So I was pretty happy that the Packers won the Super Bowl. Why?

Because then I could share this with all my friends.

OMG I'm such a geek.

For me, the Super Bowl is one of the few events that I have to be somewhere else to fully enjoy (preferably in a house crammed to the gills with people and yummy snacks) so it's a good thing that Shannon and I got a last-minute invite. We hung out with a bunch of Newgen leaders, which was a lot of fun, especially when some of the guys started taking pictures of various body parts (ears, eyes, tonsils, bellybuttons - remember, we're all church youth leaders) and texting them to each other. Oddly enough, though, just about everyone was rooting for the Packers, except for one guy who has to be contrary, and the pastor's youngest son, who idolizes Mr. Contrary, and wanted to root for the Steelers, too. All in all, it was probably the best Super Bowl party I've been to in a while.

Packers - Woooo!

I know it's been a long time since I posted, and part of that was the Christmas wind-down, but not long after that, Eleanor the laptop actually crashed on me and had to spend some time in repair. The brightside is that $200 later, it's in fine working order, I didn't have to reinstall a single thing, and I actually have a bigger hard drive than what I started with! I also immediately went and uploaded my writing to two independent file storage sites so I can access my writing even without Eleanor.

Christmas was pretty awesome - I got cash from the grandparents, as usual, but I also got an iPod case from Shannon and Season 2 of Castle on DVD from Lauren. My parents, however, went on eBay and got me a vintage 2nd edition copy of a Little Golden Book my mom used to read to us when we were kids. Since I collect antique books, this was actually an awesome gift. Now all I need to find is the 1980s reprint, since that was the one we actually owned, and I'll have the Katie the Kitten exacta. (How weird does that sound?) Considering that Katie the Kitten isn't in print anymore, this would be awesome.

Speaking of Christmas, even though I said I was almost Christmas-ed out, I managed to paint six ornaments for a pastor friend, who just adopted a little girl. I made one personalized ornament for each member of the family, and on the bottom, where I signed and dated them, I included a heart (since I always sign stuff with a heart) and numbered each in their birth order. They turned out so adorable - I'm so proud of them, and so far I know Joel is jazzed. Then I painted an ornament for a member of the MST3K discussion board I'm on, and he offered to trade me three episode DVDs for it. Last year was my first artistic commission, and this was the first time I've ever been compensated for one of my ornaments. I'm kind of excited about that.

New Year's was cool - I got invited to go to the church's singles event, which was my first singles anything. I'd heard rumors that the group was mostly re-single people, and as a 26-year-old I kind of would rather hang out with people my age than 40-something divorcees. But the improv troupe they brought in was kind of cool, and the stand-ups (Christian stand-ups with real LA credentials!) were hilarious. Then we rang in 2011 with noisemakers and the Cha-Cha Slide. That was interesting... Everybody was nice, and there seemed to be some people my age there - I think I'll keep going and see what happens. I mean, if I can't get a job, maybe I can get a boyfriend, right? :P

In royalty news, the Crown Princess of Denmark had her twins on Saturday - one boy and one girl. In Denmark, nobody knows a child's name until the mother speaks it at the christening, which isn't for about three months. So being an onomastic (one who likes names and what they mean) I get to play the guessing game until about March/April. Until then, some people are calling them Elvis and Shirley, after a joke Crown Prince Frederik made about naming the boy Elvis (since the twins share a birthday with Elvis Presley), and Shirley Bassey, another singer with a January 8th birthday, but I'm calling them Lilleprinsen ("Little Prince") and Lillepigen ("Little Girl"), after the nicknames the Danish press gave their older siblings Prince Christian and Princess Isabella. Regardless, it's a far sight happier news than what really covered the airwaves over the weekend. Also, I found a Swarovski crystal ring that resembles a certain famous British royal engagement ring at the mall and splurged on it for myself. It was only $25, so that's not too bad, and it has two more "diamonds" around the edge than Catherine's, so there. I love wearing it. It's so sparkly.

Finally, I am including a meme I snagged from apple_pathways , which means you finally get to hear my voice!

( Here's the meme: )

[Error: unknown template qotd]
One word: MST3K.

The show debuted on Thanksgiving 1989, and so "Turkey Day" has forever been linked with the show. Comedy Central would air 30-hour Turkey Day marathons, complete with special bumpers and segments featuring Dr. Forrester trying to take over the world before pie was served, and deal with unwanted guests from movies he's inflicted on the Satellite of Love gang.

Here's a collection of some of the best bumpers. 

It's now tradition among MSTies to spend Thanksgiving watching an episode or seventeen. I usually load up some episodes on my iPod and watch while we drive to the family dinner. This year it might be Jack Frost and Hamlet. Maybe Invasion of the Neptune Men, too, if the weekend gets super boring.

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I give you a sketch I wrote last year for a contest on MST3K: The Discussion Board.

x-posted to mst3k

( Ethnic stereotypes and church history? It must be St. Patrick's Day! )

I leave two weeks from today on my Temp Job Adventure (if you haven't noticed, it's also become one of my New Year's Resolutions to type in Title Case as often as possible. It's an easy way to add emphasis without overusing bold and/or italics, and it can also make something sound Way More Epic Than Before), and I haven't really considered what clothes to pack, or what to take along. I'm "stockpiling" my favorite things to do and videos to watch so I have something to do when it gets boring up there, so it's getting boring down here. Lots of downloading, considering that QI isn't available in the States and I won't have access to Hulu so I can watch Outer Space Astronauts whenever I want. (Seriously, that is a funny show. Kind of like Galaxy Quest on crack.) At the very least I should go through my closet and dresser and make a note of what I want to bring so it'll be quicker to pack when it gets closer, though I suspect I might pad the work wardrobe once the paychecks start coming... just so when I get back home I'll have so many nice clothes to wear that will just sit in my closet and use up what little space I have in there. Maybe I need to rethink that.

In addition to putting off preparations for leaving, I'm also working on a piece for an essay collection (something along the lines of Chicks Dig Time Lords, which is the only similar Book of a Fannish Nature I know of at the moment, thanks to taraoshea ), and so I'm trying to figure out why bad movies are so painful to us, which requires figuring out why good movies are so good to us... yes, it's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 book, and that's all I'm going to say right now beyond How So Freaking Badly I would love to be published. The deadline is the end of January, which means I need to get it done before I leave for Grandparents... I started to hash out an outline a few days ago, and it turned into a page and a half of paragraphs, and almost 1,000 words. Wow my paper writing skills came back fast. Unfortunately, thanks to that whole why-do-bad-movies-hurt-us-so issue, and trying to keep it as academic as possible, I've hit a pause right now, as the articles and books the editor recommended to me aren't available here in town or online. (I would almost kill for the access I had to journals and databases that I had while at Liberty. Okay, maybe not kill. But I might kiss a guy if it got me access. This makes me a Major Nerd... with problems... who is possibly a lonely person... destined to live alone with Too Many Cats.)

I really need to tidy up my room so I don't leave a mess behind when I go. I'm still painfully short on storage space, so a lot of things end up on the floor... I also hate folding laundry so it sits in the hamper while dirty clothes pile up elsewhere. This is what happens when finally nobody cares how clean your room is after 3 years of Thrice-Weekly Room Checks.

I've been sitting on this update all day, so I should probably post it, seeing as I have nothing else to add. :-)

New meme: Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."

litlover12  asked and I answered:

1. What would you say is the best episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000"?
2. And speaking of MST3K, the classic question: Joel or Mike?
4. For a romantic pairing, do you prefer Middleman/Wendy or Middleman/Lacey? Or are romantic pairings overrated and would you rather have them all be just friends?
5. I know you paint ornaments -- what other kinds of arts and/or crafts do you do?

[Error: unknown template qotd] I'll lie in state for several days at the Corn Palace while "Hooked on a Feeling" is sung by a choir of castrati.

Seriously, I haven't given it much thought. I think I'd like to be an organ donor, but this is a relatively new thought and I haven't really verbalized it to anybody... I thought it might be cool to be cremated and have my ashes scattered somewhere awesome, but I want some sort of grave marker or memorial stone. Maybe I'll have a plant dedicated to me and have the rock underneath it. At any rate, I want a marker so I can have some form of this quote: "The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning. [...] But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." It's the closing lines of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Of course, there's always the educational route, a real hands-on kind of funeral... details of my embalming written up and distributed... :-P Or have myself interred in a mausoleum on the fourth floor of DeMoss Hall at Liberty... that way there really would be a dead body up there!