When this happens, I always think about living in South Carolina, the little blue house we lived in for several years, all through my teenage years. I miss it immensely; it was really the first place that was ever ‘ours’. I remember it had that huge, brick-red concrete porch with a roof over it, and so many days like this were spent in the swing with a book, watching it pour down; I’d only get up if I started to get wet too.

It’s amazing what you discover about yourself when you indulge in nostalgia, really.

But this post isn’t about rain – not even about a little blue house on Hub Greer road, either. It’s more about my youth, and what I spent so many days doing.

I was a voracious reader as a child, it’s true; many of my afternoons involved a tall wingback and a book – either one of the Redwall series, or Stephen King. The latter has, in all fairness, never left my side. I’ve read so many King books it’s not even funny – though I haven’t devoured all of them, truth be told. I never finished the Dark Tower series, if only because I couldn’t bring myself to. I think I knew from the start that it wouldn’t end well – it was all bad business, as Golding put it – and the 4th book, Wizards and Glass – was so dreadfully boring that I just couldn’t get past that point.

However, if I was not with a book? I was with a game. I had a Gameboy back then, and I put that sucker through it’s paces. That, and my best friend’s brother’s Nintendo – not to mention Billy and Ann’s. Castlevania and Mario and Rampage and Metroids. Ah, Metroids. How I loved this game. I knew about Justin Bailey and I knew Samus was a chick, and that always knocked my socks off – that the person running around in this huge, bulky armor, was actually a woman.

So. Anyone wanna guess what I’ve spent the past week playing?

School
GA
RE5
Snake
SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE
Avatar
Iron Man
Several Free2Play MMOs that sucked
School
SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE
Big McLargeHuge
Kept up a 3.5 GPA
Started ME2, didn’t beat it, shame on me.
Started Dragon Age, didn’t beat it, shame on me.
Started ME2 again, going to beat it this time, hooray for me!
Wesker
Wesker
Wesker
Project Runway
Azumanga Daioh
Samurai Champloo, again.
New phone.
New friends.
Stinky vanilla.

It’s been on my mind a lot lately and I just can’t bear to do it. I can’t bear to let Rulihe just fade into insignificance. I love to write – so why don’t I? Why am I not in here, updating this sucker every day? It’d be nice to say it’s because I’m lazy, but seriously, that’s the biggest cop-out answer I’ve ever heard. While it’s true that I might be a little lazy…I’m not that lazy – writing, for me, doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, so let’s just shoot that theory down riiiight now, huh?

So I’m going to give this another go. I’m going to set an alarm on my phone and I’m going to try to do this. I’m going to try to write something at least once every week day. Maybe I’ll take days off. I know The Fu told me that she would write stuff in advance and just post it whenever, and while that’s a smashingly good idea, my brain sort of thinks about that idea and then giggles at me and is all like, ‘Yea. Get back to me on that one, princess.’

So here’s to me trying again. Maybe even turning to write out stuff before I post them. I’ve done so much in the past year. Surely that, in and of itself, makes up for a couple’a posts, yar?

Yar.

First and foremost, I finished my first quarter of college and managed to keep my GPA over a 3.4, which is good enough in my book. Apparently, it’s also good enough by the school’s book because they sent me an honor’s ist certificate, kind of like getting the honor roll in 3rd grade. :3 This was both embaressing and yet strangely gratifying.

Secondly, my roommate has recently become acquainted with a fellow who’s supposedly a black-belt in Shotokan. Last weekend, he proceeded to come over and started to show her some of the beginning moves of it. Thus, she’s learning how to do this. On top of that, her other friend(Hi, Gelf!) is taking her to the gym 3 times a week now, because said friend has a membership there and can bring one friend for free.

Which is all well and good, of course, but it also means that one friend is one friend and I obviously can’t go to the gym with them. Let’s back up a bit and point out that a few weeks ago, my roommate also managed to buy one of those Gazelle machines. Yanno, Tony Little? Yea, one of those things. So I figure if her ass is going to go to the gym three times a week then, by God, while she’s gone, I’ll work out on the Gazelle.

First night I tried it, I did 2 miles in 40mins. Last night, they went again, so I did it again. 2 miles in 35mins. Tonight, they’re going again, so I suppose I’ll be doing another two miles. Now, she said that her and Gelf are going to be going Mon., Wed., and Fri., but this week they can’t go Fri., so they’ll be going tonight instead.

We’ll see how this pans out. I don’t know how long the Shotokan thing will go on, but hopefully, the gym thing will be a very constant staple.

Let’s see, what else..? Oh, oh. So a few weeks ago, I’m on the phone with my mother and she’s like, “:D We’re going to Alaska!” Apparently, that’s been my stepdad’s dream trip for ages now. He’d planned on doing it once that he retired – which he did a few years ago.

:3 Apparently, it’s now time to go to Alaska!

And then, there was VAST. The first licks started playing and I started crying. Nothing can prepare your for it, really.

I understand that I take listening to music to a very extreme level; music is crucial to my happiness. You know that question, “If you had to pick between going deaf or blind, which would you choose?”, the answer is very, very easy for me. Blind. No hesitation. I can’t imagine not being abot to listen to music anymore. I’d be absolutely devistated.

So to be able to see and hear, in person, a band that I’ve been in love with for nearly a decade, it was very powerful. Combine that with how moving and powerful Vast’s music is? Yea. I was in tears pretty much the whole performance, but it was awesome. Vast sounds amazing live. I don’t have any other personal references to go by, but I’ve heard live performances before and some of them sound atrocious – G’n'R comes instantly to mind.

Not Vast. Jon sounds amazing, has a great stage presence, knows what he wants out of his music, and played pretty much every song I wanted to hear including Pretty When You Cry and Touched(the latter being the very first Vast song I heard, and still gives me goosebumps). They played a lot of the older Vast stuff, which made me really happy; it was nice to hear it. I was worried they’d play all new stuff – which isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong! – but I didn’t want to hear just that.

I do believe that was the best $60 bucks ever spent. Ever.

Today, one of my best friends got on a bus to ride across the country, from Florida to Canada to deal with an issue that she should have been able to take care of from her own state, her own living room, maybe a trip to the post office and, for good measure, perhaps the DMV and MAYBE the courthouse. I won’t get into too many details because it’s not my place to, but chances are, you can read about it  here.

The point of this post, for me, is to talk about how I’ve come to discover and understand the impact of people’s lives, how they change, and how they effect mine.

I have had the distinct pleasure of knowing Mel for many, many years now. We met on the internet, as it seems to be case with nearly all of my friends, and at first, we sort of just passed each other by, role-played together briefly, then went on with our lives.

Years later, we stumbled across one another’s path again, shared a few giggles, but then parted again. I went on a bit of a sabbatical, if I recall correctly.  Then one day, we connected. Big time. And ever since then, we’ve pretty much kept in contact nonstop. I went on a brief forray into MMO land, but we’ve kept in contact. We have constantly RPed. We have gotten along and we’ve wanted to swat one another.

Aside from my roommate, she is my best friend. I have confided a lot of things to her – and vice versa.

She is now going to be gone for a month. A month of no hysterical giggling. A month of no horrid jokes or huge capital letters. A month of no drooling over terribly hot men, or sharing suddenly found pictures on Deviant Art.

I know and understand she had to go, I really do. This isn’t some jaunt across the country. It’s important – very important – but that doesn’t make it any less pleasant. When your best friend has to go away, with very, very little contact, for a yet undetermined amount of time? A friend like Mel? Your life suddenly seems less interesting.

Though, when I talk to The Fu about this, she brought up a good point: If your hair is rather dry, I wouldn’t recommend the bar. I have very, very oily hair that requires frequent washing. Otherwise, I have enough oil on my head to power a small car. The bar really cleans hair and strips away most of the oil. So while it leaves my hair feeling gloriously clean, someone with dryer hair might come away with hair like straw and that would be bad.

The 1000g came split into two 500g, which is great because 500g is pretty much how much it takes to do both mine and J’s hair.  The last time we’ve done this, the mixture hasn’t quite been thin enough, but this time, it was just right. It didn’t take me too terribly long to do her’s – I did her’s first and then she tackled mine. It took quite a while to do mine because I just have so much hair and it’s ridiculously thick. I am, however, terribly pleased with the results, even if the arms on my glasses are now stained sort of red. :3

I mean, it’s a force of will that I don’t post the first written assignment I did for my Psych class. It’s the first report I’ve written in oh, over ten years, and I got a perfect score on it, which makes me feel so fucking insanely proud. Then there were the two quizzes after that that I did, that I got perfect scores on as well.

But one of the small issues I’m having in my Med Term class is that our homework online is frequently riddled with mis-spellings. Here’s an example:

Build a medical term that means enlargement of the spleen.
The proper answer for this is: splenomegaly. That term comes straight from our textbook. The answers for the homework, however, says the answer is : spleenomegaly, so according to the computer, I got the answer wrong. Now, mind you, the teacher for the course goes in and double checks our work by hand, but still. It also did this for splenectomy and hematopoiesis(it gives the answer as hemtopoeisis, which is another incorrect spelling on it’s part).

It will also do this if you don’t give it the answer to a question EXACTLY the way it wants it, such as:

Moving along!

So classes started Wednesday, officially. I’m taking 3 classes, which I’ve mentioned, but not gone into detail about. Lemme do that now.

ACA – Student Success. It’s basically a class on how to be a good student. Big whoop. Mickey Mouse course and I’m not worried, here.
MDA – Medical Terminology, fucking HOORAY. I’m so excited about taking this, I really am.
PSY – Psych! Literally. I’m not sure how I feel about this one, I’m really not, even though I know I have to take it.

So I spent yesterday doing the ACA homework, and then today doing most of the MDA stuff. All I have to do is do my quiz in that, and I’ll be finished with that. The Psych class doesn’t have any ‘homework’, per se. Quizzes and written assignments. I was ridiculously pleased to do it though, especially the MDA stuff. It was daunting, don’t get me wrong–I’m just in the first chapter, and there are so manny word roots and prefixes and suffixes to learn, but it was a lot of fun. J happens to be taking anatomy intro, so we’re actually sort of bouncing off one another. I will probably have to take the class she’s taking now soon myself, I would think, though I may be wrong about that.

I never thought this would be the career path I’d take, to be honest, but I can’t say I’m not interested/excited all to hell about it.