Arrr, matey, here be me afore-mentioned pirate pics! Look upon 'em an' be awed, arr!

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Arr, aye, we pirates be pretty damn sweet.

A few more pictures be here.

*leaps in, dressed in dashing pirate wear, and brandishes sword ferociously*

ARRR! Prepare t' be boarded, ye lily-livered landlubbers!

*grarrrpirateragesnortgrowlstab*

I have lots to update about -- all sorts of weekend stuff, plus this week at work. Good times!

Friday: during the day, meh, nothing happened. But after Mary got off work, she picked me up and we swung by Safeway for dinner, where we got fixings for a tasty ravioli dinner, and saw a random Dolorien! Once back at the apartment we set the raviolis a-cooking, played with kitties, and shared all sorts of girl-talk. Mary, you are always a joy to talk to :) Chris came home while we were eating our foodstuffs, but he wasn't feeling the best, so when Mary and I headed out on our adventure, he stayed home.

We decided we wanted to go hang out at a park, since the weather was nice, but we didn't want to pick one of the ones close to home. We drove out to Milwaukie, and there I remembered Furnberg Park, a park by my old church where we used to catch frogs in this darling little swamp. Tons and tons of little tree frogs there were, some of them as small as my fingernail, others as large as the first joint of my thumb. So Mary and I battled the cul-de-sacs and winding roads and stumbled across a bevy of camera crews and police cars. Turns out that a missing four-year-old boy lived right around there. It turns out his step-grandmother killed him, how sad ;_; Mary and I continued on and parked at a field. I knew the park was somewhere near, and we ended up tramping halfway across a huge field of dead sharp grass and then back again before we found the park, which was a mere fifty feet from the car, just totally not in the direction we'd started out in. Oh, self. I have no head for directions whatsoever.... Anyway, we found the park, and the swamp, and we explored it a little ways. There were no frogs though; either it's not breeding season, or, more likely, the development of the park and the shrinking size of the swamp (it's smaller than it used to be) killed or at least reduced the frog population. Amphibians are sadly always the first to go. But we had fun exploring anyway, at least until we rounded a bend and saw half the neighborhood congregating by the playground, holding a vigil for the little boy, whom they were still hoping to find alive. So sad.

That kind of put a damper on our adventure, and we headed back to the apartment. We still had a good time, though, watching random things on TV and whatnot. Friends are good :) And that was my Friday.

Saturday I went down to visit Ben for the day. It was really fun, except for the part where I got sick in the morning, but it soon passed and I was able to enjoy my time with him. We watched 6 or 7 hours of the Live 8 coverage and that was pretty cool. Anything with Ben is fun :) Then we went out and had Mexican food with various FnGers, and came back to Bill's place to watch Team America. It was less painful the second time around, lol, though it's still pretty, uh, pretty -- yeah. :-P Came home late, around 1 -- I was delayed because my stomach started feeling weird again, but it turned out just to be nerves, fearing getting sick while driving home. I was fine, and I was proud of myself that in the end, I chose to be brave and drive home instead of staying over at Ben's and giving into fear of illness. Take that, stomach! Ben was extremely sweet though, comforting me and just being supportive in general. I love him so much. :)

All right, it's time for me to head out. Ciao!

Wow. Yesterday was pretty crazily jam-packed, seeing as how it was Wulapalooza and all. For those non-WU folks, Wulapalooza is Willamette's annual huge music/art/community/all-around-good-times festival. So, here goes:

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Went back to Wula for a bit and found out poi practice was at 8, and we would be performing at 10:15 PM. I went back to my room and got all dressed up in my dark clothes, and brought along the chains I'd got at PetCo the other day. I met up with the poi folk and Katie traded me chains for a finished set of poi balls, and ohhhhh was I a happy Gina. We went through our routine and went to Sparks, where we painted each other with tribal-esque patterns and got ready for the show, which we were doing with chem club and dj club.

It was soooo awesome. Forty or fifty minutes of FIRE and EXPLOSIONS. Dj club had loud, thumping techno going, making my feet thrum on the floor. We started out with Katie, Bill, and Joe fleshing (take a stick with a wick on the end, light the wick, then run it down the skin on your forearm and leave a little trail of fire behind for just an instant), then Sarah and Daniel doing tai-chi with the lit sticks, then Leah and Sara dancing with candles, and then Katie going in with the poi. The rest of us followed in, each doing a different trick as we entered (mine was butterfly, which I only recently got down, and still mess up on), and then we grooved and did our thangs for a bit, before one of the guys entered with four staffs all tied together at once. O_O You could feel him coming, as the heat was just pouring off those things. Then the other staff guys came out, and one by one each was given a staff and off they went. When the staffs burned out chemistry club blew some shit up, balloons and ethanol cannons and the like, and that was fun.

And then it was the free-for-all, where people just came in and did anything they wanted with whatever implement they had, be it staff, be it poi, be it a SWORD ON FIRE, be it a HULA HOOP with eight or ten wicks on it, be it stilts and a ten-foot-long cable with poi on the end, be it yellow flame or red flame or green.... It was insane, and so much fun, with the music and the crowd and the heat from the other spinners.... I wasn't perfect, once I tangled my poi chains, I hit myself a few times, and my transitions were on the crappy side, but I've only been doing this two months. And there I was spinning fire and swaying my head and lifting my feet and closing my eyes and panting with the effort, with the dance, with the heat, doing butterfly, doing three-beat, doing corkscrew and reverse Mexican, getting down on my knees and bending backwards still doing tricks, getting up again and turning round and round, just feeling it, and oh my god, it was amazing. I must've lit up four or five times during the night, pouring my heart into every time even when my arms were locking up and freezing. And when I wasn't spinning, I was on the sidelines dancing still, my body moving with the pounding beat in a freeform primal rhythm.

We ended with one guy donning his stilts again, and another guy going out there with him, and both of them breathing fire at once. Pretty damn awesome, if you ask me. We then ran out into the darkness and bowed before the crowd, slipping on the floor slick with alcohol and lighter fluid, and then ran back outside panting and sweaty and proud. "Orgasmic" doesn't even begin to cover it. :-D

For all that, the evening ended pretty quietly. I ended up going over to Ben's to hang out with him and then Chris and Stu. His mom thought I was cute in all my tribal paint, lol; I hope she didn't mind that I ended peeling/scrubbing it all off in their bathroom. :-P We ended up flipping channels, and discovered a sci-fi miniseries called, eloquently, "MAN-THING." ROFLMAO. We switched between that and some really stupid hiking movie with Kirstie Alley, and that made for a bizarre background hum to fall asleep to, let me tell you.... Oh, and Chris sang the best song EVAR. (The lyrics were a little something like, "This guy did something very hard to do/he made me angry/I'LL STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH A BEEF STICK, MOTHERFUCKER!") I finally got home around 3 and went to bed by 3:30 AM.

All in all, a very good day.

And check out this badass icon!

Pictures from Freak Week under the cut. Freak Week is the big event that Freaks N Geeks, a club I belong to, puts on through the last week of April. It's a time of craziness, randomosity, strange events, and all around good times. Picspam!

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So endeth my picspam... for now, anyway. *eyebrow* Expect some wild sidewalk chalkin' fun to show up tomorrow....

...of the awesomeness of the Apocalypse Party, along with some random photos of Salem, and the pictures from the crazy, madcap 24-Hour Comic. I'll try and do those tomorrow, I ought to have the time. :-D

The Apocalypse Party was yesterday, a party that FnG's been planning for the past month or so. We got chem professor Karen Holman and her punk band the Agitates to play (yes, one of my chem professors is an avid punk rocker), plus another band. The party ended up being mostly a punk rock concert, but was awesome because tons of people showed (despite all the competition we had), and while some people just stood there and listened, we had a lot of people dancing, and also a lot of people in costume. There were some truly great costumes -- Leah's duct tape corset, Sara's spiffy bodice and fishnetty shirt, and then my heavily chained/jewelried/all-black look. Not to mention we had the four horsemen of the apocalypse in various incarnations. It rocked, really. Plus we had boffers going outside with their duct tape swords, and poi (firespinners) as well, and I've finally started going to poi club. I'm going to spin fire one day, dammit! :-D When the party ended and we cleaned up all the apocalyptic decorations we had a people pile down on the floor and it was good, good times.

The only negative bit was when during a particularly loud song, some of the crazy drunken mosher guys who I had been finding amusing got really exuberant, and as one of them danced past me he accidentally socked me in the mouth. O_O The spot immediately went numb and I went into the bathroom to check it out -- turns out the blow made me bite down on my cheek, and I was bleeding inside my mouth in like four different spots. It stopped soon enough, but today I still have big red bite marks inside my cheek and the spot still feels a bit numb. Ah well, makes for a good story. :-D

Now it's off to shower and an early bedtime in preparation for my physiology test tomorrow. Night!

-- The song I'm listening to, Chelsea, the lead singer sounds EXACTLY like Rufus. It's crazy! It's totally Rufus singing about the apocalypse! Yay!

...er, yeah, this is pretty much a gratuitous icon post. Ah well. Sue me. This icon amuses the hell out of me. XD

Am unduly tired tonight, so I think I'm going to get off my lazy butt and get to bed early. I'll work on homework and stuffs in the morning, or the afternoon, or the evening, or something. Ugh.

At FnG tonight, in addition to getting Mardi Gras beads (no, there was no flashing... alas), one of the professors (Nacho Cordova) led a guided meditation. While I was doing it I didn't feel particularly connected or peaceful or anything... but for the past three hours since I've done it I've felt very peaceful, so perhaps it worked. (Or else I'm just tired... but this feels a little different.) We also burned burdens from the past year, written on scraps of paper, in celebration of Chinese New Year. I burninated the Jack. We'll see how that goes.

Okay, off to bed now. Goodnight!

I now present to you all for the downloading and reading, my completed 24-hour comic!

Ta-daaa! Just right-click and select Save Target As, which downloads the zipped file with all the pages in it. It's a slow download even for a fast connection, because it's off of stupid freewebs, but just be patient and go about your business until it downloads. Unzip it and voila, you have my comic!

Warning: There is gratuitious nudity on page 6 for no good reason, just because I figured I could one-up another girl's shower scene. It's not porn, but it is full-frontal female nudity. :-D Also, the plot wears thin at times and sometimes there's really crappy artwork ::coughPAGEFOURTEENcough:: So consider yourself forewarned!

I liked Laurel and Mariah's idea of an anti-negativity day. (Love the name of it, haha.) Here's a list of things, big or small, that have made me happy in the past day or so:

- Going to Rite-Aid with Lauren and Leah and picking up tons of cheap Halloween candy.
- Physics lab with Annie and Jordan, who continue to rock.
- DDRing yesterday... completely naked except for socks. :-D It was fun! I just had to stay away from songs with too many jumps, was all (what with zero support for boobs).
- Eating ramen and sourdough bread in my room instead of going to Goudy for dinner.
- Last night's FnG meeting, which really needs several bullet points of its own:
-- Having a Leah in my lap.
-- Lying down on the floor.
-- Working on my doodles for my LJ mood theme.
-- Getting a deep back massage from Lily.
-- Everyone going around in a circle and talking about things that comfort them.
-- Seeing the Freak Flag unveiled.
-- Hugging Leah, Sara, Emily, Michael, Max, and Shannon at the end of meeting.
-- Participating in a twenty-person group hug centered around Katie.
-- Becoming the Queen, King, AND Pope of a small European country. Go me!
- Madame reading us a wacked-out French storybook about a blue blob and a yellow blob.
- Deciding that I'm not going to let myself sink into bitterness and resentment, because I can choose to see the positive side of things, and more importantly, I want to see the positives.

Peace out, everyone.

I've been really awful about updating lately. It makes me sad. But I've got so much to worry about right now that I feel guilty if I sit and update (but strangely enough I don't feel guilty if I'm just browsing stuff online... oh well, I'm weird).

I had a test in history on Tuesday. Did all right on it, I thought, even though I couldn't remember a lot of the names he asked us about. I wrote a huge essay for his question on creationism vs. evolution in public schools, though, and maybe I'll get full credit (25 points of 80!) for it.... Today I had a French test that I studied a scant half an hour for. o_O I did rather poorly on it, considering my usual French tests are in the 90-95 range... I can't be sure of what I got yet, of course, but it's probably a full grade lower. I didn't study for it much because of FnG stuff, history studyage, and physics studyage -- since I have a test in there, too, on Friday.

FnG was awesome last night, though. Many excellent costumes. Lauren helped me created a fabulous ratty ragged zombie costume with Value Village ware, and I quite enjoyed tromping around as a dead thing. At the meeting we had Lauren as a dapper wolf, Leah as a sexy boobylicious vampire, Mariah and Sarah as cute fairies, Sara as a wild and dangerous and rather evil fairy, Michael as Jesus (Lauren got a fantastic picture of us as Jesus/zombie: OTP), Daniel as a private eye, Max as Optimus Prime/An Unassuming Semi Truck, etc., etc. There were many, many awesome costumes. :) And I think a B on a French test is a fair sacrifice for dressing up with friends. <3

I ended up staying up pretty late last night, though, and had to get up for work in the morning (eww, washing the litmus milk tubes and getting the curds out and everything is going to be so gross...). Then I had the French test, and then step aerobics, where I got tired really easily and had to stop a couple of times and regather myself so I didn't fall over.

I'm sick, by the way... blah. Since September I've had this nagging cough that would only show up when I was walking outside at night in the cool air, and that's the only time it would bother me. It started getting more noticeable last week, though, and Friday night after getting extremely out of breath playing Holic and various other hard songs at Wunderland, I started coughing much more heavily. The cough is now pretty bad at night and in air-conditioned places like the library and Olin (when I'm doing the dishes in the stockroom, I cough like a mofo; had all the professors asking if I was all right, lol). And then this morning I woke up with a sore throat, which seems like the most random thing ever, since usually when you get some kind of bug, it goes from a sore throat to a cough and runny nose, not the other way around. But maybe I'm sick with two things at once, and the sore throat is from something entirely unrelated to the cough, which would almost make more sense... eh, I dunno.

I think I'm gonna go read through my physics notes again, and through the book a bit. Today I tried to study like a good girl; I went to the library and got a private study room at about 4:20 this afternoon, and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up it was five o'clock and my hands had fallen asleep -- they were all numb, then prickly, then starting hurting as circulation was restored. It was pretty pitiful. So I'm going to try and review a bit more so I don't feel so guilty about it. I really hope I do well on this test, I can't afford another F! But I think I understand the material more this time, so... tomorrow will be full of much cramming. Oof.

Wish me luck, in everything, would you?