Today's rambling: Creative Fever
Written on Tuesday, Aug. 05, 2003 at 12:30 a.m.
while feeling a bit

I feel like reorganizing my diary again. Part of me would like to make a new page entitled "Contact", but the only things I'd have on there would be an email address and my AIM name! Even though the link to Notes and Guestbook could be put there, I know how annoying it would be to constantly have to click that link just to leave a message. So I'd rather keep them right here on the main page, within easy reach. My email is down at the bottom, by my copyright thingy, but I should probably move that up somewhere else as well. Or maybe I won't. I mean, it's there, it's functional...If anyone actually wanted to email me that desperately, I know they'd find it.

Hehe...I get like this sometimes, itching to reorganize and redo. It's almost like getting the urge to rearrange the furniture in a room! But there really isn't much else I can do at this point, so I'll just leave it all as is until a brilliant inspiration hits me. Unfortunately, I haven't stayed up late enough to get a brilliant inspiration (and all my best inspirations come in the wee hours of the morning)! I did get intrigued by the Guestmap thing (once I finally found out what it was), so of course I got one. :P I don't get many people here, so I doubt there'll be very many people posting on this thing, but it's a novelty and I like novelties. *grins*

Today, I got another wee care package from Jam, including some patterns for small soft toys! I'm excited to try those out...but first I need to convert metric measurements over to something I can understand. *laughs* Could someone tell me why America decided to use different measuring standards? Was it another one of those historical attempts at creating something distinctly American (like Mr. Webster changing and ruining perfectly good British spellings)? It certainly makes international communication difficult sometimes...for me, anyway, since I have no concepts of Celsius and metric and all that stuff. Maybe if I'd paid better attention in Chemistry class...

Parallel parking practice went wonderfully yet again. Unlike yesterday, where I messed up once with the cones and two or three times with cars, today I didn't make a single mistake. I parked perfectly within the cones, and after telling Mom that I'd figured out what I was doing wrong yesterday with real cars, we went back to that nearby apartment complex and tried again. I pulled up a little further away this time, and I didn't go as far forward as I had the last time. Other than the fact that I should have backed up a little more so my front bumper wasn't over the line (the car in front of me had been very far forward in their space as well), I was perfect!

I wanted to just sit there for a few minutes and let it soak in. As pretty much everyone can attest, parallel parking isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. And granted, on the second try (with a different car) I hit the curb, but with some help from Mom I still managed to park perfectly! I feel so confident about all that now. When I take my test on Friday, it won't be luck that allows me to park correctly, it'll be MAD SKILLZ. I am going to be so ready for this road test!

The only part that irritates me about it all is that I feel like getting my license is all but completely useless. Mom already told me that I won't be allowed to use her car (nice, huh?), and I can't afford to buy my own. What, then, is the use of even having a license? All my plans of being able to surprise Geoff by saying, "I'll drive down and meet you" are useless now. Mom keeps trying to suggest different things, like getting him to come up here and then driving out somewhere (in whose car? Not his, since he uses a stick shift!), but that's just stupid. It would be exactly as though I still had my permit and he was just there in the car to make sure I didn't crash into something. The point of the whole surprise thing was that they'd see me driving by myself. But yeah, I guess the most I'll be able to do now is just flash that little plastic rectangle and proudly announce that at least in theory, I am able to drive on my own.

I asked Geoff yesterday how one knows when to shift gears and all that, and he explained it all to me. He even demonstrated, briefly putting the car in a lower gear than it should have been in so that I could see what happened. I still don't know that I'd ever be able to drive a stick shift...not that I need to worry about it at this point, but still. It seems like such a mysterious skill, hehe!

Speaking of gadgets, there is still no word on my laptop. I'd thought that they were going to call us back by the 8th of August, but it turns out that I'd heard the wrong thing. Mom says they said nothing about calling us back, and she was going to call them today but forgot. I am still so angry about that. What idiots! I wish I'd never turned my poor little laptop into those people. Now, I don't know if I'll have a computer to take back to college. I am not dragging this demonic desktop with me. There are computers in the library and in the Comm building, so if worse comes to worse I'll just go there. But those Gateway morons are SOOOO not through with me yet. I'll bring in pointed sticks and threaten them if I have to.

I'm still in a creative mood, but I couldn't find a certain notebook that I needed. It had this little blurb I'd written a couple years ago, and I can't remember how it went so I went through all my boxes trying to find that notebook. But I have no idea where it is! From now on, I need to keep all my notebooks in one place! Who knew I even had that many, though...I'm a writer, that much is certain!