yesterday was awesome. we hung out with my grams for a while in the morning, and then she left, and daddo left, and mom came back, and eventually we drove down to Livermore to Wendy and Aaron's, and wendy & I had a wonderful afternoon of knitting, chatting, and kareokeing. that was fun. still none of those songs are ones I know really well, but they were still fun to try to sing. and I french-braided her hair. :) it's all long and cool. Then there was spaghetti night, which was burritos, and went rock climbing at sunrise! it was awesome! I climbed the easy one twice and the next hardest one once. but coming back down the wall the last time my ankle did something weird, so I didn't climb again after that. but I really liked it. :) :) :) thanks, wendy-lady, for encouraging me & leading by example. that was totally cool. I got pictures, too. and others got some pictures of me too.

I really do think of myself as not atheletic. that's part of my problem with getting active I think. I just have to start thinking of myself differently.

oh, and the night before, grams and Ford and I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego: Treasures of Knowledge, which I'd gotten her for christmas a while back. it was fun, the game is nothing like the old carmen sandiego. it was really hard until we figured that out.

anyhow, time for lunch. yaay vacation and double yaay all of the wonderful people I get to see and hang out with!!! as they say, woot!!

well, I know I'm on vacation. yesterday filthylilanimal came over and we watched all three Back to the Future movies. :) well, we watched one and a half, and then mom took me for a facial (oh, wow, was that nice... I haven't had a facial in years, and also I hadn't seen Julie (facialist) in years, so it was fun to catch up with her.) and then we all came back and finished the second one and had brautwurst (so much for being vegetarian for the moment... I think that dish is one of the main reasons I'm not totally vegetarian), and watched the third one. it was good. :) also, mom and gma and I walked around the resevoir yesterday morning. that was also good.

so yeah. today I've slept, eaten breakfast and read a short (83 pages, one and a half spaced) book by Stuart Alve Olson called Tao of no Stress: Three Simple Paths. I'm not counting it in my booking_it book count because it was so short, but it was interesting. It was presented in a very Eastern way, as opposed to Jon Kabat-Zinn's work which is usually better westernized. it's hard sometimes (for me anyway) to see the applicability of Eastern wisdom when it's so different from Western paradigms. And so when you read a Buddhist or Taoist text and they tell you about the qi flowing through you or about how massaging the pressure points in your body frees up the qi and lets it flow... though you want to be open minded (and I do), my scientific, medical inculturation leads me to just not believe it, even if I want to give it the benefit of the doubt. (and it's hard, because I think disbelief is almost more of an impediment to those kinds of practices than anything else) So having a scientist who has studied contemplative practice, like Kabat-Zinn, present the ideas within a more western framework, just makes it easier to see the wisdom and believe the effect it has on you than if you're trying to believe in the energy flows in your body when they sound a little 'new age'-y to you. and I was a new age freak when I was younger, too. so I'm glad to find a sort of scientific back door into contemplative practice.

so yeah. there were some things in there that I didn't really agree with, but also some interesting ideas, and he had pictures to show you where the pressure points are on your hands and face to do stress-relieving massage sorts of things. and we should give each other massages more, too. either way, though, it was a quick read and still had a lot of the same wisdom about stress and how we think we deal with it when we really don't.

so yeah, my grams should be here quite soon, and we're going out to lunch at Fresh Choice, in a bit after that Fnord should show up eventually... so yeah. I'm enjoying my vacation, and getting to relax a bit and watch movies and see friends, and it's good. I know there's a part of me that's freaking out because I'm not getting anything 'productive' done. I'm trying to air out that part, show it that there's nothing I really need to do, and that if I do any work this week, it's because I want to, not because I have to. in fact, the only thing I really would like to have done by the end of my break is something to improve my computer situation, either reinstall everything, or look into getting a new computer (probably not that, though, because this computer is actually pretty good compared to current things you can get... the only real problem with the hardware is the lameness with the disk (CD/DVD) drive being basically non-functional, and the software can probably be fixed if I reinstall, etc)... anyhow, yeah, so if that's the only real thing I'd like to get done this week, I'm sure it will be fine.

well, good afternoon to everyone! (since it is now after noon)

ugh. I did not sleep well last night... I really think it was because the comforter on the bed is too warm (it's down)... or something. Zoo slept with me though. :)

anyhow, so yeah, Ford and I drove down on friday without incident, and then hung out with mom and dad, and then the next day we had El Charro for lunch, Fnord went home, and we headed up to the Andersons.' :) :) it was awesome hanging out with those guys, I got to expound on UCSB and UC Davis for Corrie's benefit, and that was cool, and also we watched the Incredibles (I really like that movie... mom and dad hadn't seen it. oh, and Mo, the DVD has a short on it showing what happens while the babysitter is leaving messages for the mom, while the baby is, ah, discovering his powers), and Legally Blonde (the first one) because I'd never seen it. also, that morning with Fnord, we watched Aladdin. that was fun. :) I hadn't seen that in years. I felt good, like, any day in which I watch three movies is a nice day of vacation. I know I should work on being more active (and today I will be going walking with Gma, Gpa, and mom), but in terms of what I like to do to relax, watching movies is right up there.

anyhow, then on sunday we hung out up there and played a game called Scene It which is a DVD-based movie trivia game. it was a lot of fun... I'd absorbed a lot of random movie knowledge just from seeing trailers for lots of movies. even if I hadn't actually seen them. there was a nice variety of questions, too, both in terms of the subject matter, and in terms of the types of puzzles/questions they were. we played through that, and then put the DVD on party mode where it just puts questions up and we all sit around trying to answer them. we probably spent hours doing that. :) then we left, and headed down back to the bay area, and went to visit JP and Tracy and Andre!!!

wow is this baby totally adorable... he's really small, and that to me just makes him the more little and perfect and adorable. I was as usual intimidated about holding him, but Mom and Dad held him a lot, and it was just really awesome to get a chance to hang out with those guys... I haven't spend a considerable amount of time with JP in a really long time, and I haven't hung out with Tracy that much at all! it's really nice to get to spend some time with them. and Andre is wonderful! :) I did hold him at the end and it was really amazing. I wish I'd held him more now. :) Tracy was really cool about us getting to hold him.

then we got home... showered... I called a lot of people trying to figure out what's going on for the rest of the break... I'll be in Livermore on part of wednesday, thursday, and part of friday. we'll head back to Goleta on sunday. okay, time for a walk. happy vacation to me at least!

yummy Indian food buffet!

and now for packing and waiting for Fnord to get over here with his stuff and his car. go north, young man, go north!

well, I should be washing my dishes. but since affie emailed me (yay!) I emailed her back, and now here I am updating, but really, Ford won't be off work until 12 or something anyhow, so I have lots of time (even though there are lots of dishes, too... :P ) but I've had a lovely morning, I got up, made the calls I needed to make, started collecting some other stuff to bring home, and am generally enjoying a sort of cloudly, slightly rainy day... ahhhh. okay, fine, I'll do the dishes now. :P

p.s. I even switched my email so that livejournal is emailing me replies again. I think my ucdavis-alumni address must have started blocking the emails because they seemed spam-like. so I missed almost a month of them, but it's fixed now. comment, damn you all, comment! ;)

well... I did manage to go through all my papers, and clean up the apartment, and feed the snakie... I settled down to back up my personal data, and ran into *all* *sorts* of problems... I don't know if it's just my CD-ROM being stupid (which is normal) or if there's something more serious at work here. the computer is a lot slower than it used to be. so I'm going to make that one of my projects over break, to figure out what's going on with that.

the other unpleasant thing that I noticed after I got back from breakfast with Mika is I think I have a cold sore. darn. I knew I was exposed to it when I went out with Rich, because I used to kiss him, cold sores or no, and I've never actually had one before, so I guess my immune system is just low enough at this point or in that particular way that it's shown up finally. I know some insane percentage of the population has it (it's actually a form of herpes, not the really bad one, but the common one we all have for the most part, and the one that causes cold sores) and it just never manifests. but I was hoping to not have cold sores... sigh. well, assuming that's what it is. it doesn't feel like a normal pimple, I'll put it that way.

but, on to more pleasant things! I really did have a wonderful day. I managed to get some stuff done, and then Gabby came over and we decided which recipes we were going to do, and went out to Vons (in the Rabbit) to get the stuff we needed, and then came back and worked on cooking for a while... we made a carrot pudding with sweet white wine (I think we ended up with a fetzer gewurstraminer) and dates and currants, and roasted chickpeas in the oven and then boiled them with garlic (that one needs a little work, we should have soaked them longer after roasting to bring a little more fluid back in, but the flavor was really interesting!), and made the mushroom-leek soup which Isles had had back last year for our thanskgiving feast. that turned out really well, and leeks are really cool!!! and we had mead, too, and that was good.

so we watched a silly british comedy movie, called 'stiff upper lips' which was a parody of many other important english movies (the references I caught were Chariots of Fire and A Passage to India, but I'm sure there were loads more), and it was really funny. the characters were really funny. anyhow, so then we watched the first episode of Arrested Development, which was fun to see again and she seemed to like it.

what a fun evening! see, this is why it's fun to be an adult. you get to do these sorts of things whenever you want, for the most part. and then you can decide you won't deal with the dishes until tomorrow. :) so, with that, good night to you all and sweet dreams!

well here I am again. I guess I'm to the point where I should start sorting through all these papers that have accumulated over the quarter. I did the dishes, and I've got mices thawing for swetha, and other than the papers, the apartment looks okay in terms of tidiness. I guess I could back up my personal files... yeah, that would be helpful too.

hmm. or I could take a nap.

well, so far things are good. I got up, showered, took Mika and Lahsa to the vet... because they wanted to do yet more things (though the coughing seems to be solved... we think she's asthmatic (sp?)), Mika ended up paying a bunch and she was pretty depressed by the time we got home. so I took her out to breakfast at Alphie's. that cheered her up. :) it was good. then I came home and I've done a little cleaning... but not much. it's actually quite pleasant. I should get a little bit done, but I could also use a little bit of time to just not get anything done, you know? really just enjoy myself and not feel like there's anything I need to do. I can work on things later if I need to. anyway, it's a nice day, a little overcast, but cozy. so good afternoon to you all!

oh no... it's worse than that. there are no links to comments anywhere in my journal now... I hope they aren't all gone...

hmm... weird. not only has LiveJournal stopped emailing me comments and replies, and hasn't since the 3rd of march, it also didn't allow comments on that last entry. I wonder if I should ask someone about this.

so today's been okay... went to my dentist appointment today in the morning, they put goo in my mouth and took molds of my teeth, so they can make a nightguard for me. I talked to the insurance person again about how the counselor should bill me, and then I spent a leisurely time walking back from the health center to the library. I'd never been up to the 8th floor... it's pretty spectacular. the view is simply astonishing. it's what you'd expect, of course, but there aren't that many tall buildings around, even in Santa Barbara, really, so usually the view is amazing but not that panoramic. it was cool. :) then I went down to the ground floor, and spent a long time looking at the political map of the world on the wall by the elevators. it was cool to work on my geography a little bit. since I've been reading BBCNews for the last few months, I've realized I don't know where a lot of places are. then I was looking at the LandSat pictures when Luca walked by, on his way to meet professor Lee to start grading the ECE finals. so I walked with him a ways, chatting with him, telling him my thoughts about the test. I got myself a burrito, and sat down to eat it, waiting for Gabby to come out and meet me. we hung out chatting and planning for our period cooking excursion for tomorrow night, until Brian came. they needed to go take their car to get the oil changed. then I went to the office... sat down and tried to work on Aki & Richards, mostly chatted with Kenny about video games, etc. then Morgan came over, and we started to discuss fault kinematics and dynamics and green's functions and so forth. I understand it all a little better, and it was fun to talk to Morgan. then I biked home, and went over to Mika's for dinner. she's a little stressed trying to finish her papers and stuff. we watched a couple of episodes of "Sex and the City" ...I've never seen the show before. I'm not totally sure what I think. I think I don't relate to the show at all. there was some pretty funny stuff, I had to admit, but I don't really like casual sex, and in general don't really like being single (in the dating, free-ish sex kind of way)... I don't know. it's well written and the comedy timing is really good, and the actresses are really good too. so I don't know, I'd watch more of it, but I wouldn't buy it. I'd prefer Seinfeld or Arrested Development or Futurama or Simpsons.

anyhow, so I'm back home now, sleepy, probably go to bed early, though I don't have much to do tomorrow. we'll see how that is, I might really be at loose ends then. but I'll see. I'm sort of having difficulty relaxing. well, good evening to everyone!