Movies, this time! This was more of a "How many movies do I watch in one year?" type thing rather than an attempt to watch a specific amount.
( Cut for movie listing )
Happy Christmas!
"I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish, pain, and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear . . ."
Yes, Virginia . . .
I've decided my userinfo/profile/what you will could use a bit of redecoration—I've had this journal for nearly five years and my profile is starting to get rather cluttered as it is.
So . . . this shall be the colourbar post! (And I'll be able to move some over here that I didn't have on my profile before, due to the clutter. ^_^)
( Under the cut to spare your flists . . . Roy G. Biv! )
I think I've mentioned several times that one of the assignments for my YA LIt class is to keep a "reading journal" consisting of book reviews of YA lit we read on our own (and for class) throughout the semester. One of the acceptable formats for this assignment is a book blog, which I think would be fun to do (and I'm also thinking of posting knitting stuffs to said blog so it will be more of a books-and-knitting blog, yay!). As I am wont to do lately, I made a silly poll for the matter! And if you make it through the poll, there are fun questions a the end—as usual. ^_^
[Poll #1280061]
Yay! And I'm off to dinner . . . Knitting and telly-watching shall probably ensue when I return. ^_^
I never do the "Writer's Block" things that appear on the main LJ page . . . but I felt I needed to do this one:
These days, there's a holiday for everything from punctuation to pie. If you could create your own holiday, what would it be and how would you celebrate?
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ladymoony and I *have* done this. Because we are geeky. (And there needed to be a Who-liday.)
I just re-downloaded the GIMP! Which means I can make graphics again, yay! And of course I tested it out by making a "nearly friends only" banner (after going "Help! How do I do this??" and running to Google). It's adorable, but far too large—and I haven't figured out how to resize it yet. I thought I already *had* as I was working on the picture at 75% of it's original size, but it turns out that just changed the *viewing* size, not the actual size of the image. For those of you who have FO banners, what would you recommend as a good size?
I actually might not use this one, as I have a few other pictures I might want to play with as banners . . . but this one *is* adorable. ^_^
Oh, and I keep meaning to ask all of you this. For my YA Lit class, one of our assignments is to keep a reading journal in which each entry is a book review with a booktalk idea. Our professor has a YA book blog and has said we could write our reading journal in any of several formats: handwritten, typed, or as a blog. I think it would be rather fun to have a book blog. ^_^
My question is this: do any of you have blogs on other platforms than LJ? If so, which do you recommend? I'm tempted to stay with LJ for a few reasons. First of all, I know how it works. Also, a lovely layout entitled "Magic Paper" exists, which would be *perfect* for a book blog (see chiara_suzuka's page—isn't it pretty?). However, it seems a blog on another platform might seem more professional-ish. But are comments easy to do on other platforms? For some reason, I vaguely remember seeing something somewhere that said certain blog places don't automatically have a comments section. At any rate, that blog will be entirely separate from this one‐as in if I end up going with LJ, I won't answer comments with this handle. Of course, you're all welcome to check it out once I finish a book get said blog set up. ^_^
And for those of you who might be interested, I found this while working on a project for my Technology class: Why librarians are awesome.
One more random thing. ::points to music:: I can no longer hear this sound without thinking of the video store scene in The Holiday. I love that movie. ^_^
Also, I love how LJ's spellcheck doesn't accept "blog." ::is amused::
I need a pair of wellies. Does anyone know where I could get some on a grad student budget? Also a wind-proof umbrella. And my trench coat would be so much more helpful if it were waterproof and not just mostly-water-resistant (also, it lacks a walking vent in the back so it doesn't swirl dramatically in high wind or when I'm walking).
When I went to lunch today, it was very, very rainy—pouring, really. This wasn't so bad at first as I like rain. By the time I got back to my dorm (which is only about two buildings away from the residence campus dining hall), my jeans were nearly soaked. I then needed to visit the grocery store as I'm out of milk (very necessary for both tea and breakfast cereal). Shaw's is about two blocks away. At this point it is now raining harder and rather windy. As in occasionally the rain is falling slantwise (this happened last week or so as well—I wonder if heavy Boston rainstorms are often like this?). My umbrella doesn't do so well in wind. Along with a carton of Silk and some cereal, I needed to get a birthday card for my mum—unfortunately, Shaw's only had a very, very small selection. Another block to Rite-Aid. It is still quite windy/rainy and I'm attempting to hold on to my umbrella, purse, and bag o' groceries. I make my way back to my room, put the Silk in the refrigerator and the cereal on a counter to dry the box, and start putting things in my messenger bag to take to the library. (Huh. When did I switch to present tense?) Now, my jeans are most definitely soaked through.
Happily, the wind went away for the most part and the rain wasn't as strong when I went to the library. Also, I was wearing my trench coat so I didn't get much more soaked. And I didn't fail trying to get there this time, yay! (More on that later.) I could only stay for about an hour-and-a-half (perhaps not that long) as they close at 6, but I was able to find a few books to look at for my YA Lit pathfinder assignment. I didn't get past evaluating the first one, but I wrote down the call letters so I can find them when I go back sometime this weekend to check in the adult nonfic section (I was looking in the Js today).
I rather hope I don't end up catching anything. And now I'm off to dinner, where there will hopefully be lovely soup (never mind that I had soup with my lunch). Perhaps later I shall write about my expedition-to-the-Newton-Free-Library-FAIL from Wednesday.
Yes, I have a longish "yay-Boston-and-library-school" post I need to write, but petitmayfaircat had this on her journal and it was too hilarious not to do.
The Love Poetry Generator—it's Mad Libs does poetry!
( This is far too silly. )
GAAAAHH!! Did I already post about my shiny new MacBook? Or is that in the entry I've been meaning to write up (including a Silly Poll of Much Randomness) and haven't gotten to yet (must do that tomorrow)? I've been working on the long process of transfering my IE favourites (yes, I know I should really switch to Firefox) on my PC to a Word document so I can add them to my Firefox favourites on my Mac (also need to lean Firefox). This, as you can imagine, is quite tedious. I therefore thought I should do something today that was still moving things from one computer to another but didn't involve endless copy/pasting. Of course, I figured transferring my pictures from my digital camera would be fairly simple. ::facepalm::
( cut for length )
I has a comm!!
You know you want to. ^_^
I was wandering about on Ravelry today and found out from the RaveLibrarians forum that CafePress has some very fun things, some of which I think are fantastic:
( Library silliness )
For those who might be interested, violet_lane has posted a rather excellent tribute to Dr. Grace Holloway on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
loves_them_all. I know Grace isn't well-liked by a large portion of the fandom, but I happen to think she's awesome. ^_^
And in other late-night ponderings, it seems I have an inordinate amount of love for the song "Running" from Sarah Brightman's Symphony. The beginning section (well, the A section if you want to be technical, as it appears again later) is just *gorgeous* and I also love the fast, dance-y middle section. And then it has a "hidden" reprise of the "Fleurs du Mal" intro! I really really hope I can somehow get tickets to see her--I tried on Ticketmaster the day they went on sale and was only able to look at two options, neither of which worked for me (one I could afford but wasn't a very good seat, the other an excellent seat but not affordable right now). This is rather frustrating as I'll finally be in a city where I can go to concerts (I live in a small town where we joke that we're 'centrally located'--five hours to several cities; the city where I'm going for library school is ten hours away) and I can't seem to get tickets!
Oh, and does anyone know of any fansites, etc. where I could find editable Sarah Brightman pictures? I want to change a few of my moodtheme pics (and can't seem to find where I originally got my moodtheme bases from--my IE favourites were of course lost due to the virus of DOOM, but Googling hasn't worked for me either).
And it's probably time for me to get to bed, by which I mean "read for a bit before actually going to sleep."
Remember I wrote about considering upgrading to a laptop a few weeks ago? I recently found out that several grad school loan companies(?) will allow you to borrow the balance between tuition and the financial aid already coming from the university—as well as money for textbooks and computers. Due to this happy news, I wandered over to Apple's website and have been looking at Macs (they also apparently have student discounts)—I hadn't really considered them before because they're much more expensive than PCs. However, the only Mac experience I really have is from using them for my biology "portfolio"/website. I think we got one class-period's worth of a Mac crash course, but it was mostly how to use Dreamweaver to set up our sites.
I know at least *some* of you have to have Macs, so I thought I'd make one of my usual Silly Polls. Any information on what type of laptop would be appreciated, too. Oh, and feel free to answer the poll even if you don’t have a laptop—some of these are Mac vs PC questions. ^_^
[Poll #1192393]
On a completely unrelated note, I'd forgotten how lovely Eden is—I mean, it's one of my favourite Sarah Brightman albums, but I'd not listened to the whole album in quite a while (which I did this morning). I suppose it's one of the downsides of always having iTunes on shuffle.
Also, I have my first high school reunion on Saturday. By "first" I mean the first reunion banquet my graduating class has been invited to—it's really our fifth reunion. No-one from my class has bothered to put up anything where people can sign up to say they're going (there isn't even a Facebook group/event, which surprised me), so I have no idea who'll be there. I only have a few friends from high school (who graduated with me) that I'm still in touch with, so if none of them are there it might be slightly awkward—I really don't like the wander-around-trying-to-find-someplace-to-sit thing. The whole concept of a fifth-year reunion sounds a bit awkward to me, actually. Hopefully things will go well, though.
And that is all.
Botheration! Remember that 1-month free Netflix trial I mentioned in my last post? For some reason, it didn't work. I definitely have a charge on my billing account now. I know the free trials only apply to first-time members, but I am a first-time member! Sigh.
And I suppose--since it's late and such--I'll be off to read for a bit before bed.
(Movie recommendations are love!)
I'm in several icon comms and have a few iconmakers friended so I'm always saving icons to my hard drive. Unfortunately, I have next to no icon space, so these lovely icons sit (unhappily, I would presume) in folders on my hard drive and Photobucket account. Therefore, I thought I'd do some icon "spring cleaning." Quite a few of the icons I'm using now were among my first attempts at icon-making and are overly-texty, so several of those will probably go. (This reminds me, I should really do an iconpost--I've had a few sitting in my Photobucket for a while.)
So . . . based on a meme seen on nentari's journal a while ago (but I'm not claiming it as my own idea because I'm sure someone's already done this): Comment with a few (say 4 or 5) icons of mine you rather like and tell me why you like them.
Also, the lovely diddakoi gifted me with a 1-month Netflix trial! (I've been meaning to sign up for Netflix for, oh, the past six months or so.) I have a list of movies I've not seen yet (mostly because the local movie rental place doesn't have them) and will be adding to said Netflix queue. Any suggestions of films I need to see?
And the second reason for getting Netflix: Classic Who!! Of course this brings me to another dilemma, namely where to start. ( slightly more detailed pondering under the cut )
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timeasmymeasure
