Double Dare, Library Haul, and other things

Hello and howdy. noxy here, blogging away. I started this post last week, then things got so crazy, I haven't been able to finish it. Gah...

I'll start with a pic I took a few days back of an awful product:

I got these on clearance, and I can see why they were on clearance. They're no good. I hate short nails. I'm actually very compulsive about it. I love long nails, but my long nails only last a couple months before they all reach their breaking point. That being said, I cannot work with nails that are so short they end at the quick. I need even milimeters of a nail or else I go on this crazy bender trying to do everything imagineable that would be easier to do with nails, and then I get frustrated at myself. ROFL. That sounds so bad, but it's true. My fix? If a nail has broken that short, I'll cover it with a fake nail. Sometimes I use long fake nails, sometimes short, but either way, they're still longer than what's underneath.

ANYHOO, I normally use just regular nail glue, but these thingers were on clearance, so I gave this a try. I. Hated. It. From the get go. I used one for a short nail on my left hand. Right off the bat I could tell I wasn't going to like it, but wanted to give it a chance. These adhesive tabs "will not damage natural nails", but they also "will not keep a fake nail stationary". Seriously! I could slide the nail back and forth with the tiniest amount of pressure. I couldn't use the nail, because it would either slide or just feel like it would come off at any moment. I got in to the habit of smashing that fingernail in to the nail bed as often as possible - and most of the times I did it, I could hear air bubbles pop. This stuff was just terrible. I'll just stick to nail glue, and mayhaps use these adhesive tabs to adhere paper together in crafts - because paper is all I'm confident it would adhere. Gah.


Woah... ranted a bit longer than I expected on that one. My bad. Ha. I dunno though... mayhaps I should start this post with the rants/sadness, and then end on happier notes... hmmm....



Yeah. We'll do that.


With that said, I shall now move on to my Coursera class. I can not stand the second lesson. The teacher got so incredibly repetitive I wanted to bash my head in. When I say "repetitive", I mean that quite literally. He was teaching about the importance of the number of lines in a song, so to make things easier, he just repeated the same exact line over and over and over and over again. If I felt like I could sit through that torture again, I'd go back and count how many times he said "I love the way you look at me" in twenty minutes.

I've quickly lost interest in this course. Last week's lesson I still have not checked out, which means last week's lesson assignment is due in just a couple days and I still have not checked it out... and this week's will be up soon.

Ack... writing all that now, I realized the quizzes for last week's is due today at 11am Central time. So I actually pulled up the quizzes and managed to work them out on my own without even watching the lesson. Great.

The peer reviews are equally, if not more, maddening. For instance, the first assignment was simple. Write an outline for a song - without writing lyrics - that fit the lesson. Then answer some questions. I reviewed twice as many as I was supposed to, and it was astounding how many people just put lyrics in to each of the answers. It says IN the assigment "without writing lyrics". And yet, they somehow interpreted that as "Write ONLY lyrics".

Sigh... I really don't know if I'll continue with this course.



Moving on to sadness... last week I lost a friend. Not really "lost" - I know where she went, I let her go.

She was the type of friend who felt the world revolved around her, very self centered. And it got to the point where nothing I ever did pleased her. I couldn't live like that anymore.

 She had called last week  because she felt like friendship should be fought for and preserved. I told her I didn't agree, but I said that only because I'm no good with words when put on the spot. I do believe friendship should be fought for... but only to a certain extent. I couldn't keep trying to maintain a friendship when the other person wasn't trying at all. Her excuse was that she was always the only one trying, and she couldn't be the only one anymore. Fact is, if  she was the only one trying, our friendship would have ended years and years ago. Because it doesn't work like that, both people have to make an effort. But she'll never see it that way. She'll never see the other side of the story. She only sees what she feels/felt/thought, and will never understand my side. And she'll refuse to believe that I could see her side. I have never been one to look at only one side of the story.

I had told her during our last conversation, that I did try to keep our friendship afloat. I even explained how I'd done multiple times what I normally never do to help save a friendship. She was that important to me.

And the last thing she said to me summed it all up perfectly.. "You say you tried... but you didn't try hard enough."

That was our friendship in a heartbeat. She'll never see how hard I fought. Nothing ever pleased her.

The pain I went through for over a year to try and remain friends? I just couldn't do it anymore. And I'm much happier now that I've finally ended it. It's nice to have closure.





Moving on again... my guy and I played Double Dare for NES a little while back.

 When I was a kid, probably around 5, we got the NES. And of all the games we got for it, Double Dare was my favorite one.

Some of the trivia questions were quite dated, but that's alright. I still enjoyed it.

And some of the challenges are just as difficult as I remember (this gorilla one was not as difficult, you just had to time it right, but I was too busy playing the game to take more pictures. lol)

He ended up beating me and only getting through five of the eight challenges in the obstacle course in the end. I admitted to him that I'd never gotten past seven, normally getting past six. So we actually searched Youtube for a video that shows them getting through all eight, and the "prizes" you win for getting that far. lol.  It was a fun time. :)




Finally, despite having about a dozen books sitting on my "to-read" pile, my guy and I wandered over to the library, and I checked out a few books.

 I was actually going to check out a couple more, but they didn't have them available when I went looking, and I didn't feel like adding myself to the hold list.



Please mind the TARDIS sticky note on all these pics - I didn't want to show my library's address label. :)

 I am a fan of the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, which is what convinced me to try this book. It's a graphic novel, and while I have one graphic novel sitting on my to-read, I was disheartened a while ago to find out that reading comic books give me a headache. I don't know what it is that makes them rub my head the wrong way, but there you have it. Since graphic novels and comic books are similar, I assumed I'd get a headache from reading either. Nevertheless, I checked this one out, and thought I'd give it a go.

I hated it. I don't know if it's just that I can't follow pictures, or that all the characters basically looked the same... or if it was the lack of words, but I hated it. Halfway through I did get a headache, and that's saying a lot, because this is a very short read. I believe the illustrations were supposed to depict a lot of what was going on in the novel, but I wasn't able to follow them very well. I had to resort to reaching deep in to my own mind to remember what had happened in Uglies to help my reading this novel. And in the end, this novel coincides with Pretties for only the first couple of chapters. And then it ends. This is supposed to be the story in Shay's point of view. (Tally was the main character of Uglies, Shay was her best friend) Essentially, I felt like I wasted my time, despite how short the story was. Because so much of what's written feels like it was in the Pretties, and just when it got interesting and hit the part I was most curious about with Shay, the novel ended. It was pretty lame, and certainly not worth the headache.

 I picked this book up only because I picked up its sequel. Last year (I think) I checked out this book and am pretty sure I disliked most of it... though I was still curious and cursing the ending because it got me curious enough to want to read the next book... but only if I happened across the sequel - I wouldn't go looking for it.

Well I'll be darned. I wandered in to the Young Adult fiction, and there it was - on the "new AF" shelf with a red "NEW" sticker on it. So I grabbed it, and then went and found the first book - just so I could flip through it to refresh my memory. We'll see how I feel about this book.



The last three books I checked out were mainly because the newest one caught my eye.

I saw the red foil letters of this book, and the red hood of the lady... along with the word "Princess" and I had to look in to it. From my understanding, this is a rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood, and the author had done a couple of rewrites already. So I went to find the others and grabbed all three.

 This one is a rewrite of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I'm actually only vaguely familiar with the original fairy tale, which might be a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing, since I can't remember much of the original, this essentially felt like a whole new story. And I enjoyed it. A bad thing, since I can't remember, I can't really compare this story to the original. Ah well. I might go looking up the original fairy tale some time, so I can compare them accordingly. I did like this book though.

And finally Princess of Glass, which is a rewrite of Cinderella, but also includes one of the Twelve Princesses. Should be interesting.