it's days like these that keep me on my winning streak

When you read this, you're tagged!

Take a picture of you in your current state, no changing clothes or tidying up! NO PHOTOSHOP. Show your F-list the real you!



Sunday morning me. Pre-shower and pre-caffeine. Both of which will change very soon.

Today I received in the mail: my John Barrowman autograph from praguematic, the hard copies of my TorchSong photos (minus my second Gareth photo, which I figured would come late) and my Deluxe Edition of the Cobra Starship album, including one of the limited edition covers (Ryland's!).

I still feel like crap and decided to ditch out on going to the Irish Fair. I spent most of the day in bed, either sleeping or reading Star Trek fic. Not very productive, but okay. I hate being sick.

Big storms again tonight. We haven't had much of this weather this summer and it's been very odd.

Ummm, I just realized that I've been up for 30 hours straight. I think it's time for bed.

no matter how amusing the MCR boys are being right now. WHY are they so adorable??

And 5 more, from seimaisin:

1. Pirates
Hmmm...where did my obsession with pirates start? Probably with The Pirate Movie, which I used to watch constantly. I love that stupid movie. I eventually moved on to reading all kinds of pirate romance novels. I even own those books Fabio "wrote". I kind of enjoy the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And all manner of other piraty things. I mean, who doesn't love pirates? Arrrrrrr!

2. wrestling
I can't really tell you how I got into watching wrestling. No one in my family watched. But back in the big boom of the 80s, I somehow started watching and I couldn't get enough. I watched it ALL THE TIME. Even the G.L.O.W. girls. I kind of abandoned it once I got to high school. The I met The Loser. He and his friends watched WCW, since it was back in the time of the N.W.O.. (Which was a HUGE deal. It pretty much changed wrestling forever.) Our third date, in fact, was a wrestling PPV. I started watching it even when he wasn't around and I got totally hooked. It was really my first foray into internet fandom, since I scoured the wrestling sites looking for news and listened to a few different internet radio shows. I even started dating one of the guys who hosted a show. ;) My interest eventually waned again but I've watched on and off for the past year or so. I used to watch CM Punk wrestle at the National Guard armory, so it's awesome to see how popular he's gotten and how much he's acheived. And I will always, always enjoy watching Chris Jericho do pretty much anything.

3. Law & Order
I got hooked on Homicide: Life on the Street and after they had one of the crossovers with Law & Order, I started watching L&O too. Now it's quite difficult to find episodes of L&O: SVU or L&O: CI that I've never seen. Multiple times. (I don't watch the mothership much anymore since Jesse L. Martin is gone) If there's a marathon on one of the cable networks, I'll easily sit and watch a bunch of episodes in a row. Goran/Eames is one of my very few het OTPs and if they don't get together everntually, I will be VERY disappointed.

4. being the ringleader
Heh heh. So. I'm totally that Virgo, left-brained stereotype. Being as how I'm not really creative, I tend to surround myself with very creative people. And creative people are sometimes not the most organized or decisive types. At all. Organizing an outing or a gathering can be quite difficult when people keep saying "I don't know. What do you want to do?" That's where I come in. I take care of all the details, make sure everyone knows where and when to be places and things usually go a lot more smoothly. =) It's a talent.

5. Kasey Chambers
I used to be rather obsessed with the show Crossing Jordan. And they had really fabulous music on the show so I made it my mission to find all of the songs featured on the show. One of the songs was Kasey's "Not Pretty Enough". I knew my friend duckduck was a fan of hers so I asked her to send me the song. I kind of fell in love with it so I found more of Kasey's stuff. That just happened to be around the time she toured the US in 2004 so we got tickets to see her play at the Minnesota Zoo. And I was forever hooked! She has a beautiful voice and gorgeous music and pretty much everything she does just speaks to me. Since she's Australian, she doesn't get over here very much, but we did see her again in Chicago last fall and she was just as wonderful.

Thing the first:
My passport finally arrived today. And I got my birth certificate back. So I can legally leave and come back into the country now. Good times!

Thing the second:
I obviously haven't worked at Hallmark much lately because I am SORE right now from working today. Gah.

Thing the third:
Remember how I wasn't going to do anything fun to my hair before the cruise because I just don't have time to bleach it and everything? I guess I changed my mind on that because I bought all the stuff today. I just need to decide exactly how I want to color it.

Thing the fourth:
I didn't run across my swimsuit while I was digging through the gigantic pile of clothes in my room yesterday. This is troublesome.

Thing the fifth:
Seriously. SORE.

I had like a MILLION things that I needed to get done last night. Instead, I decided to take a little nap around 5pm. And then woke up at 1am when my brain decided I'd had my usual 6 hours of sleep and it was probably time to wake up. =/ Which means I was up for most of the night after that.

But they brought in bagels for us today, so I guess it's not all bad.

I had a pretty awesome weekend! I went down to the Minnesota Irish Fair all three days. Three days of FREE MUSIC! Okay, I had to walk for almost a mile so I didn't have to pay for parking, but it's not like I can't use the exercise. It's amazing to see how big the Irish Fair is, yet you can still run into people you know. Like f_o_n_y and cashbox, whom I chatted with a little on Sat.

A little rundown of the bands I saw:
Romantica - a local band that's sort of but not really Irish. They sounded lovely, especially on the bluegrass cover of "Hallelujah", but the lead singer needs some work on his between songs banter.

Scythian - They were completely fun! Traditional Irish music with a nice kick. A good lead in to the next band...

Flogging Molly - Crowd watching for the FM fans was completely fascinating. Lots of mohawks and chains. Even a mesh shirt on one guy. We got the heck out of the crowd because I value all my limbs, and actually ended up listening to part of the show while we hung out down by the river. FM was great! Even though it's still kind of weird for me to reconcile Dave King of FM with Dave King of Fastway and Katmandu.

The Tannahill Weavers - More traditional music. They were good. The crowd seemed really into them.

Sweet Colleens - Another local, sort of Irish band. I do like them quite a bit.

The Fuchsia Band - I was so happy to see that they were on the schedule! I've seen them all three years they've been at the Fair. And they didn't disappoint this year. Máirtín was perhaps even more entertaining than in previous years. I think he said 'oh jeepers!' about 20 times. I totally love these guys!

( Look, I even got a photo with them! )

The weather could not have been more perfect. It was sunny with a nice breeze, not too hot or cold. I don't even mind that I got a little sunburned on the top of my head and the back of my shoulder (which I apparently wasn't able to reach when I put sunblock on). A big improvement over last year, when we nearly died from the heat.

You know how sometimes you just have that perfect moment? Where everything is right with the world and you're exactly where you're supposed to be? That was exactly what Friday night was like. I was surround by awesome music and nine of my good friends and everything seemed perfect. I like those moments. =)

We actually remembered to take a group photo of us all together, but I don't have that uploaded yet. Instead, ( here's a really goofy one with some of us )

Best shirt I saw all weekend? 'Mom, Dad, I'm Gaelic' =)

Besides all that, I also went to see Idina Menzel on Sat night. I didn't really know what to expect and I was completely blown away. (plus, we were in the front row, which is completely fucking awesome) Holy cow, does that woman have pipes! She mostly did songs from her new album, and she threw in part of "Another Day" and a couple songs from Wicked. And something from the new musical Duncan Sheik is working on about Nero? Yeah, I don't know either. But everything sounded great and Idina is very, very entertaining to watch and listen to.

And I think that was about it for the weekend. Probably enough, eh? Oh, there was the important development that duckduck and I did decide to go to Chicago next month to see Kasey Chambers. OMG! I CAN'T WAIT! I ♥ her so much!

I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT I AM STILL AWAKE.

I got home at 5am. I was finally ready for bed at 5:30 when xiolablux realized she couldn't find her phone. (oh yeah! Julee decided to come up from Chicago for the show when her other Friday night plans fell through. YAY!) We spent the next 30 mins trying to track down the hotel we ended up at and the boys in the bands and getting them to look through their van, all to no avail. No phone. I finally crashed hard at 6am only to wake up at 9am. Cue more phone issues and caffeinating. I stumbled into work at 1pm with my ears still ringing and somehow managed to make it through my shift with minimal annoyances.

THEN I spent the evening at taylorea's, where Henry decided I make an awesome chew toy. And we watched the Doctor Who finale. And I yawned a lot.

Now I'm home, I've read through my f-list and now I'm FINALLY going to bed!

I HAZ A SONIC SCREWDRIVER!!



*pokes MegaUpload*
The Doctor Who finale needs to DOWNLOAD FASTER!!! We're all waiting in our hotel room for it to finish so we can watch it before tonight's drunken festivities.

Happy Birthday physis3141!!

NKOTB tickets go on sale this morning. If my 1990 self saw how excited my 2008 self was about this whole thing, I would probably kick my own ass.

This is my second 3-day work week in a row. This is a VERY good thing.

I'm still not prepared for my trip to California. =/