Your Day

Eh, Goobsausage is just some... goob.

*rimshot*

Heh, I forgot all about the date.

'Goofball' is better then most April Fool's jokes. I liked this holiday as a kid, but as I got older the 'punked' style of humor so prevalent on this date just wore thin with me.

In other news, I woke up at a regular time today. The insomnia has been conquered! My method of dealing with insomnia is to spend several days staying up as late as I possibly can and then go to bed, and keep doing this until I'm on a regular schedule again. Yesterday I stayed up for 26 straight hours, but now this particular episode of insomnia should be all behind me.

My last couple of weeks have been busy, mostly with job-related things I don't want to go into too much detail about.

I also did a massive laundry marathon earlier in the week.
-Washed almost all my clothes
-Washed my bedsheets
-Organized my shirts into two groups: ones to keep and ones to give away to charity
-Decided to buy some more socks since I realized how thin/old mine were

I know it's a lame thing to get excited over, but as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate tiny things like getting new socks or changing bedsheets. Clean laundry feels like it goes incredibly far when it comes to feeling comfortable.

I also had a "treat yo self!" day where I...
-Went shopping at a used bookstore and picked up some various comics/graphic novels/trade paperbacks I've been meaning to get my hands on (Jeff Bone's Shazam!, Batman: Mad Love and other stories, Spider-Man: The Death of Jean DeWolff).
-Finally caught up with the rest of the gaming world and played Undertale! Bullet dodging isn't really my thing, but I still enjoyed the game a lot.
-Got some real ramen from my favorite ramen restaurant. Here's a photo if any ramen connoisseurs are curious about it.

I hesitated to go watch that movie in theaters today.

I think I'll wait for when it's available on Netflix.

Just went to house agency management in order to pay the bills
So, this is only time I went out to do something else other than going to college for the exam
and with that in mind, including how Japan was in the shoutbox, decided to have ramen for dinner
and here it is, one of my favorite ramen, extra thick soup, extra meat, extra spring onions, and extra eggs

I went with the grey athletic socks because they had thick soles and so I could use them in light or dark laundry loads. What's good about the gold tipped black socks?

Tu Hai sounds familiar and I think I may have eaten there before! I remember getting pho when I was in the Fort Worth area once and it tasted really good.

Welp I've been lurking for too long and need to get my post count up so this seems like a good place to start. 

Work was pleasantly uneventful, so I'll likely be putting the rest of this free time into making progress in Final Fantasy VI, having picked it up again out of guilt of abandoning it before I could finish. Only just got control of the Blackjack at the moment. (dimlitcandle fangirling a bit after telling her I met Setzer,  likely since he seems to be essentially Han Solo dressed like Alucard  ).

Aaaaand, my internet connection is back. Alright folks, gather around and let me explain what the last 2-3 hours of my life was like.

My brother asks me to drive him to go see his son (my nephew), who has spent two nights in a row at a friend's house. I do so, and drop him off at the house. I'm asked to come back to pick my brother and nephew up in about half an hour, I agree to do so and leave.

Back home, I'm keeping careful watch on the clock, not wanting to be late. When suddenly there is a loud crack of thunder. And let me be clear, it was loud. So loud, that for a second I legitimantly thought that an explosive had been set off in my front yard. I actually went out my front door to see if anything happened. After realizing it was just thunder, I immediately got my wallet and car keys, figuring that while it might not have been half an hour yet, I should try to pick up my brother and nephew early and try to beat the storm.

That didn't work out.

While driving out, I noticed a giant storm cloud in the distance. Not 'Egyptian plague' giant, but pretty overwhelming big. I'm a little uncomfortable, wondering if I really should be driving right now, but I get back to the friend's house anyway, a little drizzle is starting up. They had reached the decision that my nephew would spend one single more night, and so my brother left with me. When he and I left the house, it was pouring.

Well, okay. A hard rain wouldn't be too hard to drive through, I thought. We ran through the rain to get into my car and drove off. But then the weather went crazy. The rain suddenly started coming down in such volume that you could see waves of water rolling on the road, and the wind was bad enough that it was ripping tree branchs from the trees and throwing them around. More then once I had to stop and drive around a large branch that the wind had thrown into the road.

Typically, I was dangerously close to these tree branchws before I saw them, the rain was coming down hard enough that I could barely see out of the windshield. If the rain was to the car's back I could sorta see, but if I was driving against the rain? Forget about coherently making out anything on the other side of the glass. I decide to drive very slowly to prevent any kind of accident. (On that note, what other vehicles I saw on the road were also driving very slowly.)

I did eventually get through all that and got back home. Just rushing from my car's parking spot to my front porch left me so drenched it felt like I had just stepped out of the shower. And, funnily enough, the rain started to let up as soon as I and my brother got back in my house. 10 minutes after we were back, rain wasn't falling at all anymore. I should have just waited it out at the friend's house, heh.

Of course, I got back home to a home that had no electricity running in it anymore. (I'd have been surprised if the power was still running considering what the storm had been like.) It came back after about an hour, but my internet only came back in the last 15 minutes or so.

(On a sidenote, I texted some family members to tell them to find a sturdy building and stay there until the storm ended. My mother responds to the text and says she's indoors, and "won't leave until the ark comes".)

During last week I did so much drawing and handwriting that my left shoulder now hurts like hell. Thanks god all my mice are for right hand.

Just finished The Vision of Escaflowne TV series, finally. Hoooly guacamole, what a ride.

There's so much good about this series. The animation is fantastic; aside from some small scenes it's generally as good as an OVA, or at least it seemed to me, which is surprising for a 26 episode TV series! The music is equally wonderful, a stirring orchestral score that's one of the best OSTs I've ever heard. The protagonists--Van, Hitomi, and Allen--all had both strengths and weaknesses, virtues and flaws, making them quite three-dimensional and appealing. The world of Gaea itself isn't necessarily the most exotic fantasy setting ever, but in addition to the mechs it has many fantasy races to make it interesting, though only a few are relevant. Still, the show manages to be tremendously engaging through all of its 26 episodes.

My only complaints: I didn't really care for the 'love triangle' parts of it. I know Shoji Kawamori, its creator, is a big fan of love triangles (a basic component of the Macross series he's more fond of) but in this setting I didn't find it as interesting as I did in the sci-fi setting of Macross. Also, more importantly, I think this series may have done well with the more typical 40-50 episodes rather than 26...after about episode 15 or so, so much stuff starts happening that a lot of character development seems kind of sudden or under-established, some plot points appear without being elaborated on, and everything moves faster than might be wise. I'm not sure I quite understand the ending, despite it being suitably heartwarming and impressive.

Still, that complaint pales against the incredible accomplishment that is Escaflowne as a whole. I'd like to return to Gaea some day, at least the Gaea portrayed in the TV series. I didn't think too much of the movie, but the TV series solved pretty much all of those concerns. Truly a great experience.