I'm so freaking excited.  This website inspires me.

Also this, for my XTi:

Love love love!

Oh and I went up to New York with Brady to see Tara for her birthday.  I got to meet her beautiful and lovely friends and her man again.  Everyone is so nice.  I wish I had more friends in Delaware.  Also Tara inspires me to be awesome.

Lastly, but not least ~ HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALSO TO HOLLY my best friend, all the way in Texas.  I wish she was just a drive away as well, because I'd love to come see her more often.

I'm thinking about saving up to fly to Texas.

So the show's at XPN/World Cafe Live, and the University of Pennsylvania is kind enough to open up some of their lots for free parking. This is excellent, because it's pretty much impossible to find parking in that area. The first time I had gone to see a show there, the parking lot was a little hard to find, but I eventually did, and made it to the show on time.

Except this time, it was a different lot. I had no way of finding the lot. I was already running late because I had to stop for gas, and there was a bit of traffic. So I passed XPN at exactly 12:03 pm. But I couldn't find the fucking lot. I called WCL to see if they knew where this lot was. The girl had never heard of Lot 26. She explained XPN and WCL were separate (yeah, okay.) and she never heard anything about free parking. This was in my invitation. I don't expect everyone to know everything, but I was rather disappointed at how unhelpful she was. I tried calling XPN. It rang and rang and finally made this weird noise, picked up, and dropped the call. So at this point it's 12:25 because I've circled the entire 5 block radius 3 times, and I still can't find this goddamned lot.

I start to cry, because I'm stupid, and decide to just drive the 45 minutes back home, without seeing the show.

So for now on, I'm not going to any more free KD shows. This same thing happened when I sent to see him for free in New Jersey for the first time ever. I ended up being an hour late because I couldn't even find the place. But that was back before GPS when all I had was Google Maps printouts.

Anyway to cheer myself up, I bought Snow Leopard at Apple, and got to see a bunch of my old coworkers and friends. I also went grocery shopping and threw out an entire fridge worth of spoiled food. So I feel like today was productive. Unfortunately, now that I'm sitting here thinking, I'm just really upset that I didn't end up going to the show. Right now I need it more than anything. That sort of thing is the perfect pick-me-up, and I blew it.

Brady had been offering to build me a gaming computer of my own, as long as I saved up the money, so I figured I'd now take him up on the offer. The only thing was that I didn't have the money saved up, but he had the Bill-Me-Later option with New Egg. So I'm using his account, and I'm the one paying the bills, but the computer has been worth it.

I don't really know the specs, except that it's Intel Dual Core, and the processor is like 2.69 gHz (technically 2.7, but it only sees 2.69.) It's got 4 gigs of ram, and sees all 4, since I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. (Gross, I know.) I also have a pretty good graphics card. I don't know the specifics, but Brady said it's slightly better than his. I have 600-something gigs of hard drive space, and I also installed a wireless card. Why - I have no idea, but it works.

Here's the awesome part. The case is pink!

It's small and compact, and has blue LEDs on the fan, and gives me a temperature reading on the CPU and hard drive. Mine's always hotter than the gauge in the picture, mostly because it's so darn packed in there. The graphics card takes up the whole left side.

So anyway, I'm pretty excited and I thought I'd share that with everybody. I also have a pink Logitech mouse with it, and a keyboard that glows purple! ^_^

Saturday Brady and I went to Walmart. I should note here that I've never shopped at Walmart for myself and never intend on doing so. I feel embarrassed for human society when I go there, and feel like disciplining other peoples' children. After hearing me complain for the first 10 minutes, and not finding a bedframe at all, Brady decided we would take the adventure 45 minutes away from Delaware, to the nearest Ikea.

I've never been to Ikea. I was expecting a store on par with Target, Best Buy, or something similar. But no, this was like the Please-Touch-Museum. Or an Art museum. There was actual organization here, which was a relief in comparison to Walmart. They even had a food court. The food seemed really cheap, but was not Vegan, and I did not partake.

Finding an appropriate bedframe was the difficult part. We didn't actually get to the section we needed until the end. All the bedframes seemed to be either size Queen or Twin. We have a Full sized bed. We contemplated a few that were no better than simply having the mattress on the ground itself. We wanted storage, but all the ones with storage were in the $300 range.

Then, we decided to go into the kids section, and we found it. A nice sturdy wooden loft bed with space for "activities" (Step Brothers reference). It was $199 on sale from $399. We would be able to bring Brady's couch back upstairs from the basement, and have our own living quarters under the bed. I have to say, however, that the idea of a loft bed makes me very nervous, but the sign at Ikea said it'd hold 400 lbs weight, and we probably weigh 281 lbs combined. I hope we'll be okay. I've never seen a loft bed collapse except for in Step Brothers

The other concern I had was that we drove to Ikea in my 2-door Volkswagen Rabbit. It's been known to haul a good bit of stuff, but I wasn't sure if it would fit an entire loft bed. Luckily the entire bed was packed away neatly in two separate boxes that had no problem fitting into my car (surprise!) and we were able to get the bed home.

That was the easy part.

I understand the need for instructions to be easy to understand for any language, but I don't even think the Swedish could understand the instructions. It's all up to interpretation, and involved a lot of staring at tiny details in the pictures. Brady and I work tech support for a living so are used to figuring out problems and understanding the mechanics of things. So what I didn't understand was how do other people figure out how to build these damn things? Do they all call the Ikea people to come to their house and build these things? And how do those people handle their job? There must be some sort of high-suicide rate. I can't imagine having to build shit from Ikea all day every day. I would probably cry.

Despite a bashed up thumb, red and near-bleeding hands, scared cats, and probably angry neighbours, we were able to assemble the bed within 8 hours. I don't love the bed, but I love the extra space. I've never assembled anything from Ikea, and I will never be assembling anything from Ikea ever again. Next time we go to Ikea, we're buying plates instead. They don't require assembly (or at least I don't think they do!)

And so now, I understand this comic.

Friday I went shopping, and bought a food processor/blender. A lot of recipes I want to make require me to chop/blend/whirr. I also want to start eating a lot more fruit, and the blender is helping with that. I've been making smoothies out of my orange juice and bananas. I also had some strawberries in there, and blackberries. I bought raspberries, but those were mouldy the very next day. I was so upset about the mouldy raspberries, because (A) they were expensive, and (B) I *just* bought them.

Topic #2: My tattoos. I find my tattoos to be very unorganized. They seem to have no theme. They're just random things in random places, and I'm looking to tie them together a little bit. I'd at least like to get my arm going. I have this large tattoo on my forearm, as I'm sure many of you have seen it. A lot of people lately have been asking me if I'm going to "finish" it. I was kind of insulted by that because I didn't know what they meant by finish. It's done. I spent 3.5 hours in a chair. I consider it done; or do I? I'm now thinking of all the possibilities I can work into my arm. I do have the piece by Sherri DuPree on my shoulder, and I'm wondering if I could get it coloured in, and have a background added, and then eventually work that into a sleeve. I think then I would be really happy with how it looks. I just have to pick what kind of theme I want on my arm. Probably mostly Kurt Halsey, and then Sherri's angel can sit proudly on the top of my shoulder.

I'll think about that while I run off to make more cupcakes ^_^

Afterwards I went to the grocery store to stock up on some more food.  I spent a lot of money unfortunately but I think I'll be good for the next few weeks.  I also bought some blendable fruits and berries to make some smoothies!

I also got my Milla in today, and put her eyes and wig on.  She's officially Alice now.  I just need to get a body for her, but I did take some pictures.  I'm really happy with the way she came out!

I also made some Oreo cookie cupcakes!

Now... the downside. I noticed the top band is definitely a leather-like material. I'm not a leather person, and especially not now because of my new vegan lifestyle. I'm so conflicted because it's not like I can get rid of them, and I really like them, and they were cheaper than any set of headphones that I could find, that I actually LIKE. I just feel icky whenever I use them and weird. I can't tell if it's leather, but it DEFINITELY looks like leather and smells like leather.

I just feel like a hypocrite, but I honestly didn't know it had leather on it. I could have emailed the person selling them, but I was lazy, and I didn't.

So now I just feel guilty, and I don't want to stop using them, because it's a waste of money and a waste of an animal's life. I'm glad I didn't buy them from the actual manufacturer, but someone still made money off it.

Click the link to go to the store that sells them, however I got them on eBay for $18.  I'm not sure if they're very good, but they're cute, and the eBay shipping was free.  I'll be sure to give my review once I get them.

They would be perfect for a morning like today, when Brady went to bed at 5:30 am this morning, and I don't want to sleep until the start of my shift at 3pm.

This is the end of my spending for this week. <3

I really want this:

I had to move upstairs from the boys' 48 hour LAN party, because the computers just got too hot.  I'm listening to Loveline and enjoying Adam Carolla's return.