Just finished reading (yes, already) The Soprano Sorceress, which I got for Christmas (thanks d0om!). Not a bad book, all in all - but the one thing that made me want to throw the book out of the window was a very badly botched opera aria quote. Either the author didn't do his research, or his editor wasn't worth anything. Sigh. It's not that difficult to check for proper spelling and wording...

[EDIT] I was googling for the book title, to see what other people thought of the book... and look what I found. Freaky.

Distributed Proofreaders, a collaborative effort in proofreding ebooks before they are submitted to Project Gutenberg (though they are not officially affiliated with it).
I reckon I'll help out whenever I have a bit of free time. I don't mind proofreading (yes, I just said I don't mind proofreading - stop staring at me like that), and hey, it's being helpful.

Stick Thief movie. It's a repost from this TTLG thread, so most of my visitors who come from there will probably have already seen it... but it's so great that I just had to repost it here. So those of you who don't frequent the TTLG forums get to see it.

I think I've mentioned before, but the world is too goddamn big.

Our cats are getting way too clever for us. Attila managed to sneak into the cupboard we keep some food in while we weren't looking, and if my brother hadn't noticed the tip of his tail we would've locked him inside.

We are so doomed.

Whee, Christmas! \o/ Now I just have to wait for my brother to get back home from midnight mass, then we can open presents and stuff. He will so kill me when he opens his one. XD

Merry Christmas to everybody! \o/

So my brother got a tin of custard powder as a Christmas present from our aunt, uncle etc.
So after dinner mom says, let's try making a bit of it. Ok, says my brother, and starts making it.
The instructions on the tin were, 2 tablespoons of the powder, one tablespoon of sugar, 568ml of milk. Mom suggested making a small amount of it - halving the doses or so, she said.
So what does he do?
4 tablespoons of the powder; 2 tablespoons of sugar; and 200ml (at most) of milk.
He and mom are upstairs trying to sort out the Goop From Hell now. Mom's glaring, my brother's looking awfully embarassed, I ran downstairs to post this and laugh. Hee.

*cheer* About bloody time.

---

Got my second Christmas present today (the first was the one from my singing teacher that I mentioned a couple days ago), one of them cubes of small sheets of paper to be used for notes things from my aunt Catherine (yes, she's English, I've mentioned it before haven't I?), uncle Giampaolo and their two kids (and my cousins) Giovanni & Elisabetta.
Not too shabby of a present. Now I will no longer have to search aimlessly for a piece of paper every time I need to write something down and I'm at the computer. ^^

I also got a nice origami card - thanks Fishie :)

Ascolta, mamma è vicino a te? Devi dire a mamma... c'è qualcuno che...

I downloaded two songs I used to listen to a lot when I was a kid, "Piange il telefono" e "Il maestro di violino" by Domenico Modugno. (Yes, I'm aware I was a weird kid... :p)
I remember crying while listening to them, because they were so sad. I'd almost forgotten about them, but then I heard mom hum one of them while tidying the kitchen, so I decided to download them and listen to them again.
And what do you know... I cried.

"Bene. Allora ci vediamo dopodomani, signorina."
"No, maestro."
"Giovedì allora."
"No, maestro. Non verrò più."
"Perché? Ha deciso di non continuare a studiare?"
"No, maestro."
"Ma perché allora?"
"Perché... mi sono innamorata di lei."

NationStates: create your own country.
Welcome to Alathia.

Alè, la PlaMa pubblica X... salvatevi questo banner animato e controllatelo frame per frame se non ci credete. Speriamo solo che sia un'edizione decente, e che non costi troppo... purtroppo la PlaMa non brilla per rapporto qualità-prezzo =_= Smetterei di comprare fumetti pubblicati dalla PlaMa (e dalla Dynamic, che li fa pagare un occhio della testa... accidenti a loro) se non fossero serie che adoro e che non ho altro modo di leggere... --;
Non capisco come mai molti si lamentino della Star, per lo meno tutte le loro edizioni sono curate e in generale valgono i soldi che costano, e stanno pubblicando fumetti ottimi...
(Anche se, a onor del vero, li vorrei strozzare per il fatto che certi fumetti, tipo Trinetra o Ghost Sweeper Mikami, escono una volta ogni morte di papa >< Ma per lo meno non interrompono la pubblicazione...)

Devo ricordarmi di passare in fumetteria domani (sì, il mio "spacciatore di fumetti" sotto Natale tiene aperto anche di domenica... quanto gli voglio bene ^____^) per recuperare le ultime uscite.

Oh, and if my brother's friend does not return the FotR DVDs tomorrow, I'll have his guts for garters. And if it has so much as a small tiny little scratch I'll make him cough up the money to buy a new copy.

[EDIT] A small clarification. It's not the fact that he borrows stuff off my brother that irks me. It's the fact that he does it continuously. He borrows games and movies off my brother, to play them / watch them with his other friends. Wonderful, innit? And he has been known to return stuff damaged, too.

So. Now I'm done with Christmas presents. \o/ I managed to find a decent present for my mom, my dad and my brother at virtually the last minute with almost no hassle... of course I'm not gonna say here what the presents are because they read this blog (¬¬). I can say this though, my brother will kill me when he sees his present. XD
I even got a present for my singing teacher - and this afternoon I went to visit her to give her the present and chat and stuff, even if we couldn't have a lesson because I still have a cold and she just caught a cold. ^^;; Of course she had a present for me too, so now I have a rather cute shapeable balloon (basically a balloon filled with flour, with two eyes glued on and hair made of wool covering the knot at the top of the balloon... you can pull it and knead it in various shapes and it will keep them) sitting on my desk and staring at me. XD It's not much of a gift, really (nor was mine), but it's cute. And the first Christmas gift I received.

I want to see The Two Towers. Now, damnit. Stupid Italian release dates.
<hopeful> I don't suppose there's anybody willing to pay me a plane ticket to, say, London, and back, and the movie ticket too? My parents won't. ;_; </hopeful>

(I'm joking, of course. I wouldn't accept it.)

(Or would I?)

Stayed up until 4am last night watching Chobits. A suggestion for everybody: don't start watching the final bunch of Chobits episodes late at night, you won't be able to stop before the end. xx;
As a result, I woke up at 11am or so, of course. Went downstairs to find the cats had half-wrecked the Christmas tree. So I fixed it, then went into the kitchen and discovered they'd attacked the bread that mom had left on the kitchen counter. So I tidied the kitchen as well, and everything.
And the cats are very innocently sleeping on the sofa.

Oh, and I just have to say this... the Rurouni Kenshin OVAs fucking 0wn.

An amusing Christmas for cat owners, part two: we decorated the tree, and the cats went nuts. Jumping at the tinsel, trying to get the decorations off the tree branches, batting insanely at the lights on the tree, you name it, they did it.
No breakable tree ornaments this year for us, oh no.

An amusing Christmas for cat owners, part one: watching Attila the cat try and climb on the fake Christmas tree to get at dad's fingers while dad is adjusting said fake Christmas tree.

We're decorating the tree later this afternoon. Something tells me the cats will be very much entertained.

Balloon hats around the world.

Want to send a message in a bottle, but you don't live near the sea? Here you go. Don't like that place? Here's others.

Went to see the opera "La Boheme" this evening. It was nice. It's one of my favourite operas, even if some of the characters get on my nerves - Mimì, namely. ^^;
It was nice. Most of the singers were pretty decent - the tenor who sang Rodolfo excluded. >< The guy was one of the worst tenors I've seen in a while. Oh, vocally he was fine, sure, but he had all the expressiveness of a rock. You know those tenors who do nothing but stand, legs spread and arms spread? Yeah, one of those. It was painful to watch.
The soprano who sang Mimì was good, though, though not brilliant vocally. But what she lacked vocally she made up for in expressiveness.
They were, though, positively eclipsed by the Marcello-Musetta couple. Marcello was very good - far more expressive than Rodolfo was. And Musetta, well, she was bloody brilliant. Her aria in the second act was great, and the soprano (Sonia Peruzzo - I did a Google for her, hoping she had a website of her own... no luck, but I found several articles praising her in some of her past roles) was the character, she didn't just look as if she was acting the character. Same with her scene in act 3 - when she and Marcello were on the scene with the Rodolfo-Mimì couple, they drew far more attention. Which is unusual, of course, since they aren't the leading couple of the opera.
Meh. Since Musetta's my favourite character, I'm happy.
Though, that tenor... *cringe*

Small update: spoke with mom, with a bit of support from my brother. She promised she'll try to listen from now on.
We shall see.

Well, well. Mother dear has read my bitchy post of a couple days ago.
Her reaction?
"Oh, you probably should delete that post immediately, you know, people you know might go to your blog and then their opinion of you would be horrible... think about your social standing..."
Like I care about that. I needed to vent somewhere, and since mother dear would not listen (yes, I tried) I bitched in public.
I think she's more worried about HER social standing. She can say that her friends "know what it's like to deal with "overreacting teenagers" (gee, maybe you should think before speaking, dear mother? and then you say you never insult me) as often as she wants, my opinion still stands.
I say it again. I'd give up everything I have if she would just LISTEN TO ME, without prejudices, without "oh you're just overreacting" or anything of the sort. Once would be enough.
But apparently it's too much to ask.

[EDIT] And another thing. Isn't it funny how she has to read my blog to find out what's happening in my life? Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if she'd just LISTEN without passing judgements I'd feel more comfortable talking with her about my problems, and what happens in my life, and suchlike. There are so many things I've said to my friends that I would NEVER say to her that I can't even count them anymore. Because I don't feel comfortable talking to her, because she never really tries to listen. She's just interested in judging me, it appears, and in making me a copy of herself - apparently, all I have to do is do as she says.
Of course, if I confront her about that, she says "no, dear, it isn't true" and leaves it at that. What happened to discussion? What happened to solving problems?
What happened to my mother being my first friend, the one I could always go to?
Yeah, isn't it funny?

Perfect end to a shitty day (coughing fit every other minute == not good, sleeping maybe four hours at the very most because of said coughing fits == really bad), my computer crashed badly and chewed up some folders on my HD. No problems, all recoverable and/or rebuildable (thank fuck it didn't touch my mp3 folder), except one, the most important... the Trillian folder. It left, ironically enough, the program and the basic options intact: it only ate the contact list and logfiles.
I broke into tears of course ^^; Maybe it's silly of me, but I had years of conversations with friends in those logfiles, and I hated losing them. Not to mention that my contact list has 70+ people in it, and rebuilding it would have been hell.
I tried using a recovery software on this computer, no dice... nothing recoverable. Then I had the idea of using the recovery software on my old computer, which used to have Trillian with my full contact list and everything and had sat practically untouched since I had uninstalled it there.
After half an hour or so of fiddling, I managed to recover the contact list and program preferences. Phew. I still lost the logfiles though, which sucks ;_;

"Take heed, O thou wolf in sheep's clothing, for you will beget difficult teenagers!" The Biblical Curse Generator.

*squeak* Well. Naked Quidditch match (link off Ragabash). That is so wrong, but soooo amusing. Just the thing I needed to improve my mood. XD

I normally don't bitch about my family here, because they read this (even though I've asked them not to), but fuck this, I've had enough. Let them read if they want.
I've been sick the past few days, as some of you know already.
All the time, my mother's been bitching at me. "Go tidy your room", "do some ironing", "why don't you study some", all of this blithely ignoring the fact that I'm SICK, goddamnit, and I can barely stand. I did some ironing this afternoon, just to make her shut up, and I felt like fainting afterwards (ironing when you have a temperature is, as you can imagine, not a good idea). She had the gall to bitch at me because I didn't tidy my room this morning, because I SLEPT this morning because I was feeling too sick and tired to get up (I slept 12 hours last night, it's not like I'm not getting enough sleep). And have I mentioned that tidying my room right now means tidying my book shelves, because that's the only thing that's untidy, and to tidy my book shelves I have to stand on a ladder, and I'd really rather not do that while my sense of balance is fucked because of the bad cold?
Of course, my mother says, if I'm feeling so sick that I can't do anything useful, I should go back to bed and sleep some more. Nevermind that I'm bored out of my skull, nevermind that I HATE being sick because I can do nothing at all, I can't even get out of the house, and this is fucking up all my plans, I was planning to go Christmas shopping (FINALLY) today, at this rate my friends will never get their presents in time for Christmas... nevermind that I'm lonely because the rest of the family is continuously busy or, when they're busy, they don't think about socializing anyway - mom is either working or knitting, dad is either working or playing his goddamned Flight Simulator game, my brother's either studying or playing his games - except when it suits them to tell me I'm being "antisocial" and tell me I should "socialize more", which of course for them means sitting in front of the TV watching something and not saying anything. Nevermind that I missed volleyball yesterday, nevermind that I'm missing my singing lesson tomorrow, nevermind that I'm most likely missing volleyball (again) and choir rehearsal on Thursday, making this week a complete waste from my perspective.
Nevermind that I'm bored and lonely and alone and I don't want to waste all my time in bed, not even if I'm sick.
And she seems to want me to smile and act happy no matter what sort of shit I'm going through. Nevermind that I'm feeling like shit and am unhappy, I should just smile, because who cares if I'm unhappy? Who wants to see that I'm unhappy, who wants to spend time to cheer me up? It's better if I just put up a facade of happiness, so the others aren't bothered by my being unhappy, because if I'm unhappy acting unhappy is SELFISH, apparently.
I wish I was somewhere else, I'm weary of this shit. My mother is being intolerable, and my father doesn't help either. And I've TRIED talking to them about this, but they just don't want to listen.
And I can never talk to my family about my problems, because they either don't want to listen, or say that it's stupid to worry so much about such a trivial thing, or that I should stop being grumpy and [clean my room / study / iron / do any other menial task they can think of] instead. Or they just say "how can you be unhappy, you have so much more than other people your age do, we bought you stuff, we bought you a new computer. Which is the worst thing to do.
Except of course when I'd rather cry alone, then they stick their nose into my business without considering my feelings.
And if they need help I have to run to them immediately, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, while if I need help nobody ever helps me.
And I don't have any privacy at all, every time they pass near the computer they look at what I'm doing, and if I'm talking with somebody they stop and stare at the conversation and get angry if I tell them to go away. And they say I can't be allowed to have a computer in my room because then I would never go to sleep but just spend all my time on the computer - bullshit, they just want to control me.
And I'm regretting not taking the chance to go live abroad now, I'm regretting it immensely. I'd be alone and scared but at least I'd be away from this shit.
I'd give all I have to be somewhere else. I can't stand this anymore.

Antique Christmas lights. You'd think it would be a boring subject, but it's actually very interesting, at least for me. I spent quite a while looking through the page (especially the gallery) and I'm still not done.

The Megapenny Project. Now I'm waiting for somebody to do that with an eurocent. ;)

*cuddles her new computer* :D It boots in three seconds, imagine that! And it hasn't crashed on me once. And it's really absurdly fast.

And to top it off, I got a new printer today. Our old color printer prints like it has Parkinson's disease, our b/w laser one prints in pretty stripes, we needed a new printer. And it's hooked up to my computer (though it's shared on the network) and sitting on my right so printing stuff out is now extremely convenient for me (while before it was a pain in the ass). \o/

Scratch that "a couple days". I went and got a new network hub, and mom said she did not want the monitor to stay with my laptop.
So now I have a shiny, working new computer. Now to install all my software on it...

Eeeeeeeee. My new computer is here. :D :D :D :D It will take a couple days (at the very most) to set it up, because I still need an extra network hub and an extra monitor (since dad decided that the 17" monitor we got with the computer could stay with my laptop, and the new computer will have my current 19" monitor, and the old computer I'm currently typing this on will have a shoddy cheap 15" monitor), but eeeeeee. It's here. \o/ Pile of games that had been set aside because my computer was not powerful enough, here I come. \o/

(If you're wondering why I don't set it up now: no point in setting it up if I have to move it afterwards. I've waited ages for this, I can wait another couple days.)

Am I the only one who hates it when somebody phones and says their name and then goes quiet, as if they were expecting me to automatically know who they are and divine who they want to speak with? I mean, there's four people in this household. I'm not aware of everybody my parents know. You'd expect that saying "I am X, is Y home" would be common courtesy, right?

The LEGO USS Enterprise. I don't give a damn about Star Trek, but that's impressive indeed.

Poor snake. (Mefi reference thread)