Monday, December 31, 2012

Last Post of 2012!

Goodbye 2012, you were awesome!
I'm spending my New Year's Eve watching Miranda Sings on Youtube and and thinking about the junk food I want to eat. Yeah, I'm not too exciting.
Welcome 2013!

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Christmas Day!

Christmas arrived!
My day was very good. My family opened presents together and ate a delicious breakfast made by my mom. She's awesome.
I got a desk and bookshelf and my dad helped me set them up. My room looks so much better now! They were exactly what I wanted/needed! I gave my family seasons 3-7 of MacGyver to complete our set. We are MacGyver nuts here. We love the show and laugh through every episode; it's awesome! My brothers and I even have this super stupid dance to the theme song. It involves clapping on the off-beat for basically the whole thing. I think in the 70's we would have made amazing background dancers if we had tambourines.
I feel like it was a pretty low-key Christmas, but that was perfect. We stayed home and enjoyed our own company. It even snowed last night so we had a white Christmas!
I hope Christmas was wonderful for all of you too!

The Snowman (Recap Part 2)

Usually Stine's book chapters end with a scare that totally doesn't pay off. I wonder how many chapters of his end with "when something grabbed her arm!" to only have the next chapter start with "It was her best friend. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you,' her best friend said."
Anyway, on my last post I wrote that the last part I read of "The Snowman" was the white-haired guy said he killed Heather's uncle. Well this time it wasn't just some dumb joke to get you to read the next chapter. He really did it. Heather is super freaked out even though she hated her uncle and wanted him dead.
So her new boyfriend is def a murderer. She wants to go to the police but Snowman blackmails her and makes her think she'll be in trouble too, looking like she hired him to kill the uncle. It made NO sense, but she doesn't tell the police she even knows Snowman when they directly ask her if she knows him, even AFTER telling her that he killed his father too. Heather, you are crazy.
Anyway, to make the too-long ending short, Snowman knocks Heather out and proceeds to built a snowman around her, encasing her in an icy tomb. Umm, ok...
So she comes to realizing that he's packing snow around her (he's basically done by that point) but she somehow manages to get her hands free from the super-tight ropes (she mentions like 4 times how they are so tight her hands are in pain) and even gets the lighter out of her pocket - oh yeah, she carries her fathers old lighter ALWAYS (it mentioned the fact once at the beginning of the book) - and gets it to light. She melts her way out of the snowman. She used a 13 year-old, never used lighter to MELT A HOLE TO ESCAPE FROM A SNOWMAN. Whatever company made that lighter has bragging rights.
It all ends when the guy called Snowman is still there and tries to strangle Heather, but she lights his coat on fire and right then the police show up and Heather gets to go home (not to the police station, or even to answer any questions) and the police probably take the murderer to juvy. Because they're in high school.
The BEST LINE EVARRR from this book is after Heather is finally safe and free and says that she was in a frozen, icy prison, not just in that snowman, but her whole life because of the hate she had lived with, but now she was free. Thank you Heather. I guess being being encased in a snowman makes one think about tacky parables.
I think I've read this book before, but I read like 2 or 3 of these types of books week for a couple months in middle school, so I couldn't really recall the details. It was an easy read and not a total waste of time. My biggest problem in the book was Heather's logic. She was being "blackmailed" but I think that anyone with even the slightest clue how anything legal works would see that if you are innocent and you know who a killer is that you would and should call the police.
Now what will I read next?

Monday, December 24, 2012

Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas!
It's the most magical night of the year, and I hope that nobody is reading this tonight. Instead I hope that you are snug in bed or watching your favorite Christmas shows with your loved ones. My family spent a nice day together eating food and watching some Christmas stuff, and I played some holiday music on my dear old pianoforte.
My family has a tradition of watching "The Nativity Story" each year on Christmas Eve, and I must say, I have to try VERY hard to not sob big fat tears at the end of the movie. It's very well done and beautiful. I dry-cry every time.
Another tradition is to have all our bedrooms clean or Santa won't come. So tah-dah! my room is clean! I love the feeling.
This week I learned to crochet something other than a hot-pad for the kitchen! I can now crochet anything! Actually, I have only crocheted a pokeball and a Luma (from Mario Galaxy) and I might say that I am rather proud of my work. I'll have to post pictures sometime.
Ok, so I finished the Monster-Blood Tattoo trilogy, and what a great read! I'm glad I bought the set of books so I can read them again sometime. Finishing that series means that I have finally moved on to a new book: "The Snowman" by R.L. Stine! Oh man, I feel like I'm back in middle school reading this thing. So far, 16 year-old Heather lives with her mean and evil uncle and nervous-wreck aunt feeling miserable and stuff because she has a job as a waitress, but doesn't want or need the job because her dead parents left her a butt-load of money, only her evil uncle won't let her touch it. Heather hates him and thinks that he's using her money for himself!
But then she meets this guy with "snow-white" hair who literally calls himself Snowman, like, that's his name. Of course he's new to town and  the two young-uns fall in love and he is all mysterious and cryptic and I think I may have read this book before and is probably not who he says he is, blah blah blah just like everything Stine ever wrote. I just finished a chapter where Snowman tells Heather that he killed her uncle for her to return a favor. Dun-dun DUUUHHN!
I REALLY think it'd be too funny to write a parody (even a musical) and throw in all the cliches and tropes that fill Stine's books. I fear that only a handful of people would find it as funny as it would be though.
I'll finish the book tonight (happy Christmas Eve!) and post about it later.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Overachiever

Ha! What was I thinking? In my last post I mentioned reading Les Miserables and blogging about it, but I must have been in a high-brow mood.
Luckily something amazing happened! I came into a couple dozen books by R.L. Stine and the like! Blessed day!
Now, before I am blasted for my reading interests, I must say that I think that Stine's books, as well at the other "Point Horror" books,  are rather terrible. However, when I was a lad in my early teens, I would cruise through those books like crazy! Two or three a week was probably average.
Over the last year or so I've been reading some hilarious blogs where the authors blog their way through the Fear Street books and stuff, and it's awesome to remember the plots and the "WTF?" endings in basically every book. Thank goodness these bloggers have a sense of humor - I laugh quite often while reading them.
So, now that I have a bunch of these books to go through, I'll do recaps every so often on my precious little blog. I'm not original, I know, since there are other blogs that do that sort of thing exclusively, but If I don't, I'm afraid my blog will just be left to die and rot and be forgotten.
Before I get into those amazing books though, I MUST finish the book I'm on. It's called "Factotum" and it's the last part of the "Monster Blood Tattoo" trilogy (also called "The Foundling's Tale" by USA publishers) by D.M. Cornish. You guys, it's awesome! It's a fantasy, but doesn't have dragons or magic, but it's more an alternate world where there are humans and monsters, but the monsters are less boogie-man and more wild-creatures-that-live-mostly-in-the-wilderness-and-also-like-to-eat-people-if-they-get-the-chance. Of course, as the story goes on, the main character starts to learn that not all monsters are evil, and not all humans who fight and kill monsters are good. That's just part of the plot. They use bio- and chemical technologies instead of electrical power and stuff. They all wear tri-corner hats and wear Victorian(?) styles and use muskets. The ocean is caustic and corrosive vinegar, people can have surgeries done to themselves that allow them to manipulate electricity (like lightning) or mess with people's minds... The whole world is very well thought out and there is huge back story and mythology that is important to the culture, but isn't outright part of the story we read. There is a HUGE index/glossary in each book that has really fun stuff that isn't always in the main story or only mentioned briefly. The only thing I can compare it to is the Lord of the Rings, but more youth-friendly and modern. There are many illustrations by the author too. Check it out!
Enough about books for right now.
Christmas is in a week! I'm excited. I was away from my family last year, so it's nice to be back home for the holidays. There should be a songs about that. I hope my family likes the gifts I bought for them. They might read this, so I won't be posting what I got. They're awesome though!

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

12-12-12

Well, well ,well....
Today's date, 12-12-12, is the last repeating number date that I'll ever see, and likely the rest of today's living population (unless recently born people live into their 90's... Anyway, it's a good enough reason to write in my precious little blog, right?
At 12 AM this morning I was going to take special note when the clock hit all 12s, but I got distracted and missed it! Then at 12 PM today I thought the same thing and missed it again! Oh well, I got to live through the whole "11-11-11 11:11:11" thing last year and even got a screen cap of it. Yay me, I'll always remember that I waste time on my computer on cool dates (the day dates, not the  two-people-going-out dates. Ha... ahem...).
Anyway, I'm still alive. I really don't think anyone reads my blog, but that is really just fine with me.
I've been back home in the States for a few months now, and so far everything is pretty normal, just like it was before I went to South Korea.
I have my old lovely job again of being a librarian, and I'm filling my free time with piano lessons and being crafty (you should see the Harry Potter wands I made! Amazing!), and playing with my bestie friend. I've also started to take an interest in learning to cook, both for fun and because I'll starve and die someday if I don't.
I'm really not very interesting these days, which is partly (or mainly) why I don't blog or youtube that much/ever, but I think I ought to get back into it. It's nice to express myself.
I had the thought the other night as I fell asleep that I should read Les Miserables and blog about that since it would keep me reading and writing. I've seen the play and a couple movie version (and I'm looking forward to the new movie coming this Christmas), but what inspires me to read the million-paged novel is that a friend of mine had her copy of the book underlined and post-it noted all over the place. I thumbed through her copy and read some of the parts that she noted and I was taken by how amazing things were. Little life lessons and inspiring words filled the book. I think I'll try the same. Might as well get something out of reading, yes?
So, to my dozens and dozens of non-readers out there, have you read Les Mis? What did you think?
Merry Christmas everyone!