Randomosity on Fridays

Hello old friends and new friends! Thank you for all the LOVE for our 100th post, and THANK YOU for reading through my (admittedly) longer-than-intended opinion on the TLA film. If you haven't seen the original Nickelodeon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, I highly recommend it. It is well-paced, well-plotted, well-designed, and filled with properly developed characters. Also, the bending is actually cool. And it is hilarious.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THAT. It is FRIDAY, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for this short week. Well, let's just jump into the first of my random, random 5.

1. WTF Weather / Immune System Failure - It is JULY, which is full-on SUMMER in Southern California. This means an average of 90 degree weather, the ability to go swimming at 6p at night without freezing, and shorts shorts shorts all the time. I am wearing a long-sleeved cardigan and sweater dress as I type this. This is NOT summer clothing in CA. After the long weekend, it's been COLD (well, CA cold) and the weird fluctuating weather caused my immune system to malfunction and I caught a cold. A bitty one, but a cold nonetheless. IN JULY. Fail.

2. Octopus oracles and the World Cup - So my sister's friend made the hilarious suggestion that if Team USA, by some miracle, won the World Cup, everyone else would have to call the game soccer. That's obviously out of the picture now, but my sister remained very much into the World Cup because the other team of her heart is Germany. She cheered for them during the last World Cup too. I think this is the result of both of us having taken 4 years of Deutsch in high school (I took some in college too). Anyway, DID YOU KNOW that there's an octopus named PAUL who predicts Germany's World Cup game results??? He's not right all the time, but he gets it MOST of the time. His last prediction = Spain beating Germany out of the finals. Yeah, weird and freaky. My sister threatened to cook him up and eat him, and she doesn't even like seafood. I think I'll get her a vuvuzela to make her feel better.

3. Anime Expo - Anime Expo was also this Fourth of July weekend. Friends and I used to go back in high school, but we haven't been in years. (Yeah guys, if you didn't know by now, I'm a major geek.) It is HUGE now, taking up the LA Convention Center and spilling over into LA Live venues. The dance was even in Club Nokia, which is a major upgrade from JSA Convention-like ballrooms in hotels. Upon returning to this crazy event, I think Luce and I realized a little that we've sort of outgrown it, but it was still fun and hilarious. If you're an anime fan, I'd recommend it.

4. Karaoke in K-Town (sorta) - Of course, we ended the night with some good ol' fashioned karaoke, which was supposed to be in K-Town, but we had to change plans. In any case, karaoke is always awesome and funny and full of random surprises. Near the end of the night, I sang an old, kind of obscure Britney Spears pop song - like I think it was a B-side track. I didn't know all the words (that's what the screen is for), but SOMEHOW I remembered exactly how the song went - riffs and all. Yeah. My elephant memory sometimes surprises even me.

5. The Lost Books of the Odyssey - I just finished this book and it is so very good. If you love Greek myth or the Odyssey or both, you should definitely pick this up. The retellings are imaginative, and the style is perfectly evocative of the original voice of the Homeric epics. The words and descriptions are sparse but precise. I didn't think there could be so many different ways to retell the same episodes without it becoming boring or redundant. Also, Odysseus and Athena are totally like my OTP. Best story of a god loving a mortal ever - and not just because no one gets turned into an animal.

6. Shiny NEW idea - Just because I feel like I haven't talked about writing or anything related to that in a LONG TIME here, I'm adding a #6 as a bonus. I had a weird dream a week or two back, and now I have a shiny new story idea. It involves changing the past without affecting the future - a girl is saved from death but pulled into a future where she basically doesn't exist. Fun times! Now to give it a setting and some characters.

For my fellow Americans out there, how was your Fourth of July weekend? Indeed, how was your week? Will you be tooting a vuvuzela this weekend for any teams? I'll be cheering for die Deutschen and trying to decide if I should grow out my bangs...

P.S. My week just ended awesomely because I found out I won some books from the wonderful Tere at The Lesser Key! Yay! Go wish her a happy (belated) birthday! :)