I just learned that my blood type is A positive. I've always wanted to know what my blood type was. I donated blood for the selfish reason that they tell you your blood type for free. Now I have become very interested in Japanese meanings for blood types. If you have never heard of them, or forget what they are, here you go:

Japanese Blood Type Personality Chart (http://unexplainedmysteries.yuku.com/topic/703)

Type A
Best Traits: Conservative, introverted, reserved, patient, punctual, and perfectionist.
Worst Traits: Obsessive, stubborn, self conscious, and uptight.

Famous As: George H. W. Bush, Ayumi Hamasaki, O. J. Simpson, Britney Spears, Alan Alda, Adolf Hitler, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon

Type B
Best Traits: Creative and passionate. Animal loving. Optimistic and flexible. Individualist.
Worst Traits: Forgetful, irresponsible, and self-centered.

Famous Bs: Akira Kurosawa, Jack Nicholson, Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Selleck, Mia Farrow, Paul McCartney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Vince Young

Type AB
Best Traits: Cool, controlled, rational. Sociable and popular. Empathic.
Worst Traits: Aloof, critical, indecisive and unforgiving.

Famous ABs: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Thomas Edison, Bob Sapp, Miyavi

Type O
Best Traits: Ambitious, athletic, robust and self-confident. Natural leaders
Worst Traits: Arrogant, vain and insensitive. Ruthless

Famous Os: Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, John Lennon, Paul Newman, Elvis Presley, Gerald Ford, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Capone, Crystal Kay

I think my description is horribly inaccurate. But then again, I am not Japanese, so it might not even apply to me. I am not a perfectionist, in my opinion. Nor do I think that I share any personality traits with Bush, Hitler or Britney Spears. I think I would prefer to be AB. That one look like a lot more fun.

What type are you guys???

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who lived in a mightly castle. ( BUNNIES!!!! BUNNIES EVERYWHERE!!! )

Edit: It should be noted that evilhippo should receive some credit in motivating me to learn how to crochet, as this is the god-honest truth.

My friend Evan and I were just leaving the house. Evan was standing in the yard waiting for me to close the front door. I was just stepping out when we heard a rustle in the bushes.
"Oh, it's a groundhog," said Evan. "It's a pretty big one, too." That it was. I had seen it out back a few times this summer. It was about the size of a small dog.
The rustle happened again. A little furry head popped up by the side of the front patio. Our eyes met.
"I-wanna-get-past-you" said the groundhog with it's eyes.
"Oh no, please don't." I replied desperately, with an imploring look. "I really don't want to be near you and you don't want to be near me."
"I-wanna-get-on-the-other-side-of-the-patio-right-now. Here-I-go!"
"Oh nooooooo!"
The gigantic groundhog jumped up on the patio and started bolting straight-head, towards my feet. I yelped in the alarm and jumped back into the door frame. The groundhog barreled across the patio and took a magnificent diving-leap off the edge into the bushes, and scampered away.
Evan just stood there laughing at me as I frantically rushed away from the bushes exclaiming, "oh, I knew he was going to do that!"

So I decided to knit a stuffed animal. Specifically I was trying to knit Ahiru from Princess Tutu.
( Omg, so many pictures )

So, as it has become my custom, I will now share with you some of the knitting/felting projects I have been working on since the semester ended. Yes, I do realize that was last Friday, however I have completed enough project in order to justify a post in this short amount of time. How sad is that?

( pics! )

On a side note, I would like to say that the best thing about coming home is the food. I just made myself a delcious broccoli and swiss cheese omlette with pine nuts. It was lovely :D

So I haven't posted about knitting in awhile. That doesn't mean that I haven't been knitting. Far from it. I felted this hat last week (or so) and I tried to felt another hat today. It didn't turn out so well so I might work on it later this summer and get it into a better shape. Anyway, here is a pic of a little something I made.

( Butterfly hat )

The flowers are from JoAnne's floor while I actually bought the butterflies. I still have two more of the butterflies. If anyone can think of a use for them, they are free to have them.

Other pictures
http://i39.tinypic.com/o77sd5.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/21aznkz.jpg

Okay people.  I need exactly 3 more credit hours to fill up my schedule for next semester. These credit hours have to be the easiest thing I have ever done. I need a class that I could sleep through every day and still get an A. I'm not too picky of what department the class is in. Right now I'm looking at Fundamentals of Nutrition or Acting for Non-Majors.

So this is a shout out to all my friends on my flist here at Miami, asking them what their easiest class was and what they would recommend I take.

Edit: My DARS has me listed as a senior right now. Lol!

WTF, life?! Today was my day off from visiting with people, it was supposed to be slow paced and relaxing, right? NO!

Spent morning in bed knitting. That was nice.
Went to the Himalayan with Mother. She told me that she had run into the Phoenixville chuch's Pastor's wife and she had mentioned that she was looking for interns to help out with her non-profit organization called Orion Communities, Inc. It is a company that finds jobs for people who are unemployeed or in need of a bit of help. Mainly it's people who come in off the street, people from the slums, and such. They have a database of client information that I can maintence for them. They also asked for my resume so they can distribute it to their job search network and get me some internships in some of the surrounding organizations. So if everything works out I'll work at Orion for a day or two then spend the rest of the week jumping around a bunch of other companies doing odd jobs like research or public relations or maybe even counseling.
Afterwards we went over to Steel City and met a professor at Ursinus who is trying to start a college in Phoenixville. He wants intelligent people to help him set up programs and create this Sphere College. We talked for a bit and he suggested I get a professor at my college to back me and I could get some nice benefits out of it, since it is a good pro-bono, community benefiting project. I'll have to ask around at college. I just sent him an email with some samples of my writing and times I'll be available to work at in the summer. If this works out and the college gets established, it will be a simply beautiful thing to put on my resume.
After all that I went over to the library to see some old friends I worked with back in high school. Mark was there and knew the professor I was just talking too. Apparently he had tried to get the library to give him some money to get his plan off the ground. He was, of course, rejected, since the library very notoriously has no money. Talked to Edna. She was saying that the library was petitioning to expand their building into the street to the edge of the park. It is an interesting concept. Perhaps their computer lab will actually be a computer lab, instead of a computer closet. Anyway, that sounded exciting. She apparently wants to gossip with me sometime outside of the library. I hope she goes to church on Saturday so I can find out what all is going on with that shady woman down in the children's library.

Tonight I'll probably go hang out with Evan and Maria. I also want to see Watchmen.

Dad called again today to check if I was still on for lunch tomorrow. The man is getting crazy considerate of me. I can only blame Naomi's interference.

Okay, now this is all getting a bit ridiculous.

Here's how today went:

-Had breakfast with Vy. Turns out she's designing a pulse-rate monitor for her biotechology class which will be installed in kiosks around Kenya for a class. I always knew she was smart but daaaang.
- Walked around Coventry Mall with xtrainingwheels ! That was pretty exciting since I haven't seen her in forever. That mall is seriously small so we lapped it like three times and we still hadn't run out of stuff to talk about so we went to the bookstore and made fun of the romance novels for a bit. Oh man, there is so many Highlander romance novels, or stories about beautiful rich women being strung along by beautiful rich men. That was pretty good. We were trying to find these books (http://www.sandrahill.net/books.html#Viking_Series_I) but we couldn't. If you have the time, go to that website and read some of the excerpts. They're a hoot and a half.
-After Diana went off to work on her editing, I meet up with Justine who is living in Pottstown right now. She's living with her mother, commuting to Cedar Crest. She's still going steady with Dan, who we tried to meet up with for dinner but some temp bitch lost $1000 dollars and they had a 2 hour audit to find out where it went. I was introduced to My Sims: Kingdom (or something like that title). It was cute and fun to watch.
- Got home, made plans to go see a play Wednesday night with Liz N.  I think this is hilarious because she is one of my mother's friends who wants to spend time just with me. I love Liz, though, and I'm sure it will be a great time. And this play HAS to be better than all the crap ones I've seen a Miami recently. I remember the People's Light and Theater a pretty good venue.
- Dad called today and asked if I wanted to get lunch on Wednesday. I, of course, said yes.
- Melissa is coming back on Thursday and wants to go down to Steel City. Alissa might come along too, maybe even Shannon!
- Vy gets back on Thursday night maybe. Need to remember to call her.
- Also wanted to see Ben Albertus before I have to go back to Ohio. I'll try to get him online tomorrow.

What the hell? This was supposed to be the stupidest most boring week ever? Why am I running all around P-ville and the surrounding area visiting an incrediable about of people? Why haven't I been knitting except for two hours a night while watching TV? Why haven't I been cooking for myself? How am I going to get those four new coats back to college? Bah! Whatever Life, I am tired of trying to predict what you'll throw my way. Forget it, I'm going to knit myself to sleep.

Being home is surreal. I haven't been here in so long. Everything is the same yet different at the same time. It is hard to explain.

As soon as I got home Kim and Melissa came over and hung out with me at home. We talked for four hours just catching up and reminding of each other about our middle school and high school years together. Already I'm remembering so much more of my Phoenixville roots than I have in years. We talked about people from our class, the classes under us, who have already graduated and gone off to college to get drunk with their new friends. It's been very trippy for me to think about all these things that I had completely forgotten about.

Also, I'm learning new things. My grandmother and my mother were both very in to embrodery. There is a literal ton of embrodery floss in my house. If I cared more than two licks about embrodery I would be in heaven. We found two unfinished sweaters knitted by my grandmother. I'm going to fix one of them up and it should be a really warm over jacket. I just hand washed it and hung it up to dry. Now my hands smell like wet wool, which is one of the worst smells on God's green earth.

I'm thinking of going into mum pottery studio and making some ceramic buttons. I was walking around downtown Phoenixville, which is super neat after the whole Renaissance they had, and I went into a store called Diving Cat Gallery. They had all these hand made, super expensive crafty knick-nacks being sold at inflated prices. I was looking at one stand and saw some ceramic hand made buttons on sale, 5 for $18. They looked pretty cute and I thought about getting them and putting them on stuff I was planning to make but then I stopped by myself. If I made them myself I could just charge more for what I was making, or just sell them if I don't get around to using them. So I think I'm going into mum's class on Tuesday morning and starting that. I'll try to make 25 at first.

There was a shop down the street from my mum's studio that had a bunch of knitted scarfs for sale. They were made with super weird looking novelty yarn. I just raised my eyebrow at them and went, 'wow, I can do so much better than this.' So I think I will. The more I think about knitting for profit the more I want to do it. Then I try not to get to excited about it, otherwise I just won't do it because I know it won't be everything I want it to be.

If I do decently well with the buttons I'm going to make this week, will I be able to buy some clay and work on them at Rowan back at Miami? I probably shouldn't be thinking that far ahead just yet.

Haha, I went over to Kim's house today and they were watching Chelsea football. I sat there watching it going "oh yeah, Mat really liked Chelsea football. Huh, now I'll never get a chance to tell him that I finally watched it. They're pretty cool to watch too." The funny thing about soccer is that whenever they have a collision or a wipe out, the players immediately look really indignant and spread their arms wide and make the universal facial expression for "What the hell was that?" This happened without fail for the half an hour of the game I watched.

Listening to Lilly Allen. It's my thing right now.

For a long time I was struggling with my self-consciousness about my appearance. I knew that I wasn't ugly, but I certainly was never  conventionally pretty. I was positive that I didn't look like any of the pretty faces in hollywood. Mother used to tell me that I had a Modigliani face, long and thin. I didn't know what to think of that. I had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what my look was. Around high school and now into college, I get a lot of comments about how I look like the Mona Lisa. I was horrified by the thought. I never found the Mona Lisa pretty, just really famous. Really, she looks like a man. So I was annoyed whenever anyone made this association. But then, my mother and I were walking in a park and we came across one of my mother's old friends. We chatted for a bit then she turned to me and told me that I looked liked one of the Italian Renaissance madonnas. At first I didn't like this idea either. While beautiful and shapely for their time, I certainly was never that big and you don't hear a lot of people wishing they looked like that nowadays. However, I rolled the thought around in my brain for a bit and I found that I liked it. It made me feel classy. So that's what my lj (and most other accounts) is named after: Madonna Look A Like.

Revelations I have had recently:

Feeling bad or stressed out on other people's behalves is not useful for everyone involved. I can't help anyone who doesn't want my help and my empathy doesn't mean anything if I'm not helping. I'm just going to be worried about my own problems from now on.

I can't rely on the Internet to get me jobs or networking connections. I'm going to have to be more direct with my ideas. If I want jobs, I'll just have to call up the HR people and ask them directly if they need people.

Good news though, at least two people have agreed to pay me for my knitting services. The scarf I'm making right now will go for $15. The other one has yet to be determined. I need to make a run to a Micheal's or JoAnne's fabric sometime soon though. Anyone interested in going with me?

Wow, you guys are going to get so tired of me doing this, but I knitted another thing!

This is my roommate's Christmas present. Obviously it is a little late. I didn't really know what to make her since she was taking up knitting and was going to make herself a scarf. I thought about making her a hat but then she got one over Christmas break so I was at another loss. I was randomly looking around Ravelry and I happened upon this pattern. I just looked at it and went, "oh god, oh god, this is perfect!" So I made it. I didn't have any green and the only yarn I had that really went with black was this coral wool Judith gifted me when I first started knitting. The coral just looks kind of orange against the black, which makes the bag look super Halloween-y. But hey, now Chelsea can in trust her most valued possesions to the care of the Elder Gods. All hail Cuthulu!
( It looks like a thing! )
Geee, knitting is fun. And it makes Christmas gifts cheap and personal.

Marie needs money for yarn! If you have seen something you like that I have made, I will sell it to you for a very reasonable price. If there is something that I can make for you that you are willing to pay for, I can do that too. If you want me to make something for you but your not sure what, let me know and we can work out a plan. I WILL MAKE KNITTED GOODS FOR YOU AND YOU CAN GIVE ME MONEY SO I CAN MAKE MORE KNITTED GOODS!

Today was a day of adventure! Chelsea, Courtney, Muriah, and I went down to Jungle Jim's today. We were talking about making scones and I mentioned I got a scone mix from Jungle Jim's once. Then, all of a sudden, a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, "wow, i really want to go to jungle jim's right now!" So we went. Mo was going to come with us but she had to go to a conference with her fraternity. We made sure to pick her up some caramel syrup so she could put it in her hot cocoa. We picked up such a strange assortment of things to try and share. We ate the Green Tea mochi on the car ride back. That was so good.
I got some Mullu Muruka which is crunchy and kind of spicy, some rather tasty jello sticks, some slightly stale but still good strudle bites, a tamerid soda which I haven't tried yet and some really special waffles and strawberry nectur.
Chelsea got raw tamerid, which we ate and decided it tasted like prunes. She got this waffle sandwich things from hollard which were fuckin amazing. Oh and this really weird anti-candies that I refuse to try. She says they are salty, spicy and kind of sour, everything you wouldn't expect from a candy.
Courtney got persimmons, which she tried a sample of at the store and decided she loved it. She also got some poppy seed bread and scone mix. Oh and tea, of course tea.
Muriah got red tea, which I've never tried, a huge hunk of cheese, some alligador jerky,  and some mexican soda.
We also have miso. We are going to make miso soup at some point, once I get some tofu.
Novelty food is fun.

Today was pretty okay. After class and work I talked to Theresa and Ashley for a bit. Anime club was good, I think I'm going to like this line up. Came back to Ogden, played Charades with Chelsea, Courtney, Muriah, Felica, and Mo. We were getting really into it at some points. Chelsea and Felica got pizza and Mo and I watched Mavel/DC Afterhours. Then people came and watched it over our shoulders with us. It was fun and good. :D

This post is mostly here to show off my pretty new icon. I'm sure that it will become a quick new favorite of mine :D

Also wanted to post my response to the first day of classes. I have just completed the first days for all of my classes. Some of my classes are going to be a cake walk, others are going to require a lot of effort but will be pretty fun, I hope. Advanced Biopsychology, as it turns out, is a hands-on lab. We will be doing lamb brain dissection and all that cool junk. I'm excited for that.
Geology is with the same arrogant boring professor I dropped last semester. I think he remembers me. Crap.
Both MIS classes will be okay. They both require I do reading and keep up with class work, but otherwise they shouldn't be too taxing.
So far this semester is shaping up to be better than the last one. I can only hope this trend continues.

Oh, and I didn't get the Urban Leadership Internship. So now I'll be applying for internships all over the country like crazy. Sometime tonight I have to write a cover letter for J&J. We'll see how that goes.

I am posting this only because I promised myself that I would. I didn't get to take pictures of the gifts I gave Courtney's family but here is the rest of the stuff I knitted over break. I put most of this stuff up on Raverly but since they are very touchy about categories I didn't bother putting some of my stranger stuff up there.
( Knitting! Big pictures of stuff I made. )

Wtf? That's the third totaled car I've heard of in the last week! What is going on?

Happy New Years to everyone!

This was probably the most relaxed New Years I have ever spent. I watched Matrix: Reloaded and the extended version of the Fellowship of the Ring with Courtney and her dad. It was a decent time.

New Years Resolution:

• exercise more
• eat better
  
• get more sleep
  
• lose weight
  
• fall in love
  
• earn more money
• have a stable relationship
  
• get good grades

How about this one: Be happy with was you have. Learn to be satisfied with yourself and what life tosses your way.

I think that one is the biggest challenge and the one most worth trying for.