the key to the art of cooking in space? duct tape. 8D

dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/24/space-cooking.html

'...though you have not seen him, you love him; you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible, glorious joy -'

Since it's the last night before my seventeeth, I thought I'd release her morning elegance
This mix been sitting on my iTunes for almost the past month in various forms. I'm too glad that it's finished and finally up. With it I suppose I've tried to grasp some sense of where I've been, the measures and shades of change of the last year.
But really, it's also shorthand for the range of music that has crept into my playlist and stayed with me the last year.
So, enjoy.
( (tracklisting below) )

( oh yes, and i'm still alive )

one ofesnetsap's recent posts got me wondering about why anyone bothers keeping up with the news at all. this spawned a thought process, that spawned a comment too long to be tactfully added to the end of her entry.


( so it's come under here, for anyone interested. )


but dear lord, the things my brain does sometimes disturbs me. i didn't just write a half-arsed impromptu treatise on...news, human knowledge and the state of the modern age, whatever. (headdesks repeatedly)
also, it's freaky, the way my brain can consider something then point to the universe as an answer.

i do unfortunately get a kick out of how uncannily accurate this thing can be.

Michele took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Shelves her ambitions and forgoes her desire for prestige as she prefers to take things easily and indulge her longing for comfort and security." Click here to read the rest of the results.

*blinks at trigonometry*

i'm pretty certain there was rum in my aunt's birthday cake (a chocolatey affair dotted chocolate puff balls on the surface, that was maybe had a diameter three quarters of that of a bicycle), my question is just how much. her office gave it to her (clearly, some in the human resource department have been very busy, or very well paid) and my wonderful relatives pressed us to take back at least a fifth of it.

i'm rarely this sleepy at seven plus, and i'm pretty darn certain i wasn't this woozy ten minutes ago.

and at that, i had coffee at around one when crystal, marasme and i wandered into coffee bean after ramlee burgers (freshly made before our eyes), and philosophical rambling over the KS Bull KI essays on knowledge and language. slightly optimistic, but if KI is going to continue in this vein of discussion, i can't think of a single reason why i won't be madly in love with it at the end of these two years.

now if there was only some way of bypassing that lovely placement test tomorrow morning.


i feel slightly drunk, to be sure. the signs are all there.
oh dear.

i know my mum had some yesterday evening (or perhaps the one before?), and seemed not to suffer any side effects. but she'd had a cup of coffee pretty late in the afternoon (something her system rarely can handle - and she functions on five cups a day) which probably means  so i'd expect the caffiene overruled it.

it's dinnertime now, the second-last day (and last proper day) of the holidays. the starhub set-top box thinggum blew maybe three days ago, something only rediscovered by my dad, because it slipped my mind, and my mum's.

all i can really think of doing is pulling the covers over my head - and only getting out of bed after all this fuss and bother is over.

Skyscraper by Carl Sandburg

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
   has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
   it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
   poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
   valleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
   out all day that give the building a soul of dream and
   thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
   for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
   the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
   parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
   sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
   and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
   grappling plans of business and questions of women
   in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
   earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
   hold together the stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
   mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
   architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
   and the press of time running into centuries, play on
   the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
   in graves where the wind whistles a wild song with-
   out words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
   and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
   at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
   layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
   man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end
   of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone
   into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
   and each name standing for a face written across
   with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambi-
   tion for a million dollar business or a lobster's
   ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell
   nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from cor-
   poration officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and
   tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
   ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the
   building just the same as the master-men who rule
   the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties
   its men and women who go away and eat and come
   back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all
   jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
   them.

One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
   elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
   work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
   and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
   and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles
   of houses and people where to buy a thing for
   money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds.
    . . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try
    the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets.
   . . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in
   them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
   of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
   red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
   of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
   crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
   and has a soul.

happy early new year, y'all.