I Think I'm More Entertained by My Fish Than I Should Be

So last weekend I bought a beta fish at Wal-Mart with Rachel and Jenna. It took three of us to name him D'artagnan Othello Barbosa. For being a fish he's more entertaining than I thought he would be. So I did some drawings to try and show you how entertaining he can be during the day.

For I don't know what reason Little D'art likes to go in this corner and start burying his head over and over again in the rocks. He just like head butts the rocks like something is going to happen. 

Sometimes for no reason he swarms this bottom corner and just curls up in a half circle. He just floats there curled up like a dog or something. 

His favorite place to just float and hang out is always at the top of the bowl. This causes me to freak out like he's died at least 5 times a day. 

This is his normal state. Zooming around the bowl like a dog on steroids. He kinda chases his tail sometimes too. Hopefully not to rip it off or something..it's so cute when he does this. 

Then of course there's my face when watching him.

A photo journey of homework.

So I didn't really realize until recently but apparently when I'm doing homework, I make a variety of faces. You can pretty much tell the homework type and intensity by the face I'm making. I'm sure we all have our faces for homework but here's a guide to mine.

This will be my basic homework face. When the assignment is just something quick and easy but I still have to do something. 

This is my reading something long and not that interesting face. It is being utilized a lot this semester.  

This position is reserved for reading something long and intensive online.  The recline makes for more comfort for approximately five minutes before my butt just goes numb.  

For that paper I have to write based on reading an article I don't care about. I only need one eye to read anyway. My head's always too heavy to be held by just my neck during these situations. 

My "it's been a long night, why aren't I getting anything done" face. At this point it's the middle of the night and thus really cold. I have to hide my face from the homework as well. 

This is what happens when I've been at homework for at least an hour. I start touching anything and everything around my desk. 

I'm incapable of focusing on my homework. My phone is a very nice distraction. 

There always comes the point when I start to drift off to other places in my head. This realm is vast and contains many many distractions. This phase will last me a long time. The later it is, the longer it lasts. 

It never fails, that the longer I'm doing homework the more homework I remember I need to do. Always. Happens.  

Light will always be found at the end of the night. The end of toiling gets rewarded. With juice and a cookie. Heck yes to college funds to buy more cookies for homework time. 

I love my classes, yet it never fails, homework creates a feeling of dread and discontent. I have had a few assignments I have generally enjoyed though. Everything from my heavy metal class was just amazing. I hate homework though. There's one universal face that goes with every type of assignment.

Install updates?

So my phone every so often tells me it has an automatic update that it wants to install and of course asking my permission. I, of course, allow it since updates are free and probably do nothing harmful at the least, and may actually improve something that I don't know doesn't really work correctly. Well this morning when I woke up, my phone was telling me about updates available so as always I allowed it. As I was with a friend, I wandered off for some socializing and forgot completely about the fact my phone was updating.

I returned for my phone some time later, after it had finished and restarted itself, because my friend wanted to see it. I didn't look at it, just picked it up and handed it to him. I wasn't paying much attention for a bit, then I realized the direction my friend was holding my phone and scrolling. (I realized I should mention, I have a droid phone that has a touch screen and QWERTY keyboard that slides out from the side. My phone's screen switches from upright to displaying on it's left side when you turn it or open the keyboard.) My friend was holding the phone to the right. It was upright. The screen had followed the orientation. I stared at it for like 5 minutes before just grabbing my phone and spinning it in all directions watching it follow except for upside down. I couldn't believe it! I then remembered the update.

My curiosity up and running, I went to my home screen to see what else had changed. Most obvious was that at the bottom there were two buttons added under the apps on my screen. There originally had been one for going to the app screen. There was now a browser and call option one. I then noticed my google search bar looked different. I went to go see if the other main pages were different, and held the screen a bit too long when sliding and then five icons popped up, each showing a different home screen! I was in total shock! I couldn't believe how many changes this update had done.

I went to get back into my messages but hit the contacts button by mistake. Another shock! The main colour scheme used to be white. It was now black. Mind was blown. I backed up and went to the messages. Another double take after seeing that the main colour scheme that was black was now completely white! Whoa! Too much change to handle. I go into one of my message threads only to be attacked with more! The message threads had been transformed into something similar to my facebook chats. Each message had the picture of the sender beside the text!

I got a text at this point. There's a little light on the side of the phone that goes off when I get calls or messages. Instead of being blue it was green. Seriously? They even changed the colour of my notifications? Wow.

So far that's all I've found that's new. Considering the usual updates, thats a heck of a lot.

Oh just found one more. Apparently my phone is now also green. I was charging it and when it finished charging on the screen it said "phone is charged, unplug to save energy" I'm almost shocked it didn't say 'B!*ch' after that.

I'm curious as to what else was changed but worried that something I use a lot will be different and I'll find out at a bad time. Who knows. These updates are "getting curiouser and curiouser"

Dear Tall People

Please realize that when people such as myself have really short legs, it takes us longer to cover the distance you cover with one step. It takes more effort to average the same distance in the same time. That when I'm tired my steps get shorter. That being lower to the ground I don't hear the conversation as well and it's easy to get left out. That the world is different form my point of view. That when you fart, it hits me way before it hits you. Please be considerate of short people.

Thanks
Sofia

Evolution of a Lie

So when I was a child I picked up the habit of lying a lot. I do mean, a lot. And I noticed even as a child that my pattern of lying had a certain format and system that happened every time even if it was the reason for my down fall every time. The format goes like this.

1. Recognize a need for either lie or face serious consequences. (example: broke something that wasn't mine.)
2. Formulate story that is believable to the parents. (example: Someone else caused it by doing _____)
3. Injure self to cause more pity to help my case (example: slap arm repeatedly until it looks like something hurt it)
4. Debate whether to bring situation to my parents attention or allow them to discover it on their own. (example: put broken thing back where it belongs/strategically place it somewhere or take it to them)
5. Create back up story in case of failure that doesn't contradict the first story. (example: instead of so and so caused it when, it could also have happened at another time, I just didn't look at it in between said times)
6. Panic and make sure person getting blamed isn't known by parents or their parents being acquainted with mine. (example: choose random kid in class I have nothing to do with otherwise) 
7. 
   
1. Get caught while planning this out (example: sitting in my room holding broken object when Jaime walks in) or
2. Go about setting lie in motion (attempt to follow the plan)
8. 
   
1. Grounded
2. Forget all careful planning and free lance (make up everything as I go)
1. If successful, be so proud of self that I brag about it within 24 hours to either brothers or parents
9. Grounded. 

Step seven gets me every time. Honestly step one is the beginning of the end for me, as I could never pull off the lies like I needed to. There was only one that I managed to pull off. It was at least five years before I blabbed on myself, but at that point I was old enough to rectify the dire situation instantaneously with some sweet talk and smoothness just like my older brother taught me. 

I was apparently a child that didn't learn life lessons well and trial and error wasn't enough to teach me...

A Budding Engineer

When I was younger I always wanted to be an engineer. I didn't really know the specifics of what kind was what, but I did want to build things like toys or awesome structures of immense proportions that took ones breath away and did many tasks. I believe this would be mechanical engineering.

So in the form of a young child, having a certain dream of course meant that I had to start work on it right then and there or it would never come true. I wasn't allowed around the power tools so the big projects were out. My vision was already crushed at a young age. I decided to use what I had and what I could con out of Grandma for whatever big project I was going to do. I managed to gather a lot of string that originally would have been used for those bead buddies. (You know, the lizards and other animals and things people would make.) I had some bandannas, beanie babies, blankets and whatever was in my room.

With all my supplies gathered I was ready to do something that I didn't know yet. I laid down in bed for the extremely long time of ten minutes. An eternity to a child but necessary to stare at what I had and think about the possibilities as well as going off to many other unrelated things for about eight minutes. After this, I finally had an idea. I was going to make a ski lift for the Beanie Babies that went across my room.

My dresser was exactly across the room from a window with curtain rods. My bed was underneath the window so my short stature could reach the curtain rod. Now it came to how exactly would it work. I had no idea how the real ones worked and I was too young to have learned about pulleys or any of the simple machines. At this point it was just problem solving.

First I went simple. I tied a string from one of the dresser handles up to the curtain rod. I had a track. I spent more time than was probably needed tying and retying it for strength and straightness, and a taunt line that didn't slack in the middle. Now I needed a cart. I used the bandannas and tied it up longways to the line. having no weight it just sat there. I wanted it to slid down but couldn't figure out why it wouldn't. This caused another ten minutes of staring and thinking about things probably like the book I had just read or something before I tried putting a Beanie Baby in the cart. This worked gloriously for me! It slid down the line, but then caused the line to bow in the middle. I needed a perfectly straight line. It was extremely important to me to have a straight line.

My anal attentiveness to the straightness of the line lent me to probably about ten more minutes of retying and pulling and retying and trying to outsmart gravity until it was acceptable to me. When it finally was. I added more Beanie babies and had to restart the entire dang process again. My tenacious impatience finally won and I decided to give up on that so I could just see it in action. I moved it up to the top of the line and watched it slowly slide down the line and stop and start at places. I was slightly annoyed at the imperfectness of the ride but I was ecstatic at the same time. I hopped off my bed grabbed it and slid it back up to do over and over and over again.

At this point I realized something. I was sick and tired of hopping up and down from the bed to grab the darn cart. Here was a new problem to solve. Thus began more staring. More thinking. In an eternity of five minutes I was able to reason out tying a second string to the cart to pull it back up with. A few test runs with this, proved inefficient as it just pulled the cart toward me and threatened to undo the string from the dresser. Then came the greatest brain storm ever. I slipped the string over the rod and pulled from there. It worked! The cart could slide up and down without me getting out of bed! I was so excited! I ran off to find someone to show it to.

I found Jaime.

As only a father can, he begrudgingly followed me to my room.

The only thing he had to say?

He yelled at me for bending the curtain rod horribly out of place from all the weight  and pulling on it. I never had even noticed it.

Grounded.

T9. You jerk

So everyone is familiar with T9 right? I'm just saying, I cannot use T9 for the life of me. I just cannot comprehend how it functions and how people are supposed to use it. I tried watching Michelle use it once and it was just beyond what I could process. She's spelling weird things, then deleting then redoing it, I just don't even know. I don't even know! I want to know who decided that T9 was something that would speed up the texting process.

When I had a phone that was just a dial pad not a QWERTY keyboard, I could send texts in a few seconds without looking and correct mistakes. I knew how it was done. It was so much easier than wait for T9 to guess what I'm going for. There's a chance all my problems are related to my inability to spell correctly, and thus T9 can't guess what I'm going for but even if I could spell, it assumes the words I'm going for are in the dictionary of the phone. Then I have to mess with adding things to the dictionary, it just seems like so much extra work to send a text. I don't know. I just like spelling things out on my own and asking a neighbor how to spell something if it's vitally important that I spell it right.

I remember talking to someone once about T9 and they had a big problem with peoples names. T9 apparently is horrible with names that aren't completely generic. He couldn't even spell 'Zach' correctly. He had to type 'zebra' and erase it. I'd get fed up with that. Knowing me, I'd tell the guy his new nickname is 'Zebra' for some stupid reason and then proceed to always call him that in my texting and sometimes in real life. I'm just lazy like that and mean I guess.

I just wanted to see it say 2011 on the archives.

So I really am just writing this to see the archives go up to 2011. I don't really have any exciting stories. It's 1pm and I'm still in bed. Michelle is on her way back to OU and I've nothing really to do for the day. Just a nice lazy day to start the year. Maybe I'll finally finish that scarf I'm making for my dad. I cleaned my room a bit and am currently eating a philly cheese sub, while watching American Dad on Netflix. I'm waiting for some people to text me back but otherwise a pretty peaceful moment going on.

So for a random story so this isn't completely pointless. I was in Kroger last night with Mom in Englewood. They have all these really amazing couches and chairs set up to sell and I was sitting in one waiting for Mom to finish shopping playing with my phone when this pre-teen boy comes up and goes "Oh My God, Krogers just went up high in the world." He sits down in one of the chairs and reclines, saying "Why Hello Monsieur Chair" over and over again. About 5 seconds later he goes "Well I better go find my family" and leaves. I have no idea what happened but I started laughing as soon as he was gone.

It reminded me of a time when Michelle and I were at Boarders at the mall and this kid comes up and keeps saying things to us like "why are you laughing? See you're laughing!" at us. He was like shouting it at us pretty much and gleeful in the fact that we were laughing at him because of what he was saying. It was so surreal. He was pretty crazy and kept following us around and asking about the books we were reading too. I have no idea what's up with pre teen boys now a days. Pretty creepy.