A Temporary Title

stuck in socal 'til the end of time

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 05:59:04 GMT

i expect that this movie will change my life a little

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:37:41 GMT

Two minutes well spent.

friday morning happy

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:50:52 GMT

via We Heart It

that's-enough-about-me-now-what-do-you-think-of-me: variation on a meme

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:21:10 GMT

Meme time!

STOLEN FROM mayaellewood and sjonsvenson
1. Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life you're curious about.
2. Leave your requests as comments to this entry.
3. Please look at the previous requests as to not do repeats.
4. I'll snap the pictures and post them.

sorta urgent

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:22:18 GMT

So does anyone have any tips on how one would go about fixing a stuck lens on a friend's, um, shiny new for Christmas Nikon point-and-shoot? I would very much appreciate anything in the way of advice!

squee?

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:17:43 GMT

I went to Comic-Con over the weekend and took lots of fangirly pictures.

John Barrowman
Originally uploaded by Kendra??

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:48:41 GMT

So Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay?

Not sure if I like him enough to, you know, see the movie but MY GOD the poster.

POLL

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 04:27:46 GMT

Based on an argument Sky and I are having:

Which is a better date movie?
a) Love Actually
b) Fight Club

Which is a gayer movie?
a) Brokeback Mountain
b) Fight Club

Which movie has more dogs?
a) Must Love Dogs
b) Fight Club

Which movie has less Brad Pitt?
a) Spy Kids 2
b) Fight Club

Which movie has more testosterone?
a) Reservoir Dogs
b) Fight Club

Vote away, dear sporadic readers.

(By the way, if your answers to all of the above were "b", then you win a pony.)

eeeeeeeeeeeeee

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:12:02 GMT

just a little closer
Originally uploaded by Kendra??

Thank you so much, David! You're the awesomest!

Arr....gh!

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:14:56 GMT

Okay, I went camping this week. I scaled mountains and cliffs and swam in icy-cold rivers and sat around campfires playing guitar. I will write more about the camping aspect when I get my pictures together, because I have stories to tell. However, at the moment I feel a more pressing urge to recount this year's International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Out of the entire camp (70 or so people, not counting camp staff) I was one of two people who had heard of International Talk Like A Pirate Day. This lent itself to a small, perfect moment during breakfast.

I was not having a good morning. I had arrived at the mess hall too late and thus had to sit at a table with people whom I did not know and converse awkwardly with said people. Upon getting out of bed I greeted my cabin-mates with "Avast, ye scurvy bilgerats!", and with every person who gave me a strange look or said "Did you just say 'yarr'?" I slowly realized that my schoolmates are terribly unenlightened. As I stood in line for breakfast, the drama teacher drifted past, quietly singing "We massacre Indians and kill little boys..."

In retrospect, it wasn't that funny. Still, it made me happy. The hike that day KILLED ME. DEAD. So dead, in fact, that I used proper English for the rest of the day. Ah, well.

we used to be friends

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 23:53:42 GMT

A long time ago, we used to be friends
Originally uploaded by sky_mac

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:51:53 GMT

Here's a bit of history from the dorm in which I now live.

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:35:37 GMT

Oh my gaaaaaaaaawd
Originally uploaded by Kendra??

I got back from Comic-Con a few hours ago. I'm composing a report; I was actually planning to blog but the hotel we were staying at did not have any Internet access whatsoever and the novelty of wardriving was wearing off for Dad and Kai. Anyway, I'm exhausted and I need to sleep. Here's Joss Whedon.

Preview Night Report

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:15:02 GMT

Wardriving around San Diego Old Town. I am INTOXICATED WITH THE GLORY and surrounded by a rosy glow. I love life.

Hey, it's another Disney post!

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:38:50 GMT

Okay, this post was supposed to be finished yesterday but I was up until the wee hours of the morning dyeing my hair. There's my excuse. Here's my post.

In the last post I documented the first time in a long time that I went to a Disney park without my amazingly knowledgeable Disneyite friends, the McClouds. In this post, I shall document the first time in a long time (January! OMG!) that I've gone with them.

So, I stayed with the Hinrichers on Saturday night, then drove to Disneyland with them in the morning, where we met Crystal, Matt, and the McClouds. We got there really early with the intention of doing the new submarine ride first. The ride wasn't very good and the line wasn't very efficient, but we had fun nonetheless. After going to Autopia and twice attempting to crash a car, we had breakfast at the Blue Ribbon Bakery and met the Jonokuchis.

I don't actually remember what we did after that. Sky is much better at remembering these things than I. Some highlights:

-The Jungle Cruise: We were on the last boat of the night. It was just Sky, Jenna, me, some dude in a dreadlock wig, and our intrepid and very tired skipper.

-In Autopia I started noticing that everyone in line seemed extremely lonely and forlorn. I noticed this throughout the entire park. I mean, one might think that a visitor to the Happiest Place On Earth would not look completely exhausted and drained and weary of life. Sky suggested that I might have been projecting my feelings upon others. She was probably right. Still, it struck me as rather sinister.

-Speaking of sinister, I have also decided that Walt Disney had some sort of time-warping ability. By the time we left (around midnight), lunchtime seemed like a week ago and the subs maybe a month and a half. By now you might be wondering if I spend a lot of time carefully scrutinizing Disneyland to formulate conspiracy theories. The answer is yes...yes, very much so.

-The intro to Innoventions malfunctioned, which struck some of us as hilarious because the Carousel of Progress did the same thing when we were in Disney World. So much for progress.

-I rode a lot of the kiddy dark rides, many of which I hadn't seen before. (I was more of a Matterhorn kid.) Mr Toad honestly, earnestly scared me. Winnie The Pooh did not.

-I tried a pickle for the first time. I didn't like it.

-The fireworks. They were huge and loud and ridiculous and created oppressive clouds of noxious smoke over Fantasyland. They do this every night.

Because Sky is an über-fangirl, and because I like zucchini, and because we both like chocolate, we decided to make a chocolate zucchini cake. We found a recipe to veganize, and upon buying greasy non-butter and powdered non-egg and rubbery non-cheese we vowed to someday discover a way to substitute real food when cooking. (We made Spinach Tofu Stuffed Shells and Versatile Tofu Balls for dinner.) I excavated a CD player and we listened to the Dresden Dolls and cooked late into the night. And it was delicious. All of it. The cake was especially mystifying. Once we mixed in the grated zucchini, we couldn't even taste it in the batter. It just tasted like chocolatey vegan cake batter. Someday I'll make a non-vegan version and maybe someone other than me or Sky will be brave enough to try it.

Aaaand... that brings us to today. Anyway, this post took longer to write than I expected it to. Sky is composing a much longer and much more detailed post. We are currently having lunch in Gardena, after which we will be Comic-Con-bound!

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 06:21:14 GMT

[Writing this on the new MacBook, which is almost blindingly shiny and pretty.]

So, we went to Disneyland on Monday. On Sunday we drove out to Anaheim and went to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum, which was dark, crowded, and loud. (The earthquake simulator was cool, though!) Then we went back to the hotel, argued about which movie to watch, and decided to read Coraline instead.

On Monday we got up bright and early to go to Disneyland, where we met relatives who were visiting from Hawaii for a soccer tournament. The new submarine ride was opening, but this momentous event didn't seem to have any particular effect on the volume of the crowds there, except for the huge number of people who were standing in front of a rock in Tomorrowland on which a bunch of very official-looking news cameras were set up. I found out that only Splash Mountain does single-rider passes, which made me rather sad as I love single-rider passes. Nevertheless, I ended up spending an hour and a half in the Splash Mountain line with five eight-year-olds who ceaselessly demanded to know the exact number of bumps and drops in each ride, only to end up thoroughly soaked and very, very cold. Oh, and I also discovered the wonder of a Space Mountain Fastpass. Yay for Space Mountain Fastpasses.

I fell asleep on the way home and dreamt of singing snakes and slightly menacing ostriches*. Dad was listening to a Bob Dylan tape and I must have rearranged the lyrics in my sleep because I woke up wondering why he had stopped singing about seatbelts. Disney withdrawal tends to be extremely unsettling.

*they might have been ducks, but either way, oh god I may never ride Splash Mountain again

Complacency Is Death

Wed, 23 May 2007 03:36:47 GMT

Complacency Is Death
Originally uploaded by Kendra??.

Hastily taken so as to not raise the suspicions of others at the toy store, though the fact that I was giggling incessantly probably didn't help.

Where I Have Been For The Past Few Weeks

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:04:44 GMT

In an amazingly sucky case of inconvenient scheduling, I was in Oregon for the entire week-or-so that the McClouds visited Oregon. So, you ask, what was I doing there?
Well, I went camping with a bunch of my cousins* at Fort Stevens in northern Oregon. We made a pilgrimage to the house at which The Goonies was filmed in Astoria (I was a complete fangirlish wreck), climbed on the remains of the Peter Iredale (which, though covered in barnacles, looked not entirely unlike a Disneyland attraction), explored ruined forts, hiked to the top of a waterfall, learned the true meaning of "small-town" (in this part of California, the large suburban town in which I live is sometimes referred to [not sarcastically] as "the sticks"), climbed to the top of the Astoria column, roasted marshmallows, told ghost stories, and mostly mocked each other mercilessly (I was referred to as, variously, "Kendork", "Princess", and "Freakovich Chebowski" throughout the entire trip; compared to those bestowed upon others these nicknames were quite flattering).

On Monday I returned, frazzled but happy, with dyed hair** and a newfound obsession with crocheting. I posted a few pictures to my Flickr page; there are many more that I have not yet sorted through. When I have organized them into a set I will edit this post with a link.

* Six, to be precise: Aloha (31), Jason (25), Dylon (13), Kirk (12), Ethan (8; Aloha's son--does that make him my nephew?), and Siera (14; an adopted second cousin).
** The red dye we got turned my hair sort of dark red-orange after bleaching, which was nice but not quite red enough. It has now faded to a wimpy auburn-ish color. I just bleached it again but I don't think it's light enough; I guess I'll wait for it to dry completely and then see what happens. I got red and purple semi-permanent dye this morning and I think I'll use purple next.
[UPDATE (not really): vivid blue-violet. Oh gawd, it looks amazing!]

So, tomorrow my father and I are going to spend a day at Cate. I am looking forward to a more thorough tour of the school; unfortunately, I will have to wake up early to get to Carpinteria on time, so this post will be cut short. Because it sounds more like one long inside joke than the brilliant essay it was supposed to be, that is probably a good thing.

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:24:17 GMT

Thacher: rejected. (I have a feeling that it was the crappy essays. Also, the admissions officer seemed iffy during the interview when I mentioned that I skipped seventh grade.)

Cate: accepted. (YAY!)

Whew. At least I don't have to choose.

As of 12:00...

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:00:25 GMT

Hey, I'm [EDIT 3-13-07: a 12-year-old with a fast clock] now!

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:12:14 GMT

I watched The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou last night. It was like the movie equivalent of a They Might Be Giants song--droll, engaging, idiosyncratic, and much too short. And "Search And Destroy" was played over one of the Climactic Fight Scenes. Really, that almost made me cry with happiness. Yay for my new favorite movie.

In other news, I am being dragged into a world of cute, deformed, ridiculously photogenic vinyl figures.

Veronica Mars:

((xkcd))

(If anyone cares, there aren't really spoilers. I just felt like putting that there.)

I liked last week's episode, but IMO this week's was too soap-opera-y. The storyline about Wendy was interesting, but it was mostly Veronica worrying about Logan and Logan being evasive and Madison appearing at odd times to exacerbate Veronica's worrying. And Mac wasn't in the episode.

Morrissey is appearing at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium tomorrow and the night after. Unsurprisingly, tickets are sold out. *sigh* I am currently in the process of finding a way to keep up on nearby concerts so that the next time this happens I don't collapse in a heap of fangirlish angst like I did a few hours ago.

Okay, I'm tired now.

(Sky, are you ever going to post about Disney World?)

(14 days until I turn 13...)

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:56:24 GMT

I am finished with the applications! All of them! They're in the mail and I don't have to worry about them until March. Yay!

(16 days until I turn 13...)

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:42:04 GMT

notevenjonny has a very cool photoset. A scenic garden, me at my dorkiest*, and Diet Coke & Mentos, all at five frames per second.

*Well, you try getting a bunch of Mentos from a wide paper tube to a narrow bottle all at the same time, in the rain, while being yelled at from across the lawn! I can think of numerous ways that I could have done so more efficiently now. Oh well.

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:17:36 GMT

So, I was planning to fence today, but the Allergies From Hell are back and they are making me miserable.

On the other hand, I have found that when I'm sick, my singing voice sounds not entirely unlike Kim Deal's.

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 06:26:26 GMT

(I wrote some of this post on the plane and most of it right now, because I have been tired and insanely busy. [Insanely busy, that is, in a boring, too-many-essays-to-write sort of way.])
(I forgot to post this to mccloudtour, so here it is!)

We were at Disney World for five days. On the first day we went to Animal Kingdom. On the second day (I think) we went to the Magic Kingdom with Sara and Kennan. On the third day we went to MGM Studios, and the fourth and fifth days were Epcot. I was very proud of myself on Sunday, because I went on the Tower of Terror twice without going into shock. The last time I rode it, I was ten and not a Twilight Zone fan and completely unprepared for the ride, and I ended up screaming hysterically throughout the entire ride, then not being able to talk for two hours.
The only attraction that I actually disliked was the Imagination pavilion at Epcot. Yes, the one starring Eric Idle and the obnoxious purple dragon-y thing. The Tiki Room was also sort of terrible in an over-the-top, annoyingly self-referential way. I very much prefer the original at Disneyland. I loved most of the other attractions, though, for their differences and similarities to Disneyland and the fact that some are lifted straight from the California parks. (For example: Soarin’ Over California. Except in World, it’s called Soarin’, and the announcer’s mouth moves a little bit after he says “Soarin’” right where “Over California” should go, and the ride is exactly the same. The dinosaur dark ride at Animal Kingdom was apparently exactly the same as Indiana Jones in California, which explains why it was so dark.) Mission: Space was extremely suspenseful (though most of the suspense was caused by the pre-show saying things like “Closing your eyes will disorient you and cause you to throw up, and you may feel nauseous for several weeks afterwards, and if you find that your vision is permanently blurred after the ride it’s not our fault, and if all your bones snap like twigs it’s not our fault, and if you have a heart attack and die it’s not our fault, for you are a voluntary occupant of our experimental human centrifuge even though you’re completely strapped in now and there’s no way out.”), it’s a small world was bizarre and nightmarish (this was actually the first time I’d noticed that it is bizarre and nightmarish—I have a tendency to take the bizarre for granted), the ride/show starring Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye was just bizarre, and Everest (one of the new rides at Animal Kingdom) was like a cross between the Matterhorn and Splash Mountain (without furry singing animatronics).

I know there is more about Disney World that I forgot to add, but I need to start sleeping regularly because the lack of sleep is starting to catch up to me. So, to the McLeods, thanks for taking me to Disney World and letting me join the tour and stuff and everything! I also have a legitimate reason to visit again soon: Sky’s Sims2 CD is still in my CD drive.

P.S. Winter is the cutest living creature on the planet. Really.

P.P.S. POST, SKY, POST!

P.P.P.S. This post shall be edited, polished, and fleshed out tomorrow. I shall also post a photoset to Flickr in the not-too-distant future.