DRIVING! Is weird

I have just driven around in an elementary school's parking lot for an hour and a half. The first part, my mom was grabbing the wheel every few seconds so that I wouldn't take out a sign or something, which was annoying, but I can understand her concern (teen driving for the first time + THIS IS MY CAR!!! = panic situation every few seconds). I finally got better, learned how to park (not surrounded by cars, shopping carts, and crazy people/drivers, but still), and other driving basics. Funny thing was, that, even coming out of a stop with the accelerator pedal not pressed, the car still moved at 5 MPH. Which is about what I stayed at the entire time. I didn't count how many times we went around the kiss-n-ride loop, but I am guessing it was over 50 times. And I still have no clue how to turn on the wipers, headlights (thank the Lord they're automatic or else I'd have been driving almost blind during the last half hour) or turn signals. Hey, it's an empty parking lot and my first time driving. At least I know which pedal makes the car move.

I'm tired and have a day in Washington D.C. tomorrow with one of my friends, leaving at 9 AM tomorrow. I gotta go.

DMV, diabetes, and cheap batteries, oh my!

I guess I should go in the order of the title. DMV is, to say the least, not the place I want to spend almost two hours just to get my learner's permit. My mom and I spent an hour and thirty-six minutes in line, waiting for our number, F738, to be called. They eventually called F739 and F740 when my mom realized that they had skipped our number. F741, 2, and 3 were called while she went into another line to complain. The lady at the desk she complained at said that we missed our number. Lady at Desk: The DMV is so stinkin' boring that, for entertainment, we were both staring at the little signs at the top of the wall that said things like [Window 10] [C016 Please Go To] (and yes, it was backwards like that.) Almost the entire time. We didn't miss the number. So she suggested giving my mom another number, which was immediately put down by my dear mother by something like "No, I do not want to wait another HOUR AND A HALF." So we got service at the next available window, where we showed my documents, I took a 10-second eye exam thingy, and was sent off to wait by the "examiner's" desk. The examiner called for me almost immediately when I first got over there and then again, and I identified myself and was sent to test station 4, where the little TV showed me tons of info about the test (most of it was repeated a few times) and asked me questions like "What is your name?" Four names of girls, one was mine. "What is your birthday?" Four dates, one was my birthday. I was almost surprised that it didn't start asking me "What is your quest?" To get a learner's permit. "What is your favorite color?" Red. "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" What do you mean? An African or European swallow? "What? I...I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!" Anywho, then it told me the number of questions, etc. I aced the signs part of the test and discovered that pushing the onscreen buttons was painful to the pointer finger nerves, but what the heck. Took the second part of the test. Aced first twenty questions (the minimum) and so it stopped, because, even if I had gotten the next five wrong, I still would have gotten a nice piece of stiff glossy DMV paper with my name, picture, birthday, etc. on it. It told me to go back to "The examiner" and began counting down:
5
4
3
2
1
and went back to the stupid little welcome screen. Around three, I went back, declared my doneness of the test, had my picture taken (I should have smiled, but my smiles look cheesy and forced anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter) and got my permit. And left that stupid place. I had no clue how to drive yet, so my mom drove me home.

Anyway, the diabetes part. A while ago, the DMV sent my mom a packet with a cover letter saying, basically, "You have a medical problem that brings into question your safeness as a driver. Go get all of your doctors to sign forms and increase their arthritis problems. In 30 days. [evil voice of doom]OR LOSE YOUR LICENSE.[/evil voice of doom]
She was able to get the signatures she needed, but we are both sure that such a letter awaits me threatening my permit because of my diabetes. Both her endocronologist and mine were like "That's only if you've gotten into an accident or if someone turns you in for unsafe driving, right?" And our responses: "Not now." Virginia's DMV, or at least the one in our area, is getting stricter on diseases and those who have them's driving privileges. So, even though I just had a doctor's appointment yesterday, I may need to get ANOTHER one (hard in only a month) soon. Lovely. Thank you, DMV, for making life harder.

And the reason I have been using a normal toothbrush instead of an electric one for over a month is.......[begin drumroll] .........[cymbal crash][end drumroll]CHEAP BATTERIES! The stupid toothbrush would work for a couple seconds and stop. My mom finally took matters into her own hands and replaced the batteries of my toothbrush with the nice little timer and such. Guess what kind of batteries were inside?






Have you ever heard of Vinnie batteries? They're the ones all huge right here.

Those are the ones that came with the stupid thing. Cheap batteries that don't last like energizer bunnies. Or duracells, or (my dad's favorite) Rayovac. VINNIE. Sounds kinda wimpy. Is kinda wimpy. After getting that toothbrush, it lasted for, perhaps, two months or so. The five-buck electric toothbrush I used before lasted much longer than that on normal SANE BRAND NAME batteries. Brand names aren't always good (clothes, but maybe that's because I think clothes shopping is BORING AS HECK), but in the case of batteries, stick with normal.

Back from Camp

Well, I'm back. Camp was fun. We stayed in a beautiful cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Other than playing MarioKart Double Dash and DDR, we watched movies (which is why Pride and Prejudice is now my favorite movie), deep fried French fries, oreos, and waffle batter, rode a cable car, went ice skating, and listened to musicals in the car.

The deep frying was supposed to be only for dinner. We deep fried some French fries in vegetable oil (because we are cheapskates). After dinner, someone came up with the idea that "hey, we should have deep-fried some oreos while we had hot oil" and "Well, the oil is still sort of warm, isn't it?" And so we heated the oil back up again, crushed some Honey graham Squares for breading and mixed egg, vanilla, and milk as a breading glue thingy. That oreo was good but incredibly sweet and sort of squishy. So we used bisquick instead of crunched up breakfast cereal. Which worked better, but it wasn't as sweet. Whether or not that is a good thing I will never know. And eventually, it was suggested "Hey, why don't we make some donuts?" How were we supposed to make donuts? Waffle batter made out of bisquick. Eventually, we also added cinnamon sugar. We made what looked like a cross between a donut hole and a hunk of fried chicken first, and then the donuts began to look like, well, fried donuts. And then we fried one with a hole in the middle, which was really cool looking, and then another one, which broke and turned into a "C." The donuts were sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, as they were somewhat bland otherwise. I caught most of it on the youth group's video camera. Oh, man, that camera is really cool. The donuts were pretty good, but blander than your typical donut. Then we watched My Fair Lady (weird!).

The cable car was cool, abeit squishy (120 people in one car=me wanting to scream "GET OUT OF MY BUBBLE!")
We also went ice skating, which was, for me, painful. Everyone in my immediate family has wide feet. I have never been to a place where ice skates came in wide sizes. I asked for a 7 and 1/2, but I think I got a 7. They fit well, but now I am beginning to reconsider my foot doctor's idea that I may need orthotics eventually (I have somewhat flat arches). However, the rubbing on the back of my leg gave me a blister and the pressure on the sides of my feet caused a lot of pain. When I finally gave up and took off the skates to get the heck out of the ice rink, I forgot that the rubber-matted floors are covered in puddles. My socks were wet and grey on the bottoms when I put my shoes back on, but it felt good on my abused feet, so that didn't cause too much of a problem. We got ice cream on the way back to the cabin at a Coldstone spinoff (Marble Slab Creamery) which was, in my opinion, better than coldstone (coldstone doesn't have waffle cups that I know of!) I splurged and got a chocolate-dipped waffle cup with double-dark chocolate ice cream with a Reeses peanut butter cup mixin. That was really good. Although the cup's diameter was about six inches, which meant that I ate an insane amount of ice cream. Hey, insanity isn't so bad...

My favorite musical still has to be Les Miserables, but the tenth anniversary version was really weird. Javert sounded awesome as usual, but Valjean sounded like he had a sore throat or something. This version also cut out parts of songs and even entire songs. They even cut the song in which Marius first sees Cosette. I mean, it was like, they suddenly knew each other from nowhere and POOF! They're in love. And I'm pretty sure they cut Gavroche's death, which was a pity. Even though my second favorite character dies in it, it's a cool song. I prefer the symphonic version—nothing's been cut, most of the characters are really good sounding (no sore throats) (although Eponine sounds like she is singing way too far forward in her throat, in my opinion) (and Valjean is a little late sounding in some of his lines in the prolouge so that Javert has to catch up), and the orchestra is good. Anywho, I got to listen to this tenth anniversary edition on the way to the cabin. On the way back, we listened to Jekyll and Hyde (cool, but please forgive me if Imisspelledd it or something), Jane Eyre (confusing, weird, and a little too sentimental), Phantom of the Opera (cool, especially on Christine's high notes that I could reach if I warmed up) and Whistle Down the Wind (incredibly weird and modern sounding (rock musical in some places, if you catch my drift)).
Favorite Musicals (in order):
Les Miserables
Phantom Of The Opera
Jekyll and Hyde
Please note that things in this post and my entire blog are opinion only. I don't own any of the musicals (no job yet and $10 allowance a week... duh). These are my comments on the musicals only and were not really meant to be quoted/taken completely seriously. Don't use this as a guide for buying a Les Mis recording, as my tastes may differ from yours. And if I have done anything illegal here, please comment and tell me so I can remove/edit the offensive material. None of this was meant to offend anyone, so if it does, I am sorry but I did not mean to offend you.

Legal mumbo jumbo ish yuck, but whatever.

Anywho, enough about camp, I think. New website I just discovered a few hours ago thanks to my parents saving a newspaper article. http://www.lulu.com is a site that allows anyone to publish a book completely free of charge with 80 percent royalties. Each book is printed after it is ordered, so if your book sells 0 copies, Lulu hasn't lost much and neither have you. I just need to keep writing on my book... if I ever publish it, you can be sure a link will be here to Lulu (most likely, anyways) so that people can read it—in either book form or e-book form! That would be cool. And I could put my own artwork on the cover. I just need to get up the nerve to draw it... some of the characters creep me out, and I would hate to have a creepy character staring at me from the book's future cover as I write it. The only thing that Lulu lacks, I think, is an editor, but if one writes a story, prints it out, shoves it in a friend's face with a red pen and commands that friend to edit and show no mercy, and then if this is repeated with other people, and revisions are made, who needs an editor?

I gotta practice my violin (after a week of not being able to practice due to me being 8 hrs away from my violin). Here's to hoping my ears and my brain don't implode!

Done with packing!!!

Finally finished packing. I will have to borrow/temporarily steal my mom's hairdryer later tonight to make my hair not look freakish, but otherwise, all of my personal stuff fits into a duffel baglike suitcase and the DDR pad and PS2 fit into my dad's giant green duffel.

In about fifteen minutes, one of my mom's friends from the Reston Chorale is coming over to teach my mom and me how to cook Japanese-style. She's from Japan and came to America in what I think of as kind of an exchange teacher program. She has an iBook (because Macs rock Windoze's socks) and a little translator mini-laptopish thingie. Last time she was at our house, my dad and I showed her how to rebuild her iBook's desktop (still predominantly Mac OS 9) and I introduced her to DDR. That was fun.


Note to self:
Dear Self,
TELL DAD TO (RE)INSTALL MACLINK PLUS ON MOM'S iBOOK!!!!
Sincerely,
Ky
We had to use my dad's blue-and-white G3-turned-G4 to open some .doc files that my mom received in an email. Why the people couldn't save them as PDF files which nearly everyone can open (both Macs and PeeCees, and the program to open them is a simple free download) is beyond me. No, school-running people who sent my mom that stuff, the Mac is not going down the drain. Although iPod sales are predicted to slow, Apple has come up with many new products that are available for both Mac and PeeCee. =) Have you seen the new Mighty Mouse? As soon as I saw that, I almost started drooling. That thing is sweet. And less than fifty bucks. Click here for Apple's website. And click here for techspecss, design info, and other stuff about the Mighty Mouse. It's cool. I hope I can get one!

Weirdness

I don't remember who said this or his or her exact words, but I am proving what they said true. Girls, when explaining things, tend to write/say an entire essay-like entity, while guys usually say something monosyllabic. Heh. I hate writing essays for school yet write them quite happily in my blog, which no one is grading. *sigh*

Off to camp!

I haven't posted in almost a year. I have been extremely busy with life, and playing in my school's musical (assistant principal second violinist in the Les Miserables pit orchestra! Yeah!) and stuff. Anywho, I just finished Institute for the Arts (art summer school) and am packing to go to my church's youth group's camp. We're going to Tennessee and staying in a beautiful cabin. I can't wait.

With that said, I am also preparing to reread Eragon in preparation for the release of Eldest. Can't wait for that! Here's to hoping Books a Million has a midnight release party thing!

Just hoping that the books don't squelch my inspiration for my writing... After reading a book, I tend to think about "What if this happened instead?" or "I can't believe that happened!!! Why did the author do that?!?!" (I wish interrobangs were standard characters on a keyboard. They'd make things so much easier! Google "Interrobang" and read about them. They're so cool!

This summer has been extremely busy for me, even with all of the fun stuff. I don't think I have been able to sleep in to a decent time (10:00 or later) at all. First, a trip to Texas. Then, IFTA. Now, camp. After, reading the AP world history guide and making a PERSIA chart on various ancient civilizations. Fun fun fun. Stupid summer assignments.

Anywho, off to finish packing!

Wow. I was spell checking this, and it told me I had spelled "fun" wrong. And what did it offer as a suggestion? "fun." Maybe I had extra spaces next to the "misspelled" one.