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

[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! ^_-)