Strange week...

Yeah... this week has just been really odd, in several different ways.

One of them being me consistently forgetting to update this thing. XD

Last weekend on the other hand was surprisingly good.  Spent most of Saturday in town for Buena Vista's "Mountain Days," which is basically the BV equivalent of the Fall Festival in Clifton Forge back home.  Got a jar of this really good three-onion spice mix, some Cajun peanuts, and a German duck (with Oktoberfest-type outfit and beer mug) while I was down there, and also got to try free samples of two kinds of fudge and three kinds of honey.  Also saw honey bees for the first time in forever; apparently the honey jars attracted every bee from nearby, and they were buzzing around that booth all day trying to get into the ones that had been opened (...and occasionally doing weird things, like following me and Ruth around for 10-15 minutes straight or landing on my chin and crawling up over my lips before flying off.)  Bumped into a bunch of people I know, talked, goofed off, ate, saw all kinds of neat stuff at the various booths and such down there... it was a good day.

Honeybees! And not ones that are slowly dying of fungus, either!

Ruth looking at some artwork and deciding which one to buy.

BIBLE DUCKS! There were so many different ducks at this one tent...

Last Sunday even turned out good, surprisingly enough.  I walked all the way from here to the Food Lion out on the edges of Buena Vista city limits (or maybe a little bit past them?) and then came back with a pack of new batteries, a new water bottle, and a can of Lysol to spray down my stinky couch with and possibly de-stinkify it a bit.

The week itself... eh.  It was just weird.  There were definitely some good parts (got to know a few people better, for example), but there were also bad parts and just-plain-strange parts mixed in there, more strange parts than usual.  Several days this week I forgot what day it was for almost half of the day; Wednesday I thought it was Monday for most of the day, and Friday I even thought it was Monday up until a certain point... even though I should've known otherwise since my schedule's different on Fridays.  About mid-week, I ended up getting put into one of the most awkward and uncomfortable situations that I've ever been in; one of my friends came up to me and tried to convince me to ask one of her friends to go to the Homecoming dance with me.  Problem: I don't actually know this other girl.  Like, at all.  We may have met once or so, because apparently she knew who I was (even though I had absolutely no idea who she was), but... I seriously can't ask a near-total-stranger to go to a dance with me.  Especially not with less than a week's notice--if I had been told this two weeks ago, then maybe I'd have time to get to know her a little and be at least slightly more okay with the whole idea... but less than three days? No way.
Plus... I don't really even want to ask people I actually know and like to go to dances with me.  Taking a date to a dance is just a weird situation for me because if I go with someone, I'm going to feel like I'm bringing her down the whole time due to my inability to ever do any of the fast "random wiggle dancing" type stuff (and it's especially bad if I don't even know whether she'd be interested in that anyway; worst case scenario here is if she's the type to try and drag me out there against my will and ruin my night just because she wants to do it.  And since I don't know her, of course I don't know if she would be or not!)  I'd actually be more okay with going on a "normal" date with a near-total-stranger than I would be with going to a dance with one, because at least on a regular date (as in, to someplace where you're not constantly surrounded by loud blasting noise that makes it difficult to talk) you can at least get to know the other person better if you don't really know them already.  But anyway... this was a really bad position for me to be in, because first of all asking someone to go to something with me is a really hard thing for me even if it's someone I already know (with a stranger it would probably be impossible, and probably wouldn't work very well even if I did manage to do it), and second of all not doing it would make me feel pretty crappy about things because apparently this other girl wasn't going to go to the dance at all if nobody asked her.  Supposedly someone else might have asked her, from what I remember someone saying the other day, but still... that is not a good position to put someone (especially me) into, and I'm a little annoyed at the friend who did this because of that.

But anyway... the week got better (a lot better) after that whole situation disappeared.  Yesterday I went down to the SVU fields for the homecoming bonfire, which actually turned out pretty well thanks to the fact that there were a bunch of friends there for me to talk to and goof off with.  (There was also hot chocolate, which was good.)

Early on, when most of the total strangers hadn't shown up. XD

Afterward, I ended up walking back up to the Lofts with those guys and watching Corpse Bride, which I just misspelled as "Corpse Bridge" when I was trying to type it the first time.  That would've been a very different movie, I'm guessing.  But anyway, that was a movie I'd never seen before--always good to fill in some of those gaps in the list of movies I'd seen (which is generally made up of more gaps than movies, at least when it comes to things that came out after 2003 or so.)  But yeah... turned out to be a really good night, one of the few times I've ever actually had stuff to do and friends to talk to and goof off with later on on a Friday night (Friday nights are usually the start of the typical weekend boredom and loneliness for me here, so having one that was completely the opposite of that for once is definitely a welcome change!)

Earlier today, I headed out to the fields again, this time for the homecoming barbecue (which was pretty disappointing due to its lack of edible food--and worse, the food was both inedible and cost $6.00... yeah, $6.00 for what was essentially cafeteria food.  Blech!)  Thankfully, it wasn't just the (inedible) food; there was other stuff going on down there and a decent bunch of people I knew and stuff to do.  There were bags of popcorn and Oreo-like cookie/cracker things around for free, so I at least had something to eat in place of a real lunch.

There were also balloon critters being made, such as my shoulder-frog here. XD

After that, I... went home and did a whole lot of nothing for a couple hours.  And then headed down to Original Italian and got a veggie pizza for combined lunch+supper, which was pretty good (and will probably end up being supper for tomorrow, since I have two big slices left in a box in my fridge.)  The only thing left to do today is the homecoming dance, which should either be great or a completely awful boredom disaster depending on who's there and how things go.  I guess if it's looking pretty awful after it's halfway over I could just head over to the art building and finish the 3D Design project (tower of creepy zombie hands!) that I started on Friday, but I really hope I don't end up having to leave early.  It's impossible to know ahead of  time... SVU dances are so inconsistent.  Homecoming has been a good one in previous years, though, so hopefully that pattern continues for this one.

Fairly uneventful week... until the end

Yeah... classes-wise this week was pretty empty (no Astronomy homework all week, no new painting assignments.)  We had to order supplies in watercolor class, which for me meant a new 50-sheet pad of paper and about a dozen new colors of paint to add on to the 12 or so that I've been using.  Which turned out to be around $10 short of the $75 limit we had put on us, so I've got an extra 10 bucks left over to spent on... something later on, I guess.  Maybe more paper if I somehow run out, though I doubt that'll happen (I have 4 sheets of the same paper left from my last pad, plus 50 new, so... I'd need to do a whopping 27 paintings in both Advanced Watercolor and Senior Show to use them all up.  And that's... probably not gonna happen. XD)

For once, the weekend actually had more stuff going on than the week for me.  First, someone actually ended up contacting me on that online dating site that I've been on since last spring.  Oddly, when I saw that she'd viewed my profile and I looked through hers, I thought for sure that she wouldn't message me, that she'd be one of those people who just gets put off by something I said and wouldn't want anything to do with me.  Not sure why, just a feeling I got from things here and there.  Turns out that, as usual, online profiles and text-only communication don't really match up with actually talking to someone--while her profile was making me say "I dunno...", things went a lot better after she sent me a message and we got into talking about some stuff.  Three messages later we end up exchanging Skype contact info, and later that night (after I got back from a really long walk to the far corners of Buena Vista, where I found such odd things as an incomplete wooden foundation built into the side of a hill, the front of a tractor trailer truck, and a schoolbus) we ended up talking over Skype video chat... for an hour and a half.  That's happened with people I've met in real life before (I think my record is around 2 hours of talking with someone I'd just met), but never anyone from online.  We seem to get along really well, telling each other weird stories from our lives and laughing about things and just generally goofing off and getting to know each other.  Didn't hear from her yesterday, but found another message from her in my inbox this morning when I got up, apparently sent at 2 AM (right after she got home from somewhere she had been earlier.)  Which led into us talking over Skype again after I got home from going out to eat with my dad and sister, only stopping around the 45 minute mark because some of her family members had shown up and she had to go.
She seems really nice, an interesting person who's fun to talk to, and we've gotten along pretty well so far.  She lives pretty far away (in Richmond or nearby, I think), but that's seriously the only problem I've seen so far.  And even then, Richmond is a whole lot closer than Illinois or North Carolina or someplace halfway across the country, so...

Also, yesterday I ended up going to one of the General Conference sessions with a few of my Mormon friends.  It was okay I guess.  There was some of the usual talk about missionary work that I just kind of zone out on because it does not apply to me at all, and a few parts that had me going "well, you kind of have a few good points here, but there's better ways to word it than that."  And a whole talk where the guy kept emphasizing how guys and girls are sooooo different (...supposedly) and that society is trying to make them less different in the name of equality (...again, supposedly.)  Except, y'know, about the whole "society is the whole reason why there appear to be so many differences in the first place" thing.  Religious people tend to conveniently forget about that when they're levitating somewhere high above the clouds on their "in the world, but not of the world" high horse--guess what, Mormons?  A lot of the things you think are innate features of male and female are actually molded into us at a young age by--gasp!--society.  Oh, and guess what else? Religions are part of society too!  Religious influences on kids growing up ARE society's influences! You are not some unquestionable "other," you are very much a product of the society you developed in (and that's both the form of society that the religion was originally founded in, and the forms of society that its current members grew up in.  All kinds of influences going around there.)
Oddly enough it was this talk that had the "good point, but needs improvement on the wording" bits, hidden among all the "no really, we really do see women as equals, honest, I swear! you know, separate but equal!" stuff that made up the rest of it.  One good bit: equality shouldn't mean "women can ALSO go crazy with the promiscuity just like men are currently expected to by society."  Of course, the point derailed a bit after that when it skewed to the other extreme (basically "men should be super-ultra-virgins forever until marriage and be held to unrealistic standards, too, just like women are now what with the whole 'anyone who has sex before marriage must be a slut' thing.")  But the original point, that equality between the sexes shouldn't just mean "oh, you can go be just like how society expects men to be now," is definitely a good one.  What society (and, if you trim out the sex-crazed bits, that includes religions like the LDS church too) expects men to be like now is pretty much horrible.  Guys should not be overcompetitive, sex-crazed, self-control-lacking douchebags who simultaneously see themselves as being better/tougher/etc. than anyone less "manly" than them and able to get away with things by virtue of the old "just boys being boys" excuse.  Guys are not naturally like that, not any more than girls are; it's society teaching us that kind of crap since shortly after birth that encourages a lot of guys to go down that path.  When "be a man" means "be an arrogant douche," of course you're going to have a lot of male kids growing up to be arrogant douches and thinking "that's the way things are."  The less of this "this is how guys should be" mentality we have, the better off we'll be, and that applies to both males and females.
There was also another good point in that talk, but unfortunately I can't remember what it was.  I think that one was legitimately a 100% good point, and it didn't even derail off into some one-extreme-or-the-other craziness like the one above did shortly after making the good part of its point, so it kinda sucks that I can't remember it now.  I guess that's one good thing I can say about those people who take notes on these sorts of things--when they hear something and think "hey, that's actually kind of a good point!", they won't forget them because they'll have them written down. XD

I've also been working on finishing up Okédoké! La Leyenda Mexicana lately.  So far I've gotten a huge chunk of Chapter 6's final dungeon done, compared to where I was before the semester started.  The basement floors and the first two aboveground floors of the secret Alaskan base are completely finished, and you can fight Darth Cheney, Dubya (in both normal and "Ultimate Dubya" forms), and the last of the game's many optional bosses, "Ghost of Racist."  Who is, of course, the ghost of the now-dead Chapter 5 boss Captain Racist.  That means there is literally just one boss battle left.  As far as mapping goes, I've also got two of the three maps for the third floor done; I still need maptiles for the final boss's room, but other than that I have everything done maptile-wise.  Graphics for the final boss are not started yet; that's another big thing I still need to get done.  And of course, there's a few more scripts to go before the game's completely done (one when Señor Death explains what's been going on upon reaching a certain room on the 3rd floor, one introducing the final boss, and one last script for the escape from the Alaskan base at the very end of the game.)  Once all that's done, all that's left is to make the ending.  And when that's done, Okédoké will be my first true completed game since freaking Frankfurter's Quest for Soap back in 2003.  It's about time!  It'll be great to finally get this thing done.  Maybe then I can finally get a demo release of Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School done, or come out with a new version of Puckamon.  I dunno.  Better to not think about that so far in advance, and just focus on getting Okédoké done instead.