So, I have officially moved out on my own.

This is not quite true. Five of my seven full-sized bookshelves (and much other miscellany, but who cares about that stuff) are still at my parents' house. Until I am reunited with the full collection, I can but inhabit a partial existence.

Still, it is interesting to observe the differences this has wrought. At home, I only bussed the dishes from my room when they were completely choking every available horizontal surface (which included, incidentally, on top of the bookshelves that surrounded my bed). Now I went out and bought a bamboo dishrack with a little detachable compartment for silverware, and I'm excited about it. That last part is the truly scary bit.

I have also been driving myself to and from work, albeit with the presence of another licensed driver in the car, in accordance with the laws regarding these things. Amazingly, I have killed neither myself nor other people in the process! I haven't even maimed anyone! I count this as an accomplishment.

We have DirectTV now and it turns out that there is even more nothing on than there was when I made the monumentally disappointing leap from broadcast to standard cable. The primary improvement is that I no longer need to torrent Flight of the Concords. And I suppose Weeds, when it comes back on.

I can hear cars driving by my window in when I'm in bed! I can't tell you how much I missed that.

As of today, the rest of the United States will be subjected to the same restrictions on the sale of products containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine as we've had here in the midwest for a while. Oh goody!

Fortunately, I don't need to set up a meth lab in my basement, because a couple of duly-signed-for Tylenol Sinus are all it takes to get me high. Ha! Take that, interfering, ineffectual drug warriors!

Okay, so it's not a very good high. It's more like having a serious fever without the actual fever part. I discovered that I have this reaction to pseudoephedrine years ago, when I had a bad cold and my mother gave me some Sudafed so I could enjoy the free tickets we'd scored to a production of the Wizard of Oz and not all the special effects I was enjoying were actually part of the show. I used to rely on TheraFlu, which also contains pseudoephedrine but never made me hallucinate anything, but they seem to have reformulated all their products with phenylephrine, which neither makes me hallucinate nor does anything else for me, such as relieve my congestion.

So it's actually the DEA's fault that I am feeling very very shiny at the moment.

I have packed my clothing, or what passes for it, and am now attempting to decide on books, which are much more important, especially for a trip that involves an estimated 24-hours round trip driving time, not to mention the dubious charms of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

The key here is to balance physical and metaphorical weight. Hardcovers tend to weigh too much and have fussy dustcovers to worry about, although some of my paperbacks, being largely used, are too fragile to travel with either. Books that will take me approximately fifteen minutes to read/reread are obviously not worth the space they take up, so, for example, my BSC collection is right out. On the other hand, books that I'm just not in the mood to read so I never make it past the first five pages won't do me any favors either, so it's safer to stick to books that appear to me to be the sort of thing I generally like to read. Rereading is tempting, and takes care of the guaranteed appeal, but also tends to tip the selection towards being too lightweight to be worth bringing along, especially when I have so many shiny unread books on my shelves making me feel guilty.

And then of course there are the books that I need to reread because of the porn I want to write. *eyes The Once and Future King speculatively*

So far, this is what I have stacked on my bed to bring, in no particular order:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Fluke and Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore
Genius by James Gleick
Little, Big by John Crowley
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Welcome to the Ark by Stephanie Tolan
Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

If anyone knows of any reason why I should definitely not bring any of these books with me by any means, now would probably be a good time to mention it. You could also, of course, make actual positive suggestions, but these would probably be of limited utility as you have no way of knowing what I have on my shelves.

I went in to have my hair cut and now my eyebrows are gone.

Actually, they're swoopy and sort of pretty and definitely what I'm supposed to want my eyebrows to look like, I think, but I liked them before. They were pretty! In a kind of manly sort of way! Oh well.

This week's daddy-daughter film experience was Superman Returns, although we ended up seeing it yesterday as opposed to over the actual weekend because during the actual weekend we were doing ... something. I think. I forget.

I thought it was extremely adequate and very, very, very pretty. During the slower moments I distracted myself with lovely crossover crack on the basis of the fact that Brandon Routh's Clark Kent looks strikingly similar to Shirota Yuu's Tezuka what with the way he parts his hair and the glasses and all and you know, it would explain a lot of things! Or maybe I just have a one-track mind.

Just now I was dreaming that that horny beast thing from last week's Doctor Who had taken up residence in a cave in our backyard. And he was giving everyone in my family advice. And my mother had named him Roger.

Also, on Wikipedia, it recommended feeding your tennis players a mixture of stewed prunes and wristbands for breakfast. Roger's advice was actually more useful.

Thanks to everyone for your helpful advice on theatre etiquette! The next time I get dragged to the theatre, I will be sure to a.) get a drink, b.) wear sturdy shoes for kicking seats, c.) load my brother's airsoft gun with M&Ms, and d.) bring a pack of matches and a box of Get Well cards. This should account for all eventualities.

I hate summer. I actually hate spring, because it's so close to being summer, but then summer actually arrives and it's a hundred times worse than spring. About this time every year I start daydreaming about my vacation home in Antarctica.

Instead we went downtown to the plaza and I tried on a bunch of hopelessly unattractive clothing and found one perfect shirt and bought new foundation stick. I nearly died of heat stroke several times in the process. It was worth it, but only just.

There's a gorgeous stripey orange cat stalking its prey through our backyard. I've seen it a couple of times in the last week now. I wonder how long it would take my brother to kill me if I tried to adopt it. (Asthma; allergic to cats; already sniffling and wheezing and bitching that I don't understand his pain because, most of the time, I manage to breathe or perform a respectable imitation thereof. Sigh.)

I have now been awake for, like, four hours. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and could not fall asleep again so I got up and wrote some more of Boys Who Wear Glasses instead. (Which, like, what was I thinking? I sucked at writing questions when I was playing scholar bowl. I suck at writing questions now. If I were smart, I would have skipped directly to the making out. On the plus side, however, Wikipedia was invented in the meantime, and it is pretty much ideally suited for seeking question fodder.) It's like some kind of strange inverted insomnia.

EDIT: Oh, how I love dorking about things like Japanese honorifics. Before I discovered shipping and hormones, my primary fannish mode was dorkery. I hope we still have the extensively cross-referenced compilation of all the songs that appear in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that I made when I was seven somewhere in a box or something.

Last night was the annual Trivia Night fundraiser for my old high school scholar bowl team, and I wish it to be known that my table utterly triumphed, crushing all competition with our mighty brains.

Our beginnings were modest and unassuming. My parents picked me up from work at 6:00 and said oh, by the way, we're shanghaiing you off to the high school because tonight is Trivia Night. We turned up and bought our $10 entry tickets and the ticket-takers asked us if we wanted to start our own table or oh, it looks like the Hills only have three at their table.

( *insert music of destiny and stuff here* )

I really missed scholar bowl. All the thrill of competition you get from your more traditional athletics, but more reading books and less tripping over my feet. It's nice to know that I've still got it. *preens*

Plus, you know. Free books. I've already picked up mine: The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll

I am totally a Mary Sue from ff.net and I don't even care: I love my Slytherin t-shirt from Hot Topic.

(Hey, it was $8. And I was there in the first place with my brother, whose entire wardrobe consists of Nintendo shirts.)

Today I helped Danny's robotics team work on the various essays they need to submit for possible awards and a yearbook-type publication. We came up with serious BS-y answers to all kinds of questions like "Tell us about your community" and "Describe your team's greatest challenge", but when we got to "Robot and Game Strategy", we finally settled on:

01010100 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101110 00100001

My other suggestion, "World domination", was too many characters.

1. Steve Jobs announced new Intel-based iMacs and Powerbooks Macbooks.
   
2. Google released Google Earth for Mac
   
3. New episode of House
   
4. Snow! Just maybe an inch which didn't really stick, but still! Snow!
   
5. Yummy, yummy cheesecake
   
6. A copy of The Onion Presents: Embedded in America
   
7. Lovely birthday wishes on my last entry

Oh, wait. Those last three actually were celebrations of my birthday. ;)