here be dragons

I took my car in to the dealer yesterday. It's been making a funny noise for a week or two ever since I backed into my brother's car, actually...Heh. There wasn't a ton of damage on my car, so I'm okay with it - my brother's car is dented a bit, but it's his winter crap car, so he didn't really care. My dad would have cared, had I told him - so I, er, didn't. Thankfully, my mom doesn't really want to listen to him either, so she's helping me sneakily get Peter's car repaired.

Anyway. My baby's coming home today. It was a problem with the power steering which, because I didn't mention that whole 'I hit another car' thing, is covered under warranty. So I only have to pay 30 bucks for an oil change, as opposed to a gazillion dollars to fix it. Woot woot. I

n other news, someone has stolen all the remote controls in the house. Every freaking remote. It's kind of annoying me

Title: Untitled
Author: me :-)
Prompt: Obsession
Word Count: 100
Warnings: Snarry
Rating: G

( Untitled )

AHHHH, 

I can't make this layout work.  :-(

Title: Compunctions of Conscience
Author: me :-)
Prompt: Snape the spy
Word Count: 100
Warnings: spoilers for DH
Rating: PG

( Snape sits in Dumbledore's chair... )

I did lots of nice shopping over the weekend.  All large things, unfortunately, so it took a chunk of money, but all necessary and pretty. :-)  Like this chair...



Purdyyy...I got two to go in my apartment's living room.  We have a sofa in there too, a brown one, but it is absolutely hideous and I will be slip-covering it on Thursday with or without my roommate's consent.  So two of these with a nice, red slip-covered couch, maybe a few nice accent pillows, a cheap (but nice!) coffee table, side table or two in that same vein...much better already.  And the chairs are super-comfy.  I got a bedroom set, mattress and all, too.  I can't take my one from home because, well, I'm sure I'll be home once in a while and I would definitely appreciate a place to sleep.  Thankfully, everything came with delivery and set up.  I would probably just opt to sit/sleep on the floor if I had to lug those things up into the apartment myself. 

I ended up getting a new laptop, too.  It was a year before I wanted to replace my old one, but with commuting to uni, I just wouldn't be able to drag my mammoth 17 inch with me.  I would kill myself.  Especially b/c they make commuters park wa-ay out on the edge of campus - getting anywhere is a 15 minute walk minimum.  Anyway.  So now I have a lovely little 12.1 inch.  It's a tablet too, which is ridiculously cool - I've been doing handwriting recognition exercises the last few days to make sure it knows which funky scribble means 's' and which means 'q' etc.  AND it's got a fingerprint scanner, which I love.  Making sure your finger is on the scanner right and pulling it across slow/fast enough actually makes it a slower ordeal than typing in your password, but it's still fun to play with.  And tiny, which was the main thing. 

My friend, her sister and I were at The Cheesecake Factory for dinner today.  They seated us pretty quickly, but it took 15 minutes or so for anyone to come over and introduce themselves as our server.  Not a huge problem, we're skilled time-killers, but mildly irritating.  A manager finally came over and apologized.  He told us our server would be right with us - and he's right.  Another 20-something year old came within 5 seconds.  Yay.  He did his waiter thang, asked us how we're doing and whatnot. (very well, thank you.)  Likewise, we asked him how he's doing - he responded with "Well, I'm not dead yet."...er, kay.  My friend and I looked at each other and chose to giggle lightly but otherwise ignored the strange comment, more for lack of a response than anything else.

He took our drink orders, which was normal enough.  He tried to stare deeply into my eyes the entire time, which was decidedly not normal.  He left and we had a good laugh about the awkwardness.  Little did we know said awkwardness would not end there...

He came back with the drinks, and then took our dinner orders.  My friend's sister ordered a pasta dish, but requested no sun dried tomatoes.  He responded with "god, I don't blame you.  Those things are disgusting, absolutely nasty, I don't know how anyone could eat them."  Um...dude?  My pasta kind of has them on it...but , er, whatever...We had another laugh when he left because, I mean, who says that? 

A few minutes later, we eavesdropped on him while he was giving the specials to the table behind us, and this is how he described what he had told us was mushroom soup..."And then we have, well, some kind of mushroom thing.  It has a LOT of mushrooms, so if you don't like mushrooms, I wouldn't suggest you order it.  If you do, then maybe you should consider it"...riiiiight.

15 minutes after that (and, coincidentally, 10 minutes after we finished our drinks and bread) he came by and tried to give us someone else's food, though he caught himself before any real damage was done.  But it took him 5 more minutes after that to come back and ask us if we want drink refills, (and he still ignored the empty bread basket!!)  Yes.  Refills would be lovely.

He brought the drinks and, in what was, really, the most disturbing moment of the evening, as he was setting mine down, he winked at me.  He looked me in the eye and WINKED.  wtf?  Who DOES that???

And then he left.  As in didn't come back.  At all.  Two different people came with our meals and another server - a much better server - came over and took over our table, telling us that they had changed shifts. 

But the weird thing was - our first server kept right on waiting on all his other tables.  And some of them were just starting their meal, so it wasn't like he was about to go off, but sticking around an extra 5 minutes for his tips.  I really don't know what happened there.

It was the most bizarre dining experience I've ever had.    

Argh.  I'm trying to find a layout that works for me.  I do like this one, but there are a few things that are bugging me about it - I want the tags to show up at the bottom of each post, and, in that same vein, I want there to be a little list of those tags in the sidebar.  I would also love to have my icons showing (I've recently discovered the joy of potterpuff (and yes, my recently translates to 'two years after everyone else')) but I can do without that for a hot layout. 

While there are some nice layouts out there, there's nothing that I love that has everything I'm looking for in a layout.  I'm picky.  I don't even know what I'm looking for, to be honest, but it's still annoying the crap out of me that I can't find it. 

Bah.  No wonder I have issues finding men - if I can't be happy with a damn blog, what hope do I have.

x-posted to snarry100

Title: Grateful
Author: me!
Word Count: 100
Challenge: 71 - Godric's Hollow
Warnings: It's my first drabble. 
Disclaimer: The only place I own these characters is in my dreams.  And just try to sue me there.  :-)



It's my first drabble...I'll get better at them, I swear. :-) It's a lot harder than I thought, getting exactly 100 words.

"BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Thai policemen who break rules will be forced to wear hot pink armbands featuring "Hello Kitty," the Japanese icon of cute, as a mark of shame, a senior officer said Monday.

Police officers caught littering, parking in a prohibited area, or arriving late -- among other misdemeanors -- will be forced to stay in the division office and wear the armband all day, said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan. The officers won't wear the armband in public.

The striking armband features Hello Kitty sitting atop two hearts.

"Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor," said Pongpat, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok.

"(Hello) Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It's not something macho police officers want covering their biceps," Pongpat said.

He said police caught breaking the law will be subject the same fines and penalties as any other members of the public.

"We want to make sure that we do not condone small offenses," Pongpat said, adding that the CSD believed that getting tough on petty misdemeanors would lead to fewer cases of more serious offenses including abuse of power and mistreatment of the public by police officers."


...hahahahahahahaha.

In other ridiculous news, my mother told me that Suri Cruise and baby-me could have been twins.  Hm. 

Neil's in the top 4!

Let's Go Buff-A-Lo!

So.  Pimps and Hos. 
I, for the most part, did not try to reach my full ho potential.  I layered a few tank tops, wore a rather modest, in my opinion, jean mini-skirt and a pair of h-o-t cheetah peep-toe stilletos.  I didn't want to go all out in case my definition of 'ho', er...required less clothing than a 50 year old's definition.  But I really had nothing to worry about.  At all.  I got there and my friend's mom had taken a ratty short sleeve satin button up shirt, and wore it, unbuttoned, over a ratty lacy red bra, torn black fishnets, a mini skirt and high heels.  She stuck a 100 dollar bill in her bra, a few condoms (that she found in her son's room...) in her belt, and gave herself a black eye.  Her husband wore a red cape and hat, with a pimp cane and a gold tooth.  Ridiculous. 

A lot has happened recently - I finished that cancer institute internship, finally, on Thursday.  Wednesday I had a power point presentation in front of 50+ people.  That was crap.  I did alright, I suppose, but the whole project was just annoying.  I didn't learn anything new...mostly because everything I did had ALREADY BEEN DONE by my PhD student.  I didn't do all that much either.  Not compared to some of the other college students.  Or some of the high school students for that matter, sadly.  (Actually, they had me split between two projects - a prostate cancer one and a kidney cancer one...the prostate one was the project I presented and was, really, 90% me growing cells (a monkey could do that)...but, still, it was better than  the kidney one which was supposed to be checking the effect of a drug on kidney tumor angiogenesis...however, I ran a western blot of that and fgf (a growth factor protein) was showing up at 60 kD instead of 20, so all of my time spent on that was trying to figure out why fgf-1 was showing up at 3x it literature weight value...and still, I have no reason.  So I had no real project.)  But whatever.  It's over. 

Yesterday Gabby got spayed, poor baby.  She looked so out of it when she got home.  Every so often she would just scream blood murder - I suppose she moved the wrong way and, being so out of it, it just scared the crap out of her and she shrieked.  I felt so horrible for her.  Today she's fine, thankfully - trying to goad Sabrina and Sadie into wrestling, growling, ankle-biting and being her general bratty self.  You wouldn't know she was cut open just a day ago. 

Tonight my friend's parents are having a 'pimps and hos' party.  I'm sure I could find something ho-ish, but I really don't want to look like a, well, ho in front of her (admittedly cool) parents and their friends.  Awkward.

I had a dream last night.  About Snape. 
I was a spy working against Voldemort, along with Snape.  We were at a Death Eater meeting at a large Muggle home, with a huge swimming pool in the back.  Snape was the only person dressed in wizard clothes - the rest of us were in (gasp!) plain, old muggle clothing.  (Voldemort might have been in a blue Hawaiian shirt...) Snape was sent on some sort of mission and I was left behind with the rest to continue our meeting.  My cell phone went off a few times, and it was Snape, texting me about random things that were very important in the dream.  The only one I remember was something like "If you need to change boots, DO NOT put on DREW CARREY'S.  I shall get you new ones.  Do not respond with a text, simply nod your head if you do."  And suddenly the setting changed so that we were across from a small store with a large front window and, even though I couldn't see him, I knew Snape was inside.  I took it as a declaration of his undying love, I think. 

As the meeting ended, some papers fell out of my pocket - incriminating papers mixed with papers Voldemort had given me earlier.  Voldemort picked them up and, in that terrifying whisper of his, asked whose/what they were.  I told him quickly that they were mine, cried a bit, and said that they were only what he had given me earlier.  Surprisingly, I wasn't killed - he believed me, then dismissed the meeting.  I went home and all I could think about was how much I wanted to text Snape.  I didn't because I didn't want to put him in danger, but he ended up texting me, saying something I can't remember but left me feeling extremely good...

And then my dog woke me up.  Sigh.  Too bad my Harry Potter dreams only come once a year. 

This is a few years old (pre Half Blood Prince, gasp!), so nothing new, but I'm trying to back things up in places other than my hard drive and figured lj would be a good place. 

I did unintentionally ignore the fact that no one can Apparate in or out of Hogwarts, but I like the setting/ending too much to change either, so...meh.  No one's mentioned it (realized that I put it in?) so it doesn't seem too big of a deal.  Thanks to irisgirl for her lovely beta job.

My roommate's boyfriend has come to visit.

He can't go twenty seconds without putting his lips on some part of her.

The sound of lips smacking in the dark will drive me insane.

AH! My friends mom got us tickets to the premier of Harry Potter, in NYC, on WEDNESDAY. We go to school five hours away, which, in itself, isn't so bad, but I have Genetics lab that night and a calc test the next morning, which means that I would have to juggle my lab schedule around - go to genetics on tuesday and, depending on what time orgo lab is, move that to thursday - AND study like mad this week so that I don't fail that test. I can't fail that test.

I can't deal with this! The whole thing is crazy. I mean, driving six hours to see a 3 hour movie, then driving back the same night? Absolutely insane! But I still want to do it. AH! I've got to think about this.

I just got back from a presentation given by Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding In Cars With Boys. My writing class is doing a section on memoirs and non-fiction writing, and she, being a friend of my professor, also a renowned author, came in to speak with our class earlier today for about an hour, then stayed for a general presentation on her novels. She really has a gift; her writing style is so...painful, I guess, but made extremely palatable by her quick wit and wonderful sense of humor.

She did a few readings from her book, and it was just amazing to hear the author's words spoken in her own voice. It was just great.

Sigh. One day, maybe.

But tomorrow I start shadowing that plastic surgeon in the OR. I am very excited about that - I just hope I don't go and embarass myself by passing out or vomiting or something like that.

I have discovered an AMAZING bit of Snarry. Seriously, it doesn't get any better than this, folks.

I Got Tired of Waiting's Homepage

Ask her for the password - she's fantastically quick about responding, and her fic is entirely worth it. SOOO good!