There's no need to be concerned, because I don't gamble. I once tried to in the Venetian hotel quite a few years ago, when my mom and I were eating dinner at a restaurant inside the casino, and I wanted to press one of the buttons on a nearby slot machine, but then a worker came by and said I couldn't. How disappointing. Slot machines make cool noises, kind of like the newer checkout machines at the local library.

The inspiration for my blog post and title today was cars. Yup, cars. I often see doubles of the same car. Today when going to school, in front of my car were two Lexus (dunno what the plural form is...Lexuses? o_O;; ). They were the same exact kind except for the color.

And there are a lot of Subaru Foresters, I have discovered. I have seen a couple of them in my area, same color and everything. And one time I came with my mom to work at her office since there was no one to watch me at home (and I have no siblings, so I am not trusted to stay by myself, except for this summer when I was doing just that). Well, my mom had parked her car next to another Subaru. It was also a Forester except it was a black one. I know they have to sell a lot of a kind of car or they would discontinue making them but I still get amazed if I see the same kind of car. I see the Mercedes we have hidden in our garage sometimes too.

There are a lot of twins, too. A pair of twins who are both geography whizzes are in my village this year, along with a girl who apparently has a twin (but I haven't quite figured out who her twin is. I assume she has to be in the school somewhere). Maybe there's more twins in my village that I didn't notice yet.

Anyhow, on to other news. The blog layout has been changed since unfortunately the one I had in mind isn't working as well as would be nice. So maybe I'll just try and format it for Nutrinopets or something, because I often use blog layouts for my profile there. This time I got it from createblog.com, which has Blogger layouts, though I still prefer to go to blogskins.com most of the time. I thought the toast was very charming. And I really like bread. XD

I've moved my playlist and it is now underneath the posts, at the bottom of the page. It will autostart so pause it or turn off your sound or turn off the playlist's sound if you don't want to hear it. There's also a Youtube video so you can have images and sound together if you would like. I picked out Colorless Wind sung by Yuuki Aira, which is the Sola anime opening. It's one of my favorite songs. (There was another song I wanted to put up but I couldn't find it...Sigh...)

Labels: automobile, blog, car, casino, change, colorless wind, forester, gambling, las vegas, layout, lexus, mercedes, playlist, slot machines, subaru, toast, venetian, video, youtube, yuuki aira

For a while I've been looking for my old paintings from last year's summer class - in particular a small oil painting of the coastline. So I was bored and went upstairs (there's only one room which we basically stuff things into, everything is downstairs...) and walked around. I thought I saw some papers in a box and looked inside it. I discovered some of my old artwork...And especially that one that I really liked. I wonder if it's okay to scan paintings. (If so, I'll try and get my dad to scan the smallest one)

Also, I found the Ippon Demo Ninjin video! I talked about it in an earlier post. So here's the link to the video.
Ippon demo ninjin (いっぽんでもにんじん) The whales are especially funny. Once they finish counting the first time, watch the whale. He seems to be dancing on his tail and he turns from side to side, though the other objects/creatures always face towards you.

My playlist had been getting way too full, so I started clearing out songs a little bit and now I just have 194. Oftentimes we listen to music and talk about it in my painting class. (I suppose it's more relaxing than having to work in utter silence...) One of my classmates made a CD or two for the teacher and we listen to her CDs as well (I think she buys songs from iTunes? Using her brother's money XD). Anyhow, some of the artists include Jack Johnson, Cold Play, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, The Cars, John Lennon, and various others whose names I have forgotten.

Which reminds me, there's a guy in the Beetles called Ringo Starr. I always wonder why he took the name Ringo as his first name for his stage name (Richard Starkey is his real name, and he is still alive...). I mean, I thought "ringo" mean apple in Japanese...(But I don't blame him, because apples are very cute fruits.)

The weather around here has turned hot again and it's really bothering me. I end up sweating a lot but I don't want to turn on the air conditioning or the fan because I am wary of the environment...But I suppose eventually I'm going to be so frustrated I will turn on the fan. D: It used to be nice weather only a few days ago, too...But now it's really, really hot outside and I bet I'm going to start losing sleep again. :( And right when I was starting to feel "healthy"...What a shame.

Recently I went to Jamba Juice. I rode there on my bike with my dad and we used a coupon so we could get two smoothies for the price of one. There were some suspicious young people near the store. One of the guys seemed to be trying to show off muscles (if he actually had any XD) and also there was a girl who sometimes ran into the parking lot and was chased by a guy in glasses. Anyhow, I thought they were creepy (even if people near the 7-11 probably act like that) and I was pretty relieved when they left.

Labels: apple, discovery, ippon demo ninjin, jamba juice, japanese, lost and found, music, oddity, painting, people, playlist, ringo starr, sleep, smoothie, song, stage name, suspicious, weather, whale

I've heard this phrase in several places. I mean, even in Pokemon if you talk to a certain trainer after you defeat her she'll say that. And it is true, you will meet her again, because in Pokemon games you tend to travel around a lot, and besides she always stays in the same relative place.

But anyhow. The reason why I named the post this is that I have "met my playlist again". Previously when I tried to put the code for it into my blog, it wouldn't work. It'd end up in the wrong place, or it would ruin the rest of the coding so the layout wouldn't look right. Finally I've gotten it to stay. Only 30 seconds of Imeem songs really is just terrible. You can't even choose which 30 seconds of the song you want, though I have to say Imeem has more different songs than Playlist. I am so glad to get my playlist back up. True, I have maxed out my song total but I can just delete broken links to put in new songs. Or just make a second playlist. (It would be really funny if I put two playlists on my blog and they played at the same time) My Playlist doesn't exactly match the blog layout (because I am too lazy to find a background or something that would really match), and it's too big to really fit in the div, but whatever. I've gotten it to automatically play on shuffle, so you will hear a random song everytime you come onto this blog. (Just leave your speakers off if you don't want "speaker shock". I have a post somewhere in the past about "speaker shock".)

We saw two open houses today. It seems like this is unofficial Open House Weekend or something. When we were driving around doing things like going to lunch, the library, and so on, we saw a street corner with quite a few Open House signs. More than the usual amount, anyways. We decided to see two of them on Phar Lap Drive which is a steep residential rode connected to my own street, Mann Drive. Phar Lap is loads of fun to bike down because it is so steep, but it is a real pain getting back up again. By the way, I heard there is a long, sloped road in Hawaii somewhere. You can rent a bike or something and ride down the road. It is steep enough that you don't need to peddle, you just enjoy the wind rushing by, but it's not so steep you'd fall and die or something. So I would like to go there sometime. But back to the point. I don't want to get distracted.

There are two houses that I am quite fond of on the street known as Phar Lap. They are across the street from each other. I have written about one of the houses in the post known as ◆ fight, love, live. It's April 18th if you want to check the end of that post. So, the house I have seen before is Spanish-style, with cool things like being able to spy on your neighbors, a view of a creek, and a place next to the shower stall in which you can grow flowers. It even has a home movie theatre which I had not noticed last time. (Anyhow, the house price was like 2.5 million before, I think it was reduced since no one has bought it yet.) The other house, which I just saw the inside of today, is also European style. It appears to be long and thin. It has a small swimming pool and there are many, many balconies. There's a lot of stairs in the house. We had to go in through the back entrance since the realtor was temporarily out, probably doing something. It had many bedrooms (the bedrooms are small, but still, we could always convert some of them to another use), and an inlaw unit downstairs with a bathroom, hidden bed (it's a cabinet which you can use as a bed), kitchen, and TV with nice movie-like chairs. And upstairs was all the rest like dining rooms and the four other bedrooms and several nice bathrooms. This house costed 1.98 million and the price is negotiable so it is a good deal! (That is, if you can get a loan and are able to pay it off)

My parents seem to like the house we saw today better. They are both nice, really, but with different things. My dad says the architectural style of the second house is more unique and stuff. Well, I'm just annoyed by all the stairs. How are you supposed to get up and down them every day? I suppose it would make me more fit, at least. And my mom says if I really want a house that looks like the first one we should just remodel ours. My dad's friend's wife is an architect and she may be able to figure it out. (Still I would feel bad to have an exact copy of another house, you know?)

That reminds me, sometimes I wonder about getting my dad's friend's family to adopt me. They live in an apartment and already have an older son who doesn't talk much (all he really does is talk to his dad, or watch basketball) but maybe I could sleep on the couch. Dad's friend is an engineer at Cisco, my dad helped him get hired, except my dad says "The -namegoeshere- at work is nowhere near as great as the -namegoeshere- I know." Very cheesy, but I guess my father knows best, since they are good friends. And then my dad's friend's wife is a friendly person who likes to cook. Plus, their family wanted to get a cat if they can find the right cat for them. So this is my best chance to get a cat (since you usually can't have a dog in an apartment, and my mom doesn't like dogs). Perhaps I should consider being adopted.

Labels: adoption, again, architect, bike, blog, comparison, family, goodbye, hawaii, house, imeem, meet, music, open house, phar lap drive, playlist, pokemon, short, slope, speakers

I see that people are as selfish as ever. They all want ice cream because it's free. I know this since I showed up around 5:30 pm yesterday at the school, because I heard there would be free ice cream. However, many students were already there because they'd gone to the Cougar Fest (the Kennedy kids stay after school to do activites like pony hopping, rock climbing, bungee jumping, hoop shooting, and other things. I heard there were even Wii games. Probably just Wii Sports, though, and you get that for free when you buy a Wii). I paled looking at the long line of students, and my dad and I made a hasty getaway. We ate some cookies and cream ice cream at home instead.

I wish the Nature Center had been unlocked. I would like to show my dad sometime since he likes gardening. He wanted me to put his name and "A husband, a father, and a gardener" on his gravestone. So I thought it'd be cool to give him a tour of our school's nature center, which is a garden of sorts that is sometimes used for scientific studies, especially in seventh grade (our classroom has a back door leading to the Nature Center). There's all sorts of nice and not-so-nice things like two ponds (one is broken and man-made. The other is...thriving. One time we had a pair of ducks land in the Nature Center. They might want to mate there), many plants (ginkgos are my favorite trees since their fan-shaped leaves are kind of pretty), and benches (sometimes we have fern plants there, or "plaster of Paris" to use to make molds of fossils o_O;; ). It's better than a stuffy classroom all day, anyhow.

I have been watching drama, a Korean one called One Fine Day. My mom checked it out from the library so I took a look at it. It started off in the city of Sydney so of cuorse I had to watch it, because I watch things that have my name in it (like Finding Nemo, a cool animated movie about a clownfish). Dramas are strange. There's lots of yelling, cheesy background music, etc. I'm too used to anime, which makes Korean seem foreign to me. But I think my mom and I know some words in Korean now.

Ching-jang-neh-yo (that's how you pronounce it, not how it's spelled XD) is boss or team manager?
Abuji - Father
Amani ("Ama" for short?) - Mother
Neh (how do you spell that) - Yes
Deh - Either "no" or "pardon?" depending?
Oppa - Brother (I was confused about this at first. A character is called Gun but his sister calls him Oppa)

I have changed the layout of the blog. It is now Koda Kumi themed. I found it on Blogskins.com which has some pretty cool skins. You have to hunt for them sometimes, though. I have trouble getting my playlist's HTML code to work here, so I have put a link to my playlist in the click away section, and instead put an Imeem song 30 second preview thing instead.

Labels: blog, blogskins, cougar fest, drama, ducks, finding nemo, gardening, ginkgo, ice cream, koda kumi, korean, language, nature center, one fine day, playlist, pond, school, sydney, theme

I know, that may sound like an imitation of Dr. Seuss. But it was catchy, so I thought I'd use it for my post title today. I've been going to my mom's office during the spring break. When we were driving to a restaurant for lunch (Romano's Macaroni Grill), we passed by a rather ugly-looking field of grass. In the field were many sheep! They didn't have so much hair so that they looked fluffy but you could still tell they were sheep. I was pretty surprised, but my mom says that companies use sheep to eat up the grass so the ground will be more even and easier to traverse.

So, I was walking to the staircase with my mom at her office, since we leaving, and there some of my mom's fellow workers were chatting. (I don't know whether they were talking about work or just having fun.) They thought I looked like my mom's sister! This is odd because I don't have that much resemblance to my mom and also because I don't want to look like I'm someone old enough to be working. (Though we have a similar height and all, we aren't that much alike besides that.) So I was a bit offended by that. -_-;;

I look more like my dad anyhow, so a lot of people say that. I wonder what I would like if I were a boy instead? I think I would look like basically a younger version of my father. But my mom thinks if I were male, I would look like a male version of her. So who knows? I can't just change my gender, or I'd be like Michael Jackson. *shudder*

Right now my dad has become my art slave. (No, I don't mean the kind of art slave on the Internet where you pay someone to do any graphics/drawing/coding requests you have) Since I am very busy with my children's story, I draw the pictures and color small things, and he colors the big things. That way he doesn't get lazy and I have time to relax once in a while. (I am very tired from stress, lack of sleep, and carsickness. I still get carsick on long rides. Too bad we can't move to those nice apartments next to the orange grove which is close to my parents' offices. They want me to go to a good school, so I can't move there.)

Recently I finished reading Chicks with Sticks: KnitWit. It's the third book in a trilogy about some girls who become friends because of their knitting. It's too high-school centered, what with all that gushy stuff, so it doesn't count as one of my favorite books, but it wasn't too bad either. It does teach you about different colleges (at least the third book does). I hadn't known that they have a fair for you to see what kind of community service you can do, or that there was even a college called Bryn Mawr.

I was reading a manga called Dream Saga just recently. I used to go to Borders and just read the manga while I was there, but I don't visit Borders that often, so it was hard. I saw it in the library and so snatched it up quickly. Right now I am starting on the fifth and final volume. I hardly remember the characters anymore since I haven't read it for so long, but I'm starting to get it again.

Apparently the author likes to talk about what music she's listening to. In a lot of manga books, there are side columns or bottom sections here and there with things such as character profiles, splash page info (splash pages are those pages at the beginning of a "chapter" which are big and detailed), and answers to readers' questions. So I started investigating the music the author was listening to, just to buff up my huge playlist even more.

Labels: apartment, art slave, books, college, comparison, dream saga, family, macaroni grill, manga, music, office, picture book, playlist, questions, sheep

All folks living in the USA should set their clocks an hour forward, as in 9 am would become 10 am. You could set it tonight, or tomorrow, whatever you prefer to do. I wouldn't have remembered, except I read a forum post about it...Apparently people in other parts of the world don't really know the reasons for Daylight Savings. D: I'd heard it was something to do with energy saving, or whatever. I don't really care too much, hehe, though it would be easier not to have it.

This morning I woke up really early, so I tried to go back to sleep again. I don't actually know if I did sleep, since I'm constantly thinking when I'm conscious. Well, oh well. By the time I truly got up it was around 9 am.

I finally got to go to the Valley Fair mall again. It was quite a while since I was last there. It turns out they opened a new Ann Taylor Loft where the Sharper Image (an electronic store place) used to be. It seems like a lot of clothing isn't cheap even though it's supposed to be a bad time for the economy what with lay-offs. I guess the stores still charge a lot since people still want to shop, judging by how crowded the reduced price racks at Nordstrom are. xD

Anyhow, my mom and I were planning to buy a pair of shoes (or, more like just my mom, since her feet are smaller so the shoes are better for her) but then it turns out my mom's feet are different in size, so one shoe was tight and the other fit?! I guess that must be true, as my mom's legs are different lengths, even. o_O;;

I just heard that my grandparents have been reading the blog yet again...I guess they always do because they have time. This time they said my playlist was too loud. Perhaps I should change Morning Grace back to the first song because that was quieter, at least in the beginning of the song.

If you have a Wii, and the game Wii Fit, you'll eventually unlock Plank, Push-up, and Jackknife Challenges. (All strength exercises you may have done in PE class. Jackknife is similar to a sit-up, except when you come up, you make what's supposed to look like a V shape) What's really funny is how the Wii Fit trainer always gets beaten (that is, if you can keep doing more exercises every time) and how she collapses, then mutters about underestimating your strength or whatever. I am endlessly entertained as every time I do one of the Challenges again, she insists she'll "try her very best this time".

For dinner, we did some shabu-shabu again. It's basically you have some soup being cooked on a burner, at a high heat. So you can practically cook while you eat. You dip various items such as meet, noodles, or even flavorless mochi into the soup until it's cooked all the way through. I first tried this in a Japanese restaurant. (By the way, they gave us vanilla-flavored popsicles for desert. They're small but tasty.)

Labels: blog, daylight savings, food, nordstrom, playlist, relatives, shabu shabu, shoes, sleep, song, trainer, valley fair, wii fit

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