MY BIRTHDAY!

[rena_librarian]

HTML question for those with fancier journals and more time to play around than I: How you make one of those little scrolling thingies, where the text moves across from one side to the other? (They're in Kade's journal all the time.)

Okay. I feel better now. Mom made stuffed crust pizza (yes, it can be homemade! I'm the one that figured it out!) for dinner and then we had ice cream cake (my preference) and cupcakes, one of which had a candle in it. ^_^ And I got balloons! I haven't gotten birthday balloons in forever, and I don't know that I've ever had ones with helium in them. ^_^ There's two normal purple ones and one mylar one that's shaped like a heart, also purple, and it says "Happy Birthday" and all that. ^_^ And Mom said whenever we do go to St. Louis, I can take that one and refill it. (Any mylar balloon can be refilled as many times as you want, so long as you never tear it. It reseals itself. When the boys were born they refilled some of the really fancy mylars from when Madison was born, and that was over three years apart.)

Alicia left me SIXTEEN voice messages today. Like one was Madison singing "Happy Birthday" and then one was all, "Can you hear me now?" for like, five minutes and then "Happy Birthday!" and then one was Maddy singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and one was "You did know today's your birthday, right? 'Cause, you know, in case you forgot..." for five minutes. It was hilarious. I started listening to them when I left my bank and they were still going when I got to Wal*Mart. (And that's no small drive!!) Jennifer left me one, too, sang "Happy Birthday" to me. Then when Jason got home he was GOING to leave one, but I had already turned my phone on and actually picked up, and it freaked him out. ^_^ Apparently Alicia thought I worked until eight, which has never happened, but whatever. ^_^ So that was funny, he barely remembered to say "Happy Birthday."

And speaking of my bank, today was PAYDAY!!! YAY! It's great--I'm making less per hour than I did at SubWay, and there's more deductions because I have insurance now, but my total paycheck was more than it used to be because I'm working more hours. YAY! And I now have just over $2,000 in the bank--time to go CAR SHOPPING! (My manager, whenever I ask, says I'm doing a fine job, and starting next Monday my hourly pay is going up another 25 cents! YAY!)

So after work I deposited my check, then trucked over to Wal*Mart and bought myself a birthday present...I got a second piercing in my ears. ^_^ Not up in the cartilage or anything, but just up and back from where the first holes are. I plan on wearing small studs or tiny hoops in them and wearing my usual dangly earrings in the first ("main," in my mind) holes. I've been wanting to do it since I was fourteen, and Mom said no, but then much later I pointed out that once I turned eighteen she couldn't stop me. She agreed and I've been meaning to do it since my last birthday, but it's one of those things that I kind of forgot about until a few weeks ago. (I think it was a question on one of those quizzes that reminded me, lol.) So I told myself I ought to do it for my birthday, and I decided to go ahead. And I totally did. Just up and randomly did it because I could. (Well, not totally randomly--the first piercings were my 12th birthday present and I thought it was fitting to go back on another birthday...but I don't plan on getting any more, it's not like I have the desire to get a piercing on every seventh birthday from now on!) Discovering that the price of a piercing had gone down since my first ones didn't hurt, either...I mean, it's still "free with the purchase of piercer earrings," but the earrings are much cheaper.

Here's the kicker--I haven't told Mom or Dad. And I'm not going to. I'm not going to do a single thing to hide them, like cover them with my hair when I'm around them, but for all the fuss they made when I first suggested it ("You'll look like a punk, that's not ladylike, it'll be SO obvious..."), I just want to see if they even notice. The longer it takes them, the harder they fall. I'm going to be totally honest about it, but they have to see them first. Methinks it'll probably be next week when I have reason to wear earrings again. Since I can only have tiny studs in at work, I'm just going to wear the piercer earrings this week and nothing in the main holes. So on Monday, when I go to school and wear two pairs of earrings, then Mom will probably notice, but I highly doubt she'll see them before that.

Mom and Dad only got me one present. However, I have to say, if I had been handed back my birthday list (yes, I make a list, at Mom's request) and told to pick one thing off of it and that would be the one thing I was getting--well, they picked it.

I GOT A PS2!!!!! *nances around with joy* And it's the new little skinny one at that. I wouldn't have cared one bit either way, but that's what happened to be at the store.

So now I can play the pseudo-DDR game that came with my DDR pad! I played it for about an hour with the normal contorller, and once I figured out which button was which (they're X, O, A, and D in my mind, lol, not X, O, triangle, and square, and yeah, this game doesn't use up/down/left/right like DDR does, which makes it much more difficult) I was zipping through the ranks. Then I played around and figured out that all my "zipping" was worthless without a memory card (which I figured would be the case), unless I wanted to leave the PS2 on constantly. Nuh-uh, not happening. So then I hooked up the DDR pad and tried stomping it out just once, but the silly people didn't put X, O, A, and D in the same positions on the pad as they did on the basic controller (X and A are backwards on the pad compared to where they are on the controller), so I got all confused and was all sucky again, lol. (And before anyone asks, rotating the pad wouldn't help, I'd have to flip it over and use it upside-down. Which, theoretically, could be done, but I would have to like, mark out the back with masking tape or something...) And the music is kinda sucky on this game, especailly compared to DDR. Clearly DDR put a lot of time in effort into having top-quality music and graphics.

But anyway, now my dilemma is this: Do I want to spend $20 tomorrow on a memory card so I can advance in the sucky-ish game (I don't HATE it...) and save my progress (I doubt that it'd take more than three weeks to beat it all the way through, and I think I'm WAY overestimating by giving it that long, even given my lack of skill/talent), or do I want to spend it on real DDR so I can have better music, better graphics, and more logical (though not necessarily easier) gameplay but be stuck at entry level until I can get another $20 for a memory card? (Kat, you'd be the one to answer that.) And especially with a Game eXchange coming to Mountain Home soon, I hesitate to buy anything at Hastings... *Is looking forward to buying other PS2 games cheap! Especially the LotR games!*

DDR has such great music. Really. The game I have now, I can't remember a single thing of the music that I repeated for an hour, whereas DDR, you can come away having heard a song off of it once and have it stuck in your head for forever. (Kat--what's the name of the song that had the really pretty Asian girl in the background and started "Came in from a rainy Thursday..."? I've had it stuck in my head for like, a week-and-a-half now...) Seriously, "Butterfly" by SMile DK is one of my all-time favorite songs, and it's from DDR. "Ai, ai, ai, I'm your little butterfly, green, black and blue, make the colors in the sky..." And on that note, I'm going to bed, I'm going to wake up in, like, six hours so I have time to post this for you all, lol...

Comments

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

Alright! I'm only answering ONE of your long posts today. Since I can't tackle it otherwise. Because I am lazy.
The marquee? Tis *marquee* TEXT HERE */marquee*. Just remove the * and replace it with the approperate > and or <.
Balloons and Pizza make life much better. *Pat Pat* Mylar? Sounds interesting. I like balloons with helium. They float.
St. Louis? What's in St. Louis? I'm an ignorant forgiener. I know they have a hockey team. And some weird monument. And its a city.
Madison sounds adorable. Did I tell you my name was going to be Madeline if my dad wasn't a twit who didn't like the name? My mom wanted to call me Maddy. I'm an honorary Maddy. Not quite in the classifications of a regular birth-name Maddy, but almost there. Maddy sounds like... a Crazy name to me. Also the name of my friend's lovely doggie. Who's a bit senile. Maybe thats why I think its a nutty name... More like the people who possess it are nutty, or perhaps doomed to be...
Whooooooo! 25 cents!! *Has no idea why this is so great*
CAR! *Has an idea of why this is great*
... I want to see them piercings now. Thanks alot.
YAY! PS2!
... You some video game junkie? They make me so FRUSTERATED. I haven't beaten my Gamecube ROTK game for the two years I've had it. I get so far, set on easy, and I fail over and over.... I'm not one for repeatitive tasks, me suppose. But its the same with movies in which everything goes wrong. I was pacing and bouncing and crying all through "Deep Impact". I just do that.

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

Oooh, HTML...wow... ^_^

Mylar balloons are the shiny ones. We all know how Rena is with shiny objects. And they ALL have helium!

What's in St. Louis? Just my siblings. ^_^ (Well, that and the Gateway Memorial Arch--probably the "weird monument" you remember--and a million-square-foot mall.)

Maddy IS adorable! *must post pics someday* Yes, you did tell me your name was to he Madeline. I have to admit I think you got the better choice. ^_^

25 cents is a quarter of a dollar, hon, and if I get one more raise like that next time around, then my hourly rate is back up to what it was at SubWay.

CAR! SQUEE!

The piercings? They're nothing special, really. I can't really post a pic 'cause I don't have one. Ummm...I could lay my head down on a scanner, I guess, if mine was working. (I'm not about to pull that at school...)

Mmmm...I like CERTAIN video games. (Namely, ones with a plot that I like, lol. I LOVE the Sonic the Hedgehog games because I follow the comic book series, and you know why I like the LotR games.) I'm okay at the Mario games. But random fighting or games that are also board games? Not so much. (Except on the computer, I like having Boggle on the computer because it's so hard to talk my family into playing it with me, 'cause I always win, lol.)

I've played GameCube RotK! Shelly has it! We thought about using it in D2D as one of the games they played, but realized that it would give away plot points to the Fellowship and they didn't need to know that. ^_-

But no, I'm not a junkie as in I sit for fourteen hours a day and do nothing else. I'll sit for an hour or two at a time and play. (I like to take a single game and over time beat it all the way to the end, become proficient at it, rather than dabble in fifteen different games.) I dooooo get frustrated sometimes when I can't figure something out, but then when it clicks it's very nice. ^_^ *thinks* Over the course of my life I've hung on to five working video games (sometimes I would get a system used and it would die on me and made it worthless to play it, and sometimes I ended up not liking the game and taking it back) and beaten them all to the end. (Super Mario on the Nintendo, Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins on the GameBoy, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Shenmue on the DreamCast, and Mario Is Missing! on my grandma's Super Nintendo during a two-week visit. ^_^)

Gah. STILL haven't watched Deep Impact. Or Ash Wednesday. Or The War. What is wrong with me???

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

We aren't sure;)

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

I tried the marquee thing and couldn't get it to work. Gah. (Do I need to be in rich text or NOT in rich text or WHAT?)

I bought The Princess Bride Special Edition DVD yesterday, I'll likely watch the extras on that before anything else. *shrug*

*desparately awaiting weekend*

How long has it been since you got a readonly? I haven't had one all this week...

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

I haven't got a read-only for a long time. But we shouldn't speak of it, or it will come back.
... *Wants princess bride*
Me not have "Princess Bride"? Inconseivable!

You can't be in rich text mode.

I can't wait till weekend because it means SPRING BREAK for me. For 2 weeks!

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

Okay. No memes/quizzes in rich text. *nods, taking notes*

I had PB on video, but there's documentaries and stuff on the DVD, of course...plus my viedo was crappy, I taped it off TV and I'm not so great coming back from commercials is there's not a thing saying "And now back to -insert program name here-." Which are not so popular anymore! That's why I just tape the commercials when I tape Lost, I don't want to miss a single second.

GAAAAH! This WEEK (yes, SINGULAR) was my Spring Break!!! Not fair!

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

Awww!
*Pat Pat*
Look at the bright side. I'll probably be online when you are most of the time, and we can do fun interesting things with DLBE.

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I'm online (generally, if RL doesn't interfere)

--from after 5-ish to whenever, but before 7:30 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
--11-1 and 2:30-4:30 on Tuesday and Thursday

You might want to make a note of that as that'll apply until the end of the semester...

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

Is that translated into "Sara-Time"?

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

Oh! No! Totally forgot about that. That's my time. Central time. I think you're two hours behind me. (I'd have to look...)

[thehobbitwaffle.livejournal.com]

Yup, your right, according to me mum.

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

Pacific Time for you, then, right? I'm Central Time. (You know when they say, "Eight, seven central!"? That's me! ^_-)