Love alters not...

...when it alteration finds...O no, it is an ever fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is not shaken...

So, for valentines day, I had this great idea that I would make fortune cookies with love quotes from the bible and, yes, Shakespeare, in them. I thought, well, it'll be difficult, but really cool, right? So I looked up a recipe online, wrote down some selected quotes on little tiny pieces of paper in hopefully legible cursive, and mixed up the first batch. 

 So there's the batter, and I'm wearing gloves because I'd read that you have very little time to work with the cookies after they've baked so they're really hot. And just ignore the box of Triscuts in the backround. And whatever that random bowl is.

 So I popped those in the oven, and waited for them to get, "crispy golden half an inch all the way around the edges, but still light in the center."

 Yes, those are the cookies in the oven, and no, it isn't really necessary to have a picture of that. I just managed to take the picture with my computer camera and wanted to see if I could load them on here.

Well, after the alloted time they didn't look crispy golden anywhere. So I left them in for five more minutes, then five more minutes, and they still were pretty white so I just took them out and tried very hard to get them to do what all well-behaving fortune cookies do, but they wouldn't.

 Those are just the ones that wouldn't come off the baking sheet. If you look at the right, no left, you can see a few of the pieces of the others.

 Moving on...

With the progression of my classes, a few more interesting things have popped up. Yeah, most of the time its still just trying to get through and not fall asleep, but sometimes things happen that kind of make you go hmm. For instance, yesterday in my zoology class, we convinced the professor, who happens to be an ornithologist, to do the bird call of a bard owl. It was something like a mixture between your typical hooting owl, one of those whooping monkeys you hear in the zoo, and a songbird. He said that it was accurate enough to actually call the owls to him, so he wouldn't have to go out and search for them himself, and I was almost impressed.  Then he pulled a dead yellow belly sapsucker out of his bag and was like, "And this is a dead yellow belly sapsucker!" I went up and looked at it after, it was pretty cool, and thought that that class had been much more interesting and that all periods of instruction should include at least one dead specimen and a bird call. On the downside of the professor, he's so humanistic that its scary sometimes. That is, he really doesn't just teach evolution, he deeply believes it, and you can definitely tell. Like, once when he was talking about some theory about some other thing, and was saying how a new mode of thought was taking over, he said something to the effect of, "Those who believed that are all mostly old, so they won't be around much longer...so those who followed the old way are gradually dying off as mostly everyone now realizes the new way is much better..." but it was just the way he was saying it that creeped me out. Like, he really thought it was better, and these old guys just needed to hurry up and die because they were slowing down the progress. But anyways.

Lets see, in drawing with charcoal earlier today, we were doing self portraits. One kid accidently dropped his mirror, really loudly and suddenly, and the professor, Gene, walked over and was really quiet for a few seconds, then was like, "EVERYBODY SEE THIS? This is exactly what I don't want happening! I haven't had a broken mirror in here for 6 years!" Then he just walked away and went back to what he was doing. I had a hard time not laughing. Poor kid. And he (Gene) also finally said the inevitable words of all art teachers: "Just really feel the drawing, put your soul into it, do it with passion!" I had a hard time not laughing then, too. Everyone who does art of any kind must be very dramatic, I think. 

I started reading Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, its pretty good. I like some of the things he writes, they're pretty funny:

"He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was "cultural," apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. "Cultural" sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there."

"She has told me everything," Wen went on. "I know that time was made for men, not that other way around. I have learned how to shape it and bend it. I know how to make a moment last forever, because it already has. And I can teach these skills even to you, Clodpool. I have heard the heartbeat of the universe. I know the answers to many questions. Ask me." The apprentice gave him a bleary look. It was too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning. That was the only thing that he currently knew for sure. "Er...what does master want for breakfast?" he said. Wen looked down from their camp, and across the snowfields and purple mountains to the golden daylight creating the world, and mused upon certain aspects of humanity. "Ah," he said. "One of the difficult ones."

Well, I think this post is quite long enough.

"A little nonsense now and then...

...is cherished by the wisest men."

Well, I don't really have anything of importance or real interest to say,  but since my mom is now faithfully posting, I should at least try and keep up with her.

So, since the new semester at JCCC has started, I could spout on that for a while. Once again I find the most interesting part of the whole experience the simple fact that people are just so darn different from each other. And in my opinion, the people you learn the most about concerning their personalities and intelligence are teachers of any kind. I mean, they're standing there talking to you for a living, you're bound to learn as much about their opinions, beliefs, world views, likes and dislikes, bad habits, annoying jokes, random traits, psychological workings, and pretty much a lot of whatever makes them tick. Even if you have an instructor that somehow manages to say about six sentences for the whole six hour class period (which I have, believe me) that right there says tons about what they think of you, themselves, teaching, their enthusiasm or lack thereof, you get the picture.

So, launching from that, my professors this semester weren't dissapointing as far as interest value goes.

In my Drawing 1 class, the art instructor is surprisingly organized, strict, and exact for an artist, not without the usual sharp and delving eye that is typical of an artist.  He is NOT happy when people show up late; when we hear the the bell toll eight, he starts exactly, and anyone who dare come in ten minutes or, gasp! half an hour! later...

In general zoology, I have the most arrogant, condescending, and haughty professor yet. At the beginning of the class, just to prove his point that we, the students, were all so, "close minded about animals, the whole spectrum of animals out there, and most people are so unaware," that he had us write down on a notecard two animals as different from each other as we could think of. He then wrote down on the white board eight different phyla and had us say what the animals were that we had written.  Before we started he said, "This will just show the limitations of the view on animals. Ninety percent of the animals you name will be in phylum chordata." And of course, most of what we said was. You know, birds, snakes, whales, fish, random desert creatures, what have you.  Somehow, I thought ahead and wrote down a hydra as one of mine, which is in phylum cnidaria, but that's besides the point. I mean, he actually had us do that so he could smugly belittle us to make himself feel smart.

Anyways.

In Interactive Media Assets, I have one of the nicest ones yet. She is so sweet to everyone, and comepletely relaxed and layed back about everything,which has its good points and bad. The good side is that I don't need to actually work there on projects, you can leave and work at home once she's explained what you need to do whenever you like. The bad side is that its kind of hard to get at what she wants you to do because you can basically do whatever you want.

So, three very different professors, one semester, should be interesting.

On to the next topics, onward the brave and bold, traversing where few dare to venture!

Well, nothing that exiting comes to mind, but it sounded pretty good anyways.

So, in reading my mom's blog the other day, she had mentioned the show Ninja Warrior, which is, yes, about ninjas. More specifically, about people going through obstacle courses to test their ninja skills! The epicity can be imagined. But that reminded me of those other whacked out ninjas, namely Naruto! I watched a few episodes the other night, and was laughing at it the whole time as I was getting wrapped up in it. Not laughing in a good way, laughing as in, wow, those guys are really lame, do we need a flashback for every five seconds? But its still good. I mean, for being these little weekly cartoons churned out for japanese preteen boys, the quality is much better than a lot of them, in my experienced (not) opinion. If it was just, as Strongbad would say, a lot of crazy guys with blue hair flying around space in cool poses, then I probably wouldn't watch it, but, despite the entire lack of anything resembling a good plot, the fight scenes are good.  Most animes stick with the whole, fist across a a screen of flashy lines and bad music for fighting, but when the ninjas in Naruto actually get out their shuriken and ninjutsu and whatever other mad skills they might have, you usually see it. Apparently its called a technical fight, where you see each move and its semi-realistic as to punches and whatnot, as opposed to an emotional fight, which is not a character wrestling with his inner conscience, but more of what I was describing before with the flying around in cool poses.

Feeling nerded out yet?

I've been watching tons of movies lately, like I said, Naruto, District 9, Matrix Revolutions, and the last episode of Lost about two hours ago. These were just over the weekend. I would go ahead and compare the fighting in Naruto to the fighting in the Matrix, as far as most anime goes. Not that I've seen tons.

I'm feeling pretty tired. So, to finish as we have begun, some quotes that I particularly enjoyed.

 What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?

Irv Kupcinet

 Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

Jeff Valdez

 Nature abhors a vacuum, but not as much as cats do.

Lee Entrekin

 Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function. 

Unknown

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. Mark Twain

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Mark Twain

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Niels Bohr

 

Star Wars...no, the other one.

This is probably going to be the longest post I have or ever will write. 

So, this topic has been ruminating (incorrect usage, I know) in my head for a while, and was actually one of the reasons I started a blog anyways. I could have written it before, but I wanted to do it when my mind was semi-clear. 

Barring that, I'll just go ahead and write it anyways.

So it started a little less than a month ago, after Christmas when I was returning from my father's house. I got on the plane and went all the way to the back, but my usual right hand window seat was taken by a 12 year old girl. I sat next to her, which was better than the fat guy in the row in front of me, and the elderly lady who came in behind me sat on the other side of me. She looked like your typical old tourist, horrible print sweater, blueish hair, pleasant smile, and lumpy packages.  As she sat down, she told me and the other little girl, "Now, girls, please remind me when we get off the plane to not forget my things in the overhead place, some cookies I made for the neighbor picking me up are in there." We nodded, (I nodded, the other girl was reading some boring teen magazine) and I settled down without another thought on my fellow travelers to finish crocheting my sister's hat. 

The lady kept up a steady stream of conversation, though, and told me all about how when she was a girl, there wasn't an education like you could get today, especially for women, and how today's colleges are just turning out trained idiots, because anyone can get in now without barely any work. After a bit of this, I decided she must be more of your typical complaining old tourist, who is always harking back and critiscing new things, even though you know they're right.

Then she told me an interesting little story that I'm not going to go nearly in depth as would be fitting about how because she wanted to learn the Russian language so much, she got her school to become the first to teach it in the USA. She told me about how there were newspeople interviewing her, and everyone in her town wanted to talk to her. 

I thought, oh, that's cool, her moment she can look back on and tell everyone about, hope I can accomplish something like that one day, maybe actually change something for the better!

Well, she kept talking and I kept crocheting, and she happened to mention that she worked on the Star Wars Project, and went then on to say how sudden it was when they took her out to the middle of nowhere. I stopped her and was like, "Wait, what? The Star Wars Project?"

"Oh yes, you know, the Stars Wars Project. That's what they called it, but now when you say that people always think of those strange creatures and bizarre worlds and Skyluke or whatever his name is. I haven't ever watched it, you know, because its so weird..."

She kept rambling on, but I managed to figure out, with some very pointed and specific questions, that the Star Wars Project was actually an old development and testing site for laser and chemical weapons. Yes, that's right. How cool is that?

So as she kept talking, I gathered the bits and pieces and tried to formulate them in my head as best I could. Here's as near as I can say what she was talking of:

After her schooling, she got a job as a secretary. She was a very good writer, apparently, and somehow got noticed by important people. One day, without warning, some government officials came and took her out to a few buildings in the middle of the New Mexico deserts. She was going to be the secretary/project manager of the place. The first few weeks were hard, she said, when they literally dropped her off at the place she asked, "Can I have some water?" and they replied, "No, there isn't any water here yet, we'll get you some in a few weeks." When she asked, "Wait, aren't there any bathrooms around here?" they said,"No, but we'll get you a portapotty in a few weeks." Fortunately she had a house a few hours away and only worked there during the day. But for a while, when there was some 25 of them, technicians, engineers, chemists, scientists of every genre, things weren't exactly smooth and neatly laid out. She told me about how they would run out of drinking water, and she would have to ration out water for those who needed the clearest minds; how without water to use, she would wash dishes with water that dripped off the swamp cooler. Or how, since they were literally doing things that had never been done before, they would be told, "You need to do this and this," and they would ask, "But how do we do that?" and they would say, "We don't know, figure it out." 

She told me that she quickly realized what kind of environment she was working in. Walking around every day she would see people crying and hugging each other, saying their last goodbyes, because they would be going into a room to handle such dangerous equipment and chemicals they didn't know if they would be coming back out again. She told me about a chemical called F2, I think, that if one drop of it got on your skin, it would burn the entire flesh on your whole body down to the bone in seconds. Or another chemical, E2 I think, that burned invisibly, which meant that clouds of it might be in front of you burning in a raging fire and you wouldn't know until you stepped into it. With such dangerous surroundings, there's normally specific protocols you have to adhere to, but since they were working around things no had before, they actually had to write down manuals or whatever they would be as they went along for others who would follow. One day, she said, one of the security devices on a piece of the equipment needed repairs. She stationed a young man to walk the 6 foot square perimeter for the whole day. Sometime during that day, something went wrong with that piece of equipment, and she said, "...and if that young man hadn't done what he had done, and acted as fast as he did, and used his head, I wouldn't be here telling you this right now..." Those were the kind of things that happened daily.

Which leads to what her specific job was. From what she said, she pretty much organized and kept track of everything, not to mention anything else that needed to get done. One of her main jobs was to record everything that went on. Because the scientists were working so much that there wasn't time for them to keep track and write up what they did day to day, she would sit down and talk with each one of them whenever they had a spare moment so they could quickly tell her what they had done. Then she would write down from her notes what they had done, and send in the handwritten records to the government. Through all this, she learned a lot about what each job required. So eventually, when more people were being stationed there, she was the one who had to go through the huge amounts of resumes of those trying to get in. She said she threw out hundreds and hundreds of applicants who just weren't good enough. Sometimes too, she would be taken out somewhere else to where a group of applicants were waiting, then she would merely go down the line and ask them one question specific to their field, and depending on how they answered that question determined whether they would get the post. She said, "And even if the question wasn't that difficult, you just had to look in their eyes, and you can tell if a person is intelligent or not." She said eventually there was some 50, 75 maybe people, I think.  

About this time the girl sitting on my other side on the plane sighed and switched from her boring magazine to Twilight.

Another time, the lady said it was a day when there was going to be a rather important test of something, and there were generals and important government people there waiting to see it. Someone ran up to her a few hours before it was scheduled to commence, though, and said,"We have a problem! We can't run the test, one of the parts broke and ordering a new one would take weeks! All the officials are waiting here, we can't send them away, what should we do?" So she got everybody together, and they all thought about it for a while. As she was walking around outside with a couple of the scientists, they walked towards the back, near the dumpster. "What exactly does the part look like?" she asked them, and they described it too her. She pulled some old tin foil from the dumpster, some duct tape, pieces of wire, and other bits of trash, put them together, and said, "Here's your part. Now get more pieces from here and make a better one." So they made in a few hours the part from garbage from a dumpster, fixed the equipment, and ran the test for the important men. Everything went fine.

She told me a lot of other amazing stories, but my brain juice is running out. If I remember other cool stuff I'll write them down later.

I do know she said she was working there for about 5 years, and when it was semi-shut down, (yes, its still out there running with a skeleton crew) she went to work in a nuclear testing site in Nevada. 

Quite a few years later, she realized that there wasn't a whole lot of information about the Star Wars project, so she decided to write a book on it. It was under the genre of fiction, she said, because the things she was writing about were classified so she had to mix in some fiction. She tried to get it published, but all the publishers said, "Oh, nobody wants to read about that kind of thing, they only want to read about the science fiction Star Wars." So it was never published. Copyrighted, but hidden away in the library of congress archives. "Oh yes, the characters are all based off of me and the others who worked there. Much of what's in there is completely true, but you're not supposed to know that."

She said that a few times; I'd ask, "So, what exactly was it that you did with this and this?" and she say, "Oh, well, I can't tell you, that's classified..."

She said the book was called T-minus, and that I should look it up, see if I could read it somehow. I said I would, so she said that I should write down what she'd told me in a short book, or a blog, or something. I said, yeah, maybe I will...

So, when I got back, I looked up the book and found it. I also discovered her name, which I'd clean forgotten to ask: Roberta L. Temby, if I found the right book, which I'm pretty sure I did.

One of the last things she said, before we got off the plane, was that I looked like her daughter, which is why she had told me everything she did. She also said, "Oh, and if you ever do find my book, maybe you could read it someday some how...and if you do, I really shouldn't tell you this, but there's a whole section that's completely true, its..."

Oops, but I can't tell you that, its classified.

Stuff. Like, to read. As in, words.

I could write about what an awesome vegetative break I'm having, but because of extra-swift brain atrophy I'll just put out some quotes from books I've been reading lately. 

 "Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world," he said wisely one day,"but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen...Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. ...I shall never stop making Magic. I'm well! I'm well! I feel- I feel as if I want to shout out something- something thankful, joyful!"

  "Tha' might sing th' Doxology,"...

"It is a very nice song," he said. "I like it. Perhaps it means just what I mean when I want to shout out that I am thankful to the Magic." He stopped and thought in a puzzled way. "Perhaps they are both the same thing. How can we know the exact names of everything? Sing it again, Dickon. Let us try, Mary. I want to sing, too. It's my song. How does it begin? 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow'?"

Pieces of speeches from Colin from The Secret Garden. I know its a longish section.

 "You all right? I was worried about you back on the bed there. Your eyes rolled up into your head and everything."

         "I suppose I was dying again, so I asked the Lord of Permanent Affection for the strength to live the day. Clearly, the answer came in the affirmative."

 "I didn't know there was such a Fellow," Buttercup said.

         "Neither did I, in truth, but if He didn't exist, I didn't much want to either."

A conversation between Wesley and Buttercup towards the end of The Princess Bride.

Hmm. Well, between that last sentence and this is quite a bit of time searching through Xenocide by Orson Scott Card for a section where one of his characters called Valentine says something about how because of good things that happen, even though she is not a 'believer' she is a 'suspecter' that there is someone out there. Maybe if I find it eventually I'll put it up. But Orson Card writes very well. Not that I agree with everything he says. Or most things he says, really. But I like that he uses intelligence. Most of the time.

And no, I don't agree with Colin either, but I do agree with Wesley.

My shoulders are sore.

I'm going to try and make chicken kiev tonight, whatever that is.

13 hours shy of new year's day...

...but it still counts as new years, right?

Anyways, this is the official first post on my five-minute old blog! Really I'm doing this at the beheath and bequest (no, I don't think those are real words) of my sister. She said, "Do it on New Year's Day, you and mom do one together!" I enthusiastically replied, "Okay, sounds great!"

Yeah right.  

Well, it almost worked. As I said, it still counts as new years, and my mom IS going to make her own blog, soon, when she can think of a name, then it'll be soon...no really, soon...

So that's basically how this was born. Imagine, if you will, a languid pregnant mother on a hospital bed, a cup of steaming tea in one hand and a sci-fi novel in the other, as the nurses rush around and a doctor says, "Now, push! Push!" The oblivious mother says,"Yeah, okay, in a minute..."and a few hours later she remembers! Just in time to pop out a complacent blog post.

Just thought I'd give a general idea of how this blog is going to function.

So now's the time when I start into my new year's resolutions. I was just reading my sister's blog, with all her lovely aspirations, and thought, "Wow, those sound really awesome, maybe I SHOULD do something like that, make a list, think it through..."Ha. You guessed it:

Yeah right.

But yesterday talking with my family about new year's resolutions and the like, I said, "Well, you know, I don't really make new YEARS resolutions, 'cause I usually make new resolutions each day. You know, in the morning you sit up (or just kind of roll your head around) and think 'Today I think it would be a good idea to work on not being lazy. Got that? If I see something lying around, I'll pick it up.' Or maybe,'Today I resolve to be friendly to people. Get on facebook. Actually talk to people.' Or even just,'I resolve to get out of bed.' These are usually followed by a prayer, 'cause I mean really. There's no way I could do stuff (anything) without God. So for me, I really can't do year long resolutions, I just need to get the hang of daily ones first." So I said something to that extent I think.

And, just because my ramble on resolutions isn't long enough, I might also have said,"Oh yeah, and also, another reason I don't make NEW new years resolutions is because I really need to keep working on the OLD ones first. You know, like I said, basic stuff."

Well, I think I hear Kingdom Hearts calling my name. Or, calling something. I can't quite hear. Maybe I should go check.