In the last two weeks or so, I've had a bit of activity. The biggest thing was that Karuna visited for a few days, which she recounts on her own blog (http://krumatata.blogspot.com/2008/07/h-town.html), so I point you there for details, if interested. I will say that I did some mad planning, and it was several full days of Houston arts, industry, and culture. So if anybody else wants to visit, I have a 4-day itinerary that has been duly researched, developed, and tested. Oh, I know my hometown, baby.

I've also been collecting things for my August transition to grad school life. I had to buy bed linens, which was irritating because the grad dorm beds are twin-XL. There are many, many sets of twin sheets/blankets for in the hall closet of my home, which would cost me $0. I paid considerably more than that to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

I bought a new computer mouse, which I intended to use with my laptop, but since Dell is taking its own sweet time getting it built (delayed by a week!), I've installed it on my desktop, Galatea. It's a Logitech LX8, which is a laser cordless mouse with a 4-way scrolling wheel and two side buttons. It looks like this:

How beautiful is that? Do you see those contours? I LOVE this mouse. I've had it for only two days, and I have already determined that I would use my own body as a shield to protect it from harm. I am not kidding. I would throw myself in front of marauding invaders if it looked like they intended to hurt this mouse.

A very sad part of my life is the fact that our postal service has been sporadic. I don't understand what is going on -- we don't, say, live on a dirt farm road that's been washed out by recent floods. The whole point of mail is that it comes every day but Sunday. This would be less immensely frustrating if I weren't dependent on my Netflix. Last night I almost cried because I was 1/3 of the way through a miniseries, and I was supposed to get the final two discs in yesterday's mail, and I waited all day to learn what happened to the Forsyte family, and the mail just never came.

If I didn't have the loveliest mouse in the world, my life would totally suck right now.

As mentioned previously, I have trouble accounting for my lazy days, so I decided to use my digital camera to capture and share some of the activities that currently make up my life. These pictures tell the story of Thursday, which was atypical in that I had a 7am-11am shift at El Gap. This was why I was microwaving some soy-based fake meat for my morning protein at about 6:30am:

Followed by climbing into the Mercedes that belongs to my Dad,

where I immediately changed the music on the stereo. This morning, I listened to Patsy Cline: The Definitive Collection CD. I waved goodbye to 12015...

And ten minutes later arrive at Town and Country Village shopping center. Which hosts a Starbucks Coffee. Because it's 6:50am, and I'm awake, but I'm not happy about it.

My mom doesn't drink coffee, and I inherited the Starbucks gift cards that her parents (the parents of her students, that is) gave her as end-of-the-year presents. So I've been drinking/eating free for the last two months, which is nice. I don't like the amount of trash I produce every time I go there, but do note, at least, the use of my hand-knitted coffee cozy(!), which is in my purse at all times.

I drive Breakfast, Part II down to the other side of the parking lot, where sits my main employer:

Note the lack of cars -- including that of the manager-on-duty, Jason, who dragged his sorry butt to the store at 7:30. I wasn't mad at him, though; he'd had a pretty tough week, and he looked sheepish enough. And he clocked Cynthia and me in for 7. I love Jason.

After my shift, I returned to 12015 and immediately went to sleep, which takes up a lot of my time.
Behind the sofa is evidence of one of the many, many home improvement projects we are undertaking at the moment. My sister stripped the wallpaper in the family room, where she revealed the original paint tests that my mother made on that wall c. 1996.

After napping, time to dine!
Followed by Tokyo Story (1953) by Yasujiro Ozu.

I put the film on my syllabus because all my sources call Ozu a legendary Japanese filmmaker. To these sources, I would like to now say, "I respect your opinion. My opinion is that Tokyo Story is the most boring movie I've ever seen." Less boring was Calamity Jane (1953), which I own on DVD -- 2x over, actually, on account of it being in the Doris Day box set I won with the American Studies John Lax Prize at MHC. I had previously purchased it for my thesis. (And also for personal enjoyment, becuase isn't that Doris Day the cutest ever? )

While listening to the Academy Award-winning "Secret Love," I painted cabinet doors, which was my contribution to another home improvement project, best summarized as "remaking the entire damned kitchen, which is freaking huge, and which is slowly driving my mother mad." Here are my freshly-painted doors:

Note that there are no walls above the countertops. *sigh* We're working on it.

Post-door-painting, I worked on the TV, which looked like this when you tried to watch cable.

At least one of these wires was the cause:
The rest of the evening I spent playing around on my computer, Galatea.

This isn't the Sims 2, which is truly how I concluded my evening; but I do check my email every once in a while, as I did here. The dictionary.com word of the day -- from the previous day, actually -- in case you were curious, was "emolument:" [-noun] profit, salary, or fees from office or employment; compensation for services.


And eventually it was bedtime, so I put my Sims to bed, and then I went to bed myself, and woke up, and did some of the same things, or played variations on the themes, on Friday, Saturday, and today. Except with less 7am and more sleeping, which I much prefer.

Hey, that wasn't so hard! I guess I do do some things, after all!

Happy belated Independence Day, friends!
I have been über-busy with my schedule of doing *not a damned thing*. I haven't even been doing things that I need to do, like twist my hair and return the calls of friends who called a week ago and are who trying to figure out how I haven't called them back if I don't have anything to do. Dude, I don't know. I've been trying to figure out how I've been occupying my days, and the numbers simply don't add up. Here's what I've been able to come up with:

1. I've been reading some. I'm 3/4 through a terrible, terrible sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife. I thought I had read a positive review of the book, but that simply couldn't have happened. To be fair: As a Recency-era bodice ripper, it's fine. As a sequel to one of the greatest novels in the English language, it's inappropriate bordering on offensive.

2. I went to pub trivia! The team consisted of me and three of the JHJ crew (that Jesse H. Jones High School, for those of you out of the loop): Charlisa, Saralyn, and Luz. Unless and until we can recruit a sports person, we will never win, but we did play to show this week, and I call that an achievement. I did feel a little like I was cheating on the trivia boys of DC, but if they can go on without me, then I can do without them. *sigh*

3. I took the LSAT. Well, the practice LSAT from the LSAC website. Because sometimes I take standardized tests for fun. No, I don't know why I think they're fun. I made a 166, so according to my US News and World Report's law school rankings, I've got a pretty good shot of getting into Berkeley! I didn't exactly replicate test conditions on account of stopping for a snack. And of course I didn't write the essay. Still, I call it a fair estimate. Maybe I'll consider hooking that JD thing up after I finish up this PhD thing real quick.

I may take the GMAT this week. I may skip the MCAT altogether.

4. I'm watching movies I should have already seen. My Hollywood studio system knowledge base is pretty strong (that is, sound films through the 1960s), but I skipped over a lot of those foreign-language films, because I'd just always choose to watch something with Lana Turner instead. It's how I've been rolling. But really, in order to take myself seriously as a "film scholar" (and I'm giggling on the inside as I say that, despite the scare quotes), I should know something about, oh, French New Wave or Italian neorealism, or anything silent. Kind of like, if you're an English PhD, you should probably read Hamlet and have a passing familiarity with the Bible. Or skim the Cliff's Notes, at least. (Does the Bible have Cliff's Notes?)

So far I've watched: Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, Russia, 1925), M (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1931), and The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg, Germany, 1930). I'm almost finished with Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1954), which, by the way, nobody told me was 208 minutes long. That's 3 1/2 hours I was unprepared for.

5. Mostly, I'm doing a lot of hanging out with my parents and, as of July 1, my sister, who is also taking her summer break at the old homestead. Hanging out with them involves us watching things on television and discussing these things in-depth. Regardless of whether or not they are worthy of such discussion, such as yesterday, when my sister introduced us all to Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew. Good times.