On tuesday night I went to Wildfire in Takapuna for a birthday dinner. It was a meat place so there was lots of meat, meat, meat and little else. I wish they would have more light food like veges. Meat is all well and good but too much of it without veges in between is just hard to swallow. Afterwards we went to one of the birthday boys' house and half of us played Halo 3 (which I find rather boring) while the other half played Asian games like Mahjong and Big 2 as well as some poker, though halfway through the poker game my mum came to pick me up.

Yesterday I went and watched Harry Potter 6 at city. It was relatively good considering the 6th book didn't have much action and had a lot of crappy romance (though Harry/Ginny isn't too bad I suppose). And plus it had lots of Draco! I'm so happy! *Happy dance* Luna was awesome as ever, and they made McCormick pretty hot. Ron got a bit more muscle than he should have (he's supposed to be lanky) but he still fits the part well. No comment about the Ron/Hermione moments...

So yes, I would give it a 7/10 or so. I still don't think they should split the 7th movie, but I'll probably watch that too.

Today I baked a sponge cake. It puffed up a lot more than I expected, which is nice, and it came out tasting pretty good albeit a little sweet. I put peaches and cream in it - quite lovely. It was kinda sticky though, hmm. Maybe more flour is needed.

Tomorrow'll be another birthday party, but I'll only be able to go to it for a while because I have work in the evening (I swapped my tuesday shift to friday so I could go to the other party). With some luck the printer will be able to finish my DO stuff so I can pick it up on saturday!

say_o_kay and I went to city today to drop off our CDs. That's one thing off my chest! Now I have to wait for the results. Last year several prints came out shitty, so hopefully it won't be like that this year. Gee, hard to believe DO is in 11 days... I can't help feeling this rush of excitement. Like a river in my soul, blah blah blah. *Sings*

I bought a knit coat-type top from Cotton On, to expand on my limited winter wardrobe. It's probably a bit late now, but at least I'll be prepared for next winter. Had lunch at Umiya (Japanese food place owned by Koreans, as usual). I think I ate too much... also got my friend a birthday present from The Body Shop. I'm not sure she'll ever use an aromatic oil burner, but since we bought it for her she better. >=(

I was going to work on my bio assignment today, but I ditched it and just copy-pasted the info I'd typed up a few weeks ago for a checkpoint. At least it's a start, right?

And don't even talk about UMAT... I don't think I'm going to be very ready.

... for DO! Yay.

It's quite amusing to see my LJ posts from 2 months ago saying stuff like "gotta work on DO drawings!" when I obviously ended up doing not much until this week. Today I finished up my manga and tomorrow I'll be going to city with say_o_kay to drop our stuff at the printer's. In the past 6 days I managed to finish about 1/3 of my manga as well as a print, which is something that took me several months to churn out before the days of panicking about the deadline. Ah, pressure and stress can sometimes be wonderful things.

Next week I've got 3 birthday parties to attend, but I'm only going to 1.5 of them. Tis a shame but I don't think I need that many parties anyway. Oh, I still have to get a little token something for the birthday on friday... urgh. I'll get that tomorrow when I go to city. Gonna go watch HP6 on wednesday, should be good (except for the fact that Hermione and Ron hook up... hey, I'll be a Dramione fan forever you know). I don't think they should split up the 7th movie, the book wasn't that fat and to be completely honest I only remember that a lot of adult witches and wizards died (while their young counterparts emerged unscathed, mainly) and that Harry goes to purgatory (AKA King's Cross Station) and talks to a ghost.

Speaking of HP, I really need to finish chapter 2 of my fanfic. I remember telling timmehboy that I'd have the 2nd chapter out 3 months from the first, but I think it's already been longer than that. D: I'm kinda doing a couple of paragraphs each day when I can remember. I think that's a good idea instead of forcing myself to crap out story. Sorry, that was kinda vulgar wasn't it.

I've been doing some drills for UMAT everyday in between drawing. I think I'm getting better at recognizing patterns and stuff which is a section in the test - my weakest section. In fact it's the only study I've done all holidays so far. Next week I'll try to hurry up and write up bio as well as get resources from the central library.

I have this horrible feeling that I'm running out of time and I won't be able to finish anything or learn everything I need to learn. Maybe the pressure of taking on 4 scholarship papers at the end of the year is getting to me. Actually, how the hell am I gonna pass calc schol?! Even Jap schol is a little dubious thanks to my rather limited Jap vocab, but I'm genuinely interested in the language and am practising writing it on a site called lang-8 whilst getting corrected by native speakers, so that should help. At this point classics schol is probably my best shot. I'm forgetting a lot of chem. Oh well, schol isn't meant to be easy. I'm just wondering if I should enrol and focus on 3 schols instead of doing 4 schols and hoping I pass at least 3 of them. Hmm.

Back to fanfic-writing I go. I'll aim to pump out this chapter by next week.

I hate you so much when I spend an hour fighting a boss battle and end up dying. </3

Had my school ball two nights ago. The kind of dancing that goes on there is totally hilarious, but on the other hand there's no space for anything else but bopping and wriggling to the beat. I ended up having my friend's sister do my makeup, and my other friend did my hair, so that meant minimal effort from me. XD It was nice to see everyone dressed up though, some people were barely recognizable and others looked like red-carpet material.

After the ball a couple of friends and I popped by an afterball, but it wasn't very interesting so we left and had a sleepover at my house. Had about 4 hours sleep before I had to get up for work yesterday morning... I swear, 10 hours never passed more slowly.

Buuut I caught up on my sleep today, woke up at 1pm. Lol.

Nabbed from say_o_kay .

List seven songs you are into right now, no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

o In the Rowans - Balmorhea
o Lollipop - Big Bang ft. 2NE1 (oh gods, I must have watched the vid of this song at least 30 times)
o Again & Again - 2PM
o New In Town - Little Boots
o Rain - Jeremy Greene ft. Pitbull
o Keep Tryin' - Utada Hikaru
o Friends - Stephanie

I don't think I have 7 active people on my flist, so anyone who wants to can do this. >_>;;

-----

Just got back from helping some friends with their film for Media Studies by being an extra in it. It dragged on for wayyy longer than it should have, so now I'm trying to hurry up and finished my bio resources for tomorrow's checkpoint. I probably shouldn't have slept in so late this morning and instead used the time to do my work, but who cares, it was a wonderful sleep. I'll get to sleep in again on saturday! Yay! Can't wait til the ball, cos after it's over I'll hav 2 weeks of sleeping in. XD

The ball's in 3 weeks. I gotta learn how to use makeup by then. Therefore, it's time for a MAKEUP SELF CRASH COURSE!

I bought foundation and eyeshadow today, which, combined with the mascara and eyeliner my mum has, should be enough to tide me over. Like hell I'm gonna pay someone else to do it for me when I can fudge it myself! Muahaha!

I tried eyeshadow today and learned that you have to blend it all together in order for it to not look completely shit.

The one thing I like about the swine flu invasion is how we are now encouraged to stay home from school if we show the slightest signs of being sick. We apparently actually got notices about it yesterday at school. I wasn't there because I was busy staying home due to the return of the cold I had 2 weeks ago. My dad woke me up yesterday morning telling me to go to school, then changed his mind while I was brushing my teeth and told me to go back to sleep.

I don't think I've stayed home for 2 days in a row in aaaaaaages. People were starting to wonder if I was still alive. >_>;; But today I had to go to school. Sadly. I don't think I could have afforded to miss any more school, though in actuality I didn't seem to have missed much.

Also, I've given up on physics. First the A from the goddamn 3.1 which is SO STUPID (or maybe it's me that's SO STUPID, I forgot to write the mathematical equation required that was in the title of the internal), then the A from the mechanics paper which I don't really care about but no doubt my parents will. Screw SHM. I'll just wait for my report to come out and hope my dad doesn't kill me too much when he notices the two A's under physics (and nothing else). And I'll start revising physics now and then so that I'll totally understand what I'm supposed to do in the externals which I am now relying on for some spectacular results.

... Thank God I'm not doing engineering.

Today I realized I suck at catching the bus. I was bound for Newmarket, which I thought 277 went to, but then when I got to city I realized that it hadn't passed Newmarket at all and so I had to ask an old couple how to get where I wanted to go. They advised me to get off where we were, which was Symonds St, so I tentatively got off and went to wait at the bus stop across the road.

I looked at the bus routes and saw that 277 actually went to Mt Eden and not Newmarket, and they were actually different things. I asked the nearest dude where the Newmarket bus stop was and he told me it was around the corner. So I went there and asked the woman there if the busses there went to Newmarket, and she said yes so I got on and confirmed it with the bus driver (I was a little suspicious since the bus was bound for Buckland Beach or something) and asked her to alert me when we got the Newmarket. Turns out it was just down the road from where I'd been waiting.

But interestingly enough I only paid for one stage on the first bus, and I got all the way to city which usually costs 3 stages. Hmmm...

LJ, being the bitch it is, just wiped my half-finished entry when I accidentally pressed backspace. RARRR! Well no matter... anyway I got back from work a while ago, and I'm happy to say I won't have to go back there til Sunday.

Woke up at 12pm today. <3 Sleeping in once in a while is lovely. Doing it too often just screws you up and makes you late on school days. Anyway I had chamber music practice in the afternoon so I watched some anime, washed my hair and waited for my friend to pick me up. When I got to school I realized my music was in my locker, which is in the common room... meaning I couldn't get to it. So I didn't do much playing today, just mainly helped the first violinist with his hectic rhythm. Speaking of our first violinist, if I remember correctly he was silent the entire day. Pretty eccentric guy...

Argh there's so much to do and I've done almost none of it during the weekend. DO stuff, watching anime, studying for UMAT... I gotta beat ftechz on anime-planet, hmph. With all the anime I download, I have no excuse not to. XD

Yesterday I dug through my drawers and found 2 pages of short-term goals I'd written in year 10. It was nice to see I had managed to complete a number of them, and only failed to complete about 10. >_> Some of which included finishing my webmanga Evanescent (not gonna happen), making school prefect (boohoo) and get a job teaching kids piano (no matter, I teach Chinese :P). Oh well, although I work hard at my goals, I don't think I would be able to complete every one of them. All in all I'm pretty happy with the way the last few years have turned out.

*Dances*

Well, no. It's not quite time for dancing yet. Still got 3 more exams tomorrow, all in the one day, though thankfully one of them is only an hour long and the others are 2 hours each. So I'll live. It's just like a bad day of externals.

And although I do like my money, my manager seems to have been too eager to grant my wishes for extra $$$ by setting me 2 additional shifts this weekend. Which means while the rest of you happily doze away, I'll be working 4 out of the next 5 days. The timing's relatively good though, considering I'm going ball dress snooping at city on Saturday and have a party of sorts in the afternoon on the same day - the one day I won't be working AKA standing around and killing my feet in flats.

But you know me, once I get my pay I won't be complaining a bit.

I tried to look for a community on LJ for The Last Remnant but there weren't any... why don't more people appreciate this brilliant game?! It's wondrous! Beautiful! OK, the characters walk really funny in the cutscenes, but it's no big deal! It just looks like they have a big stick up their ass. Some of them pull the look off better than others. Either way, that's not important. Hell, there's like 250 rare monsters. For an epic RPG player like myself, spending a painful amount of time getting the right conditions to spawn the rares and then beating them all is worth every frustrating minute. It's golden.

I gotta go back to studying calc now. I pray that 3D doesn't come up tomorrow, but as usual when I pray for something to not come up it almost certainly will.

Why do people like gossip? Is it because it makes them feel good to hear about some disaster that befell someone else? There really is nothing that captures people's interest more. Think of all those celebrity gossip magazines. The masses love drama, action, and mostly despair rather than joy. Other people's despair, of course.

A prime example was today after school. As soon as there was mention of gossip to be heard, certain people got excited and all other talk ceased. As a fellow human being, I enjoy the odd gossip session now and then, but mostly to keep up with what's happening so that I'm not completely lost when other people talk about it, and also sometimes to vent my own opinions. But the way some people go on, I could almost label them as sadistic. Then again, all humans are, I guess... and it's not like I myself am completely pious and caring.

Humans are so complex! It's what I both love and hate about our species.

So I just got back from the Excellence awards ceremony thing that Phil Goff organized. We got a gold certificate and a gold badge that says 'Excellence level 1/2/3' depending on what year level you got the E endorsement at. Despite the stupidity of it, it's gold and a badge, so I'm gonna wear it. The ceremony was short and sweet, and there was some free food, so I think it was worth the time. Most of the people went, except for the few last year's yr 13s who were in Australia or couldn't be bothered. *Looks at timmehboy  and ftechz * 

I got my trig test back. I did well. I'm glad. It's a nice feeling when you know exactly what you're doing during the test. Too bad that feeling doesn't strike often enough for my liking. =/ Exams start on Friday, beginning with the dreaded Physics 3.1 which I'm vaguely prepared for... it's the oscillating hacksaw blade this year, I hear it's the same as last year so if anyone has tips, it would be appreciated.

Also, I really need to draw for DO! Gah!

I haven't had a steady income in quite some time, so it's nice to see some cash flowing into my account nowadays. Work is getting better too. Today I got my proper blue-green pharmacy blouse, so I don't look like the odd one out now, and there weren't a lot of customers which is always good. There was this toddler who seemed to take a liking to me and kept pulling on my finger so that I would squat down to her level. My finger got pretty sore after a while, lol. But it's interesting how when toddlers do it, everyone finds it cute, but if I pulled on someone's finger repeatedly they would probably get pissed off and yell at me. Sigh.

There's a bake sale on Thursday, so tomorrow I'm gonna bake a carrot cake for it. My carrot cake - or should I say, someone else's carrot cake whose recipe I'm using - is probably the most successful of my cakes. It was successful the first time, whereas my sponge cakes took quite a few trials and errors before I could get them to not deflate and end up a flat piece of solid sponge. Cheesecake can be a pain too, especially the base. But it's crazy how much cream cheese goes into the filling.

I'm trying to sleep before 11pm these days. It's hard because I almost have a compulsion to stay up late doing nothing in particular, but I will overcome it! *Blazing eyes*

And I can never get enough of it. It's kinda sad and loner-ish, but usually the best part of my day is the moment I crawl under my blankets at the end of the day, where a hot water bottle lies ready. <3 Ahh, there's nothing quite like it on a winter's night.

In any case, I started working my proper shifts today. 'Twas 5-9pm, which is a good shift IMO because there weren't many people and I could play Freecell on the computer. Although, the vacuuming and lifting in the heavy signs from outside isn't so great. My other shift's on Sunday, from 9am-7pm... I can't imagine standing around for 10 hours, but I'll have to do it. Think of the money, dammit, the money!

Oh and I did my Jap speaking internal today, which went pretty well, and also did a Bio class presentation on transgenics. Our group was trying to think of ways to buy time, but apparently we ended up talking for a good 20 minutes when we only had to talk for 8. >_>;; Our handout was pretty badass though. I drew a 'connect the dot' bacteria which I numbered wrong and ended up looking like a munted spiral. But hey, at least people used our handout! They didn't even bother with most of the others.

I haven't played The Last Remnant in 3 days. I think I'm experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

The DO forums just uploaded some promotional images, so I thought I'd post one here and see if anyone is interested.

I'm so addicted to The Last Remnant right now, it's not funny. It's this relatively new RPG by Square Enix. In the last few days I've spent entire evenings playing it. I thought about playing it at school. I played it whilst doing homework (that didn't really work, I kinda lost interest in the homework - no surprise there). It's a wonder I haven't been dreaming about it, but hey, you never know. That stage could start tonight.

Luckily I didn't have much homework this weekend and already handed in my Classics assignment even though it's due tomorrow (pfft, as if I'm gonna get to school before 8:30am), so I won't be failing too much.

Speaking of the Classics assignment, I had no idea I was such a Classics guru! People won't stop asking me questions about it... normally I don't mind, but the questions that some of the people ask show that they obvious didn't bother to read the assignment sheet or even the play we're working off before trying to get the answer off me. Now that is just infuriating. I mean, why the hell should I waste my time with them when they didn't even bother to do the basics? I'd be better off playing LR. >_>

School tomorrow, hooray... and I'm not sure but I might have work as well. The manager didn't enlighten me last week since she wasn't there on Friday, so I'll have to drop by and ask. If I have the same shifts as last week, all good. If I don't... then I guess I'll rot in the library for a couple of hours til my dad picks me up.

... OK but I'm still here. (I couldn't think of an entry title, so I just put in whatever I was listening to at the time.)

I slacked off with orchestra yet again. It's so boring... all the other yr 13s wag it so I end up being the only red jumper. The music can be good, but it still can't quite beat off the boredom. So I just gave up on going altogether, at least until a few others join me. Besides, it's the last year, I don't really care whether I get another color for it or not. *Does defiant gesture*

In the evening I went to my tutoring 'job', so to speak. My piano teacher's going to China in August so she asked me to teach her family some basics of the language. Kinda funny how she used to teach me but now I'm the ony teaching her! When I went today, she had my ATCL diploma certificate which had been sent to her recently. It's all nice and handwritten in pretty calligraphy. <3

Time for physics homework now... hurrah. I've got THJ for physics this year, and I think I may just fail... Oh well, I can always leech info off my friends who did exceptionally well last year. Yeah, I'm looking at you, timmehboy . Don't try to run. :)

Well, to mollify say_o_kay and timmehboy's nagging, I decided to start posting about my life in my LJ.

Today was the first day of term 2. Of course, with school comes truckloads of homework, so today wasn't all fun and games even though I laughed more today than I did in my entire holidays (chemistry camp wasn't exactly hilarious). I guess school is good for you after all.

After school I had work for 2 hours. I mistakenly brought along white running shoes which aren't allowed to be worn, so I had to stand around wearing my school shoes for the whole time which killed my feet. I think I'll go back to wearing flats at work - my feet hurt last time while wearing them too, but at least that time I survived for 6 hours. But anyway, there was a customer today called Mr Perfect. Pretty cool name, huh? There was also a lactating woman who couldn't afford what she was prescribed. It was only $40...

When I got home I plunged right into Classics. I actually have no idea what I'm really supposed to write about exactly, but I'm hoping that if I crap out enough info the teacher'll stop bothering to read and just give me an E for the sheer length. Last time I checked I was at 5k words already and I still have to write some conclusions.

So that was my day. I'm going to go play my daily fix of games now, I don't think I could sleep without it.

Title: What if?
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Characters: Balthier, Fran, Vaan
Prompt: 043. Square
Word Count: 529
Rating: T
Summary: The beginnings of something nice.
Author's Notes: Awww. This is so not like Balthier. Lol.

Lil darn table here.

( Lovestruck fool. )