[Try the second. Was almost done with this entry, mother dearest called me afk and while I was afk my computer crashed. Bah.]

First there was the wrought iron candleholder I bought on Wednesday. Well, it was cheap, and I'd never had a fancy candleholder before. And it's pretty, wrought iron and glass, looking like a tree. (Though I don't know if I'll ever have the courage to actually use it to hold a lit candle. It's so pretty, I don't want wax to drip all over it.)
Then yesterday I was told the ethnic-type store five minutes by bike from my house was having a sale (they're closing down for a bit to renovate the store). It sells mirrors with fancy wooden frames, incense, candles, wooden carvings, stones, handmade paper, that sort of thing, and I've always loved it. But, always being mostly broke, I could never get many things from there. There was one thing in particular I'd been wanting to get for a while - a small mirror, with a wooden frame shaped like an owl. I'd been considering buying it at full price, so when I heard there was a sale at that store, of course I ran to get the mirror. And sure enough, I got it for a 50% discount.
Then last night I found my incense burner again, and realized, hey, I need to get more incense. And the store that's closing for a bit and having the sale is the only place I can get the good incense at (supermarkets have some, but it's the crappy stuff with the fancy names like Fluffy Light Blue With White Accents Sea Foam that smells like shit). And it's having a sale, everything is 50% off, so I can get twice the incense I could usually get. Hmm.
So this morning I went out and bought myself some more incense :P
Then, to get home, I (stupidly) took the route that passes inside the castle. (Yes, the city I live in has a castle in the center.) So I spent some time looking at all the nice things in the windows of the stores inside the castle. Didn't buy any of them, though, didn't need or want any of them.
Until I got to the soap store, that is.
See, there's a soap store inside the castle, that sells handmade soap by weight. I'd only been there once, shortly before Christmas, and had sworn to myself I'd never go back there again, because I didn't have enough money to buy all the soap I'd have wanted to buy from there.
I stopped and looked at all the pretty soaps in the store window, and well, you know that cartoon gag where a scent wafts out of somewhere, catches somebody by the nostrils and drags them in? That's what the scent from that store did to me. :P
I was doing very well at not buying any of the soaps, though. Until the saleslady pointed out to me that if I wanted to smell soaps, they had slices of all of them on the counter, conveniently there for people to smell.
And well, let's just say my new aniseed soap smells very nice. :P
I already know what soap I want to buy after the aniseed soap runs out, too, as they gave me shards of other soaps to try out when I bought the aniseed one, and they smell very nice too. And mom has decided, after seeing the informative leaflet I brought home from the store, that she wants a bar of soap from there for Mother's Day.
I just hope the world won't toss me anything else I Really Need To Buy Immediately at me anytime soon. I'm almost broke. :P

Happy Equinox, Mother Nature. Now how about a bit of sun for today? Hmm? *pokepoke* Come on.

And, in theme with today, a game... make the bush/tree/whatever grow tall and straight. Click left and it leans to the right, click right and it leans to the left. If it leans too far game over.

Well, studying, mostly. *pokes the few weeks she's not posted* Stupid exam I had to study for. Had it this morning - yes, on a Saturday morning. Yes, it made me grumpy (way to fuck up our weekend, university, there was no need to have it today, we could've had it yesterday and it would've been the same). But it's over, and about bloody time, they kept postponing it, we were supposed to have it a month ago. It was the first exam I've ever taken without attending classes (I just studied the material) so I was a bit worried. That, and there was brief panic when the professor who wrote the exam, who was not the professor who taught the course, included in the exam questions stuff we'd not been taught - but we complained and all was set right. Whee.

What else, what else... well, IRC, as usual, though because of the studying I've been quiet there, too.

And more penguin throwing.

And a bit of mIRC scripting. I'm an addict, shush :P I've even made my own mIRCscript site (parts of the layout were a bit of a challenge, though I used a template for most of it - shush, I'm lazy and I wanted to get it online).

And a fair bit of photography, though none of it is getting uploaded until I've revamped my photolog to look a bit more like I want it to look (working on the layout stylesheet, the change should be relatively painless except for going back and editing a bunch of entries, which is the reason I'm holding back on updating now, the less entries I have to re-format the better). Also want to swap my photoalbum site to using Gallery, because backends are good and I'm lazy. :P

What else, what else... I got a new mouse (my old one was having serious problems clicking with the left button, which was... unpleasant... when image editing and the like), new headphones (the cats chewed on the cord of the previous ones, with the results you can imagine... I'm surprised they lasted that long), a few new books. And I have candles again! :D I like candles. And candy, and I have that too. And a new plant, a cactus... since I suck at taking care of plants, they always die on me, I'm hoping at least a cactus I won't manage to kill. :P
Though it's a rather suicidal cactus, it already fell three times (once on my hand... owwie). And the last time it fell, it fell out of its (tiiiiiny) pot... so I went looking for a new, larger pot to put it in, and long story short, I inherited another cactus (from mom, who'd got it ages ago... "here, you can put your cactus with mine" "but mom, I want my cactus downstairs near my computer" "that's ok, you can keep mine as well"). So now I have two cacti to keep alive. Yay. At least, I'm hoping they'll act as deterrent for the cats to keep off my desk. :P

Especially since they made my dragon miniature that I got years ago fall off my desk, and it fell on its wings and broke. --; I found almost all the pieces and glued it back together, but it's missing a wingtip, which makes me grumpy, though it's not very noticeable. I searched for an hour for the missing piece but I couldn't find it... damnit.

My computer desk is tidier now, as well. Got my brother to move his gaming magazines off the corner shelf where they were, which gave me more space to put my stuff, so it's no longer stacked messily. And I got a corkboard which I stuck to a shelf, so I no longer have free-floating bits of paper with "remember to do X" scrawled on them, and I no longer forget where I put important info-containing bits of paper.

I've started tidying my room as well... yes, yes, Tidying Urges are unnatural for me, shut up :P But I wanted to make the boxfuls of manga that I have under my shelves and under my bed tidier (as in, all archived series together, the manga in the boxes more tightly packed so more will fit in them, etc), so I spent an afternoon moving and cataloguing boxful after boxful of manga. I'm considering posting the Big Manga List somewhere online when I'm done (nowhere near done, I still have a boxful plus all the currently ongoing series that are on my shelves to catalogue). It's HUGE.

Also half-considered doing the same thing with books, but with the amount of books I have? That would be suicidal. Maybe I'll do it when I (eventually) move out, since I'll be carrying my books with me of course and I'll have to move them off shelves and onto new shelves anyway so might as well do a list while I'm doing it.

In other news, spring has finally decided to come. About time, too. ;) I like spring, my garden is now all purple and green because of all the violets. They used to be only on the borders but they spilled over and spread all over the lawn while we weren't looking... not that we mind. It's pretty, and it smells nice. I like violets.

...I think I lost the thread of what I was saying. What was I saying? Hrm. Don't think there's anything else I need to mention...

Oh wait, one thing. The other day while I was at university, I was bored and browsing the internet... found a link that talked about a new Card Captor Sakura movie, apparently set in America. It was quite interesting - but then my browser crashed (shitty IE is all we have at university, I can't install Opera, not fair ;_;) and I lost the link, and couldn't find it again, though I have been looking. Anybody heard anything about this? I'd be grateful for any info, I'm really quite curious.

Whoever invented Monday morning is a masochist, and should be shot.
"Good morning! It snowed last night, look how nice it is outside!" is a valid and pleasant way to wake me up only if I don't have to go out in the cold.
Snow + camera = whee! (Good thing I had no classes this morning, I stopped so many times to take photos on my way to uni I would have been horridly late.)
Snow (in the night) + rain (in the morning) = sludge. Brilliant, Mother Nature. Really brilliant.
Sludge + long legs = learning to take tiiiiiiiny steps. (God bless my leather boots.)
Sludge + spike heels = are you suicidal, woman? (Not me. A woman I saw hurrying to catch the bus, or attempting to. I don't doubt she wanted to make a statement with those spike heels, but the only statement she managed to make was, "I am idiot, watch me fall".)
And finally: Mother Nature? It's MARCH. You know, March? Spring? Flowers? Warm air? Sunny days? Ring any bells?
Good. Quit it with the bloody snow, already.

Well. We were just burgled.
The burglar, or burglars, climbed up the front of the house and got in my parents' bedroom through the balcony... opened drawers and wardrobes there, got some jewellery (two rings and one necklace) my mother had left on her dresser. They didn't get anything else, they only looked through my parents' room... they didn't find the really valuable jewelry, that was hidden well, luckily... they didn't get in my room (good cause I had fairly valuable jewellery out cause I'd just worn it yesterday) nor in my brother's room nor anywhere downstairs...
And we were at home during the burglary, too. Lights on, mom was just watching TV downstairs... felt cold, but didn't think much of it, just got a blanket and curled up on the sofa with it... then the cold didn't go away, so she went to look and found out about the burglary, heh.
This makes me feel so utterly unsettled and unsafe and scared... they climbed up the front of the house to get in, ffs, and we were home, and we don't live in the middle of a deserted area, we live in terraced houses and it's well-lit, and it wasn't too late at night, there's still people around...
I'm just happy none of us went upstairs to fetch anything while they were around, bad shit could've happened.