Relief

It's amazing how something as small as cracking my windows open this weekend, can brighten my attitude immensely! Warm weather makes me soooo happy and inspired... I think I need to move to a warmer climate. :)

Reactions

I'm not a religious person at all, nor do I believe in the traditional 'heaven/hell' afterlife; but occasionally, a TV show or movie will touch on a deeply religious theme, and completely overwhelm me with an emotional reaction.

This particular conversation is from Lost, season 2, episode 'Three Minutes'.

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Michael: I hear you're a priest.

Eko: Yes.

Michael: Guess you believe in hell, then.

Eko: For a brief time, I served in a small parish in England. Every Sunday, after Mass, I would see a young boy waiting at the back of the church. And then, one day, the boy confessed to me that he had beaten his dog to death with a shovel. And he said the dog had bitten his baby sister on the cheek, and he needed to protect her. And he wanted to know whether he would go to hell for this. I told him that God would understand. That he would be forgiven as long as he was sorry. But the boy did not care about forgiveness. He was only afraid that if he did go to hell, that dog would be there waiting for him.

New Dreads!

I got dreads again! I didn't forget what a painful process it was, either... 2 hours of hair pulling/twisting, then another 1.5 hours of chemicals and head throbbing! But it's worth it. :)

It's at the first stage of growth, so right now they're thin, curly and short...








But eventually, they'll look like this again! :D

Halloween 08!

Good food, good company, good drinks... rockin' costume! :D



Pretty close, right? :)


Hooray for special contacts! They were the most expensive part of my costume...


I lasted a good four hours with the mask and contacts, as they were both not very comfortable. But alas, one must suffer for such things sometimes! :)

Now what am I supposed to do with my life?

I have, finally, completed the Harry Potter books... so yeah, you can re-read the title of my post right now! :D

I guess I'll have to go back to Warcraft... lame... I mean, not really, but Warcraft doesn't have the ability to hold my attention SO severely, nor give me tears streaming down my face consistently! Seriously... I cried like, six times while reading the last two books... at least! I had to have a box of kleenex nearby... how amazing is that to say, that you cry while reading a book?

Sadly, I stopped reading in Jr. High, after my age surpassed the Fear Street and Goosebump series. (Well, the main plot with the Fear Street series did clutch my emotions at times, since it involved witch burnings...)

Anyway! Seriously, if you want an easy slide back into reading books, start with HP 1! I found it enjoyable, to read the book, then watch the corresponding movie again... but often I just became too critical of the movies because of the 'true' timelines and information I knew. :P

I cannot tell you how AMAZING this story is! Next step for me is to buy all the first six books, and re-read them, now that I know all the secrets... yayyyy!

And in movie-news, the sixth movie has been pushed from this November, to a release date of July 2009. The last movie will be split into TWO full-length films, the first releasing November 2010, the second May 2011. Um yeah, so again, re-read the title of my post!!! Arg... such a long wait for wonderful gratification! I guess the sixth movie got bumped because of the writers strike... all this info is per Wikipedia! :)

This is tough!

I can't even tell you how hard it is to come back to full-time work, and waking up early in the mornings again, after spending five weeks sleeping-in and doing whatever I like on each day. It's surprisingly harder than I thought it would be!

My body is certainly wasting no time in telling me it doesn't like this new adjustment, either... I feel uncomfortable overall when I'm sleeping in my huge/comfy bed, my stomach isn't being very nice (even though I've been eating super well this week), I've had night-sweats for the past three days, and my jaw has started clicking/cracking again.

I'm hopefull that after this first week, things will get better!

Luckily, I didn't come back to a huge workload... I have a few projects coming in soon, but generally I've been helping other this entire week with their projects. That helps the stress-load a ton! I'd probably be in much worse condition today if I came back to piles of stuff on my desk...

Oh, and speaking of piles on my desk, here's what my co-workers did to my cube while I was out...













You can imagine, from how clean a person I am, what my cube looked like before the mess! :)

Took me about a half an hour to clean it all up and re-flip my stuff... and I literally worked-up a sweat! We're getting more and more creative when people take vacations and their cube needs a good sabotage!

Here's my cube a few months ago, when I took some time off in the summer.





Good times... :)

Sabbatical = Over

Man... I can't even begin to tell you how FAST the past five weeks went by. It feels like I just left work for my one-month sabbatical! I'm excited to go back and see everyone again, but not too excited for the workload. :P

I accomplished a lot though, during my time off. I got my entire list of things-to-do-on-vacation done and I've been gathering materials for my Halloween costume! I'm going to be my Undead Mage character that I play on Warcraft.



I'm going to look so bad-ass!!! I got a dark-green robe/dress from eBay... the online store is called Holy Clothing, and they have a lot of simple Renaissance-style dresses and shirts. My mum helped me make the mask - rivets and all! I'm going to velcro the top pieces to my head so it doesn't mess with my hair. However, the mask won't cover my eyes, as it does on the character... I do have to see where I'm going. :) But I think I'll get fun contacts to wear to make me look more zombie-like!

I bought the staff from the Renaissance Festival here in Minnesota. It's beautiful!



And here's the result of wearing sandals for shoes while spending six hours at the Festival...


Dirty feets!!! :D

Anyway, I'm also feeling much better mentally than I was two months ago. I'm no longer melancholy! That was my main goal for this sabbatical... to get mentally stable again, and so far so good. :)