My brain won't let me sleep yet, so here's a sub-par update on things.

Wait a minute, shouldn't sub-par be a good thing? You're supposed to get a low score, right? Anyway.

The bhut jolokia peppers were a success. I dried them out. It was easy enough to do; they're so spicy that mould won't even eat them.

My cousin had a baby girl on New Year's Day. She is a cutie and has such a happy face. I can't wait to go to Vancouver and see her. I've already knitted her a blanket, a hat with a flower on it, and a pair of bunny-shaped booties, and my mom picked out an adorable outfit for her. She is going to keep my knitting needles busy for years.

I have had two colds since my surgery and the difference between before and after is insane. Before, it was absolutely miserable. Now, it's just a nuisance. I also find that I only need to take my allergy spray twice a week, which is great because I don't have drug benefits.

My nose is big news, folks.

If anyone is ever unsure about going through with an adenoidectomy, I suggest that if your doctor says you're a good candidate for it, just do it. Even if you think you're okay to leave them there, you're not. They're inhibiting your ability to breathe through your nose (you are used to it being harder and you will feel the difference right away), they're trapping allergens and germs and other air pollutants between them, they're making it more difficult to deal with upper respiratory tract infections, they might contribute to a deviated septum, they are making your voice sound nasal, and they could potentially cause you to have sleep apnea down the road if they haven't already. Perhaps they are having other effects on you that they didn't on me. It's worth all the misery, eating nothing but goo, and morphine-induced constipation in the end. It's only a week of your 80-ish-year life and it leads to the latter years being a whole lot better.

The main ingredient in U-No-Poo is morphine.

I am applying to a few graduate certificate programs at Centennial College. I decided it would be better to accumulate a bit more student debt and be able to pay it off faster with a better paying job than to make tiny payments with a low-paying job, accumulate an unreasonable amount of interest and not be able to save anything for law school anyway. My first choice is Paralegal, followed by Project Management and Financial Planning. Paralegal would be great, because in Ontario, that's just a few steps short of a lawyer, and would be an awesome thing to have on my law school application. It will be amazing to be finished with fast food for good. Seriously. I've had all I can take of it.

I ordered some leggings from Modcloth. I got plain black ones, sparkly black ones with zippers, and a pair with a space print on them. I am liking ordering clothes online a lot better than I thought I would. In comparison, going to the mall is a pain in the ass. There is no guarantee that I will find something in the entire mall that I will like, and it is much more important for me to wear clothes that I like than to keep up with fashion trends no matter how much I hate them. Online, I don't have to go anywhere and spend an hour walking around. If I don't find something I like on one site, I can go to one of hundreds of others in seconds. Mind, I have yet to have that problem with Modcloth.

In conclusion, this is the end of my post. Goodnight.

How I Met Homer and Bart Simpson in Real Life

For my thirteenth birthday, I went on a cruise with one of my childhood friends and her mother. One morning as we were heading to the elevator, I witnessed an exchange between an overweight, balding man in jeans and a white t-shirt and his blond son wearing a t-shirt and shorts. They might have been blue and orange, but I guess I can forgive a ten-year-old boy for not wanting to wear the same outfit every day, especially on vacation, in case I do not remember correctly.

Anyway, they were having a conversation about how the son knew where all of the "old people" were staying. The dad asked him, "How do you know?"

He answered, "I knocked."

I was expecting the dad to teach him a lesson in manners, but instead, he replied, "Let me try!" and proceeded to knock on a complete stranger's door just to see if the occupants were old. That's where the story ends. I never saw Homer and Bart again. Not in real life, anyway.

Now for the updates, since it has been a while.

I am scheduled to have my overgrown adenoids removed in the middle of December (finally). I cannot wait. The thought of breathing and sleeping better is simply amazing. I don't even care that I will be sore on Christmas, I just want them out.

I ordered one of Modcloth's Stylish Surprises. I have been meaning to try it out for a while, but I keep missing it every time. Not this time! I am excited to see what I get. I paid $15 for either a skirt, top, dress or jacket in my size that will be worth $30-300. Based on some blog posts and Facebook posts I have read, it is usually worth it, although some people get something totally horrible like this snake dress. I may or may not post a picture of what I get when it comes.

And now to plow through the rest - still no job, coloured my hair brown and got a new hair cut, harvested some dwarf sunflower seeds yesterday to plant later, tea seeds rotted again and are being eaten by worms but I will try again indoors when the bugs are away for the winter, successfully grew ghost chilies in Canada on the first try, started knitting curtains for my window but one of the needles went missing and hasn't resurfaced so I can't finish it yet, had the best grapes of my life today, can't fall asleep before 3:00 anymore.

That's it for tonight. I leave you with this awesome article about welfare.

The text in the second/broken image meme reads, "Oh, you spent your welfare check on the new iPhone and now you're broke? Better ask Siri where you can get a job like the rest of us!"

The show so far...

Obscure Monty Python reference for the win.

I bulldozed through my eight-course semester with much better grades than expected. I thought I'd need a very long break, but after having been out of school for less than a month, I'm already going crazy because I am currently doing nothing with my life. I am looking for jobs, though, and I'll take the first one I get. Even if I hate it, I can keep looking while making money.

I finally decided on law school. I will apply at Windsor, U of T, York, UBC and UVic. I'm not sure which kind of specialization I want, but I will most certainly not be a defence lawyer. Whatever I pick, I eventually want to be a judge.

I took off for Vancouver on the 21st of April and I finally adjusted to Vancouver time on the 30th. Unfortunately, I came back to Ontario on the 29th, which is why I am once again writing at a ridiculous hour. It was hard to leave this time because most of my family lives there and I realized that I have gone my whole life without getting to know them. That, and it's much more fun than any city in Ontario I have experienced.

I treated myself to an iPad mini and I do not even remotely regret it. I even knitted a case for it. I can use it to prepare for my upcoming LSAT and look for a job for my year off, as well as waste time with games and fun little apps. It made the recent plane rides a lot less boring.

Time to sleep and hopefully wake up early and get my sleep back on track. Goodnight, internets.

For those in search of the perfect bowl of oatmeal

I'm in a generous mood, and since I have no money, I'll give my oatmeal recipe. I'll admit I just eyeball my ingredients except for the water and oats, so hopefully this will taste the same for anyone who tries it. This makes one serving.

1 cup of water
1/3 cup of rolled oats
2 tbsp of table cream (or 50/50 2% milk and whipping cream if you're like me and that just happens to be what's in your fridge, but you can probably substitute just milk if you want)
1 tbsp of honey
1 tbsp of brown sugar (heaping)
Cinnamon to taste

Boil the water in a small pot. Once the water is boiling, add the oats, turn down the heat to medium-high and stir often. Once the oatmeal looks about 3/4 done (thicker but still runny), add the cream and/or milk, brown sugar, honey and cinnamon. Keep stirring until desired thickness.

Best of all, it's pretty damn cheap. A pound of rolled oats is $1.20 at Bulk Barn and provides 15 servings, so add up all the other ingredients and it's just over a dime for a meal.

If you wanted to be supremely cheap, you could even get your honey and cream from the bins of honey and cream packets at the coffee shop.

I've been knitting a lot of socks lately. They're much easier than you'd think, and I even developed a way of casting on using the magic loop method that doesn't create an ugly ladder in the middle. I just wish I'd known already how horrible wood needles are before I bought my circular needle with bamboo needles. It makes the most disgusting noise, the ends are sharper than they need to be and there's way too much friction. I might put some mineral oil on it once my OSAP finally comes in, provided it won't stain the yarn. From now on it's either metal or plastic, but I'll save it in case I'm ever crazy enough to buy silk yarn.

And that's all for tonight.

What's going on now?

Since I last posted, I've started classes, I'm playing in wind ensemble, I've perfected the recipe for non-instant oatmeal, two of my tea seeds rotted and I figured out how to crochet a multitude of things as well as knit hats and socks. My next knitting project will be an ugly Christmas sweater.

I'm taking two musicology courses and I am not particularly thrilled with the subject. I like subjects where I am either right or wrong and can draw upon factual knowledge to prove I am right, not where I have to pull an answer out of my ass and draw upon something that came out of someone else's ass to prove that I might possibly be right but it's a bit of a grey area. It's very much philosophy-based, and while I can respect anyone who studies philosophy, I find it becomes less profound as the subject progresses because the publish-or-perish mindset that plagues the scholarly world has resulted in a lot of (at least seemingly) pointless hair-splitting. I can understand these ideas, even if it means taking a brief look at the Simple English version of the Wikipedia page, but why exactly do the most minute details of human experience have to have all these fancy Greek and Latin terms attached to them? Why do these negligible aspects of our lives have to be defined at all? If you're a philosopher, you might already know that I'm ranting about phenomenology. If you're not a philosopher, I dare you to look it up. It's difficult to understand the different aspects of it, but once you can put it in terms you understand, it seems so basic.

Before I forget again, I forgot to mention last time that I packed up my balcony garden and brought it home. It's probably withering away because of the temperature/my parents and brothers don't water it, but when I was home at the end of August, the plants were doing better because they get better sunlight in my south-facing backyard than my east-facing balcony. I still have the peppermint and the remaining tea plants under a fluorescent light behind my laptop. I might end up ordering new seeds and starting over, but this time I'll scarify them before they've been planted for three months.

And that's my life right now. Tomorrow I have classes all day and on Wednesday I'm going to look through the discontinued yarn at the craft store for yarns that I can incorporate into my ugly sweater.

Where have I been?

I had to cut my intergalactic journey short because my Heisenberg compensator blew a fuse. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find one with circuit breakers, even if you pay over three million credits for it. I was expecting not to come back until the next galactic cycle, but at least I got to see Jupiter before I had to turn around and go back.

It's even harder to find fuses for Heisenberg compensators. With the trouble you go to find a replacement and the cost of paying the mechanic, it's almost better just to buy a new one.

If you're wondering how I managed to get to Jupiter and back in two weeks, it actually took a day each way, but there was roughly a 7:1 time dilation because I was traveling so close to the universal constant. Micro deuterium uranium reactors are the way of the future in space travel, man.

I hope you've figured out, and not based on the conclusion that the time dilation resulting from traveling to Jupiter and back in two days would be something completely different from 7:1 after your horribly time-wasting calculations, that I'm full of shit. I decided to go home (as in Whitby) for the last few weeks of the summer holiday and forgot my laptop charger, brought it back after my shift at the bar on Saturday, bought new knitting stuff when I got back and forgot all about my laptop until just now.

You've just caught a horrifying glimpse into my brain. How does it feel?

I've learned that the cable stitch is super easy, but I wish I'd known about slipping the first stitch before getting a third of the way through my scarf. I'll just sew along the sides when I'm done and hopefully that will cover it up. If it doesn't work, the sides are stockinettes and will curl inwards and cover it up anyway even though I did a garter stitch border. Oh well. I still like it. I'll have to get a crochet hook, double-pointed needles and a circular needle so I can make fancier things, and perhaps go back to Zellers and get crazy amounts of half-price yarn before the good stuff is all picked over.

So that's it. That's where I've been all this time. Now you know.

Maybe I should post more frequently or something.

Between the last time I posted and now, my marigold seeds started sprouting. The tea seeds are taking their time and the lettuce is now at a point that I can eat it. I take off a leaf every day for sandwiches. I've eaten quite a few of the strawberries and many more of the cherry tomatoes, and dried a fair amount of chamomile flowers. I'm already thinking about what I want to plant next year. I may not know where I exactly I'll be living, but it will have some outdoor space to plant some food and it will not be a basement.

I checked out my audience statistics a while ago and I've had three pageviews from Russia. Who are these Russians/this Russian who has viewed my page three times?

Just checked again and found one from Germany and one from Argentina.

It's certainly not a bad thing, just unexpected. I think I'll leave it alone for a while and see what happens. Or maybe I won't leave it alone for a while, since I don't anticipate becoming less curious any time soon and I'll still be able to see what happens if I don't leave it alone.

I'm in the midst of knitting a scarf. It's the second thing I've ever knitted and it's looking awesome. The first thing was a coaster that gets narrower towards the top because I was actually knitting it tightly enough for the last 9/17 of it.

This does mean that I counted the rows and reduced the fraction.

The ends are going to be a checkered stockinette pattern and the middle is whatever stockinette-based pattern I feel like. It's looking awesome so far - knitting is very mechanical in nature and I just so happen to be mechanically oriented. One of these days I'm going to get some different kinds of needles and learn how to knit things that are not scarves or made with just knit and purl stitches. I figure if I'm going to have a hobby, why not have one that results in a cheap article of clothing?

I'm probably using the wrong-sized needles. I bought them from a store that was closing down and the biggest ones I could find as a pair were 4.5mm.

I suppose I'll end it there. I'll have more to say at a better time of day. Goodnight, world.