birthday, hobbitgasm, & other news

All right. It is actually, officially, and unfortunately my birthday. I'm getting sick of aging now. Can't I just be nineteen indefinitely? That would be a pretty nice indefinite age. 

So, I've seen the Hobbit twice, once at school and once at home. And OH. EM. GEE. I can't even. What. It is so friggen fantastic. Check it out, there's my friend Elinor in front of the hobbit door at the theater.

I shall make sure to always sit next to Leif in movies now, because the entire time he kept flapping his hands and whisper-shrieking things like "HOBBITGASM" and "DWARFGASM" and "ELFGASM" and "WIZARDGASM" in my ear. It was the greatest. But seriously, have you seen Thorin's FACE? He has, like, the best nose ever. He comes in the door of Bag End and he's all like "I am Thorin Oakenshield" and I'm all like "Good gracious. Since when are dwarves allowed to be hot?" Apparently, ever since Thorin and Kili showed up onscreen. Who'd 'a thunk?

Remember that snippet-of-a-thing I showed you several posts back? This was the thing. It's a forty-foot Smaug made out of cardboard and zip ties, jointly created by my sculpture class for the Hobbit-themed dinner in the Caf. Boy, did we have a blast putting that beast together.

There he is lookin' saucy amidst the Caf tables.

Hello, handsome. My art professor stuck a fog machine in his schnoz.

And there's me in my elf costume. Classy, I know. See, I knew I'd have a use for my pointsy earses in college!

Also, we had a bit of snow on campus right before finals week. Anna, JC Aly, Lil'nea and I built a snowman. The snowsquirrel on his head was Anna's idea, and a brilliant one at that. We also had a pretty epic snowfight once the rest of Kildahl got back from lunch. Lol, I think I had a studio class that morning that I didn't warm up for because I was too busy playing in the snow. Also didn't eat lunch, but that's nothing new. That's Aly in the picture. She's spectacular.

More snow pictures.

Because we live on a hill and the winds are of the prevailing variety, every snowman on campus was listing rather severely by midday.

We also went midnight sledding on appropriated Caf trays and acquired a nice assortment of minor (and less minor) injuries. Poor Sarah went home with a concussion and missed all her finals. Nothing that drastic happened to me, although I did come down with a cold.

Got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for my birthday and spent it on pretty books, including The Fire Ascending and Rain and Fire by Chris D'Lacey and Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. I also discovered that there are apparently six more Merlin books (T.A. Barron) that I didn't know about, released after the original five? What? Can has?! Anywhoo, I continue to sneak more books back to college by wrapping them in clothes and stuffing them waaaay down in the suitcase. It's the bringing them back home in the summer that's going to cause problems, because I'll clearly have way more than I initially took with me in the fall. Whatever, we'll deal with that later. Oh, I'm reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell at the moment, in anticipation of seeing the movie eventually, and it's pretty fantastic. I'm enjoying the timeskips rather, although not so much the devastating cliffies.

In other, less celebratory news, my poor dear dog died two days before Christmas. It was sudden and horrible. None of us were expecting it. The emergency vet said it was probably an internal blockage, as if he swallowed something and it completely stoppered up his guts. In other words, his own dumb fault. He was whiny and smelly and stupid, but I'll miss the wooly lunatic all the same. He loved us. We loved him. Even my dad admitted it.

Back to cheerier fare. The Doctor Who Christmas special was, in a word, fantastic. I made the questionable decision of watching the tail end of Angels Take Manhattan right beforehand because that's what was on the channel, and I definitely watched the first few minutes of The Snowmen through a wretched trickle Pond-related tears. Also, disillusioned Eleventh Doctor is so very painful to watch. But Clara is gorgeous and cheeky and awesome, so it's all good. Lady Arin paid me a visit yesterday, and I was delighted to discover that college has transformed her into a true Whovian, hurray! And she also watched Smith before Tennant, because we're sisters and that's how we do.

Hokay, off to do birthday things. My goals today are to finish Cloud Atlas and play through Portal. We'll see how far I get.

Commander Kip
"It's smaller on the outside!" "Now, that is a first."
Normal is overrated!