Having seen Lord of the Rings more than is probably healthy, I couldn’t help but think about Middle Earth. The road, with its miniature white-capped mountains, became the landscape just outside the Mines of Moria. The fellowship is still in shock over the death of Gandalf the Grey. The hobbits collapse in sadness, unwilling to continue on. Aragorn stares across the seemingly endless landscape, reminding them all that they cannot stop.

I looked down the road, lifting my gaze from the tiny Moria mountains to see how far the landscape stretched. It was endless. I pictured a miniscule Aragorn, standing atop one of those piles of powder, wondering when his journey would ever end.

I didn’t want to wake up this morning. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to shower or find an outfit or put on make up. I did it all anyway. Because I guess I have to keep moving, even if the journey seems endless.

That is all.

Ohhai clean car! I even cleaned the cup holders inside.

That’s saying a lot, if you saw my cup holders before.

Anyway, after cleaning my car, I put my new fishies on the trunk.

My car is so hip now! Thanks Jamie.

Now…there’s one part of my car that’s pretty ugo (besides all the dents and scratches caused by the pole in the parking lot behind my old apartment building). A piece of it fell off. D: (And by fell off I mean knocked off by the aforementioned pole.)

Poor car door. D: It’s supposed to look like this:

Affixing the fish on my car gave me the idea to try double-sided and mounting tape on the door….

Alas, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t tape my car back together. The problem is the piece that needs to be attached is all hollow inside. See?

So there’s not really much for the two-sided tape to stick to. Plus, well, it’s tape meant for things like paper, so…yeah.

Anyone have an idea for what I can use to get this piece of my car back on my door? I’d need something that would hold up in all the weather things. But I don’t want to pay some body shop to fix it because that’s pretty vain for an already beat-up car. Plus I don’t have the monies.

Anyway. Even with a piece of my door missing, my car still looks pretty cool.

And the rest of you that call yourselves my FRIENDS…less than 6 comments for 58 posts and 12 whole months?!

D:

It feels kind of ironic to call these New Year’s resolutions. I know it’s because the year is new (duh), but my goals feel rehashed year after year. There’s nothing new about the whole process of setting goals, thinking about them for a couple of weeks, forgetting them until December 31st, and then setting the very same goals again.

I don’t mean to be cynical. There’s nothing wrong with a lot of my goals. I quite like them, in fact. That’s why I keep trying to do them every year. But for some reason I feel like emphasizing the fact that these goals are a work in progress over many years. So let’s look at the things I hoped to check off my list during 2011.

• Blog more (I wrote 50 blog posts in 2010).
• Try different artistic mediums (I have tried lead pencil, acrylics, oil pastels, ceramics, and glass etching).
• Make art that isn’t Achaean.
• Read more (Just going to have to guess on this, not sure how many books I read this year).
• Travel more (I went to Vegas in 2010).
• Weigh less (I know how much I weigh…we’ll leave it at that).
• Write more fiction (I’ve got 4 chapters of one idea so far).

I’ve tried to make my goals measurable, so I can see if I “finished” any of them. But I don’t feel like that does me any good, really. What I really care about is if I’m a better person. That’s what all these goals are for. They are just finite manifestations of what I consider success in the moment I’m writing them. The funny thing is, my concept of what a successful life is can and will change over the course of an entire year.

For example, I set a goal to try more artistic mediums. I understand the value in that goal and what I considered a good artist to be back then. And I still would like to try some new mediums. But the fact is, I’ve become more confidant in art over the past year. I paint more. I don’t paint a ton, but I paint more often. I’m slightly less afraid of the canvas. I’ve done most of this in acrylics with a little bit in watercolor. Those two are kind of my staples for now. So the fact that I didn’t technically “accomplish” this goal just feels silly to me, because I am a better artist than I was before.

Just for the sake of my own curiosity, and possibly yours, here’s how I did on each of my 2011 goals. But my 2012 goals are going to be slightly different.

• This blog post is number 58. Take that 2010!
• I haven’t tried any new artistic mediums.
• I’ve made plenty of art that isn’t Achaean.
• Given the number of book reviews I’ve written here (and that’s not all the books I read either..I got lazy with blogging back in the summer), I’d venture a guess that yes, I read more in 2011 than I did in 2010.
• I did not travel anywhere this year, except the Salt Flats once. And I’ve already been there.
• I have, in fact, lost 22 pounds. That’s probably my most impressive accomplishment in 2011 (for me anyway).
• I haven’t written any fiction whatsoever for a whole year.

Okay, so…4/7. 57%. So what is that?

Shut up Yahoo! answers. What do you know? Let’s ask Wikipedia.

Gasp. Stupid official US grading scale. I know there has to be somewhere that thinks I passed…

Wooot! Go Canada! Il sait porter la croix!

Okay, enough nonsense. Here’s what I want to do for 2012. Basically, I want to be a better person. Here is how I currently define that. I will feel successful if I:

• have an increased feeling of independence and personal responsibility.
• continue to be health conscious.
• continue to grow as an artist.
• continue to grow spiritually.
• am happy.

The only one of these that I’ll need to compare how I feel right now to how I feel at the end of the year is the first one. Right now, I live in my parents’ basement. I don’t manage my money very well and continue to live paycheck to paycheck. I do have a great job that I feel very confident in and I have a car that’s paid off and works. I have a nice personal space here in the basement. And I feel like I’m a more honest person than I have been in the past. Hopefully that’s enough for me to gauge whether or not I feel more responsible and independent at the end of 2012.

Anyway, those are my goals. They aren’t anything new. And I plan to keep working on them long after 2012. That is, if the world is still here after December 21st.

Awww…people at work like me!

It wasn’t exactly nail-biting action that kept me intrigued, either. The entire universe and future situation created by Dickson was just really good. I don’t read a lot of science fiction. Not sure why, either. I just haven’t. So this is probably a common thing in any science fiction story–describing the evolution of the universe so many years into the future. Despite how common it might be, I really like what he did with human evolution and what his projections  for the further evolution of the human species were. It was very fascinating.

There were only two instances where he repeated himself in his explanations of how things worked. That probably only bothered me because I read the whole thing at once. But if you explain something once, it’s the reader’s responsibility to remember this for future plot points. Re-explaining it just makes me roll my eyes. I’m paying attention!

I also really liked a particular few paragraphs where the main character describes why loving a certain woman is different than any of the relationships he’s had in the past. He talks about how he would always metaphorically create this amazing imaginary castle and bring his love to it, only to realize he doesn’t know them at all. And that this is because they don’t even believe in his castle. So the relationship falls apart. What he realizes about this new love is that not only does she believe in his castle, but she’s already built one of her own. She’s not relying on him to create a paradise for her. She just wants to share hers with him and have him share his with her.

“It was because she had built castles of her own, before I ever met her.”

I thought that was lovely.

Though I found one or two battle-strategy sections to be a bit boring (only because I have a hard time visualizing those), they weren’t drawn out insufferably long. The internal, political, and emotional battles that take place in this book are done quite well. I found the main character to be intelligent and intriguing. I had no idea how it was going to end, but was quite pleased with the course of events (even if they weren’t all happy-ending-y).

I liked it enough to go back to the used book store where I found this one and buy a few others in the series. I got Dorasi!, Necromancer, Tactics of Mistake, The Spirit of Dorsai, and Lost Dorsai. I probably didn’t need to buy that many, but they were $4 each and have the retro covers ‘n everything. Plus, I buy things. Books especially.

I’m the only one that decorated in my entire department. Course, I’m the only one with a plethora of toys on my desk too, so I guess it’s no real surprise.

Convenience Fee–fine. I’ve heard of that (even though $12 is ridiculous). Handling Fee, though? On TOP of the Convenience Fee? $16 in fees?! The tickets themselves were only $18 each!

Yes, I know rage over additional fees for concert tickets is old hat, but odds fish m’dear, this is bent as a nine bob note!

This post has been brought to you by SmithTix’s ridiculous fees, British slang, and readers like you.

Omg this cloud looks like a huge UFO. Someone call Mulder!!