I’m off, taking the chapters i need to go over with me.

I finished this tonight, I know, should have been writing. Sigh. I don’t think I will be able to make my deadline. Too much going on. This is the first night I’ve really had free.

I told my mother, on the phone, that the Pizza Hut near our house wasn’t a really good place to have dinner.

While the food is usually fine, I’ve had poor service there, and worse! it seems every time I go that there are always tons of noisy kids there. So, it wasn’t really the best choice for my mom and my grandma and I to have a meal where we could talk.

But, she didn’t want to drive into town to the other Pizza Hut (the one where the food is better, and the amount of well behaved kids tends to outweigh the brats).

Also, she really didn’t understand how bad it could get.

It started innocently enough, we got to the place, and I requested a table that wasn’t directly under the loud speaker playing hits from the eighties. We circled the salad bar, and talked a bit about the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter what night I go there, it always ends up quite crazy. But, she said, at least it wasn’t family night. I think that’s Wednesdays, I said. She says, well, at least the boy scouts aren’t here. Not more than a minute later, while I’m trying to decide if I do want green peppers and cucumbers on my salad, do we hear a waiter talk to a man about the basketball team that would be coming in about twenty minutes.

She looked at me and laughed.

We sit down and begin to chat and eat, and a set of about eight 4th or 5th grade girls are seated off to our right. They appear to be in some sort of club, having similar t-shirts, but don’t seem to me to be a basketball team. They are very loud, loud and rambunctious, bouncing around, screaming and screeching at each other, yelling across the two feet of table.

My mom looks at me, and laughs, starting to understand what I meant earlier.

In the course of the next ten minutes, practically every table in the place, is quickly filled with wiggly, ill mannered children. And then the basketball team appears and takes the whole area to the front of the restaurant. (right behind me)

During this whole time, while I am munching on my cheese pizza, the noise level in the whole place is going up up UP!
It quite literally sounded like we were eating inside the monkey cage at the zoo.
(I hate to be one of those women, but the sound of children being ill-mannered and crazy screeching drives me up the wall. Who knows if this will change when I have children of my own, but ack!) I was really trying to put on a good face though, because it was quite obvious my mother now fully understood what I meant, and had shared my warning with her mother earlier when I had got up for salad.

Trying to have an adult conversation in that climate was quite difficult, and every once in a while my mom would grimace and joke, ‘If they would just quiet down’. But honestly, it was really hard to hear her, and she was a foot and a half away from me. And then a surge of noise as the team behind us applauds and cheers someone, and we can hardly take it.

We’re sitting there, chuckling over how absurd the whole place was, and suddenly, my grandmother yells into the din
“Help me! I’m drowning!”

This, of course, made all three of us crack up. And the really horrible thing was… no one even noticed, the monkey noises and the little girl songs and the wrestling behind us continued unabated.

She did it once more before we left, and I told her she’ll still be yelling that in ten years, but won’t remember why.

All you need is a couple dozen horns, and a bright orange suit….

http://www.hugi.is/hahradi/bigboxes.php?box_id=51208&f_id=681

a little coordination wouldn’t hurt either…

Wow!

Ok, this is sooo cute.

You can make Sega Chao from printouts!!

http://www.sonicteam.com/chao/en/gift_papercraft_menu.html

The Chaos were the breedable lil monsters you could raise in the Sonic Adventure games.

Mperia.com

Mperia allows artists to sell their work directly to their audience — the audience they already have, and the global audience behind every Net-connected browser and PDA and keitai handheld device on the planet.

Very cool! Works off the http://www.bitpass.com system. You can choose how much you want to sell your music for, anywhere from 1 penny to 5 bucks to whatever. Mperia takes 30% for operating ect, and you get the rest.

Sounds cool to me.

Friday night. My husband gave me my valentines flowers(roses) in a pretty red vase with a teddy bear hugging the vase, and chocolates early. We went over to my Mom’s house for dinner. My aunt and uncle were in town from Ohio. It was really great to hang out with them, and chat. I don’t seem them all that often. (Though Uncle Jim was here a few weekends ago when my dad was in the hospital) She thrust some knitting needles on me and taught me how to knit. I didn’t get too far, but I could totally see myself making some scarves for fun. Mom wants to take a knitting course from a local craft shop. I think that sounds like a lot of fun. I have no clue when I’ll have time to actually knit, but it’s really nice to make things. Dinner was really good, sesame chicken with broccoli, beer bread and sourdough bread, parmesan asparagus spears, and strawberry applesauce.

Then Mom gave me/us a couple gifts, an awesome crock pot cookbook, with tons of different recipes that look easy, with the WW points attached and everything, and a pretty frame with little red and pink beads on it. Mom always makes Valentines day special.

Valentines Day-Saturday
I did some shopping in the morning, found this awesome sweater on sale, and the items I was questing for(had to go to several stores to find something that fit. ) I indulged my manga addiction. (Hi, my name is Stacie…) I was trying to be good and picked up only three, but the clerk told me they were buy 4 get the 5th free. So.. I picked up .hack 1 and 2, and Pet Shop of Horrors 3 (they had 4 but I restrained myself), Megatokyo vol2, and The Ring(for husband…).

We did have a real date night, though it was all a bit strange. We went to the movies and watched, Something’s gotta give. It was ok, funny enough, but it was really apparent to the both of us, that the movie way out of our demographic. It was nothing like his last movie with Helen Hunt, and dwelt much more on aging and being older, and ugh. Rent it if you must, but use your date money elsewhere.
Happily, we had movie passes, so no real tragedy there.

Then we wandered around trying to figure out what to eat. We had toyed with the idea of cooking, but neither of us really had the energy to do that and clean up the kitchen after. So, we started calling places. Ginza wasn’t taking reservations OR walk-ins. Chili’s was sitting at a 1 hour wait. As we wandered through Half Price Books and Pier One, we called Imperial Garden on a lark, and they only had a 20 min wait. Cool, we thought, and made a reservation, and proceeded to ooh and ah over the trinkets in the Pier. Aha! We even found me a nice teapot with four little teacups, and a neat serving tray. Very happy about that.

But then dinner was only ok. It was frustrating, the sushi was way too big, and the chef was obviously in a rush, things weren’t quite as pretty as usual, and there was a huge wet pile of ginger slopped into the box. Sigh. Then lost Carlo’s order, they did give us a certificate for another time, but the whole thing was not really conducive to romance.

But, we were together, and we went home and relaxed, and spent some time together, and it was all good.

Sunday. I made my first early mod/hack for thegreentavern rpg game, a reset button. This is great, it means that we can restart the rpg user stats anytime we need to. This is a big step for me, I’m starting to do more than just use other people’s modifications. I’m going to polish it up with the help of a cool user I met online, and have people beta it so they can use it for themselves. It’s not all that difficult, but very handy to have.

Later on we did some gaming with Tammy and Jaz, in which our characters sleuthed and healed (depoisoned)the Warmarch of the town we last saved from several armies of Orcs. Sarah might be coming back to join us again, she helped start this campaign and has been away training for Guard.

So, a successful weekend, more good than bad, and this week seems to be looking up already. Can’t ask for more than that!

Had a swarm of people over, lots and lots of Halo, Super Monkey Ball 2, Mario Racing, copious amounts of Captain Morgan’s Private stock.

We had 12-14 people over all weekend, including my brother. It was a blast, lots of intense Halo CTF matches, and lots of good times.

It’s really great that perfect strangers from the internet can become perfect friends. We’ve known this group around 4 years or so, and have parties like this a couple times a year. It’s always fantastic.

And, as always, the house seems quite empty when everyone leaves.

Had a swarm of people over, lots and lots of Halo, Super Monkey Ball 2, Mario Racing, copious amounts of Captain Morgan’s Private stock.

We had 12-14 people over all weekend, including my brother. It was a blast, lots of intense Halo CTF matches, and lots of good times.

It’s really great that perfect strangers from the internet can become perfect friends. We’ve known this group around 4 years or so, and have parties like this a couple times a year. It’s always fantastic.

And, as always, the house seems quite empty when everyone leaves.