Monday, November 26, 2012

Pride and Prejudice and Unicorns and Wasps


I’m annoyed with Word right now. Somehow I messed up the settings so it always wants to double-underline everything. Grr.

But actually that’s not what I was going to talk about at all.

First off, something funny: have you ever searched everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE, for something…and then found it right where it should be but you never thought to look?

I’m reading Pride and Prejudice for school. I have two copies: the nice hard-cover one my parents gave me for Christmas and the paperback one I can annotate. Mom wanted to borrow the hardback to re-read, so she asked me for it. About a week ago, actually.

I’d pulled it off the shelf and I couldn’t find it.
If you’ve ever seen my room—which, of course, you haven’t—this shouldn’t surprise you. Here, I’ll take a photo.

No no no, I wanted Photo Booth, not iPhoto. Whoops.

Ah, here we go.


Darn you, Word, I did NOT want this underlined. Ah, that’s better.

Anyway, I searched on and off all weekend. All long Thanksgiving weekend, actually, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then tonight, since I’ve got all my homework done, I ask Mom if I can watch a Doctor Who.

Here’s how my watching Doctor Who works: I ask at the beginning of the weekend. Mom says “Maybe, if you get all your homework done.” I do all my homework (or I DON’T do all my homework and subsequently don’t watch Doctor Who). After I’ve done my homework, I ask again. Mom assigns an additional chore or two (usually stuff that she already told me to do and I forgot about). I do the last chore(s), and finally, FINALLY I can watch Doctor Who.

This time the additional chore was, as you may have guessed, finding Pride and Prejudice. So I donned my gas mask, protective radioactivity suit and heavy-duty gloves and looked through my room again.

After about five minutes, I hadn’t found it, so I put on my deerstalker. (I actually do have a deerstalker, by the way.)


Anyway, what was I saying?
Oh yes, finding Pride and Prejudice. Let me renumerate the facts of the case, Watson. Did I spell renumerate right? No, I did not. Wait, is that even the word I should be using?

Imaginary Watson: Ahem. The facts?

Right. The facts: The book was in my room when I last saw it. I have searched extensively and have not found it. Therefore, I must have moved it. Add to this the fact that I have a bad short-term memory and the probability of my having moved it increases dramatically.

I walked out of the room to check my parents’ room…and suddenly spotted it on my own bookshelf.

To be fair, there was a Madame Alexander doll in front of it. So I can’t be totally blamed for not seeing it the first twenty-three times I looked…right?

Anyway, happy ending: I found it. And there was much rejoicing. Mainly by me, because I now got to watch the Doctor Who episode. Yaaay!

I love Doctor Who, but I only got into it this summer, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I’m currently on the Tenth Doctor, who is absolutely crazy and brilliant and wonderful. Donna Noble, by the way, is my favorite companion thus far. God, she is funny…

I’m in the 4th season, so the episode I watched was The Unicorn and the Wasp.

I had heard that it was pretty bad, but I quite enjoyed it. Sure, the plotline was pretty silly and didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and yes, some of the minor roles were over-acted a bit, and the whole thing was over-dramatic, but I like silly things and I like the 1920s and I like murder mysteries, so it was a good episode for me. The mystery kept me guessing and the actual villain took me by surprise. I think they were trying to parody a cliché of a murder mystery and they very nearly pulled it off.

Tomorrow I’m going to return The Big Sleep, which I never had time to finish but kept forgetting to return, to the school library and check out an Agatha Christie mystery because now I am really curious about them. I wonder if Clue was based off of her work? (Professor Peach, in the library, with the lead pipe…)

I’m a little bit nervous about the next episode, The Silence in the Library. I’ve got a vague idea of what to expect from the Chameleon Circuit song Count the Shadows (Chameleon Circuit, by the way, is a Doctor Who themed band. They started Trock, or Time Lord rock), but that’s not the problem. The problem is that my friend Sally* says that this episode will forever change the way I see libraries…kind of like Blink forever changed the way I look at statues.

I love libraries. Libraries are my friends. Seriously, if I’m stressed out, direct me to the nearest library or bookstore. The presence of books comforts me. I could spend hours in the library. Actually, I HAVE spent hours in the library. I have two libraries close to my house. The librarians of the one within walking distance know me by name and the librarians of the one within 10-minute driving distance know me by sight. (“Oh, hey, it’s that weird girl who always checks out sixteen books at a time…I wonder how many late fees she’s paying today?”) I don’t want to be scared when I walk into a library!

But the other problem is that I can’t skip the episode because it has all kind of important plot stuff. Yays. I’m all for important plot stuff.  But must they do it in a big scary library?!

I’m messing with you, you know. I’m sure it won’t be too bad. Nothing can ever change my love of libraries. YOU HEAR THAT, LIBRARIES? NOTHING CAN STOP OUR LOVE!

Just being silly now…good grief, is it that time already? I need to get to sleep.

By the way, this blog post is being written on the night of Sunday the 25th. I’ll post it on Monday the 26th when I actually have internet access.

*I decided to use pseudonyms for my friends, to protect their privacy. Sally is not actually my friend’s name; I chose it because it’s phonetically similar to her name and also as a Doctor Who reference: Sally as in Sally Sparrow. More on pseudonyms later, when people actually start reading this. 

Friday, November 23, 2012

Happy Thanksgiving! Also, First Blog Post!

Hi! My name is Rowan. This is my brand new blog, launching as the holiday season approaches with alarming speed and ferocity. Actually I guess it started yesterday, during Thanksgiving.

I was not expecting to enjoy my Thanksgiving. We were driving up to my dad's cousin Paula in Yucca Valley to spend the holiday with her, her husband Elvin, and her parents. I'm a teenager and I was the only person under 50 in the house.

A little background: Paula is, as I said, Dad's cousin. Since my dad's parents are dead and my mom's live in Texas, Paula likes to say that she's my surrogate grandmother. She's really sweet and a lot of fun to be around. I don't see her very often so I'd kind of forgotten how much fun she is to talk to. Elvin, her husband, is a nice guy too although I don't know him very well. I don't know Ruth and Stewart well either, having seen them a total of maybe four times in my life.

Paula had made most of the meal, with my mom bringing a quinoa (keen-wha) dish and desert. The quinoa was partly for Dad, as were the gluten-free brownies, because Dad is gluten-intolerant. He's also a bit of a health fanatic, but more on that later.

It was a really good meal. Dad and I got a kick out of the fact that Paula had made Waldorf salad. Any Fawlty Towers fans will know why. I discovered that I prefer dressing to stuffing and mashed-up cranberries to the weird gelatinous ones that come out of a can.

Did you know, by the way, that roadrunners are carnivorous? I certainly didn't. Elvin grossed my mom and me out by telling us about how they hunt little birds in the backyard. They'll lie in wait and then drag their victim off and eat it right there. Mom apparently knew that they would eat roadkill. I was totally surprised by the whole thing. I shall never look at the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote the same way again. O.O

After Paula and Mom and I finished doing dishes, I went out in their back yard to look around. The backyard was pretty much this large expanse of dirt with a lot of cacti growing in it. This is the desert. Some of the cacti look really, really weird. They're flat and spiky and they look like mutant Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) forcing their way out of the ground. Seriously, picture the top of a Mickey Mouse head with thorns and two or three deformed extra ears. Totally scary.

While I was out there, I learned the hard way not to walk in between a pencil cactus and a silver cactus. There I am, trying to stroll in between them, and suddenly--bam! I've got this inch-and-a-half long thorn stuck in my leg. It didn't bleed, but it hurt quite a bit, especially when I sat down and yanked it out. I still have it taped in my diary.

Elvin had this story about how once he fell straight into some kind of big, scary cactus. He had thorns stuck all down his leg. He was wearing these big army-type boots too and the thorns went straight through the soles. I kid you not--the things punctured the soles of boots.

I was a lot more careful after that.

Have you ever seen a Joshua tree against the sky?



That's not quite what it looked like, but it's close. They're very weird and cool looking, like aliens that are going to reach out and grab you at any moment. I got to see a few before we left.

Sorry to end this so abruptly, but my dad and I want to watch a Sherlock so I have to go. He hasn't seen the last one of Season 2 yet! Oh boy...he is so going to cry...