brenna | Recent Entries

Awesome names attached to addresses that send me spam:

Hillberry F. Elfriede
Fernando Hoover
Pencil A. Marisha

Also Order of Tales fanart!

I'd be astonished if she was actually supposed to be pink. But I had fun.

I found a used Canon A650, which is normally more expensive now that it's discontinued than it ever was while it was still being sold, but I managed to get it cheaper. It has a swivel screen. Those are my weakness. I demand them in my cameras.

It makes my options for purchasing cameras very limited. :|

But anyway, here some pictures I've taken with it so far that are actually a little bit good!

We have:
Testing manual focus!, and
1/2000 shutter speed!, and
the cheap motel I am staying in right now! Where I forgot to bring any pajamas!

...My laptop is really hot on my tummy :o

Talked to my friend who is a girl earlier this evening about some stuff, and she thinks she is a whiny coward and I think I am a needy user and she might be illustrating a children's book and I might have trouble sleeping with this loud air conditioning on all night.

Time to test that last theory.

My eye is fine now. The bloodshot bump went away all by itself. I swear some good fairy must have cast Regen on me as a baby. I may be impervious to bullets; I have not checked. So, based on that, and the way it gradually got less uncomfortable, all I can conclude is that it was... maybe... a mosquito bite? On the surface of my eyeball. Does that happen? I'm just glad, but surprised, that having this theory has not made me more afraid of bugs.

Speaking of which, you know what's a great mosquito repellent? It sounds like a joke because it makes so much sense, but I find it to be true: swatted mosquito. Just get the first one, and display it (smearing as desired). It feels very war-painty to me.

Moving the salt shaker just out of arm's reach worked great, until I started writing this very entry. But it's back on the shelf again now, since I got to this paragraph, looked down, and felt shame. (A tiny bit.)

And that girlfriend I mentioned-- scratch that; apparently we are friends. :c I actually raised the issue with her intending to confess that I wasn't sure about the relationship and I didn't know why, but before I could get there... I found out why! It was all very friendly though, and she went home and I lay around going "o_o..." for a little bit before taking a walk and angsting into my paper journal about my shortcomings in human relations. Then I came back and instead of taking stock of how I needed to grow as an individual person and all (as I'm sure you all can tell I should do), I instantly hit up OKCupid~ =_=

I think that mood may have passed again already. But there needs to be a more casual outlet for the need to be hugged and have your hair petted.

( Continue for remarks on entertainment media things referenced last time )

I was all sad that I never got any comments on my last entry, but I have realized why! I just now noticed I never made it un-private for anyone to see. (I always post my entries locked-up first, to give me a last chance to proofread.) So plz to go read it now thank you byebye.

I just discovered there is a Broadway musical version of Frog and Toad! There is a link, just in case you are not familiar with Frog and Toad. Anyway, I discovered this by finding it at Half Price Books just now and I cannot wait to listen to it.* Here is how that went:

CHECKOUT GIRL: Frog and Toad!

ME: I know! I didn't know this existed!

CHECKOUT GIRL: I know! I used to read Frog and Toad over and over when I was a kid!

ME: I know!!

Look! Look at it! Look at those two guys; how perfect and adorable are they? Man, I buy myself the best presents.

...I keep shaking salt into my hand and licking it up, as a snack. I should probably move the salt shaker further away from my desk.

I also picked up Palimpsest, which I've been meaning to do for a while. (Free related short story.) The author keeps a Livejournal, which I like-- in fact I first heard of her by having a tiny chat with her in the comments at Cleolinda's-- but she always writes Very Seriously in it, which turned me off for a while. Always does. I know I take too much pride in things like knowing better than to refer to my own thoughts as "musings," and I should probably grow up more and keep working on being secure in myself for positive reasons instead of having to make a note of everyone I find Doing It Wrong. I'm pretty sure, at least, it's not (purely?) out of a sense of superiority, but a desire to take things as a lesson for myself. Or is that what everyone's sense of superiority is like?

Really I think it makes me uncomfortable to see someone so confident that people will care what they have to say, since I know I don't have that kind of confidence. I never even began to try to develop it until the last couple of months-- mostly to keep up with, and keep in check, a girlfriend who will happily go on about her boss' secretary's errands for as long as she feels is necessary to sustain the conversation. (But she is a darling, etc.) This still leaves me not knowing what I can reasonably expect will matter to people in general, and I'm all about erring on the side of caution.

...So that's why I ~~can't conclude a line of thought gracefully~~ have negative reactions to some people sometimes!

Now I just have to figure out why there's a small, bloodshot bump on the surface of my eyeball.

*And by "cannot," I mean "will," because it's my bedtime.

There is a Life Woes post I am avoiding making. Just so you know.

My brand new hobby: Buying huge, el cheapo cubic zirconia rings and taking the stones out, to build a collection of pocket jewels. I still have my Treasure Rocks, naturally, but those are plastic and my tastes have matured since then.

...Shiny toys. :> Suggestions for what to do with the bands afterwards?

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions on your journal.
* Don't dig for your favourite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Okay.

"Read the message and click Print Check Pattern to print the nozzle check pattern."
--Canon PIXMA iP4000/iP3000 Quick Start Guide

Yeah, I think this meme works better on students.

Fun with Painter!

Elizabeth! Stop making me go to things I have to leave early in a huff!

...This time it was a songwriters' competition, and everyone at our table was talking throughout except for me and Amy. So what does the old guy from the other table do when he comes over to tell us to shush? Leeeeeans in and puts his hands on Amy's and my shoulders. First of all -- the two quiet ones! Second of all, like we were his grandchildren or something. You don't just put your hands on people as part of a scolding. You don't even always do it when you're being friendly.

So I left in a huff. :( Which I had wanted to do earlier anyway, pre-huff, because there was no food, not even for ready money, and literally half the songs were about how blind the world was for not worshiping Jesus, and who knows how long that trend would have held. Amy left after me, since she was only there because I was there, and we went to Cafe Brazil and had nummies and admitted neither of us had been enjoying ourselves there anyway, and made friends with a woman who gave us a business card for eyebrow threading, and I got my hot chocolate free because there was a cricket(?) leg in it. Totally worth it!

Different topic: You can't tell, thanks to the PayPocalype, but I have a seed account now!

Too bad it's not Monday, because this afternoon I totally beat up my insurance company until they gave me money.

Another thing: I came home to find a few ants* in my shower, wandering around since the walls were too slippery to climb, and then I looked closer... and saw a single small, neat pile of little ant wings over on one end. Wikipedia tells me that ants drop their wings after mating, but the collection of them is still weird to me. The spiders I'm allowing to live are falling down on the job around here.

*Okay, when I googled 'winged ants' to make sure that's actually what they were, I ended up on a pest control site and I saw on their sidebar that they had an entry for ladybugs! And I thought that was cool of them to list ladybugs, since they're natural predators of garden-y bugs and harmless to everything else, and not focus exclusively on chemical insecticides.

BUT WHEN I CLICKED ON IT, THERE BEFORE ME WERE INSTRUCTIONS FOR LADYBUG ELIMINATION. WAAH.

Unexpectedly getting into Poetry Month! I just discovered this five minutes ago and am in love.

----------------------

"Extract from the New Yorker Magazine 1945: 'The breeding of the bee,' says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, 'has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.'”

( Poem begins under the cut )

You know, it's a good thing life has no inherent meaning and we're not here for anything in particular, because otherwise I would feel a lot worse about all the bad things relating to my car in the last couple days than I do.

Two Things from MetaFilter Today:

1. Google now offers 'Profiles'. They are for showing up when people Google your name (if you're one of the top four people with that name-- apparently it only shows four?).

Guys this is bad. :( Google results should remain pure. In MY DAY, if you did something embarrassing and it got online, you learned to live with it, whether you were a regular person or a group of people or a corporation or even a government. You learned, and sometimes even chose to conduct yourself accordingly, that you could be Googled, and that no special weight would be given to what you personally had to say about yourself. I don't care how handy or harmless this thing seems-- it's in the wrong spirit. Even though they're at the bottom of the page, and all the same results still show up, play it backwards and you hear a voice heralding the return of the Official Version. Dear Google: stop it, and quit turning the internet into not the internet.

2. A cool story about a monument in Georgia I did not know existed. Just the one link, so I went straight to it.

----

Okay, listen up, kids, I have a rule for you. Any place with enough doors in it is bound-- as in, by Fate-- to have one left unlocked somewhere after hours. If you doubt this, just think of how lazy and unconscientious you are, and multiply that by however many people work there. This rule was proven yet again by me at the Christian academy by my apartment, after playing on some swings (which is all I went there for originally) and wandering around getting the bug. In the end it was just... schoolish, and I would have spent my time better by just sitting and reading the copy of The Hobbit that some kid had on top of their locker, like I thought about doing. But it was neat to smell crayons and stuff again.

!!!!BREAKING!!!!!!

Candy followup: My grandmother introduced me to, but only gave me four-- FOUR-- Palmer Buttercream Eggs. They are ingeniously tasty and I may cry from needing more. And Palmer doesn't have a thing like Orville Redenbacher where you can pick an individual product on their website and get Google Maps of stores that carry it. (Who does?-- but I'm spoiled by it now. I used it to find the quasi-discontinued Old Fashioned Butter popcorn.)

LOL ADS ON DREAMWIDTH anyway

nuri has provided me with my first DW meme! Now we're talking. For extra funtimes, it involves y'all getting music.

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions

I don't have too many L's, but I did get some good ones!

-L'Innocent - Jean-François Côté
Epic and beautiful and all over the place. I've KINDA stopped tearing up whenever I listen to it now. Part of the soundtrack to Cirque du Soleil's KOOZÅ-- not that I formatted that name correctly in the mp3 tags or anything.

-Linda's Castle - whoever worked on the music for Snowboard Kids 2? :X
It's clipped off a tiny bit at the beginning, but you'll live. Happy electronic music for bouncing. And snowboarding. Over... carpet?

-Living By The Blade - Nobuo Uematsu
Wait through the intro for some stirring, looping fauxrchestra (yes, thank you, spellchecker).

-Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi (last on the list) - David Darling & Wulu Bunun Tribe
Is peaceful and sweet and simple.

-Lullaby (#3 on the list) - Loudon Wainwright III
I guarantee you will practice learning the words to this.

I also did this on my LJ once!

Right now, I am almost done with a glass of apple juice, thinking about picking up where I left off on the chocolate ~~bunny~~ rectangle I accidentally left in the car and am now scraping away at with a fork. I probably won't, though, since I just had a plastic egg full of jelly beans. I got Easter candy from both my grandmother AND my parents this year. We are such a smart bunch of people, having so many holidays devoted to candy. I tell you.

This, just so you know, is the other type of entry you can expect from me. There are only the two. And a lot of these ones will be about how I saw something interesting when I don't even have a camera to show you with, because no cameras are any good.

So I definitely explored one abandoned, tore-up, decrepit-ass restaurant last night in the dark with a tiny keychain fla--

I can't even finish that word right now. Firefox spellchecker does not know "keychain." Augh. I don't think I'm going to import my LJ here, with all my other spellchecker moments, but you should know our battles have been many. Fields stained ... desaturated yellow ocher?... from irritation, shed over things like "Wiccan" and, at one point, "spellchecker." And lol. Honestly, Firefox, you are not the OED or something, you are a browser. WHAT IS THIS LOL; I AM NOT FAMILIAR WITH IT. IS IT FRENCH?

So, the restaurant. It was underneath the piano bar that I left my friends behind in because I don't even like bars, and certainly not ones where the piano guy not only refuses to perform "I Will Survive" when requested-- because apparently it is a song about how all men are pigs? I did not know this-- but belligerently interrupted the chick piano player forever so she could not play it either. The mood required that she not openly ask him what his problem was, but she held her turf pretty well, though she did it by calling out things like "THAT'S OKAY, WE WOMEN KNOW WHO'S REALLY IN CHARGE HERE" and getting loud cheers, and I wished that part could go differently as much I did the other. Seriously, people need to stop acting like we have to be enemies. How old are we, here?

So I wandered around the parking lot, and sat in the designated smoking area of some CompUSA offices where there were benches and trees, watching the light turn on and off on a timer... and wishing I had a big janitor-style sweepy broom to clean out the parking garage with, and getting some hot chocolate, until I finally decided that the ridiculosity had reached critical levels and texted, come what may, the epically and obviously passive-aggressive: are y'all about done?

AND THEY SAID NO.

( So, the restaurant. )

So that was yesterday. Today I killed a fly by slowing it down with spray adhesive first, but only because I didn't have any hairspray around, which works much better. Write that one down, for real. If you can get a fly in a good stream of hairspray, it will literally fall right out of the air. It's the best trick.

Hi! My name's Brenna. It actually really is.

As I said somewhat more Internet-tastically on my LJ, I had some trouble deciding what I wanted my username to be, which is a problem I'm sure a lot of people can relate to right now. I've had this problem with choosing names for kind of a while, and I'd really been getting tired of the two I've relied on forever. I was starting to feel really silly, and not in a good way, about being called something I made up myself to sound cute, or clever, or pretty, because it always just ends up sounding dumb-- eventually, to me, and probably immediately to others. I didn't even try very hard to come up with anything, if we're talking straight, because I just didn't trust myself to.

I wanted to avoid looking like this or that-- like the kind of poser who's clearly just looking for Internet Points, like I have a true spirit name but when asked about it, I only say "eh, I just made it up" because I haven't felt forced yet to separate what I'm serious about from what I'm embarrassed by. But I decided I couldn't just worry about looking like that, because one of the big things I've been telling myself lately is to give people credit for their perceptions. It's standard to refer to a negative impression as "the wrong impression," but not everything negative is a mistaken assumption on other people's part that I helpfully go and correct for them. Knowing this about myself, that unflattering truths come gently disguised as tactical considerations about how I "might seem," I decided I probably wasn't going to succeed in finding the perfect amusing short phrase or fantasy name or reference-- the one that would satisfy my desire to have an amusing phrase or fantasy name or reference but, oh noes, wouldn't give the wrong impression-- after all.

So that seemed to leave only things I didn't choose for myself. I've only ever had one real nickname, and if I ever tell the story you'll know why I don't identify with it. (It's not a dreadful tale of abuse and woe; it's just entertaining.) That pretty much left my own real name. Well, it happens to be pretty. I obviously have a history with it. It feels like it'll help connect what I'm actually like with what I'm willing to talk about-- something I'm really wanting to bring about in myself. I've always been an amazingly private person, and it's only lately I've been realizing how little of that is for good reasons. Finally, it's arbitrary-- and yes, I ended up thinking of that as a positive. How can you possibly do a good job of naming yourself meaningfully, permanently? I know I can't.

My only doubt was that I wouldn't use it enough, or well enough, to deserve to be THE Brenna. But whatever. Even if I don't: such is life! This, what I'm doing, is called assertiveness, and it is awesome.

And so it came to pass. I need to get my style figured out. That's another thing I was counting on having more time to ~~put off~~ figure out. Anyway, Dreamwidth! Here's to -- oh, forget it, I can feel the legion of jinxes staring at me. Let's just all friend each other. We know what we mean.

Profile

Brenna

June 2010

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Spam people, glass people
Three photos (might rethink the 'art' tag)
Several Followups
Suspend my DW license, please
Frog and Toad Stay Up Late Typing
Things I Haven't Outgrown
That book-grabbing meme
Pigeon
Removing self from lawn
Bug Time
Song of the Queen Bee - E.B. White
Going to bed before I hurt myself
Google betrays us all, episode 114
First meme: L Songs
Go on now, go / Walk out the door
Inaugural Post: On Names

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Charcoal Fire for Crossroads by branchandroot
Resources: Holy crap!

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 27th, 2025 11:48 pm

You can't make this stuff up

Recent Entries

Spam people, glass people

Three photos (might rethink the 'art' tag)

Several Followups

Suspend my DW license, please

Frog and Toad Stay Up Late Typing

Things I Haven't Outgrown

That book-grabbing meme

Pigeon

Removing self from lawn

Bug Time

Song of the Queen Bee - E.B. White

Going to bed before I hurt myself

Google betrays us all, episode 114

First meme: L Songs

Go on now, go / Walk out the door

Inaugural Post: On Names