my presence online might be a little bit sparse over the next week or so. not that i've been around lately, but i guess if you see me online at all between now and next weekend, you have my permission to inflict pain upon me. :(

i have three projects due next week, two of which are some form of oral presentation. the 20 minute one is worrying me a little. the japanese skit shouldn't be too bad. 4 minutes. just have to memorize, that's all. x_x i wrote the script last night for my group and, well, it might be nice and perfect, but it's really long. it's four pages, typed. not double spaced. and that has to be memorized by wednesday? yeah, not happening. it's probably way too long, so we'll cut some stuff.

i was supposed to work tomorrow at 5:00am, but i asked for it off for the sake of my grades. x_x

speaking of "grades", i should really be calling them "marks", shouldn't i? i nearly did, but i've noticed that i'm censoring my dialect on here as much as i can, and it's mostly subconscious. i thoroughly read this article on wikipedia yesterday (i don't care if it's factually disputed or not). it's about canadian english, and there are lots of extra things you can read as well. i found it interesting in the same way i find online tests interesting. they tell you what you already know, and somehow that's just plain cool. and you can't help but tell everyone you know about it. so, yeah. i found the spelling and vocabulary sections particularly interesting. i notice that i use defense more than defence. i'm going to have to break that habit.

finally, a secret santa update. i have all nine people's info, so i finished my secret santa program on my calculator and ran it. let me just say that it's going to be really interesting this year. :D at least i think so. i'll send out everyone's info once i get confirmation on kley's address, and stuff. she still has to reply to me on facebook. x_x

you know what? if someone was going to organize it this year, i'm glad it's me. :D everyone came to me last year for suggestions and they told me who they had, so secret santa wasn't such a secret for me. >_> if i'll end up being the man with the info, might as well organize it, right? :D only sucky thing is i know who has me. :(

one quick question before i end this thing, what was the limit we had last year? o_o i forget. was it $20? $15? $10? @_@ i totally forget. if anyone wants it to be any different than what it was, let me know also.

here's a link. enjoy the video. especially you, hammy. why? because.

yesterday was supposed to be my first saturday off from work in, like, three months. the fact that i had sunday off as well made it even better, so i was excited. but i got called in to work yesterday. talk about sucky. :( oh well. i also found out yesterday that my work has increased the starting wage by two dollars, but i get squat (because i'm above what they're increasing it to). so now i'm all upset over this again, just like i was when i first found out they were going to do it.

i should really be studying and doing homework. i have a physiology quiz tomorrow, and i missed a lot of stuff in that class. so i need to study extra hard. but i haven't even started. how awful. :( i also have a japanese vocab quiz, as well as some homework to do. but that won't take very long (an hour, tops).

okay, so secret santa is definitely on again this year. those who have expressed interest this year are the following:

• me, of course
• venuswillow
• usa
• hammy
• lbeth
• jen
• ami
• jbeth
• kley

i'd use the list of addresses from last year, but we've got a couple more people this year. i don't think any of us have moved, have we? so if i could get everyone to resend me their info (just so i know it's updated for sure), that would be great. name, address, phone number, please. (hammy says a phone number is needed to send to canada, so i don't know. o_O) also, if you have an updated wishlist online somewhere (like amazon, or something), please mention it or provide a link. if you want to give some info about what kinds of stuff you like, feel free to mention it. just in case the person who gets you doesn't know you that well. >_> thenetferret@yahoo.com is the address to send all this to. :D

let's set a deadline. how's friday? that should be enough time for people to send in their info, right? and maybe that'll be enough time for people who aren't on the above list to contact me and get involved. tanya? karl? scot, even? >_>

i'm starving. i think i'm going to make something to eat and then study. x_x

this morning i went to get a pepsi out of that machine that has been giving me two bottles.

it gave me not one, not two, not three, but FOUR bottles of pepsi. it was exceedingly difficult to get it out of the stupid little slot (it's hard enough trying to get two out), but it was worth it. $1.50 well spent. :D i gave my sister two bottles. aren't i nice?

there are toaster ovens on sale at my work for $20. i want one! o_o but my bakery manager got the last one. >:O i hope we get more.

i've been playing the sims 2 pets lately. and maplestory. i rather enjoyed my five day weekend. actually, now that i think about it, it was six days. school's back in today, but i don't have class on thursdays at all. so yeah. :D i still worked today, though. and back to school tomorrow. :( i was a good little boy and i did the majority of my kanji homework last night. the time consuming bit, at least. stupid stroke order. i'll study for my japanese vocab quiz tomorrow and i'll finish the rest of my kanji homework later tonight after my sister goes to bed. she's playing the sims 2 pets now. what can we say? we love making pets. :D i should make a good ol' sims post and show you the breeds i've invented. :D and the new grep family i started. it's a legacy family. :D

i don't know if i should post this or not because it may be too late. do you folks think it's too late for secret santa? x_x if not, we need to organize this ASAP and have things sent out before november is over (for the canadian folks, at least). so that's two weeks. well, it's not like we're strict. i think half of us were late sending out last year. no big deal, but the sooner the better. i'll volunteer to organize if we do it. i wrote a program on my graphing calculator which randomly pairs things up, so i can program our names into that if we go ahead with this. any people who are up for it please comment on this entry. hopefully nobody's packages get lost in the mail this year (every year someone's does x_x).

we'll see how short i can make this. i always say that and it ends up being a novel.

see? this is already getting way bigger than i wanted.

anyway, today (yesterday, technically) was day two of my five day weekend. by the end, work will consume three of the five days (two down, one to go), one will consist of working on an ecology presentation (tomorrow/today), and one will be used for japanese homework (wednesday). how joyous.

i have this really weird thing with carrots these days. we buy these mini-carrots in a bag… and whenever i eat them, i eat dozens at a time. like they're chips, or something. we started buying the larger bags, but i still end up eating half of them in one sitting. x_x my stomach hurts.

a word about nana. i'm not sure how much i should talk about. today i watched up to episode 28. the end is nigh. :( episode 50 is the end, right? it's kind of sad, really. i hate thinking of this show ending. it's not exactly the kind of show i can watch over and over repeatedly… because i'll want to thwap hachi's first boyfriends every time they appear on the screen. >_> okay, i'll just spoil everything now. i'll use the more feature just in case. >:D and if you don't care you don't have to click. there won't be any more oh-so-important information about my oh-so-exciting life. just nana rambling with spoilage. (more…)

i'm watching some people debate rumsfeld's time in cabinet. (yay, by the way! democrats for the win! even though i think the democratic party isn't liberal enough! :D still!). anway, one rumsfeld supporter just said that "we were very successful in afghanistan." literally as i was typing this, once again he just stated that "we did well in afghanistan. . . . we changed that system." you have no idea how badly i want to thwap this guy with something made of metal. i just went and figured out who this retard is. i just had to know, even though i'm sure you don't care.

what kind of dream world are you people living in? and by "you people" i don't literally mean the people immediately reading this. well, maybe i do. i don't know who'll come along and read this.

the war in afghanistan isn't even over! while the current mission is NATO-led, america still has 18 000 troops there. does that sound "successful" to anyone? these days i'm hearing about canadian soldiers being killed all the time. yeah. successful. for someone who's so blatantly conservative, and never mind the other troops that are part of NATO, way to support your own troops, mr. zakheim.

i need to stop watching american news. like, right now. srsly.

the mother of the family in the apartment below us needs some serious help. i'm not just saying that. just moments ago she was yelling so loud that i could hear every word through the floor. i've never heard a mother drop the F-bomb so many times, especially at that volume. i feel so sorry for her children. this is abuse, as far as i'm concerned. i wish i could call child services on her, or something. i don't think they'd do anything, would they? any advice on what i should do? :( i hear her screaming and yelling and using extremely foul language with her children all the time, and it's not like the walls and floor are horribly thin either. she just screams that loud. this time i'm pretty sure she was yelling at her husband, though, but you can guarantee those kids can hear every word she's saying. hell, if i can hear her, i'm sure they can.

why is the world so messed up? :(

first off, i actually remembered my dream from last night! that in itself is really rare. secondly, it was in japanese! ._. i met anza in my dream. i spoke to her in broken japanese, but we got along fine. we were in some sort of game… where we had to pretend to be students, or something. and my japanese teacher was the teacher. and at the end we opened up our desks (they were the kind where the entire top opens) and there was a big slab of bread in there. o_o and then we had to fill it with stuff and roll it up (i don't know what kind of messed up cuisine that is).

this doesn't really help the fact that anza is in north america right now and i'm missing out. ;_; she needs to give more notice when she comes, especially when her and her band go to new york pretty much every time. why not vancouver, or something? :( even LA would be better than NY.

anyway, enough of that. i'm not even going to talk about work because i'm 100 times more pissed off at it as i was before (yes, i had a very bad day yesterday). i'm going to be late for school if i don't go now. i have a quiz in japanese and a bio lab final tonight at 6:00. i should really study for that, shouldn't i? >_>

and thank you for the updates, hammy. it's good to know that star trek really can awaken the passion in anyone. >;P

i guess now is probably a bad time to start my japanese homework that's due tomorrow. oh well, it should be easy. i'll study kanji tomorrow. give me an hour and i'll have them memorized, no problem. writing and all.

i forgot to mention sea monkeys!! although i'm not sure hammy wants to hear this. in my last bio lab we played with sea monkeys. :) which are actually Artemia salina ("brine shrimp" is a more accurate common name). i don't really like calling them sea monkeys, but i will for hammy. we tested what kind of conditions they like living in the best. long story short, we had to count the total number of sea monkeys at the end of each test. there was a problem though, and we had to ask whether or not to count the dead bodies. >_>;;; poor things. on the other hand, there were lots of unhatched eggs, and we got to see a few of them in the process of hatching. :D it's pretty cool under the microscope. poor little things are swimming like crazy, struggling to get out of that egg.

anyway, enough about that crap. have i ever mentioned the cursed pepsi machine outside of my work? ugh, i hate vending machines, let me tell you. this one pepsi machine has eaten at least $4 without vending anything. but i keep on trying to buy stuff from it because i prefer pepsi to coke. for a while, though, i was mad at the machine and i bought from the coke one next to it. well, today i bought a pepsi from it and, as if karma was working its magic, the machine spit out two bottles of pepsi. *_* i was like, "YES! FINALLY!" i should also mention it's very difficult to get two bottles out of those machines when the slot they come out of is really tiny. anyway, yeah. on my bus ride home i really struggled whether or not to share my free pop. :( i'm normally a really selfish person like that, and i'll probably need the caffeine in the morning, but i ended up giving the extra pop to my sister. aren't i nice? :( i swear, i'm converting to buddhism without even realizing it.

i hate this snow crap. it snowed here about a week ago and it hasn't melted. not very often does the first snowfall linger this long. well, from what i've noticed. maybe i'm still used to southern alberta where you'll have snow for two days, yellow grass for two days, snow for two days, yellow grass for two days. craziness going on down there. i have a feeling this snow we have now will be around till march, so i'm not counting on it melting. i've been wearing my lovely prison orange puffy coat, and i'm doing just fine. :D

STUPID SIMS. i got it to work, by the way. that's computers for you. i just can't load up certain families, for some reason. i'm hoping if i leave that alone long enough it'll fix itself too. >_> so, yeah, i've been playing that all night. after working like 10 hours at work. the time it takes to train new people cancels out any "progress" they make during their shift. i hope they get skilled, and fast, because i'm still dying here.

tomorrow my sister and i are going to west edmonton mall. :D haven't been in a while. i really need new work shoes for work (the pair i have now didn't even last a year! cheap! >:O), and maybe some new black pants for work. and other stuff i forget. i still want a wii. it's all i can think about now, actually. *eyes that california trip savings account* :(

okay, homework. for realz. i shall leave you with yet another amusing clip. :D same sort of thing… an english lesson for japanese people, but this one is, uh… graphic. well, the language at least. i'm still in shock that there are english lessons that teach this crap. don't teach japanese people these things! X_X but it's fun to laugh at. i love this chick's examples of when to use these sexual phrases. "come on, toshi! come on! come on! toshi! come on! come on, toshi!" and i nearly peed myself when she used examples of different subjects (i/you/we/she, etc.). i don't want to ruin it for you. >:D just watch it.

i bought the sims 2 pets today. i'm having technical difficulties. -_- i can load the game up, but when i try to load a family up, it stops half way through, the music goes into seizures, and it eventually closes (or crashes followed by a lovely error). i checked help pages and i updated the drivers that were supposedly problematic. yeah, didn't help. at least i got to make cute little pets, and it's so fun and cool. i can't play them though. -_-

i don't really have the energy to deal with this right now. i've been trying to fix this for the past few hours, and i'm sick of it.

today while i was buying the game (at eb games, i went to a different one that actually has decent service… the only one i'll ever shop at, to be honest) i think i was the only one that wasn't buying a copy of final fantasy xii… o_o i joked with the clerk about that. :D i don't really play final fantasy, so i didn't really know. the lineup was huge, so it didn't take me long to figure out what was going on.

while at eb games, i saw a video of the nintendo pee wii in action. i pretty much just heard of this motion-type controller, never really seeing how it worked. actually, i have seen people apparently using it, but that's about it. just the people. you couldn't see what they were playing and what their motions were doing on-screen. and, yeah, today i did. i want a wii. o_o i can't really afford it, and it's coming out in less than two weeks. :( i don't really have time to play it, so maybe that's a blessing in disguise. i think i might buy it for myself in december if i have the money. >_> i doubt anyone will buy it for me for christmas, but if i buy myself one, they can get me games. >:D that zelda game looks awesome. *_* and you can play gamecube games on the wii, so that's cool. two-for-one. i've only ever played gamecube a handful of times, to be honest. i've kind of shunned console gaming for the past few years. hmmm, i guess i should mention that i originally wanted a ps3. until i saw the price tag. wii is half the price and actually appears to be more innovative. and actually has a few games in its lineup that i want to play. so, yeah, i want one! :( i also want to go to california in the summer. >_<

halloween. i didn't do anything for it. :D not a single thing. i will, however, be buying cheap candy in the very near future. >_>

work. things are improving. we've got three trainees all of a sudden. @_@!!! how crazy is that!? so that makes five people we've trained in the past month? the first two left after a couple days. i hope at least a couple of our current ones stay. it's kind of interesting how all three of them are racially different. one's asian (chinese, i think?), one's black, and one's east indian. we're turning into the united nations in the bakery department. >D

i have a final on monday. o_o yes, already. it's my ecology lab final. the weeks following the final are our research proposal presentations, which is worth more than the final. as if mondays aren't bad enough for me, i've got class for several hours in a row, then a final in the evening. x_x

i have so much japanese homework all of a sudden. some due friday, some due next week. i think i'll just do it all at once. and then study for the kanji quiz on friday. x_x yeah, i'll do that tomorrow. i'm at the point now where i really hope i get an A in this class. i have one more midterm coming up (i hate classes that have two midterms) and if i get a good mark on that, i think i might have a chance. i've done some rough calculations of what kind of grades i'll need on the upcoming exams, and A+ is just out of reach for me. if i do well on the final, i'm just barely in the A range. which is good because at my school, an A is considered a 4.0 (is it like that everywhere?). A+ is kind of pointless, isn't it?

bleh… i should go to bed. work at 7:00 in the morning, once again. :( i'll leave you with a really funny video i found on youtube recently. really, it's hilarious. i can't stop laughing at it. the intro is boring, but just stick with it. the actual content is gold. it's an english lesson for japanese people of the highest quality possible.

judy, come on!