Scariness, Now in Mold and Energy Drink Form

Icky icky icky icky icky. Ew. Icky.

Okay, I'm better now. I just spent the past several hours cleaning up a house after some neglectful renters with small children. I'm slightly traumatized - there was mold. And weirdly painted walls. And holes in walls. And cobwebs. And mold. Normally I'm not squeamish at all.. However, after spending a good portion of the day in a house repainted pink and brown, without air conditioning in 90 F weather, scraping (I cannot repeat this often enough) mold off the windows and cobwebs, with spiders still present, off of everything, while light-headed due to having given blood recently and having consumed the ungodly power of Rockstar Energy Drink to stay awake, I feel a bit nauseous. Ew.


(Also, this is my excuse for not posting yesterday - they successfully vampired me and I was silly enough to not drink a ton of water before, so it was like trying to write in the midst of a day-long period of vertigo.)

Nauseous or no, I have come to respect the power of said Energy Drink. 

This stuff is scary.

I only drank a quarter of the can - supposedly about half a cup of coffee - because dear God, it was like drinking fruity flavored, carbonated electricity, in that it was good but sort of stung. Its fumes were worse than that of the cleaning solution I was using, and that stuff was close to making me loopy. For the time that the drink was presumably affecting me, I was like a light-headed, bouncy, Queen-belting, distracted-by-shiny-things cleaning machine. I almost didn't care about the mold (so much mold!). Then, as I had not continued consuming the scary drink, I crashed, nearly fell over, and told people it was time to go home because I said so, and because everyone was traumatized by the mold, they all agreed. I only recovered from the ensuing Rockstar-level caffeine hangover after we stopped and I got deep fried mushrooms, which are both a thing and completely awesome in a greasy, Wisconsinite way. Less cliche than deep fried cheese curds, too.

In my hubris, I drank some more a little while ago, so if I seem a little hyper, that's my excuse. I can totally see  why it's called Rockstar - it's like someone distilled one of the Who's room redecorating parties and added ionized slushy syrup to it.

I can see music. Lookatalltheprettycolors...

Willis Haviland Carrier Deserves a Medal

Today's topic: air conditioning. It is a very, very good thing.

Currently, it's 90 degrees out and 'feels like 96,' according to Wunderground.* This is not exactly a normal temperature for June in Wisconsin. Not unexpected, and not completely abnormal, but still. The mid-eighties is the normal max, and therefore the state is unprepared for this heat wave. When it's that hot outside, your body practically doesn't even need to do anything. You can hibernate. You just lie there, preferably not in the sun, and try to keep your body's processes from raising your internal temperature more than six to eight degrees above the air temperature. It is not a temperature for having to actually do anything in, because sheer friction will cause your skin to start combusting  in a relatively short period of time.

So it's just my luck that I have to go work out at the YMCA for roughly two hours three times a week. The local one is having some issues with the heat, and so I show up and discover it is literally hotter in the lobby than it is outside - at least there's air moving outside.** My prognosis: death by heat stroke within an hour.

Even more unfortunately for myself, the cardio room is on the third floor, and heat rises. As I go up, so does the temperature, until I'm becoming seriously worried about both my health and whether the paint on the wall is going to start melting and getting me and my stuff all drippy. By the time I hit the landing at the top floor, it feels like I'm in an oven, and I'm relatively sure that the dust bunnies in the corners of the floor are actually the ashes of other patrons, who've spontaneously combusted. The paint is definitely beginning to look drippy.

And then I open the door to the cardio room, and it's like stepping into an ice bath. I can breath, the rubber soles of my tennis shoes solidify, and I swear I can hear angels singing in the background.*** I then proceed to work out for the allotted two hours without any death by heatstroke or spontaneous combustion at all. And that is why air conditioning is awesome.****




*And according to every living thing outside, except the ones complaining it feels way hotter than that.

**Blowing at 18 mph, no less. Weird, weird weather.

***Turns out it was just Freddie Mercury. Same difference.

****Then I had to leave the air conditioning and walk eight blocks to the library, of course, but the point still stands.

Exams and Styrofoam.

Recital, part one of three: Finished!

Huzzah!

AP English Language and Composition Exam: Finished!

Huzzah!

ALL AP English Language and Composition Exam: Finished!

HUZZAH!

Styrofoam cubes into smaller styrofoam cubes and taping them together again into another styrofoam cube: Finished!

W0000!


And I'm not going to explain the styrofoam cube thing until I finish that particular project.  If it works, it'll look pretty cool.

Now I'm off to shower off all the nasty styrofoam stuff that managed to float into my hair and my clothes and everywhere.

Geek Toys and Unfortunate Story-writing

I have a new to-oy, I have a new to-oy!

Alright, I've gotten the childish glee out of my system.



My new toy is a Coby Kyros tablet. I'm a little bit in love.

• Pros: The touch screen is responsive, the apps are good, and I have internet! It's not hugely complex, which I appreciate, because hugely and unnecessarily complex things irritate me.
• Cons of the Pros
• The touch screen can be too responsive, causing the screen to jump a little. I have yet to root it, so I have yet to get to Google Market. I don't have a data plan, so my internet is restricted to WiFi. And perhaps you like hugely complex things.
• Cons: There is no on-board word processor, the soft keyboard isn't the best, and the gyroscope that autorotates the screen is a little trigger happy. Playing music with it eats the battery. Also, for some reason, Blogger won't work on it. Odd.
• Fixes for the Cons:
• I use Google Docs (ma cherie amour), I have a wireless USB keyboard, and if the autorotate bugs me I can turn it off. Music and Blogger have yet to be fixed, though.

My only real issue so far is that I have no money to buy books on it as of yet. Which is a literature-nerdy thing to have an issue with, and totally unrelated to the tablet itself.




Different topic: Unfortunately for my atheistic sensibilities, I go to a Catholic school. I have mentioned this before. For my mandatory religion class, I had to write a children's story explaining Catholic Social Teaching. It ended up being about a hedgehog. I'm not sure if I feel like a hypocrite or like my brain just leaked out my ears. As these things aren't mutually exclusive, I think both.

Ick.