4 hours and one number 2 pencil later...
today i got up extra early to drive across town to take the ACT assesment test. i saw chris there, and we talked while we waited outside for 15 minutes in the freezing cold wind. "were your ears and extremities thoroughly frostbitten before the test?" should have been a question on the student review at the end. anyway, chris saved the day, since i had gotten everything i could possibly need...except for pencils. so he lent me one. how nice! i hate the science section. give me english or reading or even math, but the science?no. don't get me wrong: i love science, with a passion, even. but the science on the tests is all about interpreting data and confusing charts and graphs. "according to the pH data experiment 3, under what conditions would the percent of enzymes in Facies G affect the number of Newtons the ants would need to exert to pull the elaiosome from the seeds?" well, i think i did better on the science on the test than i did on the practice test, since i actually tried to understand it this time around. of course, that meant sacrificing the last 4 or 5 questions to the uneducated guess. D for "Daisy...G for "Grandaddy"... got a 16 in math with that method when i took the ACT in 7th grade. i hope i did that good this time around. :c)

thar she blows!
everyone likes dead whales, right? well, i found this interesting article a while ago. kept forgetting to post it. and after you read that, check this out for a whale of a good time. oh and BTW, my current favorite song is "My Immortal (Band Version)" by Evanescence.

hop-a-long goes for a walk
this afternoon, i went walking with my sister and the dogs. yes, my toe is still blue-grey and painful to move, but she couldn't handle two dogs all by her lonesome. so being the good sister, i took daisy's blue leash and walked up the street with her. it was an uneventful walk, except for the few painful times daisy would run me. then we saw a big dog and started to pulling the dogs when we realized that the poor thing had it's front leg in a cast. its run was like that of a raven, a rocking from side to side, except less smooth and more comical. i laughed. then i remembered i didn't look any better running up the street. and we saw trey on his dirtbike. while we were talking to him, i looked over and saw daisy dumping in the yard of a new house for sale. i tugged to leash, i'm guessing to move her out to the street, but i didn't expect to get that far. instead, there was left a kind of trail across the driveway. a trail of poo. instead of letting her leave a big pile in their grass, i decided to be helpful and spread the turds around a little. i hope the owners didn't see me scurrying away...

blonde bombshells
sometimes when the dogs behave so well and are sweet and loving to us and each other, i can't imagine parting with biscuit. then some days...i could give both of them away. right now they're outside because i didn't want to deal with them fighting in the house. just a little while ago, i shoved them outside amid a gutteral tirade of "bad dog"'s, after they had found a paper towel roll and torn it to shreads on the loveseat. luckily, it was almost empty anyway. that before that, biscuit had brought in and chewed up a foreign object that looked suspiciously like a turd. i decided it was just a muddy chunk of wood. not too long ago, we discovered that somebody had chewed up the printer power cord. lucky for the culprit (::cough cough:: biscuit), it wasn't plugged in. and the power cord to the laptop charger, which is near the printer cord, was chewed also. fortunately, my dad was able to splice the printer cord and repair the other cord. i'm wondering if we'll ever be able to find people who want a fat, masticating cocker spaniel that exacts his revenge through piles of poo on the carpet.

twenty years of macintosh!!
yes, folks. on january 24th, apple introduced the macintosh. lately, i've been marvelling at how apple is always behind everything cutting-edge. very few people know how instrumental apple is. most people are already familiar with the obvious achievements like the G5, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and many other innovative apple computers and products. but did you know that apple partially owns FireWire? and i'm sure everyone's familiar with Pixar, but how many know that steve jobs, co-founder/CEO apple, was co-founder of Pixer also? yeah. and if you look at the end of the credits for the Lord of the Rings movies, which had the best CG that i have ever seen, there's an apple and a blurb that says "Rendered with Pixar's RenderMan." if you see something totally new and innovative and amazing, there's a big possibility that apple is somewhere behind it. and now their greatest innovation is 20 years old. everyone, no matter what his os, should at least respect the mac. heck, if it hadn't been for the macintosh, we'd still be using commodores. :c)

around the world in 80 seconds
i don't have kazaa; i don't trust kazaa. i don't trust cheezy mp3 memberships either. i just want my mp3s free and without strings. or porn. eesh. and while i think the iTunes music store is one of the greatest inventions of our time, i'm a cheapskate. :c) so in these days of kazaa and iTunes, i have to travel from one end of the internet to the other to find a song. and that's if it's popular. i've been all over the world. i've been to dingy russian sites that remind me of MIR. i've been to creepy japanese sites that are covered in hoochy anime cartoons. i've even been to a ukranian site. i can translate some of the text on the spanish sites. then i give up and use the systran translator in sherlock. :c) well, i still haven't found the song yet, so i'll get back to work.

good news bad news
the good news: my pen drive works splendidly! it's been dropped on concrete and washed in the washing machine, and it still mounts flawlessly on my desktop. what a marvillous piece of technology! i've garnered a whole new respect for my gritty little flash drive.

the bad news: my sister went to the hair cuttin' place to get dark red streaks. more like intense stripes, i guess. but not highlights. and that's exactly what she got. highlights, except it's mostly red. apparently there was a communication breakdown even though they had a picture of exactly what she wanted. it's not bad, actually. very cool, but not what she wanted. and it's not easy to pay $80 for something you didn't want. that's why i'm too afraid to want something, especially if people with cotton in their ears will end up distorting it.

speaking of cotton, i'm using cotton between my toes so my skin won't fester or "macerate," as the article said. we never went to the doc-in-a-box, so i decided to ask jeeves instead. the bruising and bluish-grey color of my toe and surrounding foot supposedly means it's broken, and if it doesn't get better in the next day or two, then it probably is broken. so meanwhile, i'm just splinting it with its neighbor. i've been getting around better, though. and since amber strained her ankle, she can't run away from me at school. heh heh.

aaarrrrghh!! (not yeeaargh!!!)
webmd must be the worst site i've ever been to. the first time i tried to use it, it was confusing and clunky and i don't think i ever found what i was looking for. now, i'm trying to view a page about broken toe symptoms because i STILL haven't gone to the med clinic, and i'm very curious. it has finally loaded, after several minutes of being stuck in a javascript quagmire. and everytime i would click away, it would load more of the page, so i would click back. and it would start all over and never load. geez!! people hate waiting. especially people with cable modems and maimed digits.

who am i?mrs. g?
guess who's 256 mb flash drive got washed with the darks this afternoon? after 3 close calls, it finally happened. now it's undergoing a complex dehydration process over the air vent.

of course, my flash drive's poor fate pales in comparison to the condition of my little toe on my left foot. i've stubbed it many times in the same way, in the same place, yet it has never hurt so bad for so long and turned the entire top left of my foot such an eerie shade of cyanosis blue. tomorrow, the med clinic to see a University of Pakistan alumnus. for now, ibuprofen and the constant ache in my teeth from the orthodontist appointment yesterday are keeping the pain tolerable.

oh, and my dad thinks the random luching and shuddering of my car that has been happening recently might be the engine cutting out. he hasn't done anything about it. but each time i see that little engine-shaped carbuncle glowing on the dash and feel my car shaking like a mad cow, i'll be reminded that i've no clue what to do if the engine does cut out. oh, time for more ibuprofen now.

yeeeaaarrhh!!
i really don't care who wins the iowa caucus or the new hampshire caucus or the bathtub caucus even. i am interested in who came in third in iowa, though. if howard dean hadn't fallen from his high horse, he wouldn't have lost his mind and given us this precious sound bite. gosh, i'm going to have so much fun with this.