Oh, my poor, poor neglected blog.  What has full-time schooling done to you?

No fear though, I have successfully survived my first semester!  Bring on the Christmas holidays, coo coo ca choo~  I'll try to give my blog a little more love during my two weeks off, maybe post some more book reviews -- but for now, here's the entirety of what little you've missed of my life for November and December:

• Exams are finished!  Grades are in!  I finished my classes with three A+'s and one A so far (though we haven't officially received our final grade for English, but based on my prior assignment marks and the final exam, I'm going to go ahead and assume I'll end up with an A for that class as well.)  I'm looking forward to the start of second semester with its early morning classes (leaving more time to spare in the afternoons and evenings) and having one less class in my course load; I opted to drop a class in both second and third semester, in favor of taking them during the summer and hopefully lessening my stress over the next two terms.  *Crosses fingers*
• I'm a mere hairs-breadth away from finishing my Christmas shopping!  This is an improvement over last year, considering I only began my shopping two days ago; however, once again my procrastination when it comes to ordering gifts online has left me fretting if any of them will even arrive before the 25th...  =_=;
• My temporary four month page position at SAPL has been extended to a permanent one!  Hallelujah!  It's still only one day a week, but it'll be on Thursdays instead of Saturdays which will free up my weekends nicely to breath a little and keep up with homework.  Besides, a tiny one-day-a-week library position looks better on a resume than no library position at all.
• After exercising a considerable amount of will power for the last two months, I've finally broken open my copy of Batman: Arkham City!  *Gibbers excitedly with fangirlish glee*  So far, the sequel is just as much fun as its predecessor -- though I hate the new take on Harley, and for whatever reason I'm feeling much more inept this time around when it comes to executing all of the different button combinations...  There has been a frustrating increase in accidentally falling off roofs when I'm trying to ground pound goons, and inadvertently exposing myself headlong into enemy fire when I'm trying to sneak around all ninja stealthy-like.  I'm a sorry excuse for a gamer, but it's Batman and so I shall persevere.  *DETERMINED FACE*

Oh yeah, and obviously I'm back from our cruise!  I kind of forgot to get around to writing up a whole vacation recap post in the midst of looming project deadlines and exam havoc.  Rest assured though that the vacation was very awesome, despite this Carnival ship being especially rocky for whatever reason -- we heard someone say that the Carnival Dream didn't have "stabilizers" or whatever the crazy boat magic is that's supposed to keep the ship from pitching back and forth wildly under your feet in crazy 16 foot swells.  So a slightly dizzying trip, yes, but still awesome.

Did I mention that we swam with sea turtles?   WILD SEA TURTLES.  They swam up for air right next to you!  If not for the strict rule we were given beforehand of "no touching, no hugging, no licking" (no lie)  of the wild life, I could have kissed those sea turtles right on the nose -- that's how close they came!  So amazing~

:3

Mood: Nervous

If you've never played Telestrations you really should. It's a cross between the games Pictionary and Telephone, and is all sorts of awesome.

That's right, PRAYING MANTIS KNOWS HOW TO HAVE A GOOD TIME! (Kudos to Glen for drawing the best picture of the night.)

You know what else is a good time? Pretty purses! I was just introduced to the most fantabulous website ever: Miche Bags! One purse, so many easily changeable looks! What a concept! X3 So badly do I want one of these babies, one in each size, maybe a couple different styles of straps... oh the possibilities! *Adds to wishlist, gushing girlishly over all of the pretty bags*

Other news: I have officially put in my application for the Information and Library Technology program at Grant MacEwan! In just mere minutes all of a sudden I felt like I was applying to school for the first time all over again. It's nerve wracking! When will they let me know if I get accepted? What if I don't get accepted? :x What if I waited too long and anyone who applies after the holidays are just automatically branded with a big red FAIL stamp and tossed in the rubbish bin? What if I'm doomed to be forever diploma-less and continue to fruitlessly flail after this career like a gruesome, flesh-eating zombie chasing a juicy brain that will shun me for not having the qualifying paper credentials hanging framed on my wall? ;_; Good god, I don't know if they've even looked at my application yet and already I'm a stressed out college student again. *Pulls at hair*

Mood: Bouncing to Christmas music

I just couldn't leave poor December hanging there, gimped or not gimped.

So for anyone completely out of the loop, I broke my arm. Mason and I joined a beginners curling league back in the middle of November which I was pretty excited about, obviously not having any curling experience prior or even interest in the crazy sport whatsoever, but it seemed a fairly Brenna-friendly form of exercise. Or at least that's what I innocently thought. Leave it to any sport to be out for blood and make a liar out of me -- low and behold, half way through our first game I slipped on the ice and *SNAP!* there goes the right arm in a valiant effort to break my fall. =_=

Four weeks later, I'm now in my third cast (this one is purple) and have two more weeks to go until I can hopefully get this thing off. Needless to say, I have become pretty skilled in going about my day-to-day activities one-handed. Having to learn how to be a lefty has been awkward and downright annoying at times, and I've probably wasted way more time than is sanely needed to type this one single blog post.

In other news, I am thankfully 95% finished with my Christmas shopping with only a week to go. Yay me! I am, however, growing a little concerned that the 30% of my 95% worth of gifts that I bought online aren't going to arrive in time. :x I may have to end up stuffing printed out pictures of purchases into festive envelopes for family members to open up on Christmas morning in lieu of actual gifts.

All in all, not much else is new in my life, other than I finally received my DC Universe Online beta key. I was all excited and whipped up a pretty cool looking superhero of my very own, only to realize as I actually began playing the game itself that trying to play a two-handed computer game is exceedingly difficult with a gimpy arm. I managed to finally figure out a rather uncomfortable but do-able way of holding the mouse with my right hand and leaving my good left hand free to handle the multitude of buttons on the keyboard. It's not ideal, but it gets the job done. Now if only I could actually figure out all of the controls and stop running my character around uselessly in the same room.

This will probably be the only post I make until my cast is off, so a Merry Ho Ho to all next week, and here's hoping no one else gets their car stuck in the massive snow dunes accumulated at the end of their driveways like we did the other night.

Mood: Better now

Last night was all sorts of awful. It started with a very tiny, almost unnoticeable headache which then spun entirely out of control into a full blown migraine. I went to sleep early after popping some Advil and laid in the dark with a cold wheat sac over my eyes for half an hour until out of no where I got the shakes and hot shivers and an oh-god-I'm-going-to-toss-my-cookies feeling. I managed to stumble to the bathroom and proceeded to spend the following half hour crouched over the toilet dry-heaving with my head feeling like it was splitting open and huddling pathetically in a bath towel trying to keep warm. Eventually I called loud enough for Mason to wake up and he plied my sad, sicky self with water and blankets and pillows, as well as the marvelous idea of Gravol which is now my self-proclaimed wonder drug of choice -- after a couple of hours sleeping on the floor of the bathroom, I woke up feeling perfectly fine once again and went back to my proper bed.

I'm no stranger to migraine headaches, but usually the only symptom I get along with them is the preemptive flashy lights in my eyes right before. Other than the blistering pain itself, I've never had a migraine like last night -- no eye flashies, but hey, look at all these other super fun I-want-to-DIE-now side affects that got swapped in instead. Ugh. No thanks. Can I have my old slightly-less-agonizing head pain back, please? D:}

On a different note, I've pulled out and brushed off my game face again and started playing Kingdom Hearts 2. *Strikes dramatic gamer-girl pose with PS2 controller in hand and shimmery light from on high shining down on her* I don't remember KH being this addictive -- since Saturday I've played over eleven hours. I wanted to play more today, but the crazy little paranoid voice in my head insists that my bizarre migraine experience last night was the fault of sitting for too long in front of the television playing video games. Maybe the Powers That Be are angry that I'm once again pretending to be a game geek and this is their way of telling me to stop now before I really tick them off.

...I can't promise that I won't go back to playing more tomorrow though... ¬_¬

Mood: Content

Wow, I haven't posted in a while. This is no doubt a result of a) realizing that despite how many of my projects and hobbies revolve around the internet and computer, I really do sort of hate modern technology most of the time; and b) nothing very interesting has been going on in my life lately to blog about.

On a some what hypocritical note of my opinion regarding computers above, I was very excited recently to receive a new (at least for me) gift in the form of my sister's old G4 iBook. The closest I've ever come to owning my own laptop has been when I "borrowed" my Dad's Macbook for an extended period of time and *cough* neglected *cough* to give it back until he came and tore it back from my fingers -- so actually having one (that I don't ever have to give back to anyone) is pretty exciting for me. Lookit me, world! I'm watching West Wing on my comfy couch while I blog! :D I even updated it from OS X Panther to the slightly less out-of-date Tiger, so I can actually run most of the modern browsers and applications. Sadly, however, just like my Dad's ancient laptop, this one too also doesn't support WAP2 so I can't connect wirelessly to most networks, which is all sorts of sad pandas.

Our house now has Christmas lights up for the first time! Cute little white LED ones. I'm so excited, they look really nice all lit up and it'll make this year feel much more Christmasy~ While I'm too lazy to decorate the entire house up like my Mom loves to do at home, there are a few holiday sparklies like Christmas lights and pretty trees that I insist on having since I moved out that help make the holiday special for me. :3

Mason also helped me install a much-needed extra shelf in our kitchen pantry this morning, in which immediately following I gleefully spent a half hour re-organizing all of our dry food. I'm not sure it's normal to get as excited as I do over a nicely organized pantry, but I think we've all realized by now that I'm strangely quirky like that occasionally. (You see what I mean when I say I haven't had anything interesting going on lately?)

I buckled and pre-ordered a copy of DC Universe Online under the tantalizing prospect of getting a chance to play the beta the same night -- only to discover afterward that I shouldn't expect to receive my beta key until at least mid-November. =_= Frankly, the whole pre-ordering process has left me rather irked on a number of levels. Sony's sort of dropped the ball with their customer service -- aside from the complete lack of details regarding beta keys prior to clicking the BUY NOW button, they send out no confirmation or acknowledgment of any kind when you try to actually submit your pre-order receipt, and from what I've read they're not bothering to take any time to ever reply to customer questions and clarify the lack of information. Shame, Sony. SHAME. While we're on the subject, the whole clunky system of "send us a photo of your pre-order receipt" seems a little... ridiculous... I've never heard of an online website processing a proof-of-sale through the use of screenshots and camera photos. o_O Either way, I look forward to eventually being able to create my own super hero/villain and running amok in Gotham City and Metropolis.

Mood: Triumph!

OMG, I BEAT ARKHAM ASYLUM ALL BY MYSELF! :B Sure, I had it on easy mode and it's taken me over a month to trudge through it, but I totally did it without handing the controller over even once! For anyone who knows what a crappy excuse for a gamer I am, this is a fairly big deal. I only have two big complaints about the game:

1. For a game that is so ridiculously gorgeous and highly detailed in design, it's pretty ridiculous that you spend practically all of your time in Detective Mode and don't even get to enjoy any of the eye-candy.
2. The final boss battle against the Joker is just plain disappointing. It was probably one of the easiest fights in the entire game (and I use the term "fight" loosely, considering you hardly even take a swing at Mister J and spend the entire time fighting henchmen instead) especially compared to Ivy, who I died six times with much swearing and gnashing of teeth before I managed to beat.

In any event, it has been the highlight of my lackluster gaming career to date, and I'm super excited for the sequel, Arkham City, to come out in 2011. Catwoman and Two-Face and even more Joker, oh my!

Iroh went in for his annual checkup and it turns out he really is getting a tad tubby. All this time I thought the extra weight was just the whole second year "filling out" stage that cats apparently go through. *Sweatdrop* The doctor says he should loose around 1/2 - 1lb, so in an effort to not end up with a rolly-polly kitty, I'm cutting back on his wet food in the evenings. *Iroh is very sad*

While we were in at the clinic, I also took the chance to ask the vet about how to put on the Soft Claw nail caps. (Iroh has been caught one too many times scratching at our sofa downstairs, and certain individuals were two whiskers away from having a conniption.) The caps were easy enough to apply (though I have no doubt that next time I try it by myself Iroh will fight me to the bitter end), and they seem to work pretty well. Other than visibly wigging him out when he walked anywhere for the first day of having them on, they don't appear to bother him much at all -- aside from any regrettable injury to his kitty pride he may bear, that is. Sometimes he'll shake his paws in annoyance and give me such a dirty look, like I've betrayed a sacred trust or something.

Poor Iroh. Vet visits, dieting, and no more scratching at the furniture. It's been a bad week for him. ^^;

Update on the kitchen renovations! And by that I mean that we've scrapped the kitchen reno idea for the time being (we're going to wait until we have more money to burn for that big project), and instead we've sort of -- and almost entirely by accident -- decided to redo the upstairs bathroom. What started as an outing to buy a new toilet seat turned into a new shower curtain, which in turn escalated into new bathmats, towels, and paint to match the new shower curtain, and has ended up with us buying a new vanity from Jysk and light fixtures and shopping around for the best deal on floor and wall tile. We haven't even done any of the big changes yet and already it's looking so much prettier! I'll post before and after pictures when we get it finished~