Biking and whatnot

I just rode my bike for the first time. I biked ~1.5 miles to the nearest Starbucks and back (I didn't get a drink because I didn't feel like one/didn't bring any money). It was immensely tiring getting there because there was a minor grade going uphill, but going back was super fast and easy because it was a minor downhill grade. It was also awesome because a random guy on the street talked to me saying how awesome bikes were and congratulated me on recently getting a bike (I told him this was my first trial run on my new bike). He told me to watch out for crazy drivers.  : )

In other random news, my cat is sitting on my lap while I am typing up this blog post, so I have to lean forward because I can't put my laptop in my lap. However, she hasn't really been this cute and purring and loving recently, so it's awesome.  : )

And this morning was awesome. I woke up still kinda sleepy, and instead of falling back asleep I decided to get up and read. Reading is something I used to do a lot more when I was younger, and not so much now even though it's still one of my favorite activities. I find it's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for such a long time...there's the distraction of the computer and people on AIM and me wanting to talk to people in general, so very rarely do I shut everything down and go have some time to myself to go do my own thing without someone else's input...like read. Well, this morning I did for about 4 or 5 hours or so (I was reading a book by P.G. Wodehouse called "The Code of the Woosters" that Nisan recommended to me). I don't think I was reading completely consistently because at some point I got up to make breakfast and do other things, but it was still awesome and it started off my day completely right. Afterwards was when I decided to go ride my bike around for a little bit less than an hour and now I'm sitting here sleepily wondering what I should cook and thinking I should work on my MA. Although the sleepiness is making me want to put it off.  *shrugs*

Anyways, my rambling means I don't have much else to say, so I should probably stop.

*waves hi to the MystBlogs people who are seeing her blog for the first time*

Climbing trees and other things

So, yesterday I got to visit a couple of friends of mine, and we decided to go spend the day wandering around doing whatever we felt like and wherever the day happened to take us, which was absolutely awesome. It's been a while since I've just hung out with people and wandered around all day like that. It started off with going to a bookstore and buying four books: two recommendations that one of my friends gave me ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, and some book by a guy named Wodehouse, or something like that), one replacement for a book I used to have ("Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez, in Spanish of course), and a book of short stories called "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges book was something that I should have had in my book collection, but for whatever reason I didn't (I discovered this recently while organizing and alphabetizing my library for the first time), nevermind the fact that I read lots of his short stories in high school for the Spanish AP exam. So I'm very excited to have new books, although I know that I don't have any bookshelf room for them since 7.5 40" tall bookcases evidently is barely enough room to house my book collection.

After the bookstore, we picked up our other friend and wandered over to the coast and found a straw maze to wander around in, which was kinda fun. It wasn't incredibly hard, but we had fun screwing around in it anyways. There were a couple rooms in the middle that looked exactly like another room further towards the edge, so that was confusing unless you noticed that there were either more doors in the side or purple flowers in one room but not the other. We even discovered a rotating door! And we also kinda scared this little kid by sticking our hands through the hay bale really quickly from the other side.

Then we wandered down the coast, stopped on a beach and watched the parasailors and continued on towards a local college that had this climbing tree. It's this tree that someone tied a rope and a rope ladder to and so you climb up this rope ladder and keep on going up the tree until you reach the top, about 300 ft up. Only one of our group went past the rope ladder (my other friend and I are scaredycats :( ) and he ended up climbing all the way up to this natural chair formed from the trunk and 7 branches extending outwards like a spiderweb. I've decided that one of these days I need to get up the nerve to go up that tree because it sounds amazing, especially if you go up around sunset so you can see the sunset from above the trees while the forest gets increasingly shadowy below you. 

All-in-all it was an amazing day and it makes me miss living up here.  :(

In other news, I got an early Christmas present today! Mostly because I decided I couldn't wait until Christmas, so I decided to go buy it now. It's a bike! I asked my mom for one for Christmas, but we're going to be up at my parents' retirement home during Christmas and I'm flying up there because there's going to be snow on the ground and it's going to be too hard for me to drive up there. So my mom was just going to give me money for it, and I decided that I'd rather have a bike now so it'll make my commute to school easier. So whee!

Life is good and very exciting.  : )

No one ever takes "vaaht" when I sign up for things...

Did you ever have a name that is never taken when you sign up for things? Well, I do. "Vaaht" is available on almost everything, unless I've signed up for it and forgotten the password (like on Skype). It's actually quite awesome, as a consider Vaaht as good as my real name.

Anyways, I have a blog! As if I didn't have one before...but I have a blog! And hopefully it's much cooler than my old Xanga blogs which I refuse to update anymore. Hopefully less whiny as well.

Anyways, I figure I should write a first post so something comes up when you click on my blog. I really don't have too much to say right now...

I've been working on my MA and generally off the computer lately, partly because I've been at home, and partly because I've been so busy. School starts this week, so that should be cool. I'm TAing Intro Linguistics (whee! students who don't care about linguistics, or in general give a shit about anything!). Ah well. I'm also taking a guitar class (this week is the third week of class), so that's awesome. I'm also currently in the market for a bike, and I think I found a cheap one at Target that I want to get. I also discovered that I have a new love for sewing clothes, so with any luck I will be wearing the dress that I made to school on Thursday. So things are going fairly well, and hopefully they stay that way. My apartment is all clean for school starting, my kitten is appropriately attached to me enough that she'll hate it when school starts because I won't pay much attention to her anymore, and I've just spent the past week having fun with some friends of mine and in general trying to relax. In short, life is good.  :)