shroud ourselves in the cosmos; let the music play

1. BUT FIRST! a quiz. ( tarot )

2. Things I have cooked: ( cheesy bread, crepes )
Oh, speaking of cooking! That's what I did ALLLL MORNING today. Chocolate chip pancakes, which turned out a little too dry, maybe because I added some cocoa powder and it absorbed the milk? also I didn't measure the flour too painstakingly I guess. AND the little pumpkin my mum gave me was actually a PIE PUMPKIN! And I didn't make a pie with it, but I did scrape it out (with much elbow-grease) and make PUMPKIN MUSH by stirring its innards up with an egg, condensed milk, sugar, and spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves), pouring it into casserole dishes, and sticking it in the oven (no, I didn't measure anything here, either). I tried to roast the seeds (sprinkled half with sugar, half with salt, plus various spices on both sides, including cinnamon, chili powder, ginger, curry powder, and I forget what else) but I ended up burning them to a blackened crisp and setting off the smoke alarm and making the kittens hide under the bed. Oops.

3. Star Trek waffles! ( Also, I swear I don't hate Flatmate ALL the time. )
I do wonder how these actors feel about having their faces on waffles, and people eating them. I guess it's probably about the same as having their faces all over any other kind of promotional materials or tie-in merchandise or whatever.

4. Downtown LA and the opera costume shop sale: ( graffiti, a van, and fangirling a professor )

5. Travel fun: ( my commentary on a packet of peanuts )
I also had some napkins that were pretty great, but I have mislaid them. I really hope I didn't leave them tucked inside Dorian Gray when I returned it to the library :\

6. And some random stuff! ( YAAAAAY )

COMING UP NEXT: EPIC KITTEN PICTURES POST. (srsly, EPIC.)

BUT FIRST! btw that concert tonight? ( THIS: )

(I wish there were some way to indicate where my big smileys fall on the sincerity scale. this one is not very.)

I CAN HAS EAR INFECTION!!!! not the outer ear this time, which means no drops (yay) -- just regular old oral antibiotics. The doctor I saw at the student health center gave me a scrip and I'm gonna take it to Rite Aid when I get home tonight.

In other news, today is RAINY! I did bring an umbrella and my rain boots, but it wasn't raining when I left my car this morning so I left the boots in the backseat and put on ballet flats. It definitely was raining when I went to student health, though, and my feet got wet :( HOWEVER the lot I park in is underneath student health, and indeed the stair I use is right next to student health, so after I saw the doctor I popped down and put on my rain boots and then got a pretzel and boba and went back to work. And then I changed back out of my boots the second I got back to the music building, because they are fabulous and warm and dry, but they are also not quite wide enough and have insufficient arch support. *shrug* such is life.

I was going to complain about Patrons Who Expect You To Do Everything For Them Including Look Up The Location Of Every Book They Wish To Check Out, but I have to go eat lunch before orchestra. (wearing an ear plug won't fuck with my infected ear, will it? I'm experiencing sound sensitivity, which suxx0rz.)

He saunters into my room, presumably bored. Jumps onto my bassoon case. Looks at himself in the mirror. Looks at me. Then he jumps off of my bassoon case and trots over to Ducky, who is asleep on top of a paper bag (THEY LIKE PAPER BAGS OKAY) and has been for the past fifteen minutes. He steps on Ducky, then walks around him to sniff at the food and water bowls, then he walks on top of Ducky again and pounces on him, waking him up by biting his throat.

What loving brothers they are.

(Also, they refuse to drink from the stainless steel water bowl next to their food dish, preferring to drink from the plastic bowl I put in the other room (so that when it was super-hot, they wouldn't have to go as far to keep hydrated). What's up with that? I can't figure out the problem.)

In other news, the haze today is so thick that I cannot see the mountains from my kitchen window. This perhaps explains the tightness in the chest from this morning, yes?

The clearing-out of my school e-mail account continues. I just discovered that on the morning of 5 May 2009, I sent myself three e-mails in the space of an hour. The subject lines were:
feh
feh II
grandson of feh
Am I funnier when I'm annoyed?

edit 14:47 Deletion finished!! I got down to 7 pages, which is all of my e-mail from the last month, plus one or two pages of significant older stuff. That means of my gig of storage space, I have decreased the amount I'm using from over 20% to 8.55%. I feel so accomplished!

He eats bugs <3

The biggest goddamn housefly I have ever seen landed on my bedside lamp. I managed to hit it (pretty hard, too) with a book, and it fell to the floor -- probably partly because I hit it that hard, and partly because it was stunned. Ducky was on it in a flash, pinned it under his front paws, and then gobbled it up!

The other day he ate a spider for me, too. I'm glad Ducky likes the kitty treats because he deserves them <3 <3 <3

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Missed my chance at going to an awesome birthday celebration at The Magic Castle because I didn't know my phone rang until an hour and a half later, but it's okay -- went bowling with Flatmate and some of her peeps (the band minus the bassist, but plus Flatmate's bestie/the guitarist's GF). I like bowling, even when I suck at it :) And it's always easier to be a sport when you're not The Worst, at least it is for me, anyway.

Which leads me to the observation that Flatmate might be the anti-athlete. The vast majority of the frames she bowled were zeroes. Add to that the fact that she generally dislikes games and is Bad At Swimming and not very strong or fast or given to endurance...

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I went to Petsmart today, to buy litter and food for the kittens, and I stopped and looked at the Bettas while I was there... and I absolutely fell in love with one gorgeous male. He was striped -- long bands of white and I think red (it's hard to tell because they dye the water blue, which I have always wondered about. Maybe the blue is actually keeping the water clean?) from his nose to his tail. The edges of his fins were white, but the bases were red, and his body was mostly red but for a thick streak of white on his upper sides.

I was thisclose to buying him, but I'd have to get another bowl and more rocks to put at the bottom of it and it would take up so much more counterspace and he and Huw would make each other crazy trying to fight but never being able to. But he was so pretty. :c

I just checked the schedule of classes for this quarter, and if the Graduate School of Education does in fact get its shit together and offer the classes we need, following the tentative schedule the Music Education professor sent us, I definitely won't be able to take a second year of German. Sadness. (Although honestly I probably wouldn't have been able to anyway because that would surely put me over 20 units, and I'm pretty sure the Arts counselors won't let me over-enroll any more because I'm already over my Official Unit Cap for all four (five) years here.) Of course, if the GSE has no money to offer our classes (because of University of California has failed ALL OVER ITSELF -- O HAI SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE FOOT, I GUESS YOU DON'T WANT YOUR CHILDREN TO BE EDUCATED BY WELL-TRAINED TEACHERS), then I'll be able to work in the library in the mornings, instead of lunchtime, and take German 4 from 11-11:50. Is it wrong that I almost hope that the Music Ed program here falls apart so that I can do what I want? I did not say that. I swear.

In other news, after taking two days off, the air seemed okay this morning, so I went running (1:2), and it felt sooooo good. I'll probably do the same run:walk ratio tomorrow, take Sunday off, and try starting "week two" again next week (2:1, walk, 3:1, walk, 4:1, 4:1, rest -- a rather intimidating ramping up of the running portion). Also, my daddy told me to bring my running shoes when I came home this weekend (to see his cousin & her hubby & their new baby who are visiting from Chicago), and we might get me new shoes. Mine aren't uncomfortable, and they're probably not too worn out sole-wise, but they're a couple years old and I marched in them, so the upper part of the shoe is pretty beat up. *shrug* I like shoes, so it's all good.

In kitten news, they enjoyed my friend's visit, and he definitely enjoyed hanging out with them! Baxter threw up this morning, though. He's fine now, I think -- at least, he was fine when I left this morning. I'm pretty sure he's not actually sick, I think he was just a little too worked up running around and playing this morning, and then he ate too fast and gave himself a tummy ache. Right before he booted, he made the loudest, most miserable-sounding meows, though. I felt really bad for him. And then he tried to eat his own vomit, which was, well, not okay, but I can see why a kitten might do that. Especially since it was mostly entire pieces of kibble. (Baxter is apparently bad at chewing? Ducky seems to chew more, but he's a little bit smaller than Baxter and I think the kibble pieces might be too big for him to swallow whole.)

Oh, crap. I just gave a woman directions to the student services office, but it's a furlough day and none of the department staff are here. Whoops.

So I decided to try going for a run, since on the 4th floor, it's not particularly smoky.

At street level, I didn't even make it two minutes before I was wheezing like a ... thing that wheezes a lot. So I went back inside.

Oops.

After a hot, hot day, it's finally full dark. Looking out from my balcony, I can see the glow from at least three conflagrations.

And here I am, planning to bake bread.

I feel like there's a punchline somewhere in there.

So, I mistakenly checked out Beck's album "Mutations" to a patron, and when discharging it I noticed that the art on the liner notes looked very familiar. Turns out all the art used in "Mutations" is by Tim Hawkinson, whose exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art I went to see with Betts by chance on a "College Nights at LACMA" thing (free admission, free food with college ID) -- an exhibit that is mentioned in this NPR story, which was the fourth result I got when I googled "Tim Hawkinson art" and the first link that I clicked on.

Duuuuuuude.