What a great day :)

I woke up whenever, and got in touch with Tanya, and we headed to Southcenter, with a brief stop off in Shoreline to drop off the Sakuracon registration thingies with Jack and get some of Tanya's stuff. That was odd, but I'll leave it at that. First we went into the mall and played a round of DDR. (I played on the Percussion Freaks machine, but the sticks sucked and the chair is too low and it hurt my back.) That was kind of nuts. She got 3 greats on Senorita. Anyway, after that we went to the JoAnn's fabrics, and sat around looking through patterns for ages. I already had some ideas; I basically am definitely going to try making a Tran costume, and if I have time/inspiration, I'm gonna do a Charmy costume (don't know which one yet, 3rd or 4th mix). I found a pattern for a VERY generic dress, can be either a sundress or a sleeved dress, short or long, etc. Tanya looked unsuccessfully for a sailor pattern to maybe make a Yuni costume - I need to bug sorakirei when she gets back from Katsucon to find out how she did her Yuni outfit. Anyway, my pattern cost 99 cents, AND I found knit teal material, and some glossy teal fabric to make Tran eyes out of. Now I just have to do some MAD sewing... once I can schedule some time on someone's sewing machine. I don't feel like hand-sewing this time.

After that, it was like 6:30, so we went to the Southcenter mall again for dinner. Got Ivar's fish'n'chips, which was really good for mall food, actually! Headed home afterwards... I got here at almost 8pm and *just* missed Chris on IM, I'd offered him a ride to IZ. Oops. He ended up taking the bus with Danny (who it turns out is the son of Rick Rashid, who used to be a CS professor at CMU! How weird!), so I guess it's all good.

So, I had a really fabulous time at IZ. Lots of awesome people were there. CorranFox was there with his sister, which was funny because she totally looked like a non-nerd... all these guys kept hitting on her! I wouldn't know if this usually happens to pretty people, I guess, but it was sort of freaky! DJ and Keevon and Steve and all were there doing some mad session action, and Tian and Damon and whoever from UW were there, and Brian-the-freestyler was there, I got a picture of him doing a headstand in some song. Oh, Ryan and Becky were there! I hadn't seen them in a really long time. Ryan kept telling me how much I've improved at PPP and DDR since he last saw me, which might actually be true. I hung out with Chris a whole lot, which was pretty awesome, he's so cool! We did session with me on DM and him and Allan on GF, and poor Allan ended up carrying us because we suck :) And we played Pop'n'Music the "cheating" way, me taking the left 4 buttons and him taking the right 5, and hey, it's actually possible to pass songs that way! After playing Ultra High Heels as our third song, I was like "oh, you have to see this in Para Para", so Ryan played PPP and I shadowed, which was fun! I also played a game of KBM with Chris, and we did Pink Rose and Frozen Ray because they're in DDR and all. Oh, and lots of DDR. Wheee! It's so cool to not have to play alone... I played one game with Christine (Mike's sister), and the rest with Chris; I got him to carry me on some of the new catas, I forget which, but I passed them for the memcard. I AA'ed LTBHE but didn't have my memcard in at the time, whoops.

Heh, I love sessionning and watching other people do Session. I think that it's my main motivating factor in going to IZ these days now, is to get better at the session-able games and hopefully get in on sessions... since I can really play a lot of DDR EX at Sunset if I want, and work on PPP with the videos and all. I wonder if Keevon was serious that he'd play GF with me sometime so I'll stop sucking at it so much. I don't really like GF, but I want to at least get some skill at it.

Sometimes I get these evenings where I'm horribly tongue-tied and can't make a complete sentence to save my life, and I admit that this was one of those evenings, but I guess it was okay in the long run. I drove Chris and Danny back to UW from IZ, and we all managed to talk for most of the ride. I talk too much sometimes (like when I get excited over random things), and too little other times (like for example, every time I see Steve) but I guess it all works out in the end. Either way, I had a really fabulous time tonight, it was a LOT of fun. I forgot to make origami stuff for people though. Whoops. And I have to be up in like... 5 hours for drum corps. Oh well, I can sleep in the car on the way down to rehearsal, I guess. I haven't practiced on my baritone bugle at ALL in the past three weeks though, so I'm really going to suck. Or blow, as the case may be.

'Night everyone. Time for some Sleep Sleep Revolution... er... Bedmania IIDX... errr.. Pillow-raping... Sleep With Intensity... I'm gonna go AAA a Dream A Dream. Yeah. (This all comes from QUITE the bizarre discussion in the DDR chat room. :)

Unsunny day Sunday

Today I almost overslept going down to Olympia for freaking band rehearsal. Jack informed me that I really ought to remember to call it "corps rehearsal", 'cause corps people don't like it when you call it "band rehearsal". Anyway. Joy and Jack and I went to Subway for lunch, then went over to Tumwater HS, where there were not many horn players, and not many drum players, and blah. I think a lot of people were bummed out by the idea of not marching this year. Eventually we had like 13 people in the horn line, at least.

Jack led some breathing exercises at the beginning of rehearsal, and then Keith showed up with this guy Chris, who apparently is one of the founders of the Carolina Gold Senior Drum Corps. Chris conducted our rehearsal, and it was REALLY cool. We got a few new charts, and he worked through them with us, with a lot of really constructive stuff about how we could do better at playing things. It was actually really cool, and even despite how I'm always really nervous about sightreading treble clef music, and playing the 2nd bari part instead of 3rd, I did pretty well for once. Apparently Keith is going to convince Chris to be our horn captain in the fall, and that's kind of something to look forward to! For the second part of rehearsal, our Chris (the one that plays 1st Baritone) conducted us through the new charts. Some of the new charts are cool, some are not, we'll be getting more... we'll see. Anyway, I guess my arms are getting a little stronger, 'cause I can hold my baritone up for all of Aztec Fire now without too much aching. This drum corps stuff is doing wonders for my bowling game.

Horn line got out at 4:15, and Jack and I went over to outside the pit rehearsal to read books (I'm reading American Gods, and he's reading Mona Lisa Overdrive) and wait for Joy and talk about CS stuff. It turns out both of us want to go to UW for CS grad school eventually. It's also fun to get to babble about Perl 6. And then we went home. I slept in the car for almost the whole trip home.

Got home, goofed off online a bit, then Eli made me dinner... pad thai! Whee! It was the recipe out of the new Thai book I got him. And it turned out really really well, it was very yummy, and he made thai iced tea too. That was good. I've mostly been lounging around the house since. I have to work tomorrow, unlike everyone else. Damn, I meant to go play IIDX, but where the heck did all the time go? Maybe I will go play for a little bit and then head to sleep.

You know, sometimes I know I get all confused about what I want out of life, but I guess having a boy who will hug me and cook pad thai for me is probably much more than I deserve.