The calendar says it’s summer!

Even though outside it looks more like it’s autumn, next Thursday is the first day of summer holidays for me! Well, it’s about time! But in the useless lessons I still have at the moment (which mostly consist of watching films, going to get ice-cream or going for walks) I’m busy making plans for the first three weeks of the holidays (before I’m off to Canada for the other three weeks – excitement!). So, here it is: my list of summer awesomeness:

• Read, read, read. Read! Finish Much Ado About Nothing and start Love’s Labours Lost (yay Shakespeare!), A Christmas Carol by Dickens (not the most suitable reading choice for summer, but I can’t live by your rules, man *turns into Craig Ferguson for a second*) and Goethe’s Italian Journey. If I don’t finish one of these before I leave, I’m going to take it with me to Canada and read them on our car trip through Ontario and Quebec, completely ignoring the fact that I get motion sickness when reading in the car. Or maybe I should get some audiobooks. Hmm.

•  Watch some of the old Doctor Who series. I’m currently on the Season Six, and although I was suspicious of Matt Smith as the Doctor at first because he just looks like such an awkward fellow, but now I really like him. And I figured that since I like Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor as much as I do, I should really check out Doctors One to Eight. For some reason, I’m especially looking forward to the episodes first aired in the 1970s. I bet the Tardis looks hilarious in a Seventies-look.

• Write. God, I’m such an inconsistent writer. I probably won’t get around to do Camp NaNoWriMo in August since I’m going to be on holiday for the second half of the month, but I want to write. I’m so fed up with not writing. I want to get my hobby back. I want to be that weird girl again who sits on the computer all night with fingerless gloves on and listens to Biffy Clyro on headphones and has the time of her life constructing highly improbable plot twists.

Pirate overdose and two lists

It’s a long weekend! To celebrate this, my friends and I re-watched all of the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films yesterday. We started at 3pm and were finished around 10.30pm. It was really good fun, and now I will now what actually happened in the first three films when I go and watch the new one. (Although I still didn’t get entirely get all of At World’s End, because by then everybody was getting a little bit cheerful and distracted.) So this is what I noticed while watching:

1. I really don’t like Orlando Bloom. At all.

2. Johnny Depp will always be Captain (!) Jack Sparrow to me, no matter what.

3. Keira Knightley has a really large jaw. And is overrated. I mean, she’s okay, but there are far better actresses than her.

4. Why didn’t Elizabeth just go with Will on the ship at the end of the third film?! There wasn’t even a proper explanation given – and no, “she can’t go where you’re going to” is NOT an explanation. Major plot hole.

5.  I still don’t get why the crew of the Flying Dutchman was gross and fishy when Davy Jones was the captain, but became normal when Will Turner took over.

6. “Bootstrap Bill” is a crap nickname.

7. The film music is absolutely goooorgeous.

 

And, because I’m bored, a list with what I need/want to do today:

1. Do my homework and start studying for my Latin test on Tuesday. Get the unpleasantness out of the way.

2. Find away to access my Youtube again. For some reason it froze, and all I access now is this, which is what I was listening to when it broke down:

Of all Muse songs, why did it have to be Popcorn? I like it, but I’ve listened to it about twenty times now, and I can feel my brain slowly turning into jelly.

3. Get some writing done. I’m slowly starting to get my own pace back and write regularly again, and I don’t want to risk that by not writing for too long.

4. Read. If I continue reading at this pace, I will finish the book I’m currently on sometime next year.

Did I mention that I love extra free days?

Colds, ANTM and Young Adult books

The good news: I’m still not completely ill. The bad news: I’m still half-ill, and have been since Monday or Tuesday or so. My head still hurts, but thankfully my sore throat and my poor circulation are better today. I still have the feeling that all this cold needs to become the absolute Mother of all Colds is one more push over the edge, but I don’t want to complain. Instead, I’m going to focus on the positive side of it: it’s the weekend, I get to stay at home (because I can’t be bothered to leave the house again today), watch the latest episode of America’s Next Top Model (oh, this guilty pleasure) and lots of Vlogbrothers videos, which are kind of my new obsession.

I discovered the Vlogbrothers’ channel (I’m kind of confused on the apostrophe situation here) the other day in an orgy of re-reading last year’s NaNoWriMo pep talks and simultaneously watching videos about NaNo. So I was reading John Green’s pep talk and watching a Vlogbrothers video titled “NANOWRIMO” and went: “Wait. Isn’t that the same guy?” Since then, I’ve watched heaps of their videos – but then again there’s like four years of vlogging for me to catch up on. I also found one of John Green’s books – An Abundance of Katherines – at the library and am already halfway through. I really like it, although I don’t usually read a lot of Young Adult stuff. I don’t like most of it which is weird, since I am technically a young adult and thus fall into that category perfectly. I think the thing about many of those books is that (a) the authors are trying too hard to appeal to their potential target audience (that is, young adults) and/or (b) lots and lots of those books are some fantasy crap (I don’t particularly care for the fantasy genre) where teens with stupid made-up names travel through worlds whose names I can’t pronounce and inexplicably discover a new mythical creature every four pages.

But I do like An Abundance of Katherines…so that’s good, I guess.

How do you know you’re writing Young Adult books? How do you even find your genre? The stuff I write – or try to write, to be more honest – just won’t tell me what genre it is. A situation that I only noticed last NaNoWriMo when I was editing my novel info and the page told me to pick a “Novel Genre” and I was utterly confused.

Still watching ANTM. They’re doing elimination right now. And…NOOO, I wanted that one to go home and the other one to stay. Bleeergh. Tyra Banks is annoying as hell.

Hey, it’s flu season!

Well, it is for me, but then again I have a cold for the better part of the year. I really don’t know what’s the matter with my immune system. Or am I around people with colds more than other people are? I don’t know. But I do have a cold again. And I have so much to do before torture school starts again next week. I need to prepare about a thousand things for school, and on top of that I really need to go get a haircut, and I REALLY need to go to the doctor and have him have a look at the thing on my foot (I’ll spare you the details). Also, I’m trying to get rid of my bad mood. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but these days I seem to be permanently pissed off.

Hey, I changed the theme of my blog! To be honest, I liked the old one better, but I’ll stick with this until I find something prettier…And the themes I like are always green-ish, for some reason.

And, just because, I’ll link you to this awesome Editors song. Mmmh, Editors…

Easy, there.

So, I am a week into my summer break so far, and I love it. The weather’s been pretty crappy for the last few days, of course, but to be honest, I couldn’t care less. I’m as chilled out as I haven’t been in months. I can go to bed, get up, eat, read, write, play “Virtual Villagers” and go for a walk whenever I feel like it; School doesn’t manage to sneak into my thoughts every other minute, which is incredibely relaxing; I have three driving lessons this week. What do I care if the weather is pants?

There isn’t an awful lot to write about, really. All I can say is that this is what I’ve fantasised about on the endless winter afternoons where I was spending hours and hours studying for class tests.

I’ll leave the sun behind me…

…and I’ll watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by…

Mmmmh. Smells like holidays. Anyway.

Two days ago, the weather was nice. Today, the weather’s nice, all sunny and summer-y and happiness-inducing. Yesterday, however, it was raining buckets all day. Coincidentally (I’m really proud of myself that I knew how to spell that word without looking it up), yesterday was one of those days when I absolutely needed good weather, because me and my best friend and a bunch of people from our school were going to see “Aida” (Verdi, you know *pretends to know a lot about opera*) on an open-air stage. Well, as it happens, the performance was only going to happen if the weather was dry (which it most definitely was not), but the final decision wasn’t made until 8.30pm, which made us stand around in the pouring rain for several hours, watching some weird Austrian band with admittedly hilarious dance moves. Like anyone with ankle-high water in their shoes (which was about 75% of the people there, and the rest were wearing flip-flops) might have suspected, the rain didn’t stop, the opera wasn’t performed, what still doesn’t explain why neither the bus nor our non-organised teachers entered the scene again until 9.30pm. Gosh. Well, we did make it back home eventually, but my suspiciously achy head and throat make me think I probably caught a cold during the process. Great. It’s definitely not flu season, for crying out loud.

To the more enjoyable things in life. As you might have noticed from the title of this blog entry, I’ve recently re-discovered my obsession for The Kinks. Their music is awesome, and I admire the creativity of the Davies brothers. (One thing that constantly irks me, though: What on bloody earth makes parents go, “Hey, our last name is Davies, why not call our son David Davies”?!) Plus, it’s fun to read about all those fights they had on stage. I’ve also got myself some new music today: I just downloaded “Here comes my baby” by Sons of Admirals, plus the new album by Alex Day. Yay! for me spending money I should actually save for my driver’s license! What can I do, I’m a Youtube fan girl.

Huh?

Whoah. I woke up today unsuspectingly, and Ta-DA, I had a blog. How the hell did that happen? And I wasn’t even drunk, although I get drunk very easily.

The bad news is:  I’m still tired because I was woken up this morning at seven o’clock by our barking dog and wasn’t able to go back to sleep afterwards. The good news: I’ve decided to stop whining about it and instead get some blogging down, following my motto: Blog while you still want to.

Today aaaall the people in the little town I live in celebrate the annual “Street Party” thing. For most people it consists of going to flea market in the morning, eating all kinds of greasy food, getting really bad sunburn, listening to terrible brass band music and getting so drunk that by midnight they don’t even find their way home in the town they’ve lived in for years. This year, my parents bribed me into going into town with one of only two things I can be bribed with: food. Since otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything for lunch, I went with them, had some curried sausage (insert innuendo right here) – and met my brother’s girlfriend! He’s been making a major mystery out of this relationship, what I completely understand, because our parents can be awfully embarassing. But his girlfriend seemed nice enough. Not what I expected, but hey, as long as it gets him out of the house (hopefully soon permanently…)

Later today I’ll hopefully watch the worldcup, Argentina against Germany. I think Argentina will win, to be honest. How very un-patriotic of me.

But, in the meantime, I have to study. Yay. Maths. Yaaaaay.