It's vertically challenged!

So I was talking to my teacher Bob, and I was looking up into his face to talk to him and I realized something:

Bob is really tall.

Either that or I'm just very short. It's probably that I'm short. This reminds me of the time in the ninth grade when I was walking down the hall with my friend Travis. We were almost to class when he looked down at me and went "You're short." I just looked at him like "Really?"

It was funny at the time because he told me that like it was something that he had just realized, even though he's been taller than me since kindergarten.

Boxes and Boxes

My mother is on this renovation kick and is in the process of ridding our house of all its carpeting. She already did the living room, spare room and downstairs hallway sometime during the summer (I think, somewhere around that time), and got the rec room the other day. She is now in the process of having the upstairs done. My brothers' room is done and the carpet in the hallway is gone, now my room is being worked on.

So we had to take everything out of my room. The walls are also being painted so I had to take everything off the walls too. My walls look so bare without all the pictures and posters on it, it bothers me muchly.

So tonight I had to cart everything out of my room. I emptied the contents of my closet into a few milk crates and my brothers moved those to the living room. Then I cleaned off everything from the tops of the bureaus. Everything's piled in the living room (along with my bed). I have a lot of stuff. My two bureaus and my bookcase were also moved out into the upstairs bathroom and my parents' bedroom.

Actually when I woke up this morning my brothers' bureau and a bunch of pillows in the bathroom almost right in front of the toilet. That was kind of awkward. The bathtub is now inaccessible.

We had to empty out my bookcase before we moved it too and we didn't have any more boxes to put the books in, so we had to pile them up on one of the shelves in the hall closet. The shelf is now sagging in the middle under all the weight. It's actually quite funny. I have a lot of books.

My room looks really weird without the carpet and doors. There's an echo in it now too. Twice my brothers have shown up with weird stuff they found under the carpet or behind the baseboards. So far they've found a piece of a children's puzzle and a little cardboard Barbie picture.

Now I just have to pick out a colour to paint the room. According to my dad we're painting the whole room one colour and the ceiling's gonna be white. I don't get a choice in the matter, all I get to choose is the colour (which is gonna be some shade of blue).

Memoirs of a Girl Guide

Apparently it's around the time for the Girl Scouts/Guides/whatever to go around selling cookies. But I could be wrong, I don't really care either way. But I was on STFU, Parents and there's a new post up about a mother posting on Facebook that her daughter is selling cookies and another woman is making a big deal about the mother posting it on Facebook, or something... I dunno (here).

I was reading some of them comments and there were people on both sides of the argument. Some thought that parents should leave the cookie selling solely to their daughters, and there were others that said that there was nothing wrong with parents letting other people know that there were cookies available.

I personally don't care either way. Selling cookies is apparently supposed to teach Girl Guides/Scouts lessons or something, I don't know how accurate that is because I sold cookies for years when I was in Girl Guides and the only thing I learned was that I hate fundraising.

Some of the commentors on that post shared some of their experiences with selling cookies during their childhood, and I'm going to put mine here simply because I can (it also may or may not have anything to do with the homework I'm procrastinating on right now).

I was in Girl Scouts from Sparks up to when I quit before my last year of Pathfinders (so that's from about age 5/6 to my early teens), so that's a lot of cookie selling and fundraising in general.

Let me just begin by saying that I did enjoy a lot of my time in Girl Scouts... when I was younger. But as I got older I had to deal with a troop leader who I did not like and who did not like me, and other girls who I wasn't really close to. I had maybe one or two close friends by the time I reached Pathfinders, but to get to that point I had to last through cliques, bullies, other girls who were nice but who I didn't really spend a lot of time with, and girls I disliked from school. I didn't always get along with the others in my group, probably because as I got older I began losing interest in the whole Girl Guide deal. I mean, we went camping once, and that experience was ruined for me because I had a cold the whole time and I was stuck on an island with a bunch of women/girls I hated/didn't like. The camping aspect was fun, but I could've done without the company and the cold. (Seriously, my brothers were in Beavers (Boy Scouts) and they went camping and they had loads more fun. Probably because their activities were more entertaining and their group wasn't made up of annoying teenage girls and two dumb leaders.)

We went to Ottawa once too, which was pretty fun, but mostly what happened on that trip was that my self-esteem died a painful death and I ultimately did not have a good time. (The Canada Day fireworks were awesome as all hell though, and we got to see Kalan Porter sing live back when he was popular.)

But yeah, cookies. The way we sold cookies in my area was that us girls were each given a certain amount of boxes of cookies and sent out to sell them door-to-door. Sometimes girls grouped together to sell cookies, or maybe that was required, I don't really remember. But I was usually paired up with my 'cousin'/bully/'friend'/whatever because we were close friends when we were kids (because I was a stupid child) and because our mothers were close friends. The way we sold cookies was that either my mother or her mother would drive us in a vehicle from house to house and me and my 'cousin'/etc would get out and go up to the door to try and make a sale. Sometimes my mother would come up with us, other times she'd stay in the car, but we mostly made the sales ourselves.

I don't remember there being any kind of competition about who sold the most boxes, and I'm pretty sure there were no prizes at the end. We didn't really get anything out of it unless the money was going specifically for a prearranged trip (I think we went on a total of about 3 or 4 of those, including Ottawa).

My father never took boxes of cookies to work to sell and we didn't use order forms so there was none of that to fool around with. But the whole thing was basically the girls selling the cookies with some help from the parents. As we got older, we were able to just go around from door to door for a certain number of houses and get in the car at the end of the street, or something (I live in a small town).

Ultimately, selling cookies didn't teach me anything, except that I hate fundraising. And that's mostly because we always went out during the morning in shitty weather lugging around boxes of cookies that probably weighed half as much as we did. As I got older, I dreaded cookie selling time, I was also getting fed up with Girl Scouts in general, and that was a combination of uninteresting (to me) activities and not liking the people i was with.

I had to make a poncho out of a fleece blanket two years in a row, and I fucking hated it. I mean, the first poncho wasn't that bad, I like making crafts and it was kind of fun, but it got annoying fast. Then the year after that, the troop leader had us make another one. I told her that we had already done one last year (she should know, she was fucking there!) and that I was not interested in making another one, especially since I didn't even use the first one. But she forced me to make it, so now I have two ponchos made from fleece blankets and I don't use either of them. I'm pretty sure I just stuck them in the closet on the day they were made and haven't looked for them since. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they've been eaten by moths, or something.

Thinking back on it, I don't have many good memories of my Girl Guides experience, especially from the later years. I'm sure it's good for a lot of people, but it just was not for me. I would've quit a lot sooner (probably in Guides instead of Pathfinders) if my mother had let me. But she was all like "You should stay for your Canadian Cord because it'll look good on your resume and [the other girls] are going to get it and blah blah blah". That's really the only reason that she didn't let me quit, never mind that I was bored stiff the whole time, never mind that the leader was a bitch and we didn't like each other, never mind that I hated most of the other girls and the ones I didn't hate proved to be pretty shoddy friends later on, apparently the Canadian Cord would've been worth all that.

Well, I quit before my final year so I never got my Canadian Cord. I'm not even sure what the hell that is anyway. I think it's some kind of award that the Governor General (or someone high up in the government) presents to you and there's a ceremony and all that. Big fucking deal, I don't have patience for all that. And then my mom finally got tired of my complaining and let me quit.

Noise Makers Ahoy!

My first post of 2011, at 3:30am... you know, because.

We just got a new computer tower for our desktop computer, so we now have Windows 7 in the house. Should be interesting to see what goes on there. Oh! And we can get the wallpaper on it to change pictures every 30 seconds! Me and my brothers were very entertained by that. Our father was considerably less impressed, mostly because we were wasting time with that instead of setting up his email on Outlook. But that's what he gets for making me do it instead of learning how to do it himself.

While we had the other tower unhooked, I brought our old Windows 98 computer (the 98 Brick) up from the basement so that I could get some stuff off of it and be done with it for good. I finally did manage to get my flash drives to work on it (after about an hour of trying to figure out how... God bless Google). I got a bunch of pictures and old files and 3 or so gigs of music and stand up comedy.

I count that as my final major accomplishment of 2010, since I've been trying for years to get things off that computer. I'm quite proud of myself actually.

So it's 2011 now. Wow. I'll be finished college this year, and hopefully I'll be able to get a full-time job this year too.

Another thing to look forward to is the release of the final volume of With the Light (yes, I'm still on that). I'm hoping for closure with this series. I want a more concrete ending this time around. I mentioned this when I did my autism/WTL project for my class and my teacher asked me why I didn't just imagine an ending on my own. I told him that I did, and it was that Hikaru grew up to be a happy, cheerful working adult and that he was still surrounded by his family and friends (except Masato's mother, unless she changes her tune). But it's one thing to imagine something in your head, and quite another to actually see it. Even though Hikaru is a fictional character, I really want to see a happy ending for him with my own eyes.

Also, I finally discovered the name of that fat kid with glasses, I'm pretty sure it's Gozaru-kun. I somehow missed it the first dozen times I'd read the series, but I got it now. Now I know his name, but I'll probably always call him 'the fat kid with glasses'... even though I think he only actually has glasses near the end of the series.