot of experience failing before I gave up and started doing it this way.  Second, congratulations!  You've just cured ADHD!  "Just pay attention," holy shit, I can't believe nobody thought to tell me this all through school.  What the hell was I doing taking medication and shit when I could have just paid attention to the stuff I couldn't pay attention to?  WOW!  Now that you have that out of the way, why don't you go tell people with lung cancer that they probably shouldn't have smoked so much.  Cured cancer!  Dang, you are on fire!  Way to go, dude, your Nobel prize is in the mail, being shipped with a rabid honey badger.  Enjoy opening the box.

So I guess what I'm basically trying to say here is, I dunno, don't assume people who have a learning disability or whatever are all recognizably learning-disabilitied, or that people with a learning disability are just weird or dumb or "special" all the time and are super-visible about it.  Don't assume that someone who says they have a learning disability is making it up for attention when they say, hey btw I have an eldee.  And don't tell somebody with a learning disability that "Hey if you just act like everybody else does then you will be completely normal!  You are just lazy and you intentionally don't pay attention to stuff going around you because I guess you just don't care."

That's...that's kinda all I got.  I thought I was starting out with a point to make but I guess I just wanted to complain about morons who have been saying dumb shit to me lately.  Uh.....sorry?  I'll try to actually have a point next time I write a blog post.  Hint it may or may not be about Jem and the Holograms. 

I spent too much money today :(

So today I went to the mall!  I was supposed to go with Sam, and head up to Value Village to look for a Halloween costume, but she was a butt and decided to feel sick today.  So the Halloween costume search is put off 'til next week, but I still needed new headphones (as you may remember) so I went to the mall solo tonight.  Insert Forever Alone face here.

Overall I'm relatively pleased with my purchases! I got the new Harvest Moon game -- well, relatively new, it came out last year -- and two pairs of headphones instead of just one, because I lack willpower.  Nail polish for the same reason.  But both the headphones and polishes are really cute so it's okay.

I haven't tried the earbuds yet.  I'm expecting them to be pretty mediocre-to-terrible, since they were only six bucks.  I'm sure they will crap out in a month or two and I'll have to buy another, better pair.  I did try the big over-the-ear headphones on the way home, and I think they were kind of shitty?  I can't really tell.  I mean, they don't sound as good as my old earbuds used to, but that might just be because my earbuds were noise-cancelling and these aren't, so I'm expecting them to be louder than I have a right to expect them to be, uh, loud.  Still, that's what I get for buying the cheapest pairs in the store.  I should have gone for the Skull Candy ones, like TK recommended when I called him for an opinion.

I might end up buying a better pair next paycheck and just keeping these as backup.  They are really cute, and they did a good job of keeping my ears warm.  Plus they fold together to be small enough to be (kinda) portable in my purse, and they have that nifty curled telephone-wire on them which just looks neat.  And they were cheap.  So overall, I'm happy with them.

Trust me, they're adorable.

I haven't played the Harvest Moon game yet.  I'm gonna start it tonight, and I will probably be completely sucked into it and disappear from the world for a week or two once I do.  I will have to do my best not to become completely obsessed.

No promises.

The nail polishes are omfg crazy cute.  I tried the pink and green colours on my left and right hands, respectively.  The pink went on frickin' neon!  I thought it would take a couple coats, but nope.  Straight out of the bottle, blinding pink.  Also it dried into sort of a matte finish, rather than a gloss.  I've never had polish that dries like that before!  I like it.  I always did prefer the feel of a matte finish to a smooth gloss finish.

For the record, my camera does not do justice to the crazy-bright colours of these polishes.  Or to my bright pink headphones, since we're on the subject.  All these colours are like ten times more intense than they look.

So that's what I got at the mall tonight.  It was an arduous journey, but the loot was worth it.  Now excuse me while I go play Harvest Moon for the next eight hours.

I'm a pretend reporter!

Okay I will admit it up front, this is probably a lame thing to be excited about.  But you can just fuck right off, because I still think it's cool.

There was a two-car crash on the Outer Ring Road this afternoon, in the westbound lane of the Paradise turnoff.  Traffic was blocked for a few kilometres back, and there was police and firemen and an ambulance there flashing away.  I was driving home from work with Dad, we didn't see the crash itself but when we saw the big mess Dad gave me the phone and I called up CBC to let them know about the crash and the traffic.  Not five minutes later they reported it on the radio! 

It was pretty rad.  I mean, it's not like they mentioned names or made a big deal out of the report, but I still think it's pretty cool that I got to call in with a report that they thought was helpful or important enough to announce right away on the radio.  And then repeat just as we got home, using the exact information we gave them.  I've done it a couple of times before when driving with dad, but this was the first time it was for something exciting like a car crash and not just "The road is washed out" or "There's construction on that street" or something.

And....that's all I got.  Nothing else interesting going on except for a tuna sandwich that is maybe a little too old to eat.  But possibly not?  I will sniff it.

Oh, no, that's gone bad.  Into the trash it goes.  Bye-bye, sandwich.