I am pretty easily impressed and awed by nature. Whale sharks impress me (so big!), Thailand rock...things impress me (so topsy turvy!), the Amazon rainforest has always deeply impressed me (so many creatures!). Pretty much everything but mountains impresses me on some level.
But at the top of the list is the Northern Lights. You can tell how impressed I am by the fact that I'm devoting a whole blog post to say how amazingly mysterious they are. After all, I only blog about the most meaningful things. But look at them!!!
Aren't they just the most mysterious and lovely things in the world? I guess they aren't technically mysterious, since science explains them, but they're still mysterious. A long while ago, LivingSocial offered a trip to Alaska for a Northern Lights expedition trip. I don't remember the price or the dates, but I still check their website to see if it comes back up again. There are lot of places/things I'd like to see and of course most of them I probably never will, like the Great Wall of China or (*tear*) the pyramids. These, on the other hand, feel more possible since I can see them without leaving the continent. Alaska's just a quick jaunt up the road.
As a random aside, the Northern Lights are one of the very few things I remember from The Golden Compass (those, and the polar bears [ARMORED polar bears]). "Remember" is probably overstating it--I remember there were Northern Lights and they were terribly mysterious. Is anyone counting how many times I say "mysterious" in this post?
I should also probably note, for posterity's sake, that I think I can trace my initial fascination back to the hours spent playing as Cammy on Street Fighter 2. Showing here:
Anyway. Let's look at more pictures of the Lights.
I love a three-day holiday weekend. It's really the best kind of weekend. I enjoyed this last holiday weekend so much I can't resist documenting it. It was such a satisfying combination of fun, laziness and productivity, and really, isn't that best kind of holiday weekend? Here is how we celebrated the births...lives....existence....of Presidents:
I reacquainted myself with Diablo II. I mention this first because this was an ongoing activity through the weekend. I think it's been three years or so since I played, and it was just as fun as I remembered. All that was missing was my family peeps to play with online! Wanna play, peeps?
(Look at all my dudes--skeleton dudes, skeleton mage dudes and my blood golem dude. Score.)
We saw an early bird of this movie.
(Pretty good. Someone cut Sam Worthington's hair before it becomes a true mullet.)
We ate many good foods, including this Thai coconut soup (twice), more of these chocolate cookies (much more than twice), some Poppers, pulled pork (the in-laws get credit for this one) and some random things at Sam's Club. We finished off the weekend by having grits, which are always delicious and not at all fattening. Right?
We got some books signed by this lady:
I've only read one of her books, but since most authors I read are long since dead, I thought I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to meet a living one. She was very pleasant and not uppity at all, though some people are disgruntled by her dislike of Tangled.
I finally started running again on Saturday. I was very slow.
One of my goals for this year was to go through my closet and get rid of all those things that have escaped previous purgings because I think I'll wear them. I never do, so off they went at last. Look at this haul!
I also finally gave up my beloved and truly tattered pink hoodie.
I don't want to talk about it.
Side note: does anyone know where I can find a pink hoodie with a) no words or logos and b) that is not made out of velour?
I then went on to clean out the fridge but I decided against photographic evidence of what I threw out. Some people were so enthralled with the look of some rotting potatoes they even wrote a Facebook status about it. Other people were too disgusted by the smell to care much for the look of them.
And that about sums up our weekend. Now I can start counting down to the next, which is Good Friday. It's only um...some number of days away.
This morning I was jolted out of my Nyquil-induced slumber by the sound of two tanks being banged together. Turns out it was the garbage truck (again!), but when I fell back asleep about two seconds later, I had a dream that I blogged about the garbage truck and how loud it was. So, in an effort to fulfill this prophecy:
The garbage truck woke me up last night. It was very loud. So very, very loud.
Also in this dream I blogged about computer games that I liked or had played a lot in the past. One of these games was Hocus Pocus. Man, that game was sweet. I tried to find some screenshots but those were surprisingly hard to come by. What I liked about this game was that it had some cool atmospheric backgrounds. Most of it is just castle walls, but then these castles have huge windows with neat scenery. The scenery would change with the levels, and you start out with big toadstools outside. Later, there's a moonlit forest that looks so neat and that one is my favorite. Just thinking about it makes me say "Ooooo." You can download the first chapter for free although I couldn't get it to work well on XP and I haven't tried with Vista. This game is old school! Another oldie but goldie: Jazz Jackrabbit.
Another game I dream-blogged about was Resident Evil (2, I think). I have fond memories of watching my old roommate play this for a 1/2-1 hour at night while I ate graham crackers. I only ever watch people play it because I am too chicken to play it, but nobody I know plays it anymore, which is sad. What I liked about RE2 was the sort of spookiness and creepiness of it, and it didn't hit you over the head with zombie violence. It was more about tension than bloody limbs, or that's how I remember it at least. Of course there was plenty of blood and dismemberment involved too.
I think those were all the games I blogged about, but other computer games I played a lot were: Mortal Kombat 1&2, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Halloween Harry, Jetpack, Jill of the Jungle and some crazy hospital game where you did brain surgery. These days I don't play computer games too much--just Sims 2 or Diablo II when I get the chance. But I still got some skillz! Also, I should start eating graham crackers again because they are tasty.
EDIT: Oo, I just remembered my post-blogging dream! I was at some kind of ComicCon and I was wearing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer costume. (Which meant I looked like a teenager in the 90's.) Eventually Angel showed up and there may have been some vampire slaying at some point. You see why I love my subconscious?
