Christmas continues, off to see the rest of the family for what I am calling "Christmas.2"
I've been meaning to get out of the house and take some pictures, but haven't. Been sleeping a lot, mostly on account of nothing to do (the weather is shit for photography).

Merry Fucking Christmas

You can read, right? It's Christmas eve, so I'm getting dragged off to non-secular festivities. Not especially happy about it. On the other hand, four hours until the twenty fifth.

I'd forgotten what I didn't like about Christmas.

Fuck it. The whole damned season.

That went well

I didn't get around to finishing those liveblogs.

I also managed to leave the memory card with all of my pictures from Montreal back in Ottawa.

I didn't finish the liveblogs because I over slept and missed the train I was supposed to catch and had to scramble to get a ticket on a different train and... look.
It was a fucking mess. A sixteen fucking car pile-up with a gasoline tanker thrown on top for shits and giggles.

And I have no snow :(

Train Ride

A recap, for the week. I wound up going to Montreal. It's a gorgeous city, for the record, but I don't have any pictures from there. There are two reasons for this. Winter decided to finally get it's game in fucking gear and bit down hard with a cold snap, and I wasn't fucking around outside with the sun going down in a city I wasn't familiar with in the fucking cold without any fucking gloves. That is the requisite run-on sentence for this post. Long story, as to why I was in Montreal, but it's always nice to be out of the house with company. I'm not exactly a fucking social butterfly.

As for my plans. I've got a five hour train ride to Toronto tomorrow, and this time I'm actually going to take pictures as I go. I could liveblog the whole trip when we stop at a station, if I had a mind to. I'm also going to finish my Blair Witch Liveblog tomorrow on the trip, and finally get around to resuming watching those hilariously bad videos.

TL;DR? G0t my shit packed, and I'm getting the fuck out of here for a while.

Pattern

I remember reading an article a while back, can't remember where, about how the human mind is essentially geared to look for and recognize certain patterns, the shape of a human face, for instance. It's an instinct... a skill set that's hardwired into us, ostensibly so we wouldn't get eaten by tigers or something. The article goes on to say that the human mind even tries to find patterns in places where they don't exist. It's where you get kids making the clouds out to be dragons, or kittens or what have. How we got that famous face on Mars, and why there are conspiracy theorists. Misfires. Because the human brain apparently needs to do this. But does it recognize breaks in patterns as well? The one thing that doesn't fit in a crowd?
I'd like to think so. If the human brain is geared towards patterns, it seems to make sense that it should recognize changes to them.

So let me tell you about houses. The houses on my street, most of them have christmas lights. Or lights period. You can see them as you walk down the street. Except for a few of them. A house with no lights on, no cars in the driveway, sitting on it's own at the end of the street gives me an... off sort of feeling. One of these things doesn't belong, you know?

And I'm going to get into touchy feely stuff, because the season sort of merits it. Christmas is that whole family thing, but I'll be spending it five hours away from mine, with my mother's sister, for assorted reasons. The least of which is that I have no desire to see my father, a miserable, hateful, decrepit, alcoholic excuse for a human being for whom death cannot come soon enough.

Things with Miranda are going well, though she's still glaring at me if I so much as mention the homeless guy from the other day. I've got a week until I take my train ride. Probably spend the whole thing liveblogging, if anyone cares to enjoy it.

Caffeine withdrawal has started to subside. I expect I'll spend at least a week of the break sick as a dog post finals. But I've got a dinner date on wednesday (also the last of my exams), and need to finish this website.

What the fuck?

We were downtown for class today, and Miranda flipped out. At a homeless guy in a wheelchair.
I think that sums up what happened fairly accurately. Exam stress must be getting to her or something.

We're on our way back from the field trip downtown, visiting an office, about to catch the bus, and all of a sudden, from behind me I hear Miranda start swearing. At least I assume it was swearing, judging by the tone. I'm assuming because I think there were at least four different languages in there. She starts going at the guy in french. I know a *little* but she was talking way too fast for me to pick up more than every sixth word.

You have to understand, this is fucking out of character for her. Incredibly out of fucking character. I have never seen Miranda flip the fuck out on someone like that. Not on her worst days. So I have no idea what this idiot did to get her going like that. I knew she spoke french, but I think there was some italian and german thrown in there for good measure. At least when she was cursing.

In any case, the entire street now staring at them (myself notwithstanding) Miranda finally manages to get a hold of herself, leaves the wheelchair guy alone. And when she gets close enough, she shoots me this look. You know the sort right? The ones that contain volumes of information without actually needing anything more than a glance? This one said "Don't even fucking think about asking." Did I mention she was... I think grinning is the right word. What the fuck have I gotten into here?

I'm going to go back to this thing I was working on then. The break cannot get here fucking fast enough.

Further Update

I could really have done with a wakeup this morning. Almost walked right out of the house without my glasses.

To those of you with vision that doesn't need correcting, I'll try to explain. Without my glasses, objects start to lose definition outside of arms reach. Like having a great big blur filter tossed over them. After a certain distance things like words and writing become indistinguishable blurs of little more than vague ill-defined shapes and blobs of colour.

I need more sleep. Just another week or so. It's snowed again, which means I'll be making my yearly trip to Toronto for the holidays soon I suppose. Snow always looks so pretty right after it's first fallen.

More updates

So, I've talked with Miranda. Good news! She knows about this blog. (Hi Miranda)

How to best go about this then? Well, let's start with the obvious update. Caffeine free:

I'm still doing pretty good without the caffeine. My sleeping had normalized a little before we went into "OH SHIT EXAMS TIME" and I started fucking with my sleep again. At this point I'm catching naps or scraps of sleep whenever I can.

Suffice it to say, sticking with my personal challenge is proving harder than expected.

Miranda: Take the chance to thank Rynia here. Miranda found me liveblogging MH (part of the reason that's on hold) and recognized it. How you recognize one shaky cam video out of a few dozen I don't know. We got to palavering and things followed. That was a few days back.
She's... yeah let's go with 'intense' as a word to describe her. Apparently I am seeing her. This was an... I think this qualifies as an ultimatum.

Update time

So, we're now at.. the end of a week, I think.
One week sans caffeine. I'm not doing terribly well at this point. My sleeping is completely thrown off. Maybe I should have just tried giving this up in march or something? I'm starting to come down with something. Not surprising. Gotta to get around to getting my flu shot before I head to Toronto for the holiday.

So, yeah, might as well cover that there. I'm heading to Toronto for the winter break. Don't expect too much from me during that period. It's probably the most social interaction I'm likely to get for the next six months, I intend to make the most of it.

The date with Miranda (that's her name, incidentally) went... badly. I either couldn't shut up, or couldn't articulate my thoughts properly, neither is a good extreme. I blame the lack of caffeine. We did get to watch Dead Snow without my running commentary (understand, this is rare), but she caught the bus right after that. Quiet the whole way.

I kind of get the feeling I fucked that one up, quite a bit.

I was walking home this evening and realized I could see Orion. I don't think that I could live in a place where I couldn't see the stars. It's just not possible.

I got home, having left the light in my room on. For a second, I thought that... well it was stupid of me. Let's leave it at that.