Just a quick post that today is my BFF’s birthday, so everyone leave her lots of warm fuzzy birthday wishes, mmkay?

<3 Tart

Bad blogger, no posts!

I know. Sigh. 50-60 hour work weeks have a way of crushing any desire to do anything creative along with your soul, what can I say?

There’s been so much new geekery too! I have been learning to play D&D thanks to a few friends who don’t mind my reading things and then IMing them going “waaaaiiiitttttt I don’t get ittttt!”. (yes, I do whine like that to my friends, but they assure me that it’s endearing!) I’ve also been learning to play Magic: the Gathering, and let me tell you, I’m not half bad with a Pearled Unicorn. Any tips on deck building are welcome though! I’ve mostly just been playing Packwar to try to get used to the flow of things, but I’ve got a tournament of sorts to go to in a few weeks, so I have to build my first deck! I’ll get a list of cards up here soon for the ease of helping me.

Gaming geekery has been pretty hefty lately too. I’ve been playing: Pokemon SoulSilver, (yes still. I love my pokemon, I’m sorry!) Dragon Quest 9, Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, Transformers: War for Cybertron, 3d Dot Game Heroes and Fairytale Fights. I have the attention span of a small child, I know. That’s why it takes me so long to play through something, I bounce back and forth between things too much. So far the main winners for my attention are Fairytale Fights and Dragon Quest 9. I’ve also been dabbling in Maplestory on a friend’s recommendation. And there’s always WoW, though you can tell from PW:Bubble and from asking my Real ID cohorts that I’m not on much.

My ever present love for books hasn’t lessened either. If anything, I’ve been reading more lately than I have in a long time, mostly due to the fact that after a 10 hour work day, laying in bed and getting lost in a book is about the most energy I have. Plus the Kindle app for my blackberry is reaaaaalllllyyyyy handy. >.< Right now, I’m on a bit of a YA novel binge. This is fine with me though, as John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Sarah Dessen, Wendy Mass and the duo of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl are all phenomenal writers.

And with that brief update, it’s 2:30am, and I think I’m finally tired enough to sleep. Now that I’ve installed the WordPress app to my phone, hopefully posts will be a little more often, but I make no promises until I’m fully moved and settled.

<3,
Tart

- I fail at jumping.
- I am more of a Starscream fangirl than I thought.
- Hearing “I AM MEGATRON” reduced me to a quivering puddle of squee-ing.
- Co-op story mode is for the win.
- StoppableForce kicks my ass at this game
- I am a bad ass sniper. \o/
- This game is so full of win.

More detailed info on it coming as soon as I get more play time with it. :)

June 10th will always be a hard day for me. 4 years ago my mom died of a hemorrhage after having brain surgery when her breast cancer spread. She first developed Stage 1 Breast Cancer shortly before my 18th birthday and had a lumpectomy and chemo and radiation and finally went into remission. Not too long after I turned 20 she was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer. IBC is automatically considered Stage 4 as it does not have a tumor that can be removed. She had another round of chemo, but as the IBC was on the same side as the cancer she had previously, she was not able to have radiation again. She had a double mastectomy and two more rounds of chemo, and started to have reconstructive surgery.

She went on vacation to visit a friend and I was headed to Vegas to celebrate my 22nd birthday. My mom called to tell me Happy Birthday, which if you knew her was extremely out of character. She sounded tired, but just said she had a bit of headache when I asked her about it. She chalked it up to the travel (she had driven from Southern California to Oregon for her vacation). She got home and was still having the headaches and they were as bad as any migraine she’d had over the years. After one particularly bad night, my dad made her go to the ER, and they found that the cancer had spread and she had a tumor at the base of her skull which was causing the pain. The did surgery to remove it, and after a few days she was sent home. After about a week, she was still draining pretty heavily from the surgery and the fluids were still foggy and cloudy so she was readmitted into ICU so she could be monitored. June 9th was a Saturday and her doctors had said that her draining was looking good, and they were going to release her and send her home on Monday. The hospital she was in only discharged from ICU Monday – Friday and they wanted to be absolutely certain that the draining was clear and minimal. She was laughing and joking with all of us, and when I snuck down to the vending machines I brought up a can of pineapple chunks and when I got back up to the room with them, she mentioned that they looked amazing. I remember starting off thinking ‘eh, I’ll just give them to her and eat what she doesn’t want.’ She devoured the whole can and just had this look on her face like they were the best thing she had ever eaten. Then made a crack about my having a big enough ass that walking back to the cafeteria area wouldn’t kill me if I wanted another can, and my nephew seized the opportunity to drag my dad to the vending machines (he was 9 at the time and liked pushing the elevator buttons) and to explore. While he was gone my mom made me promise to force him to go home that night, “because the nurse have got to be tired of seeing him by now” so I did. Finally around 2am, I managed to convince him to leave. I followed him home and told him that since I had some things to do the next morning that if he came home after he finished church I would go with him to the hospital. He got up a couple hours earlier than he usually did for his sunday service to be able to go to the hospital beforehand to say good morning to my mom (yes, they were THAT couple, but that’s a whole other story) and not even five minutes after he left our house phone rang. I per our house rules ignored it with the motto: “well if it’s important they’ll leave a message.” Then about 15 minutes later my cell phone rang and my dad told me to come down to the hospital. My mom had hemorrhaged and bled out right around the time my dad woke up. The call that I didn’t answer? The hospital calling telling my dad to come down there. The nurses conveniently “couldn’t find” the DNR paperwork my mom signed on admission and put her on life support until we could get there. We waited for family to get there and then they took her off life support. I won’t delve into those details, because I’m fully unprepared to deal with reliving that experience. But suffice it to say, that was that.

Now I don’t mention this for wanting anyone to feel sorry for me, or any kind of attention garnering; that is the way things happened and there is no changing them. But this year, more than most, I’m having a very hard time with this, so it’s simply my way of saying if I’m quiet or moody here’s why. I debated with publishing this and the next portion that I wrote a few days ago with no intent of letting anyone see it, but I figured that those who cared to read it could, and those who didn’t wouldn’t, and in the end I needed to get it out and well, it’s my blog. :P

Madre,

Yes, I know you hated my calling you that and yes that was the reason I always did. Wow, it’s been 4 years already? Some days it feels like just yesterday and some days it feels like a fucking eternity. I still miss you so goddamn much. I know we didn’t really have the best of relationships at for quite a while, but right now I would take any amount of bruises for the chance to talk to you again. I just feel like so many things would have turned out differently if you were still here. Regardless of how stubborn I am, I wouldn’t have gotten married so quickly if I wasn’t afraid that you wouldn’t be there for it. That was the only reason I was so easily talked into it. I never told you that I didn’t want to get married, I was just afraid that by the time I wanted to, you wouldn’t be there for it. And hell, you would have beat sense into me about that relationship long before anyone else ever had the balls to even try. That or you would have castrated him the first time he cheated and left. And at the first sign of what I now realize was some severely fucked up emotional beating and mind fucking, you would have gutted him and buried him in the backyard. Or at the least threatened him since you knew he was terrified of you. But hey, I wised up eventually, and you always said I had to learn the hard way. And guess what? I’m happy for once. Honestly happy, not the fake happy you always called me on. I just wish you could meet the person making me smile. You’d like him I think (and no, not JUST because you could talk music and he’d actually know who you were talking about) but mostly I wish he could meet you. I just keep telling myself that everything that happened was for a reason and if everything hadn’t happened the way it did I would still be miserable and likely not be a giddy, grinning idiot like I am and worse not able to appreciate what I have now.

I did only keep half my promise to you though, and for that I’m sorry. I make the effort with dad despite his business, but I’m sorry things didn’t turn out that way with Gabe. I miss his kids so much, and I hate that he has one that I’ve never met. I don’t like feeling like I don’t have a brother, especially with how close we used to be. I know my moving to Vegas didn’t help, but I couldn’t stay in California. It was too hard and too many memories with you, I just couldn’t do it. And I realize now it was also part of the plan to get me away from everyone that would have tried to talk sense into me. Dad marrying Grace just finished the wall between us. I couldn’t forgive him for not letting Calvin be in the wedding simply because of Grace’s age, it was so petty and it hurt dad so much, and Gabe wasn’t there after you died, he didn’t see dad and how sick he got until he started dating Grace. And I know you’d love her even if she is a total dork and she makes dad happy and that’s all you cared about. Plus, hey, you were right and told him he’d get remarried even if he said he never would. I’m just sorry that I didn’t do a better job of keeping everyone together like you did. I tried, I really did, but it was all I could do to keep myself together and dad healthy and I didn’t have enough strength for everyone else.

Despite how much I miss you and wish you were here, I’m able to focus now on the more important things and how I could make you proud. I know you realized it towards the end but I am a good person, perhaps a little too easily hurt and I know I care too much about people liking me, but I’m working on developing your talent for not giving a shit about it. I will always be too nice, but I like to think you’d appreciate my not getting bitter about everything. I do love you and miss you and I really wish we could have been friends for longer. I’ve missed you occasionally popping up in my dreams so feel free to do that again, it would be nice to hear your voice. I promise I’ll keep an eye on dad and I’ll work on Gabe and sucking up my stubbornness when it comes to him. Tell grandpa and kristen I said hi.

<3

For those of you who don’t follow me on twitter, I finally stepped into 2006 and bought a PS3. I know! In my defense, I USED to own a PS3 (one of the old school fattie 80gb ones) but when my personal life ‘asploded I lost custody of it. So to break in my shiny new 120gb slim (wooo upgrade!) I bought the first Assassin’s Creed and the first Uncharted as well as 3d Dot Game Heroes. So far, 3d Dot Game Heroes has consumed my life. That game is so much fun. I’m a huge Zelda fan (and I mean really, who isn’t?) and 3d is really similar. Just straight up old school fun. The kind of fun that has me yelling, “OH! A SPIDER!! Kill it! Kill it deaddddddddddd!” and making stabbity noises (yes, stabbing has a noise in the World of Tart) and acting like a nerd in general. I still haven’t gotten to spend as much time with it as I would like, but working 50+ hours a week and progression raiding will do that to you. Hopefully everything will calm down soon so I can get back to some semblance of normalcy.

But in the meantime if you have a PS3, my PSN name is tartdarling (duh!) so feel free to add me and say hai sometime :)

The BBC believes people will have only read 6 out of these 100.

Only 6? That makes me kind of sad. I bolded the ones I’ve read, but one day this whole list will be in bold. (Some of them I’ve started but disliked enough to not finish. :/ Hopefully I can make it through those ones!) Though now I’m tempted to make my own list of the 100 Books I think everyone should read. Ideas? Suggestions?

01 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen –
02 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien –
03 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte -
04 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling -
05 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee -
06 The Bible -
07 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte -
08 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell –
09 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman –
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien –
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger –
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams –
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky –
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame –
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis -
34 Emma – Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen –
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden –
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne –
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell –
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez –
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood –
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding –
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan -
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel -
52 Dune – Frank Herbert –
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen –
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley –
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon –
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck –
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov –
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold –
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding –
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens –
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett –
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses – James Joyce –
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal – Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession – AS Byatt –
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens –
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker –
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert –
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry –
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White –
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom –
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton –
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad –
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery –
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams –
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole –
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare –
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl –
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo -

<3
Tart

Why hello again! I know things have been quiet as of late. I was house sitting for a friend and working lots of over time and I went on vacation, so I’m just now getting back in to the groove of everything. But all in all, things are good. Very good in fact. :]

But anyway, on to things. I’ve discovered that more than ever my lack of free time and my short attention span make my love of all things geeky terribly difficult. I’ve got a stack of books demanding my attention, a handful of games calling me as well as some make up and hair projects waiting for me and what seems like no time to do them all. So I present a list of sorts. The list of shit that I need to do before I’m allowed to buy more stuff or slack off!

Finish the collection of books I have acquired:
Steampunk – Ann & Jeff Vandermeer
Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne – David Gaider
Dragon Age: The Calling – David Gaider
House of Leaves – Mark Danielewski
Only Revolutions – Mark Danielewski
The Looking Glass Wars _ Frank Beddor
Seeing Redd – Frank Beddor
American Nerd – Benjamin Nugent
Wicked Lovely- Melissa Marr
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith
Crazy Aunt Purl’s Home Is Where the Wine Is – Laurie Perry
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke

Finish the following games:
Kingdom Hearts 358/2
Pokemon SoulSilver
Torchlight (I know, I’m a horrible gamer, I’ve not finished it!)
Dragon Age: Origins
My 3rd play through of Kingdom Hearts (the original.. my roomie has never played it, so I’m making her/making her watch.)
My 2nd play through of Half-Life 2
My umpteenth play through of Portal

Make Up projects:
Clean out the containers
Compare primers
Look into palettes
Daily nails
Research Lip Products

Hair projects:
Look into coloring for people who’ve requested
Color lifters

Blogging/Writing Projects:
Project Space Goat updates
Cheesy book review
Chapter for Sleepy
Stories for Jenn

Knitting Projects:
finish hat.
finish scarf.
leg warmers?
ravelry projects

So it looks like I will be a busy, busy bee for a little while. Let’s just I can overcome the short attention span and make time for everything, rather than getting distracted by the first shiny thing I see.

So my dear friend Samodean over at Massive Nerd, has decided it’s time to buck up and admit your nerd-ness! I could not agree more. I may not be your traditional nerd, but dammit, I am one. Everyone has their own definition of nerd, but I think John Green said it best.

“Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, you are just too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.” – John Green

That’s what my nerdiness amounts to. I’m the girl that ‘squeeeeeee’s over lots of things. New Make Up? SQUEEEEEE. New Video Game? SQUEEEEE.  Just dropped $50 at the bookstore? SQUEEEEE. I still have your traditional nerd qualities too, after all I am the girl who had a 2 hour debate at Denny’s at 2 A.M. over theoretical math with my friend Tatiana. We had theories and equations written on napkins and were throwing fries at each other to prove a point, and it was fantastic.

But I guess the point I’m really trying to make, is be what you are. It doesn’t matter what kind of nerd you are,  if you are a nerd, be proud of it. Let your Nerd Flag fly.

SQUEEEEEEEEEE

OH.

MY.

GOD.

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

/dies.

Happy 20th Sugar Dumpling. Hope it is as amazing as you! Sylvanas sends her love too, and lots of puppy kisses.

<3 Nay.

And yes. I do love you more.