thanskgiving was good. there was good food, good people, and so on and so forth. the baby was here, and she was cute and funny, as good babies should be. my aunt linda brought her dog, valentine, who sat in the kennel and barked, so kanhya barked back. she was very enthusiastic.

yesterday, my mom, brother, sister, and i hit both goodwills in town because they were having a 50% off everything sale. we got a lot of random items, including several books, a satiny red jacket, and three sweaters for me, a black frenchcoat, cathrobe, and a couple suits for my brother, a clip-on tie for my sister, and a book for my mom. i also bought a gray overcoat for $4, but i ended up giving/lending it to kk. he didn't have a good, warm coat. i have a couple semi-warm items, as well as gloves and a ton of sweaters, so i figured, really, i'm ok, he needs it more. it looked nice on him, anyway. we might go back today and see if they have another one; it's still 50% off today.

i watched a lot of iron chef last night. yummy.

and now i am watching the killing fields with my brother, who's watching it for a school project. happy, eh?

we watched a little video this weekend of sua's recent trip back to vietnam to see his family...

i think i'm going to go back to the watching the movie...

the rain falls heavily on this seattle thanksgiving, but i'm going back to olympia. my aunt linda is picking me up in, oh, maybe half an hour, and we hope to be there around noon. i'm bringing the yams (baked with pineapple instead of candy sauce), sichuan-spiced eggplant, and two big bottles of limonata soda. mm. mom has a smoked turkey. my brother sua is coming up from portland with his entourage, and they're bringing eggrolls. mm, multicultural thanksgiving feast.

heh. the eggrolls thing, i think, will become somewhat of a family joke: my mom told me that what they were bringing, and i said i hoped the weather was good for their drive. then, after discussing the storm that passed seattle last night for lands father south, like portland, i said, "but my brother is coming from portland, and he's bringing the eggrolls!" my aunt gasped in agreement. so bad for you, but ohsodelicious. i will be fine as long as they don't have beef satay. i think the amount of beef satay i ate at kanhya's birthday alone is enough to give me my first bypass surgery.

happy thanksgiving to all, yippy ki yi yay. may you enjoy it with good food and good people, as it should be.

ok, so.. yeah. i'm boosting my magnesium levels with some chocolate chips here and watching the princess bride on hbo until 8pm, when gilmore girls is on. woo!

i'm tired from that whole getting-up-at-6-only-to-be-fucked-by-online-registration thing, though i do have a 15-credit schedule now. no writing classes (BOO!), but some other interesting stuff. it's a bit scattered throughout the day, which is annoying, but i should still be able to have a decent work schedule around it. anyway, i signed up for zoology 118 (human physiology), which is daily at 8:30am (eep!), political science 202 (intro to american politics), which should be interesting and would help me out if i decide to major in/am accepted into the journalism program, and psych 345 (social psych), which should be a good class, i just didn't want to take it because it's offered so late in the day. oh well. but no writing! nothing available to me, even if i rearranged my schedule! blah!

i should be able to apply for the psych major at the beginning of the quarter, though, so that will be nice. and, with junior standing for spring quarter, i should be able to get into biopsych, i hope. geez, i never would've thought a 9:30am 200-level psych class would fill up before i got to register, but i guess a lot of people put it off. *shrug*

a lot of people i know are taking psych 210 (human sexuality), which is a popular lecture class where they watch porn that is for nonmajors. it's not worth anything to psych majors. oh well. i'm sure we'll talk about it in my other classes. at least i'll get a strong enough background in the research/science stuff to understand writings on the various subjects covered by 210, which is ultimately more valuable.

"mostly dead you can do something about. all dead, well... there's only one thing you can do for all dead: go through his clothes and look for loose change."
heheh. i love this movie.

i got a new cd in the mail yesterday, the avalanches' since i left you. i ordered it off amazon (uh, first time i'd ever done *that* silly little number...) a couple weeks ago after reading a review in the onion's a.v. club that described it as something like a novel written entirely out of adjectives. it's neat-o danceable cool.

i think two of my roommates are heading to london for spring quarter. this makes me sad. chris is going to russia for *all* next year. sniff..wonder what we'll do for a living arrangement next year? i think chris, josie, and i will rent and apartment, though both chris and josie won't live there the entire time between the end of spring and beginning of autumn quarters. i will, though! i'll work, maybe take a class summer quarter, work some more... try to have visitors... i dunno, live in seattle for the summer. that would be fun. whee.

and mikey's coming to visit me after christmas! yay!

i hate registering for classes this morning with the passion of a thousand firey hot suns. it used to be that, once you got on the website that let you put in the SLNs and stuff, you wouldn't have to worry about the whole process of hitting reload repeatedly for hours on end until something else loaded. now you do. and first i send it two sets of SLNs with classes i should be able to register for, i think, and it spits back that all of these are closed. so i try more alternates, and it tells me that i can't register for those sections because i am already in them. MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND BEFORE I KILL YOU.

as you can tell, i have a lot of pent-up aggression that won't release itself in traditionally violent fashion, so i spit it out through a keyboard and use bad words instead. how clever.

i can't believe i just posted that. and blogger mocks me with "Sorry, publishing is temporarily unavailable," so i'll have to come back later and see that it's published. gah!

the royal we here at butter knives are for the weak have of late found ourselves enraptured by the weather. weather has a tendency to lend itself well to very bad poetry, and certainly we hate to fall into that trap, but today, walking to work, we simply could not help ourselves. however, in an attempt to layer thick sarcasm over the thought that we might take our poetry seriously in the slightest and protect our fragile writer's ego, we have decided to recall and post said weather-related poetry, prefaced by this "royal we" crap.

at times, the fear
that the poet inside me,
trapped by my cynicism,
may escape
is validated.

seattle rain induces
my spouts of poetic trailings
as its heavy drops linger
til finally they slip from scalp
to eyelash to nose
and finally shirt
where liquid is absorbed.

this is the nature of my beast:
rain falls. i walk in rain.
overhead, clouds thick and gray
mask the sight of thundering aircraft.
i walk and sip my tea, as its
temperature drops from hot to warm.
on me, tea works
its strange ways.

i begin to see the ducks gliding across
their polluted pond;
surrounded
by drops of chaos,
they still silently move.

i consider the rain
when yesterday was clear
as the day before it, remembering
in seattle, when it does not rain,
at least in november, it
certainly is not hot.

the weekend has been unseasonably sunny, but worse than chilly. we braved the cold to enjoy the bright sunlight anyway, because blue skies in november are strangely irresistable, when they're all but a complete annoyance in the summer.

friday night i lost a glove. it must've fallen through my long coat's right pocket, which has a growing hole in a difficult-to-reach-to-mend seam and opens to the wide open space between satiny black lining and somewhat thicker black exterior, falling through the gap between these unattached fabrics at the hem. i need to break out the needle and thread and do some work to my coat. my sweatshirt's left sleeve has a hole about the size of the cuff itself, too. anyway, they were a cheap pair of gloves, so i could use a new pair anyway, but still. if i want to warm my hands on my walks to and from home, i have to do it one-hand-in-my-pocket/michael jackson style.

i had enjoyed dinner with chris and her friend roy at new star (ahh, new star: i thinkest thou art my favorite thai eatery on the ave) and we were walking down the street with freshly-mixed cups of frozen yogurt, glad to be out of the hostile, smashing pumpkins' "zero"-blaring environment--they played it twice in a row, and obviously from different cds, which seemed unacceptable to me--when i realized my glove was missing. a block later, i dropped the remaining third of my dessert cup on the sidewalk in front of espresso roma.

for a good portion of the rest of the evening, i watched television. lots and lots of very silly television. first it was a few episodes of star trek: the next generation, then the american iron chef with chairman shatner, good lord. the computer-generated name screens with rapidly pulsating colors were REALLY annoying, but the show still had remnants of the amusing charm of the japanese show. only, y'know, it was american and therefore not as good, especially since it feigned such self-importance as to not even admit it had said japanese predecessor--shatner v.o.'d something about coming up with the idea for kitchen stadium a year ago, blah blah blah. yeah, perhaps when you and your agent were sitting around, watching the food network and laughing about those priceline commercials. anyway. also, we watched some tv funhouse. that show is fucked-up brilliance, i swear. it's not really that *good,* but when i watch it, i die laughing. it has given me the gift of the catchphrase: "damn you, tail!" sigh.

saturday was so beautiful, it woke me up early. we had planned to see a movie, but decided it was too nice out to do that, so we thought about walking to the arboretum or renting a canoe. graylan called to tell us he saw on tv--watching apple cup, of course--that the place we'd rent canoes was closed, and we decided the arboretum would be too far and too noisy a walk to be worthwhile--the route takes us right by the stadium and over a freeway--so we grabbed a couple frisbees and headed to gasworks. we actually played frisbee only for a few minutes, then spent awhile longer gazing at the water, the sky, the city, the silly boys skateboarding.

at home, josie baked a pie, chris worked on homework, christopher vaccumed in anticipation of reid's mom's anal-retentive arrival, and i finally finished reading of human bondage. every few minutes, a song would come on the oldies station that necessitated a dance break, much to christopher's amusement.

chris, adam, and i did sit and talk in espresso roma awhile that evening, followed by a long, happy visit to second time around, where chris and i blew a lot of money. she bought five videos and i bought two cds. we easily could have spent much more. when i get a record player, i am going to set aside $100 from my paycheck to buy vinyl there. we came home, then everyone else came home, and we gathered in the living room to eat apple pie and watch one of chris' purchases, the jerk.

unfortunately, everyone but chris, josie, and graylan were way too tired to stay up and enjoy the meteor shower at 2am.